Consolation Prize

So, Monday night we killed the Paragons quick then had all night to poke Garrosh. Poking literally, as we don’t have enough dps to do it with 3 healers, so I went ret. Man, I’m telling you … melee is a lot of fun, but it is also a lot of WORK. My wrist hurt at the end of the night. We had some good pulls and some bad pulls, with the best one getting him to the final phase but not handling the mind controls well enough. Close but … not close enough.

Last night at the beginning of the night I didn’t even want to raid. I was cold, and tired, and very much de-motivated after not getting Garrosh down the night before. I died like an idiot to the swirl thing on Immerseus. After that, however, things got better. I got a ret chest off him, and a strength belt off of the Protectors. Then since we had geared up some since the week before and had everyone present, we set Norushen to heroic.

On heroic, there are four orbs instead of two. So with twice the number of people going in, the number of adds ramps up pretty quickly. Toss in having a healer go in as well, and remember this is only 10 player, and it gets pretty intense in the first part of the fight. I used all of my cooldowns multiple times each attempt, with the low mana warning persistently beeping at me. The berserk timer is so tight that if any one dps accidentally soaks an orb, that lost dps is enough to throw it off. We had wipes at 8% and another at just 3 million health before getting it all put together perfectly.

I know it sounds terrible to call a heroic kill a consolation prize, but it feels weird getting one before killing the final boss. It feels like I don’t quite belong there, ya know? I know I do, but still. Anyway, he dropped heroic bracers for me, which I needed badly as I was still wearing ToT bracers. I got a ring and the mace off shaman later, so I think my healing set is all at least normal 10 man gear now, minus trinks. Yeah, I got the three slots that I really needed all in one night. PLUS like four things for my ret set …. Garrosh better look out.

Outland Again

So, after my last RaF pair finished on Friday, I made a new set. I learned a few things on the previous run which have made this one go faster … so much faster that Alestav and his buddy Edgabran rode through the Dark Portal last night.

My plan is to have them fully leveled sometime Sunday and be working on the next pair. I’d like to get two more pairs done before my time is up late next month.

I don’t do the usual multiboxing strategy of having both characters act in tandem. Could I? Probably. But I’m too lazy to set it up. I have one character handle the killing while the other is on follow. When the second character needs to pick up/hand in quests or loot quest items, I tab over to his window. It may be less elegant than true multiboxing, but it requires no setup other than a convenient ‘follow’ keybind. With this in mind, here are the things I have learned to make leveling go faster:

1. Use a pet class as your main questing dude, i.e. warlock or hunter. It makes no difference whether the character is on the main account or the RaF account. And no, frost mages don’t count. I already tried that with Oranis. Sure it’s doable, but the pet doesn’t tank, so there’s a lot of downtime. He had to port to town often to keep up on his first aid training. Lesson learned.

2. Aside from the obvious ‘wear as many heirlooms as possible’, you should also make sure to log out in an inn. That rest xp is very much worth it!

3. Don’t be afraid to skip quests! Some, like the one to pick Banshee’s Bells in Eastern Plaguelands, just take too long when you have to pick up so many items on each character. For fastest leveling, kill x things are the easiest and fastest to complete. If you’re on a quest that a lot of other people are on and everything is dead, just move on to another. You level so fast you can often skip ahead to the next hub after doing only one or two quests at your current spot.

4. Move to the next zone as soon as you can. You’ll get more xp by doing level-appropriate quests, and with full heirlooms there will be no issues with having to kill yellow or even orange mobs.

I think that’s about it. I’ve been keeping up with 10 levels per day on this pair pretty easily, without playing them on Tuesday because it was raid night.

I have everything on this server now except for druid and shaman. I think. Let me count … DK, Lock, 2 paladins (because of transferring Van), hunter, warrior, priest, mage, rogue, monk … yeah. Factor in the xp transfer from the characters on the RaF account, and I might end up with another double by the time it’s all over!

Celestial Family

There. Finally finished getting the last of the celestial pets.

I never did recreate a set of teams for the group of tamers that had Wrathion in it. I never had enough humanoids left after beating him to also beat Yu’la, so I have always skipped the tourney on the weeks that his group of tamers is up.

I spent a good part of the weekend mining ore so I could gem and enchant my DPS set, crappy though it may be. There are some fights where we need one of the healers to DPS, and of course none of us really wants to or is good at it. So I’m going to give it a try. I’ve studied the stat priorities, the best use of talents, and the ‘rotation’ (although of course it’s a priority system rather than a strict rotation, which is pretty standard these days). Tonight we have the full raid time just on Garrosh, so hopefully we’ll get him.

In other news, I finished the RAF pair I was working on. Oranis is back to bank alting for now, mostly naked with his heirlooms stripped off and sent to the new lock. The guild hit level 5, partly due to the help of Trout’s belf priest Bartok, who hit 90 over the weekend. So the new group is an undead rogue named Alestav for the main account, and a lock to power through the quests because locks are OP. They are already up to level 38.

One last shot here, to show why I love both Kargath and my new computer. I never saw numbers anywhere near as good as these on any other server (for the lat) or on my old computer (for the fps).

Dragon Caravan

So, I’ve almost come to the end of the RAF journey with my second pair, my bank alt Oranis and his rogue girlfriend Ilieda on Kargath. Over the course of their adventure, the Lemon Squares guild has hit level 4. Maybe I should finally get around to designing a tabard for it.

They headed out to Uldum on Sunday. Since the second account is pretty much only going to be used for RAF and then deactivated, I have not bought any flying for the character. I probably could have gotten away with not buying any riding at all, but I did because there are times when she needs to ride somewhere alone. But I skipped the flying. So she goes everywhere on the back of the Sandstone Drake. Well, when we went to join Adarrah’s caravan, I didn’t shift out of dragon form, assuming it would automatically ‘dismount’ me when I clicked on The Lady. So I clicked, and the caravan started moving, and there I was …

Interesting, well, I guess I’ll just head to the back of the wagon.

Sorry there, troll, I sort of take up more than my fair share of the space in this form. Ohai Budd! How’s it going, dude?

Um, yeah, dragons don’t really have a /rude emote so … just pretend that this is a glare, ok? Thanks.

Oh, Adarrah, I just LOVE the smell of that shampoo. You must tell me what it is! This is way more important than the fact that we are in a cage, trust me.

Yeah, so …

in other news!

We cleared to Garrosh last night and I got to at least get some attempts in on him. Here we are all in our Mr. Smite disguise with some D.I.S.C.O. and we also had an ogre pinata and it was almost but not quite like having Arv around.

We didn’t get him, but that’s ok. I’m not the only one new to the raid, so we had some behind on gear issues and of course just some learning curve issues because hey … this is not LFR and it is Garrosh! Not some scrub. I would honestly be disappointed if it didn’t take some work. So maybe this week. I’m having a good time anyway. It’s clear that this group has a solid core of people that enjoy raiding with each other and are truly friends, and that is way more important to me than where they are in progression.