Mcgoo from Medivh

How to make 1-4= something greater than zero..

2009-11-12T13:37:00.000-08:00

Lately I've been getting Grimrpr steamrolling into as much content as possible.

I haven't gotten IN to see Ony yet, but I have been in 3 groups that just suddenly dissolved or lagged on forever and still didn't get in. So.. I'm hoping to get in there and get an upgrade or two for my dps/tanking sets to move myself up a little. I may give up on tanking altogether though..

I have found the yearning within my heart.. Arena.

With mcgoo it was terrible. My job was to dot everyone before they all killed me. Sometime in the 70 cap days, there was a bunch of super-uber locks that pwned everyone. It wasn't me, but I sure felt the backlash. Start a match, let the rogue hide and walk out alone away from the group. The WHOLE other team (healer, dps, cc) all ran right at.. ME. So I got to die VERY fast. My team did okay for the pure reason of me being such easy fodder, and my spellpower really sticking it to people even after I died.

Now.. With Grimrpr.. Its, um. Mostly the same. Only with plate. I am in a 2's team most frequently with my buddy.. a rogue. He outgears me by a lot, but I am competitive with survivability and dps output. I'm the bait. I'm the lure to pull people in. So I run out.. run in a circle and hide behind a pillar. Most people in 2's will divide to have 1 person on each side of the chicken, in this case me. What this does is give my roguish buddy a chance to pwn someone without their helper around to do squat. Well you get the idea.. we suck something awful, but we've improved a lot each week so far.

So.. what is the problem? I play wow about 14 hours in a 7 day period. That time sounds pretty steep, but consider.. WG is a every 2 hours kinda funtrip, and lfg takes TIME. I have a great desire to make grim a higher end raider.. I also have a desire to make him viable in arena matches.. The solution?

I don't have one.. I was really hoping you did. Right now I feel like I'm splitting my time and so everything suffers (gamewise). I just ditched my blood tanking spec for something more saucy for PVP and arena. So far I pwned a lot in WG, but haven't had a chance to partner up for some practicing. I am itching now to replace my weapon with a arena one, but with OUR rating? That'll never happen..

Tic ToC

2009-09-02T10:52:00.000-07:00

I am in such a rush to get into the new heroic and normal dungeons Trial of the Crusader.

If you haven't heard of this... its the new Argent Tournament style dungeons (and a raid to boot!)

I'm not sure exactly how hard these new places are.. The reason for that is.. I can't get in a bloody group!

I think this is the new DK mecca so there are a million groups looking for healers/tanks.. but full on DPS. I have seen 2 groups with 3 DK's in it. The heroic version drops a axe (oooo yum!) that is the only REAL upgrade to titansteel destroyer (ahem.. my mace) until Late 25man Naxx. So its a big deal. My dps is holding pretty solid at the 2k mark, not shabby.. but I still can't find a group that needs my particular brand of mayhem and slaughter.

So in the mean time.. I'm running a ton of dailies on my 2 80's and piling up the gold for the eventuality that Grimrpr will be my only epic flying character.. on his nifty dragon.. So there..

OMG.. where am I?

2009-09-01T06:39:00.000-07:00

Well with for frickin ever past since I posted (which was when Grimrpr was dinging 70), here are some updates...

1. Grimrpr is now 80!!
2. Grimrpr can now sustain 2k dps!
3. Grimrpr can now pwn everyone! (especially healing druids..)
4. Grimrpr.. can't um.. get in a raid to save his life.
5. Grimrpr won a dragon mount (woot, COS timed lootz)
6. Grimrpr can't ride it.. :( saving up though.. getting there soon
7. Bored with Grimrpr for now.. so started leveling Bigscrybear
8. The 'bear' hit 62.. and is dealing with life fine..

So basically I'm using mcgoo and grim to run tournament dailies and see if I can get grim into a heroic nexus or something.. Which is boring.. doing the same quests 2x's in a row. But oh well.. I seem to be looting over 70g a day.. and this is ONLY doing the super fast quests, solo.

Jeez.. when did I forget how awesome mcgoo is? I one-shotted a dragon in icecrown, and was literally cursing aloud at the power. Crit for 8k? srsly? dang. I am still bored with him though. Nothing is a challenge and I can't get into raids. Realistically, I should be guild shopping for one that raids during times I can.. But I'm not. There are a few I have looked into, but they are either not wanting warlocks, or full on DK's. At this point Grim is 'part of the package', and frankly more fun. Running TOWARDS ppl trying to kill me is a new thought for a guy who played a short warlock. I usually ran away.. (insta curses/diseases FTW!!). That is still proving to be fun (the plate wearing skull bashing).

Well.. I have begun my 2nd siege of the AH as well, and I am doing well. I am not necessarily pushing for MAXIMUM GOLD!!! but I am pushing for SOME gold. There is a margin, which is small, where you can undercut most competitors, while still making some decent gold. My time spent farming is being fruitful? Nah. I'm not farming. I am just doing H VH. Skinning all the dragons and OS10 skinning there too. Sometimes I get dragonscales (which oddly don't sell as fast) but I at least get leather. Now realize that for a long time I was hitting there (both) daily, and you see how I got so much leather. Managed to make a paultry 800g in selling it all. Could have probably pushed to the 1k's if I had spent the time on it and all, just didn't feel like it.

More to come, this time for sure!!

Ding 70...

2009-04-24T05:08:00.000-07:00

Well I log on last night hoping to push my uber DK up to 70. He was just standing there looking bad as heck.. I had checked armory during the day and found out that he lost all his talents. So I go to re-talent the poor schmuck.. and wait a second.. wth?

Talents = 0
unspent talents = 0

How is that? So I ask around to other DK's.. maybe its a quirk or something.. Nope. Nobody is having any issues. Soooooooo I put in a ticket with a GM. And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait.

Then I got tired of waiting and just decided that I wanted to hit 70 anyway. So off I went. Did you know a 69 DK can hold off 12 pirates in borean tundra? No you didn't cuz I couldn't do it. I ended up killing 5 of them before they got me. Next time I managed to kill 8. Why am I killing pirates? was I on a quest? No. I was doing my new "brainiac" idea of using my DK's ability to run ON water to get me places faster (straight line, and all that). Just so happened the cove of pirates that you quest in later was in my way. So anyway, I rounded up the tuskar quests in the valley of crazy mages and demon dogs, and pounded them out. Then migrated to "amber ledge" to talk to dragons.. and kill/skin dragonkin. DING..

Wow, that really didn't take that long did it? (don't answer.. you weren't there anyway) So I look at my talents again to see if maybe another point might have un-screwed it up for me. HA HA! I have points to spend! So I put in a point on improved icy reach or whatever.. and boom.. all gone again.

RINGALING (not a quote, but close)
GM- Hi read your petition about not having talent points.. sucks to be you. I'll just hand that over to our technical staff to handle
Me- Is there an ETA or an average wait time?
(7 minutes pass)
GM- This is an automated message your GM is not listening to this. Deal with it.

Now given that GM's have typically been really cool for me, I don't understand this kinda thing. I was basically fed a canned answer and then disconnected so I couldn't talk to the guy/gal/robot. My hopes are that if I can sneak away from family time this weekend, Ole Grimrpr will have his talents restored or totally reset. Either way.. I just like seeing what I have so I can compare and contrast things I may/maynot want for the future.

So if you are the GM that ignored me.. in the future good customer service would dictate you say something like (do not reply to this) in the first message so I know I just got a update and not that there is someone wanting to speak to me about my issue. I'm not hard to please.. I thought talking to a GM would be neat, and it kinda was.. didn't really get any responses.. ever.. but as long as the problem gets fixed, why should I care.. Right?

To 70... and BEYOND!!

hiatus

2009-04-21T06:16:00.000-07:00

Like the title says.. my blogging has been on hiatus.

Well new news... :)

I have been playing mcgoo well until 3.1 dropped. I actually swapped spec back to heavy affliction (yeah!! dots return!). I am sup'ed up and ready to go for some raiding right?... RIGHT?? Well not entirely. My gear doesn't suck per se, but it surely isn't good enough for the "woo hoo wipefest" that guilds are having in Ulduar. Although I think my guild has recently finished Ulduar 25.. I don't have the gear to really be a help there. I'd like to get some of my 200 level gear up to 213 or 225. So I plan on hitting EoE, and OS25 a few times and see if something happens that way. Aside from that all Mcgoo has been doing is pounding away at Sons of Hodir Rep.

So...

That got boring so I bought the herloom shoulders with the XP boost for ole Grimrpr.. And within 3 days.. he went from 65.. to 69. I burned all his rested, moved him to Northrend, and have already completed the first leg or so of the borean tundra quests. Which, by the way, are much easier with a DK that can handle taking on 5 mobs at once. The most substantial of all my upgrades is my new axe the "blubber clubber" and the sword from a noob quest in borean tundra. I measured at least 4-5 crits above 2600 which seems ungodly high for only 69.. I managed to completely exhaust my rested on Grim and nailed about 69 and a half or so. Then I parked him. I PLAN on leaving him there for a week or so to do that last big push to 70 and onward afterthat. (To me 70 is a milestone for abilities so its good to get to it and master them so that you can move ahead well). I spec'd my 69 talent point into.... Corpse Explosion! It just sounds fun, doesn't it? We'll soon see..

Wowee zowee

2009-03-30T05:06:00.001-07:00

Well I rarely find good groups for heroics and whatnot.. but last night was definitely the exception to the rule. I had a big night, and that was even before I got in group with these guys..

1) COS - timed attempt - failed.
Despite not getting the timed event done and me getting a chance to loose another roll on the epic drake.. sigh. It was pretty good though. My dps was consistent, and I pushed the tempo on a lot of fights (which is what I like). I either led in dps or I was narrowly defeated. Either way the COS event went well and if we had another 2 minutes we'd have gotten a chance to let me fail at that dragon roll.. ROFL.

2) Utguarde Keep (2nd group)
We stormed through here very fast, we did well with 2 dk's and a pally healer me and a hunter doing dps. I was pwned a bit here, but not by very much. We ran through crazy crazy fast. I finally got a shoulder upgrade.. FINALLY.

At the end everyone was still kinda pumped up.. so we decided to do a UP run since we were all here. The hunter crapped out on us, but we ended up getting another DK (very well geared) to help out.

3) Utguarde Pinnacle (same group except the new DK)
The new DK pwned me in dps most of the time.. I managed to end the instance with like 400 more total damage (yeah, that close). I think I got an upgrade here but last night was such a whirlwind.. Ah yes.. I got my belt. I have it updated with the buckle and all since I may avoid the guzbah belt now since this seems to be good.

Ok now the group stayed the same right? Nope.. the new DK left to go tank some such nonsense. Good for her. I got my ole buddy wulven in on the instance that came next.. which worked out well for him.

4) Violet hold
We stomped through squidhead boss.. then the birdman boss.. then even cyanigosa. My dps was off the heezy for sheezy this time. I topped all the charts by a long shot and managed to get about 2200dps. Which is where I want to be at the current point.

Wulvy got a new cape and didn't roll on the staff of tricks or whatever cyanigosa drops. I smacked him since nobody would use it.. but he's new to this heroic stuff. His dps was where mine was when I started he was nailing down 1300dps.

Then I dropped a buttload of gold to upgrade all my new stuff (gems and whatnot, buckles..). Check me out on armory now and you'll see a even more improved Mcgoo.

Later and hopefully updates will come more frequently.

Put me in coach!

2009-03-10T11:24:00.000-07:00

Well getting geared up for naxx and doing the more complicated things that are done in heroics (timed runs, etc..), as well as OS.. Well its been rough for me. I've made decent progress through the gear, and even managed to get some rep going with kirin tor.

So I log on, on Sunday..

I look at my spreadsheet of gear/location/time and see where I should go LFG for.. I make my normal comments about how all the cool kids are in Naxx.. (I think they are funny, but I'm probably alone on that). My guild leader throws me a bone..

GL: "wanna come?"
Me: "obviously, but I'm not much help.. gear is bad.. dps is about 1500 atm"
GL: "don't worry about it, should be fine"
Me: [giggles, and says outloud.. NO F'n WAY!
GL: [invite]
Me: [faint]... [quick hit accept]

Now my GL is very well geared. Very very well geared. Its sick really, but yeah he's just well geared. 3-4 others from my guild are in the raid.. oh wait.. this isn't naxx10, but heroic? Uh oh.. I wonder how long till I get shown the door for poor dps?

Well it didn't happen. I did what I had intended to do.. I did my best with my DOT's and trinkets and everything else and let the chips fall where they would. My DPS, btw, was stellar.. I pumped out a total (including trash/everything) 1500 dps.. on boss fights I ranged from 1200 (ew).. to 2100 (ROCK OUT). In looking at this I couldn't help to notice I was dead f'n last. by a margin of always about 1500 dps.

Knowing my margin of for dps now you will understand the following statements. I got a TON of gear. I won't bore you with what it all was cuz you can look at armory or wowheroes and see.. I've been to naxx 1x, so everything to date is from there. I didn't just GET everything, there was a ruling on who got what.. and really that was fine with me. When our guid's highest rated DPS'er (a lock) rolled on a trinket against me I immediately thought of passing.. luckily I rolled a 9.. so I got to still LOOK like I was a greedy SOB. I just kinda thought, while that would basically be my single greatest piece of gear.. if it would benefit her, then seriously.. she should have it as all her gear is stellar. Having greens/blues from 77's on you means everything is a upgrade, and getting ANY upgrades was a huge bonus for me.

My initial gear ideas put me reasonably high on the hit cap and still had reasonable damage. With my upgrades I will be better than that now. I still need quite a lot though.. I plan on raiding vaults tonight and pray for a upgrade or 2 to drop (why not? everyone else does..).

Here is my grocery list, at the moment:
Head (H-COS)
Shoulders (H-COS)
Waist (H-HOL, or wormrest honored)
Trinket(40 badges, and VH)
Neck (H-Ahn'Kahet Old kingdom/ 25 badges)
Wrist (H-UP)

Strat is my money pot at the moment.. I could get my 2 big upgrades that I plan on from there.. Head/shoulders (lmao.. you'll get it in a minute). UP is 5 badges and VH is 3. So I plan on trying to hit those 3 places after tonight if I can get vaults raided for the week. I guess I COULD save up badges instead of getting a trinket or a necklace.. I could get some of my T7 stuff.. My problem is impatience. I feel like, if I can get a few upgrades I can get my dps to around 2k.. THEN I can go anywhere. Well anywhere people are pugging, anyway. So if I get into a naxx a week or a OS a week.. or even get in on Malygos (got a quest to get a necklace there.. so that'd be nice) I always win on any upgrade that drops. I'd really like to get the badge belt sash of.. somebody.. Anyway, most every lock I see raiding naxx 25 seems to have that belt. Even if all their other gear is in good shape they keep that belt. I hate buying things, ever.. but if I am buying something I want it to last. Plus with a belt I can add a socket thanks to my good buddy the smith, which means I basically get to add 14-19 spellpower to anything I get there. I'd just go ahead and do that now on my green belt (which would make it pretty competitive.. gearwise).. But its not FREE to do, so I'd like to minimize the harrassment I put my friends through and minimize my gold output.. I mean.. Someday.. I'd like to have an epic flier.

Hopefully tonight will yield me some gold and some upgrades!!

Fishing.. oh yeah.. and Cooking

2009-02-17T04:57:00.000-08:00

Well I am a strict Heroes watcher. Heroes and Chuck. So I usually don't make it on to play WoW on Monday's, due to me being really old and not being able to stay awake long after Heroes. Last night, was... the exception.

I thought.. I'm not really tired yet.. why not just log on as Grimrpr and pound out the rest of my fishing/cooking. Good idea? No. GREAT idea. So off to Azshara. I fish my brains out in a "forever and a day" time period in the bay of storms. I get my fishing to 300 and my bags are totally full. No seriously they were totally full, I forgot to dump my inscription stuff in the bank so I've got 3 kinds of ink and 2 kinds of parchment and some herbs sitting in my bags.

Woo Hoo.. Dancing in the streets, I wander to shatt.. and fly to HH so I can cook all this fish and be done with fishing for a while. I cook and cook and cook.. (and cook.. but you get the idea). Boom. Look at armory and you'll see my pain. Made it within like 4-5 points of smacking 300 in cooking. They nerfed the heck out of spotted yellowtail or I'd have been 300 a long time ago*. For some reason its barely useful anymore and that is TRULY upsetting. Because I have 3 orange recipes and the rest are green or grey. Orange is lobster stew, mightfish steak and some kind of salmon (not sunscale). I'll be trolling around looking for a lifeline today but I'm hopeless in my persuit.

After a brief run on Wowhead, I've found my solution. Unfortunately the easiest way is to cough up gold and buy fish. The easiest way without gold is to fly to silithus and get desert dumpling recipe and kill worms. Sigh... Will Grim ever see WOTLK content? Not at this pace.. not at this pace.

I may just troll the ah a little and see if I can buy 4-5 mightfish for the steaks and be done with it. (I have so little patience)

*Spotted Yellowtail is one of the recipes dwarf and mcgoo used to cap out at 300 cooking in TBC expansion.

Orly... STFU!!

2009-02-16T04:51:00.000-08:00

Well I have been piddling with my deathknight just leveling cooking/fishing at the same time kinda stuff.. but Sunday night I took some time to stop.. and play mcgoo. I wanted to run heroic Violet Hold (apparently 30% of my total upgrades I am after specifically are in there.. sigh).

So I log on to mcgoo and grab atikam, my goofball huntard buddy, and we scour the LFG. Boom, got a healer.. boom got another dps. Tank? Oh for crying out loud are all the tanks raiding tonight or what? I was exasperated, and grumpy (if this doesn't happen with the tank it happens with the healers when I am LFG). Then a guildy logged on who is super duper qualified for tanking a heroic.. as she had MT'ed all our raids in BC and before. Well she was rusty but not bad at all.

The shaman is way way overpowered. SICK gear and damage output. The healer seems to be ok. Tanking is good. DPS is really one sided.. the shaman is doing 60% of the damage. (I am accustomed to not winning a dps race at this point as I lack the gear for it, but this guy was unreal). In looking at him on armory, I can only assume it was his haste that did it for him. He has over 25% crit (elemental shaman) 1800 +spellpower, and 250 haste. All those together mean a beating for the mobs. ANYWAY.. Atikam is geared as always 100 steps below everyone (I have no idea where his questing gear goes.. he always is sitting at the level cap with weird gear on that doesn't help him), so he rolls on everything that he can use.. even if its not great. He ended up with some +spellpower gear that somehow was an improvement on his gear (I told you.. worst gear ever). and a spear with a crapload of stamina and a little strength. The shaman decided to be an ass and fuss about it (why? nobody else could even use it.. but whatever).. fussed about ati getting +strength, and +spellpower on his last 2 rolls. I can't account for atikam's dps, not even a little. I don't watch him, I watch ME.

My rotation was tight, I had reasonable dot uptime.. very little missed refreshes, and I was getting decent luck with everything. I wasn't at my top DPS, but its tough to do that for me as I seem to be much better at long fights and that is usually just bosses. So I just kinda limp along as well as I can, and then the bad thing happened.

Xevozz(spelling?)
He's the reason some people won't run Heroic VH. If you know the fight, he has to be moved so the orbs he spawns don't get to him or he gets massive damage buffs against your tank. Well our tank didn't know that. So we all died in try #1. Attempt 2, I screw up and the boss gets ahead of me so the orbs are coming TO me. I have to jump off the balcony to run around and get in front of the boss. (all this time missing damage, I know.. I hated that). I get there and go balls out on the guy and he dies in the beginning of his second lap on the balcony. Good... Great... awesome. Now for some unknown reason.. the stupid shaman is getting huffy about our damage output and the healer is crying too. My thought is.. I've run this 1 other time when I was the #2 dps with about 25% of total damage (tank was #1), and it was a walk. Why are you crying cuz you are WAY over the top in damage output? And why is the healer crying? Well in subsequent pulls the healer lets me die (mob of 3 and I somehow got attention). I look at that second, and see.. the tank is at full health. Why did I not get a heal? He has full mana almost... and I'm dead. I understand if you have a choice..dps or tank, dps dies.. but there was no choice. Ok so I was pissy but not too bad.. I released since I was getting no attention and the runback is super short. I get to almost the door and he gets pissy..

"Ok.. if you die.. let me rez you" - douchebag priest
"kk" - mcgoo with gritted teeth

So I am back into the fight before its even OVER. and the shaman dies.. and he rez's the guy or the guy self rez's. and is back.. In the SAME fight the shaman dies again. I am reasonably sure he was hating on my tank. Well I know this chicky as well as I can know someone that I've never seen and only rocked around with online on more than 40 occasions. She was rusty, sure.. she was boomkin for a while. but she didn't suck. The problem was he was putting out way too much threat and not holding off so the tank could get solid aggro. Period. Well he died like another 2 times and then got huffy and bailed when the dragon lady at the end of VH came out. Then our healer bolted. so now I have a tank and 2 dps against a heroic boss. So we all died.

Not before douchebag Shaman says...

"Guys the dps was terrible, you really need to pick it up a notch"
*recount report showing him doing a buttload of damage*
-

Had to put his 2 cents in about dps. Yes ati was way way low, but if you can raid Naxx you don't do heroics anymore ya dork. I know I wouldn't. Anyway apparently he's way too good to mess with me and my peoples again so forget him. Now I feel really crappy about subjecting my buddy the uber experienced raiding tank to a bad group. I feel really really bad. She took it to mean she was sucking, which I do not believe was the case. I feel like one of our dps (points to douchebag) was crazy, and our healer was retarded. Well that and the tank didn't know the fight against Xevozz. But c'mon from the comments on wowhead and such, wiping on Xevozz is almost commonplace to some folks.. We only wiped 1x. That's not bad for a group that "needed to pick it up a notch". I didn't /ignore the two folks I did add them as friends as I feel that grouping with douchebag would be great if we were in a raid so I could hear 20 people yell at him for causing a wipe.. The healer.. I think has ADD and was probably doing his taxes at the same time. Solid mana-pool, and good heals. Just not on me. He may have been overworked keeping the shaman alive since he was being a douche.

So tanky-lady.. I'm sorry we had such a butt-weed group since you did me a favor in tanking..

ps- douchebag Shaman.. (had to say it 1 more time)

fail... folowed by epic fail

2009-02-11T12:41:00.000-08:00

Last night I was all ready to rock out in the vaults of arch.. vaults of.. whatever the vaults place in wintergrasp.

Anyway... so I get logged on and manage to find a group (woot for 25 man!!) and we run it.. cake. Easily done sir, easily.

Fail 1: I got bupkis as far as drops.. I was hopeful (naively so) that I'd get something.. ANYTHING. but alas not meant to be.

So I'm down due to the lack of epic goodness, therefore I throw it up to go into the 10 man flavor. I notice that there's 2 groups of 24 in the LFG channel for the 10 man vault (yes you did read that right.. I don't get it either). Not promising, I know.. So anyway i decide to go LFG for Violet Hold (VH) and see if I can get in a heroic for that. There is precisely 2 people LFG for heroic VH. Myself and a REALLY poorly geared dps warrior. So my thought is I'm going to be stuck and not get a chance to do anything more tonight.. oh well chit chat is fine.. maybe I'll queue up for some PvP **(see below). Before I can I get a note from a nice fella wanting to know about my gear (my first gearcheck EVER.. woot!). I throw my stats at him, crit/hp/spellpower/hit. I get an invite fast. WOOT. So now I'm summoning folks into the wintergrasp area just in front of the 10 man vault portal. YEAH!! I get DC'd. DOH!!! I quickly reconnect as fast as I can. I get logged in and thankfully nobody noticed (I got raid buffed while I was not seeing anything).. Poof again DC'd.

Epic Fail: I try to log on again and see the bad news.. my modem is flashing red lights (red=bad, mmkay). So I unplug the modem, and wait 10 seconds for a reset. BOOM back to the modem. Ok now its doign its thing booting back up.. I'm getting antsy as my group was clearing trash to the mob (if you don't know there's like 4 guys there and thats it.. 4 guys and a boss, so its hardly like clearing naxx). I get a connection eventually (took another 2 minutes), and log in.. WOOT!! and then.... I notice my group stomped right on through to the boss and booted me from the raid. I expected this, and regretted this. Now there's nobody in LFG for the 10 man vault.. None.. nobody in LFG for VH or anything I need. So I get all pissy and log off of mcgoo and switch to my DK.

So Grim is at the point where he needs to do the cooking quest in Tanaris, and do the fishing quest to further both skills. So I go to tanaris.. no quest.. read online that i need to go to ironforge and see a trainer that gives me the quest to go to dirge in tanaris. So.... I go to ironforge, I go to the trainer.. no quest. No nothing. So everything was a wash.. everything was terrible.. and I got nothing.. I got no new gear.. no new badges from the 10 man.. no quest to work on in cooking.. and flew all over azeroth to get there. So, in a huff.. I log off and curse loudly at the PC.

I'll try tomorrow night to get something done.. I'd try tonight but there's just no way unless the horrible storms and wind (yes wind.. some friggin crazy wind in this area). My current PC is a joke, but I can't get it blown up from a surge... sigh.. this may prove to be a terrible night weather wise, I still have a friggin branch on my roof (kinda hanging on/around some power lines) so I'm hoping that THAT turns out to be a headache for the power company and not me. Well... I'll find out soon enough..

Mcgoo in the hiz-ouse

2009-02-04T06:39:00.000-08:00

Mcgoo.. what can I say.. He's the best toon I've got. I can play him better than any of my other toons and I typically can perform higher on all accounts when I am playing him. I am crafty with him and use all his tricks to devastate opponents.

Needless to say Mcgoo is boring.

I had stopped playing mcgoo actively so that I could get dwarf moving up towards the cap, but that stopped when i saw that my good ole buddy Yara was sporting more epics than I could shake a stick at. do what?!? So I look into it. Ole yara stopped his PvP ways (almost) and his focussing on doing heroics and such. With the same intensity he had with PvP. Instead of logging on and doing 4-5 bg's in a night, now he's doing 4-5 heroics in a night. So his gear is stellar (compared to mine). So I get whiney.. I mean inquisitive and ask him about where I should be (since he's told me about being booted from groups for lackluster dps and gear).. he tells me "you're better off than I was when I started".

DING

I was apparently laboring under the idea that I was somehow inferiorly geared for these things and I needed to (as in BC) make my crafted set (which I may NEVER get done cuz ZOMG forstweave, but I digress) to be able to step up into things. His insight opens many doors for me. So I log on to Mcgoo last night and start trolling around looking for the "need dps for (random heroic) PST" tells in LFG. Instead I remember that some of yara's better gear has PVP stats (do what?) and he said it was a drop (drop? PvP epics? do what?). Now behold my new favorite place

Wintergrasp- vault of archavon.
Ok this little place is a RAID like encounter with almost no work/prep involved. Basically there is 4 guys in side.. Then a raid boss. Same for 10/25 man. Its a "beat the clock" kinda thing, so you have 5 mins from start of the boss to kill him before he "enrages" and stomps you into the ground. SWEET!!! Lets check what I need to be in there (woot, wowwiki!!). I am CLOSE to the minimum req's so I decide I'll throw my hat in the ring. boom.. 10 man. We get there and I come in 5th in DPS.. So not stellar, but really.. if they are geared like yara I will never outperform them in my rags I wear. And loe and behold.. look what drops..Deadly Gladiator's Felweave Handguards. yes.. yes indeed sirs/madams. So I freak out with excitement (my first WOTLK epic.. woot).. take it and graciously thank everyone (I won the roll out of "ew he has only THAT to wear?" excitement from the group). Raidleader says.. "we're goign to try a 25 man if anyone wants to stick around!!".. Sure. Why not? So we get in there** and do our thing again and the priest apparently loves life as everything that dropped was awesome and for PRIEST only (only 1 in raid). So I run off to dalaran to get my enchant and then portal to IF to get my gem for it.. I spent more gold than I will admit to on the gem, and still owe a buddy some dust for the enchant but needless to say ole mcgoo now isn't as scrubby as before.. with a few more pieces of gear here/there he might be up to his old level of bad-ass-ery. Suddenly I am excited to play mcgoo again. So tonight barring good TV I'll be pounding away at some heroics to try to get some badges (sadly it takes a bigillion to get anything). Perhaps a few drops will make things a bit better for me, who knows.

What I do know is that ole Mcgoo is on the road again and without reason to stop..

**sidenote: If you are in a group with multiple locks, and someone is summoning, let the other lock know who you are summoning so he's not wasting time. I had an issue with a fellow lock summoning inside the instance without letting me know and so I'm standing there with 2 people trying to summon folks that are either in the process of being summoned or are waiting to accept HIS summoning. Manners are not big online, but seriously.. I wasted time and could've been helping clear trash.. The "LOL we're summoning the last 3 at the boss now" is not a good way to let a guy know who's been saying "I need 1 more for summoning" in raidchat that he's been screwing his time up..sigh.. I digress.

State of the dwarf...

2009-02-04T06:06:00.000-08:00

From my /yawn.. /stretch posting.. I am updating my status on my active toons.

Dwarfenstuff.

He is a bad mama-jamma. I really feel that he is more interesting to level than Mcgoo was. I was having no trouble at all as a BM spec guy, so I heard rumblings of "SV spec is WAY OP they should nerf it.." which in translated to my ears is "you should be SV.. cuz it is teh awesome". So now I'm a survival spec hunter. and here is my favorite 3 words..

EXPLOSIVE SHOT CRIT!!

It shows up in my text when I get one. I don't know what a mage hits for in northrend but I know that mcgoo never hit that hard on crits at this level. I can on an easy day hit a single mob for 5k crit on explosive shot. Its happened several times and I usually almost die cuz its the niftiest thing in the world for a guy who has been a SLOW drain on mob's HP to suddenly see things disappear... like over 50% of their life. There are problems with survival though..

Aggro. I can't seem to get people to leave me alone when I hit them for 5k. Any ideas? LMAO. I continue to toy with the idea of getting a "tank" pet instead of my trusty wasp "mosquito". However, this hasn't really been something that I've PUSHED for. I figure I'll get one eventually just to try it out and ditch my cat pet (sniff.. bye bye king B from STV). I am intending on getting a gorrilla or a worm. I have heard nothing about worms as tank pets but the fact that they reduce armor means they provide me with some of the utility my wasp already does only with less damage and more threat(which I would gladly allow him to have). No ETA on this but as I am in dragonblight now and have rode past the jormungar out there, I figure it may be soon.

Money. I have found that I am a bit of a priss-pot when it comes to some things. Like ammo. I only use mammoth cutters. Only. When I get below 1k and no backstorage.. I start looking for someone to make me some. I should probably check the AH as it is a wonderous place for goodies like that and engineers are used to not getting any gold for their time (sorry guys, I know it sucks), but I never do. It takes a reasonable amount of mats to get a bullet machine or whatever its called that makes 2k bullets. I don't think its unreasonable to say that this means I am forking out a LOT of gold. I dislike repairing gear because I do not like to loose money. I like to MAKE money. I typically get very cranky when I have a huge repair bill and have no junk in my inventory to sell off to cover this loss.. I usually do not repair (regardless of questing status) until my bags are full of crap to sell off. So yes, occassionally I am fighting 2 elites at a time in mostly red gear cuz I can't get my bags full to go repair. Is it smart? no. It's me though.. go figure.

Mcgoo is coming next... stay tuned!

\yawn-\stretch

2009-02-04T05:51:00.001-08:00

Well its been a lifetime since I posted, and there is a lot I COULD say, and a little that I WILL say.

Lets start with status..

Mcgoo - lvl 80 (woot)
Dwarf - lvl 73 (semi woot..)
Grimrpr (my DK) - woot.. (So much fun to play his level never matters to me)

Ok lets start from the bottom shall we?

Grim.. Grim levels like a man possessed with undead powe... hm. Ok so he is a man possessed with undead power. Leveling him is a JOY. It is more of a challenge to level him (as he is my only Melee only class) than anyone else. Lately the challenge is what makes him so attractive to play, but I digress.

My most recent leveling attempts with Grim had nothing to do with XP and more to do with professions. I have gotten my first aid almost topped out (thanks to mcgoo for having a storage vault of netherweave.. woot!), and I have my skinning doing fine. Skinning really is the easiest profession, you just kill stuff and skin it. There is no "hard" part to it. This is good as THAT profession is Grim's money maker. His other profession is Inscription. Stop gasping at a guy without a mammoth vault full of gold leveling inscription! Its possible! Not really QUICKLY.. but it is possible. I have gotten it up a good deal and find that I am now looking at inscription as a serioius money maker in his arsenal. On my realm (medivh, duh) some of the silliest glyphs seem to be in short supply. I don't know if it is due to inscription folks not caring and not needing money, or if it is just my dumb luck. I had a glyph for something or other for pallies.. Pallies.. I plugged into my auctioneer addon to see what it goes for.. 20-30g.. each. Good eh? Great.. So I search to see what the market looks like.. 1 on there priced for 50g. Are you seeing why I made a lot of money last week yet? True I burned through most of my mats and all my stock of inscriptions to make it (initially I would only make one if it gave me a skill point). I priced mine at 35g and watched the gold just FALL in. I'd love to say I sold 500 of those but it was more like 10.. and keeping in mind the mats that I had used to purchase the herbs to mill.. I didn't end up with the dumptruck load of gold I wanted, but it certainly made leveling easier for a time, and made it NOT a money sink for me at this point also.

So that was working for me fine.. what else? Oh I decided my cooking skill was an abomination and I needed it maxed out for outlands so I could cook the boar meat and various other things that drop for me there. What was my cooking level? 1. Stop laughing. Seriously... stop. So I looked at my notes for Powerleveling cooking as I had in the past on mcgoo. The PROBLEM is mcgoo could dot up a group of animals with corruption and run around while they died around him and just autoloot and cook when my bags got full. Grim cannot AOE farm with this level of ease. So... I decided fishing would be good. I grabbed my rod/reel and went to a lake in goldshire and fished up my level until I was almost full in my bags.. ran to get some recipes (thanks to old buddy ati for hooking me up with some I couldn't find).. and then cooked. If you check Grim you'll see his cooking/fishing are right on pace with where they would be if I was lvl 30. So that puts me about halfway to where I want to be. I figure I'll probably not see a reason to fish after I get into outland territory as I kill SO MANY things that drop meat that cooking mats are so much easier to get in just regular activity. For now though, fishing is paying huge dividends and I'm relatively happy with it. I have considered pushing it all the way up to max.. but it just seems silly to do that as all the stuff that I would cook (in keeping with spellpower since mcgoo is my main consumer of meats) are all MEAT and not FISH. Sure there are neat things that happen there, sure. As time is my major hinderence in WoW though, and as time is the ONLY factor in fishing I don't see this being very effective. I mean unless I have all my guys where I want them in levels and gear.

sheesh this rambled on quite a bit.. stay tuned for dwarf/mcgoo's story..

DK-licious

2008-12-23T07:06:00.000-08:00

Well I have been barely on WOW in like 5 days. I'm shaking a little, but my small bursts keep me from loosing it.. So I'll be okay.

What have I been doing when I'm on?

Playing Grimrpr (my DK). I have been sending him stuff to mill (since I am only sitting at the PC for like 5 minutes at a time), and I leveled him a bit.. It takes almost NO time at all to push up a level at this point with him. Ironic I think as I don't remember it being so easy with Mcgoo or Dwarf at 60. Dwarf had an easy time, but hunters always do. I mean i fall you ever had to do was Send pet > shoot > loot, you'd notice almost no downtime. Then add in Viper aspect (as it WAS, not IS) and everythings great. Not the case with Grim.. Grim is actually having SUCH an easy time its somewhat rediculous. I made a few mistakes here and there, like doing the telhamat quests before I did the honor hold ones. Which if I remember I had a bit of a time with, with mcgoo, weren't an issue with Grim. I can't stop this nagging feeling that DK's are going to be hit with the "nerf stick". Its sick to see a lvl 61 DK take out a 63 undead mage. I really wish I could get to 70 before my buddy Yara gets his main toon (yara) up to 80 so I can duel his warrior (well geared, not great, but good) with Grim to see how Grim sits vs a warrior at level when the warrior outgears him. I KNOW a warrior can't level the way Grim does.. I run with my friend atikam's warrior and he can't run like that, so I know that PvE wise DK's smackdown on warriors.

I plan on pushing my inscription up to about 125 or so in the next week. The problem is I also plan on pushing mcgoo to 80 by 1/1. Is this pure hopes/dreams or can I do it.. I think I can. I know I need to do some mining in zuldrak and do the ampitheater quests (like ring of blood) and then I can roll out of that zone ( I missed a few quests but not enough that I'm hurting for xp, I mean I'm 2 bubbles into 76). After that I'm going to the Sholazar basin and kill everything, mine everything and pop up maybe a level or 2. THEN I'm off to the next zone to push up a level or two. The last level I plan to sit in the highest level zone and just go kamikaze on everything. Then I can get done with my leveling, respec to affliction/destruction hybrid and hit instances whenever possible.

sigh.. more leveling.. with mcgoo..

76, FINALLY.. jeez

2008-12-18T10:55:00.000-08:00

Ok I hit 76 last night after.. well after too long goofing off and not playing enough. It was refreshing to see the bright lights of leveling up. I don't use the abilities at 76 that Thottbot says I get, so I am not training yet for it (why spend the gold?).. Well there was health funnel and soulstone but I don't seem to have an issue keeping the felguard up at this point. Well if I need to get into an instance I'll go train.. Maybe that's better..

Anyway. I am hammering out the zul drak's quests I am now doing the troll quests where I run all over finding relics.. and all that nonsense. Its not hard, just time consuming. I think if my PC was better I could find them better as I lag a lot, and don't see the "sprinkles" or whatever to tell you that a item is a important one (quest related). Kill quests though... with Mr Felguard on my side, its not a problem. I pulled I think 8 undead in the ampitheater or wherever that is (where they are trying to over run the FP/inn).. and slaughtered them all relatively easily. I noted that my new last resort technique involves me popping a healthstone, a health pot, and then going metamorphosis on the group in front of me.

More and more finding that my lock is "ezmode" and not exciting to me anymore. Sigh... we'll see how things progress though..

Frostweav'ing my @ss OFF!!!

2008-12-15T07:26:00.000-08:00

Ya know.. I pick up 20-100 pieces of frostweave cloth a night, and just recently spent some time burning through it all making bolts and all. I found two things..

1) It takes a holy-jeez-I'm-going-to-die-from-all-this-cloth amount of cloth to make a decent pile of bolts of this stuff..

2) You would have to have TWO-THREE times the amount in 1) to have enough cloth to level tailoring.

Sadly I have only about 200 bolts of frostweave at my disposal now, I sold 2 stacks of 20 a while back for a quick cash infusion (has anyone SEEN the prices?!?!?!), but since then have done very little to level tailoring at all. Unfortunately frostweave may be more of a pain in the butt than netherweave was... sigh..

sigh.. stuck in Zul Drak

2008-12-15T05:14:00.000-08:00

Zul Drak. Funny thing is when I first heard the name I thought immediately of the Sci Fi show "Farscape". (If you don't know of this show, go watch it all now.. its great.. trust me, you'll thank me later). In Farscape, the word "Dren" is the curse word for poop. So I have always thought of Zul Drak, as Zul Dren. it is proving itself to be such now. I am pushing along in my 70's trying to hit 80 before my guild is DONE with everything already again.. And I hit a wall.

The wall is what I call it when I am leveling at a crazy speed and then suddenly.. there's nothing. I end up with quests for all 4 corners of the zone, and spend 80% of my time online running, instead of killing(what I do best). Duskwood is the first BIG signpost I can say is a wall for me. I stall out something terrible in my late 20's to my early 30's. Then the magic that is STV comes to me and I start leveling again like a madman.

Well I hit the wall. I ended up goofing around and ran my buddy atikam to the wrong end of Zul Drak, so I made him go through dragonblight entrance (cuz really most of the q's I started with were there and were easy at 74). My goal was to hit 76 and move to the basin (sholazar, to be exact) and do my quest pickups so I could beat out another level in a night or two. What happened is I only finished 4 quests and barely barely barely moved the XP bubble. Ati's running in Zul Drak now and probably having an easy time of it, (don't ya just hate BM hunters?). My guild is showing e-peen for having the new badges.. "I need 20 more to get all the badge epics".. I threw up "how many do you guys have?" they were all like 200.. 150.. 400.. So I was like holy crap. How on earth do they do all that dren that fast?

So it already sounds like my guild is about ready to run naxx.. (yeah, I miss it again!!, I mean .. CRAP). Will I catch up? I doubt it, but I'm going to hit 80, that is a promise. Then I may start throwing my time around with dwarf and my DK. I really wanted to play my DK last night, but it wasn't meant to be. We'll see what the future holds for my peoples.. sadly Mcgoo has a neverending amount of rested xp to burn off so I may never get to say "well Mcgoo is done with rested, so I will burn it off of dwarf/Grim now"..

I know I know.. I whine too much. "boo hoo.. poor warlock stomping over everything in northrend.. wah wah baby.. " yeah yeah.. I know. I just like new and exciting things, and right now my DK is new/exciting.

Azhole-nuub or something like that

2008-12-01T06:13:00.000-08:00

Well I made it into the second real instance.. Azjol Nerub.. or something. Well whatever its called..

It was pretty cool really. Lots of spiders. The only caveat was the waves of autopulls. One guy in the group called it an "event". Well whatever, they come in 3's. and there is no downtime. So make sure your tank is good at holding aggro on multiple mobs, and your healer keeps you topped off.. lifetap early if you are a lock so your healer can top you and your mana off. These aren't terribly tough fights, but a prot spec tank is a must really(or feral tank, or DK frost spec..etc). We started with a ret pally tanking, and that was a fail, so he respec'd and then it was a breeze. Mana efficiency was kinda rough at this stage still for me personally. I did manage to top the damage meter (yeah me!!, and over higher level folks with better gear!!!)

It was a neat run but make sure you don't go in half cocked at 71-73 or you might get smacked around pretty good.

Nexus... FTW!!

2008-12-01T05:31:00.000-08:00

Well this past weekend I made a run into my first northrend instance. Nexus.

Impressions:

I really liked it. It was simple simple and went off without a hitch. We had 3 pallies me and a shadow priest. So we were just healing and dps'ing everything into dust. I was the lowest level. I represented well with 15% of the dps. The big DPS'er was a 75 ret pally, who was spanking everything in sight. I was 71 at the time, so I felt my dps contribution was good enough.

All in all, an easy instance, healing wasn't intense.. Most everything was tank/spank.

The gear that dropped was all crap everyone didn't want. So I think it went to the vendor.. OH wait.. it went to the shadow priest. Sadly my frozen shadoweave may never leave me.. i may never get new stuff.. :(

Got a ton of xp from the run since I had a bunch of Q's there anyway.

Arthas.. you son of a...

2008-11-24T05:30:00.001-08:00

Well I'm truckin along in Northrend with Mcgoo.. Dwarf has yet to show up there at this point. Probably won't until Mcgoo runs out of rested XP (I mean seriously.. I have another guy to level).

Initial thoughts: This expansion is lame. I was fairly well geared but by no means rediculously so.. And I stomp on everything. I can only imagine what the rediculously geared folks are doing. My hopes is that this will allow dwarf to actually be useful in Northrend.

Initial complaint: Are you serious? Every quest gives like 20k xp. All of them.. just about. And I do a crapton of questing. I Did something like 24-40 quests yesterday and FINALLY pushed over 70 into 71.. and got most of the way through 71. Do the math and you'll see the rediculous amount of XP needed to go up a single level. Now I don't think it should be insta-leveling... But none of the 60+ levels were this long (or they didn't seem like it). If this is merely my perception, sue me.. otherwise I think its noteworthy that doing 4 quests in outlands at level 1 would get you to level 20.

Challenge: My son when i was loading the expansion saw Arthas (the lich king) looking menacing, and said...
-"Daddy.. is that the bad guy?"
---"Yup that's him, he's the Lich King"
-"Lick king? That is a funny name daddy"
---"No LICH.. not lick.. he's a zombie kinda guy"
-"Oh. "
-(menacing look)
-"Kill him daddy"
---"You got it boss.. "

So you heard it here first (rather you read it).. First WoW was a fun game, but I've been tasked with killin Arthas' Monkey @ss. Am I talkin crap for a lvl 71? yes. 2-3 people in my guild hit 80 this weekend. This means the gearing process is beginning. I BELIEVE I'm the highest warlock, so I should be competitive for when that starts up. My mentor Sanath might be there before me, but who knows.

So Arthas.. watch your back.. Well mostly for rogues. If you see a little gnome /roar-ing at you. You better get that sword of yours and cut you some gnome sticks fast.. That little guy.. He's got orders.

Watch for the Rpr

2008-11-19T05:53:00.001-08:00

As silly as I am I did start a DK. The beginning quests were a breeze. The biggest issue is taking on mobs that can easily kill you if you don' t know WTF you're doing. The bad news is nobody knows wtf they are doing, its a NEW class. So I died a few times.. what did I care? Ok it bothered me a lot, but lets not mention it ever again.. EVER.

Moving on... Since my buddy was held up in getting the expansion pack, I had nobody to level with in Northrend, and even more importantly no hunter to track what we're after (I love hunters). So I pulled my DK who's name is Grimrpr (as in grim reaper).

My setup:
I'm blood spec, it has a self heal aspect from bloodworms and blood aura that is awesome for me. I chose this because I heard blood=dps, frost=tank, unholy=aoe. Well I wasn't interested in tanking or Aoe-ing. So I went for DPS. I have since found out that unholy may be better for pure dps, but more on that later.

Fight Coreography:
Almost all a DK's melee abilities are buffed by how many diseases the target has. So its important to maximize your damage by putting your diseases up and leaving them up. I usually start with plague strike, then the freezing (ranged) magic attack (I forget names, deal with it). That means I have 2 diseases on the target, and my weapon has a rune that CAN increase frost dmg. So THEN.. I start with my serious abilities.. I do death strike first because I can convert runes to death runes (like a wild card rune), this is helpful in longer fights since you can cast your spells easier and without the hindrance of the "you don't have enough runes" to do that message. After Death Strike I go for heart strike. They both get buffs from diseases as I have said but heart strike does more damage by far, but lacks the death rune conversion I am after. After that I tend to flip flop.. 2 heart strikes, then 1 death strike. Rinse... repeat until dead. What is nice is the abilities in blood spec make it so you're nearly invincible. I ran Ramps with some guys (all DK's) when I was 58. I feel as if I held up my end of the dps, and I never died. I only bandaged 2x's. Are you seeing what I'm saying now? I hope it doesn't get nerfed but seriously if you wanted to cry over OP, or imba.. this would be a good reason to do so.

I plan on leaving the rpr in the inn for a while and let Mcgoo run around in Northrend and collect some xp. My goals are non-existant at this point as I don't have questhelper (a crutch, I know) running I'm just trying to get a lay of the land. This is difficult for me personally as I have mental issues not grasping distances.. like oh its just over that hill.. mount up.. ride.. then look as the hill NEVER gets closer.. ah.. hm... ok.. so that hill's not so close.. back to the other area to finish up the other 2 quests. Its just me, I know.. but its a problem that Questhelper fixes. I need some UI tweaks since ace is out of the picture.. I just don't know where I'll go for all that.

If you have some UI customization hints hit me with them.. I could use a hand.

TTYL.. oh and.. watch out for the Grimrpr.. I don't know how long he'll be insanely OP.. but I 'm loving every second.

Wow.. getting the ball rolling

2008-11-19T05:44:00.000-08:00

Well.. Like everyother noob-cake.. I started a DK. I did this for 2 reasons

My leveling buddy was SOL when it comes to getting the cash for the expansion.. leveling alone, FTL.
It starts at 55 or something right? well thats awesome..

So I rolled a DK, I'm full blood spec ATM, although I will be dipping into frost to give my own personal idea of a DW guy with a rune weapon smacking ppl in both hands a try. If you know this sucks.. please STFU so I can figure that out alone. HAHA.. ok so if you know it sucks.. tell me why.

I have only had Mcgoo tiptoe into Northrend a VERY small amount. I believe the starter area is Valiance Keep? Anyway I've done like 8 quests (I told you I tip-toed). Then last night.. When I was loggign on to tip toe a bit more.. my buddy sent me a whisper.. FROM A DK. /dance. So he has the expansion now. We managed to meet up in Valiance keep, only to find out we couldn't see each other. I don't mean we were blind.. I mean his character was invisible to me, and vice versa. The world server crapped out on us before he got there, and I assume this is part of the issue. So we are both parked ATM in valiance keep waiting to stomp through everything. I am not terribly hopeful in this regard, but so far I have been drain tanking 6 guys at a time even still. The new mojo from the affliction tree makes this a bit easier. I mean if I dot you up and then haunt you.. I can fear you and know that you will probably be nearly dead when you return, and that I can Lifetap if need be and get a big heal coming my way. So far my impressions of Northrend are.. This place is a zoo. Too many people, not enough mobs.. not enough anything. Is it cool you ask? well hell yes its cool, but I mean really when we have 5 groups of 5 waiting in line to kill a named mob for a quest chain.. seriously... SERIOUSLY.. jack the respawn rate to like every 40 seconds or something blizz.. it was like a free cheese line out there. But I digress..

More on the meh...

2008-11-07T06:13:00.000-08:00

Wow has really kind of stagnated for me.

I play still about 3-4 nights a week and I have a good time when I do, but I'm apparently all excited about the expansion and cannot see getting beyond that into the other stuff. I played dwarf a bit in "the Isle" to get some gold.. did that.. then played my druid and got him to 52.

The druid.. Jeez louise. I seem to find myself in these situations once in a while when leveling.. When I'm too low level to go to a new zone, and to high really to get any good XP in the zone I'm in. That is where my druid is. I finished up a bunch of quests in UnGoro and Felwood. I am really waiting for 53 (of which I am halfway through 52 anyway) so I can go to the plaguelands. You do realize what happens after plaguelands don't you? Outlands.

I plan on hitting plaguelands for a few days and get a few levels knocked out and then at 55-56 roll over to blasted lands to finish my approach on the black portal. Will this happen Pre-XP? no. I seriously doubt it anyway. With my select skills I use killing is kind of easy I don't seem to stop to heal ever, and I tend to help out others when they are soloing just to get some good druid behind the back attacks in. There is a new talent from mangle called infected wounds. Basically its like the pally talent in ret where you gimp the mob from your hits.. THAT little talent was worth every penny. I was taking on 3 level 55's last night and easily solo'ed them in cat almost the whole time. I kept mangle and rip up on everything as well as faerie fire. So I was (in my mind) gimping them 2x's. I was removing some armor (faerie fire) and removing some of their attributes (ala infected wounds).

Tonight I won't be playing because I never get to play on Friday's. Real life closing in on me as it would seem. I have high hopes to get in on some WoW-time this weekend pre-sunday (my biggest wow day). May consider taking a day off around XP release so I can get some all-day gaming done. Mmmmm my new death knight... if you have ideas for funny names for a death knight (most certainly a gnome.. ) let me know.. I'm not 100% on any names yet.

Hardly blogging..

2008-11-03T12:17:00.000-08:00

Ok I let it go for too long before I updated here again.. so here's whats going on..

Dwarf.. Now has epics.. I'm shocked too, so don't feel bad. He has all the "new" scourge invasion epics, 2 rings from headless horsemen, 2 trinkets from brewmaster. Plus his bracer he got from PvP goodness... So he's doing well. I am sporting a wasp as a pet, mostly for the armor pen ability that he grants me and my party. Pet is 68, and is very nice. I really can't complain at all about him. He's not really the sort of pet I wanted, but he's good enough. I named him Mosquito.. cuz.. well a wasp named mosquito seemed funny to me. I still have chump bow.. and chump arrows.. and... chump head/neck/boots/cape.. but really that doesn't bother me. I do a lot of damage now. Am I as good as a Tier4 guy? GOOD LORD no.. But I think I do decent. Shot rotation needs work, and I'm a bit spacey with new abilities and such.. It is to be expected. I will get better as I thunder through the expansion. Maybe even get ole dwarf decked out in some epic 80 gear (ZOMG).

Mcgoo... Well I have only done bit of dingle danglin around with Mcgoo. I play around with dailies.. and I killed a ton of undead for the invasion. If you don't remember Mcgoo got himself his last epic from Brewfest, a +spellpower pipe (don't ask). So he's in all epics (woot) and with my new spec I do more damage than should be rationally possible. I went into TK mech last night to help ati out.. and we were with 2 other 70's. I don't think either were geared as well as ati, or myself. I did what I do now.. I just dotted the hell out of things and started bolting them. and I don't know for sure but I am reasonably sure I was at the tip top of dmg. The tank commented on it.. and tanks tend to watch aggro/dmg meters to see who's getting crazy. Well anyway.. i was happy to know that I could crank out that kind of dmg.. So now it beckons the question as to how well I'd fare against other locks... My thought.. poorly. My build is almost totally set up for PvE, Raids.. I think I'd be a GREAT asset in raids.. but then again my spec is hardly unique.. oh well

Last update for now...
I bought my expansion preorder saturday. That means it's time to rock very, very soon..

Headless horseman!! zomg

2008-10-23T11:47:00.000-07:00

Well the gathering of "leet epix" has all but stopped for me and my toons..

Or has it?

Behold.. some headless guys in the silk farm I call "scarlet monastery".. and he drops epics.. not great.. but good enough.

So I put dwarf in a group and beat him up really good and got myself 2 EPIC rings.. ok so they aren't amazing.. but a lot better than what I had. Then while I was laughing at how easy the HH was.. I thought.. wait doesn't mcgoo need new rings? Well it helped that all of the caster rings dropped and nobody wanted them in our group with dwarf.. but I digress.

So last night I took Mcgoo in for HH-fest. I managed to get myself both caster rings.. and a broom. Ok so I don't care about the broom.. still it was great to round out my epics in that way. I realize everyone in my guild thinks the drops are "lame" but I didn't get in to the same things they did.. and these rings were awesome for me. Now to see how many weeks until all my epics are just rags compared to my 72 questing greens.. ROFL!!

Ati and I have taken to doing nightly runs of the isle of Quel (what I call it). Firstly for my pet.. dwarf's wasp is only 65 so he needs to go up a lot of levels just to be of use.. Secondly.. well I need some cash. I have 2 70's and almost no money. I don't even have 1k gold anymore. Of course me cessation of selling my crud on the AH hasn't helped that but I hate dickering with the AH.. I like doign it with auctioneer but my POS PC won't allow me to monkey with more than 1 or 2 addons.. and now my server has a wait to log on!! So who wants to logout as my banker and then back in so he can sell my crap with the correct addons? (I know you don't have to do this, but I never have the foresight to set the guy up legitimately..)

Ah well.. counting down to WotLK.. and LOVING it.

alchemy0-300 in almost no time

2008-09-23T05:24:00.001-07:00

Well I had long decided that I needed to drop LW on my hunter and push alchemy for the mojo that is PRIMAL MIGHT. I had been chicken and not done it for a LONG time. Well I switched not long ago and pushed up a decent amount..

Then the other night I pushed HARD. I hit 298. I blew more gold than I'm comfortable talking about... But I'm close to 300 and will be going to the outlands guys to push the rest of the way in a single night. I'm done horsing around with all this foolishness.. I want to start transmuting stuff asap. Mostly because I have a few primals in my bank.. Not enough to DO anything with but enough to keep a transmuting fella like myself busy till long after WOTLK pops.

Stay tuned.. I'm sure I'mm do something crazy and have to fix it and then complain about my noob-ness shortly there after...

2008-09-22T06:20:00.000-07:00

Well this is the score from a winning AV we had. It was a sick win.. seemed to take no time at all. I don't really have the gear to do much "surviving" so I'm not competant to solo anyone on the field. So I play highschool and run with the group. The group did the old fashioned thing and zerged FW RH and capped fast.. I was astonished how well I did with the dmg.. and was scouring this.. and I saw this...

I read Megan's blog "Out of Mana" all the time.. and knew she was in my battlegroup but never saw her.. I did once.. sadly I was on my scrubby hunter toon at the time. I am awaiting her blog post about how the morons in a AV pushed RH and she saved us by defending (which she and her counterparts did, BTW).. Sorry I couldn't help!!

check her out at Out of MANA

Compelling post numero Uno

2008-09-05T07:52:00.000-07:00

Like the title? Well that's what this is.. a post of compelling information... of stories.. Of how-to's..

Ok so its not really.. Really its fluff.

I haven't done much in wow lately. Real life issues and the continued obvious procrastination of not having my main rig running wow.. Its just been a pain. Even with ati back.. Now I seem to have so much fun goofing off that I'm not pushing any toons up. I'm running around killing 70 hordies in lakeshire.. or.. killing belfs in southshore.. or.. killing belfs anywhere.. I have lost interest in PVP where I am often outgeared more than outclassed.. and outnumbered (due to poor alliance teamwork). So the real world aspect of PvP is better for me. I come accross some 70's flagged.. I wax em. I have said it before on this blog, but 1:1.. I am REALLY hard to beat. REALLY REALLY hard. I have lost about 2 duels.. maybe 4 ever. EVER with mcgoo. I duel a lot too. I try dueling any class at all times with any pet I have out. So far I have lost to a full s3 priest (holy if you believe it), and the best Enh shaman I have ever seen (we ended up about 50/50 so I consider that a point of pride). The priest.. simply burned me.. then healed himself everytime my felpup left him for a second.. he had like a dozen things healing him at once.. and I couldn't get him below 10%. This was his resilience beating my (at the time, almost no PVP gear) +dmg. I still think that the affliction and destruction tree need a bit of a boost to overcome resilience in their dots, or bolts. I mean it seems odd that a sl/sl lock can roll with you and has no pvp gear.. but mcgoo would loose to him even though all this other stuff.. due to the high resistances of the felpup (fine, demo's need that), and the rediculous utility of soul link and siphon life (neither of which should be nerfed, btw). What I am saying is if you are that deep into affy you should be given a 'this talent negates 100,200 resilience to all dots' addition to UA. This allows the other trees to PVP also. (and of course I meant that shadowfury should do the same for destro's..).

I don't want to PvP all the time anyway, or level. But right now killing random looser hordies makes my day.. (again.. I'm full affy raiding spec, so its not like a reasonable pvp class in pvp gear shouldn't be able to stomp me, the fact that they don't means they suck).

Strat.. and EPIC FAIL

2008-08-29T05:34:00.000-07:00

Ok so we stomped through scholo like it was a joke (it kinda was, actually)..

Our group was bound for Strat. Nobody had been there before so it was bound to be fubar from the word GO. Yara had scouted it, and there are some disease givers that reduce your healing by 100%. To a mage this is not a big deal.. to an affy lock, this is terrible (explanation at the bottom). So we fumble looking for a dispeller to take that off of us. We got one!! YEAH!!

So we were...

70 frost mage (epic'd out, scarry powerful)
70 BM hunter (epic'd out, scarry powerful)
64 BM hunter (along for the ride, but always helpful to have a spare hunter)
70 Elem Shaman (ok so not a dedicated healer, but what's wrong wit a little dps?)
Some gnome that calls himself Mcgoo..

So we stomp through EPL to get to Strat. Suddenly.. my lag spikes. Like it was 140 (not terrible) and then hit 4k. So everything got jacked up. I got booted. Came back in... lag is normal.. then BOOM.. back to 4k. OK so now I'm ticked.. wth is going on here? shut down wow completely.. Windows is updating to SP3.. son of a vocational school drop out monkey.. OK so how long could this possibly take?

Try over an hour and a half. SO when I got back in not only were they DONE, they were all logged but 1 and they asked me wth, so I told them. I promised I was going to unleash hell on strat tomorrow, I promise!

----------------
Now its Thursday night... I log on late (bah, real life.. always getting in the way of zombie killing), and I find only 1 person on. We immediately push to Lights hope to wait for others. I throw it out in general chat, "lfm strat, pst".. A pally (61) answers the call. SWEET. Most people resent pallies.. I personally think they rock. He was a tankadin so not ideal, good news is he could prolly take a beating better than me.

So we get in.. and we're immediately lost. Trying to find "the key guy" so I can have a key too. We wonder aimlessly until Yara comes on and we start moving with some speed. We make it all the way through to baron and he was a chump.. Got nothing good as drops.. but we got so many friggin blue boe drops it was SICK. Lots of gear that was designed to be super leet before TBC, which is all but DE fodder now.. Was hoping for Baron's horse, but alas.. no luck. I hit honored and now have some of the mats necessary for my attunement.. I may log on briefly tonight to purchase it.

What's that? Naxx? oh HECK yes..

2008-08-27T05:47:00.000-07:00

Sitting at my PC, and my buddy pops me a note saying..

"Did you hear about us trying to get a group for Naxx?"

This is a single sentence that stopped my whole night. I have always wanted to raid Naxx especially before its retooled as a lvl 80 instance in Northrend. Well also the prospect (all be it slight) that I COULD get the staff of Medivh. The only Caster legendary weapon that I know of. Not to mention, I'm in a guild called.. "The ORDER of Medivh". I just think it'd be fitting for me to have one.. well not fitting there are certainly more qualified raiders who would deserve such a legendary weapon.. but still. I wanted to go there and see what this place has, and experience it while I am technically overpowered for it.. unlike in the expansion when I will most likely be on the shallow end of the gear pool.

So quick reading of our forum, and lo and behold.. we ARE trying to go there! So I quickly give them my "I will be there, please dear lord let me go!"... only in a cooler tone. Well I hoped.. So I made my druid sleep a bit longer in the inn and I dusted Mcgoo off for a tromp through the plaguelands..

Last night we stomped all over Scholo.. I mean ALL over scholo. The kills and badges got me sufficient rep to get me about 2-3 bars from Honored. Honored, by the way, is the minimum to do the attunement to even get IN to Naxx. If you are Exalted with Argent Dawn you go in for free, otherwise.. you gotta pay. Things that aren't that hard to come by now.. but I'm sure they were hard to get to originally. I have the disposable funds to get attuned even at just honored so I see no real reason to push beyond that anymore.

Well last night it was scholo... tonight.. Strat. Our group? BM hunter (mostly in S1 epics), frost/arcane mage (FULL pvp mojo), and me (mixmatched epics from S1 and raiding, affliction build). Notice we have no healer? I would prefer one honestly, but Que sera sera.. We had 2 deaths in Scholo.. and those had to deal with us being kinda vein and trying to do AOE fest on 60 elites.. which takes 2-3 aoe cycles to bomb. I never died. Mostly cause I am awesome like that.. or maybe cause I was so undergeared/outclassed that I didnt' top dmg... ever.. ever ever. So I was either really rusty or they really outgeared/played me. Any of these could be the answer but it stung, since I wasn't SL/SL I didn't have that to fall back on.

So I'll be pushing hard in Strat.. since it is loaded with undead I'm thinking my "OS" button (fear) will be worthless. Ah well.. I'm going to take care of this rep issue so I can go on Saturday to Naxx..

Ret Pally HEALZ- ZOMG

2008-08-18T06:01:00.000-07:00

Well I was looking for things to do on my pally and found that he had 3 quests in the stockade. Stockade? at 29? sure why not..

So I popped into LFG and quickly found 3 other 29's wanting to go in (apparently I'm not the only bonehead). The druid dropped out at the last second (who knows why).. So we went in as..

29 Ret Pally (me)
29 Prot Pally
29 warlock with VW

This made things really easy. We pulled a whole room at a time and in a few instances it turned into 2 rooms. I was SS'd so I took that to mean I get to heal... YEAH FOR NO MANA!! oh wait.. no that sucks. So I popped heals on them as best I could. For the first several pulls I didn't do DPS (squeemish much?). The tank told me to get into it.. so I did. AND HOW! I popped up righteous fury (keeps em off my locky friend with his shadowbolts). Typically one of us would judge crusader.. the other would judge Justice. So no runners (usually), and all the dmg you could ask for.

Dinged 30 after I got done with all that non-sense and flew to.. I think southshore to start questing there after a few days of rest. Also note.. I now have a new aura!! Sanctity aura. So in the future a duel pally situation can have me with imp sanctity aura (cuz I helps ppl) and him with ret aura. Should be time for HOLY DAMAGE BATMAN!! ok so that was a little weak, but I think it holds as a good pun. Also got the "take one for the team" ability (divine intervention), not that I see myself using it anytime soon (I prefer not to wipe at all). All will be seen in the future though kiddies.. so stay tuned!

Loosing focus..

2008-08-18T05:53:00.000-07:00

Well I'd love to update everyone and say.. "druid now at 47!".. But I can't.

Or even "druid now at 46!".. but a big negatory there too.

So. What HAVE I been doing? I ran out of rested on my druid and then got BORED. I leveled my shaman up and got water totem abilities (mmm healing stream). Then I got bored with him, so I leveled my pally up to 30 (almost 31!!) and got his mount (woot!).

Why you're asking? Why would I start horsing around on alts now?

Focus. The social aspect of the game being tantamount to me rather than the actual GAME itself.. I find that without a leveling buddy, things aren't nearly as much fun. I will return to my druid tonight, unless I get a buddy to run my pally through SM for some gear upgrades in later levels.. Who knows.

Druid is sitting in Tanaris waiting on more stuff to kill. With any luck at all he will have sufficient rested bonus to get him up a level tonight and maybe get into the next one a bit. I may do some dailies-days for when this happens again. I seem to burn rested REALLY fast solo, not so much in group.

Nub!!

2008-08-15T05:00:00.000-07:00

Well last night I got griefed..

.. and then turned the table on the little fella!

Ok well as you'll see in my post after this, last night was ati's last night for... well for a while. So I told him, his last night.. whatever he wanted to do we'd make that happen. He wanted to level his pally.. in duskwood. Sounds good to me, but then I let him choose which toon I would be. He chose my recent 70, dwarfenstuff. Sounds good.. pallies have movement issues, so having pack aspect will help with travel.. DOH.. he has a mount now.. nvm. So I don't know why the hunter was preferrable.

So I was killing everything in the cemetary, and some rogue for no explicable reason said...

"Nub"

Well I'm not a "nub", so it didn't bother me but I caught on he wanted to bait me.. I can type at like 50 words a minute so I went round and round with him.

"Why am I a nub" - me
"70 and in all greens, nub" - him
"yeah I'm mostly in greens atm.." - me
"yeah you nub all greens, my hunter [made up guy on another server] could 1 shot you" - him
"orly?"-me
"yeah look him up {explicative deleted}.." - him
(first just know I didnt' look him up.. I can easily name off 10 guys in the top raiding guild and SAY they are mine.. they aren't.. but who can prove this?)
"convenient they are on another server, huh?" - me
....

It went on and on... and then on some more. I referred to him as "little boy" and "junior" almost constantly. I went as far as to accuse him of making up his toons who are "so much better" than my 70. He continued.. this lasted like 20 minutes.. maybe longer. So he kept on saying how lame my 70 was compared to his. I didn't report him. I won't. It was an entertainment to me that someone would try to be such a troll.

In the end he did a mass spam of
"NUB" about 200 times. Which made me laugh again.. cuz, I didn't need to talk to ati.. I was killing he was looting.. that was our makeup. I made sure I didn't runoff from him and kept him alive, so there was nothing to say till Questhelper told me he was done. So he disrupted no communication (his hope), and he made me laugh when he wanted to make me mad.

Griefing.. Well personally I don't do it. If you REALLY know how to play, you just do and others opinions of you don't really matter. I know what I'm doing.. Am I the best? well you can check and see I'm not in SWP gear.. so I could not be the best. I will chance to say that I'm good. I have almost NEVER lost a duel be it with a same level or higher level character. Nobody has ever pwned me in a bg 1:1 (with mcgoo.. dwarf was a twink, so thats really kinda mean since I used to take on 3-4 guys solo and kill them all). Could someone? possibly. Like I said I 'm not in the best of the best.. I'm in some good gear, I'm not denying it.. but nowhere near sunwell or brutal gladiator.

So this guy had an epic fail as a 25 rogue. Epic. he talked trash (when it meant nothing to do so), then when I wouldn't stop talking with him (Not harrassing.. just challenging his points and his integrity) he ignored me. Yeah.. a griefer who no doubt wanted to have me /ignore him.. now has me on /ignore. EPIC... FAIL...

Lets look into this.. firstly.. my guy just hit 70 and did 1 round of dailies, followed by 1 pvp match (EOTS, which I won and placed 5th in total dmg 3rd in HK's.. in greens/blues). So he's not epic. Not even close. He's there to go to 80 though when WotLK pops, and do dailies when my druid hits 70. So he was kinda weak for a 70. No epics... I could buy a few.. but why? again he can move from 70-72 in this gear easy and then get questing upgrades to get better so why drop big gold on it?

Lets see some points as to why this guy was cracked..

no epics = nub..

Not possible, as not everyone has hit 70 since the 3rd day of TBC.. so he's cracked

my 70's are better than yours!

first.. he could be making this up.

second he could have bought his...

third.. could be his dad's or brother's..

Honestly.. I think this guy was a kid being a kid. The whole "mine is better than yours" thing..kinda tired. And since it was unprovoked, obviously just a troll. I consider this a victory.. I didn't let it bother me at all. We did dabble in some name calling (well I'm no saint.. c'mon..) and some yo' mama issues.. But in the end we were merely discussing his legitimacy that he could evaluate MY gear as a 25 rogue (as that was the only toon I could prove he had). He gave up.. and I'm on ignore. If anyone wants his name so you can tell him what a dork he is.. let me know. If he wanted help he just had to ask.. if I killed a mob he wanted, he just needed to say so. Griefing accomplishes nothing. And in his case he lost a guy who would have helped him out if he wasn't a jerk.

Pwned.

Druid pounding up the levels

2008-08-13T12:08:00.000-07:00

ZOMG.. With real life kicking me in the head daily I have neglected my loyal readers!!

Well enough bs.. what is up? Let me TELL you.

With my hunter now lvl 70 and being moderately effective in all things, I started pounding my druid up in levels..

Initially I wanted to finish the Nessingwary q's in STV. I did. Then I marched my bear-hiney (get it.. bear, not bare?.. oh bite me it was funny) up to Hinterlands.. with a pit stop in Guild chat to say...

"Um.. its been like a year or so since I had to FIND the Hinterlands... anyone know where it is?"
Quickly answered by my astute friends in my guild by..
"map.. North East of your location"
Very nice.. well at least people with excessive sarcasm group together eh? so I followed up..
"great.. thanks now that I can read the map.. is there a path.. THROUGH the mountains?"

Ok so NOW I get the sensical answer of where the path (if you haven't discovered all of southshore you're SOL cause I would never have found it otherwise) was located.

Get there and bring in my good buddy Ati's druid. So we start stomping through everything.. doing things like taking out a group of 5 47's at lvl 43/41 (Myself and him). So to me, I thought we were doing GREAT. Then we hit what is known as a concrete wall.

We did all the quests we could do due to our level in Hinterlands... So.... now what?

Well we logged in frustration and came back last night where we lept down to Tanaris for a bunch of q's I had stored since around 40. We collected them all and then started doing the dance of crazy druids. Pounding all of those out.. or close to all of them.

So progress is good.. I'm at 44 and about 1/3 of the way into it. Just got my First aid leveled to mageweave (not heavy just yet)..

Now for the bad news..

My good buddy Ati may be taking a hiatus.. having a real life seems to get in the way of WoW? Glad I don't have one... (or much of one..) So my relentless drive to 70 on the druid will most likely be a solo one for the foreseeable future. Ya know... I don't really think WoW is that great a game. I certainly have other games I prefer.. its the SOCIAL aspect of it. Reading other ppl's conversation in guild chat.. or local chat.. running around meeting people and questing.. and so on.. its just very interesting to me. THAT is the part of the game that is compelling. Sure I like that I have reached some milestone of success in the game (to me having a lvl 70 is some success, and mcgoo is pretty decent.. not to mention having 2).. but again its the SOCIAL nature of it.. I mean if you want to run out and quest all the time and grind on mobs for money.. I mean.. you can get a older non-online RPG and do that till your nose bleeds.

So on top of my "Woot!! level 44!!! WOO HOO".. I am adding this.. Please try to branch out a bit and meet new folks on your server around your level. I know of a lot of people and remember friends from other guilds.. and groups.. Unfortunately they don't share my passion for leveling alts up so I have a selection of people to play with at the level cap for raiding/instances.. what not...

Not sure what I'll do without my home-boy to talk to when I level.. this just in.. guild chat becomes spammed by a lowbie druid.. ROFL!! beware guild... BEWARE!

Ding!! 70! (for real)

2008-08-04T05:10:00.000-07:00

Wow.. so I finally hit 70 last night a full night behind schedule. I only needed from my reserve funds about 140g to get my flying mount/training.. So I did.

Did my pre-req's for skyguard dailies in terrokar.. also did a battleground.. I came in like 5 in overall dmg (remember, no pvp gear.. I'm in mostly questing greens). I WON.. (if by winning you mean I died the most of all the alliance in this particular EOTS).

Tonight it will be dailies for Mcgoo and Dwarf... so that I will have plenty of gold for my up and coming druid to get his epic ground mount and any training he wants.

(YEAH!!! DWARF IS 70!!! YEAH!!!.. a full month behind my original deadline..)

YES LVL 70!!

2008-07-31T10:40:00.000-07:00

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!!

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

2008-07-29T05:18:00.000-07:00

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!)

Being sorry... and meaning it

2008-07-28T13:59:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-07-28T06:13:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2008-07-24T05:33:00.000-07:00

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..

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

2008-07-23T05:26:00.000-07:00

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.

Friggin Ogre's...

2008-07-22T10:35:00.000-07:00

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!

MIA again... sorry

2008-07-18T10:34:00.000-07:00

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.

OMG long time no... blog?

2008-07-03T05:22:00.000-07:00

Wow updates updates updates...

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...
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)
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.

Stalling..

2008-06-20T05:48:00.000-07:00

Well even though my rise has been meteoric until outlands I've stalled horribly. I was doing 1 level in 1 night from 50-61 really. 62 took me several nights (all be it shorter periods of play so who knows on the time scale) to get to and 63 is starting off that way also.

Really unsure of reaching my 70 by 7/1 goal, but I'm still pushing. My rate of ascent has slowed considerably though so it is doubtful. Ati has started dealing with more "real life" things like moving, etc.. So he's gaming a bit less, which leaves me to solo. Well don't cry for me argentina, I'm a BM hunter. The premier solo class for ever and ever, amen. Soloing is great for xp progression, but it sucks butt when it comes to speed, I mean with me and ati doing dps, and my pet tanking we were running through mobs at light speed.

I think a big slower on my time right now is mana. I have been away from my hunter forever so this thirst for more mana is new to me, probably not to the seasoned hunters though. I'm considering checking my enchanter buddies for +int or +mp5 enchants (if they are even worth it). When I was dual wielding my twink 1'handers I put mana oil on them and used that to supplement my mana sucking. I find that mana is my biggest problem. I can almost kill a lvl 66 elite (don't ask) at 63, but I run out of juice and the guy is at 20%. What? 20% is pretty F'ing close for a 63, don't be a jerk! Of course he kills my pet (my ravager I named "eatsfaces"), who I am trying to keep armored and HP'd up for his tanking job (yes I know he'll stop tanking when I'm in instances, and only need resistances but still makes him more effective as my tank). Right now he's got big armor/hp, and decent showings in frost/nature resist.. Why? poison = nature.. rooting by freezing = frost. Holding down most of that poison keeps him alive longer, and keeping him from being rooted means I don't have to think like a warrior and melee ppl.

Ah.. now if I can just hit 65 by monday..

"Shyeah.. and monkeys might fly out of my butt.." -Wayne

timeline issues..

2008-06-17T06:33:00.000-07:00

Well my elegant timeline of getting to 70 has crumbled at my feet.

/cry

Well at my current rate of progression I won't ding 70 till after 7/4 weekend. That puts me at least 5 days past deadline.. and leaves NO time for money raising to get epic ground mount for the druid. So this whole thing has become a big debacle that I just don't know if I'll be able to fix and still have 3 70's at launch (with mcgoo flying on his epic netherray).

So now I'm eating into my druid's timeline unless I get really lucky with the questing in higher levels.. but I doubt it.

100th post.. WOOT!

2008-06-13T12:37:00.000-07:00

Well I pushed all the way out of hellfire peninsula and into zangarmarsh. I've completed all the quests from the druid encampment and have started picking up quests at talredor and the camp near the BEM area.

And... I'm still not 62...

According to my schedule I had worked out I would need to be.. Oh.. 62. So I'm like ALMOST there.. and I haven't even leveled 1 level a night. How the crap did THAT happen?

Just as well though. The optimum goal is to be 70 by 6/23 so I can start dailies and spend a week or so pushing gold accumulation. Although on 7/1 I start playing the druid every day to push him up to 70. I think the druid will be the most fun personally but we'll see. Right now he chews through everything and with ati's druid running with me (if he doesn't get distracted)

61 FINALLY..

2008-06-09T09:03:00.000-07:00

Wow.. The best laid plans..

Ok so my dibble dabble in black temple set me behind a level. I managed to get that back, but I remain a level behind my schedule (I should be 62, but that hasn't happened yet). I dinged 61 last night and kept pushing until I found a good stopping point. I'm about 10-20% into 61 now, and things are getting a bit taxing. I think even with quest helper the craziness that IS outlands may mean I'll need to utilize a leveling guide also if I'm going to ding 70 in the allotted time. This brings all new issues to bear on when or if I'll get my druid up to 70. Which worries me..

Well time will tell.. we'll see what tonight holds

Priorities.. and overlap

2008-06-06T06:40:00.000-07:00

Wow is a priority to me. Not the TOP priority.. but I find if I go too many days without playing SOME video game.. Life tends to beat me down a bit too much.

Now in game of late my priority has shifted off of Mcgoo and onto my hunter (dwarfenstuff.. just "dwarf" when I talk about him). Goal is to have 3 lvl 70's by expansion (what Val says and scares me, might be november) which shouldn't be hard by any standards. I've been ignoring raids and ignoring invites from ppl doing heroics for a while now (by ignoring I mean I say no thanks), to push these guys up to 70. Last night.. I got weak.

Raid leader: "Hey black temple?"
me: "um.. gosh no but thanks for asking!"

Sounds like I said no right, and its not a big deal. BUT in guild chat.. the poor guy is like BEGGING for a dps for BT. Now I feel like an ass. This guy has gone out of his way to help me out in ways that no other guild has.. and in ways many guilds could not. So my first thought is..

"dude.. you gotta go.. They've been awesome to you, even when you are in greens they took you to SSC, thats rediculous! don't be an ass log onto Mcgoo and put your hat in the ring"

Sounds sensible.. Then my second thought...

"zomg.. BT?!?! are you friggin kidding me? YOU are not a spec for any REAL damage.. You're PVP spec'd still. Going will hinder them more than anything else as they'll be waiting on your friggin corruption and shadowbolts for dmg, and the damage just won't be there like it would for a raiding lock spec.."

Also logical. Its Black-friggin-Temple. Until the sunwell thing fell out onto WoW it was the NEXT TO THE LAST raid for the WHOLE HONKIN GAME. How awesome is this guild to even give an SL/SL lock a invite for this? Sure my help will be marginal.. sure I'm close to the same damage level output as the healers.. but they need a guy.. so I'm going.

Well guess what...

We got STOMPED. Horrendously. I don't even know the guy's name, but was told he's the first boss and not really hard. For some reason we couldn't do anything right and it was a huge cluster.. well you get the point. Nobody reacted to the "spine", people popped the bubble early.. it was ridiculous. We got him down to a pitiful 15% and that was as far down as we ever got him. We wiped 3 times on him also. So I think to myself.. man it'd have been nice to blow this guy away and see what kind of goodies he drops.. (another thing.. my guild gives me a fair shot at loot, even though I've been in less than 20 raids EVER. I'm not a regular.. I'm not a top dmg dealer.. and they give me a /roll on stuff. These guys ROCK. I have gotten a few goodies in raids, most of it is stuff that nobody else wanted, and thats fine with me.. one of the benefits of everyone being better geared than me, is that I get a few goodies nobody wants. My one thing I got that a LOT of people drooled over was my sword "fang of the leviathan". It was precisely this win that made me smile big and be proud of the open mindedness of the guild. Nobody even complained.. There were only "grats goo" on vent/raid. Now they prolly all hated me but I was the only guy without an epic weapon.. so I feel no shame in taking it). I log back into my dwarf and start pushing to 61 again now almost empty of playtime and send a msg to atikam who I left to go raid..

me: "hey man"
ati: "hey how was Black Temple?"
me: "sucked, all I got was a repair bill.. LOL!"
ati: "LOL"

A good T shirt idea? I think so.

Boom.. lvl 60

2008-06-05T10:53:00.000-07:00

So last night keeping with my 1 night = 1 level idea.. I hit 60. I made it about 25% into lvl 60 before logging so there is SOME cushion to deal with on tonight.. Me and Ati's alt are all push, and all business..

At this rate I might actually reach 70 ahead of time.. although I remember the xp grind to be painful at 68-70. I think my new addon (questhelper) is like MONEY in the BANK! I don't have 7 lvl 70's that I've gone from 1-70 with no help on.. all I have is 1 so I don't KNOW all the quests and where to get things.. This little dandy helps with that, and really well at that. Makes the lvl grind not so painful.. It has its bugs.. and its flat out wrong-ness.. but I still think it is a tool that everyone who is just interested in dinging 70 should have on them almost immediately. It even shows me Ati's quests just in case I don't have one, I know where he's going and what he's doing so there's no "zomg.. wtf are you going?" Ati's a hardcore guy really fast at leveling, but he's holding himself back for me since..

Leveling alone is boring
I'm really funny
he's a warrior and its much slower without a OP hunter.. :)

Well see if tomorrow Its BOOM lvl 61 or not..

OUTLANDS!!! HOOOOO!!!

2008-06-03T07:15:00.000-07:00

Well good ole dwarfenstuff pushed and pushed and finally kicked down the door to outlands. I hit 58 and moments later stepped through to meet the wild war in front of the portal on outlands side. Now knowing what I learned from Mcgoo doing this.. I know there is a griphon on the left of the portal to go to honor hold. (If you have read me for long you remember me getting stomped continuously as I tried to sneak past all the demons attacking.. not fun.)

I pushed and pushed and I am about 4 bubbles from hitting 59. I am LOVING it. So far I'm still mostly in my twink gear and doing just fine without any sizable upgrades.

** update dinged 59 on 6/3 post was originally on 6/2***
Now have a new 2her axe to replace my 2 1h axes.. and a new xbow and a new chest/head/belt.. so upgrades are flowing in much faster now..

Zomg, WotLK is coming!!

2008-05-28T12:11:00.000-07:00

Well as I was patiently reading news on some blogs.. a hint of WotLK was put out there. I immediately swarmed to WoWiki to see what they had to say again..

Here's a quote: "A public beta has been announced, but no date has been given; the game itself is scheduled to be released in the second half of 2008"

Wait.. second half of 08?

The SKY IS FALLING!! AAAA!!

So I've given myself June to get dwarf to as high as he can get before I park him and spend the rest of the time allotted (I'm betting on a close to christmas release) to get my druid to 70. The druid is really the priority, but dwarf is closer, and for insurance purposes he's my sure thing bet. So now its not a slow grind to 70, its a paniced-screaming-mad-dash to 70.

Stay tuned for more details of how I whine/cry to get Atikam/Wulven to run me through places or quests to make things faster for me..

(get ready you 2..I'll be calling)

SUNK in TEMPLE

2008-05-28T11:52:00.000-07:00

I am an independent person. I don't really like waiting on others to get their head together or to anything. I'm not a people person.

These given facts are needed to understand how happy I was that my longtime amigo Atikam was able to run me through sunken temple to get my blue (har har) Hunter Trinket (devilsaur eye). He's a tough customer so I thought soloing would be easy, but nobody really ever says they just solo'd ST, so how would I know? We went in with another long time amigo of mine.. Veyona. She's just 47 at the start (dinged 48 at the end) but she did great. All 3 of us were hunters, and we all worked really well together. The group pounded straight towards Morphaz, who had a tooth we needed for the trinket I was after. I'll diverge a bit here..

If you have ever DONE ST, you know its a long drawn out very annoying instance. You run in circles for quests.. you run up and down stairs for quests.. it seems to never end. And just when you think you ARE at the end.. You go into a main hall with 900 friggin dragonkin in groups of 4-6 all waiting to smack you down.. We made a beeline to this room as its just a heck-of-a lot shorter than running around forever and ever. Now back to my story

.. Anyway.. So we started taking the groups apart, Ati doesn't really NEED help, but I wanted to push my dps so that I could account for a decent amount of it even though he was running US through. I'm always the guy looking for "scale". So I want to always compare how I do with how someone else is. Ati I know is one of the better hunters I've seen for pvp. I've never raided with him to know if he can even POINT the xbow in the right direction, but to a hunter.. you send pet.. you shoot.. there's no real science here. My goal was (admittedly low I think in retrospect) to be dealing 5% of the total group dps. I ended up in the 20th percentile for damage, which I think is REALLY good. Veyona did her part and nailed down my goal of about 5%. Veyona isn't really geared right (she's UBER casual as a player) and has been powerleveled a lot more than she probably should have been.. All things considered though she did as well as ANY hunter in her range could do, regardless of gear. Unlike Me, Ati, and Wulven (Veyona's husband) who had to wander around mostly confused and lost till we hit 70.. She is definitely reaping the rewards of others' experience. Jealous? nah.. V's my buddy and the sooner she gets to 70 the sooner me and her husband can put her on an arena team and watch another team tear her to shreds.. Ok so we will probably do that, but its all in fun. Sooner she is 70 the sooner I have 1 more person I know and can depend on at a high level for support (when needed, of course).

Anyway.. we stomped everything. Nothing lasted long at all.. Ati used his improved hunters mark, me and V shot and set our pets to support (growl off, of course). That is till we reached some quest area to use an egg to revive Hakkar or something..

Everything spawned FAST (first time for me/ati so we didn't know wth would happen), and everything killed her in like 3 seconds. Me and Ati stomped the event and a good time was had by all. BUT she had to do it again.. so we had to run out and reset the instance.. run back and do the thing again. This time we had traps all over her and pets left in the circle on aggressive (mine was anyway..) and ready to defend our lowbie pal. This one went like clockwork. Stomped out and laughed at how easy it was..

well easy if you have Atikam doing everything.. hey.. a win is a win, bite me.

meh..

2008-05-27T06:31:00.000-07:00

I think the title is self explanatory really.. Lately WoW has been all meh..

Went to SSC, meh.. Didn't really want to go, but my hours on the soapbox over "never getting into raids" kinda hogtied me into it. I got a great offhand.. meh. I was happy to get it, but I have totally tunneled and only Tier Gear and my alts really matter to me now. Selfish? yes very. Rude? Probably yes there too.. Honestly my alts are plain and simple THE priority. While having Tier 99 headpiece would be sweet.. I just don't think I care enough about it to really deserve it. This attitude, while until now was unspoken, I think ruffled some feathers. (thats polite talk for really ticking ppl off). I TRY to have enough where-withall to SAY when I get invited to do stuff that this new raid/thing isn't a real priority for me atm. I failed to do so last week. My guild is awesome. They are all fully bad mo-fo's and not to be fooled with. I have begun to wonder if my lack of push to become "attuned" or "geared" for the next great raid hasn't really removed me altogether from the guild proper.

Why? Why you say? Well I think the big reason is this.. PvP is getting boring, dailies are a grind and boring without enough money to do what I want (epic flying) in any short time frame. I can't RELIABLY get into raids at my typical signon time. So that leaves me with 70 and nothing of interest to do.

Options:

stop playing, cause everything has gone to a shade of "meh"
get someone else to 70 for the fun and thrill of "yeah I'm 70.. kneel at my all green gear!"
just goof around and try to make the most of it

I've honestly gone with like 2.5 somewhere between 2 and 3. My druid is who I REALLY want at 70. They can do a LOT of things, and I want to be able to do that kind of thing.. However, he's not quite 40 yet so he's still unmounted. I ran out of rested xp like 2 weeks ago and haven't gone back to him.. so what have I been doing?

Dwarfenstuff returns!! I've been working with him. I'm chipping away at 60 and should have it before too long. At which point I'll have to decide if I want to push dwarf to 70 and get his flying and have him/mcgoo do dailies.. till I have the gold for a epic on my druid.. OR just leave him on his lvl 40 pewpew mount till my druid gets his epic and starts laying some gold down for the cause. I've tried to get the 2 (in my mind) hardest gathering professions to skillup. Mcgoo: mining (oh so awful to level).. and BigScryBear: herb (not all that fun to level as it is..).

Why gather then? Honestly its cause I want stuff. I WANT things like jewelcrafting.. engineering.. alchemy. And those things NEED the gathering professions to back them up. So there's a reason.. I'm debating on it being a "good" reason or not though..

Herb has netted me $0 to date. I keep it all in the bank. I will be making someone my new alchemist in the future. Who? I dunno.. I have a rogue as an alchemist but she's only 18. So unless I want to start dragging another alt up to 70 she won't work. Big could do it, but then I loose a skinner. Dwarf could do it, but I'd loose LW or skinning. I'm not 100% on keeping LW anyway. All my buds who do it whine a lot about how bad it sucks.. most of them are still not at max after a few months at 70.

so back to meh..
if you have something awesome to say.. SAY IT.. or go back to your meh..

Update weirdness..

2008-05-15T10:39:00.000-07:00

My favorite wild/crazy thing to happen after an update was when I was in Darkshore, and I caught the boat to Menethil.. and after it finally zoned.. I was in Dalaran. Literally. I was on top of a purple bubble and I totally freaked out.

I freaked out.. and by that I mean I checked the map to make sure I wasn't on crack.. and I immediately zoned back to darkshore and was in the water at the edge of the "dead" water.

So forgetting to take a screen shot.. FTL. :(

Nifty at 50..

2008-05-09T11:35:00.000-07:00

I have been getting SO bored with my druid. My leveling guide makes things un-challenging while maximizing xp and time.

“I sense something. A presence I've not felt since...”

So I logged on to all my alts. Looking for what I was after.. Then.. when logged into an alt.. I thought: "this is what I want.. I don't know why but I want it"

So I ran to Tanaris.. and hit level 50 with Dwarfenstuff. It felt weird.. Not "bad" but not all that great either. So I started picking up quests and turning them in. Then I hearthed back to SW and trained.. well there was more than that. I respec'd to BM. It works so well for Atikam why wouldn't I try? My damage is ridiculous now. I was mowing down mobs at level or 1 below so quick it was really kinda silly. I am following no guide with him as he's more of a distraction than a serious toon to level. Although I fully intend to do quests in appropriate zones he's not a priority. Mainly because his mounts will be all out of pocket where my druid will get his flight form for free.. and 2 70's can stir money faster than 1 flying 70 and a non flying one. I have sufficient gold to get both toons all the way to their flying mount. Although this would all but drain me completely.

Me and some folks ran through Maraudon in some wild time. We wiped, and by WE I mean.. THEY wiped.. (FD FTW!!). My damage was crazy high I outdamaged everyone significantly.. and by significantly I mean I did 38% of our groups total damage, beginning to end. All this with a shammy in good gear and a lock doing dps with me. I don't know how I'd have faired as a MM, but this definitely worked well for me.

I have pushed so far as to even ding 52 last night. Putting my first of many points into MM to get some decent damage out of my new crazy fast shooting speed. I'm using King B as my pet still ( no ravager, :( ). I may swap out to get another pet.. just to horse around with till I can get a raptor and or ravager in outland. I should probably do some planning.. I know I want 3 pets in my stable.. scorpid, ravager, and probably raptor. I don't know when I'd want them but I don't really like leveling pets.. although BM spec makes even a lower level pet do great damage..

More to come on this guy.. He's not stopping.. can't stop.. won't stop.. Looks like I may get my 3 70's by expansion.. but instead of lock/pally/druid.. it'll prolly be lock/hunter/druid..

but it is real nice horsing around with the dwarf again tho..

Lazy dog..

2008-05-02T05:22:00.000-07:00

I am like .5 bubbles away from level 35.

I was using quest helper but the thing is kinda bonkers to be honest with you. I can't get my pathing right on it yet. It is really pretty good for finding quest objectives though..

I should ding 35 tonight.. maybe even get a good run at 36 before I get too tired to go on..

If I can get a buddy of mine (Veyona) to log on to her hunter, I may start leveling my twink to 70 again.. but you just can't count on that kind of thing.. :)

Updates for all...

2008-05-01T06:27:00.000-07:00

Well I've been a while without an update..

Its been a busy time, I was being powerleveled for some time with my druid by a buddy of mine (atikam).. He apparently HAS a life, so he's gotten kinda iffy when he can be around, and I don't want to monopolize his time... So I've been pushing my druid on my own. He dinged 33 and then 34 last night exhausting my rested xp gain. I finished my first big push in STV and my leveling guide has me running into wetlands, which seems odd for me, oh well. I doubt this guide all the time, but it is what allowed me to level Mcgoo at the speed he was leveled.. Actually I slowed Mcgoo down by doing a lot of warlock quests that left me way out of the way from the guide's points.

I will be installing a new addon that is to allow me access to my leveling guide via a submenu from the bartender such that I don't have to ALT+TAB to see what my next move is (very bad short term memory). I'll update you guys/gals with that info as soon as I have it.

I have a bit of reading I have been putting off (you know who you are, and I'm sorry its been delayed) which should prove useful for a LOT of people.

So much more to come.. I don't know how long it'll take me to reach 40 and get my mount (money in hand as of now) but I'd assume by next weekend I'll be on a saber mount. We'll see..

Tempers flaring..

2008-04-22T05:45:00.000-07:00

I'm mean. No I don't mean like periodically. For the most part I am mean all the time. I usually tend to be in control and not blast off with my temper also. Last night was different..

Ok my longstanding buddy Atikam was running my lowbie druid around helping him pound out some high level quests.. I had ran to moonglade (druid haven) to train up (dinged 30). Well he's doing whatever ati does when he's waiting on me.. and a blood elf mage starts attacking guards.. So ati opens up on him. He gets close, but the mage pwns him. Then CAMPS him..

Ok.. I'm level headed.. I'm very calm. Then he tells me the mage's name. Its the guy who was farming my lvl 29 druid (at the time) a week ago.
Boom

Ok so I immediately logon as mcgoo and burn all I can to get to southshore to kill this guy. In the mean time he's just WAITING for ati to rez so he can kill him again.. I land and immediately sac my succubus and pull my felhunter (known as the "I win" button for fighting mages). I run up on the scene, he sees me and blinks away.. I mount, and then chase him. He tries to get away on his mount and I go "full tilt boogie" on his booty. I put curse of exhaustion, corruption, siphon life, and cast searing pain at him.. (all while felpup is running him down). Then, he unflagged. How? I don't know. I thought you had to be OUT of combat to unflag.. but whatever. He got away but in a short burst was down to 70% life.

Ati, and myself decided that we should go to Tarren Mill and level the place. So we're in Tarren Mill killing guards all over the place.. I apparently out of luck, pulled a lvl 60 melee mob. He's nothing special but I can't get him off me and all that jazz so he's interrupting my casts. Ati was busy nailing down mobs too (he managed to get like 5-6 guards on him at once. Ok so we died. Now I ran back to my body cause I hadn't had sufficient blood for the evening. Since I saw no casters, the felpup was a waste.. so I summoned my succy. SHE can put out some pain on folks, and is more than a handfull for the guards. So ati and I are getting ready.. well to get ready.. and my 3's team-mate signed on. Wulven. So I tell him to come kill some horde with us and he's all about it. When we were finally doing well 2 70 pvp folks showed up. A enhancement shaman, and a rogue. They sucked. Rogue got ati, but I got him.. and almost killed the shaman even with 3 guards on me. Wulven I believe polished them off.. only to die before we could get back cause they both had a 20" run from the GY to their corpses. When we were 3 again, we took out the flightmaster and his bats and we toyed with the noobish defense group that showed up. As an arena team we covered each other well.. I dotted everything, ati's pet whipped booty, and wulven used his pet to keep guards busy while we dps'd the PvP guys. Well they eventually got tired of us stomping them and started resing and running into town (with full respawns) to hide. I thought that maybe a shaman looked bad without dots on him so I put 3 on him and drained him out of range of his totems and his defenders. I got him to 20% FAST, so his gear was more lame than mine. I don't meet many folks with gear as poopy as mine for PvP but when I do, they notice it RIGHT away. Anyway we got bored with them no longer rushing us.. and I didn't want to be TOO much of an jerk.. So we rode/hearthed back and were satisfied in the killing spree that resulted.

** To the 49 Belf pally who tried to heal the shaman, I'm sorry I had to kill you with a shadowbolt crit.. Not really cause I hate blood elves.. but better luck next time. Maybe leave the PvP to the grown ups (70's). Much respect for trying to help your buddy tho..

Holy Shnikies!

2008-04-17T08:15:00.000-07:00

Well I logged on last night, thinking.. me and some buddies are going to kill everything in hammerfall.. Well mostly for fun, but also to help us work on our arena tactics right? Well I signed on.. nobody there. Then I get insta-invited to SSC for my guild. I like SSC, but since I paid my gold to go back to sl/sl I was kinda hoping that I'd be able to use it for what its intended to be used for.. So I grumbled about missing arena points and went to SSC.

Firstly, my guild is amazing. They must be 1 of 3 things:

Crazy to invite a sl/sl lock to ssc for dps.. I mean how much could I REALLY be helping?
love me (probably not.. but its possible)
totally stretched when it comes to dps'ers

Now personally, I don't care. I like raiding. I don't have the time they all put into it, but thats why they roll with super-uber-mega gear, on all 8 alts.. And I still have a green ring. I think I add a lot to the raid such as:

my dots (I have good dmg, and I do pretty well there)
I'm durable (if nothing else, sl/sl gives a lot of utility to just staying alive)
I take orders well (I usually haven't been there, or don't know wth I'm doing.. So if someone says.. 'stand there and do this' I STFU and do it)
I'm a gnome, and you all know gnomes rule
If for some reason you don't believe #4, I am also a warlock.. so I rule^2

I tend to be really meek in raids. I don't want to say OMG OMG OMG, if I get that I'll faint!. And I don't want to be a jerk either.. Last night though, Fang of the Leviathon dropped from Leo. Yes I know its awesome. Yes I know it lends a lot of utility by adding crit in case I go back to destruction.. Yes I know it offers me the chance to have another equipped item for more dmg/stam/int/crit/hit.. I KNOW. So when we rolled, and by we, I mean every caster.. since there really isn't that much better than this that we have seen yet. I have been to a few raids and not gotten anything (literally) so me and another person were at the top of the list to get this. Then the guild leader called it to me. I poo'd. Not literally, but close. So I got the sword of destiny.. (as I will call it till it bothers me to do so). I was in afterglow. Totally shocked that I had something that others wanted. Seriously, I don't really have anything on me at any time that someone else hasn't passed on cause theirs is so much better. So getting this gave me a bit of a boost, especially with mcgoo.

We roll in and take out another boss. Nothing there that I could even equip.. except the wand I have (it gives mana, shut up! I know its a healing wand). Then we go to Nagafest in SSC.. Fathom Lord Karathress event. I call it an event cause he's the last one to kill... you gotta kill all his buddies first. AND he gets their abilities.. So in the end he's really a tough cookie. Well we downed all those jokers without too much stress. Then nailed his snake-butt to the wall. Guess what he dropped? 3 tokens for warlock T5 pants. Guess how many ppl wanted them.. 3 (including me). So I got wicked new britches and a new sword.

I'm freaking out now. So I dash out to IF to get a gem and some mats for runic spellthread. Which, btw.. Nethers are now BOE. I didn't know and looked like a moron in front of a superior player.. I blushed for not knowing anything.. sigh. So now I have T5 pants, grabbed a offhandI had in the bank for 'just in case you get a good 1h'. Tonight I am going to look into soulfrost mats (if my buddy isn't on for alt-leveling-palooza) so that I don't have to buy all that crap for the enchant. I'm torn on whether or not I want orb of the soul eater or not. Its awesome, no doubt. I really wanted to tank Leotheras one day though.. Well with my current badge collection rate (about 2 badges every raid night I get to go on, which is about once a week) I won't ever hit 100 badges before the expansion anyway. It looks like a fun fight though.. I really do wish I had the time to raid kara weekly so I could get the badges to tank him.. oh well. Its not like the orb would eliminate my WHOLE stock of badges.. but it will dent it. Possibly though you could get the badges for a kara run and regain all those used.. well almost. So its not terrible.

I do know I'm getting the pvp offhand. Need that resilience! Need that stamina! It has crap damage though.. Oh well. This is a OMG update, but a good update none the less.. eh? I'll let you all know what I do with my badges, especially if end up tanking Leo!

Destruciton spec

2008-04-15T06:23:00.000-07:00

I had a "crackhead" spec part demo/part destro for a little bit with mcgoo.

It was oddball, but I did really well with it. I hated it for grinding. It was awful. Period. I lacked all the survivability of my SL/SL spec, and my affy spec. I did a LOT of damage though. My average hit non crit with a shadowbolt was >3k. For me thats outstanding. Crits were kinda rare for me though ( not enough +crit gear). I don't know that I've seen shadowfury in a raid, but I thought it was an AWESOME ability. Near instant, AoE shadow ability. I'm still mostly +shadow dmg so hellfire doesn't hit like it should and seed takes a while to cast and spam. Most of my trials were on the new Isle of Quel.. whatever.. But it gave me an excuse to kill blood elves, and I jumped all over it.

Raiding: Raiding with this was the-shiz-nit. There was so much less that I did. This alone meant a lot of damage pounding on the boss. My guild usually runs with at least 2 locks. They are typically uber. Both are affy though. Basically all I did is drop agony on the boss and then spam shadowbolt (other affy lock with malediction put shadows on the boss, so I didn't need to). Thats 1 instant cast and then spam my big gun. I was hitting for 4k regularly in all that. Plus by what I was told I was way closer to the top of the DPS guys. Something that hasn't happened since I changed from affy to SL/SL due to lack of raiding.. So I was much happier. Did I top dps? no. My guild has too many ridiculously awesome people in it for my partial epic gnomey butt to be able to compete with. I did well though. Out of 25 total people with what 4 healers and 3 tanks.. ( I include off tanks as dps, cause.. well thats how I see it) Out of those numbers I ranked 9th in dmg. So I actually beat some of the bad asses in my guild. I loved that, but they probably had an off night, I'm not cocky enough to think I could really beat some of them as they are just too good.

But shortly after I ran SSC the second time for a few bosses I dropped onto my SL/SL spec again. This means my spelldmg went up pretty good, and so did my survivability. Did just a little bit of PvP as the bg/arenas were all screwy. I won an EOTS with my buddies.. Tuaren shammy was wailin on my buddy (hunter) and I was being ignored. I HATE being ignored so I started a shadowbolt after I dotted him. I hit him for 3400. He stopped.. turned slowly to me.. and then ran at me to stomp me. Now get this sports fan.. he LEFT the tight range he was with the hunter.. who has better gear and is now pissed at him. Needless to say my buddy finished him. I just thought it was funny.. ignore the gnome lock.. until holy crap... where'd my life go.. lets kill the warlock!! Moron..

Winning in EOTS is something to savor. I won't play it for probably another 2 weeks just to make sure I savor it enough. But that win.. was sweet. Pretty decisive although they TRIED to loose it about 2/3 of the way in. Even though me/my buddies were on D in the mage tower, we still had #9, in damage.. (me). Which means as bad as our team sucked.. Horde sucked more. Which is always nice.. :)

I'll try to get some more mileage before too long though so stay tuned.. and sorry for the long lapse of no posting!

Rawr.. Bear makes it to 30.. almost

2008-04-15T06:09:00.001-07:00

Well with the never faltering assistance of Atikam, my druid has RAN from 18 to 28. Pretty much stopped there too. I want this guy to ding 70 pretty quickly, but I am in doubt that this will happen at the speed I want. I think realistically to get to 70 fastest I would have to be "ushered" through the red quests I have through every zone I get to. That is what we've done so far. It works wonders, by the way if you can have a lvl 70 hunter usher you around, it helps. No other class will help as much (aspect of the pack for speed boost). Although after 40 I think a pally would be best. Since they can heal me and at the same time have crusader aura to again, help with speed.

He's been sick off/on for a while now. So basically my druid has a bunch of quests he can't possibly do. So I have been running around and herbing to skillup and at the same time skillup my skinning. Last night I swam from westfall to booty bay. Thinking, that every board I have read about herbing says barrens is "THE" place for it. So, I thought swim down there.. go to barrens do a few laps and skillup fast/hard. What NO boards told me was.. there's like 30 stranglekelp spawns in the water you can herb on the way down to booty. I got on the boat at booty with about 50 stranglekelp. I fared really well. So now I'm in my 100's for herbing, so I can herb most everything but the Wild Steelbloom. If you remember I don't really need all that much in herbs for alchemy.. I just want to be able to herb.. why? does it make money? Not that I noticed. I just thought it'd be good to have a herb person. I have a mining person, although Mcgoo made a fortune off of mithril, and it worked out well. There are some things that are hard to get in herb, and I imagine my druid will camp them out eventually to make some gold. After I have my portion that is..

Wednesday is our arena night so tonight I'll be pushing more herb/skinning to make sure that when ati runs me to higher content than I should be able to do that I can loot the appropriate things (herb nodes/skins). That's for tonight anyway..

Mcgoo has had some fun along the way also.. but more on that later.

Running with the Bear..

2008-04-01T12:42:00.000-07:00

Ok just because my character name is Bigscrybear doesn't mean I'm ALWAYS in bear from...

Well anyway.. my buddy and I are now parallel leveling some alts to try to hit 70 asap. You know.. doing all red/orange quests.. doing the better chains and popping it off quick. I played my druid for just a bit short of 1.5 hours.. and I got 27k XP. This was enough to level me and almost get me to 50% of the next level.

The goal for me and him is that we will perpetually have a tank/healer for a group. Seeing as the world of warcraft is LITTERED with dps.. And that he and I both have only had DPS characters, we know how tough it can be to get in a group.. Tanks/healers are persnickety. I know.. I have been too.

"come heal VC 4 us man!"
"what lvl is the tank?"
"16"
"16, are you nuts.. no way. Is anyone >30?"
"no, but we can do it!"
"sorry m8"

I don't like doing that.. but the hard fact is that I like healing.. but not as much as I like hitting 70. and not NEARLY as much as I like getting epic loot from moving QUICKLY through instances. Now I have healed some "rag tag" groups.. But its gotta be something I think would be fun. My healer is an alt, so is my pally.. so is my druid. For me to take time away from "the march to 70" to dork around with you.. it needs to be fun.

My financial burden seems to be growing though.. as my alts I want to keep their crafting prof's in good order (priest=JC, pally=engineer). So far the priest has the mats to push up to the cap, but I cant' seem to find time to make it to exodar to train.. bah.. My pally.. well I'm gathering things for the initial push in engineering which won't be for a bit. Seriously though I want him to have some grenades or something.. Don't get me wrong.. body pulling groups of 3 is fun, and survivable for a pally, but so is lobbing a grenade and THEN killing all 3 guys. What? You ask WHY I would push 2 expensive crafting prof's on my poor lowbies? Cause I WANT THEM! Seems kinda obvious to me really.. The only profession I want MORE than those 2 is a master transmuter for primal might. If I can do primal might xmutes for a bit of coin, or in my case.. I'll do it for a primal.. (my thought is for each one I do.. I get an extra primal.. so that I am eventually making my own mights, and selling them for fat gold).

As in life, my wow-life is littered with money making schemes. Funny thing is once I get a few 70's my money making potential will go up by leaps/bounds. Keep in mind, I'm being conservative..

If I do ONLY the skyguard quests in skettis.. ever. I'd make with 1 guy 24g, 2: 48.. and so on. Now keep in mind my feeble amount of dailies I was doing with Mcgoo (mcgoo alone now) was netting me about 80g a day. So carry that over with 3 iterations and my daily gold is 240g. Basically if I was to spend 5 days doing this.. I'd have over 1200g.

My longstanding goal is, since I FINALLY hit the level cap with mcgoo.. To get others there to finance his fun. The other guys are not going to raid. They are not going to do heroics. What they WILL do is jerk around enough to have a reasonable set of blue/epic gear so that when expansion rolls out.. Mcgoo will have a good nestegg for gold.. AND people to do crafting for him (1 JC, 1 miner, 1 tailor, 1 engineer, 1 blacksmith, 2 alchemist, 1 herbalist) {this plan requires 4 alts to hit 70.. but thats more or less me being greedy, the actuality will be all the same, but only 1 alchemist.. and no herbalist}

My mind keeps thinking of reasons to KEEP blacksmithing. I can't see it ever paying off for me big. It may be helpful/beneficial for my pally.. but I can't see it going beyond that. I really wish there were more options.. I mean I understand engineering is where you build ranged weapons.. but I just wish there were some smithing things you can do that are more BOE. Most of the good stuff (if not all) is BOP. Meaning if you can't use it.. it means nothing to you. Epic chest? nah got one from Hyjal.. oh well waste of armorsmithing.. Epic Mace? nah got one from S3, its rediculous.. So there really isn't MUCH you can get out of smithing that will pay off bigtime. I like making weapons and armor though.. So far thats all it has going for it though (that and sharpening stones/weight stones)

Behold the Fist of Verigan!

2008-03-19T12:45:00.000-07:00

Through some sheer luck, and a helpful guy I met in SW, I got ran through the WHOLE questline for verigan's fist last night. Dinged 21 and everything.. Was a neat little run, a buddy of mine (atikam) has a pally who needs the fist asap, so we're going to make that happen on tonight.

Note.. hitting lvl 20 made it apparent as to just how overpowered pallies are at low levels. I do damage on par with my rogue (19, but pretty good).. All this while wearing mail, and being able to heal myself. Sick..

Tonight I will be helping ati, and then he helping me with pushing through some red quests for my druid (pally's not in rested xp, so I prefer him to REST). If worse comes to worse I can get my mage/priest involved to really help out in their respective roles. Sadly, I find I have no more patience for low level questlines. I want a mount, NOW.. And I want to be able to do things.. NOW. Being 70 and having the world there for you is really a spoiling experience.. or it has been to me.

Workin on the night shift..

2008-03-17T06:07:00.000-07:00

No my new job hasn't forced me to work night shift.. its more my candid approach to raiding. I miss most of the raids for being not online till 8:30-9 on most nights.. I've complained how I WISH OH I WISH someone would raid post 9 for something..

Guess what?

Well my guild leader told me that I can arrange a run, no problem, just don't compete with the "real" raids (by real I mean the ones where they are pushing towards BT/MH).

SO tonight is my first "late shift kara run". We start at.. 8:45!! If you're on Medivh and you have some game, and are kara keyed give Mcgoo a shout at 8:45ish and we'll see if we can fit you in.

My main excuse is that I want the dagger from prince, I want to SEE prince.. and I want to kill the shade. The wicked ring off of atumen would be nice but, I'm not delusional.. that'll never drop, and if it does I won't get it. My real hope is that I will have some wacked out ubers from the guild push through all this with me and since they all have better gear than me, I'll get all the good stuff I want. Greedy? Yes, a little.. But I want it, and I hope I get it sometime, even if it doesn't drop tonight.

Wish me luck guys!!

So much, so much..

2008-03-17T05:41:00.000-07:00

Well a lot has been happening.. Firstly.. my alts

I have decided that burning through all my dailies, then doing 2bg a night with mcgoo is boring. I decided that I want to have more than 1 lvl 70. I went to my guildies for advice since I've never had anyone above 49 (ahh.. the dwarf) except for Mcgoo. The crowd mostly pushed for a 50/50 on whether I should push a pally up, or a feral druid (turning boomkin @70). My response.. Ok.

What? you expected something more complicated? I'm an easy going guy.. So I started with a lvl 16 druid. He's been pushed through and out of rested xp into 19. To be honest he's about 50% done with 19 also. I had decided to pass time fairly between my alts to burn rested xp, so once that rested was burned I started kicking other toons around. My pally, well I got him knocking on 20's door, he's less than 1 bar away, and I have 4 quests from VC to turn in, so I imagine its moments from happening. My rogue, I played for about 10 minutes (hey, I gotta sleep guys!) and totally fell in love with the dmg rogues can put out. I love the direct-ness of a combat rogue, but nothing beats a stealthed ambush followed by a stun/backstab for a quick death for a mob @ lvl. Much thanks to atikam my arena-mate for pushing my pally's tired behind through VC. Had a ball, and tried to help with some healing (well.. I said I TRIED). I suppose once I go through rested on the pally and the priest (sigh.. more priest grinding), I can maybe.. push my mage up a bit. Mages are fun too, like warlocks only with BIG hits. My mage is all fire tree so far so the dmg is really there, but I miss the flexibility frost gives.. Maybe I'll go elementalist if I ever get her to 70.. dunno.

My rogue is kinda my "last alt" to push up. I enjoy her almost as much as my druid, but the hard truth is, that its because I lucked out and got some good weapons. Rogues are like hunters only without the pet, if you have no good weapons, you die. Fast. I feel like I have a good feel for the class though, so pushing her up to 70 won't be too hard once I get to it. I think combat might be the spec best suited to solo play, while assassination seems better suited for grouping (if you get the bit from subtlety that allows better sap). Don't know how she'll turn out in the end, but she's wicked cool at this level.

There, now you guys are caught up with my alts.

Jealousy..

2008-03-10T11:55:00.001-07:00

It is always good, as a instructor/mentor, to have your student/cohort move up dramatically in ability..

Ok not only has my buddy Wulven (a veritable noob at PvP) moved up several notches in his PvP gameplay, but now I find myself being overtly jealous of him. Why? He's a "noob", mcgoo.. why be jealous?? Not jealous of his ability, not yet anyway, but REALLY jealous of his honor grind so far. Want a ballpark? He hit 11k honor in a day.. a WEEK day.. I've done that on AV weekend, sure.. who hasn't.. but DANG!! for a weekday? That's an insane amount of honor. He pounded out and in about a week he got his S1 xbow (huntard).

My old days of causing un-familiar folks to oggle my dmg in battlegrounds, are long gone. While my +dmg is WAY up.. I no longer have the PUSH to really get it there. Once my gear is totally retooled to all arena/bg gear, I'll be loosing a significant amount of damage (roughly 50 dmg), and that is factoring in enchants for spellpower (no soulfrost till next season when I get the new S3 spellblade at a reduced honor amt). So his damage was about 40k off mine last night, in the one AV we ran. Yara was with us, and of course his damage was off the charts. We 3 defended Belinda against, what seemed to be ALL, the horde. Successfully I might add. We defended SH bunker/IWbunker also. Yara and I know that the best way to wipe a group in pvp is the same as in a raid. Overwork the healers, while overdamaging the dps. He(yara) runs in with arc explosion, frost nova, CoC.. all kinds of frosty/arcane goodness. I typically try to see how many seeds of corruption I can get on the dps group. Nothing drives healers crazy more than having all the melee dps (including tank) get hit for 1500 dmg 8 times within a minute(on top of regular damage). I try to cast curse of tongues too on the healers.. Mages don't want to decurse in AV, it slows their damage.. all the while not realizing I'm killing their group by slowing their heals and increasing the dmg needed to heal. I WANTED my buddy (wulven, the huntard in question) to put a explosive trap by one of the wing entrances to belinda.. Either forcing the dps/healers closer to melee.. or onto the other side to escape the dmg. Either way meant bigger group to have a AoE go off on. Personally my seed spell is hotkey2. So I hit 2+tab, 2+tab.. until someone kills me. Remember, I don't mind getting killed.. what i mind is LOOSING. So after that death I come back in find the healers and pop tongues on them then I do a AoE fear standing next to them. The undead folks don't mind it as much as the others, and on occassion when I see 1 tauren warrior tanking belinda while rogues are viciously backstabbing her.. I deathcoil the warrior.. just for giggles.

In about 2 weeks wulven should have as much PVP gear as me and be 2x's as tough to beat. Now if I could just get him into some instances so he can get a decent trinket! In the end I want him/atikam/mcgoo on a 3's team. 3 DPS is a bit rediculous.. but why not. Its just for fun and points anyway.. Atikam is BM, Wulven is MM, and I'm SL/SL. I'm thinking I should just aim to put my dots on all 3 adversaries.. More "kill the lock" strategies seem to be rearing their ugly heads, bah!

Was thinking about my next upgrade equipment wise. I think I will aim for either getting both rings at once (cause its a biggy) or the S1 spellblade+offhand. Either way will up my resilience a good amount, and my damage (although the weap/off combo naturally boosts this damage a lot more).. guess we'll see..

-goo

2's are for fun!

2008-03-05T07:38:00.000-08:00

Well last night my buddy and I pushed through 10 arena games. Took about 2.5 hours to do it too. Why all at once you ask? Well he's going on vacation and wanted to knock those arena's out so he could get some points (2's is his only team ATM). Well as a BMhunter/SL/SL lock, I think we do well.

Let me preface that by saying: I know we have no healer.. no one to gimp healing, and my DPS is painfully slow. I know that he will most likely outlive me 100% of the time (he does, by the way). I know that if I was "serious" about arena I'd have a resto druid as my partner. READ THE TITLE PUNK.. 2's are for fun (and points for ati {that's his name}).

Well we won 3/10. A poor showing? I dunno.. we were 0-5 the first week we played.. So I consider this a monumental improvement. We lost 3 we should have won though, but due to poor coordination (no vent!). That and my damage is too slow, and his damage isn't on point yet (we're still collecting s1's for him to beef him up).

For instance, mage/priest combo ( I know, but we suck.. so we get no good combos).. Priest is just running around a pillar and the mage is going nuts on ati . By nuts I mean he was all over him like a cheap suit, and ati was having trouble getting done what he wanted. Thus.. ati died. Then I have a mage at 40% and a priest at 70% running to me. Now, 1:1 I can smoke any mage. ANY mage. Warlocks are just bad like that.. but what I had to essentially do is eat the heals off him with felpup.. then put felpup on the priest to block heals while I feared the mage. Ok.. so I'm busy. Priest got a way too frickin lucky psychic scream off, which made the felpup run. Worry? No I pooped on the floor. SO the mage is down to like 2% and the priest is coming into range so he can heal his team mate. I get control of felpup and go nuts on the mage. Kill him.. Only then to get killed by the priest (remember all my ducks are on the mage). To my credit, I feel like I basically solo'd a 2 man team and got 1 down (poor ati.. frost mage ate him for lunch).

I'm new to arena, and ati is even new-er than me. So we're basically noobs trying to mess up some faces.

One we won. Warlock/priest. This.. was... yucky. I ran in.. dotted lock and feared him.. then had felpuppy/ati going batshit nuts on the priest. Killed him fast (can't do much against a felpup), then went for the lock. He was good. Standard sl/sl playstyle. Dot dot dot.. drain.. So I took the spell lock off of the felpup so I could control when it happened. We were basically in a drain race cause ati had been dotted pre dead priest.. and he croaked on me pretty fast. So its lock v lock. SL/SL vs SL/SL. My advantage... I had more +dmg. His advantage.. more resilience. We went down to the VERY last second. We both died.. I just did it after him. I got spell locked at a bad time and just threw out 2 searing pains who 1 crit on him the other didn't hit for much at all. Then I popped corruption on him and hit drain. Wait 3 seconds and then realize I said CRAP did I get him? and looked at scorecard.. We WON! I was pumped.. ati was pumped.. it was all good things.

Then we lost a bunch, close ones mostly. Except a druid/priest combo. They pwned us. More correctly they took out the lock. The druid must've been on point with dmg, cause he didn't hit me a whole lot but killed me sickeningly fast. Which left ati to take a 2 man team.. He's good, but not THAT good. So we lost. The druid was sneaky.. and the priest shadowmelded so I couldn't see him either. So we appeared to be alone in the arena for a while there.. I did what I do to get attention.. I ran around and swapped directions a lot (rogues like to get behind clothies for backstab crits). I just KNEW we were doing this against 2 rogues and I was pissy about not finding them (remember.. we both had "see invisible" buff I have, and paranoia from felpuppy). Had we not have lost me in 3 seconds.. we'd have won that fight. 1) because druids suck (sorry guys.. but you guys do many things good... nothing great) 2) because the healer was a priest. Pallies we have trouble shutting down, but priests.. we can kill those VERY fast.

We did 2 against a couple lock/shaman, hunter/shaman teams. We won one of them. Took out the resto sham before he could do much. BIG key in my new playstyle is knowing only a pally and a mage can decurse. So if there is neither on a team, the healer gets curse of tongues.. period. A few seconds on a holy spell means someone dies for us. So that's not an issue any more.

While our record was poopy.. I can say that we did well for a mishapen team. Hopefully more fun in 5's will keep me more optimistic (and the points ROLLING in..)

Arena fun

2008-03-04T08:21:00.000-08:00

Well its been a while since an update, and the reason for that is the BT:DT kind of things I've been doing. Nothing exciting.. nothing cool

But...

Last night held 2 good things for me

winning a few in arena
got enough honor for my pvp bracers

Well arena is rough.. I don't have to tell you that if you go there. Seriously its one of those "barrier to entry" things. You can't outperform a team in season 3 goodies, in zero pvp gear. And you can't perform really at all without pvp gear (bg or arena). So to do well in arena.. you must first do well in bg's to get your gear up enough so that you aren't just there for eye-candy in arena. By the time I get some S3 points racked up, S4 will be upon us. So I'm not so much doing arena for S3, as I am stockpiling points for S4.. since my rating is poop, on both teams, I'll not be grabbing tons of points anytime soon. So its a gradual system..

Anyway though, arena has daunted me with perpetual losses for a while now, but this has started to fade. I think we've sunk low enough that the ppl we fight might suck more than us. Of course none in my group is in great gear.. I think all of us are in "good" gear. Personally, I like doing damage. My armory page will highlight that, as I am stacked higher (by about 200 dmg) than most locks in arena/pvp. I do this cause I like to hurt people, plain and simple. Although, analytically.. in arena "kill the lock" is a common strategy. Usually trumping "kill the healer". So being able to do damage even after death, to me, is important. I don't want to die though, and the majority of the battle's we've won were when I lived. I'm half joking, half not when I say notice we win more when I'm alive? I'm an SL/SL lock. We are known to LAST, not to do damage. I can put out some serious damage if I need to. Nothing like my old affy days, but this isn't pve. I'd be willing to stack up mcgoo to almost any lock out there and I think I stand as good a chance to beat any of them. Reasoning, is expectation. You expect a lock with 700+dmg (standard sl/sl makeup).. what you GET is a lock with >1k dmg (not uncommon, but also kinda freakish for sl/sl.. only me and the real bad-boy locks have this). Now granted, I don't know specifically the breakdown of dmg vs benefit to dots.. What I DO know is in a 5's match, 5 ppl with corruption means I WILL proc a nightfall at some point. At that point you WILL get blasted with it. With any luck it will drop you enough that my ensuing drain life will finish you.

Mostly its nothing more than us going against casters that allows us to win more than other times. I mean, considering we have typically a Shadow Priest, Lock, hunter/mage doing DPS.. With counterspell, felhunter, mana burn/viper sting.. We can handle a caster or 2. Our losses seem to spiral around Melee dps. Good locks are hard to kill also, while I don't find their damage all that impressive, they do put a lot of damage out there, but its cumulative. I typically try to wait when I get dotted.. at least 3 seconds. Reason for this? most locks, like me, lead with corruption 1, SL1, and max agony curse. My spellstone (which all locks should have for a lock battle) will remove all but agony. This reduces mana waste, and also forces a less experienced lock to burn spellstone. I wait a few seconds.. This can send a false positive to the lock saying "I have no spellstone cause I'm a noob". He then drops his big dots on you. Only then to have them dispelled by the spellstone. What has happened? Now he must RE-apply dots to hurt you. AND he's wasted a lot of mana getting 4 dots up on you that went bye-bye. I do this a fair amount of times cause I don't really mind hitting OOM, as its rare I live that long (remember, kil the lock?) At the same time all this is going on my dots are on him, so is my felhunter.

2) Finally getting my bracers tonight. They really aren't that huge you say? true.. but I'm pumping a good gem in them, and getting the +15 spellpower dropped on them. The only other equipment piece that i'll have a high price ench for is my weapon. That will get soulfrost(depending on how soon I can get it) or +40 spellpower. I personally LIKE my shoulder/head/chest armor pack that dumps 30 stamina on me. My shoulder ench from scryers is lame still so why waste the tomes? and I have almost NO rep to get the good head enchant. Shoulders are a bonus with this 10 stamina armor kit.. so rocking out is key. Probably will get a resilience enchant on my cloak (if there is such a thing) as I don't care for armor (I have like.. none now anyway.. so whats 100 armor?)

Alas once this is all said and done... I'll have to decide whether its more feasible to get the s1 gear (shoulder/robe/feet) or keep FSW for the dmg. I would want another FSW set for PvE though cause I would stack resilience on the gems hoping for a good enough showing in the end. I see NO locks running in FSW in the top tiers.. but.. I'm still pretty new to it all and running in the S3's before S4 seems highly unlikely.

Stay tuned to find out how my bracer enchant rocked my financial world!

-goo

PvP goodness

2008-02-27T05:08:00.000-08:00

Well last night I was about 900 honor short of hitting 3k honor. Which was my goal.. However, I had a fun night. Why was it fun? lets see...

Firstly I got to group with a solid group of folks and we did AV (via lightqueue), and after queuing for this we would leave shatt to do some dueling.

Here's the make up all guildies
Umai- enhancement shaman, he's rediculous. He practically tanked one of the bosses in ramparts back in early 60's. He's kinda scary since shaman are cloth eaters.. and he's the best I've ever seen

Dathbre- Marksman hunter. I think thats sufficient, but for real this guy is rediculous also. He's tooled recently for what seems more like arena (scorpid? why.. oh to keep healers from drinking). He's got my LEAST liked ability in game.. silencing shot. He's the best marksman hunter I've seen, period. He's been there and done that as far as I've been told, and he's well versed in how to stay alive and kill the other guy.

Yara- Frostmage. He's my buddy IRL, and his mage is crazy. Not rediculous like umai, cause I really don't want to fight umai.. ever.. He was the least scary of the 3 though. This is in no means a statement on his skill/prowess so much as knowing a felhunter all but stops him. I tease him, but so far its accurate "felhunter=you lose".

Ok first dual was me vs yara. I won. He did what he does.. which is root me with frost (why do I care I have dots/drains to recoup that life while the felhunter irritates him and keeps him out of the frost tree). It was closer than it sounds.. cause if you fight yara... and yo uwin with like 35% of your life.. you were about 1 shot away from going down.

Then the bad news.. I had to fight umai. I had felhunter out cause I was being stubborn. I lost. Badly. I think I got him down like 1k hp.. not down TO 1k hp.. down 1k hp. humiliating and reasonably expected..

Then dathbre (still with the stupid felhunter). Basically the same fight as umai. My pet brought nothing to the table so I was basically gimped.. Yeah!! stubborn-ness! Whatever... /grumble

Then I did some shard farming off the basilisks and a wolf. THEN I pulled out my succy. Redo the fights.

Umai- I almost had him. Meaning he was down to like 2% health. My succubus was there JUST to beat on him. A misconception from succy's is that they are for seduce only. I typically don't seduce right off. Sometimes I don't do it at all.. Why? I want that as a fallback.. A reason for them to worry that my succy could pull that out if they ignored it.. and if they ignore me they might get feared. It worked well. (sidenote.. I beat him the third time.. probably luck). The strategy here is pretty sound, so its one I'll keep. If i had been equipped with more pvp goodies.. who knows.. Maybe me winning would be a standard.

Dathbre-part deux. He beat me. Pretty badly really. I consider it bad because I had no burst to knock that last 5% health off him, a problem I have is that I consistently forget to do searing pain.. a quick/dirty Direct Damage (DD) spell. Would that have turned the tide? A crit might. If I still had (sniff) shadowburn I'd have pwned him with it (I used to hit in white on shadowburn close to 2k).. keep in mind I have 200 more dmg now than I did back then.. So I'd either have won.. or gotten scary close. The way to fight a hunter is not breathtakingly new.. get in his dead zone. The pet gets curse of weakness.. and siphon life (if you have mana do corruption.. maybe a nightfall proc ya know?). This gimps the pet a bit, and regains some of your life (maybe nightfall!). Then you go nuts on him.. Fear him, dot him drain him.. basic stuff. Just stay close don't let him out to range. Hunters don't seem to remember that they can OMG kill a clothie in melee.. Maybe not a warrior in melee, but a warlock? sure. SO they will spend time running instead of fighting. The way "I" would have done it if I'd have been him, would be explosive trap, wing clip.. serpent sting at a distance then go nuts on melee (he is a good hunter, which means he kept my felarmor gone with arcane shot). Wing Clip keeps me in melee range, the trap keeps me dot'ed, along with serpent sting.. Then there's the actual MELEE dmg he can put on me. He's pretty uber when it comes to raiding, and I don't KNOW that my "go melee" idea would have worked.. but.. it surely would have gotten him more hp after the fight. I just see time running as dmg LOST.

Yara-part deux- Pretty much the same fight, except he killed the felpuppy first. fel domination popped an instant one back out in less time than his frostbolt took. Which means he got locked out of frost. Yara gets pissed when the felpuppy pwns him, but really the felpuppy is my only hope against a mage. I mean.. He can literally 2-3 shot me! I gotta keep him FROM 2-3 shotting me. LOL!

Then Umai logged off and put on his priest.
***Sidenote: Umai's main (Bellatrix), in question here. She is the best healer I've ever seen.. ever... ever ever ever..

So when it was my turn for a dual with Bella, I just wondered if it was POSSIBLE that I could kill her with all that +healing. I did. Actually it was really scary close. Like I said.. a lot of +healing. I would get her down..way down.. she'd shield then greater heal and boom.. full health. Was like fighting a pally with 2 bubble's!! Felpuppy could eat her shield sure, but she's still casting. I hadn't tried to manually spell lock, but eating buffs was good for that point. It ate her fort buff :).. If you ever get the choice.. remove fortitude. Its basically like taking a huge dmg attack on someone. She can reapply this buff.. but not with the felpuppy tryin to eat her lunch, not to mention the friendly lock draining/dotting for all he's worth. In the end I think I did more dmg to her than all my other duels combined.. but I won.. Barely.

The BG's were lame. We won a few though, so big honor!! Plus if you check armory.. The Goo-meister is now in a 3v3.. Hopefully I won't appear to be the scrub I am in arena.. :)

--sidenote: if Bella ever went shadow.. I'd be terrified. Just saying if you convert all that +healing to +dmg.. and that rediculous high mana pool.. She'd be a monster.

Honor grinding.. still

2008-02-26T05:45:00.000-08:00

Well I hear a spitting of slurs about "welfare epics" regarding bg gear.. All those people can BITE me. My semi welfare epics got me into 2 pretty competitive raids WITHOUT kara gear. So eat me.

In the end I'd like to roll in Tier 5/6 and have a set of PvP gear to get down and dirty with people of the opposite team. As of right now I have 1 (thats ONE) gear set. The major differences are:

In PvP I equip a spellstone instead of a wand for dot removal
I have a pvp cloak and a pve cloak.. PvE has better dmg but no resilience.. you see where that's going

And that's it. I basically have 2 cloaks, thats my whole pve vs pvp setup now. I wanted to get into bg's last night and push another 3k honor in a night (which is, the awesome.. just so you know). Unfortunately the mongoloid mouth breathers were playing last night and I had ppl dancing on the dun baldur bridge while horde ran past. I realize I can report them as AFK if they are, in fact.. afk. I wish there was a button for "report as not really playing" which would kick them from the battleground and automatically sell all their gear and bank belongings. I hate that crap. Look, I realize that the horde come in with Force and it can be daunting to stand there and die 4-9 times while keeping the bulk of their forces at bay. But it is the game.. You have to. Or you shouldn't play. That is just how I see it. So I ended the night with my only win being AB (we stomped them that game.. all PUG on our side.. didnt' check theirs) .

AB last night. Sketchy at best. I played 2 times and won 1. We stomped them to the point that a pally/shadowpriest/me were graveyard camping the horde at their starting area. We didn't keep them all in there.. we didn't try. What we did do was recycle them a bit and frustrate their game plan. Putting me next to a shadowpriest is almost always going to mean 2-4 people getting killed at a time. Couple that with a pally (who are ridiculous to fight as they take FOREVER to kill), and what you have is 3 people with an occasional hunter helping out just smacking down horde. Having a felhunter on a priest then popping curse of recklessness and having a mm hunter aimed shot the guy means he dies. They had a lot of shaman who put up some good heals/totems. They pushed us out of the gate on a few occasions, which didn't really bother me cause I can run in.. dot the folks that just rez'd and then run back.. (LOS, for once on my side). The real issue was what I ALWAYS have issue with.. pally/warrior. Well, I really hate pally/hunter duos. This team was pretty slick, I have little doubt that they were in an arena team also as they worked together well and switched targets well. I called burst on the pally and we immediately pounded him while he was casting a big heal. I put the felhunter on him and all my dots then waited for his life to get critical.. And just when I'm sure he was going to bubble/heal. He got deathcoiled. Just enough to let the dots tick another few ticks and me to get off a shadowbolt. As suspected, this gimped the warrior as he wasn't on cloud9 with heals. My pally team-mate took him to school on that go round. Well I gimped him with weakness and put corruption on him to help bring him down. Typically a warrior with equal gear will kill a pally if he misses his bubble/heal. That is unless he has had his dmg output gimped a bit (weakness, shadows embrace), and has corruption on him. Oh and the pally is in S3 epics himself. I'm pretty tired of pally's due to the spanking I get in arena. I'm hoping to get back in and tell you how close I came to killing some folks. I think I'm getting better here/there.. but at this point nothing serious enough to matter.

All in all, crappy night. I missed my honor goal for the evening, but I DID get my gold from dailies. So I'm inching closer to 5k gold.. just at a snails pace.

SL/SL

2008-02-22T05:34:00.000-08:00

After being in raids 2 nights in a row, SL/SL was breaking my heart...

Then I went into Eye Of the Storm. I don't remember, win/lose.. But I did well. Scratch that, I pwned ppl. I shut down healers, I shut down mages.. It was a marvel. For some reason that night, that battleground I was a baaaaaaad-gnome! I was with 3 ppl from the guild, one of which is a frost mage (he's a much better player in pvp, has the gear to prove it too). I did my normal "let others run in first and come up from behind and eliminate a healer or mage". Problem was.. There were shammy's and mages.. and everything.

I say problem because I have only 1 felhunter. I was all over them though. Shammy was healing so he got locked out of nature for a few seconds and his buffs removed.. only then to lock out the frost mage on the other side of him and remove HIS buffs. I say this because that is the fun part.. I hit my insta-dots and started draining the shaman's life immediately. Shamans are kinda predictable here, they will almost always try to heal themselves. Well, as one of my buddies is the best resto shaman I've seen I know that if that heal gets off.. I'm probably toast. So I do what any good lock does to keep a caster busy.. I Deathcoiled him. While in deathcoil the final bit of curse of agony took hold.. Which if you don't know is when it REALLY starts to kick you in the teeth. Mage was now back to trying to hit me with frost bolt (meh..) so he got feared (undead mofo popped right out tho).. So while all this is going on I put corruption anew on the mage and started casting fear. He Iceblocked to stop this. Which is what I wanted. Him not hitting me so his healer could die. Sure enough the healer was at 2% or so, and casting another freakin heal.. my felhunter was too far off to lock him so I put curse of tongues on him and drained that mother for all he was worth! So I killed him, then the mage popped out and got pwned by me and my felpuppy. He was good, but I made him IB too fast and he lost his advantage. People do this a lot in pvp.. they do things that are better for THEM as a player but deminish the team. Had he kept on I'd have killed him but the healer would be back up to full and would have won due to me finding I was OOM with a shaman ready to hit me with a windfury weapon (if resto's get that, anyway I don't know). Basically I would have died, and the horde's offensive on the mage tower would have succeeded as they had their healer back and their "rediculously overpowered tauren warrior" was spanking the whole lot of the alliance. Yara (the mage I told you about on my team) was rooting and rolling with the guy and doing decent dmg but a druid was popping hots on him.

So he survived long enough for me to kill both of them, congrats on the selfish move not paying off. So then I turned on the warrior. My felpuppy is more of an annoyance than anything else.. or is he? He had blessing of might and fortitude buff on him with something else I didn't recognize. So he lost a LOT when my felpuppy started in on him. That was my only goal. Put the pup on him and continuously remove his buffs. I dotted him and then he went wacko and charged me. He did a TON of dmg in 1 or 2 hits. I bet he's in arena cause he'd surely pwn me in 2v2, no question. Then I did what I always do when warriors charge me.. I Deathcoiled him and renewed corruption and tried fear (why not? the rage thing doesn't last forever..) Fear took, but he trinketed out. Only to find my drain life on him and a HUGE frostbolt from yara that ended his attack. Funny thing was I saw a druid run behind MT... Druids are hit/miss for me as sometimes I totally dominate them.. sometimes I never see them till I'm dead. I got lucky and he got locked out of nature when trying to cast a HoT on himself. Now HoT's overpower dot's as I'm told. However... I find that if its a feral druid.. HoT's aren't all they're cracked up to be as on a priest or resto druid. I typically in EoTS don't chase people. Typically all I wanted was to hurt them and make them leave the node. I STAY on the node. I think this is better because the longer you are there the easier it is to scout incomings, and you may remember who's coming back.

So needless to say a lot of offensive pushes by the horde were put off thanks in no small part to me. So I just REALLY did well. I made almost 2k honor in the night even with the raid.. So I called it a win. I got my pvp cape after the bg's were over. So now my pvp gear is (head/hands/legs/back). Next will be the bracer, so I can get the +15 dmg to it popped on. I have a whopping 89 av badges 31ab, 49wsg, and 19eots. So if I just had 100k honor I could buy all my crap and be done with the "grind" and get to really even fights against the uber folks in there.

Anyway.. doubts about SL/SL are and should only be, in relation to raiding. Cause it clearly overpowers casters with felpuppy in all bg's. (keep in mind I realize some ppl are better with aff/destro.. I'm just saying I've never seen a lock in as crappy of gear as mine control 2 people at once in a bg.. It happens but its usually a guy in S3 gear and full epics, which I'm not even full S1 yet)

"Buddha provide"

2008-02-22T05:10:00.000-08:00

This is a quote from the Karate Kid movie.. Basically if you can't place it, as most won't, Daniel-san is getting ready for the tournament, and Mr Niagi stole him a black belt. Upon noticing he had no belt he (daniel) was put off.. Then Niagi puts the belt on him, and he says

"Where'd you get this? Where'd it come from?" - Daniel
"Buddha provide" - Mr Niagi

Basically all that bull to tell you that somehow.. I've been included on 2 (not 1, but 2) raids in wicked higher rated places than I think I should be. How? Buddha provide.. meaning I don't know and I'm not asking.

Wednesday night the guild was needing 1 dps for SSC. I sent the raid-leader a tell asking simply "I'm not in even kara gear.. is this over my head?"

He had the most awesome response ever... "**** invites you to join a group".
/dance....

So I didn't get to see Leo, or lurker.. which is a bummer. I'd heard from Megan (Out of Mana) that leo was a wicked awesome fight. Apparently my guild has no issue schooling his blind butt, but the only 2 bosses I got in on was Fathom-Lord, and Morogrim. I got all hot and bothered about the T5 pants token that dropped... Why I don't know as this was my first real raid (kara is mostly being pugged so I don't count it anymore) and I couldn't possibly be the only one who wanted/drooled/lusted for these pants. Well of course one of the more frequent guildies got them, which is only right. I mean I was in 1 raid.. why should I get something when a more consistent member could get them and use them better? I wanted them though, and I'm reasonably sure that the master looter didn't take me being a noob into account. He might have, but seriously why bring me if I'm not up to the "dance"?

Anyway logged on last night feeling happy about the previous night's raid (I got a necklace off morogrim), I was ready to commence the long grind of honor in AV. Suddenly same raidleader (he's also heading the guild at the moment) sends me a tell "wanna fight solarian?" I peed a little.. but said hell yes.. and asked him if he wanted me to respec (I'm still sl/sl, which is moderately poopy for raiding).. He said I'd be fine, and that as long as I had>8k hp I could come. I have 11k buffed, so I /danced again and went in. The hope would be that the Void Star Talisman would drop, and since I was the only lock who wanted it.. it would be MINE! The fight was long and kinda lame really. I didn't find it challenging, and I didn't find my dps at all remarkable. I did help with the priests who heal solarian by putting CoT on them to slow their healing while the other lock did curse of elements to help mages burn them down (they have the talent anyway that improves the dmg bonus from that). The AoE mobs that come out in groups were lame too.. hit #3 on my keyboard (macro I made that changes target and then casts seed of corruption). so I hit the right keyboard arrow key, and 3.. a lot. The fight took a long time (a testament to my piss poor raiding spec (sl/sl is breaking my heart now..). I'm not saying "the mighty mcgoo could solo this guy".. just saying.. I have 3 dots. And one of them was put as curse of elements to help the mages (not sure why the other lock didn't do this since they had the talent.. but I did as told). So that leaves me with siphon life, and corruption. So my dmg on Solarian was just a smidge above corruption dmg. I was missing my shadowburn and improved shadowbolt.. and REALLY missing my UA and all the yummy goodness that comes with that. As an affy raiding lock I had 4 dots I could apply before spamming my "improved" shadowbolt. Now I just had 1 (siphon life takes a while, and does poop for dmg). I think I should next time (if there is one) equip my skyguard trinket to gimme a pinch with crit/dmg.

So ask me.. how'd I get into Tempest Keep, and Serpentshrine Caverns...

-buddha provide

Tip Toeing into arena

2008-02-20T08:49:00.000-08:00

Well I formed my arena team!! 2v2.

Me and a hunter buddy are now officially starting to mess with arena. So we had 5 matches last night.. Here's the rundown

(means first match).. Anyway, we fought a frostmage/slsl lock. We got pwned. No reason for it, we weren't outclassed just outplayed. I died relatively quickly due to me not knowing that 1" of concrete created a LoS problem for drain life.. Lesson learned.
Warrior/Healadin. Pain. Like Mr T said in Rocky, Pain. The good news was it was over quick! I sent felpuppy off against healadin, and the hunter sent pet to him also (BM spec). We pushed and pushed trying to cut off healing (simplest of all strategems). In doing so, the 800lb tauren warrior smacked me with an axe several times and killed me.. then with my felpuppy not stopping heals, my partner fell soon after. I was pissy cause I sucked.. again
Warrior/Healadin. Pain, part deux. I got pwned fast again. He probably barely had time to clean that axe off before putting it up my rear again. (read this as, we lost.. again)
Warrior/Healadin: Feels like we've been here before? yeah, but doesn't matter. In hindsight I wish I had put curse of recklessness on the healadin.. give my felpuppy a chance to do some damage.. and that raptor of my partner's.. maybe he'd have pushed that pally a bit more
Warrior/Healadin: Ok, I realize this is getting old.. but at least you weren't getting killed. This time the group (same guys) decided.. hey that lock dies fast..lets kill the hunter. So they did.. and I died VERY fast without the pet to bother healing and such.

The problem here is.. well... theres a few.. 1) We're new.. literally noobs to arena, and it showed 2) Resilience. Other teams have it.. we don't. 3) we don't have the gear/weapons. These sound like excuses, and would be if we weren't so undergeared. I have "decent" gear.. nothing exciting some welfare epix from bg. But I don't have a respectable amount of resilience... My buddy.. He's missing a lot of stamina, and he's almost in all NON-epix (pvp or otherwise).

We'll get better.. if you are looking for us tho its "goo in your shoe" pvp

Running around again

2008-02-19T09:23:00.000-08:00

Well even though I have a mere 100k honor points to grab so I can go full epic and mostly PvP, I have some buddies that need to be pushed up in levels a bit. This being said, it is almost painfully boring to do PvE after you've had the ability to down 2.. sometimes 3 people in PvP. Those were PEOPLE, not mere AI entities. The sport of which is pretty important to me nowadays.

So last night we (myself and a buddies lvl 50 warrior) pushed up to everlook, through felwood. I quickly realized I had never finished my infernal quest. So I picked it up. I figure if I get on before him tonight I can push around and do this really quickly. I mean it was meant for a lvl 50 lock to do, and I'm a whole 20 levels above that. Higher in HP than most raiding tanks pre BC, and more +dmg than possible before BC also. Surely this won't be a problem. I say this because I want you to realize I'll run into a problem, as sure as the sun will rise.

Tonight on the agenda is schlepping some lowbies around and grinding out their XP. I figure we'll do RED quests only so that we are maximizing total XP per hour. I usually only have the mental ability to stay awake for a few hours a night to play. This being said I will want to do my 3 quests in Blades edge as they are much more profitable than the 2 in skettis. My biggest hope is my badge of tenacity might sell and net me over 1k gold. I spent a lot more than I should have to get my last enchant. I did no farming, no planning. Just decided I wanted something and I bought the mats. It cost me dearly, and I don't think I'll be doing that again anytime soon. The next enchant will be for my bracers (+15 spellpower). These mats will be farmed, as I don't find them to be terribly hard to get anyway.

After that the only remaining enchant I'm interested in is soulfrost. This is a biggy. GREAT biggy actually. It will mean +50ish dmg to shadow/frost spells. This coupled with the knowledge that I will not get this enchant until I have the appropriate marks/etc to get the pvp staff. The staff alone alots me +75 dmg.. couple that with the enchant and you see that this is going to change Mcgoo from a storm to a tornado. At least that's the hope, anyway.. I figure that the PvP staff should be good enough for a long time in PvE.

I wonder so many people argue PvE vs PvP gear/talents, etc.. I have (as a lock) yet to see a difference aside from +hit, +penetration, and +resilience. My guild, although not the best in progression, is doing really well and is in tempest keep. Of the locks they are using (and successfully, by the way) none of which have big numbers in any of those categories. The highest at this point is 100, on an affy lock with 5 in suppression. This is almost what I had before I made my FSW set and started pushing out in PvP. I had no problem reaching those numbers and assume I wouldn't again if the need arose. I just can't get into the runs I need to go through to get what I need. My PvP gear makes running heroics foolish (my gear is better, as is).. and mostly my gear is better than kara stuff. I know I need to push at leat 5-6 heroics... if nothing else just for badges so I can get my silver crescent icon trinket. Its the best trinket I've seen for locks.. till.. well its the best I've seen period.

Anyway.. aside from getting my buddies leveled up 2 levels at least, the next several nights will be mostly a wash. With any luck though we'll find a few bobbles to sell to cover my repair bill and maybe enough to repay a helpful mage for dumping some mana biscuits on me. I do so much dislike using my +dmg or +stam food for goofing around in lower areas. I need to clean out my bank so I CAN have a ton of foodstores/trinkets to hold on to. Right now I have 3 bags full of bolts of cloth, that I may need again.. someday..

Welfare Epics

2008-02-15T05:30:00.000-08:00

I try not to rant about personal opinions TOO much here.. But...

Last night as I was doing the push to get the rest of my pvp gear (non arena), someone in guild chat.. GUILD CHAT stated that...

"I don't understand why someone would bother trying to grind for honor/badges instead of just getting in a crappy arena team and pouding out their 10 weekly.. Stupid welfare epics.. So we end up with all these posers who don't know how to play with "leet epix" in bg/arena getting schooled cause they don't know how to play"

I wanted to say so much.. SO much. That not EVERYONE had access to an arena team.. That most of those hose-brains in true Leet Epix are already IN arena teams.. That not everyone wants to come in and loose for 6-8 months so they can have the gear they needed to succeed 6 months ago.. Probably just in time for new gear to come out and the truly elite arena battlers get their gear first (since they have the best gear already, they grandfather in and overwhelm others lesser geared) This is what I call the vicious cycle of PvP.

get into pvp
die a lot cause everyone has "raiding epix" (which are better than non raiding blues), or pvp epix
slowly grind your way up to get the epix yourself so YOU can school others

realize that new gear has just come out, and those uber folks, just got complete overhauls..

repeat step 1

I don't see a cure for this really. I mean I guess Blizz could coral the people.. the "sometimes" PvPers.. and the "I have nothing else to do aside from delete my excess badges in av/eots/ab/wsg while I wear my leet season X epix".

My issue with this is there is almost no middle territory. There are those totally decked out, and those who work towards it. I'm not hating on you PvP-wild folks.. just saying, how is it at ALL fair to have you compete with me in my "welfare epix"? I've heard its "skill not gear", if this is the case.. drop your purps and put on some blues.. and lets have a go.. I thought not.. chicken! Its gear and everyone KNOWS it. The warriors with the big mace from arena with executioner KNOW its their gear. They KNOW when they hit a non epic'd person, they will most likely die. KNOW. I just wish, if perfect world and all, the un-epic'd got extra kudos for hanging with the crazy pvp'ers.

I'm good at PvP. I'm not the best, nor do I want to be. What I want is to make a lot of gold, and in my spare time, have 100 badges for all bg's (getting there, slowly.. except eots).. Have a set of total epic gear for PvP and required enchants.. I'd like to raid more, as I think as a warlock, I'm best suited for this, but raids are becoming hard to find at my level of gear (again.. gear). I've ran most of kara 2x's now (I have the belt to prove it!) but still no shade/prince/maiden. I realize that this is basically a stopgap and that worrying about this PRE expansion is fruitless. I saw how fast my guild shot their 60's to 70's and started raiding.. My goal is to have reasonable gear (even if just pvp) to jump in and push to 80 with them so that NEXT round, I get to go do some cool stuff. I fear this round is coming to a conclusion anyway, so farm your mats.. stockpile nethers and be ready for the push forward people!

And if anyone says crap about my "welfare epix" they can try to 1:1 me.. TRUST me, they'll loose (I never loose 1:1.. even to the wacked out warrior in crazy lightening bolt gear.. I die.. but so do they.. more of a draw)

Respec

2008-02-13T05:21:00.000-08:00

Well I was kinda ruffled by a guy in a bg, who gave me crap for not being a "pvp spec" (I was almost pure affliction).. I admit it, he got to me. I went through typical denial, anger.. elation (I did 30k more dmg than him in AV).

In the end though I thought, I've only respec'd Mcgoo one time (ruin.. oh jeez.. I miss it still), so why not try a SL/SL spec? So I did. I was terrifically surprised. The SL/SL spec has a lot of "wasted" points in demonology that you need to get to soul link. I couldn't foresee a reason to have most of these, so I picked up the ones that may have the best utility for all around gaming.. Check my spec and see what you think.

Anyway, soul link is the awesome. You read that right, the awesome. I stay alive so much longer than I used to its just rediculous. I also (by virtue of fel stamina or whatever Tier 1 demonology talent) now have close to 10k hp.. without imp. I chose to buff up the succubus and the imp. More imp than succubus as I figured the imp would be JUST for instances now (instead of JUST for dark pact). Running with succubus buffs my dmg up to a crazy 800 (crazy as I'm not even close to all epics yet). I can only assume I'll top out about 1200 in the end with appropriate enchants, gems.. what-not. I tested my new found spec on a mage friend (Yara), he's got good resilience (not great he says, but better than me by like 2x's). And I smoked him. I smoked him without the felpuppy too. Funny thing is, now with my succubus doing more damage and actually TAKING damage for me, the old "ignore the pet, kill the lock" axiom no longer holds. My succubus can do just enough to keep you hurting while my dots tick away at you. God help you if I can drain you too.. It's like fighting a pally, you gotta practically kill me 2x's.

In closing 1:1 this spec is FAR superior for PvP. Possibly for raiding as my damage is so much higher. I miss improved shadowbolt, and I miss shadowburn the most. UA was mostly used for "hey that healer doesn't see me, lets dot him up" stuff anyway and in instances. I wonder if my damage buff ot >800 would make up for not having UA.. Perhaps I'll try that another time. As of right now I'm grinding AV for honor, and kills. My kills sucked last night, but that was mostly due to the superior groups I was falling into.

Last night scorecard - 5 AV's... 3 wins, 2 losses. This is actually what allowed me to get my new pants (generals dreadweave) for Ole Mcgoo.. So BIG stamina increase, dmg increase.. and 30 resilience to boot. Next on my list I think will be the cape, then rings, then bracer, then... the staff.

If you are wondering why I'm not going for full BG gear, its cause I loose so much damage from getting rid of FSW that I don't consider it an option. I may rejewel my gear to buff stamina constantly and ignore the socket bonus' to try to make up for the lack of stamina on FSW. The damage is not something I am willing to loose tho.

Playing Hookie

2008-02-11T06:07:00.000-08:00

This weekend I logged a little over 5 hours playing Warcraft. Most of the time I spent... was on alts.

I call this playing hookie because I secretly KNOW there are things I can do on Mcgoo to increase his mojo, and his epic-ness. I know it. I know I can spend about an hour (slow) to make about 60g. I KNOW this. I also know that if I do this I inevitably end up standing and cursing at the battlemaster for not letting AV pop sooner. Again, I KNOW this.

I really want to have more guys to play around with though. I mean I have a decent bank of gold on Mcgoo, not even 2/5 of what a epic mount costs, but good. Everything seems like such a hassle though. I play the same dailies.. I pound out my 60g.. During the week this usually means I'm tired and I go to sleep. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself.. But like I said.. I want to do NEW things. I tanked VC with my lvl 15 druid.. (yeah.. really), I ended up wiping the group cause I couldn't hold aggro or take the beating I should.. Still though.. 15! He's now 16 so he popped up one level. Then I thought I'll just res and run in the front, which shortly there after I remembered res-sickness. Noob mistake, and I was pissed. However, I had Brepalan (my favorite toon ATM) sitting and ready, and a bit higher in level. So I pushed him in there and we made a good go of it but I had to go (Brepalan is now 18, and loving it).

Then to mix things up I pushed my rogue up to 18. Its not that hard really with my rogue. I have plenty of mojo to deal with people its more or less just a pain to use her cause she gets hit (unavoidable at this point) and then I gotta eat.. I enjoyed pick pocketing though. I am reasonably sure that I am going to make her my herbologist for life, and some alchemy. I think my druid will also go alchemy but without the icky-ness of herbology. I hate mining, but I love it. I see herbology as being about the same, only without making money (till I can transmute.. then.. HOLLA!)

So Rogue to 18.. pally to 18.. Who else.. hm.. Oh my Priest (healyoself) got up to 21! So I popped into the 20's just a bit. Healing is so much fun, I really enjoy it. For some reason though there are 900 preists running around now. Wasn't one my whole way up to 70.. but now.. there's a ton of em. This has been a fun time leveling these guys up this weekend, but I don't know how long I can turn down 60g a day until I go back to mcgoo for an epic flight mount. Of course if I fall in love with my druid, I could just get a freebie on the flight form.. ROFL

Just today though I was thinking of a respec to SL/SL just to horse around with in PvP... hm... more news on that tomorrow I guess

Kara, reloaded

2008-02-06T06:32:00.001-08:00

While I had been in kara before it was kind of a total misfire. The group had cleared up to curator, and was trying to pass him.

Last night, on the other hand, rocked out. I was in with a destro lock (I think, can't remember name now for armory check) and a mage (guildie). The rest were a total mystery.. well the healer was also in the guild with me.. but the rest were complete idk's. We had no pally (which was horrible according to the group but I don't know wth they are talking about), but we did have a shaman (resto I think), and a boomkin.

Ok things I've learned: Most locks raiding have better +dmg than me, so I do CoShadows to help them out more. Good side: It increases their damage at the cost of my own.. Better side: Boomkins use an arcane spell all the time (spamming for big dmg) which also is buffed by curse of shadows.

I used my grinding macro which does a cycle on each target starting with: UA, Corr, CoShadows, Siphon Life. Most of the time I didn't put Siphon life up till we were on a boss fight, but the rest stayed the same. I kept my dots up.. Did my best damage I could spamming soulfire when I could, and shadowburn when I can too. So I had to drainsoul on some trash to get some shards.. big deal.. Personally, I think I did well. Draining soul seems to drop my DPS significantly.. but it helps for boss fights where I need to burn shards like there's no tomorrow.

**Sidenote, the other lock didn't have the super health stones.. So the party got 2 healthstones each.. and I was LOVING it.

We went past Atumen without an issue at all. I think the tank was just so good, cause I crit several times on that fight and NEVER pulled aggro (omen isn't reporting for me anymore and its bothering me, but apparently not enough to try to fix it). I was hoping to get the mount of his, but no such luck (it didn't drop).

Then we went to Moroes. This was a neat fight, as there were big mobs of non elites who enjoyed getting 2 Seed of Corruptions each. Needless to say those all died very fast. The Moroes fight itself was pretty weird. The guy has some buddies you gotta kill too. I, of course did my thing as instructed. I love it when people ask me if I've been here before.. if I haven't I still know what to do.. Depends on the tank and who's marking..but typically my job is "dot the crap out of the skull marked mob, then s-bolt it to death". As a lock I don't bring a lot to the table aside from DPS. I personally thought a hunter would have been good in here as I can't ever kill a hunter in PvP I just assume the pwn everything like they do me. Mages can poly, and de-curse.. healers can heal/cleanse.. Me, I just dot. Anyway that went well.. I think I got a epic belt there.. Anyway it was awesome.. and I cheered.

Then we did the Opera event, and it was "Oz". The instructions were good and to the point.. Kill dorothy, she's untankable. Then assist the MT on the Roar.. Then move on to the next guy. I am reasonably sure that the mage took out the scarecrow, as he's a fire mage.. but what do I know I was lifetapping, and dotting and bolting my gnomie butt off. I accidentally rolled on a healer wand, and was jokingly asked if I do much healing. I replied what I would always reply when I mess up and roll on something I don't want.. "reading- FTL" and everyone laughed. I hope so anyway cause it was really an accident. I think I had the low roll anyway, but knowing that I messed up bothered me.

Then, these guys are like.. hey lets do nightbane. I spewed my Pepsi One out on that one. From the articles I've read (and really I've read a few) this was one of the big deal fights of the whole instance. So I was pumped.. Plus he's a dragon.. And as a gnome I love the idea of killing a dragon. We wiped 1x here, and it wasnt' my fault (which is usually my main concern) but then we took him down no problem. He dropped some goodies but none that I could use, unfortunately.

Then to my surprise, they say they want to take out curator. Now if you read my last entry, curator was fubar before. So I was a little antsy about going there again, but this group seemed to know wth they were doing so why not. Anyway first time out we downed him no problem. Of course, the big difference to ME was that we had 2 locks doing curse of doom for like 24k dmg a pop during each evocation. I forgot to do the improved doom, but hey.. we downed him.

So, in kara I need to have experience getting down:

Maiden of Virtue
Shade of Aran (I really want to take him down)
Netherspite
Prince Malchezaar
Ilhoof

Kara at last!

2008-01-30T05:36:00.000-08:00

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:

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.
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.)
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..

Pally on the move

2008-01-29T07:08:00.000-08:00

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.

Funny thing happened at the mailbox last night

2008-01-25T05:54:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-25T05:38:00.000-08:00

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..

argh.. coilfang sucks

2008-01-24T05:08:00.000-08:00

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!

Pilfering for gold

2008-01-23T05:30:00.000-08:00

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

Epix, well a few anyway

2008-01-22T04:34:00.000-08:00

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)

Dailies, and my stomp through tailoring

2008-01-02T10:58:00.000-08:00

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.

Lvl 70 and flying.. high.

2007-12-20T06:17:00.000-08:00

Well through a stroke of kindness (allbeit unexpected) a benefactor stepped in and gave me a quicky loan for a flying mount. I won't mention names not because he doesn't deserve the honor of being so kind, but because I don't want 900 people begging him for gold 'cuz they herd on blog he givz it away'.

His reasoning was sound, he said the daily q's he does on a regular basis are the skyguard q's that involve bombing. So he helped me get there and I have some juicy items ready for AH this weekend that should put me back square with the guy. The bombing q I've been doing awards me about 11g and I had to run around and kill guys in Skettis for another stupid q. Anyway I'm quickly approaching friendly, which is a long way from exalted, but.. I'm a long way from 6,000g or whatever crazy amount the epic flying skill costs.

I need to get logged on early one night and push through my dailies and then rush to karazhan and start my quest to get into that place. The people I prefer running things with will be doing so on christmas break. At this point it would take a subtle miracle to just get HALF the quests done in what is apparently 5 days. I'm willing to give it a go though, and I'll let you guys know how that rolls on later..

The switch Evil to Holy

2007-12-12T07:32:00.000-08:00

Well as the name of the blog implies I am a Warlock, I dabble in the forces of evil the same way fat people dabble in buffets...

My favorite, favorite character in all of World of Warcraft is my priest. I started him with the expressed intent to be a shadow priest, and he may well swing around and do that at some point. However I am LOVING healing. I was main healer for 2-4 VC runs, and it was grand. I heard that mana was a big consideration for priests, so I have a lot of spirit (for my level), as well as heal/mana pots on hand, with some good bandages. Basically my intention is to be able to heal myself with bandages/pots.. and my group with my mana and healing abilities. I do almost no damage at all. It's really pathetic. I did find in my last run I was doing more damage than a same level rogue. I took this to mean he sucked. My offensive abilities are described thusly, and are used only when the group has an "oh crap!" moment, or when we are fighting a boss:

1. Shadow Word: Pain
2. Wand (continually, and I'm wand spec'd so I do okay here if I had a good wand anyway)

That's it. I can DoT, and wand, and thats all I ever really do. I have been known to mindblast the runners to see if I can kill them.. but thats about it. DPS is for everyone else.. I heal.. If its not intensive I can do a little DPS but wanding is best (save mana for heals).

Being Dranny I can use a nifty spell called "symbol of hope" which increases mana regen. If you're in a group with a hunter/lock/mage.. they instantly love you for doing this in a fight. So Dranny priests get much love with our extra HoT (Gift of the Naaru), and Symbol of Hope.. we apparently rule all.

I'll try shadow someday, but now..I'm happy healing.

Weekend Questing

2007-12-10T06:15:00.000-08:00

Well I FINALLY hit 69 last night, (no applause, please) in doing some random grinding after turning in some q's in Netherstorm. Now for anyone who is a caster, you won't really like Netherstorm, a lot of the mobs are magical resistant. For a mage, this could be terrible. As a DoT-master, it didn't bother me much. The little crab people were shrugging off my shadowbolts, but my drain life/soul was working just fine. I am making a note of this so I know not to run here till I am high enough to really put out damage as a mage (since she'll be probably my next one here).

Wow.. Ok so I hit 69, and immediately flew to shat, port to Stormwind. Ran to the slaughtered lamb and got trained up.

Then I met up with a hunter buddy of mine to do some (group) quests in Nagrand. Personally, I like Nagrand, but everything is spread way the heck out for questing. Nothing is ever just right HERE. Its some here and some on the other end of the freaking zone. The good part is that there is always some elemental something or other patrolling near you. Thats the bad part too.. if you stand still too long.. a big rock elemental will try to pummel you.

Anyway so we meet up and I immediately want to take down durn the hungerer. We knew of a MM hunter to help out so we snagged her, then a priest/druid came to finish off the group. For me, I thought the tank was low (64), but we steamrolled durn in a quick way. I have seen many fights with elites take much longer, but with the BM hunter, the MM hunter and me.. we had a crapload of DPS. I consider myself a big bad dude when it comes to dps.. my unbuffed +dmg is almost 600 now and I'm just 69.

Anyway this night was a grindfest with a good group running through many hard q's (I could've solo'd probably tho). I am now about 3/8's into 69 so not quite halfway, but I'm moving there tonight. Tonight I am pushing through a quest in zangarmarsh for a good trinket to up my damage a wee bit more. Then off to shadowmoon to get acquainted and find the altar of shadows, etc etc... I am not excited about finding a NEW place, but thats just me being huffy. The goal is to level, and then get my gnomey butt to azeroth to finish my mining (I mean once leveling is no longer a point of pressure). I want to get up to 300 so I can round out my mining in outland.

And then I get to push to get a better ranking than my friend Yara.. He's got a big headstart, but we'll see.

WSG-apalooza

2007-12-05T05:59:00.000-08:00

So last night when I should have been studying, I took a break and jumped in 3 WSG matches. My record: 1-3. The final score seems much less about me than the rest of the team. I credit myself and at least 2 other folks who I seemed to be running with (even if not on purpose) with allowing the matches to last as long as they did.

I got a total of almost 300 kills, with close to 90 killing blows. And more damage than a raid group of lvl 70's could mitigate. In the end the 3 stooges (what I playfully named me and my running partners) constituted about 7-9 defenses, and 4 captures. So we were doing the bulk of the work for the team. The last game I didn't get my 2 partners with me, I ended up with some crybaby hunter twink (it happens) saying how the team sucked (nevermind that when we started it was me and 2 druids vs 7 horde... Nevermind that they HAD 1 capture before we had an even CLOSE race in manpower.. or that I had 1k more damage than him and 10 more kills). OK the team DID suck, but to condemn the group when you come in for the last 2 captures is kinda jaded. On MY watch they only got 1.. That's my story and I'm stickin to it.

Anyway so I made 5 WSG marks and now with a little over 8k honor for dwarfenstuff. I am still missing the +20 agi enchant for my 1h weapon. To be precise I am short the prismatic shards, and 2 Greater Planar's. So its not a long journey to get that up, and running.. just massively expensive. The goal is (since all the 49 trinkets seem stupid/lame) to get 2 rune's of duty to maximize my health regen and my stamina. I'm about 4 WSG losses(since, I don't count on wins) from getting my other rune of duty.. So that leaves shoulders. I have good shoulders, but they use spirit and not stamina/intelligence, and lately I am running OOM before I can possibly die. I have mana/health pots, but I HATE using them. I much prefer fending off 5 guys and then drinking to get my mana back. I just seem to ALWAYS be in combat.

Now I've been away from WSG for a LONG time, and the new hunter abilities with arcane/aimed shot are now in full effect. I've found a few things that made life easier.

warlocks hate me

this is due to me leading off with arcane shot (which removes demon armor), and follow that with viper sting. It seems a silly thing to do, but locks can effectively shut people down, and I should know. The best thing to do is handicap them. Locks can/will lifetap to get mana to hurt you.. This is something I use in MY favor. I viper sting them put the pet on them and then just do autoshot. Conserve MY mana while eliminating his. I got deathcoiled like 7 times last night, which I thought was great. Mcgoo's Deathcoil is reserved for what I call "Oh S*^%!!" situations. So the fact that someone used it on me meant that I was considered a serious threat.

Paladins hate me

this has more to do with me just kiting the live long day out of them. I use my traps for damage and not immobilization. I use my pet to keep pressure on him and I use arcane shot to remove his mojo that makes him tough. He still bubbles/heals, which is fine. That usually drains his mana and makes him a meat puppet for me.

Shaman should fear me

why? well cause as a dwarf I can ditch their "frost shock" that slows me, AND I can kite them using my pet to chew their sorry butt down to the bone. They can out melee me, but I can out DPS them. I actually went into monkey aspect and finished a shammy last night. With my Agility so high my armor is buffed from it, AND I dodge like every attack.

Warriors pwn me

I don't know if its that I don't know how to respond, or if the warriors last night were just exceptional. They just beat me down, every time. Don't get me wrong they died quickly after cause I leave people WOUNDED. I just couldn't take a warriro 1:1, and after being with Mcgoo where I can 1:1 take anyone but a shaman.. it was frustrating. Charge/intercept, hamstring.. beat down.. that is how it went.

Hunters are a toss up

depends on who sees who first. If I see them first I am shooting my "wad" at them and trying to make the battle terribly one sided. If they are BM spec, and their pet is on someone, that is just candy. I blaze through their HP before their DPS machine (the pet) gets to me. If MM spec, its a tie.. he can deal out as much dmg as me, probably more if he has an epic bow/gun.. So its just a matter of how much I got off on him when I started shooting him.

Mage = +1HK

I've just seen nothing that can stop me from annihilating a mage at 49 bracket. I don't know if they haven't come into their squishy goodness yet or what. I just haven't seen one that can roll with the dwarf.

Priest = +1HK

They Scream to get the pet off them and then realize that I'm going to hit them with aimed shot, all but neutralizing their heals. Shadow priests can't touch me, I drown them in their own blood. I still haven't been pushed by a shadow priest that could take my pushback with either Mcgoo or Dwarf. And aimed shot all but ends the healing goodness from holy priests.

Rogue, tossup again..

If I see them, they die and its painful. If they ambush me.. well its just a bad way to start from my perspective. Typically Rogues love going after clothies, as it makes them happy to 1-2 shot someone. So I get ignored. I consider it my honor to kill rogues trying to kill my team's mages/healers (locks should pwn rogues at 49, if they don't they might deserve their fate).

So things have changed, either with my new agility adding sauce to the mix, or people just sucking more than they used to. All but the stupid warrior knuckledraggers.. oh well.

burn out

2007-12-03T10:16:00.000-08:00

As sure as I channel Hellfire, I am getting burned out on Warcraft. It is terrific fun, but the key to having this terrific fun is to keep pace with friends.

My school, and my week off due to Thanksgiving have made me lag shamefully behind. The momentum I had had before is now gone. I consider Mcgoo a standout warlcok, mostly due to my ability to play him (I mean really, he's in crap gear and he still is 1/2 on the damage meter in an instance with 70's). Now I know for a fact there are better locks out there. I had one help me get my mount, and he was awe-some. He did SO MUCH damage and without really pushing DPS at all. I want to get to that place where I am the warlock that people say, oh wow.. there HE is.. but honestly I don't think that will happen.

Realistically its not that my friends have blown past me in-game, its that I've run out of things to do. I'm not done questing or anything like that.. I've just done all the stuff that I really REALLY wanted to do. I need some new goals or Mcgoo will live out his life as a 68 warlock with an inferiority complex.

My next main is SO going to be a healer..(healyoself)

Almost 67

2007-11-12T09:27:00.000-08:00

Okay so I did a bit of playing this weekend and I'm only 8% away from hitting 67. At this point its just a countdown until I hit 70. I need to follow some good advice and start leaving nagrand after I finish a few more quests. I think the zone is great, and good for farming, but I need XP not fun and games. I'll come back after I get 70 and farm the holy crap out of it then.

Next stop is North Nagrand so I can get my mage's battle baton. Its a rediculously difficult series of quests where you kick the daylights out of some instance level guys. I am almost 67 like I said, so its not something I think of as a problem, I just hate finding groups. I know some guys but they are usually raiding and I don't want to wait all day to get this done.

After I get that and a few more things from Nagrand, I'm off to Blades Edge Mountains. According to the Warlock's Den, there is a TON of quests that give me things I should have pre 70 there. Of course its all crap once I hit 70, but it is what it is.. I still need to hit a TON of instances, but that comes secondary to leveling at this point.

Need to do:
Underbog (all the way)
Slave pens
ManaTombs
CoT Durnholde

And thats just to be going into instances at my LEVEL! So I'll let you guys know how each go.. hopefully no more craziness from people. Monday's my night off WoW, so probably no update tomorrow.

After the Tusker!

2007-11-09T07:32:00.000-08:00

Tusker, the big snuffalupagus in Nagrand needs to die.

Well I thought, this looks like it could be a problem. Lots of people saying, you need 3 to take him down. So I kept reading..

Looks like Locks have a "easy button". There are some holy-moley felguards over at some forge camp in Nagrand. Numerous entries list that enslaving one, mounting and running like you-know-what will allow you to solo this snuffy with ease. So try #1, I enslave. Suddenly a invisible felcannon blasts me and I take a LOT of damage. I assume it was a felcannon.. cause really I saw nothing. Big green flames, big damage. So I die.

During the ghost run I had to do to get to my body (cause I always forget the friggin soulstone), I thought of pulling with Curse of Shadows and then enslaving the guy. This seemed to work well. Now I'm not really a believer in enslave demon. It always breaks and I die a terrible death. I push this feeling aside for being able to solo a guy other classes can't solo(even some at 70). Now I get there and well, someone (me) didn't read the stupid description from other posters on thott.. There is a ton of other elephants running around here. So I end up just overwhelmed at the base of the rock the tusker chills on. Fighting like 6 elephants. Good news sports fans, I WIN. These felguards are NO JOKE. Mine was 68, but some are 67, and he was vicious. I dotted, and whenthey turned to go to me, I made him hit them. That was the strategy. Well that and howl of terror. Which helped but not a solution in and of itself. So finally the guy and me make enough elephant corpses that we can go up to tusker. and..

and...

He breaks enslave and goes into a "evade" coma. So he's just standing there.. not doing anything, and THEN I get summoned into Underbog.

My second attempt will work. Even if I gotta just totally get a 40 man raid together.. LOL. I'll try this again tonight without the 40 man raid. Really if I could just have dealt with 3 elephants it wouldn't have been a problem. This is really a waste of time if my experience doesn't pay off some good dividends.

Which reminds me, questing experience in outlands sucks. I mean sucks BADLY. I get about 1k xp from each of the kills I'm making at 66. I'm getting about 10k xp from questing all over nagrand. So the nessingwary quests, if solo'd make you more experience in the KILLS than you make in the quest itself. I think this better affirms what everyone has thought for a long time, grinding vs questing is a dumb argument. Grinding +Questing = quicker xp.

Grouping into Underbog (take 1)

2007-11-09T07:10:00.000-08:00

Ok so while I was running around killing things in Nagrand a guildy (whom I did not know personally or in WoW) hit me up for a Mana Tombs run.

I've done MT before, and it was just garbage. Cost me 5g to get repaired cause we wiped like a bad case of the runs. Anyway, since then I've been eager to get back in there and really try to do some good. Plus I wanna kill that boss..

Ok, back to the story.. So he invites me to a group and this group is just flip flopping people leaving, joining.. leaving/joining.. Till finally we're in. WAIT A SECOND, I get summoned to Underbog? Well its a new one for me, so why not.. Everything goes well (I was so far on top of the damage charts its silly to even mention, yeah me!). He makes some kinda rookie mistakes, and handles himself in a "not so good" fashion. But that's ok, I mean.. When have I been known to ever be 100% on anything? So then our tank has to dash, his job called him in so he says. (see note). I said.. (notice the quotes) "I know of no one on that can tank for us, do you guys?" followed in 3 minutes by "Well guys with no tank this concludes our night, have fun". Then I hearthed. I wasn't happy, cause really.. I was doing well. Saving the group here and there, and just annihilating everyone with my damage. So I'm standing in Nagrand now, and the guildy jumps me about "wth man? I thought you were into helping guildy's" It set poorly with me, I don't know if its "maturity" or just being old and cantankerous. So I ran the whole thing by another guildy who is a real life friend. He told me to just brush it off.. I checked and this guy is his main, so its likely he's new to the experience of grouping, and guild grouping.

Karma1: I joined for Mana Tombs... Not underbog (truth is I would've done underbog, but I resent being lied to)

Karma2: If we had been at work and he had done this kinda bull, it'd be cited as "Unprofessional". We weren't at work, but still don't be a hose brain.

Karma3: He jumped MY stuff for leaving when no one had a tank. I had other stuff I could be doing beside dancing in underbog.

Apparently he had just GOT a tank, and quickly made amends about jumping me for leaving. So I'm letting this one go. As a side note, I probably will never run with this guy again, unless it is just out of painful necessity. I can't say anything specific, cause I don't want to name names or point fingers.. But he conducted himself in a way that made things "less fun" for me in the group. Ergo, I'll not group with him again. No hard feelings, I'm sure in 3 months he'll be raiding Kara or something.. but not with me.

Note:
Some WoW players are actually so retarded that they thing REAL LIFE should come second to the GAME. These people should immediately commit suicide. My kids/wife/house/job/school all rank higher than this game, and they SHOULD. If any of the aforementioned higher rated issues require me, I'm logging off. If you have these things and maybe they don't love/need you, or maybe you just don't love/need them.. I pity you. Don't dog those of us who have a life outside of WoW, it just makes you seem pathetic.

Epic Mount, oh yeah..

2007-11-07T06:19:00.000-08:00

Well last night I had planned on a group to get through Scholomance. Well, at least to the alchemy lab.. Anyway, so I logged on and only one of my buddies was there. So I, reluctantly, put it out in guild chat "any1 wanna go through scholo, to the alchemy lab?". Remember, I'm "new around these parts" for this guild. Most of them are so uber, I don't even understand it.. Nevertheless, before I could count to 10, I had the guild's primary tank, primary healer, a lock who is way uber also, and a druid healer (who spent her time in cat form helping out with dps).

Basically I hosed my buddy. He understood, but I still felt bad. Honestly though, what an experience! To say these guys just straight up wtfpwned this instance would be an understatement. They were unbelievable. We rolled through the mobs so fast I barely had a chance to cast an instant dot on anyone. All in all, scholo lasted.. roughly.. 15 minutes. Tops.

Dig this though.. THEN the lock is so cool, he says to me "DM is next right? wanna go there?".. This would CONCLUDE my mount quest. I don't know that I'm crazy enough to turn down the freakin superfriends in the guild to try to find a PUG to get in later. So of course I ran to BFE where the quest guy is to turn in this part and get the next, and final leg of the quest. The MT, and the healer druid dropped out. So my buddy Yara got on (68 frost mage, atm), and then we got a rogue from the guild (also 70, apparently ALSO a superfriend). And we stormed through DM west. Now when I say we stormed through.. I mean I LITERALLY had to pull with drain soul to get a shard from the mobs. The damage was of the charts, and thats no understatement. So without a tank we steamrolled DM west. Being new to the instance I tried to put a curse on the mobs and then drain soul (for the lodestone to keep the crap moving in the ritual I needed to get my mount). If the lock was doing a fire spell, I put curse of elements, if he was doing shadowbolt, the mob got curse of shadows.

The fight to GET the freakin mount was insane. Not HARD, but insane. I think pre burning crusade it took a bonfide group of bad mofo's to pull this off. Me and the other lock enslaved big felguards and had them run around smacking people. Imps, imps everywhere.. there were 30-40 of those dudes.. I did Rain of Fire as I was just tryin to help while watching the doohickeys to make sure they kept going. This was no small feat, as there was so much craziness on this altar that I could just barely see anything specific about the nodes at all. The Felguards are really what helped out, I think anyway. If we had had a 70 demon lock with us their felguard would've been more powerful.. but really, who cares about THOSE guys.. (j/k demo locks). Anyway so at any time the other lock is droppin dots and shadow bolting.. while also keeping up doohickeys with me. He was such an uber lock too.. I mean, I consider myself good, or I DID until I saw this guy. Its obvious that experience raiding pre/post burning crusade has made him just supremely knowledgeable about what he's doin, and how he's doin it. I on the other hand am just not that serious. In the end we smoked the mount and the stupid demon guy that follows after it.

Victory lap of Shattrath on my new epic mount. Yeah, okay.. so I was the only guy in Shatt that had JUST got their epic and was >64.. I still felt like a bad mofo though..

Now for the flying mount.. argh!

60-69 WSG

2007-11-06T09:06:00.000-08:00

Firstly, I'm really REALLY new to this bracket, but seriously... When did all the horde stop doing PvP? If you are on my server or in my battlegroup, then you know how odd this really is. 60-69 WSG hordies are like 20-29 alliance guys.. nearly retarded and all running around trying to do 1:1 and no group cohesion.

Although I was really grateful to smoke some horde, when last time I went PvP at 60, in alterac valley, there were a ton of morons trying to solo 4-5 horde at a time. I'm no coward, but a clothie versus 5 horde guys is going to die. Unless the 5 guys who had more sense than you and are in a group, are all messed up or having keyboard/mouse issues. We got smoked... A lot.

Then I go into this bracket for WSG (never did 60 wsg..) and we just rolled these guys. All the alliance guys stayed in 3's for the most part, and I was in a mini group of friends (65 lock, 67 frost mage, 66 shaman).. Personally we stomped them. I had the top in HK's and #3 in total damage. I didn't see a mis-shaped field either. Everyone I saw was my level or higher. Mostly 69's to be honest. I thought this resilience thing would really play a bigger part in how PvP was going to be done post 60. Now I want to PvP all the time. Winning is something I really enjoy, duh...

Now I'm going to push to 70 with total disregard to the fact that at 70 I'll be up against ppl in their Tier6 who are going to put such a hurting on this little gnome. I doubt I'll ever get that far along until there are lvl 80 folks who want to jump into these instances and see how far they can pull a lvl 70ish gnome lock.

A ssecret to my success in this particular run into WSG was the healers bane.. Unstable Affliction. You can't remove it without being hurt pretty good, and its NEVER the only dot on you (if you saw a guy named Mcgoo run by you, anyway). I was ignored on the field a LOT, which helped. Since I'm affliction, I am a slow damage dealer.. I have enough juice into destruction that I can pop out some damage if need be.. But it would shoot my proverbial wad of mana and leave me standing there with an imp and a glowing stick.. trying to squeeze juice from the little imp and lifetap. I have emotional issues about using lifetap when a Tauren guy with a HUGE flaming axe is running at me, I consider lifetap a last resort in PvP. The only occasions I have known this to not be the case is when I have a druid at my back and I get HoT'd out my wazoo.. which usually means unending mana for Mcgoo. Which in turn means when I die, I'll have either 3 rogues standing over me, right before THEY die.. or a field of bodies. I'm pretty persistant, and just like with Dwarf.. if you ignore me.. you'll die.

Back to UA, and why Affliction is king in PvP... Well there were these 2 blood elf pallies see.. and an undead priest. The priest, pretty much has to pray that he can keep his heals up to live through my DOT's or he's gotta go kamakazi on someone. Either way, he's not a threat on a big scale. Pallies and rogues are the only classes that can ditch UA without getting a smackdown. Pallies bubble removes it without damage, and rogues just suck in general and blizzard gave them an out so they wouldn't cry (just kidding). Anyway, there is this buff marker or whatever you call it after a pally does a bubble. I looked for this and dropped UA on them. Basically their bubble, their defense to this, was on cooldown and I was going to rape them for this. You heard right folks a nobody-knownothing 65 lock schooled 2 49 pallies. This to me meant I must rule the world.. in reality it was just that I was paying attention and I had the skills to take them out of the game.

One pally tried to flash heal himself out of oblivion. This is a smart move, but not when I'm still watching.. I drained his mana and then /laughed at him. When he was in range to do some melee damage, nightfall proc'd. So night night, pally1.

Pally2, on the other hand did a unofficial berzerker rage and rush for me. I don't know if pally's can ditch fear.. but he didn't. So while he's running (I did take some damage, which when a big 2h hits cloth armor it means gnomes take damage).. I drained his life.. then his mana, for good measure.

I don't play a pally above 13 or so, so I'm no the end/all be/all with them... I will say this. I have been hocking some plate that I am cursed to get that is +stam/+int.. why are you pallies not BUYING THIS! Its a known exploit of pallies/shaman.. When your blue bar is gone, usually you die. So make your blue bar a bit bigger.. PLUS I never EVER saw these pallies have an int buff from a mage (poor teamwork).

I run with a mage so I almost always have brilliance or intellect buffed. My favorite is when my buddy buffs my imp (Im affliction and it takes an almost all caster enemy to get me to NOT use my imp).. Any good Affy lock knows this means I have even MORE mana to dark pact away from the little booger. Dark Pact = Love. Thats how that breaks down people.

As I am 65, I have 5 points left for talents. I really think they are going to go to my Imp, and my healthstone. Just figuring that since I use my imp exclusively in instances, and I'm basically a healthstone vending machine, that these would be logical places to put my points. Just checked improved imp as a talent, affects my bloodpact by upping the stamina I get from my bouncy friend to 80-ish. That's right sports fans, 80 stamina that isn't gear dependent! When I get that stuff together I should be pretty versatile for both battlegrounds/arenas as well as raiding.. Guess we'll see

The gnome on the non epic..

2007-11-06T06:33:00.000-08:00

In a almost continuous stream of whining and bitching regarding me being both too cheap to buy mats for an epic ground mount AND need to get a group to go through both scholo, and dire maul. I am still refusing to do it, but honestly I'm not even to the point where I can go to diremaul and DO the quest. What I really want is to for a lock buddy to take pitty on me (and a bit of gold) and take me through Dire Maul and help me get this mount.

This seems like its not going to happen anytime soon. Two great problems arise from this. Number one, I cannot get my flying mount until I am both level 70 and have my epic ground mount training (received for free upon quest completion for my dreadsteed). I do not want to be level 69 screwing around on a level 40 style mount while the cool kids are out grinding the last 20g to get their flying mount. My choices are slim, and unappealing. So I am going to have to sit in front of scholo and LFG. Precious little is as boring in the game as going LFG. It is a painful, often unending time upon which my life seems to accrue less value and less meaning. Now my new guild, The Order of Medivh, is wicked cool. Problem is that they are pretty much all doing level 70 stuff. Arena/raiding, etc.. Which means this "FNG" will probably receive less than a helping hand doing some old old level 60 stuff. I am really hesitant to ask for any lock style help either, cause I don't want to look like a schmuck. I have some favors I can call in from some lock buddies, but some of them have quit the game in its entirety. One of those people may not even still have their mount, maybe split the costs? Hm.. sounds better than ditching 250g from the word go just to get my stuff..

Don't get me wrong 250g isn't as bad as what other people farm to GET their mount skill money and mount money. The thing to remember here is, if you want to you can farm that kind of gold in a few weekends. No matter what I do, I NEED a group of people to run through some lvl 60-ish instances with me so I can get my mount. Granted its the shizznit as far as epic mounts go, nothing comes even close. I may buy a mechanostrider too just to run around and look normal, instead of like the uber super bad-mofo that I really am.

Large Prismatic Tard

2007-11-06T06:07:00.000-08:00

Well the only things left to do to Dwarfenstuff to put him up to real uber-twinky-ness is his weapon enchants (and something called nethercleft let armor?), and the +150 health to chest. Then if I just want to obsess I could get a libram for his head, and if I get just really nutty.. A hurricane/precisely calibrated boomstick.

I am going for extra twinky-ness and getting Greater Agility Enchants on each of my 1h axes. The mats for this is beyond all belief extensive. Well they are for me anyway.. here's the list

8 Arcane dust (currently I have 37)
4 Greater Planar Essences ( I have 6)
6 Large Prismatic Shards (ouch it hurts, but i have 5)
2 Primal Air (I have 3.5)

So you can tell I am 1 Large Prismatic shard away from cranking out even more agility for my hunter. I need more Greater Planar Essences and a little bit more fun in Nagrand should reap me the remainder of my primal air. As usual, shards are my major pain. To me, everything green that I get is a potential payday from the AH. Some weapons sell better than others, just like some armor sells better than others. Lately I have been putting up an auction for my "less desirable" weps/armor for 24hrs on the weekend, and if it doesn't sell its off to my buddy the enchanter. So far its gotten me a crapload of arcane dust (good, I'll need it later for tailoring), and about 2 greater planars. Never a shard. I realize shards are usually from BLUE items, and I would sooner run Mcgoo naked through ramparts than have a blue DE'd instead of sold for the (incredibly overpriced) outland norm. So, I end up trolling the AH looking for people who are "pricing to move" their shards. Now as a non-enchanter, this seems dumb on their part, but I love them for it anyway.

I may push another 20g over to dwarfenstuff and let him get one of his weapons enchanted. I'm not sure I can wait till I have enough mats for both!! I have always been a force to deal with on the battlegrounds and in duels. Since I basically ramped up dwarf's stamina and agility to the max, shedding almost all other stats.. I have noticed that I:

stay alive longer
do a LOT more damage

I am hoping there isn't a wall of diminishing returns once I get this extra 40 agility, but this is really my first high level enchant (everything else was really kinda cheaply done). Either way I'm happy to have a weapon that is really top notch along with an enchant that is considered borderline overkill for my bracket (40-49). The libram would be nice, but I doubt the necessity of it, and this nethercleft stuff doesn't really seem to far and away outshine my clefthoof armor I got put on my legs already. No matter what though Dwarf is getting his glowy weapons, and if I happen to have 100g extra sitting around and hurricane or the boomstick show up on AH, I may just swipe them up. I miss not having a gun, /cry.. Bows seem so.. so.. elven. And forget those long eared people!
hehe

PUG's

2007-11-05T09:00:00.000-08:00

The PUG is a necessary thing, but not always the ideal situation.

---Firstly if you don't know it, a PUG is a pickup group. Like people who don't know each other just deciding to team up to take on an instance/quest, etc...

My Friend Val, basically wrote a "hey what do you think" post and I'm filling in the blanks.

To ME a PUG is how you get to know people. Almost 95% of my action in game is from PUG's. Oddly the same percentage of things I don't like came from PUG's. This is, to me essentially the reasoning behind PUG's. Learn what you like/hate about groups by doing so with mostly less accustomed individuals.

Like I found, I hate pally healers. I know I know, some of the biggest baddest guilds run all over the dang place with pally healers. Sure. As to date, I've not had but 1 experience with a pally healing that didn't turn to crap in 10 seconds. This is ALL post 60, so its not like I was in deadmines and he couldn't keep me alive.. As a lock I found I LOVE druid healers. They can HoT me and I can lifetap to get some free mana. LOVE that. love love love love love.

For a guild leader, it is essential to have your officers doing PUG's. I mean that is how I would draft people in. Word of mouth, but I would only take my officers word for it. And the more the officers work with folks the more they can coordinate their leadership skills with how groups should work. I haven't raided, but I would think having any amount of "what do I do when he does..." would screw you over pretty quick.

Now for the casual player, I think its good for the same reason I like/hate them. Basically seeing how other people do what they do, you get an idea of how you like things done. People you like to do things with, etc.. I have a big friends list, and probably 4 are in my guild. The rest are people I played with in the past who handled themselves good. This is basically my go-to list for groups. Like if my group (guilded or non) need a rogue. I know of 3-4 rogues that can do what we want and how we want it done. Frost mages? I know 3.. Fire mages? I know 2.. Hunters.. well who ever needs a hunter in WoW and can't find one has serious issues. I have a hunter and I can't throw a AOE up in a town without having 4 hunters run in that circle. But yeah, I know of some BM hunters, 1 survival hunter, and 2 MM hunters.

So basically I think pugs are good. You will create more headaches than you'll solve, but it will help you by having people put their expectations on YOU, and you in turn learn how to deal with them.