Adventures in Sholazar

Any of you that are regular readers, know that I’ve had some good times in Sholazar Basin. It should  come as no surprise, then, that Van trotted off to River’s Heart as soon as he hit 76, to do the Oracles/Frenzyheart questline. I still think it is one of the best questlines in the game. Who could get tired of moments like this?

The only catch is, when you get to the end of the chain, you’re faced with the group quest A Hero’s Burden. I’m sure anyone who played in Wrath remembers the battle in the cave with the lich, and the two frozen Oracle and Frenzyheart that you had helped during the questline, now held captive. I still feel bad having to choose only one to save. I mean yeah, the puppy-men are bullies and jerks, but … well, if you’ve taken care of Kekek the Wolvar Orphan during Children’s Week (and actually read the quests and paid attention to the things he says), then you know there’s more to the story and they have feelings just like anyone else does.

Oops, I kinda got off on a tangent there. Anyway … once Van hit the end of the questline, I looked around and … there was exactly one other guild member on and he was level 60-something and has nothing higher level. Ok, well, you know what? I’m not some pansy-ass cloth-wearing sissy. I’m an unkillable holy paladin! If you can run me out of mana … maybe then you will win. If not? Hah. Good luck. So I soloed it.

Once that’s done, you can start right away on the first round of dailies. It took five days including that one to get to revered so I could buy eggs. What? You KNOW I collect pets and mounts on pretty much every character I spend more than five minutes on. So last night I was on the last round of those, taking my best buddy Lafoo around to collect shinies for the shrine, when C’Thun’s voice suddenly blasts out of the speakers “You Will Die” … I check the NPC-Scan thingy that has popped up on my screen and … squeeeeeeeee! King Krush! Quick … log out!!

I was so afraid someone else would nab him while Juna flew over from Dalaran. She was the first toon I leveled in Wrath and doesn’t have the super shortcut to Sholazar that all my others have, because she (naturally) turned in the breadcrumb quest that gets you there. le sigh. At least she has 310 flight thanks to all those holidays. But as I’m flying over Wintergrasp, the battle starts! Sonofa ….!!! So I get dismounted and I’m fretting the whole time I am floating on a parachute over the edge of Sholazar into Borean Tundra. But … I eventually get back to Rainspeaker Canopy and there he is … big and green and deadly. He did kill me on the first try.  He’s immune to traps and he has a fear, just like King Dred. But I was determined. I came back and resisted the urge to start taming immediately, sitting down and getting back to full health before trying again. I had to time it so I began the channel right after the fear wore off, so it could complete before he got off another one.

And one more shot from the other side because Juna is so pretty.

Not from Sholazar but related … Van finished the night off by doing Explore Northrend so he could get the tabard and get his 10 Tabards achievement. He did some fishing and archaeology while he was at it. And, of course, one other thing I always do is keep an eye out for rares. So when I flew over the Crater of Mam’toth, I wasn’t all that surprised to see Gondria pacing along the wall. Juna already has him, so I asked in guild if anyone had a hunter that needed him. Arv did, so he hopped toons and I used Have Group Will Travel to bring him directly to the spot. I love that perk so much.

Grats Arv! That’s one pretty cat. It felt good to find him a home instead of killing him. Not that I would have hesitated had anyone not needed him … I could always use the 20g, stack of cloth, and BoE blue that he drops. But getting someone a new pet is always preferable. 😀

My Epic Dress

Time spent leveling to 20 to train archaeology ~ a few hours

Initial training ~ 95 copper

Hours spent digging in the dirt ~ trust me, you don’t wanna know

Getting something cool from archaeology AND at the proper level to equip it? ~ totally worth the mind-numbing repetitive digging

Just look at the stats on this baby! Ilevel 78?! As a point of reference, the set of blues that DKs leave their starting zone in are ilevel 70. Yeah … this is THAT good. It will last all the way through the Outland levels.

Tel immediately made fun of me for wearing cloth, but there is almost no intellect plate to be had before Outlands. And that stat increase is so huge … my last piece had 15stam, 15int, 15spirit. The best part after the 41 int is the awesome haste. With Judgement up, my Holy Light cast time is 2.1s. It gets all the way down to 2s with a boomkin or spriest in the group. (Don’t get me started on the disc priests queueing as dps … that’s a rant I don’t have time for today. )

Horseys! and a title

Lots of pally playtime over the weekend. Right about level 37 or so I hit exalted with Undercity and headed over to Brill to buy horses. Of course, it wasn’t long before I hit 40 and was running back there to buy fast riding and even cooler looking horses. I’m assuming I got a discount on riding since I’m exalted with them.

The undead warhorses have always been my favorite mounts in the game, with the headless horseman’s mount and the pally chargers coming in close as well. Here, have another shot just because they’re so awesome.

As I’ve gotten into the higher level, longer lasting dungeons, it seems like my groups are having more difficulties staying together. Or maybe the moron quotient just increases exponentially on weekends. The theme this weekend was jerky tanks. In the lower levels it was idiot dps.

One group, the tank decided that roleplaying was more important than actually doing the dungeon. That’s fine if you have other people with you that want to do that, but please, don’t use LFD for that. Once she finally did tank it, she skipped a boss, which was fine with me by that time. She went on the ignore list.*

In at least two other groups, tanks either dc’d or just plain left, and I ended up 3-manning large sections of Uldaman and Scholomance with a hunter and either a mage or a lock. We’d gone through two tanks already in each one of those groups, so we said ‘screw it, pet tank the trash.’ Beacon one pet, heal the other and spot heal the owners … no problem. We were actually going to 3 man Archaedes, but were awarded a new tank and dps just before we got to him.

And I STILL haven’t gotten a tauren pally tank that knew what he was doing.

I took a break to heal a heroic when Kaify whispered me that he was geared enough for one and wanted me to run one with him. We picked up two more dps and … proceeded to wait in queue for 20 mins. We got a really squishy bear that didn’t mark or use CC, who left after the first boss didn’t drop the polearm. Peachy. The replacement bear zoned in, I asked if we could please kill the other Captain because Kaify had the quest, he responded ‘you can get it next time’ and proceeded to speed pull the rest of the place. Le sigh.

So, to break up the dungeon running and also gather ore to level my JC, I hit up some dig sites between runs. At archaeology skill of 90, my first rare showed up in my book. Really? That fast? Well … I’m not complaining. I got this achievement and title before I even got the achievement for completing 10 unique commons.

Tomorrow I’ll have a raid update. I left a screenshot at home. >.>

*Disclaimer: I have nothing against RP. I played on an RP server and do a little myself on occasion.

My Dirty Little Secret 2

Remember my dirty little secret?  He started as prot, leveled through a portion of Ghostlands, tanked RFC once, and got shelved at level 20.  He got ignored for quite some time, as happens to most alts on occasion, but I’ve dug him back out. And changed his spec. lol.

Considering that Kerick is holy/holy, it should come as no surprise that Van went holy as well. He’s leveling almost completely through LFD, supplemented by some exploration, mining, and archaeology. Here he is around level 26ish.

Some of the people in LFD are … well … interesting. I’ve lost count of the number of wipes caused by pet  classes not dismissing their pets before we jump down somewhere. It happened multiple times in Wailing Caverns and Gnomeregan.

At the end of Gnomer once, a spirit/stamina ring dropped. It was needed on by me, the warrior tank, and the hunter. Really? I can give the warrior a half pass given that the stamina was probably greater than what he was wearing and is actually useful to him, but the hunter? And of course, the hunter won it.

In Maraudon, a tauren pally tank needed on an intellect/spirit shield. I was nice, I simply stated in party chat “That’s a healer shield” and when he won it he nicely handed it over, but still …. he was bad on top of it. To be fair, he did state up front that he hadn’t been there before, but … the enh shaman really tanked the place. There was one hairy moment where the warlock’s imp wasn’t dismissed on a jump and pulled a ton of demons. The shaman had run ahead and pulled something else, so I had to run back and forth between him and the group, keeping everyone up. Fun!

What is with hunters? Ok, it’s not always hunters, but they almost invariably do this. I even had one hunter in SM:Library boast that “I could probably solo this place” … well, why the hell don’t you so that we don’t have to put up with you? IF YOU ARE NOT THE TANK, DON’T EFFING PULL! I cannot emphasize that enough. I told one guy in SFK that if he wanted to tank, he should have queued as the tank. The actual tank and I stood back and watched. I didn’t heal him.

Halfway through, the tank had to leave (we were on our third hunter by then) and the one we got was a tauren pally. (Side note: I have not gotten a good tauren pally tank yet. Every single one has sucked.) In the room before the gargoyles, the tank wins the roll on a green 2H sword … and promptly equips it and proceeds to tank the rest of the instance with that instead of  sword and board. Care to guess what Lord Godfrey does to block tanks who don’t wear a shield?

One of the more interesting groups was when I zoned into an SM:Graveyard and it took me a couple of pulls to realize that the guy in the cloth heirlooms was actually the tank. I mean, he was an orc with a shield and caster ‘looms, so I just assumed he was an ele shaman, and the big cow in the plate heirlooms and a 2H sword was another ret tank. Nope! The dude in the robe is a warrior. I stay silent while the other two dps make rude comments about the tank in a dress. (The tauren was with him.) And you know what? He was one of the best tanks I have healed so far. He knew what he was doing and it showed. I requeued with him and his pally and we did Gnomer too. Good times.

Would I tank in cloth heirlooms? No. I’m not even healing in my plate dps heirlooms. As soon as I changed specs, I mailed them off to my baby femtaur warrior and bought whatever pieces I could get off the AH to fill my slots with spirit or intellect. But hey, it worked for this guy, and if he values the extra xp that much, I say go for it.

Now at level 33 I look like this … pally in a dress.

Wait … ugh. Look how my hair clashes with my robe? AWFUL! So, in the grand tradition of belf culture and vanity, I visited the salon.

Much better!