Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Kara at last!

Well just as I was ready to do 2 WSG matches then bounce out onto my pally.. Guild chat read:

"We need 2 DPS for Kara, we're on Curator"

I literally said, HELL YEAH! Let the horde Flag Carrier cap and bounced out of WSG to get into this group. It was really neat. Kinda confusing though, even trash in raids is crazy tough. We had 3 tanks (or a dps warrior, who knows) and 2 healers. I didn't do my job well (to me) and we ended up wiping 3 times. Here's the rundown:

  1. First time we wiped, its cause someone (probably a mage) ran off or blinked and aggro'd curator before we got rid of the astral.. or whatever.. look like white fire elementals.. ANYWAY there's a few of them to take out first before you start curator, this of course caused a wipe.
  2. Second time we weren't killing the stupid astral flares (the ones the curator poops out every so often) fast enough to really take advantage of the evocation period. (This is the time I felt ticked off cause I thought I was doing what I should, but wasn't doing curse of doom when he's about 45 seconds from evocation.)
  3. Third time, kinda the same as time 2. Not really, but I'll say that. This time curator was to 24% and was told "no more flares, all out on curator". THEN guess what? 2 flares appeared and we all died.
Ok in the scope of my guild raiding kara, this was a crappy crappy run. These guys are pros and know this stuff backwards/forwards. The problem was some non guild folks we picked up. Well them and me not doing my job on the second time... Who knows, if I had been doing that we might have actually got him down more.

In the scope of "Mcgoo's first raid", even though it was JUST one guy that we went after, it was AWESOME. I have read about curator and how he's a "gear check" for the instance, he's a mandatory boss or some sort of nonsense. I was hoping beyond hope I'd get the staff he drops, and MAYBE get the T4 gloves (more just to have, cause I think my pvp gloves are superior.. But I'd like to have some Tier gear someday). We got nothing, but I got about 3g worth of trash off of mana worms and astral thinga-ma-bobs. With a repair bill of 5g 50s I actually LOST money on the exchange, but I'm not sweating it. I jumped out and immediately the raid leader asked me if I wanted to do a heroic. This is why I think I must not have sucked TOO bad, cause why would he ask a noob to do a heroic? I didn't have time (1.5 hrs and I was zonked) so I went to the ah and bought some gear for my pally (brepalan), I sent it to him along with 3 netherweave bags to get him going. I logged onto him to get the bags equipped and boom a good friend wanted to run me through stocks for xp (this is possible and advisable at 15). I shot up a whole level and now had to train. Turned out the time I didn't have for a heroic would have only been about 45 minutes longer than what I was on for.. oh well. I still need heroic badges (by the ton), so I will be trying to hit a heroic ASAP, maybe get me set up with that idol of the crescent? yeah... that'd be awesome..

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Pally on the move

Well I've become down recently about my warlock. This should come as no great surprise to all that are casual players such as myself. I've hit the "wall". There comes a time in your WoW career when you are either dependent on others to help you move on (raids/instances), or you are dependent upon hours of queue times in PvP settings to get better stuff.

Firstly, I LOVE PvP. Love it. L-O-V-E, love. I hate queue times. hate hate hate. To me, time I spend in queue is time I could be spending getting my other toons to do new and exciting things that mcgoo couldn't do, or never had a chance to do. Ideally, there would be a patch for PvP queues, so I could have a alt playing while mcgoo was in queue.. when it popped, it would log me out of the alt and into mcgoo at the battleground. This, will never happen though.

In my depression directed at Mr Mcgoo, I have just kinda resigned him for daily quests for gold, and farming for mats other toons can't get. Mainly ores, since I'm a 300+miner. I'm not topped out, which again, seems painful without an epic flying mount. Doing a loop of hellfire peninsula takes me about 30 minutes. And that is if I get at least 4 nodes (which I don't always). I dropped some gold to get a riding crop so I could speed up a bit. This has helped a lot, really. However seeing a dragon zoom by me so fast that I'm apparently standing still was a bit disconcerting.

I thought, I'll just log in to do dailies.. if someone is getting a group for kara, they can msg me. Problem there is my lowbie alts are in my friendly guild. The one where I have "ppl". I suppose I could go out and put the alts into my mains guild.. I figure my problems I have with mcgoo would just be amplified though at a lower level.

My presumption was, once I hit 70 and push to get my kara key.. I'll be able to hop in kara and eventually get to raiding a bit. Honestly I don't even know if I'd LIKE raiding, but I do want to try it. Most of the gear I see on people running into tempest keep raids (for warlocks anyway) says on the tooltip "drops in kara, low drop rate". So I apparently need to farm this place to have anything of any value, and of course the 2-3 heroic badge turnins for the cool stuff from there. So I suppose kara is my end step, just in case I don't like raiding I'll have good damage gear to farm with and be ready for my march to 80 (when the new expansion hits). This presumtion was punched in the face with the issue that my guild is steady raiding SSC and Tempest Keep. They can clear Kara with some incredibly short time frame, so I know the guys could do it.. its just they spend their time in the big raids doing "big stuff". I still hope that I can get in and do kara, but I am now less hopeful.

I could PUG it! but I'd rather not run with random dingleberries who managed to get the key.

Anyways.. the original title of the post is what is "up" now with me and mine. My pally Brepalan is on the move. I barely made it up one level last night with him but much of that is due to the long time it takes me to do my 4 skyguard dailies (2 bombing, one escort and 1 nether ray roundup). I generate about 50g each day.. So 2 day's work will buy a mount at 40 for one of my guys. Even though my pally gets a freebie. My pally I'm trying to get to about 49 to leave him for pvp till he has a crap ton of honor and marks to buy things with. The real reason for that is because of a buddy of mine that has a 40ish hunter. I figure if I'm a pally I could probably tank/heal anything around the 40's level. Well with good gear, but again.. money won't be a big problem since I'm churning a good amount out as is.

After the pally I will probably push the priest, as he is the most fun of the alts ATM. I am wanting to work on consortium rep too as those guys send me gems!! Well not great gems, but hey.. I'll need them for my priests jewelcrafting in the future.

Friday, January 25, 2008

Funny thing happened at the mailbox last night

Double post today cause I laughed out loud when I saw it. My Paladin, who has long since been growing dusty in goldshire, has been my default "send crap to him when my bank toon is full, and it will eventually ping back". I think the name is descriptive enough, but basically when dwarfenstuff had a full pack and stuff getting ready to ping back to Mcgoo, I'd just forward that stuff off to my pally. Well apparently at some point I had sent a bunch of stuff to my pally from Mcgoo.. Apparently 30 days ago, since last night I got about 800 netherweave cloth and various other greens/ores.

Why is this funny?

Read back a few posts to when I went to farm netherweave so I could top off my tailoring... THIS is why I shouldn't be trusted to remember things. Anyway I made a bunch of bolts of netherweave, and I'll probably make a bunch of netherweave bags and push them to dwarf so he can get a full bank and get rid of stuff he doesn't/may not need. I think I'm going to buy some of the herb bags and give them to my rogue for storage of herbs, maybe an engineering bag for my palladin for when he gets going again (which will be happening soon)

WOO HOO!!! Ogrila

Well I finally mustered the group to get my ogrila pre-req quests done. This statement alone belies the fact that it took over an hour to get everyone grouped and ready to go kill. Only then to find out that a horde group was doing them at the same time so we didn't even HAVE to kill 2 guys (we helped though) as the horde killed them and we could still loot the object dropped. I partiuclarly liked helping as the horde had a shadow priest, and since I'm affliction almost all my damage comes from the shadow pool. I used curse of shadows, corruption and unstable affliction (my heavy damage dots), knowing this would augment the Spriests shadow damage with the curse, and then I volleyed shadowbolts and popped a trinket. I got really lucky and crit 3x's so the priest and I were just wailing out damage, he stole aggro (well he had already started when I got there) but with their tank, our tank their DPS and some of ours it wasnt' a big deal to kill the guy.

All in all last night was productive, I managed to push through to friendly with Ogrila, and I have about 100 Apexis shards. On top of that I passed through to end up with 6 daily quests done and now revered with skyguard (so they chant at me).

The absolute best part, I made over 100g in those few hours. I have about 2 days left on my shadowcloth cooldown, so my robe is still not made, but it should be soon... Soon..

Thursday, January 24, 2008

argh.. coilfang sucks

Well last night after doing my pitiful few dailies I have access to, I decided to help one of my buddies run through the steamvault to get his kara fragment. This, like other stories of pain and frustration, is short in distance, but long in problems.

Anyway we got there and we were (as we always are) DPS heavy but without tank or heals. My buddy Val will accost me for not knowing one to call, but all the healers I know were in SSC or TK, so I was up the creek. Anyway we found a guy to tank it for us, but when HE shows up he's a arms warrior with a 2h sword. Ok, I thought, me and the elemental shammy are in some good epics, we could probably just give him a few seconds to get some threat and then wipe out whoever was there, right? Well maybe.. Then we go on a search for a healer.. So we are basically screwed from the word go here. We are in all actuality 4 dps guys, looking for a healer. Between you and me the healer would need to be a pally or a druid just so they could fill in with some tanking if need be, but I wasn't trying to take over the leadership role of my buddys SV run. We had a 6x holy priest come, who could have probably done the healing, if she wasn't lagging all the live long day. So she left due to causing us to wipe 3 times due to lag on heals.

So then what you ask? Then the 4 of us spammed LFG and our respective guilds trying to get a healer or a healer and a tank(cause really, an arms warrior?). Then we were getting bored so I started holding miniature pvp lessons. The hunter is pretty new to the whole idea of a 1:1 pvp experience, so I was showing him what to do.. How to place your hunter, and how to kill a warlock(which for any of you who have read my blog before it moved here know, that is why Mcgoo became my main.. I needed to know a locks' weakness so I could kill them in bg). First I school the elemental shammy, why? Cause I pwn all shammies but the enhancement ones carrying 2 purple weapons with windfury. Really the issue was I knew she was elemental so I put my felhunter on her.

PvP lesson 1 (for locks): If the guy you are trying to kill is a caster, use felhunter. Felhunter = win.

So felhunter locked her up long enough for me to put my 3 dots and my curse of shadows on her while I wound up for a shadowbolt which finished her (after some life draining and a fear). I was impressed really cause she didn't use her shocks on me (more correct was as she noted, I didn't cast till the felhunter spell locked her). My shaman spams shocks and is light on lightening, but he's just 19 (a poor attempt at a twink, so I may delete him and start over with a new shaman).

Then I have a go at the hunter (BM spec, but has aimed shot in MM). I pwn the daylights out of him cause he has his pet on the felhunter, and I do too much damage too quick for his small HP pool to handle. I won because he didn't play his class, he was trying to be a mage with a pet and just shoot from 20yds away while his pet took out MY pet. I did everything wrong, and still won. Had he known how to deal with me I'd have lost, and lost badly. So I instructed him thusly: As BM vs a clothie, you trigger your "I'm a crazy kitty" ability and send the thing to kill me. Meanwhile you are doing poison shot, arcane shot, multishot, and then if I stay at a distance do rapid fire. Told him the super secret method of beating a warlock.. (we do great damage, but usually over time, not burst (unless you're destro, which I'm not). )

Then I thought, lets try the warrior, he's in plate.. has epic weapon (swordsmith apparently) so lets dance eh? Well I school this guy too. 1) he used his berserker rage too soon, 2) he didn't stay in berserker mode (a must for fighting a lock, it keeps you out of fear most of the time), and 3) I rule. Okay so #3 was self gratifying, but I consider it accurate for this night. Warriors should know that you loose to a lock by letting them kite you. If you are on top of me hitting me, I should die very quick (and I do, trust me).

What did I have going? Well I did have >10k hitpoints due to the food buff (for instance), and the fort buff from the priest. Aside from that I knew how to do what I needed to do. I got a break with the hunter who just had a brainlock on how to beat a lock. I doubt that happens again unless he's drunk.. Hunters beat me always, and so do enhancement shammys.

So with a whole lot I wanted done, I got nothing done, and didn't even help a buddy out getting his kara frag. So basically last night, was JUST for 30g I made in dailies. Tonight I'm going to camp out in Ogrila till I can get a group for those quests and knock them out. I don't care if I gotta wait till after the raid is over, I'm going to get it done.. maybe if I pay a tank/healer? I dunno.. but I want it DONE. I want to hit exalted with skyguard asap!

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Pilfering for gold

Just last night a hunter buddy of mine and I went on a netherweave hunting mission to fill my mags with bolts so I can round out tailoring (done now, btw). This was all brought about by my "hey lets go nuts and level tailoring to max and get the FSW set asap" mentality. It has cost me all my gold, literally. My normal AH workings have been reduced to sending greens to an enchanter buddy for DE in hopes of getting arcane dust. So the enterprise my main and bank toons had going has ground to a halt. So my only gold is coming form dailies and coin loot when farming.

Anyway, it is because I'm broke as a joke that I went farming for cloth to round out tailoring. In doing so we went to the ogre caves in Nagrand. They spawn in rapid succession, so don't go there and try to farm if you aren't ready for handling 3-4 at once. Well I got all the netherweave I needed to convert, yet again, into imbued netherweave. This is how I finished my tailoring, along with a final imbued netherweave robe.

My guildies came through for me and in a night I got 8 shadowcloth. So I am basically 3 days away from having my epic robe. So what comes next? Next comes the full tilt and boogie portion of the Mcgoo rep grind. First I want Skyguard rep, I can get a good trinket from them (epic, again.. woot!). To do THAT I will either need to keep playing wow for another year or so at my 3 daily quest rate, or... Get Ogrila rep so I can do skyguard dailies in BEM.

Why oh why Mcgoo do you not have that ability already? Oh cause when I was questing in BEM, I never came upon or even thought of seeking out ogrila... And now realizing how retarded that was, all my buddies are 70 and either hot/heavy into arena or PvP and have no time to group to get the 3 pre-req's out of the way. The pre-req's I've been told are not to be solo'd as its like trying to solo circle of blood in nagrand.. you can't do it.. the bosses are too tough and you can't handle their mojo. So after I get my FSW robe, I'm literally going to camp out in Ogrila and wait pinging LFG channel for LFG Ogrila quests..

After I get there with Ogrila, and consequently skyguard outpost in BEM, I'll run to shadowmoon valley so that I can pound those blood elves for their rings/tomes. I've been pretty lucky I think with tomes, as I've gotten 12 already and those are just from the blood elf nest in Terrokar.

So that's whats coming for me, well on the PvE side. PvP side, I'm going to push to try to get my pvp pants, but I need honor, and a ton of it. This is only going to make strides on AV weekend, which just passed. The other BG's don't net nearly that kind of honor, but I suppose I'll be pushing all the bg's

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Epix, well a few anyway

Well I've not updated in a long time, but the scenario has changed significantly. Firstly I am at 374 tailoring (rock), I am now fully kara keyed (rocking, but harder).. and I've completed 2/3 of my Shadow's Embrace tailoring epic. There is a lot to say about each, but here's the lowdown in order.

Tailoring, I thundered up through the mid 300's by just buying what I didn't have, and pushing hard. This was expensive, to say the least, but it got me where I needed to be to get my epic set going. My first piece of this set, was mostly with bought cloth, as I thought this was cheaper. Which is TRUE if you aren't a shadowweave tailor.. Some things, I have to learn the hard way.. Consider this one learned. The second piece was all farmed mats. I farmed my little gnomish butt off too. I'm so sick of killing elementals, I couldn't begin to illustrate this. What I basically did in the end (which means after I had moaned and groaned through 3 days of farming off/on and doing dailies) I made a list of stuff I needed for the WHOLE set. I was doing it piece at a time, but decided that farming was so annoying I would rather have a week or so of un-fun WoW-time than space it out over a few days, as I would just hate to go back and farm. Before I made my boots, I had all the mats for everything except 2 primal fire. I actually bought 4 primal fire on AH since I farmed fire elementals for a while and got NOTHIN! This bothered me.. I lost my temper and bought 4 at a cheap price (according to my addon, roughly 5g less than typical per primal). This still means I need 2 Primal Fires though. Now the AWESOME part of this story is there are like 5 shadow tailors in my guild all with their stuff DONE already.. So the are benevolent enough to make me cloth for mats. So I'm coughing up mats and I'll get roughly 4x's the amount of cloth as usual for me in a week. I am short about 5 primal waters and 2 primal fire. Fire is more of a priority, since I'm having people help me out on shadowcloth creation. I am projecting an early date for finishing my FSW robe, roughly the end of next week. This is of course meaning that I will be getting pretty immediate responses from the guildmates who are helping me out. Honestly, I'm so pumped at the group response to my query in group chat.. I almost wouldn't care if they waited a long time to pass on the cloth. Most of these guys are high rollers anyway and this is small potatoes. They can zip down to the altar of shadows on their epic flying mount and zip back in 10 minutes. While it takes me that long just to GET there.

Kara keyed. This was actually kinda hard. The guild is so busy doing big stuff, little stuff like this was way under the radar. The hard part was the arcatraz portion. Apparently nobody likes this instance. I didn't think it was tough, but getting IN there was rough. Then I had to do black morass in caverns of time. This was easy cheesy. I don't know about other classes but as a lock, I dot the boss, and then spam seed of corruption. That's it. So on my keyboard kids thats doom,corruption,UA, then seed. So 1,1,1,4,4,4... So I just had my toon set to follow the mage. Follow, and then assist.. That was it. My seed was enough to stop almost all the adds, without problem. I want to do this place again, cause it was just fun. I did next to nothing, and got about 10g in crap loot. Sad part of all this is after I got keyed, I wanted to go THEN to kara. Not wait, just go. I'll be a honest here, I'm a little put off by going into a raid with a pug, especially when I'm new to raids. I'd rather go in with friends/guildmates who have bt/dt and have the tee shirt. So that brings me to the last part of my post.

PvP'ing till it hurts! We just got off a AV weekend, and I farmed about 12k honor out of the thing. This has allowed me to have my epic PvP hands/head. I figured I'd have time to get the pants before my robe was done (as my current setup in gear has my chest/legs linked giving me a +dmg bonus for having netherweave). Its not essential to do this before I go to kara, but I still want to.

Whats coming? More pain to you folks in AV! I don't always win, but I do always leave bodies in my wake. I'm planning on an arena "dip toes into water" team. Nothing serious, but something just enough to really get a finger on what I need to do in there. After all, I want that epic holy schmolies dragon mount for being in the top tier. It won't happen for a long time probably, but still.

Epic count: 4 (head/shoulders/hands/feet)

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Dailies, and my stomp through tailoring

Well where to begin... I've been away from blogging for so long I 'm not sure where to put my 2 cents. Well for starters, dailies..

I hate daily quests. I don't really, but its fun to say to shock people. I hate the daily PvP quest. I seem to check it on just the wrong days so its Arathi Basin. My server, the only time AB is a win for alliance is when we run in with a premade. That is fun and all, but I kinda miss the spontaneity of PvP pugging. I have been casually trying to complete this popping into a few bg's here and there, but not much on the way of dedication. I'll talk more of Eye Of the Storm in my next post, by the way.

Mostly I am all hyped up to get a skyguard epic mount. I've been pounding out both of the dailies I have access to (keep reading) and slowly building rep. The big problem here is, there is only 2. Now Ogrila (spelling, bite me) has a few skyguard quests you can do daily too. I believe more than 3! However to get access to those, you first need to do some quests for Ogrila. These are basically (to my untrained eye) big monster elite guys that need to be killed. They also need to have a full 5 man to down. HERE is my problem, nobody is EVER doing these quests. I can get a healer, but no tank. OR I can get 3 healers and a shaman.. It's always something. So I'm hitting major roadblocks there, and it continually bites my rear that I can't get to the other dailies I want cause nobody wants to do the quests. I really like those mounts, never mind I don't have the crapload of gold it would take to BUY the mount. I just don't see a time when I'll have an extra few thousand gold pieces to just throw around. Maybe I'm just pessimistic, but I don't really see a need for it so much as I see it as a "neat" thing. My buddy Val, is an overachiever and seems to always have a ton of gold sitting on all her toons. Personally I don't.. I don't really worry about money too much on WoW, cause well.. I can go grind on blood elves for 20 minutes, which is kinda fun, and make 5-10g. So why sweat it? She doesn't sweat it, she's just a master planner..

My other daily quest I do is cooking. Cooking to me, is like the most fun profession. It takes nothing to level, the goods are immediately usable, and often provide me with some really good buffs (+20 spelldamage? +20str for your tank? +20 agility for rogues/hunters?, or even +20 spellHIT. all of which come with +20 spirit.. and the standby +20 stamina). so I can never stop cooking. I have no intention of leveling cooking with anyone else, as.. well I have all the recipes possible at this point so I see no reason to change or push someone up through there. Now I HAVE been working on fishing with my alts, cause fish seem to give some of the better buffs pre burning crusade. PLUS in the eventuality you get to Nagrand, you get the bonus of fishing for motes of water, which are always nice to have, and SELL.

A lot of my gold stores have gone to pushing me through tailoring. I had all of the linen/wool/silk/mageweave that I needed to push through there. Maybe I bought a few stacks of mageweave, I forget.. Anyway, runecloth is where I got bitten. Now a funny thing about runecloth is, on Medivh server at the time I was pushing through... The bolts were cheaper than the cloth itself. So after a few wasted gold on buying cloth, I bought the bolts and pushed through easily. I sighed deeply as I could FINALLY use this enormous stockpile of netherweave I had saved up. I had, by a rough count, 1k netherweave. Wow you say? incredible you say? well to level quickest/cheapest, you need 2700! So I pushed through all my netherweave in about an hour (making bolts, etc..). So this left me with about 1/4 the imbued netherweave I need (for further crafts to top out) and a lot of goods that are flooded in the AH. No worries there my trusty enchanter friend will DE that crap and send me the goods back (less anything he needs) and I sell those on AH. The biggest shocker was that my problem pushing things was.. BAGS. Nobody buys mageweave or runecloth bags anymore. All these spoiled toons are rollin up to netherweave really early. Well I've had netherweave since it was possible to HAVE netherweave.. but thats because I had a ton of money and nothing to spend it on. I'm just about to 350 on tailoring in a blazing streak (thanks to mages for the int buffs, and druids for their buff for int). I almost never had a missed opportunity for a leveling point in yellow or green.

So to make a long story short, (no pun intended) this gnome is a merc. I'm grinding rep for scryers in Terrokar.. and doing these dailies till I can get access to more dailies for skyguard. I imagine eventually I'll be doing the dragon mount quests (to get one, I don't know what faction it is at this point). I'm not in a huge rush cause everyone has a dragon mount these days, and quite frankly I like the blue-ish looking sporebat that skyguard can get me. It looks dark and evil and stuff.. the dark dragon just looks silly. I'll have one someday, but it still looks silly.