All I see is Disorder; Though not Always a Bad Thang...

Lotsa Nada happened this weekend...

I made another few hundred gold, grabbed a few more Champion Seals, a couple more Dalaran Cooking Awards, and got a few of the Valentine's Achievements.

Actually, I started the Valentine's day ordeal a day early. (I played a while on Saturday night on Aman'Thul - Oceanic - they are 19 hours ahead of me) Aussie-wannabe-Balthazario is less than 5 bars away from level 15 and beginning the low level LFG.

As a tank. Kattastrophe suggested I start a low level pallie and learn to tank from low levels, and my server sojourn seems an appropriate place. Katt & I are still sorta considering each loading up a "home" (Velen) toon with heirloom gear, bags and gold and then do a server transfer.

A Gold Farming Hint for the holiday averse:

Even if you have ZERO intention of actually completing the quest, speak to a local questgiver (one in each main city) and get a Lovely Charm Collector's Kit. Once you do, you will collect Lovely Charms from from many of the mobs that you kill in your daily Frost Runs. (unless you are a healer - you need to be killing stuff) Anyhow, collect 10 of thos charms (which are soulbound) and convert them into Lovely Charm Braclets. These are NOT soulbound, and can fetch 10-40 gold each from the Auction house. So, you run a few PuGs, and collect free gold.

In Other News

My pre-LFG routine seems to be helping. (this is where I unequip a bunch of gear to ensure I get into a low/easy dungeon) Every time I have done this prior to entering the LFG queue, I have gotten a low level (aka "easy") heroic.

Why don't I want to run PoS, HoR and FoS? Because it is not uncommon to wipe on them. I despise doing the LFG, and at this point I am ONLY doing them for the Frost emblems. The Frost Emblems I get from Violet Hold are the exact same as the emblems from Halls of Reflection. (In fact, I get more Triumph running VH, if I recall correctly) Not to mention that I have yet to wipe on VH, which means saving 5-10 gold for each wipe that doesn't happen.


I am kind of enjoying the Valentine's activities. Granted, as a Draenei Paladin, I keep getting showered with petals, but it's better than being turned into a turkey. lol (poor rogues) Also, I kind of like the idea of being able to get a freebie pet.

I *did* try to kill the holiday bosses with extreme wipeage resulting. Once was by having a small party (2), once was due to not really getting the fight, and the third was because all the adds swamped the healer. (and here's an odd thing; I looked up a video for it, and it showed maybe 3 or 4 adds all together. During our last wipe, I saw well over a dozen. - odd) And yes, I was trying to tank the last 2 attempts which did not help things. It also didn't help that I didn't realize there were THAT many adds in the first place. I pulled a couple at the start, along with Mister Pink.

Yes, we used the anti perfume potion thingie. *shrug* Oh, as a group, we did ~ 12,000 DPS before we died.

Later!

Mad, Mad World of Warcraft

I thought about linking the Gears of War video instead, but live seems to feel better...

Anyhow, as of late, my time in WoW has been a tad melancholy. I dread queueing for the Sanity Tap ® and have gone about my business on many days without even bothering. I'm barely raiding, and overall, any progression I've made has been really slow.

Looking for Dungeon

I'm not sure why, but going into here for my daily heroics stresses the crap out of me. I'm putting my tanking project on hold, so this really only relates to me playing DPS, which I seem to be pretty good at. I'm just terribly leary of people taking things the wrong way, me gaffing something up, or just general asshattedness of the randoms. A couple examples:

- I get put into a group starting Pit of Sauron. Nobody is near the entrance area, and the NPCs are already running. I start moving away when I see a flame hooved horse go running by. I run to follow and seem him/her jump a ravine and stand off to the side. Not knowing wtf is going on, I try to jump over and miss. And fall down into a group of mobs. Or, 3 groups.

Someone drops down to help, and we both die. Someone else yells "real pro". Another asks "WTF happened?"

As I am flying back, I try to explain, and I appologize. I can see from the health bars that some are still in combat and taking LOTS of damage. I applogize and upon entering the instance I appologize again and leave group.

- I'm with a guildie, and we get put into one of the appostrophe'd instances. (Zul 'drak, Gur'ub or whatever the fuck it's called. It's the one with the spiral staircase down in the beginning and lots of snakes) We fight a couple trash mobs, and I end up having to Lay on Hands. It's not that I'm taking a lot of damage fast, it's just that the healer is doing NOTHING. The tank isn't marking and is switching targets, so that I'm pretty much guaranteed to be getting some aggro and taking *some* damage.

Shortly after, we have to wait while the tank says brb and goes afk. (not that long, but a couple minutes)

Then the healer gets pissed off that RankWatch whisped him that one of his spells is low rank. I replied "ok, gimme a minute and I'll shut it off". To do this, I have to log off. Normally this isn't a problem, and I don't drop group. I pop back in and get teleported out f the instance. My guildie informs me that I got vote kicked. She drops group and we go elsewhere. My guildie mentions "That healer wasn't healing AT ALL."

So there are my sad, sad tales of woe and misery in the LFG. Honestly, it wasn't THAT bad... especially when compared to some of the crap other bloggers are dealing with. It's just getting to me. Hell, the very next run, my guildie & I got Oculus with a good group, and we ended up getting both the speed and the Amber Void achievements.

This less than ideal LFG/LFD thing just gets compounded when I think about raiding; which I'm not able to do. even though I have access to my guild and Kattastrophe's guild, the amount of 10 man raiding I've done is approaching an asymptote: Zero.

I can't really blame the guilds. After all, there's nothing forcing me to stay associated with them. That said, it's a tad frustrating that both of them only seem to do raiding at 4 pm server time. (weekdays) I guess my guild did some "real" 10 man content this last week, but I was out of town.

Now, I'm not only carping about it. I am trying to be pro-active and try to organize things my self; I've posted in our guild forums and had a whopping *2* views thus far. (and no replies - posted 3 days ago)

Now, since I'm not running any raids (not even the weekly easy one) and I'm not getting all my weekly 14 LFG frost emblems, this pretty much ensures I'm not able to buy any new gear. This in turn leads to:

I'm not progressing.

As I mentioned in my last post, I *did* get a new set of bracers. And yeah, going from i200 to i213 is an upgrade and all the stats ARE better. How much? According to the melee info, I am getting an extra 2.5 DPS. That's not a typo. That is: "two point five damage points per second". And I think I got an extra 50 health points.

*blink*

Heck, I still haven't even hit Honored with the Ashen Verdict yet.

The one upgrade that I know for certain that I *can* get are the Rings of Kirin Tor. The first purchase is the only really big one (6,400 gold) and I'm at nearly 5,000 right now. If I do a *little* bit of grinding, plus my dailies, I should have enough in another 4 days or so. Then it's just another 2-3 days for each upgrade over that.

Then if I'm still feeling badly undergeared, I can farm another 10k-15k gold to buy a couple Titansteel razorscale armor bits.

So what then?

I think uch of my time for the forseeable future may be just grinding out some achievements. Big Bear Butt mentioned a grindable pet that would get me a bit closer to the Salt Lick and would occupy my time.

I'm not sure, but I think I have about 60 Champion Seals, so I plan on getting more and using them to buy some Argent pets. (BTW, the Argent Crusader Tabard KICKS ASS! A free teleport for the win!)

I recently got my Eastern Kingdoms explorer achi, and will probably spend time running around Kalimdor to finish everything off.

I think I'll start gathering honor points and marks so I can put together a set of PvP gear. Not that I really care to PvP, but having the gear should certainly make it less painful to do it.

I have about 500 stone keeper shards, so I can also get a bit more Heirloom gear for my alts. I'm not sure I really feel like running them, but getting the gear should at least make things easier.

And, I hope that I get out of this funk, maybe get one or two raids in, and, if all goes south, maybe look for a new guild. Alas, my needs are pretty specific (casual, friendly, active mainly weekdays between 8pm and 11pm server time, familiar with EJ, and related sites enough to know what they're doing, but not so much that they suck the fun out of the game)

Oh, and I need to watch Donnie Darko one of these days.