I... Don't Wanna Work.. I Just Wanna Bang on the Blame All Day...

Another Friday post for me... as things slow down here at work, I have a few "free" bits of time to expound on the aetheric, and wax poetic about the pointless. there are fewer people here to notice me wasting time, and even fewer folks reading the blogs in the next couple days.



So be it.



Last night was a tad lazy... I ran the LFG "daily" to get my Frost badges, ran most of the Argent tourney dailies (I never joust anymore) and did a couple other random ones. I got a handful of Champion Seals and a couple hundred gold, so it was reasonably productive, even if it were a tad boring.



I was in no mood to grouch my way to more Triumph badges, so I had to think a bit for stuff to do, so I could procrastinate on going to bed. The only thing that came readily to mind was to look into getting another 2 tabards for the "wear 10 different tabards" achievement. (I currently have 8) I am not sure which ones I *do* have, but I', certain I have all the following:



Ebon Blade
Wyrmrest
Guild
Kurenai
Kirin Tor
Sporregar
Tabard of the Hand
Tabard of the Explorer

(thanks to having somewhat recent upload of my bank & bags at rpgoutfitter.com I was able to find 3 I had forgotten about)


I do NOT have:


Honor Hold
Aldor
Argent Dawn (if there is one)
Undercity
Cenarion XYZ (circle, expedition or any of them)
any other rep tabards
any tabards that cost Champion Seals

Me being the Outlands n00b I am, I had wondered if I could just buy the rep tabards and then run more Northrend Heroics to get exalted.

Um, nope.

Turns out that Outlands Tabards are the REWARD (or being able to buy them) for becoming exalted. Alas, I am only (barely) honored with the Aldor and Honor Hold, so nothing easy.

*sigh*

WAIT!!! I know you get rep with Honor Hold for all kills in Hellfire Heroics! I'm a moderately geared 80, this should be a breeze! Easy Peazy!

*Flies off to Ramparts and enters the Heroic*


I walked towards the room with the 3 groups of mobs, and at the end of the entrance hall, there are 2 guard mobs sitting like reputation gifts.

I pull one, Repent (crowd control stun - "CC") the other, and burn them both down. WTF?!?!? My health is way below half?!?!? I've got 14k armor and 21k health. WTF?!?!?!?

Oh, and I received 15 reputation points each.

hrm....

I pull the group of 3 mobs farthest to the right, stun one, and just get to work. Kill the first, hammer *BUBBLE!* the whelp and finally -WAIT!!!!!!

*mana up and heal*

and kill the third.

?

Holy shit, for "only" being level 70 elites, these are some nasty effing mo-fos!

I switch to my tank gear, but stay in Retribution spec.

I move on to the next group of 3.

The extra armor & health helps mitigate the damage I take, but since I now take a LOT longer to kill them, and it is basically a wash as far as how close to being killed I am.

I rinse & repeat this until I clear that room at the base of the stairs. I got maybe 200 rep points with Honor Hold and a 1.5 gold repair bill.

Yay.

So I go back to Honor Hold to get the small repair and sell off the little bit of loot I grabbed. While there I see that "Stadium is under attack by the Horde!" (the other 2 places had just been captured as well)

I'm not in the mood to PvP, but I AM in the mood to be a pest (ie, not flag myself or attack, but stand there, simply being a geared 80 alliance toon, and try to be as intimidating as I can.

I fly over and there's a Horde v Alilance 1 on 1 battle going on. One of them is a DK, and one is (maybe) a Paladin. With things running around like they are, I have no clue which is which.

I land,

hit [tab] to select the Hordie

then

-WHAM

-BAM

-SPLAT!

There's a dead horde (unreleased) and an Ally DK . I feel good about helping the guy out.

Until he starts corpse humping/Teabagging the Hordie.

Ugh.

I wave to the Horde corpse and bow (it still hasn't released) and head back over to Honor Hold to ponder my next waste of time/diversion.

Upon arrival, there's some Horde over there killing all the NPCs. Looks like it's 2 level 80s. A Priest and a Rogue. I *think* I kill the Rogue and the Priest bugs out. (actually it was a Pally) because there was a non-flagged Priest sitting there.

How do I know there was a Pally? Because he returned a bit later (with the Rogue) and came after me. I had hurt the Rogue and nearly killed the Pally when I died. The remaining 60s & 70s chased them off.

I respawned at the grave yard, took the 5-10 steps to my corpse and came back. By this time a couple other 80s had arrived (one was the alt of the DK I had helped)

The Hordies had cleared the area so I logged.

No, there's no real point to this post... just sorta rambling... though I *could* bring up a couple semi-relevant points about it all:

The Outlands (Hellfire in particular) 5 mans are where Kattastrophe & I 2-manned several dungeons. this is where I learned to use my CC, use corners ("LoS" - line of sight) to force casters to get within my melee range, and to have to sit and plan out attacks.

I've read a lot from folks that were doing end game content back in the "BC" (Burning Crusade)days, and all of them are melancholy about the challenge those dungeons represented. Mainly because crowd control was an integral part of the game, and was some actual utility that DPS players could bring to the table. (other than simple DPS) Now, sadly, most dungeons are a DPS Tank-n-Spank race to kill the boss before the next enrage. DPS just needs to bring the hurt.

Which (per Big Bear Butt) is another possible source of DPS hazing...

I wanna go home... only another 3-4 hours left here at work. Hope you guys have a good weekend!

:P

We Made it Through a Ring of Fire

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t quest or do raids/dungeons/instances with a guild or anything. I have only partially pugged Deadmines once, and that’s the extent of my real “real group” type playing in WoW. It’s normally just me & Kattastrophe.

This has ZERO effect on the simple/regular quests (actually it makes them easier since most quests are doable solo; they become MUCH easier in a duo. However, this arrangement makes it impossible to really be able to do instances, dungeons or raids, at least not until we level up a bunch. Often this has been where we are ~10 levels above the top recommended level.

At level 67, we decided to try Hellfire: Ramparts (aka “ramps” ) which is a 60-62 level, 5 man dungeon. Kattastrophe had been walked through it once by a level 80, so she knew a *little*, but we were essentially walking in blind. (she did remember which guys to pull first though) For the first two guys, we just ran in & killed them: (Watchkeeper Gargolmar and Omor the Unscarred)

Before the “final” Boss and we then watched a youtube vid of the fight so we had an idea of what to expect. It was tough, but we made it through!!! We didn’t even wipe! (we did come close on one occasion where we pulled too many trash mobs, but that was it) Vazruden & Nazan was an interesting, tough fight.

YUSS!!!

Nazan the Dead

A few days later, at level 68, we decided to give Bloodfurnace, (a 61-63 level, 5 man dungeon) a try. This was a *slightly* different story. For starters, many of the mobs are SIGNIFICANTLY tougher. The damnable Shadowmoon Technicians in particular are nasty if you aren’t prepared. They plant bombs under your feet that do 1,800 damage. YOUCH!!! We wiped once when we pulled two of them and a Fel Orc. We didn’t know about the bombs, so we just stood still and fought. And died. Once I read the battle text and saw the bomb planting bit, and read up on them, we came up with a simple strategy: I pull and gain aggro, Kattastrophe THEN plants her totems, then I just sort of kite them around. The only time they got REALLY tough was when you were in a confined place and couldn’t run. BOOM! was the result of that. (and if it’s only 1, we can easily survive/heal through it)

The Bosses were a bit more challenging as well. (actually the first Boss, “The Maker” wasn’t that bad at all, and with a little preparation, the last one, Keli’dan the Breaker, wasn’t either) But the middle boss, Broggok, was a bit of a pain.
We read up on him, the progression of the fight and the mobs involved. The sources we read said that all the pre-Boss mobs were regulars with a couple elites thrown in. Nope. They are ALL elites. We found this out the hard way when we were trying to save mana and not be too aggressive, and we got wiped with the first group.

So, we wiped twice, but got through Bloodfire furnace a two-some!

WAHOO!!!

Kel'idan the not so tough...

I can say I’m a bit proud of doing that. We weren’t really very over-leveled (in fact we got exp for all the fights) and only having 2 meant it was a LOT tougher, since we each had to dual purpose our fight: I had to tank and DPS, and Kattastrophe had to DPS and heal. And it worked out well!

Then we found out that we could then run the Heroic level. We grabbed the needed key, and headed over, with our newly dinged level 69 toons.

Ouch.

Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.

Our first attempt, I tried to pull just a walker. We got him AND two guards. We were dead within 5 seconds.

Our second attempt, we avoided the walker, and just tried to pull the guards; with me using Repentance to stun one, while we focused on killing the other. The only problem was that we miscued. I stunned one, and then Kat attacked him, breaking the stun. We died very shortly after that.

Our third attempt, we did what we wanted: stun one, and focus on the other one. It was going ok, except that the guy is WAY tough and has a boatload of health. It got a LOT worse when Kat somehow ended up with aggro, and the guy focused on her. I cast Hand of Reckoning (which is usually enough to regain aggro and deal some damage at the same time - also, I have Righteous Fury on all the time) It had no effect, and by the time I can click Righteous defense, she's dead. Now I'm 1 v 1 with this guy, and it's no contest; I die while he still has ~30% health, even though I bubbled and laid hands. I never even thought to bubble Kat because it just happened so fast. WIPE.

Only later did I find out that the Heroic mode is INTENDED for 5 level 70, geared players.

We have since dinged level 70, but I don’t think we’ll be heading back any time soon. We’ve got Northrend on our plates, as well as saving gold for epic flight, grinding rep to get a cool epic flying mount (Netherwing Drake) and just plain levelling up.

I'm Not Your Stepping Stone, Except When I Am

Note, this was written on Dec 21, 2009. I'm not sure why I didn't publish it at the time. It's still rather poignant and relevant, at least to me, so here you go...

*melancholy face*

(and sorry about the short, choppy "paragraphs", but this is how my brain is "working" today...)

I get the new LFG system.

I get the use of emblems, instead of (only) dropped loot and a DKP system.

I get chain running Heroics for emblems.

I get it, but I don't much care for it.

I don't have much chance to run "real" raids (10/25 man), simply because they can easily take a couple/few hours, not to mention the fact that I am barely geared to run most of them.

I've been a part of a couple of them, and they're kinda neat. (we killed Sartharion *no drakes left* and started running VoA not long before the timer reset) But these are kind of rare happenings...

Other than that, I'm going to have to run 5 man Heroics, which isn't very fun right now. Overall they feel awfully grindy and seem to be groups of 5 people using each other (as briefly as possible) for loot. Minimal conversation, planning or anything else.

First it was a bunch of over geared folks blazing through them so fast you could hardly keep up. Now it's mostly a bunch of under/moderately geared folks trying to blast through. (great for writing failpug blog stories, but useless for anything else)

I have had a couple runs that werwe fun, where we had (and DID) take it slow, look around, plan things out a bit and actually kind of enjoy the process.

Unfortunately, those runs are the rare ones, and with the cross server pugs, but no cross server chat/parties, you can't "keep" those fun players. At most you can run another instance with the same group, but even that rarely happens, even if you are interested.

That leaves the other sundry non-raid related things to do:

fish

cook

rep grind

rep grind

maybe a little questing

(Speaking of quests, the quest line to get the Winter Veil achievement "Fal-la-la-Ogri'la" has to be one of the most frustrating I can remember. That "Simon-esque" thing you have to do in Blade's Edge - The Relic's Emination is pure frustration)

Or you can

Go explore all of Azeroth

Play the auction house

Create interesting shapes on your fingers with papercuts

Or maybe level an alt.

*sigh*

*note as of Feb 18, 2009, I think the "Honor you Elders" questing is rapidly earning my least favorit holiday quest thing. It isn't as intensely nasty (except all the death runs into Org) as the RElic's one above, but the sheer number of annoying places you have to trudge to is just mind numbing...