<insert catchy title here before publishing>

 

I meant to get a post up yesterday but the day literally slipped away from me.  When I looked up from my desk at work, it was already 2:30 pm and I had a pile of work that would take me well past my 3:30 quitting time.  Today was looking much the same but I put my nose down and worked hard, carving out a half hour to type up what’s been floating around in my head for a few days.

Mini Lan Party!

Saturday night, I did a crazy thing and packed up my husband’s iMac and went to my friends’ place and we had an impromptu mini lan party!  Mike and Cindy are two of my “converts” into the WoW world, and I received my Zhevra mount by referring Mike.  We decided to tackle Maraudon to get them both some gear.  Their priest and hunter, respectively, are 48 and were in desperate need of gear.  We had some problems getting into the instance initially as “additional instances cannot be launched” whenever I try to do anything in the Old World or Outlands.  We fooled around on lowbie druids until trying again, and were finally successful.  Some nice gear dropped for them, and I think there was only one piece of gear that got disenchanted.  There are so many things in this game that I take for granted and hadn’t stopped to think how I learned the things I know in game.  For instance, I said “oh just auto follow me and I can run us there” and they both looked at me with a blank stare.  Auto what?  2ish months in the game and neither had discovered the Follow option on the portrait menu.  I imagine I was just as frustrating to a friend of mine shortly after release when he would try to help me finish quests (I have a problem reading Quest text… I just.. don’t read it).

I laughed as I told them about things had changed in game.  How back when I first got my mount at 40, I was in Stranglethorn Vale and the bridges used to dismount you.  They thought that was hysterical.  And how it would take an hour to mail yourself something.  From your own alt!  I told them about the legendary spamming from Blackrock when their server is down, and told them about some of the major drama that Argent Dawn has seen over the years.  It was fun to catch them up on stuff and it was nice to remember all those quirks in the old game.

I did pick up a few quests and completed them as I waited for them to find their way from Ratchet to Desolace and get their flight paths.  This threw the “planning planning planning” part of my Loremaster Quest out the window.  I have a full quest log, a bunch of quests here and there and I’m scared to abandon anything.  I have a bunch of quest items in my bank, who knows what those are for.  So I’m re-evaluating my approach I think : )  I’m only going to concentrate on Old World quests first.  I’m going to abandon any quest that is Burning Crusade or Wrath and I’ll pick those up later.  I need to look up the quest items that I have and figure out what they are for.  Then I will start tackling zones. 

Aggro Warning

It seems strange, so many funny stories or recollections that I mention are also talked about in Tales of the Aggronaut.  I guess this is because Bel and I are friends IRL, though half a country apart.  It’s also because he is my guild leader, and my raid leader.  He mentioned in a recent post about doing a little spring cleaning of the guild roster, etc., and this affects me because he promoted me to officer, a position I held long ago.  It’s nice to know that he finds me a responsible person and he knows I won’t do anything overtly dumb.  I just do small dumb things like forget to go Tree Form on the Ignis pull.  And on a Hodir pull.  Oops : )  I totally make up for those oopsies by proc’ing 8 extra Flasks for him hehehe.  So, thanks for the nod Bel : )

Anyway, we had a great run last night and finally put the beat down on Hodir!  Everyone did a great job and we managed to pick up the achievement Cheese the Freeze.  This was our 10 man run and we actually filled up quickly and were underway without much wasted time.  We ran into the Hodir wall about 8 or 9 times before it all falling into place.  I can’t wait to do it again!  Well, I can’t wait to win again, or fail at winning a few times and then winning : )  We started trash on Freya but never made it to the actual boss pull as we ran out of time.  We took down Ignis earlier and our new Pally OT is doing a fantastic job.  It’s nice to play with people who know what they are doing, and if they don’t know, they know how to learn.  We had some great communication on vent, aside from Euron bringing up horrible songs which led to a discussion about often misheard lyrics.  I choked on my water a couple times when people were sharing their favorites hehehe.  There was one that was something like “Make love to a calculator” instead of the Love in an Elevator (Aerosmith).  Classic…

Loremaster Ysinnia?

 

Not quite yet.  But I think I’ve decided to start working on this as my next large project.  I’m going to finish up the Argent Crusader assignment that I got on the Achievement forums and then not ask for another assignment.  This is a huge undertaking because when I leveled this toon in Classic WoW, I didn’t quest very much.  I think I’m something like 160 short on Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor is something like 300 short, I haven’t looked recently.  I just know it’s a number that when my brain sees it, it goes “oh god, so many to go!”.

I’ve been kicking the idea around in my head lately, but it’s not something you just jump into, ya know?  I mean, I HAVE TO MAKE LISTS.  AND PLAN.  Yeah, I’m like that.  So my first order of business, after completing my current assignment, is to make a list of each zone starting with the lowbie/starting zones.  I know I did some of the Human starting area when I was grinding out my Ambassador title, but I think I stopped around the Goldshire area.  Not just because I hit exalted, but because when you hang out near Goldshire too long on Argent Dawn, you have to bathe frequently and you get a rep for “hanging in Goldshire wink wink”. 

So, lists of starting areas and then to Wowhead.com to start pulling lists of quests in the zone.  I also have to remember to hit the Easy to Miss thread on the Quest forums.  There are a ton of quests there that I’m sure I missed.  I need to give myself a deadline for completing it and I won’t know a realistic timeline until I see everything laid out on paper.  I do know that I’m going to make a timeline for the entire Achievement, not just Eastern Kingdom or Kalimdor.  There are too many quests that shuffle you between continents, so I want to take it as a natural progression of zones and quests and not try to get hung up on watching one specific continent. 

Such planning!  Who would have thought you could translate your OCD into an Achievement!? : )  Anyway, that’s my summer goal. 

News from the Front

We had a fantastic run last night in Ulduar25.  Life found me with some playtime unexpectedly and I checked with the healing lead to see if I was needed as a backup or anything and they did have a spot.  Their first night in the raid was Tuesday so we were up to Auriaya last night.  It was a bit tricky getting the pull coordinated but once the pull clicked, it just took some old fashioned pinching and pulling to get everyone to fit right.  I even got to dps!  Of course, that was after 4 of the 6 healers were dead, we’d lost our main tank, both off tanks, and about half of the dps.  She was at 1% so I started pew pew wrath wrath cuz I didn’t really have anyone to heal ; )

I did notice one amazing thing during this fight.  I spammed Nourish and all my hots on our MT for the entire fight and only one time did I notice that I was below 50% mana.  One time.  I usually try to hit my Spirit Glass Trinket once kind of early in the fight, once again when we are about halfway and then it’s up for the end when things are getting tight.  I instinctively hit my trinket and then glanced at my mana and I was at 80%.  Hardly any desperate need for a quick regen but I used the opportunity to throw a few hots on myself to alleviate some of the other healers mana. 

We headed on over to Iron Council after that and after a couple false starts and some reassignments, we were able to down them.  I have to say, I much prefer experiencing the fight vertical, as opposed to the 10 man version I did Wednesday night when I was busy healing the floor.  I picked up the heroic Achievement for I Choose You, Stormcaller, also.  So I’m helping rez people and didn’t really look at the loot.  I never do, really.  Now that we get our badges auto-looted, who needs to?  So when the Master Looter linked all the items in Raid, I had to scroll back up to make sure I read it right.  Phaelia’s Vestments of the Sprouting Seed!  I whispered the Master Looter with the !command to find out how much dkp I had, confident that I had more than the other resto druid I breathed a sigh of relief.  I felt slightly guilty because I had picked up a really nice chest the night before in 10 man, but this was THE chest I had been hoping for since stepping foot in Ulduar. 

Flame on!

Before the raid started, I finished up the Flame Warden Meta Achievement after stealing and turning in the Undercity flame.  Apparently I had gotten credit for Silvermoon City but not Undercity during the reset of the quests earlier in the week.  4 more holidays to go before I can check off that section!

So, Ulduar really does drop Leather Resto gear…

 

/italian accent …Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Wednesday

So Wednesdays and Mondays have become my almost-standard raid nights now.  I did Ulduar25 for a month or two on Tuesdays and Thursdays until real life stepped in and strongly suggested I rethink my WoW schedule.  So instead of 25 with the raiding group, I’m doing 10 man with a portion of the raiding group.  We go in on Wednesday nights, have a lot of fun, clear some bosses, try some new things, and finish up what we can on Monday nights.  It’s very casual and a lot of fun.  We are getting in somewhat of a rhythm with each other and even though 2 or 3 faces may change from week to week, there’s a pretty solid core of 7 that run it. 

Last night was no exception.  We assembled and started a little late but nonetheless got underway and knocked off Flame Leviathan, XT (which gave me a Nerf Gravity Bombs achievement) aaaaand my first piece of Leather healy loot from Ulduar!  Vest of the Glowing Crescent and I was the only one who would use it so Yay!  I had won the roll on Spark of Hope several runs back but this was the first Leather Healer gear I had seen drop.  I was beginning to think that only Pally and Shammy gear dropped in Ulduar.  We downed Kologarn and then Iron Council, which I had not been there for but the group had done it a couple weeks back.  I was totally helpful in the kill (which was our 3rd attempt I believe) in that I was rolling Lifeblooms on my dead body for probably 90% of the fight.  Note to self: Overload kills trees.  Well, that’s not right, trees not watching for Overload kills trees.  We finished the night on Razorscale.  Anywho, IC gave me a couple of achievements for the night.  It’s funny because I didn’t even realize I had gotten achievements for it, I was just so happy we killed them!  I didn’t find out until this morning when I logged in and (the first thing I do when I log in) hit Y to bring up my achievements. 

I had a lot of fun throughout the night, raiding, even on wipes.  On XT, I dps’d during two of the heart phases which was fun, and then raid healed the rest of the fight.  I also got to go boomkin for the pulls right before Auriaya.  I reverted my UI back so my bars aren’t fading so switching specs on a moment’s notice didn’t cause quite the anxiety that it did last week.  I was also not MT healing this time around, so my focus was OT, general raid healing and hotting the MT.  I played around with some of the timing, trying to get 3 LB stacks on the MT and then weaving in a couple on the OT, and letting them bloom and return mana to me, and then distributing some rejuvs to the dps taking splash damage.  I always love thowing a regrowth on another healer because a) my regrowths hit for a lot and b) I know the hot will keep them mostly topped off and I can swiftmend it if they run into trouble.  Last night, we had a new to the group healer with us, a shammy.  He did an awesome job and I think the combination of priest-druid-shammy was fantastic.  We all have our strengths and areas where we need someone watching our back and we just sort of meshed last night. 

Flynch!

The Midsummer festival is almost over for me, I have 1 more fire to extinguish in Kalimdor and then I need to redo the horde cities since I did Org and Undercity before the reset.  Redoing these should give me the Thief’s Reward quest, and with that my crown and final Achievement for the Meta.  Flame Warden is not a title I particularly care about, and I doubt seriously that I’ll ever display it.  I just like checking things off : )  Finishing the meta will also give me the opportunity to log back in on my baby druid, Flynch.  I’ve been itching to play her again, much to my surprise.  I don’t really see it as playing an alt, it’s more like a little nostalgia with my main druid hehe.  But I’d like to tack on some levels on her during the festival so I can use the 10% buff to experience gain.  This weekend should be quiet on the home-front, no birthdays to attend, no crazy festivals… I should be able to get to 18 at least, and she’s at 12 now.  I’m walking the fine line between wanting to go crazy on Achievements for her, but so far I’ve been able to just enjoy playing her and focus on Achievements on Sinny. 

A little bit of everything

 

Ulduar10 fun

Last night was a nice mix of raiding, achievements, and old fashioned fun. I logged in to get a couple things done on the Midsummer Festival achievements so I headed over to Exodar, where I heard it was much easier to do the torch catching quests. I’m not a fan of Exodar, I get lost easily in Stormwind so Exodar is a confuzzled mess for me. And let me just say, I’m impressed with any Horde that are able to find the dang bonfire.

I finally find the fire and pick up the torch catching quest. I tried it a couple times and I am a complete moron sometimes. I would get the torch catching buff and then run back to the bonfire to light another one and toss it. Duh. It’s a chain of them. I must be the last person to find this out because everyone else, it seems, has finished the dang quest. So once I figure that out, well hell, it was so easy! I watched the shadows on the ground and the only time I had a problem was when someone else’s shadow crossed near mine and I lost which one was my torch. So about that time, I got an invite for a group from Belghast, thinking he was grouping me to help me find this stupid bonfire I was complaining about. Newwwwwp, it was raid time hehe. He held off converting it to a raid so me and our priest could finish the quests we were working on and then we were off to Ulduar. We had cleared to Auriaya the previous Wednesday and were ready to head for Hodir.

Freeze Frame! 

Our group makeup last night included 2 resto druids and a priest, and we were pretty heavy on ranged dps: 2 mages, a shadow priest and a hunter.  Throw in a tank, a dps warrior and a deathknight and we were off!  The entire night seemed like a total comedy of errors, when in reality we were all learning the pulls. At one point, we got snakes from the mounds of snow, a reverant and all his friends, and a Champion. Ahahhahahah good times. We were making some decent attempts at Hodir, learning the best strategy for our group and making tweaks along the way. Of course, someone piped up that whenever they saw the Flash Freeze warning, he thought of the J Geils song, “Freeze Frame”. So, that was stuck in all our heads after that : )  It was a fun fight, I am always in constant motion anyway when I’m healing so it wasn’t a big change for me to move to shake the Biting Cold debuff.  We switched around healing assignments to give our priest a little more time to dispel and that seemed to help a lot.  She could focus on the MT and dispelling while we druids raid healed.  I think we have a good handle on the fight now and the general mechanics, just need to put it all together and color it with win.

Winds of the North, consume you!

Unfortunately, it was actually a Storm in the South that consumed us.  We heard what you never want to hear from your priest on Vent: “guys my latency is in the red”. That, followed by broken Vent chatter from her, and finally a disconnect. Our Raid Leader got a text from her saying her power had gone out due to a storm so we hung around for 20 minutes or so seeing if her power came back up. No such luck so a few of us decided to head over and kill Ahune for the Midsummer Festival. Yay for getting the Frost Lord achievement!

Wrapping up the evening

During the raid, a couple of us were talking about the torch juggling achievement for the Festival and I was pretty worried about it. Even though I finally figured out the torch catching thing, I was pretty sure that I would screw up the juggling thing somehow. I also didn’t want to buy a ton of torches and waste the blossoms. One of the raid members said he’d put a good bunch of torches in the guild bank for everyone so I headed there and pulled out 10 or so. This gave me 15 to try the achievement with. I went to a quiet little corner so I wasn’t affected by any lag and tried it out. Of course, I had forgotten to turn on the achievement tracking so I was just standing there flipping torches and had no idea how many I was doing or anything. So I stopped spamming the mouse click and #1 on my bar long enough to put up the tracking. Yeah, I was moving way too slow to get the achievement hahahaha. So I started spamming faster and ended with 23/40. So I did it one more time, and spammed it as fast as I could and I got 40 with 6 seconds to spare :D Yay!!!!! Torch Juggler!!!! Flame Warden title, I will have you soon!

Achievement freak Ysinnia checking in

I got my reassignment on the forum game, Get that Achievement. I dumped Capture the Flag (thank god) and was reassigned “Argent Champion”. I’m already exalted with Argent Dawn so it shouldn’t be too hard to finish up my Argent Crusade rep. Also, while running around putting out the bonfires, I knocked off the last 3 pests I needed to kill and completed my Pest Control achievement.