Guild Friendship

I think I've been reading Gevlon too much and been too quick to measure everything. I was reminded of how much I'll pay for FUN! There are some intangibles that could be measured, but I won't. Doing a favor for a friend only cost me a small bit of time and when he did the reverse, I got paid back much more than my contribution. How much did it cost him? Some time, for sure, but he's also taught me and trained me, so when I end up in a Guild Run with him, I'll be a better player. I suppose he could measure the return in value, but I doubt he does. He just did a Guildie a favor and shrugs. But it really means a lot to me.

I had spent Sunday working through the Love Fool requirements, including a trip to Arathi Basin. I mentioned before I wanted to actually contribute and maybe finally manage an Arathi Basin Victory. The starting strategy while awaiting the gates to open suggested an early Blacksmith grab, which was fine with me. So I followed the few that went that direction. There was a short battle and suddenly we had it! In the lull that followed I dropped my fool, ran my pity macro and I Pitied The Fool was mine! Alliance still lost in the end. Still, I don't think I embarassed myself too badly. I did manage my share of HKs.

Now all that was left was to get the Red Roses. A fresh 85 fellow guildie also had a few bits left to finish. I made a couple level 1 Hordies for him to shower with rose petals, but I couldn't easily make the Orc Death Knight he needed to finish. Then we grouped up to run a dungeon. We got another guildie to join us to Grim Batol where we saw the Roses drop. I lost on the roll. We had a gogogo Hunter with us who would annoying as all heck, but we kept good practice of using crowd control even where we might not have needed it. We might have been a little slow, but we were methodical and made it to the final boss without too much trouble. First try on Erudax was a wipe though. I didn't get to the safe zone of the vortex quickly enough. The hunter dropped and we noticed despite instructions, he wasn't hitting the Faceless Guardian adds. We got another guildie to finish for us and this time I managed to find the right places and I did focus damage on the adds. With all the movement, I'm sure my DPS was lousy, but still, we completed Grim Batol.

My Guildie was willing to help me finish my run for the roses before returning to complete his holiday achievements and switched to an alt. I hadn't realized until then just who his alt was. Well, I knew, but wasn't really reminded until the switch. He was one of the tanks in the prior day's Black Temple run and when he joined a queue, there was zero wait for anything to pop! I thought healers were the critical link in Cata dungeons, but not on Sunday. While Grim Batol had been slow and methodical, we zipped through Lost City of Tol'Vir. 

A real blizzard moved in and while we didn't lose power, we did have a few flickers to the lights. Unfortunately, my laptop has ZERO battery support, so the least flicker meant I was rebooting. I'm glad my Guildie was patient with me and the pugs were patient, too. Then I realized part of that when one puggie asks "So what's such a well geared tank doing slumming in the normal dungeons?" He was there helping me, thank you, thank you! OMG, average equipped gear score of 351? I guess I can understand the PUGs patience better.

While he didn't need it, he reminded the Pug about teamwork, assigning CC duties and teaching us what we'll need to do. He often admitted he knew the heroic version of bosses and politely asked for information from others about differences. When items dropped, folks asked and received permission to need on off-spec items. It was a good experience all around.

After a Halls of Origination run, we were told that the roses don't drop from all cataclysm dungeons, but only Grim Batol and Stonecore. So we next went to Stonecore. We actually had a wipe on trash when we aggro'd three patrolling packs together, but that settled us down to take the dungeon seriously. My experience said everything else flowed pretty smoothly after that. Even when we had one other accidently pull, we were never in danger. It just was a little messy.

By this time, I was way late for getting to bed. I worried my friend wouldn't have the time to finish his own holiday, but he managed some how. Not only did I get my Red Roses and Fool For Love achievements, but a couple new dungeons and some good drops! Excellent!

Martuska, Laptops and Foolish Love

I've mentioned my family computer situation before in Communal Laptops. At that time, we had 3 laptops and 2 desktops. 5 computers? We didn't know how good we had it. Now I dream of 5 computers in the house. Luxury!

The newest laptop went with Syylia to Korea. My older boy's laptop died. It was only a couple years old, but a bad video card burned out the motherboard and the thing is totaled. The remaining laptop is ancient and decrepid, but it's the only thing running WOW right now! Actually, I could probably installed WOW on my older boy's desktop, but he needs that for his college classes and it's inconvenient. The other desktop is even older and needs a video card upgrade to run WOW. It ran fine before 4.0.1, but won't now.
Meanwhile, the hinge on the remaining laptop is broken and the battery won't hold a charge. It also has a hard drive with a loud and annoying whine, but it works. I haven't installed all the addons I had before, but (and this is the important part) it works.

Obviously I should just get a new laptop, but we've a few other expenses with higher priority. I can live with it. All this has resulted in my neglect in playing and I was resigning myself to failing to finish the Fool For Love holiday achievements on Martuska and thus flunking Strange Trip completely this year. I know Syylia was resigned to that. Mentally I knew it would happen, but then this weekend arrived and I had some time. Could I do it? Let's see what I had left... I only needed two achievements: Red, Red Rose and Pity the Fool. How hard can that be? That's one dungeon run and some dips into PvP, right?

Saturday morning I ran some quests and realized the critical path was collecting enough Love Tokens to purchase the Love Fools. Granted, if I ran short, I might be able to find someone else with one, but that's where I started. A few quick dailies and I had the Love Tokens to buy two and a half Love Fools. Good enough. I could finish it tomorrow. I went ahead and pitied my two purchased in Wintergrasp and Gurubashi Arena. Nobody was around for these, but that wouldn't be the case for Arathi Basin. I needed to check out my PvP set.

I only dabble in PvP. I've more experience with it on Kallixta, but I was doing this on my mage. I'm still horrible, but I wanted to contribute, not just join the BG, run my pity macro and get out and to do that, I wanted something other than my PVE gear. Luckily for me, Psynister and Cynwise recently wrote pieces on Planning for PvP. Cynwise's Gearing Strategy outline was perfectly applicable for any class and for my purposes, I only needed to look at step one "Get the crafted pieces made as soon as you can"
Well, I'm a tailor and I already had most of the Frostsavage Battlegear and could craft a few Fireweave/Emberfire pieces, too. One visit to the Auction House later and I had over 400 resilience without hurting my other stats too much. This should mean that I could NOT excuse excretable performance on my gear.

At this point it was Saturday evening and the guild was running a Black Temple raid. This would be a low pressure raid and something I missed during Burning Crusade as I hadn't gotten to level 50, nevermind a raid-worthy 70. I had one disconnect, which punted me back to the beginning and I had to navigate my way back to the group, but we managed to Kill Illidan without much trouble. The whole run reminded me of my real goal, getting Kallixta up and raiding. But this weekend was still keeping an eye on the short-term goal of making a fool of myself for love.

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.

Day Twenty Two - 28 August 2010

I had a plan, really.

The plan was to run Arathi Basin on this Call to Arms weekend. And I did. Three games, all lost to the Horde. One game I only joined for the last 3 minutes or so. What I didn't anticipate was that I'd ding level 30 after the third one!

And I have diminished interest in being at the bottom of a bracket.

I considered how to spend some of my 800 honor points, but nothing struck me as critical, so I'll wait a bit.

I took the opportunity to do some travelling and pick up some more flight paths. I grabbed the green bang in Duskwood, the Rebel Camp and then switched to Theramore. I entered the Barrens and remembered that I had the shard from Wailing Caverns. So I rode to Ratchet and picked up that flight path, rode the boat to Booty Bay and grabbed that one. I remembered to pick up a few recipes and parrots for Aldonza to sell before riding the boat back to Ratchet and do the next step in the sharding quest chain. The final step required a flight to Darnassus, so first I rode through the Stonetalon Mountains and picked up the flight path at Stonetalon Peak. That's when I flew to Darnassus to turn in the final quest.

My travel through the Barrens provided an opportunity for a couple nice screen shots, one above the Crossroads and the other just a bit lower down that peak to the Shrine of the Fallen Warrior.

Above the Crossroads

Shrine of the Fallen Warrior

I had some trouble with the laptop and a few other distractions, so I hesitated running an instance. I knew something would pop up. Hopefully tomorrow!

Day Twenty One - 27 August 2010

I was Called To Arms to the Arathi Basin this weekend. Being level 29, it all seemed like destiny was demanding it. We won on the first try and the Honor just flooded in.

Not that I have plans on spending it immediately. I'll probably pick up another trinket as that second empty slot is burning a hole in my pocket... so to speak. Do other folks have this yearning to see slots filled? Leaving my tabard and shirt empty gives me an ache, although not one big enough to do anything about it.

Now with Vertiferrous Fluoride!

I also enjoy seeing all these blues! When I was levelling Martuska, I know I never had many. It might be a residual effect from running around at level 80 and trying to improve my gear score, but on Kallixta, overgearing is just funny. It tickles something.

So I had another empty slot, head, that I knew was there, but was attempting to ignore. After running AB, I decided to do something with all my accumulated cheap iron that Aldonza had been picking up at 25% normal price. I cranked out some green iron items to 170 and then went to buy whatever new recipes were on offer. Green Iron Helm? Well... let's just jump up and down. We will pretend I knew that was coming all along. Oh and those Green Iron bracers I was making to level Blacksmithing just happen to be an improvement?

So I stopped for a minute to do research, just in case I was missing something important. I also checked the Auction House for usable recipes. It just so happened that Shining Silver Breastplate was sitting there with less than 2 hours remaining and while its buyout price was over 10 gold, the bid was only 2. Fine, I'll put in a bid. Since I had jumped on Kallixta without giving Aldonza a peek at the Auction House, I decided I could check on smithing supplies. I grabbed some more cheap stone and iron bars and lesser moonstones. Because of my haphazard planning, I must have made 6 trips from the AH to the forge in the Dwarf Quarter. Is there a closer forge? When I returned to the AH, someone had bumped the price of the Breastplate, but it was down to less than 30 minutes now. With some patience, discrete purchasing and a final bid, I got the recipe for around 3 gold.

After spending all this gold, I felt a horrible spendthrift, but looking at my cash reserves, I realized that I was still doing fine. Aldonza has been making plenty of money plus while the leveling blacksmithing is costing money, it's nowhere near as expensive as expected. Those Golden Rods in particular provided some nice profit.

So while tonight only witnessed Arathi Basin runs, I did improved my wrist slot and got my first helm and I levelled my Blacksmithing to 180.

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 Nineteen - 25 August 2010

Playing without a Plan


I logged onto Kallixta without a plan. I hadn't thought past my previous plan, so having completed BFD and Stocks, I didn't know what to do.

Well, I had some ideas. I needed to finish up the Stockade Riots questline. I had turned in Thredd's Head, but still needed a couple of Clara's Fresh Apples for the next step. Having a mount at this level makes this whole business of dashing around (and outside of) Stormwind so much simpler. It's still a bit of a pain having to run up and down the halls of the keep. I remember the pain of soloing these two as a Mage and I'm so happy being a Paladin on occasions like this. It was also brought home just how long ago it was that I did this as Martuska. I'm sure it wasn't the King that gave me the final blue reward. Was it his son?

With the new ring

That was some easy XP and nice reward for a few minutes of running around. It sparked a memory of a prior plan to gathering quests for upcoming instances. In particular, there are several quests for Gnomeregan and at least one requires getting the first punch card prior to the instance itself. So, I have a fresh plan for the next few minutes!

The dash across western Dun Morogh by horse meant I could finish Explore Dun Morogh. Soloing my way through the first hall of Gnomer was simple and I got a Yellow Punch Card in no time at all.

Picking up the Achievement as a side effect reminded me of another minor plan. By doing all of these Dungeons and not quests, I hadn't been collecting flight paths. I had entered the Wetlands before to mine Incendite Ore, but never made the long trek to Menethil Harbor. By horse it wasn't that painful. I rode the boat to Theramore and picked up the green arrow there. I even waited for the boat to Northrend before remembering that Kallixta is on a Vanilla account and aborted that trip.

After another long ride, I made it to Refuge Point in Arathi Highlands for the flight path there. Seeing the Quartermaster made me check my Honor Point total and pencil in some PvP time onto my sketchy plan. Since I couldn't immediately buy a trinket to fill my last slot, I postponed any purchase at this time.

I next headed for Southshore and the small accumulation of discovery XP actually got me to ding 29!

With Southshore's flight path, I was uncertain of my next move. I wasn't ready for more riding to someplace else when I remembered the fishing pools just off the docks. I should explain that I enjoy fishing sometimes, but usually when I can multitask. I'll watch TV and listen for the splash. I'll fish on Kallixta, but it's very much a low priority thing. Still, there were Oily Blackmouth just waiting for me and the first to get pulled flashed the Old Gnome and the Sea achievement! I emptied three pools. I wasn't sure if I could find something else to do while waiting for them to respawn.

This is when I decided to queue for Arathi Basin. The recent visit to Refuge Point made it easy to just push the PvP button and jump in. I had done some research on AB and knew as a level 29, I wanted to visit now and before I moved brackets again.

I couldn't tell you much about the Alliance team, except there were at least 3 paladins and we all were happy to buff the others with their preference. As the gates opened, I found myself the first to the Lumber Mill flag by a small margin. I still don't know what I'm supposed to do when fighting a hunter and pet, but I became very good at finding someone less than 50% health and finishing them off! I need to improve my awareness of my allies and heal some of them. I wasn't particularly good at strategic awareness, but someone would spam the /BG with suggestions and I'd run off to the suggested location and help. We won an Arathi Basin Victory and I was middle of the board in most things, too low at healing and I did have one cap, so I felt pretty good.

I was back to Southshore and the fish hadn't respawned and I didn't want to wait anymore, so I hearthed back to Stormwind. I did the sell, mail, repair stuff and realized I had some tasty clam meat to cook. The Auction house didn't have any more obvious food to cook, but I did raise my cooking enough that I thought it useful to check with the cooking recipe vendor. I bought 4 recipes I didn't know and had Lunch Lady flash.

It was nice to have several small achievements to measure an evening without a plan!