WTF Happened?

I've certainly had my ups and downs with WoW, but I think this one may be the one that gets me to swear off finally.

For the 2-3 weeks, I've barely been playing. I went on vacation to visit a few conventions and on coming back, it felt like a completely different game I was playing.

The biggest reason seems to be 5-man dungeons. They're nigh unplayable at this point. Unlike in Wrath, many of the Cata bosses have mechanics that people must perform or it's a wipe. Early on, you expected wipes as people learned the mechanics, but eventually everyone knew them. At this point, there's no excuse for someone not to know how to do the beams on Corla in Blackrock Caverns. Yet the past 3 times I've been in there, someone's gotten themselves transformed.

Shadowfang Keep and Deadmines are lengthy, torturous instances full of wiping on trash because people can't focus fire. ZA and ZG people seem to know now, but they're also painfully long.

And queue times keep getting worse. It used to be 20ish minutes if I queued as dps, 5 as healer, and none as tank. Now it's 45, 25, and none respectively. Only to wipe repeatedly due to poor players looking to be carried.

Raids haven't been too bad though. The biggest issue is that we're still having to pug 1-2 spots every week and the result is having to waste large amounts of time teaching someone new how we do things every week. I'm not interested in sitting around and waiting for them to get it while we wipe repeatedly, so after a few hours, I generally quit.

So the only thing that's been left for me to do lately is dailies. And then I log. And I'm done.

That's not worth my monthly subscription fee anymore. So we'll see if that changes by the 23rd when my time expires.

It's Tuesday!

The guild finally downed Cho'gal last week. I capped a vid of it. Oddly enough, our feral dps druid was in the wrong gear (healing) and as a consequence, only pulled 3.7k, and we had no problem.

Meanwhile, last night, we spent 3 hours on Al'akir, hoping to get him down before patch today, but it wasn't destined to be. Our best attempt got him to 11%, but we only made it to phase 3, a few times, so people weren't able to get the handle on moving with the clouds. But it looks like nerfs are coming, so we'll get it down soon, we hope.

Because it's patch day! 4.2 is out and I'm downloading it as I type this. I've looked ahead to what daily reward vendor I want to unlock first and.... they all suck for me. Each vendor has one item I can use, but every one of them is itemized with crit/mastery, the two worst stats for a shadow priest currently.

The only thing that does look pretty nice is that there are some blacksmithing plans to create an ilvl 365 dagger I can definitely use. Guess I need to start making truegold again. I guess this might be some incentive to work on my warrior again, who's a miner. Might also be a good idea since it's the Midsummer festival and I can get the XP buff.

Aside from the gear, however, it looks like there's 2 new pets. The Crimson Lasher and the Hyjal Bear Cub. As a pet collector (up to 127 now!) those are definitely on my list. I think those may determine which vendor I go for first more than the gear. >.>

Sadly, it's looking like most of my new gear is going to have to come from Valor Points. There's a ring and wand I'd definitely like since I'm currently using 353 items in both of those slots, as well as a neck, and wrist.

Is it Tuesday yet?

So 4.2 comes out on Tuesday.

I pulled my main out of the guild I joined a few months back and joined another new guild, . They're not quite as far along (they still have trouble with Council and haven't had many tries on Cho'gall), but they're a larger guild, so they have 2 raid groups and one of them fits my desired times perfectly.

Plus they needed a shadow priest.

I'm still somewhat disenchanted with WoW right now, but I figure I'm going to see how 4.2 goes before giving it up. In order to help bust into the new patch, I've been leveling my paladin alt as a tailor to make the craftable gear for my main.

Yeah, weird, I know to have a plate wearer as a tailor, but she was only Enchanting so I had a free profession slot open and don't care to make her a blacksmith to help herself out since she is just an alt.

Doing this was made somewhat easier since I'd just finished my Shatari Sky Guard rep grind on my main and had about 300 stacks of Netherweave cloth. I was able to do all my BC tailoring and still had a ton leftover. Guess I'm going to have to find something to do with all of it.

Meanwhile, Frostweave Cloth is sucking. My tailoring is at 395 right now and getting to 425 (where I can begin the Cata levels) is estimated to take another 150 bolts. At 5 cloth per bolt, that's 750 cloth I need to pick up. Joy.

So far I've farmed up 77 of the bolts... 73 more to go...

Loremaster

Well, raiding hasn't been happening. The new guild has gone to pieces. Everyone went to spring break and only a few people came back.

I tried pugging a few times. Several have fallen apart before the first boss. Most get me saved to two bosses. One did get Cho'Gall down to 0.01% and then wipe which was frustrating.

But for the most part, I have nothing to do anymore.

So I finished Loremaster.

Icecrown:


Storm Peaks:


Zul Drak:


Dragonblight:


Grizzly Hills:


Howling Fjord:


That puts me up to 8735 achievement points. So my next goal is to polish that off to get the "Over 9000!" Achievement. Hopefully by then, things will be interesting again.

So bloody close....

Finally raided again last night. Got in on a Bastion of Twilight with one of the top guilds on the server doing an alt run. Despite some problems with some of the other pugs, we downed the first 3 bosses and for only the second time since the expansion came out, I got to stand up against Cho'gall.

Our first attempt was pretty miserable. I was healing at that point and the DPS wasn't quite sufficient to keep the blood boils out of the raid so we barely made it into phase 2. At that point, they had me switch to shadow and decided we'd two heal the fight. We easily got the boils down that time and got the boss to <300k health before wiping. So bloody close.

One of the tanks had to go shortly after, but we got in one more attempt and again got him down to just a few percent. The tentacles kept killing us because people were getting them too early on (including me; lesson learned, the shadow crash graphics are slightly smaller than the actual radius of effect). I'm hoping we'll continue it tonight. About the only gear I still need comes from Cho and Nef.

Killin Critters

I don't have a tendency to join large guilds. The one I'm in currently has a full raid team, but that's pretty much it. As such, trying for the Critter Kill Squad achievement so I can get the Armadillo Pup is a ways off. Thus, I'm always looking for ways to murder some critters.

I found this post on another WoW blog that suggested using stormchops and standing in the Ironforge side of the tram where rats spawn indefinitely and then just letting them do all the work while I take a shower or something.

The idea sounded pretty good for 2 reasons:
1) I don't have to do much - I don't even have to be at my computer!
2) It's close - Hearth is in SW, so quick tram ride over.

Sounds like a sweet deal, so I figured I'd try it. So I dropped by the auction house to pick up a few.

None there.

Damn.

Oh well. I have the recipe. Just need some lightning eel.

Crap. None of them on the auction house either.

Oh well. I know how to fish.

Unfortunately, the drop rate sucks. Whatever. I fished 5.

Bought some clefthoof meat. Slapped it together and have five stormchops. Great. Let's kill some rats.

I used two of the five I made and watched some TV. In total, I netted about 600 dead critters, so all said and done, about 300 per 30 minutes. In other words 10 per minute once you're all set up. Factor in the time taken to fish up the damned eels (another 10 minutes) and you're probably getting 6-8 critters a minute.

Not too shabby.

Except that I can kill about 300 critters in 1-2 minutes up in the cave on the west edge of Eastern Plaguelands. They don't respawn instantly, but do in about 10 minutes. Do the math there and you're averaging closer to 20-30 critters per minute. Far better.

The real exception is whether you want to travel all the way to EPL. It's not too bad if you take the portal to Twilight Highlands, but still, rather out of the way.

However, I get a lot more satisfaction out of seeing the kill count shoot up so much. So I think I'll stick with the latter.

I.Stab.At.Thee.

I've been working on trying to get the From Hell's Heart I Stab At Thee achievement the past few days in my spare time.

As a shadow priest, it's not hard in concept. Dots. Kite. Mind Blast and Mind flay when you got the room.

I'm averaging 7.5k dps as I go, but it's still taking 20 minutes to do it.

The issue is that he's been liking to glitch a lot. Suddenly, he's "not in line of sight" in the middle of a freaking ocean. And then he evades, wanders off, and resets.

And then of course, there's horde around who love to be pricks. Which is why usually do it at night when the kids are in bed.

So tonight I had the shark down to 1% and a 81 horde lock comes along and fears me into it.

Fffffffffffffffffffffffuuuuu......