Archive for the “Achievements” Category

So last week, if you follow my twitter/facebook or just paid attention here, I got to do something I’ve been *itching* to do since Icecrown Citadel went live.

Last Wednesday was a particularly painful raid night. All sorts of things were messy/sloppy, I was annoyed we were carrying people (I was also PMSing, which may have made me way more irritable than I’d normally be). Fast forward to Thursday night, I was invited along to fill a spot in a 25-man Icecrown Citadel raid with US Horder Patrol. They only had 3 bosses left, but I didn’t mind because one of those 3 was the (dun dun duuuuuun!) Lich King!

Prior to the big bad fight though, we did hard-mode Rotface, which while it was hectic because I’d never done it before, wasn’t too bad, honestly. Anyway. We downed Rotface, then Professor Putricide (on normal mode) and then it was off to the Frozen Thone!

Learning the fight, for me, was rough. There is a LOT going on and to keep track of. However, a few attempts (and thankfully no royal eff-ups from me) we killed him! I’m now the proud owner of a shiny Kingslayer title (which is not so special, since everyone and their brother has it these days)! I was on a crazy high after that, and I totally want a chance to do the fight again.

Friday I got totally shocked though… Shadow Prophecy’s core group was all online! So what did we do? Something we don’t do normally… PROGRESSION! We killed Valithria (we’d had problems with her on Wednesday, due to sleepy healers) and moved onward to Sindragosa.

Now, you may wonder why we’re rounding out the ice wing before even touching the blood wing. The reason is simple- the mechanics of the Sindragosa fight are easier for us to work with than the Blood Princes right now. Anyway, we got a few really solid attempts in, and got her down to 24% (this is a huge improvement for us, as we were previously wiping during phases 1/2). It was incredible, actually. No one even remotely screwed up the initial ground and air phases. We’re still working the kinks out of the 3rd phase, but we can get there pretty consistently now, and I have confidence that if we go right to the frost wing tomorrow after Saurfang (instead of going to clear Fester/Rot/Putricide like normal) we can totally get her down this week. Which if it happens, will be amazingly awesome.

In other news, yesterday brought the start of the Midsummer Fire Festival. There have been a bunch of changes, which if you follow my twitter you’ll see I am totally. not. thrilled. but anyway. I’ve had 2 goals for this holiday: 1- get the scorchling pet on Binya (now impossible, thanks Blizzard!) 2- get the Frostcythe of Ahune for my mage, Étain. Of course, while the minimum level for the Brewfest boss (and I’ll guess the Valentine’s guys) was 75, Ahune’s minimum level to engage is 78. Urgh.

So while my plan had been get Étain 4 levels (from 71 to 75) and farm away, it’s not get to 78 as fast as humanly possible. Don’t get me wrong, I’m having a lot of fun playing her (who wouldn’t love playing a pink, puffball- haired gnome?!) my brain is starting to stall on going quest crazy. I’d queue for random dungeons back to back, but then I’ll burn through all my rest exp faster than I want to, and this whole process will take longer.’

Anyway, been grinding her since Saturday, and she’s now 74, with 25% more to go til 75. I figure if I can keep my momentum going, I can probably get her to 78 by sometime this weekend. Which will give me roughly 5-7 attempts on Ahune for the scythe. Which kind of sucks. Oh well. Once she hits 78, she’s going on a nice, long break for awhile.

In non-WoW news, I managed to get a Frigost beta key for Dofus this past weekend. Of course, this is pretty silly since I’m pretty sure the content of the next expansion is for 100+, and I am but a lowly little 48 Enutrof. I’ve been playing intermittenly with WoW, as kind of a break. The play styles are completely different, so it can be kind of a nice vacation for my brain. The only goal I have in that game is getting my Enu to 100 so she can basically be a lootwhore (you get a spell at 100 that gives you a summon that lets you get 2x the loot from monsters, basically). That’s a loong way to go, though.

Waiting for my financial situation to… make more sense (cents?), and then I’ll probably reactivate FFXI for a bit. The future for me with FFXIV is unsure, since I can’t get the benchmark to run (and I’m terrified to run a manual driver update… mostly because the last time I did it ended with my video card exploding. Literally). We’ll have to hold out and see what the future holds for me there.

Sorry for the lack of posting, things in the real world have been a bit hairy, and I honestly haven’t gotten to play much WoW outside of the weekend the last two weeks.

One thing I have been doing though, is making some money. And wow. Really, it is so retardedly easy to make money in WoW vs. FFXI. I’m just talking about crafting here btw- we already know dailies make making money into easy-mode.

I’ve been putting Esa to hard work the last week- farming herbs like crazy (Sholazaar to get Adder’s Tongue, which Binya uses for Inscription, and Storm Peaks for alchemic purposes). Of course, the mass amount of herbs I get for Inscription seem to disappear way too quickly, and the last 4/5 Darkmoon Card of the North attempts have been fail (1 Nobles Card- which is good, the 1 Chaos and *3* Undeath. Blargh). Been making circles around Storm Peaks though, and I seem to have found a fairly reliable way to make money.

Yup, I changed Esa’s Alchemy spec to Elixirs (again) and have been cranking out Flask of the Frost Wyrm’s. Once- sometimes twice- a day, I’ll throw up 5 at a time on the Auction House. I keep the buyout the same as whatever’s on the top of the list (organized by price, least->most expensive) and will list the opening bid as 1 copper less than whatever’s on top. I’d like to throw up more than 5, but I don’t want to flood the AH and ask for some jerk to undercut me, so 5′s been a pretty workable number. Plus, they sell for between 29-35 gold a pop on Ner’zhul-A, so I am making an easy 150-300~ish gold a day doing this. I’ve got about 1500 gold across all my toons again (after cleaning them all out to purchase Esa’s epic flight) and that’s without doing any dailies regularly. If I can suck it up this weekend and do dailies on both girls, I’ll have a nice chunk of change.

I have to admit- not wanting for money in WoW has definitely made it more enjoyable than FFXI. For me, anyway. I can spend an hour here or there, and make enough gold to get me through a weak of raiding repairs (since I don’t need to purchase any consumables- I can make them all myself). It definitely means there’s more time to play the game and do random stuff than to have to spend hours and hours farming to be able to afford say, a stack of shihei (I think I spelled that wrong).

Anyway. Moving on~

Last weekend I got asked while on Binya if I wanted to run ToC10 with the guild one of our officers has an alt in. I said sure, since I didn’t have that achievement on Binya yet, and emblems and possible gear upgrades are always a good thing. Well, there were a few bumps in the road (and wow, I don’t like Anub’s p3 as a healer- not being able to heal people kind of sucks) but ultimately we were successful. After that, we went along to Onyxia10, which I have yet to do successfully on *either* toon.

After 2 wipes, what happened is, once again, why I will always be asked to be a healer. -.o Basically, once her p3 hit, everyone died except for 4 of us- the Warrior tank, myself, a resto shammy, and a hunter. We 4-manned her, but the Hunter died (I have no idea how- he just… died). We managed to 3-man her to the end after that, with me keeping SW:P and Devouring Plague up (lol) and I think the shammy was DPS’ing too. There was a snide comment over vent about me having full mana (Hi, I have 25k mana UNBUFFED as Disc. I know how to make my mana pool last a loooong time) and that was why people people died. -_- However, I shut them up once I got under 50%, popped Shadowfiend and Hymn of Hope and was back up to full again. ~.^ We won, it was crazy and stressful and fun, and I’d forgotten what that was like.

No fab drops for me (I got a neckpiece in ToC10 which was a decent upgrade for my Disc set), but I got invited back again for the two raids tomorrow, so I’m glad.

Normally, I’d save Binya from getting saved to stuff like that, because the guild will usually run it. However, the GM has been kind of MIA the last week or so, and we’ve lost pretty much all our tanks as a result of not raiding. >_< We *do* have pallys we could use, but we’d be a losing well-geared Hunter and Mage as a result (the pallys are their alts). We lost our 2nd Pally who served as off-tank to lack of raiding (his Warrior is also my Arena partner), and two other tanks we’d invited a few weeks ago left this week too. Kad will be back online in about two weeks, but he’s said he wants to focus on his Hunter when he comes back, since he has the most fun playing her.

So… I do have two options on what I can do to help the guild. Both involve Esa, and both involve re-spec’ing.

Option 1 – Esa becomes Arena-capable as well as a raid healer.
Yep. I’ve been planning to spec her feral tree to resto once I’d built a PvP set of gear anyway, but this would give the guild another option as a clutch healer (and would make it worthwhile for m to keep bringing Esa for gear upgrades, since they technically wouldn’t be losing a healer) when we’re in a pinch. I’m sort of not so thrilled about playing a healer on *2* toons though, and it would require me to build up another gearset form scratch, since hit doesn’t help heals, and most of my boomkin stuff lacks a bit of spirit.

Option 2 – Esa’s Feral-hybrid build becomes a straight bear build as another tank.
I’m actually kind of leaning toward this. My cat set is decent (I could probably do okay in Ulduar10 with my current build and gear), and I have a slightly better than okay bear set. I’ve done a little bit of tanking, and honestly BadKitty makes it kind of idiot-proof in which debuffs and buffs I need to keep up. At this point it would a matter of slightly upgrading my gear a bit more (I currently do have the BiS neck, though, for bear at least XD) and getting a little more experience. I need more Stam though, that’s for sure- I only *just* pass the 30k mark with self-buffs. It’s a good start though.

Or I can just leave her as she is- a Feral-DPS/Balance-DPS character. I put out solid numbers as Balance, but the guild is in a bit of a pickle and I’d like to see us get back into the swing of things.

Besides, I’d like to see at least *one* of my toons clear Ulduar JUST ONCE. I’ve gotten as far as Mimiron. I’d really like to see at the very least Vezax and Yogg and maybe someday… Algalon.

I held off on posting this week, because I wanted to post my epic achieves. And they are epic. But first!

Yes, that is Onyxia. Last night we grabbed 10 bodies and went in to give her a try (now that the servers are more stable than they were on Tuesday). Fun fight, but tough! Especially if you never did it before. ¬_¬; We had trouble, not because of the fight, but because of the changes nerfs to pallys that came with 3.2.2. All the same, we got her down to phase 3 twice out of 5 attempts. I’m sure once our pallys get a handle on things we’ll be able to handle her no problem!

Anyway, onto my achievements!

It started with this:

Aside from working my butt off to get 4000 gold together (half of it was easily raised by selling 2 Argent Tournament pets on the neutral AH, btw), I was going quest and daily crazy to hit exalted with Valiance Expedition so it would only cost me 4000 gold. I’ve now unlocked those dailies in Icecrown on Esa, btw. :3

It also meant that I could *finally* use my Bronze Drake (which me winning and not having epic flight made some drama on a random CoS run. Because doing the timed run is HARD! /sarcasm).

Nifty flavor screenie:

So one that was finished, I went off on my ultimate goal: the Swift Flight Form quest chain. I’d decided a long time ago that I wanted to do the quest instead of just buying the training from the trainer. Mostly for the Feat of Strength, partly just to do it that way, but more so because I’d really like to farm Heroic: Sethekk Halls for the [Reins of the Raven Lord]. That, plus my eventual Guardian of Cenarius title (my next undertaking!), and purchasing a [Cenarion War Hippogryph] would, in my opinion, make my Druid as much a complete Druid as she could be.

So on Tuesday, despite the amazing server lagginess, I started the chain. Got about 2/3 of the way through it before I lost steam- and not because of the chain (though the travelling all over the place is the most annoying, time consuming part). No, it was because I was Neutral with Lower City on Esa. Why is this a problem, you wonder? Because in order to enter Heroic: Sethekk Halls for the final part of the chain, you need to have a key. The only way to buy the key is to be Honored with Lower City.

So off I went, running regular Sethekk Halls a bunch. The last few times I went, a fellow guildy came through on his Hunter, then swapped to his Warrior for the last boss so he could have a shot at the axe Talon King Ikiss drops. Thankfull, it didn’t take many runs to hit Honored, and last night I went off to finish the chain.

After some confusion with my friends and the rep their toons had, we went in with me as a Feral Druid (Bear tank ftw!), a Priest, and a Mage. We got to Anzu pretty quickly and cleared the room. Once I popped him, I attempted doing it the “right” way- popping into caster form periodically to cast Rejuvination on the NPCs t help- but eventually gave up for the sake of annoyance.

All the same, we killed Anzu easily (no mount drop- THIS time) and off I went to turn in my quest!

Shortly after grabbing a port to Shattarath-

Feat of Strength yay! Not to mention- I snagged my permanent moonstone, so I can now summon Anzu every day! Mount farming, here I come!

Also- I am now a pretty purple birdy when I fly!

And all the time, blood, sweat and tears was well worth it- I zipped around Sholazaar Basin this morning herbing. Got 100 Adder’s Tongue and enough Eternal Lives to make a Darkmoon card in under 25 minutes- and promptly made a Nobles Card! 8 more to go, and then Esa gets a shiny new trinket ([Darkmoon Card: Greatness])!

It’s been an interesting week. Once again, I didn’t raid all that much but I did manage to get some other stuff done.

Last night I logged in to see my guild doing 10-man VoA. I was annoyed and a little hurt, as I’m a member of the “core” 10-man team who usually does that and Ulduar with the other officers and core/regular raiders. Since I was doomed to PuG again, I jumped into a VoA25 with my Druid.

Which pretty much fell apart due to weak healing and people not being able to NOT stand in fire.

It’s not a difficult thing, and is an ongoing mechanic for boss fights in WoW. Don’t stand in fire. Don’t stand in slime. Don’t get hit by the giant flame wall that takes 3 seconds to even form up and start moving. Don’t drop your Grobbulus debuff in the middle of the raid. It’s not rocket science, people!

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