Thursday, July 31, 2008

YES LVL 70!!

I finally made it to 70 with my hunter!!

Psych...

Ok so last night me and good ole krinkor were looking forward to decimating everything in shadowmoon (there's a questline there that yields a buttload of xp plus is long as crap.. Plus I just like that place).. Well we got there and Krink is still sitting at 66. Now if you know wth you're talking about you now are laughing as almost ALL the quests in shadowmoon are for lvl 67 minimum.

What are 2 dwarves to do? Well I took out my frustration on the blades edge mountain area instead of shadowmoon. We got him all the way to 67...

Psych...

We got him to about 4 bars from 67. A big deal? Not really there is a ton of quests in the first ogre camp that we can push through really quick tonight if need be. If I don't see him I personally will be in shadowmoon... killing demons and hoping for Kiljadeen marks and the other ones.. whatever the lvl 2 turnins for aldor are (I don't know at this point). I have like 5 Fel Armaments sitting in my bank as is, which is what people call lucky.. Until they realize just HOW MANY FRIGGIN THINGS IT TAKES TO GET UP TO EXALTED!!! But I digress...

So running around in the BEM I managed to get about 4 bars into 69. So I'm about at 30-40% of 69. My typical rotation is that I go into a zone get all the q's then just follow questhelper and stomp them out. TYPICALLY, the first night in a new zone is my low xp night. If Krink is on I'll be dragging him up to 67 so we can go there and perform our deadly duet.. If not I'll go there solo and kill everything... maybe 2x's. I did get the FP there (since we didn't figure out he was too low for the area until we were there and he told me "hey why now q's?".. So we spent abotu 10 minutes not even playing just BS'ing in party chat.

I'd like to finish my shadow labs experience, if I am left solo tonight... But again that puts me at the mercy of the LFG tool.. which is aptly named TOOL. I want the sonic spear pretty bad, plus the bracers from the quest I'm on would be nice.. Aside from all that.. my Valanos' bow is in my bank I have the scope with +crit on it (crit makes my pet happy.. and when he's happy.. I'm happy)... I really want the sonic spear (not a necessity, but it would be nice).. and I WANT the trinket from BM.. I need it.. Don't make me explain.. but I'm going to have that.. and maybe the spear.. we'll see. But 70 is close at hand!!

Then on to the druid!!

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

69, and the shadow labs run that never should've been

Well as you can tell I dinged 69 last night.. Not questing though.. in an instance! Shadow Labs (my least favorite of all instances, more on that later).

A buddy I met leveling in Nagrand had a crew assembled to run shadow labs. I was 68, he was 69, tank was 69, warlock/priest were both 70 (and had a few epics). Sounds bad from the get-go right? Well anyway we manage to get in and we wipe on some early trash mobs. Its like you're reading my mind.. only from the past.. its getting worse.

Ok now we manage to get through to the room with the first boss. He's a joke and we all know it. The problem is the felguards he has that do AOE fear and have more HP than all of us combined. But after a few wipes (yes a few) We got to the first boss. I did all out mojo spank-tastic DPS. Well I thought I was anyway. I assumed I'd be last in dps just because.. well there's a 70 lock there (and I know a little something about locks), and a enhancement shaman (of whom I have great respect cuz everytime one of them hits mcgoo they get the windfury triple crit smack down and kill me). After the first boss I ask if anyone has damagemeters up (sorry val, I know you just posted a groin punch of a post about this very thing, and I laughed when I asked in party chat too just because of it).. I said specifically.. I don't need a figure, I just want to make sure I'm pulling my weight.

Me = 37% of damage
lock =36% of damage
(I don't remember the shaman because of this figure here)

He immediately started either teasing or belly-aching about how he can't believe he was loosing a dps race with a hunter. I was still wearing my WWdN "don't be a ----" shirt so I totally just kinda kidded around back and forth with him.. What I was thinking was.. SCRUB!!! I'm in crap gear, 2 levels beneath you and I'm beating you in DPS? Please delete your character, and never roll a lock again! Could he have been having a bad night? God I hope so. I want to say it publicly here, I have trouble beating hunters in many DPS scenario's.. I have NEVER lost a dps race to anyone 2 levels beneath me.. EVER. EVER EVER EVER.. (I digress)

Now looking at his spec and stuff I don't really know why he was so gimped. I mean sure he did as good of damage as me.. but why wasn't he blowing me away? Anywho I think all these guys knew each other but me, which is fine. The healer was awesome. The tank was good (all be it, unexperienced in shadow labs). Shaman while not maxing out on DPS certainly played a vital role (tremor totem for anti-fear.. poison cleansing totem for.. guess what..you got it.. Poison. And the biggest help mana stream) Mana stream totem earned every bit of its worth last night as we were a group of ALL mana users, (pally tank). With Mana stream and blessing of wisdom on me I could pretty much churn the dps out. I rarely stole aggro, and on those occasions FD'd to ditch it. There were some points where the pally gave us all salvation blessing (I know Val will have something to say about it), and I literally remembered how Val removed the buff just to show the guy/gal that hunters don't need it. I mentioned in her comment area on her blog that I take this as a challenge.. Can I pull aggro with salvation? I did.. on purpose 2x's.. but a quick FD sent the mob back to the tank.

This really wasn't a "brag fest" for me.. so if anyone wants to gander at my gear and say "zomg wtf you're awesome gear is leet" or "noob... your gear is poop" be my guest. I kinda think I keep reasonable gear for what I want to do, but by no means scalable for a 70 (hunter) any way you slice it. I'll have to get some new duds.. finish shadow labs.. and maybe do a few other instances to get some odds/ends I want.

All this being said.... I'm now 1 level away from having 2 70's (you are forbidden to go back and read about how I planned on having 2 70's by 7/5/08.. FORBIDDEN!)

Monday, July 28, 2008

Being sorry... and meaning it

I was questing in the BEM zone a few days ago..

There were 2 of us after the same mobs (some buggy like folks.. like flayers or something..) and a druid and I were doing what I call leapfrogging (you take one then I take one.. ) ungrouped of course..

When I screwed up. I multishot and hit his mob as he was charging in.. I got credit for both his kill and mine. Here is a transcript..

me - "OMG, dude did you get credit?"
him - "no"
me - "dude.. I'm so sorry, my bad "
him - "hey thanks man but its no big deal "

Why does this stand out? First, 6g for 1 mob? are you freakin kidding me? Truth be told I was feeling bad.. I've been on my "last XYZ mob" before and had some butt-munch come steal the credit. There are plenty of these flayers around here but just doing that burned me up (at myself) so I thought some recompense was worth it. He was thankful for the apology and offer of gold, but we left it there.

It felt GOOD to actually give a reasonable apology for stealing a mob.. hopefully karma will smack those jerks that always steal my mobs...

69?

I put the title as it is to try to lure in the porn surfers.. LOL!!!

Well the dwarf is now giving dirty looks at 69 (about 5 bubbles from it). I'm happy with his progression since I started giving the game more time and less time to my dead PC(the one I like.. its still down atm).

This puts my schedule at 69 by tonight... 70 by thursday (why thursday? well I might want to get some sleep for a change..ROFL!!). I have a few quests that I HAVE to do that involve long drawn out processes. Firstly there is a quest in shadowmoon that eventually (and I mean eventually cuz this quest line goes on so long, mcgoo still hasn't finished it) grants me one of the "your toon won't get a better one till kara" upgrades.

Then there is the auchunai bracers (spelling?) that I get from doing a mana tombs run I think. After that I need to start pounding at the instance everyone hates.. dark portal (black morass for those who don't know) in the caverns of time. I will devote precisely 1 night to this endeavor of doing each. This puts me at tuesday at the earliest (of next week remember) to start pushing my druid up from 40 to 70.

Druid

Well I'm going feral cuz I'm lazy. I like doing dps, and I like tanking. At this point the gear difference is like 2 items. Do I foresee doing both in outlands? no. I plan on dps'ing my kitty heart out till I hit 70 and then running back and trying to get some "gear" if I have time (expansion remember?). Regardless my guy will be competitive to other druids. I'm not saying your T6 uber druid is a pushover and mine in green will be up there with him on damage-meters.. what I AM saying is that if you looked at my gear after we ran an instance.. you'd say "dang.. you need new gear". All the while thinking, "dang.. he did THAT ... in THOSE?". That is kinda my hallmark with all my toons. I want to surprise you with my gameplay and then shock you at my gear. I have always WANTED "kewl epix", and Mcgoo actually has a few.. but I never expected them. So I have built my guys up around "what I really want to squeeze from them" gear. With Mcgoo, pre 70, I had almost 980 +shadow dmg. Thats NON-epic, NON-70 gear. What did I loose? Well not much, since locks worry about only 2 stats before raiding.. dmg, and stamina. Most dmg gear has +stamina if its good anyway.. I had a ton of both. As a matter of fact.. even when I made some of my gear transition to epic, I actually held my greens in my bag, just due to set bonus'.. With Dwarf I want attack power and int. Why int? am I nutty? no. I concentrate on killing fast and moving on. INT has been my secondary stat I worry about but I do have a little. I have found i could probably solo ramps with a decent healer thanks to my pet's massive hp pool and dps provision.. what I couldn't do is last more than about 1 minute without going OOM unless I go into viper aspect and loose the crunchy goodness of hawk aspect (all that AP? are you kidding me?).

So the future is again getting "the look" and I groom my original main on the Medivh Server to take his proper place at the level cap..

More to come... as I hit 69 tonight.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

ding ding ding!!! 2 levels left on dwarf!!

Well last night I finally hopped over the limbo bar to ding 68 on my dwarf hunter.. aptly named.. dwarfenstuff.

I tamed a wolf for bite 9 to give to my ravager (rema in bem in case you wondered).. which should help with some dps on his side. Not that he is at all gimped as is.. I just like to be OP all the time. Krinkor dinged 66 which made him happy.

Tonight I plan on pushing krink and myself up to deaths door questlines and then see about the gnome camp quests.. Killin stuff.. looting stuff.. setting up nets and such. Plus a FP which is the awesome. My biggest excitement comes from skinning the dragons to get nether dragon scales around there.. Thottbot says that is a decent place that they drop <70. So since me and krinkor can steamroll just about anything I imagine that'll be a big bonus for me. Don't know if I'd sell them or if I'd just hold them for possible leatherworking joy.. who knows. Personally I like drums but they've been nerfed.. and plan on being nerfed again.. so not likely that they'll matter.

Long story short.. I'm knocking on lvl 70's door. I got about 3 bubbles into 68 and feeling frisky. I should be close to 50% done with it by the time I finish the quests around the gnome encampment in BEM. So I should be close to 69 when I go into shadowmoon or netherstorm. Either way things are looking good for a meteoric rise to lvl 70. A shame that krinkor won't get there at the same time, but ati has 900 alts he's leveling all at the same time.. so who's shocked? not me.. He works even better as an aggro magnet now than before!! can't wait for 70.

Can't wait for 70. I have just enough gold to get dwarf his flying mount (if I so choose, may not just to keep gold and to get mcgoo's epic flying done faster), and "bear" his epic land mount. So things financially are solid.. not great.. but solid. I should follow more of Val's advice.. but at this point I'm just much more focused on getting multiple 70's..

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

*&^$!!!!!! Stupid lag!!

Well the awesome-ness that is NOT my current PC I'm playing on further gimped me last night.. It was night 3 (of real play) at level 67. I am 1.5 bars from dinging 68. Me and krinkor (god bless him for helping me, mobs have a way of just showing up and me dropping instantly to about 75% health (again.. *&^$-ing lag!!). He helped by being 2 levels lower and an atomic aggro bomb in the blades edge mountains. So nobody ever attacked me, I could just assist him.. I still put out a dumptruck load of dmg in a short time aferall. So our pairing was a huge success. Except he apparently has to begin a job hunt today, and had to sleep (pansy, j/k). Knowing I couldn't go it alone without a ton of luck I logged as well.

Since my leveling foray with my hunter/druid/pally.. I have learned that seeing the end like at 1-2 bars makes it nearly impossible for me to log. If I had my REAL computer (the one laying in defeat on the kitchen table) up and running, I'd have stayed on.. pwned BEM and rolled into shadowmoon or netherstorm. I can't complain.. Krink says he rocked out with about 100g at the end of our joint venture into BEM. I admit I'm whiney about my PC, but the biggest hurt is reconfiguring my gameplay around a ... less customized UI. I have toolbars/quickbuttons setup all over on my REAL PC (due to some awesome addon love), and have almost had to relearn how to play. Did you know Macro's were saved on your machine, not the server? Ok, big deal smart ellic.. so you knew and I never thought of it.. Man I hate it when you guys are goofin on me. Well anyway so my fubar that tells me how much money I made.. how much xp I made.. how much all my vendor crap is worth.. All gone. My bank toon has a FAT load of stuff to AH off as soon as I can get my REAL PC running. Motherboard RMA's suck.. they do. Well just trust me, ok? They suck.

Hoping to hit 68 tonight.. and maybe march midway into that level, but at the pace I'm going I won't have but 1 70 at expansion launch. Which will be depressing.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Friggin Ogre's...

No offense to you ogre lovers.. But those butt-monkeys in BEM are way outta line. I managed to eek by them last night for the ridiculous vindicator's quests (5 ogres in a hutt, 2 norms, 2 elites.. 1 named). and I did those by.. well by thinking like a hunter.. I sent my pet in BRK mode (only he's a ravager), and marked the named.. (after kiting the 2 non elites out and killing them).. This leaves 2 elites and a named pounding on my poor ravager (EatsFaces is his name). So I laid my frost trap and multishot. Most everyone knows this is an awesome way to pull adds off of your pet and freeze trap them.. Good news is I kited them into the frost trap and ran right through them to multi/arcane/poison shot the named and kill him.. (by now ravager is charging, teeth bared at the 2 elites). I Looted him and ran. My poor ravager couldn't take the beating any of the 3 times I did this.. but FD pulled me far enough out of the hut to pop up and res him and then bandage/eat/drink to full power again.

So if you haven't done these stupid quests.. .this is the way to go if you are a hunter. As a lock I remember dotting the named and AOE fearing the others and looting and running. Curse of Exhaustion has very limited uses in PvE but running from 2 elite ogres.. its the money baby.. the MONEY.

Tonight I totally plan on polishing off 67 and driving up to 68. At this point that might be all the use dwarf gets before the expansion ( I feel it coming like a storm on the horizon), and I'm not yet ready with my 3 lvl 70's to storm into the frosty northern reaches of Azeroth.. I think my pc issues have compounded the stranglehold time has me in.. I'll keep ya posted!

Friday, July 18, 2008

MIA again... sorry

There has just been a slew of problems around me and WoW lately..

I've been having PC issues (first my PSU, then my mobo). So my MAIN PC is DOA until I can get my RMA from my mobo. What this means is WoW is a painful exercise.. my selling/buying at the AH has STOPPED (too many addons.. slows my dinosaur standby PC to a crawl).

Dwarfenstuff dinged 67 after my night o adventure running almost all the remaining nagrand q's. His next place to go is BEM mostly for some decent quest rewards and possible upgrades. Then its off to netherstorm. I'm way behind in leveling and zones.. For highest XP/hr you really have to be in a zone that is at or above you (if of course, you can be effective as a player there, which I am). Nagrand has SOME mobs at my level but they really aren't a challenge now so moving on is way past due. Ati's warrior hasn't moved nearly as fast he's just recently dinged 65 or so, which is good since I've been of NO real help at all lately.

Then there was the patch I was waiting for... Now we're running our "almost 30's" through SM for xp (I mean really am I alone to think thats nuts to allow a 20 into SM?). So I've pushed him through 1.5 cathedral runs, 2 library runs, 1 armory run. I think he's out or almost out of rested which makes it kinda slow at that point but he still levels a full level each run (just about). I may beg/whine/cry for my pally at 28 (or is it 27?) to get a SM armory/cath run. I'll be good, I promise!! I've actually been terrible at running him through here cuz I have um... well my PC is garbage that I play on now. So he's died a few times.. which is regrettable since he's the one that can rez.. not me (pally).

Druid (BigScryBear) got his mount. Spotted nightsaber or something or other. I have a snow leopard mount is what I call it. (Is this new? I dont' remember seeing these before)

Nobody else has done a DARN thing (with me only on for about 30-40 mins a night due to fighting with my good PC to try to get anything to do anything on it...

That... and I bought a wii... LMAO!!!
wii rules..

Should have my mobo and be back into some better stuff by middle of next week maybe week after. So my updates will probably be lame.

Thursday, July 3, 2008

OMG long time no... blog?

Wow updates updates updates...

  1. Dwarfenstuff: He's chilling in Terrokar right now. Why? well he ran out of rested and I thought with the xp buff leveling some lower toons WITH full rested was just a better idea. You'll see why soon...
  2. BigScryBear: He um.. slid from 37 to 40 in like 2 nights of partial attention. I'm not buying my mount because #1 I don't need it atm and #2 the cost will go down with the new patch (whenever that comes)
  3. Brepalan: OP-Pally goodness. He's jumped up several levels and I now LOVE fighting zombies/undead. I've pushed through the vast majority of the duskwood quests (working on stalvan ATM) and should be done with the area after another night off attention. Oh did I mention He's gone up 3 levels also? Well he did. He's even more rediculously OP than before. AND I pushed his engineering skill to max.. Which cost me a lot of gold, gold I hadn't intended on spending.. oh well. I plan on using Mcgoo's Epic riding around tanaris to gather the >100 mithril bars he'll need. I bought 100 thorium in the AH last night (cuz I'm not mining that.. I hate thorium) so I'll need about 90 more bars that I'll have to buy/mine. I may just do a few laps in EPL and see what happens.
So I've been busy. Mcgoo has been taken out of SL/SL durability and thrust back into the LOVE build (full affy/some destro). I have no qualms about him going back into arena/bg's as a affy lock, I really doubt it'll matter. When we won I was ignored in arena, when we lost I was immediately killed.. and that was with sl/sl.. So I can't see there being a big difference there. Sure I'll spend LESS time getting hit and more time getting dead, but whatever.. I'm too late in the arena game and my schedule too wonky to ever compete at the level I probably should be at. PLUS I arena with buddies, not necessarily complimentary classes.. So while we can dish out the dmg, we don't do ... well anything else very good.

In the end, Mcgoo will always be my main focus. My focus on my alts is to provide me with a better launchpad for mcgoo, in lieu of daily quest gold, supplies, farming.. you name it. Majorly I want my nether-ray flying epic mount. thats 5k gold. Do you have it? Not me.. My thought was I could get my hunter up to 70 have him do (skyguard dailies for the trinket, which I think is awesome for farming with a hunter) dailies. My take-home gold for running skyguard and Ogrila dailies was around 80g (before the Shattered Sun Offensive happened) 80g a day is good but for 5k gold? My thought was doing that in 3's. Even if I JUST did those 2 zones' quests.. That plows me up to a daily contribution of 240g. So about 1/4 of a thousand gold, and that's assuming I get NO drops of any merit at all doing those quests (which I always run home with about 4-5 greens).. Then take into consideration the SSO quests in the isle of Quel.. Q'uel.. well whatever its called. SSO q's I don't NEED a flying mount so my dwarf hunter will probably hang out there until I get the sufficient gold for mcgoo to be Epic'd, then He'd get a flying one.. and consequently he'd get the next epic (if there is time before expansion).. Since the druid epic is a friggin crazy quest line in a instance nobody goes to.. He'll get the last one. I hope to get my pally into the 60's but I have some doubts about it since we're talking about getting my 40-70 then my hunter to 70.. then pounding out 5k gold in dailies.. So I doubt he'll make it into his 40's realistically, but he is by FAR the most fun at this point. ( I took on 6 skellies in the cemetary of duskwood all at my level or 1 above and I killed them without bubble and had 20% health left. I mean thats pretty awesome)

I'll let you know after the holiday weekend (maybe sooner if something cool happens) where I'm sitting on all the goals.