Monday With Kerick

Happy Monday. Bleh. It was a good weekend, too bad it had to end.

Friday night we were missing two people from the raid. No wait … three. Or does it only count as two? Maybe Log doesn’t actually count. hehe. Kitchen remodeling got the best of Ana and she needed to sit out. We got guildies to fill in though. We got to make Rev heal. It was pretty awesome. We cleared four with no problem. We even subbed in a rogue from the guild to pickpocket Hagara.

Saturday I alternated between WoW and Sims3 that I got for Christmas. I logged on in the afternoon to do the fishing tourney on Kale. A priest came levitating over Bittertide Lake to the pool I was fishing in and cast his line in.  I’m one of those people who will pass by a pool if someone else is already fishing in it. Maybe I should just be an asshole instead, because after that one cast I saw him teleport to Dal. Sure enough, a few seconds later the yell comes across my screen that he’s won the tourney. $#%@. Back to Sims I go.

I *almost* didn’t bother to log back in an hour later for Kerick’s turn. (The servers are on different time zones so I can do them both the same day.) Bocat probably wishes I had just kept playing Sims, because she’s been trying to win the damn thing as long as I have. Well, at least she won’t have to compete against me any longer.

Oooh, look at all the Kaluak rep I got there! I might have to start working on those dailies.

Saturday night, and our raid is once again a mess of declines. This time it’s 3 dps though, so it’s a little easier to fix than having to shuffle roles. The guildie who had tanked on Friday brought his dps shaman, the shadow priest from the night before came back, and I got Hartbane to come on his hunter. Soooooooooooo awesome to get to raid with Hart again. It did take awhile, but we eventually got Ultraxion dead.

Want lovely screenshots like this? Just let a sapper through on lootship 2.0 and you can have this view for your very own! In all seriousness though, sappers are going to be a big problem for us with no DK. Not sure how we’re going to work around that yet but I’m sure we’ll come up with something.

Hope you all had a good weekend too! All you slackers who played Star Wars and never even logged in to WoW … I’m looking at you. Bitches.

Bad Mogging

So how is everyone liking transmogrification so far? I’m finding it quite fun, and from what I’ve seen around town and at the Faire, a lot of others are, too.

Most people are using one of two methods to get a nice look.

One way is to just take some things that you like, and put them together in a nice, color-coordinated ensemble. Analogue mentioned her outfit on her blog, knowing that I took a screenshot and would likely be posting it. Well, I am happy to oblige.

Very tasteful yet attractive at the same time. Two thumbs up on that one.

Others simply put on a favorite tier set. This is a good way to ensure that your armor will all match and look great together, like Grom’s Judgement set from tier 2.

Again, nicely done. You just can’t go wrong with a complete tier set.

With a feature like this, however, you can be sure that some people will be extra, um … creative. Like this fine example …

And here we thought that the introduction of mogging meant no more clown suits. Wait .. what is that behind him? She needs some new clothes, hers seem to be missing half of their material. If you look close, I’m pretty sure my horse has his eyes closed. If this were a cartoon he’d also be holding a hoof over his face.

To make it even worse, Hart yells ‘RAINBOW KNIGHT’ every couple of minutes just for kicks. Even the shield is … well, see for yourself.

So I guess you can clearly see why I hang out with Hartbane. lol.

Old Raids, Good Times

How can you double your fun in Classic Raids? Bring two paladins of course.

Over the weekend, it was Kerick and Hartbane. I forget what I was doing at the time, but when Hart wants to do something, I’ll drop everything as long as I’m not already in a group. AQ40? Sure! I whispered Saint and got him to log over as well, figuring it would be even faster with three of us. We’re going along and Hart says something about how no reds have dropped. So of course, one drops shortly after that. And guess what?

Yeah it’s a fail screenshot but still …

Then last night, Trout had Tempest Keep on the calendar. The screenshots from that are even more fail because there aren’t any. Oops. Kerick and Paaradi took care of divine storming everything in sight in that one. I made Zari go along too. I joked about how killing all the blood elves was like having a couple dozen Fayles tanking the floor. Afterwards, Trout hopped on Elgar because he needs a belt from Gruuls, so we went there. The party at that point consisted of 2 paladins and 3 priests. I keep telling him we need to change the guild name from Crits and Giggles to Priests and Pallies.

Ok, so that’s over and I log on to Van to check my auctions, and there’s Arvash in guild chat … ‘anyone want to hit Kara or BT?’ … hellz yeah! Of course, it’s Arv, and I haven’t seen him for like a week since he was on vacation, so he coulda said let’s go PvP and I woulda said yes. No one else wanted to go, so we hit up Kara. I’m not sure but, there might not be anything in the entire game that’s more fun than a couple of paladins divine storming their way through Kara. We barely even stood still long enough to loot. Finally we stopped for a second at Barnes.

Of course, Arv couldn’t let Barnes have the spotlight all by himself, so he dropped his D.I.S.C.O.

Yes, I took multiple screenshots here. What?

We had a bit of fun in Chess. We literally used up every piece so at the end, the only two of ours that were still alive were Blackhand and the demon that I was in. I think it was like the third piece I jumped in. lol. Oh well, we won.

Afterwards we tried going to Hyjal. The raid, not the zone. We had no problems with the trash waves, but Arv hadn’t been there before, and I kinda forgot about the first boss’ Death and Decay, so since we stood him right on the piles of dead ghouls, we couldn’t see the ground and it quickly did us in. We released and ran back and got the ‘unable to zone in while an encounter is in progress’ message. So annoying. So I’m whispering Trout for advice because I know he loves Hyjal and might know what to do … and then I hear the sounds of battle nearby. I believe my exact thought was ‘What the hell could he have found down here to … oh’ so I turned around and raced down the corridor. A warlock. I jumped on them and was doing pretty good, almost had him down when I saw him get a heal. Look over my shoulder … frack. A disc priest. So I switched targets but naturally that left the lock free to do whatever, and they made short work of me. As I die, a DK on a drake comes riding up. Arv was already down when I saw the priest so .. yeah. Neither one of us claims to be good at or even like PvP so we were kind of sitting ducks. Especially in our off specs. They would have had a fight on their hands in our main specs though. Or at least would have had a hard time killing us.

Notes From the Weekend

Lazy today, so instead of breaking things into their own posts I’m just tossing stuff together here. Deal with it.

Ragnaros. Still needs to die. Sigh. We made super awesome progress … especially once we switched over to 2 healing it. Things just all go to hell in the final phase though, and having an extra healer isn’t going to solve meteors rolling through the tanks/melee. Our best attempt was … 1%. Yes really. All of my friends in other guilds were telling me how they downed Rag this week. Well … so what. We’re as close as you can get without him actually dying. It’ll happen soon enough.

Direbrew. Got Juna to 84 over the weekend and found that she could queue for it now. Woohoo! It’s probably a good thing I have recount disabled on her though. Also, despite running the boss on 8 (now 9) toons each day, the only thing I have to show for it is a couple of tankards. You’d think I could get a mount in there somewhere eh? Zari got one. Kisara got one that she already had! One funny thing happened though .. queued up on Arelin and guess who was in my group? Arv’s hunter! And we didn’t even queue together. Oh, yeah, and he got a mount.

Hartbane. Is bored already and I haven’t really been able to help entertain him since I have so many projects I’m working on. Sorry! Yo dude, roll some alts or somethin!

Dizzee and Dyle. The main reason I didn’t play with Hart much. Arv is eyeing those Direbrew trinkets, so we’ve been pushing hard through Northrend. We’re about 2/3 of the way through 77 now. Tempted to open up the Argent Tourney at 78 to boost the xp in those last two levels. Probably about time to start looking at Cata greens so I have replacements for the heirlooms once I hit 80. We’ll need an ilevel boost to queue for BRC once we get there. I’m just a few points short of Cata tailoring … my enchanting is about 15 points behind.

Rathanos.  Wrath-a-who? Yeah, um … there was this article a little over a week ago on WoW Insider about rolling a prot pally. I left a comment about how I was really tempted by the article… and something about how you can never have too many pallies or belfs … and when the author (veteran prot blogger Rhidach from Righteous Defense) replied to my comment, it totally sealed the deal. I know! I know. I already have a paladin. Um .. some paladins. Two on the same server and faction now. So??? Here he is at level 4 or 5 in the starting zone.

Yeah he didn’t even have a shield yet there. I finished getting him to level 15 yesterday. I crafted some green stuff for him to wear. I found a couple of old enchants lying around to put on a couple of his things. I reached for the LFD button … and had a total breakdown in gchat. Dude. My first toon to kill an end boss this expansion was a tank! I’m not the greatest at it, but I willingly step into raids as a tank when needed (or did before Firelands at least). Why does the prospect of tanking 5 mans freak me out so much? Especially level 15 5 mans? I mean seriously … I think I even said in chat “It’s only RFC, how bad can it be?” Except my next thought was “but what if I DON’T get RFC? WC and Deadmines are right there on the possible list too!” So yeah … I finally talked myself into it and got an RFC in progress. There were two other paladins there wearing shields. One was holy … the other wasn’t. Really? Why queue as DPS if you’re prot? They at least didn’t have RF on, so once I had aggro it was all good. But it was only like 3 pulls and the boss. Since I missed the quests because of zoning into the middle, I wasn’t down for staying around. I decided to count it as a success and get the hell out of Dodge. Small steps … with my stage fright, this is totally the way to go about it. No way am I gonna try to learn prot on one of my 85s. Hopefully Arv won’t get sick of me asking questions, because I’ll probably drive him crazy later when things get more involved and I have more to do than throw my shield and curse about the 20s cooldown on Word of Glory.