All Caught Up

Tuesday night we went in and knocked off the first three bosses on heroic. The guild had killed them all before, but we hadn’t yet downed Protectors since I joined. Now that we have, I am caught up to the rest of the guild on progression.

It wasn’t pretty but hey, a kill is a kill. The most amusing part? The three of us still standing are the three who needed the achievement. Ha!

We put some good work in on Heroic Sha, too. Our best attempt had him at 9% when he enraged. Ok, he was at 11% when the rest of us died, Schriko knocked another 2% off before eating the floor. This fight, oh boy, it really makes me appreciate the mostly-stacked strategy of normal because I rarely get to stand still. We’ve got the mechanics though, we just need to fine tune.

Liberation Complete

Finally ….

Why yes, that IS a dps cloak proc you see there. We tried to get him down with me healing instead of our disc priest, but we just don’t have enough geared DPS available. I’m guessing, going into WoD, I’m going to have to either get better at ret, or find a dps spec that I *am* good at.

Although, to be fair, my Skada said I did close to 100k. The log that was posted says I did 113k. BUT … my game froze partway through phase 1, and I had to alt-F4 and reload. So maybe I did better than I thought. Ewwww look at the misses. I swapped in my shiny new trinket before the fight and it dropped my expertise. I did reforge afterwards so it’s all capped again, but obviously that did hurt me. Dang, how did Stick do twice my DPS in the opening of the fight? His Divine Storm … and of course he logged out in prot spec again so I can’t armory stalk him. Dangit. :p

Ok, ok … sorry. Rambling about a log that you guys can’t even see. I’m done! But check THIS out …

Thursday instead of continuing our normal raid, we did a flex raid with the members of this other guild that we are thinking of doing an alliance with for Mythical raiding in WoD. Our goal, other than seeing how we all got along, was to complete the achievements for everyone. Almost everyone got their mounts that night, other than a couple people who needed different weapons on Blackfuse, and of course, me still needing Garrosh. So the kill completed the achievements for me, also.

I think he’s my favourite proto-drake model so far.

P.S Grats to my good buddies Slice and Adoe who also downed Garrosh for the first time last night. YAY! 😀

Goodbye to RaF, Yeah

Finally! Officially my RaF doesn’t end until sometime midmorning on Wednesday, but in reality, it ended yesterday. Between work and raiding, I wouldn’t have time before Wednesday to get any more done anyway. Plus, I really didn’t have more to do. I don’t want to boost all of my characters, I want to do SOME solo leveling still! So let’s take a look at how things ended up.

My last pair, Vorta and Crazbi, needed to get to at least 43 over the weekend. But as I got to thinking about it, and since I had time this weekend, I decided that getting them to Outland would guarantee that I could boost one of my pre-existing characters to 85 as well. So that’s what they did.

So here’s the tally:

On Drak, I got Wega to 78 and used the bonus levels to boost my pre-existing warrior Naeladi to 77. Sadly, since the guild kinda died and the mega-combination of six servers transformed Drak into a high-population PvP cesspool, this was kind of a waste. I moved Dyle (now Paddey) and Adryen off the server this weekend, while I still had the second account available to toss them ginvites without the help of a second person.

The majority of my work went into building up my stable on Kargath/Norgannon. The character count there is now quite impressive, although there is still much to be done.
I have a laundry list of 85s there now to level through Pandaria:
Oranis, frost mage and GM of Lemon Squares
Alestav, rogue
Vozzkaz, shaman (leveled solely from granted levels, she has an ilevel of 0 and no spec, HA)
Hunahuna, balance druid
Vorta, feral druid
Rathanos, prot paladin (pre-existing, boosted from 55-85)

PLUS since I transferred Adryen, he is 88, so he needs a couple levels. Then there’s Giska at 72, Oslee the warrior who got the leftover levels and went from 34 to 50, and Oslen the hunter who is something like 32. I did delete my level 30 priest once I transferred Dyle over.

It was fun, but … I don’t know if I’d do it again. Running two instances of WoW at once really strained my video card. (I’m on the lookout for a good deal on a better one.) Plus, since it is a limited-time deal, I felt obligated to spend my free time working on getting as many levels as I could. I wanted a zhevra, and I wanted to have every class at 85 that I didn’t already have. Mission accomplished on both of those counts. And really, since I was changing servers, it came at a good time, because I could build up my alt army there.

Oh yeah! Side bonus … my personal guild Lemon Squares went from level 1 to 10 because of this project! With some help from Trout’s level 90 priest and a little from Slice as well.

Better Than a Love Rocket

I have mixed feelings about the Big Love Rocket. On the one hand, it’s really super annoying that the drop rate of this is sooooooooooooooooooooooo much worse than that of other holiday mounts. I had multiple toons with Brewfest mounts or the Headless Horseman’s mount long before they went account-bound. Remember the year the Horse dropped like candy? I think I had it on all five of my max level Alliance. But THIS thing … argh!!!

On the other hand, since I have all of those others, I ignore those holidays. Since pretty much everyone and their dog still wants this one, the queue times to get a group for the apothecaries are negligible. Like, I’m talking anywhere from 2-8 minutes …. as a DPS. So even with 10 nineties lining up each night to try for one, it’s only taking me an hour to get them all done (there are tanks and healers mixed in with instaqueues).

Which brings me to my main rant. Even more annoying than the low drop rate. Healers who aren’t healing. They may or may not have a healing spec, but even if they do, they aren’t in it. I stopped queueing as tank on my two least geared tanks because wtf? I have like 410k health, people. I KNOW this thing is easy, but the boomkin who did 30k dps while I nearly died would have been far more effective actually healing me. The first time I queued as dps instead, the tank we got was level 89. Thank the Light the healer we got for that run was actually in a healing spec. It’s a difference of 5 minutes, people! If you’re too lazy to wait 5 minutes in queue as dps, gtfo.

So, to make up for the frustrations of the holiday, I bought this on the AH.

I had a heck of a lot of fun zooming around Stormwind. I haven’t tried picking herbs from it yet. Maybe this weekend … although I need to finish my RaF this weekend, it ends in less than a week! Next week I’ll post a recap of everyone that I leveled.