Purple and Shiny

I had my 10man raid do wish list for me so I could compile a loot list for all the bosses. I figured we’d have a couple of bosses we could start to skip after a few more rounds and then be able to concentrate on the super hard mode bosses.

Turns out, the list is a lot larger than I thought it would be which means EVERYONE is in need of upgrades from Ulduar hard modes. Several still need normal mode loot.

I tried out the site http://gear-wishlist.appspot.com/ and chugged in my toon. I don’t agree with all their best in slot choices but my playstyle is probably different from the general play of 25man shaman heals since I only do 10mans.

It’s interesting just how much of the upgrades are NOT obtainable for me just from running 10man Ulduar. Just looking at my weapon…I can only hope for a side grade of sorts. Nothing about the Ulduar loot table was drool worthy from being fully decked in 25man Naxx gear.

I’m beginning to think this was not intended because I heard they are changing this in the new 10man content. Hopefully we’ll start seeing some decent upgrades.

Onyxia Revisited

This past weekend, Flipmax and I were wondering if Onyxia was doable with two people. The last time we had tried to take the dragon out was nearly a year ago when all we had attempted it with a level 70 mage and a level 70 druid. It did not go so well.

 

Curiosity satisfied, it is more than easy to take her out with two people. In fact, I’d she’s easily soloable for a good portion of the classes. Sadly, it was my shamans first time downing Onyxia! And of course the first thing we said as soon as we got into the instance was “odds left! evens right!” and after we downed Onyxia we killed every whelp in the caves. “like one if a F0000uuu***ing Million!” good times.

 

  As we were skipping out of the cave, we noticed a pit of lava below the path out of the instance. I decided to jump in and of course, Flipmax follows thus answer the famous question (if your friends jumped off, would you?). In any case, we got stuck in the lava with no way out!

 

Turns out, if you get qued into a BG from a pit of lava, you can AFK out and you’ll be transported ALIVE and well at the graveyard. :D

Rusted Proto for Keeps

After further discussion, we decided not to remove the rusted and ironbound proto-drake rewards for the normal and heroic Glory of the Ulduar Raider meta achievements when patch 3.2, Call of the Crusade, launches, and currently have no plans to remove them in the foreseeable future. However, we will continue to evaluate the situation and if a decision is made to remove these rewards at any point in the future, we'll provide a one month warning so players will have time to make some final attempts.- Blue post from Eyonix

This of course is supposed to be great news for me and my 10man crew who have been chasing the clock ever since they dangled the possibility of 3.2 over our heads. With 3.2, the Rusted and Iron Proto Drake were to be taken out of the game. Now, it looks like we not only do we have plenty of time, we have an eternity.

What this means for us is that we can now go back to concentrating on getting gear for the team instead of pushing the Glory of the Ulduar Raider curriculum.

However, this also means, I’m not sure I give a sh1t about the drake anymore either. It’s sort of a double edged, this news. On the one hand, great news we have more time… on the other hand, who cares about the achievement anymore?

Would the Armani War Bear mean much if it was still attainable? Would the Plague or Black Proto Drake mean anything if you could still grind OS, Maly, and Naxx to get it post 3.1? Not really. Sometimes I really don’t understand the motivations behind Blizzard’s actions.

Chillmaw

Chillmaw
Originally uploaded by alachia
I've been working on my Argent Tournament dailies for the past week or so trying to get enough tokens to move up to the larger ring to do even MORE dailies.

I finally got to the big tent and came across the daily called Threat from Above. It's a suggested 3 Players daily quest that requires you to kill 1x Chainmaw and 3x Cultist Bombardiers.

I flew out there thinking I was going to be able to easily solo it despite the player suggestion and nuke the hell out of this dragon and be done with it.... Flame shock! Lava Burst, Lightning Bo----- *SMACK* *SMACK*-- the Cultist spawn and boom, I'm dead.

I tried this about 3 times using all my cooldowns including heroism. I was very frustrated. I sat there for a bit trying to figure out how I could solo him and his ads when a horde orc DK came flying down. He pulled Chillmaw down and immediately started dropping down in health.

I must admit I was sort of delighted thinking I was going to get to watch this horde die to this mob that had been kicking my @ss. NO SUCH LUCK. While he hovered at 50% health, he never went below that and proceeded to pwn all the mobs down completing his quest.

This made me extremely pissed off... (you know qq class imbalance and all that). Finally after thinking on it for awhile, I decided to switch my spec back to resto and put on my healing gear.

Sure enough, with a combination of rotating Earth Shield and Water Shield on myself and using Flame Shock and FlameStrike Totem kiting, I was able to down them all by myself. It took me much longer than the DK but I was just happy that I could actually do it.

The next night, I ended up tanking Chillmaw for two horde clothies who cheered me on. /flex Shammy power! yeah, I dunno, sometimes I'm good to horde and sometimes I hate them.

One Toon to Rule them All

Snarly
Originally uploaded by alachia

After declaring my shaman as my main for WoTLK, I've been extremely satisfied with the results. Yes, I miss my druid a lot and yes I miss the aspect of playing other classes at end game.

However, there has been nothing worse than having to start at ground zero with a character's history for me. Especially when it comes to having keys for instances or not having a flightpath or my favorite unique pets. There are so many things about the history of your character and gameplay that you would have liked to carry with you.


For example, on my shaman, I don't even have the bloody Karazhan key although I have it on FOUR other toons! It is also frustrating as all hell knowing I have two AWESOME unique pets on my priest that I can't pull out while I'm playing now. I even had to go back and kill trash in ZA just so I could get mojo AGAIN!

Needless to say, I'm all for the idea of having one character now that has ONE history. Yes, it comes at the great sacrifice of not being able to play classes you might like on a regular basis. But if it means I don't have to go get attuned to some daily quest in the Outlands just to complete a holiday quest, it might be worth it.

Another great perk to having ONE main toon is that your gold becomes more concentrated so you can splurge on things like a mekgineer chopper :D

And yesterday, I was doing the fishing daily from Shat (trying to get find fish) and I got Snarly from the quest reward!! I was so excited as it was a pet I really wanted back in TBC. A baby croc is just the cutest thing ever...almost as cute as the baby panda.

I guess I'm just going to have to learn to love being a space goat shammy forever. Losing yet another adorable pet would be heart breaking. It still pangs me a ton I never get to see my baby gorilla and baby hippogryph. *sniff*

Crazy Cat Lady

Crazy Cat Lady
Originally uploaded by alachia

Our 10man is slowly getting its stride back which is great. However, in the next week or two we're going to have another flux due to vacations. Win some, lose some.

We're trying to work down the list for Glory of the Ulduar Raider and after tonight, we have about 5/13 achievements with about four super tough ones left.

Tonight we knocked out another easy one, Crazy Cat Lady which was to defeat Auriaya with her kitty cats alive throughout the fight. Aside from some extra poundage on the OT, it wasn't bad at all.

Then we moved to Thorim hard mode. It's a two part hard mode process for that fight, one being a timed gauntlet run and the other surviving a psychotically horrific lightning/blizzard storm show! We didn't down Thorim HM tonight but we got really close. I have a feeling we'll be getting our first sigil by tomorrow. *crosses fingers*

Episode 45 Supplemental

Episode 45 is up.

Once again, I fail at doing an intro and outro to the show. I’m still getting used to the new format. I will say I am thoroughly enjoying my sit downs with @eljeppy. I always imagine I have tea and biscuits in front of me while we chat. :)

So this episode was spawned a few weeks ago after I had read this warlock blog: jagoex.blogspot.com about a Paladin Blogger, Ferraro, being exposed as using a fake photograph and claiming to be someone they weren’t.

This of course piqued my interest as to doing with how we perceive meta identities and then lead into a discussion about WoW information blogs in general which then lead into a discussion about elites and casual who use such tools.

What is really interesting is that several weeks after we recorded this episode, the Paladin Blog is back up and seemingly going strong. It laid low for awhile and is now simply chugging along…which sort of confirms one the theories we discussed about how there are no “real” consequences in the Meta.

Anyhow, apologies for the delayed release. hope you enjoy.

The Celestial Planetarium

Brann Bronzebeard says: Now, this is what we call a nice find!

After we downed Iron Council Hardmode, the Archivum Data Disc dropped which I picked up. I went back this weekend to turn it in in hopes that we’ll start the quest line in Ulduar to unlock Algalon.

So I turned in the disc to Brann Bronzebeard and then he told me to find the doorway to the Celestial Planetarium which I had never been to before. It was in one those sections of Ulduar you never head towards.

I circled around for a good 15 minutes not understanding why I hadn’t “discovered” the entrance yet. I got as close the doorway as I could but it was guarded by Chamber Overseer. Finally, I decided to just make a go for the door and sure enough it completed the quest, just as the mob pwned my ass. lol.

Now, we’re set to try to get Hodir, Thorim, Freya, and Mim’s Sigil to get a Celestial Planetarium Key which will unlock Algalon. dun dun dun. I’ll be happy if we even get half of the hardmode bosses down at this point. :D

IC Hardmode Down

Iron Council Hard mode has been our latest challenge in progression. Every time we thought we would make a good go at the encounter, something would unfortunate would happen. We’d lose a player that week to work or someone would quit raiding due to blah blah blah.

It’s like every time we take a step forward, we end up taking two steps back. Anyhow, that’s pretty much how my raiding experience has been going this summer. It’s very frustrating always feeling like you’re starting over again.

Tonight we downed IC hardmode. It took longer for us to get all of our raiders in WoW due to Authentication Server Failures for two hours than it took to do our 18 attempts.

We used Prot Pally, DK Tank, Resto Shammy, Holy Priest, and DPS Mage x 2, DK, Hunter, Boomkin, and Rogue. I was actually impressed we had the DPS to pull it off because our new DK is poorly geared as he just started.

I remember the days of 40mans when we used to moan how much easier it would be to find 25 dedicated raiders. Then I remember whining about how much easier it’d be to find 10 committed raiders than 25….. and now, I can’t even keep a static 10man group consistent. GAH!!! If only 5mans raids… hehehe.

Rilletoo Gets a Gig

Rilletoo gets Paid
Originally uploaded by alachia

Tough economic times in Azeroth. However, Rilletoo was able to find a gig from Grimand Elmore in Ironforge to deliver a crafted weapon to Mountaineer Stormpike in Loch Modan.

He set out of Ironforge and headed north in the snow, definitely regretting he chose to wear sandals. Being sort of a lost soul, he wondered around aimlessly and was easily distracted. For some reason he was compelled to collect every peacebloom and silversage along the way.

About midway to the Northgate Pass, he happened upon Amberstill ranch where he ran into a young female dwarf named Yarlyn Amberstill. Apparently the ranch was down on its luck and she was selling off her pet rabbits to try to earn money to buy feed for the rams.

Rilletoo was not in need of another companion as Thoggak (his voidwalker) was already a hassle to take care of. However, he felt sorry for the lady and scrounged his pockets for the 18 silver pieces to buy a snowshoe rabbit.

A few wondering sandal prints later and a lot more peaceblooms, Rilletoo finally arrived with the package and delivered it to Mountaineer Stormpike. He was paid 7 silver pieces! DOH! The whole trip ended up costing 11 silver!

Outraged, Rilletoo carted around Loch Modan raging curses among the living creatures.

Silly gnome he is...