Day Twenty Three - 29 August 2010

I've discovered that taking screen shots isn't easy. At first. I just was forgetting. then I discovered that each of my computers uses a slightly different key sequence. I'd need to double check what I was doing, adding a delay and resulting in lousy shots. When I get the desktop stable, I'm sure it'll improve.

So I knew I had some comfortable time today. I could run a random LFD. If I got Stocks, at least it would be quick. I wanted to run any of the others. It gave me the Scarlet Monastery Graveyard. We went straight to the final boss and nothing dropped for me:

I lost the greed roll on the Headguard

So that was nice and fast. The Tumultuous Necklace of the Bear dropped from the satchel of goodies. Just the enchantment I wanted!

With that done, I decided I'd like to select Razerfen Kraul. I had to wait a few minutes, but then we got going. Things were going smoothly. The first three bosses succumbed to our might. Overlord Ramtusk dropped just what I wanted: Tusken Helm!We moved on and were getting close to the next boss when my laptop went dark. It's a strange problem and only rebooting seemed to fix it.I'm sorry I left my group in the lurch like that, but I suppose they got another tank before too long. By this time I was just short of level 31 and I had my interest soured by the cranky laptop, so I took a break.

Later I got set up on the good laptop and got threat-plates and some other addons all set up. It was time to run Gnomeregan. The party was looking for XP and was perfectly happy to hunt down every boss. We shared quests and took off. I felt we did fine. The instance isn't easy to navigate through, but we found Grubbis easily enough and nobody got trapped in the explosions. We got to the room we knew had a boss, but couldn't spot him, "Vicious Fallout" just doesn't look like a boss, but we figured it out when the blue dagger popped up. Time to move on.

I didn't have problems with threat or runners, but I was burning through the mana. I had to drink twice and uses a mana potion twice to keep things going. After the third boss, we knew finding the fourth would be tricky, but one party member volunteered and led us down with some fancy jumping. No one misjumped and we got to the Crowd Pummeler. We knew exactly where to go next. Stopping just short of the final boss, his trash defenders line up in a very different way. These guys didn't look like they were wandering around, but instead were resting until released. One party member thought it looked scary and I agreed. They were rather intimidating, but fell quickly enough. Actually, so did Thermaplug. He dropped his shield and I won that. I also got the grime encrusted ring, but folks left before I could convince anyone to run back to the Sparklematic with me. Oh well, I can use another run.

I turned in my completed quests, including the one that gave me Dual Reinforced Leggings. I like upgrades, but I am not a fan of the metal bikini look. I cry!

The Metal Bikini

I realized two other quests required me to return to the part just outside of the Instance to finish (Techbot's brain and the Phial thing) They were surprisingly easy. Still, I will need to return inside to clean the ring.

I celebrated by running Arathi Basin twice, but Alliance still failed to win! Grumble, grumble.

All those quest turn ins and the PvP gave me the XP boost I needed to ding level 32. It was a busy day.

Entering the 30-39 bracket

Razorfen Kraul
I was sketching out a plan for my next few sessions with Kallixta. On the list included upgrading her equipment, either through quests or dungeons. Despite already running RFK once, I noticed on Cassandri's Razorfen Kraul guide that I had missed optional bosses, quests, and loots. I'll need to go back.

• There is a quest chain that starts at the Thousand Needles great lift and requires a run to Feralas, kill the final boss of RFK and yields a nice blue.
• There is a quest from Ratchet, but it's probably not worth a special run for itself. I may want to go to Ratchet anyway, but not just for this quest.
• There are a pair of quests that start inside the instance, but after the final boss. One is an escort quest back to the beginning. The other just requires a item return, but it's easy to overlook.
• Possibly drops include a mail head piece (Tusken Helm), a necklace, a ring and bracers.

Leveling
Besides RFK, I'll be visiting Gnomer and its tasty rewards. I don't yet know if I want to repeat visits to these two dungeons or instead just level with quests until SM opens up to me. According to the strategy I've been following, I'll respec at level 30 to full protection.

PvP
My earlier visit to the AB Quartermaster got me thinking a bit deeper about how to spend some honor points. In particular, I think the Caretaker's Cloak might be a good investment since any such blue drop in an instance would have way too much competition. The Arathi Basin trinket would be good if I includes its usage in a macro. Otherwise I'll forget it too often, probably.

Day Seventeen - 16 August 2010

I want to overcome my worries over logging on for a couple hours on a week night. Too many lowbie dungeons take too much time that I'm afraid to push the Random Dungeon button without knowing I've a few hours of uninterrupted time.

After queuing for BFD for several minutes without seeing anyone else in the queue, I did it anyway, switching to random. Razorfen Kraul popped right away.

The healer was another Paladin that didn't talk or bless. I did all the initial buffs. We had a Drainei shaman, a gnome warrior and a warlock. The first encounter didn't go well. Instead of just two, runners gathered more and soon there were ten dead bodies, one of which was Kallixta. I don't think I received a single heal except for the health potion I drank. I whispered to the paladin, trying not to make a big deal of it. He still said nothing and didn't even rez me. It took the shaman to do that.

We continued to struggle with runners that wanted to gather more adds, but no fight got quite as hairy as the first one. And the healing paladin would only select need, so we kicked him after the first boss. We were doing fine with only four (and the shaman healing), and the new healer showed up sometime during the second boss! Welcome to the party.

We were enjoying ourselves after that, despite the difficulty in runners. If I tried to keep something back to hit runners, I'd lose aggro to the shaman! I passed on most stuff. I won a chest on a /roll, lost the Corpsemaker - Two-Hand Axe to the warrior, and maybe the shield Heart of Agamaggan, too. All I got was cloth, gray junk, my satchel and level 27. Oh, and An achievement

The satchel yielded Earthbound Handgrips of the Soldier

With a bit of time after the instance, I grabbed the Iron Ore Aldonza had picked up and leveled Mining to 154. One skillup short of Smelting Gold!

With the new Iron Bars and some plans picked up cheap, I produced 7 Green Iron items that might show some return. My Blacksmithing is now 163.

I really need to do BFD before it rolls off.