Dear Alchemist’s Cache, <3 you. Always, Sinny

 

The door opens and closes in the small room next to me, the dividing window slides to the left.  I start..

Forgive me father, it has been one week and one day since my last Achievement.  The holidays, they tore me away from the game and prevented me from working on any reputation grind, searching for random books, and stealing money from corpses.  I shall do better, I promise!

Hmm my penance… I guess it should be to finish that freaking Argent Crusade rep grind before I start really crazy into the Loremaster stage of my life. 

We had another amazing night of raiding on Wednesday, with our 10 man group.  We smooshed Freya pretty easily and got another huge Alchemist’s Cache.  I really love those!  We got a stupid amount of Flask of Pure Mojo, which I find to be kind of useless.  In fact, none of the healers in either the 10 or 25 man have mana issues so no one wanted the flasks.  I have them all on the Auction House so that I can buy real flasks that our tank and dps need.  After downing Freya, we backtracked and took out the bosses that we had skipped on the way in resulting in us clearing every single boss we had ever killed in one single night, going over our regular ending time by 15 minutes.  Amazing.  Flame Leviathan, XT-002, Kologarn, Freya, Iron Council, Ignis, Razorscale.

Best place for Runecloth drops…

I ran a friend, another 80, through Strat (undead) the other night, too.  He’d never been there (a fact which blows me away) and he needed runecloth to level tailoring.  So, we get out there and he says “should I just go resto (shammy) and heal you then?” when I switched to my boomkin spec.  LoL.  “We won’t need healing, enjoy dpsing” I say.  We cleared that place in something like 12 minutes.  Seems slow, but mainly because we were looting stuff for Runecloth and he was DE’ing the boss drops (he was also leveling his enchanting).  I remember when Strat would kick our butts.  It was always such a chore to get through that place – crypt crawlers and their nets, those damn banshees that silence… ughh those boxes that you get too close on and they are full of rats or something.  But it was such fun, having a challenging huge instance with lots of bosses and the creepy streets of Stratholme were always hiding some horrible being.  I was hoping we’d have some beginner luck and maybe see the mount, but no such luck.

Whew!

Well, I feel much better after yesterday’s post. 

Last night we had a great time in our 10 man run.  We ran into Freya and beat our heads against her for a good while.  I think we had 10 minutes left on the trash respawn timer when everything clicked into place and we won.  We tried a few different strategies over that hour plus to take down the detonator plants in a more safe manner, and also the 3 pack fights got a tweak or two. 

We were having a good time with all the herbs around the area.  We joked that this was the situational test of this encounter – can your raids’ herbalists keep their heads while seeing yellow dots on their mini map, knowing that a Frost Lotus looms just over the hedge… We were pleasantly surprised to find an Alchemist’s Cache amongst the rewards to our hard fight.  Our DK and Hunter each received 5 flasks, while the remaining potions, elixirs, and herbs were guild banked.  I was also lucky enough to win the roll on the tier8 gloves.  Wheeee! 

We made 2 attempts on Thorim before the evening was over, getting a good feel for the gauntlet and definitely looking forward to Wednesday when we can make a b-line for Freya and Thorim after knocking off those in our way.  I look forward to the new possible option of extending raid lockouts that may be coming in the next patch.  If we were able to extend that another week, I’m sure we would down Thorim and keep our steamroll going. 

A disappointment

I was disappointed to learn that a member of one of the more respected guilds on our server was discovered to be running a bot to farm Timbermaw rep.  The video was captured by a horde character that is known on the server as being a decent guy/straight shooter, so no real reason to doubt it.  The chatter on the forums from the botter and a representative or two from the guild is showing everyone the true colors of this guild and I hope they can take swift action to remove the botter from their ranks.  If Argent Dawn is nothing else, it is rabid regarding the defense of the community as a whole.  Ninjas and whorish server transfers typically do not find a welcome home on Argent Dawn, on either side of the banner, and usually transfer off post-haste. 

QQ

 

Honestly.  I’m SO tired of it.  The constant whining and complaining and bitching about EVERYTHING.  Specifically, holiday achievements.  It started with the Winterveil one, and waaaa I can’t pvp in my gnome costume because I shapeshift.  And let me just say that I tried doing the achievement and would end up losing my gnome costume within minutes – mainly cuz I suck that badly at PVP.  But did I bitch about how unfair it was?  No.  Then came the Valentine’s one.  OH MY GOD stop bitching about RNG with candy bags.  HONESTLY.  So everyone cries so much on the wow forums that Blizzard FREAKING GOES IN AND FIXES IT, after the fact. 

That was their downfall.  They bent to the QQ.  My almost-2 year old doesn’t want to take a nap sometimes. If I caved and said “oh ok, no nap for you”, he would know all he has to do is cry and he’d get out of anything he doesn’t want to do. 

So, Love’s Fool got their 6/8 fix for the bag candies.  Yes, I was lucky that I got all mine, but, you know.  LUCK.  I’m not always that lucky.  For the Valentine’s one, I woke up early and tried to find my way around the event and various quests.  I barely got a dress, I think I got the only one I pulled the whole event on the last day.

• Brewfest… QQ … changes incoming.  Don’t even get me started.
• Children’s Week: School of Hard Knocks – god, seriously.  I’m worse at PVP than anyone and I managed to get it.
• Noblegardener.  Camp your own egg and STFU.  People get up and leave, or they are slow.  Camp it and eventually you’ll get it. 

It gives me a headache.  So I log in this morning and hit the forums, expecting to peruse the latest goings-on on the Argent Dawn forums (seriously, no drama today?), and the Achievements forums hoping to find something interesting to jump start my morning.  QQ The festival ended.  Really?  You couldn’t see this coming?  We have a freaking calendar.  Complaining because now they can’t finish their quest.  If you are that busy in real life, or can’t rearrange your schedule to fit in a few quests then Achievements and the Metas are just not for you.  That’s just it.  I’m sorry, they just aren’t for you.  GET OVER IT.  Find something else in game you enjoy because obviously, THIS IS NOT GIVING YOU ANY JOY.

Don’t forget the official Scorchling whine thread.  THE LOOT, ITS FREAKING RANDOM.  ALL OF IT.  Not everyone can get a special pet or mount.  I’M SORRY.  I didn’t get a scorchling.  Why?  Because I didn’t try and who knows if I would have even seen it drop, let alone win the roll.  I knew that I wouldn’t have the time to run that instance as often as I would need to give it a good go.  I’ll just have to enjoy seeing them when my friend’s pull them out in raids, or a stranger in Dalaran.  Maybe next year.  I got the little spirit of summer vanity pet with some of the flowers I collected.  Then I had 250 or so flowers leftover after getting the outfit and following achievement.  I sold back the shoulders, got the pet, and then was happy to find out they had reset the fires.  I went back to the towns I remember hitting before the reset and picked up more flowers.  I knew I wouldn’t have enough to get the dancing flames pet, so I bought the shoulders back (completionist, sue me) and then bought like 3 stacks of Smorcs.  Did I cry about not getting both pets?  No. 

Gawd, there are a lot of things I want in this game – if I cried about not getting everything then I wouldn’t have time to play the game.

/rant off

I feel better

I Have the Coolest Friends

Really, I do…

I’m scared to say it, because I don’t want to jinx it but dizam, our 10 man group is the bomb.  It feels like we have the best class balance and the best personality balance a group can have.  We steamrolled through last night, taking out Flame Leviathan, Ignis, Razorscale, XT, Kologarn, Iron Council, Auriyia, and Hodir.  We had a couple hiccups on Iron Council, but it was stuff we could easily correct and avoid on the next attempt.  Everything else went very smoothly; there was friendly and fun banter on Vent.  Nothing is really getting DE’d because a class isn’t represented, it’s getting DE’d if it’s a duplicate.  We have a pally, a shaman, warrior, druid,  shadow priest, a holy priest, a hunter, deathknight, and 2 mages.  The pulls are getting to be muscle memory and everyone knows what their responsibilities are.  Love it!!

I did have the funniest thing happen on Razorscale.  We had just finished up Flame Leviathan and headed to Razor when my little one started fussing, so I needed to AFK for a quick 2 mins to get him back to sleep.  When I came back, they said “Ok as soon as Sinny gets back, we’ll start it up”.  And I said I was back on Vent and then looked at my shapeshifting bar… Hm, where’s my tree… OH NO! “WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT” I hit N and click Activate for my resto spec… “too late, we just started it up”.  I thought I had gotten it in time but then I see “Entering Combat” and my spec switch stops mid stream.  “uh guys? I’ll be dps’ing for this…” It was really fun, too : )  We got the achievement for A Quick Shave even.

We had one wipe on Hodir, I can’t even really remember what went wrong, but when we did our 2nd attempt, we got the I Have the Coolest Friends achievement.  I think the only fight that I had mana issues on was Iron Council and I think that was mainly because I was healing our Pally tank and I’m not used to healing him so I can’t anticipate his damage yet.  I had a lot of overhealing on that fight from spamming Nourish and constant Blooms.  I’ll be conscious of that on our next encounter with The Council and see what I can do to be more efficient with my mana.

The Badlands

Before the raid started, I finished up a couple quests that I had in my quest log.  Trying to make room for Loremaster craziness.  I did one quest that was inside Uldaman, but not actually *in* the instance and it didn’t count towards my total.  So I abandoned the rest of the chain for the time being.  Sure it would count towards my Seeker achievement but I’ll have that without problem when I have Loremaster (the big Loremaster, not just Classic) done. 

Blog Front

As it pertains to this blog, I’m tweaking some of my layout.  I’m learning more about blogging from practice-makes-better-but-not-perfect and reading other blogs and seeing what elements I like as a reader.  So, stay tuned and hope you (the one or two people who are reading) enjoy it! :)