This and that

So, what have I been up to on Azeroth, lately?

Well, the long and short of it is: Not too much. =) And I'm liking it! I love just vegging out and grinding on lowbie alts. It's been awhile since I've had a long stretch where I've not felt pressed in a way like: "Omg must hit 80!!" or "Omg must hit exalted!!"

So, in between raiding Naxx with my beloved guildies, I've been giving my Horde characters some well-deserved attention.

Since getting his power pony [ahem, Thalassian Charger], my paladin, Cadmus, has hit level 65. I ran out of rested experience at that point, so I set him aside for the time being. Having as many alts as I do, you kind of get frustrated levelling without rested experience [unless I'm in a mad rush to get to 80, like I mentioned before kinda.] As a sidenote, I HIGHLY reccomend the addon Altoholic if you are, as it says, an altoholic, much like myself. It lets you track just about everything with your alts, but the reason I mentioned it is because it keeps track of everyones' rested experience, so you know when they're capped out and it's time to play them again and such.

I took a break to get my rogue, Callidora, up to 71 just because I kind of missed questing in Borean Tundra! Weird? Maybe a little. But whatever, progress is progress!

And last but certainly not least... I've gotten into playing my little Forsaken warrior, Clive, again. It's about time! He's my lowest alt at 42 [on his way to 43!], and consequently, warrior is the only class I've never gotten to Outland + beyond yet. But he'll get there!! Oh yes he will!

Despite Clive's low level, I've been pvping with him all night, in Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin. I'm having a lot of fun, even if I get roflstomped a lot! I'm really just trying to get marks so I can get him a pvp mount later on. I'm thinking a raptor.

Where would my update be without postcards from my travels?



Gloomy. Aww, muffin.



Gimme food or me eat you.

Anzu

Yes, my little druid is seated there in her epic flight form, which means the raven god, Anzu, has been vanquished! ...For now.

Admittedly, I spent the extra 17g and picked up epic flight form from the trainer after I had bought my druid her epic flying skill, but I wanted to do the quest chain anyway. It was actually pretty fun, and I got a nice Idol out of it, as well. [You also get a trinket for your flight form, which has since been nerfed in the doing-away-with of riding crops and etc. It used to increase your speed in flight form/swift flight form by 10%. Now, it does this.]

Anyway, two of my guildies - Maara [prot warrior] and Bruzin [ret pally] - and myself [resto druid] went into Heroic: Sethekk Halls to finish off my quest. It was actually a pretty fun fight, but I can see how it would have been quite hectic at level 70. [My druid is only level 73, but my friends were on their 80s.]

Hopefully we can farm H: Sethekk just about every day now, and try to get someone the land mount. I think it's one of the prettiest in the game - but I feel the same about the swift flight form, so I'm happy either way. ;)

Re: Paladon't

I crossposted my last post to wow_ladies, and a girl over there named terra_firma made me this:



Awesome.

Charge!

I did it, I did it! I got my little Blood Elf Paladin, Cadmus, to level 60, AND got him his Thalassian Charger.

But let me tell you, this was no small task.

The Horde version of the Paladin epic mount quest is a lot easier than the Alliance version, or at least less time-consuming. You pay some gold, buy some things from a vendor/AH, kill some Scourge, steal some holy water, and then it's one quick trip to Stratholme, and you're done.

At least, in theory.

I did the goldsink part of the quest no problem, as well as the Scourge slaughtering. Once I got to the next part though, something silly happened.

The object of this step of the chain was to head into Tyr's Hand and procure a sample of the Scarlet Crusade's holy water from their abbey. I had no one to help me [at first], but it was still straightforward enough to me. What I planned to do was run into the abbey, die where my quest item was, corpse run back, ressurect, pop my bubble, loot the item, run out to a safe spot, die AGAIN, run back, res, and then hearth out of there. A bit long-winded, but a very straightforward plan. No real kinks to work out, right? WRONG.

It all went well up to the part where I died and released my spirit. Where I was transported to looked all too familiar, but not exactly because I had been there moments ago...

You see, I was transported to the Death Knights' phased version of Tyr's Hand / the Scarlet Enclave.



Let me re-iterate: I was on my PALADIN.

I res'd at the spirit healer and tried to hearth out. I recieved a warning message saying "You can't leave here until you've escaped the Lich King's grasp!" Uhh... Okay. So, I sent in a ticket, and waited.




In the meantime, I headed up to Acherus to socialize.

| |

I even managed to find my name in the Death Knight roster. Wow, I hadn't realized Arthas had planned so far ahead. Was he keeping names of every paladin around in there, just in case he might run into them and Scourge them up?



Eventually, I got in touch with a GM, and they were kind of unhelpful. He ported me back to UC. I said thanks, but, wasn't this just going to happen again if I went back to Tyr's Hand and died a second time? He said "yes," and his advice to me was: "You know, you can buy the mount off the paladin trainer at 61 now. You don't need to do the quest."

Umm, thanks? I know that. Some of us like to do things the fun way, or the hard way, depending on which way you look at it. I'm also planning on doing the epic flight form quest for my druid...

But I digress.

My husband ended up helping me with his Alliance hunter to clear me a path to my quest item, as well as a level 80 BE Pally who happened to be there when I returned.

Then I just waited until I got a hold of a friend of mine, and he took me to Stratholme where we kicked the crap out of some Silver Hand after I burned down their church.



[OK, so this is what the instance was really mostly like... He killed most of the things and I just sat there and drank mana juice, QQ.]

All the stress ended up being worth it. I got a shiny new tabard:



AND, of course, most IMPORTANTLYYYY, my Charger!!



YAY!

Palading

Goal the first: Get pally to 60 this weekend. GOOOOOO!!!

Yay raiding!

I love raiding. More specifically, I love raiding with my guild. Even when it's a wipefest on progression attempts, we still manage to have fun.

Tonight, we finished up in Naxxramas, and had a very good run, at that. We one-shot every boss except Gluth, which was only because our designated zombie-kiter died early in the first attempt. It happens!

The person in question doing the kiting was my husband, who plays a hunter called Biggun. He gets a little frustrated when he's having trouble keeping the zombies together, but it proved to be worth it for him. When we finally got to and downed Kel'Thuzad, his [Nerubian Conqueror] dropped, something he's been coveting basically since we started running Naxx. So, grats to him!

Since our raiding night ended a little earlier than scheduled, what with us trucking along so nicely and all, we decided to head into Ulduar for our second-ever time and try it out. This time, we downed Flame Leviathan without a single wipe, even on trash. Pretty cool, considering we all kind of run around like chickens with our heads cut off during that encounter.

One of the best parts of being a tank, imo... We get designated to the choppers.




OMG, Snooky! Put your helmet on!




Much better.

Also, a friend/guildie of mine got a really weird achievement mid-instance:



Umm, okay. I have heard of that happening in Ulduar though, so I wonder if it's just because it's connected to the siege vehicles? Probably.

We did make a couple of attempts at Ignis, but it was a bit too chaotic for us at that point. Still having issues with trash, and I need to work on kiting the adds better. Once they turned molten, they just ran away from me! Lrn2threatpersecond, offtank.



[Yeah, that little speck helping to lead the charge is my gnomish self.]

All in all though it was a really good night. I'm so proud of my guild, we've come so far together! Here's to more epic loots, you guys. You rock!

Well-rested

Last night, my guild and I ventured into Naxx-10, as we generally do on Wednesday nights. We were short one initially, so decided to head in with nine of us. I was offtanking on Snooky, my death knight, as usual, and we were doing quite well!

Then, I let a pack of spiders get away and hit the raid. We didn't wipe, and I didn't really mean to but the reason for my mishap was obvious as I proclaimed over Vent:

"Oh my god! Is that Lumpey?!"

A close friend and guildie of mine recently was out of commission when he had an issue with a new graphics card he bought. He couldn't re-install his old one, either, because of DirectX being a butthead. But - he fixed the issue! Yay! Just in time for our raid!

So it turned out to be for the better that we'd hit up Naxx with nine of us rather than 10, since we had a spot saved for him.

In other news, today is the last day of Children's Week, and as it peters out, I'm hit with a minor WoW burnout. Unfortunate! But, it happens. I've been playing way too much trying to get these achievements done for the Violet proto-drake, among other things. I'm going to take it easy, for now, and let my alts build-up some well-rested bonuses.

I did get my paladin, Cadmus, to 56 today.




Here he is, in all his femboy glory, with his little Golden Dragonhawk Hatchling eyeballing him, wondering how it is possible for anyone to look more flamboyant than it does.

Recruitment, etc.

Over the past few days, I've gotten a couple of hits with my recruitment post. Pretty awesome!

One of them is a girl from wow_ladies, whose main character is Horde, on another server. She is currently levelling a Paladin to raid with us, which sounded cool to me -- as even if her main was Alliance, transferring servers costs real money, and if she ended up not liking our guild then she'd have been stuck on our server for a few months. Her main is a priest, so she has experience healing -- and when she rolled a paladin, I was doubly happy, since one of our core raiders who recently quit the game was a holy paladin. Yaaaay.

Another person we just added to our roster today, a balance druid gentlemen gone feral to try his hand [paw?] at tanking. I joined him on a couple of heroic runs as a trial [Utgarde Keep and Drak'theron Keep, to be specific]. He did quite well, really! The only thing that could improve him is gear, and that will come in due time. [He did pick up two epics from the aforementioned dungeons, so that was cool too.] As far as the basics, though, he seems to be doing just fine with them. We had a laugh about trigger-happy DPS on a wipe, myself included... because I should have known better, being a tank, geeeze!

I finally got my alts their Children's Week pets, but that took up about all the time I had during the day, in between running around doing things here. Didn't even get to my fishing daily, QQ.

Bedtime!

Children's Week continues

It's still Children's Week! I managed to get my "Matron" title on my warlock on the second day. My guildies are having some trouble with the "School of Hard Knocks" achievement I talked about in my previous post, so I guess maybe I got really lucky in getting mine finished. Alliance in my battlegroup are generally terrible with teamwork on a regular day, so... I can only imagine. I plan on not PVPing at all until this holiday is well over with, now that I've gotten my achievement out of the way... Well, actually, I guess it helps that Strand of the Ancients is my favourite battleground, and there's no part of the meta tied to it... Yet!

I'm still working on getting all of my alts their holiday pets. It's taking considerably longer than the Noblegarden bunnies took to procure, but I guess that's because it requires running around all over Azeroth and beyond, as opposed to running laps around a little starter town.

Tomorrow night I guess!

Children's Week

Children's Week is upon us, and what that means for me is another group of achievements as part of the What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been meta, in pursuit of the Violet Proto-Drake.

I was very disappointed to learn that the gorloc and wolvar orphans did not make it past the PTR. They are easily one of my favourite parts of the last expansion, and I was looking forward to having one of either race follow me around outside of Sholazar! Oh well, maybe next year.

Back on the meta: Like a lot of players, I was a little worried about the "School of Hard Knocks" achievement that required you to do a bunch of things in each pre-Wrath battleground that were honestly difficult for most classes to do on a regular pvp day, nevermind during a world-event where eleventy billion people would be fighting against their own team just to get a certain thing accomplished.

But, my worry turned out to be for naught. I actually managed to get it done within an hour, although I will admit the Alterac tower cap was basically dumb luck on my part. My team and the Horde's team were busy killing each other at Frostwolf, and I managed to slip by and assault one of the towers... just before getting steamrolled by a bunch of Death Knights.



Woot!

Afterwards, I parked my main and hopped on my shaman to go do the Outland orphan quests.

Mostly because I missed adorable moments like this one:



[Dornaa and her brother Jheel, reunited at Aeris Landing, Nagrand.]



I love world events so much!