It is Suspicious

Unbalanced play

World of pet battles

This expansion is great! Yeah, I know I have behind… We were moving. We still have not gotten the raid back up yet. We will see there… But in the mean time I have been doing pet battles. Lots of them. So far I am at 366ish pets. It is a good think they upped the cap because I was releasing them right and left in order to stay under 500. The only tameable one I was missing prior to Tuesday was the darn minifernal. I have tried server hopping and a early morning log-ins but so far nothing is working there.
For other pets I have used persistence and good luck plus lots of wowhead research. Of the new 5.1 pets I have 4. The mecha cat, the imp from molten core, the kunlai yeti runt and one other I am completely blanking on at the moment. Oh wait, I also snagged a harpy before I left for work this morning. So I have 5 of them. Have checked for a few others, without luck. I ran molten core and only the imp dropped. I tried to run BWL. I think the new abilities razorgore is suppose to have aren’t working yet. They were there, but they did not do a darn thing. I wiped a couple times, put in a ticket and left. Tonight I might try the other two raids. If anyone is wondering, the raid pets are BoP, but once you equip them they are cage-able.
So far I have 19 lvl 25 pets, obviously some from every family. I am working toward the uber trap you get for having 30 max levels.

I have been checking my progress on wowprogress and I have been holding steady at number 2 on the server. A week or so back I rolled a noob hordy and whispered the number 1 guy. Well I don’t think I will be passing him soon. He has around a hundred more pets than me. The only way for me to get there from here is with CCG pets and some holidays that aren’t any time soon (children’s week). I had a hard grind to get this far because I was not a pet collector before. I had pathetically few prior to the 5.0.

So next up I am thinking to start trading. A lot of folks trade on the forums and such. I will have to gather up a bunch and make a list. I will post it here when I am ready to start swapping. Hopefully my wife did not auction all those spares I sent her.

WTB Playtime

So I keep getting blog posts about raiding, progression, even patch 5.1 for crying out loud. And it’s been two weeks since I’ve logged into the game. Ugh. Moving ain’t fun. But most of the stuff is here now so maybe after Saturday I’ll have time to set up my gaming rig and get up to date.

I want to raid so bad! I know we’re short people still (ah, Kerick, are you 90 on Winterhoof yet?) and I need to recruit dps. Which I can’t do if I can’t log in, but that’s coming soon! I hope…

At least it’s nice to be moved and getting unpacked. Today starts NaNoWriMo which makes 11 years for me participating in the Write-a-novel-in-November challenge. I’m psyched for that! Got to get my writing habit back too. But honestly that won’t interfere much with WoW. I’m aiming for two hours a day of writing, right after my workday gets over. I’ll be done by the time Rev gets home from work and then if we want to spend an evening in Azeroth there’s nothing stopping us! But I have to get serious about my writing again. Taking a month off was necessary but not fun. 

I’m thinking my top priority once we start playing will be to do some more LFR runs. Maybe I can get some of our old raid together? I could try scheduling something for next Saturday night and then we could go from there…

 

Looking for Loot

So Rev and I ran LFR last night. We read quick overviews of the fights and checked our gear. I couldn’t quite meet the requirements, but I had a nice cloth helmet that would give me the last point I needed. I equipped it and we were ready to go!

Got in. Some dk says “Ok I’m main tank.” He had more health than Rev so whatever. I decided I’d be Rev’s personal healer. We started trying to talk about strategy but the other tank was just “keep amethyst dog away from the others go go”. Only the amethyst dog wasn’t even up… and that’s not remotely the strat… whatever.

After the raid got petrified and wiped (I didn’t die, I like the petrification mechanism!) Rev told the other guy what to do and he said “oh ok”. And then didn’t do the taunt swapping. At all.

Another druid healer said “Ok, I’ll go tank, you dps” to the tank. We did, it worked better, still wiped, came back and got them down cleanly. I noticed we’d four healed that encounter. LFR means people can stand in bad, not do anything they’re supposed to other than tank swaps, and four healers can manage it. Also, I was doing huge amounts more healing than the other healers. And I’d cheesed my gearscore to get in. Huh.

Next fight has a boss that… does a lot of stuff. As a healer all I was really aware of was oww oww that hurts heal everything not enough mana arrrgh who dies? Everyone who isn’t me or a tank, oww. He wasn’t too hard to get down but again, we were down a healer, I doing about 20% more healing than the next guy on the list, and I was starting to get curious. The five healers we had right now included 3 druids and two holy priests, so you’d think the numbers would be somewhat similar, but not remotely.

I got a lovely offhand fan from that fight, chock full of spirit! Yay! I’d thought loot showed up in the bags of treasure but I guess you get either loot or a bag. Hey I wasn’t arguing.

Looked at the gear from the lowest performing druid healer. Huh… ilvl 429 shoulders. PVP legs. ilvl410 boots. One nice trinket. How on earth did he even get in? Clearly, he had a whole set of tank gear, or something, in his bags because there was no way his raw score should let him in.

I think Blizzard shot themselves in the foot by setting the ilvl to get in so high initially. I know they knocked it down to 460, but when you see 463 and realize you need a heroic piece in almost every slot… and you just can’t get that stupid hat to drop… it’s depressing. You start thinking about cheesing it and once you’ve decided to do that why not go crazy and just get in with whatever you can? Someone else will pick up your slack, after all.

Lest you think I’m just being elitist about gear, I checked this guy’s spell use. He wasn’t using Lifebloom on boss fights. Like, at all. He apparently was just hitting swiftmend and wild growth on cooldown and occasionally tossing a rejuv. Which is a great way to go OOM fast without doing anything useful. Sigh. I’m always amazed when other druid healers are so bad, probably because I know what good druid healing looks like and so can tell when someone else sucks.

We downed the last of the three bosses in one attempt, very cleanly, and I spent a loot token and got a ring. And enough valor to buy a necklace from the bug people, since they’re the only ones who like me enough to give me goodies. Sweet! My mana regen went up about 500 mp5 after that run!

Anyway, I’m liking LFR but looking forward to being able to raid for real soon. I hope soon. We’re getting ready to move here and I think it’s going to affect raiding a little…

 

Help a girl out…

So last night I did this:

Did the archeology on my mage, who is currently level 86. I did a lot of dying, hitting nodes on Kun-Lai Summit and Towlong Steppes. Did a lot of cool mage tricks like slow falling down the tallest waterfalls in the world out at the north end of Kun-Lai, which you should really go fly past if you haven’t. Just beautiful.

I might not have made the push to 600 but it was one of the last professions the guild needed to get our BOA legs. This one really was a team effort! Another guy did the fishing and was working on archeology but when I mentioned how close I was he went off to level his panda, clearly glad to be done with that grind for a while.

I’ve made three of the four MoP rare archeology things: the spear, the trinket, and the umbrella. Oh, the umbrella…. it’s a BOA offhand, one of the nicest in the game pre-raid right now and it is lovely. I don’t mean the stats. Here, let me show you.

Seriously, it’s one of the most beautiful items in the game right now and I really need to transmog my whole outfit around it. So I’m looking for suggestions: leather gear that will look good with this. I have a feeling it’ll be harder than finding cloth pieces. Is there such a thing as a leather geisha dress? I’m currently thinking of going back to Conqueror’s Nightsong Headdress for my hat: it’s just a simple glowing half moon on my forehead and my default head item. But that leaves the rest of me… and the tabard. Our guild tabard is unwearable right now thanks to the death knights winning a contest and having the tabard redesigned to honor them for a month. (Troutwort, it’s been long enough, right?)

 

So, fashionistas, how would you coordinate around this umbrella?

Taking it slow… too slow?

I’m loving the expansion. Loving Pandaria, although we were questing in Valley of the Four Winds last night and I looked at Rev and asked “so where are all the rice paddies?” It feels weird to have such an Asian-inspired landscape without the ubiquitous rice paddies. And they are ubiquitous. I’ve ridden the shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto and you go from massive high tech urban to rice paddies just like driving out of Chicago and hitting the cornfields of Illinois. I did see one corner of the Valley looked like it might have rice paddies on the map but I haven’t gotten there yet.

Anyway. We didn’t quite make 86 on Tuesday, but we hit 86 and then 87 yesterday thanks to some good solid quest time and a couple dungeon runs. Got bugged out on the storyteller encounter in Jade Serpent temple but we went back and finished that place later. I really like the feel of the dungeons so far. They feel just about the right length, the fights seem interesting, and based on the pugs we got yesterday it’s going to be a while before anyone’s beating Rev’s dps. We should have taken guildies but I always just find it easier to decide I’m feeling like running a dungeon, hitting the button and instantly having a group. Plus if I take guildies I have to keep them alive, not let them die to laugh at them for standing in bad.

 

Where was I? Right. Leveling sweet and slow. Only then I looked at the calendar and realized Rev’s going to be out of town interviewing twice next week and we’re supposed to have a raid night of some sort a week from Saturday. Hmm… I guess we’d better get down to things. Wouldn’t look good for the raid leaders to still be level 88, would it? So I think we’ll have to focus a little more and I’ll hold off on the pet battles (but my team is level 11!), the baby monk (I haven’t even rolled her yet), the alts, everything else…

That’s the awesome thing about alts though. Even if we miss whole zones on our way up, we’ve got alts ready to go as soon we want…