A little progress

RARE PETS
In the last days, I've been hunting rare pets, and in one hour, I got both a (1/1000) dragonling and the (1/2000) oozeling, bringing my total to 71.

I can now get the 75 pets, however, I'm still trying to get 1 more (hyacinth(!!) or firefly or a cheap horde pet hehe), in order not to spend my argent seals (got 200 now), so I can save for the flying mount later.

MOUNTS
I also recomputed my total mounts, and I can achieve 95 (if I'm lucky enough with baron, oracle egg and two zul'gurub mounts, plus AQ40 ones). So theoretically, with an additional 500 seals (!!!) I can get my 100 mount achievement. Or I wait for 3.2 or 3.3 and get it easier.

My guildie pal also told me that the violet drake is nothing less than 310%, I had missed that !! HAHA, so in September I'll have one. Nicey.

PVE
I did a Ulduar hardmode, easy mode actually, if ppl have enough gear lvl to do it and play smart, avoiding the frost beams.

PVP
I got the EOS assassin one, 5 kills in 4 towers, woopideedoo.

Exalted
Another front I'm fighting is the 40 exalted reputations.

Since I was slacker enough not to run Black Temple or Karazhan with Netcownt, I had to find some replacement reputations.

So I beat a record, getting from neutral to exalted with Thorium Brotherhood in 24 hours. It was so easy, just farm Searing Gorge underground lizzards, then farm BRD for dark iron residues, and then farm Molten Core (with my nice skinner alt)... and of course, farm the Action House and guild bank. I spent about 700 gold, most of it in heavy leather to level it faster. Actually it was a bit silly, the cores were much cheaper, but fck it, I'm exalted :)

Total exalted reputations are now 33, needing only Zul'Gurub, 3 of the Steemweedle Cartel, and the old TBC ones I slacked also, Lower City and Honor hold, and Oracles (for the 3rd time, I bring a Sholazar faction to exalted, OMG!)

RARES
Tchan tchan only 3 rares to go, 1 from Sholazar (Aotona, the worst place possible, right on top of the oracle quest givers), and 2 from Icecrown (same shit, due to argent quests)


The rest of the time it's been crappy due to holidays, loss of interest in raiding, etc, etc.

I'm not so sure anymore the spirit will be back, considering dpsers started to gquit.

Hail the King. You are Immortal Michael

Flame Warden and a few other things

In the last days, I've been concentrating on getting my 75 pets.
I've got now 68, with some luck I'll get a rare and a fishing one, and complete my thing.
It's a pity that I didn't know the mechanics to get the fishing pets. All pets are actually crocodiles, obtainable by the random daily Crocodiles in the City. Unfortunately they are BoP, otherwise I'd have my 5 70+ toons going for it.
To help with whelpling farming (1 more to go), I had to code some nice ideas on my "dualboxing helper" application, one of which is OCR to get past the stupid idea of Blizzard of not allowing data to be saved on disk. Oh well, nothing DCOORDS and a little C++ won't get around. 600 whelps later I got my Swamp of Sorrows whelpling, and I've now turned to Wetlands. My kid also helps a bit, hunting whelps, but I dont want her to get too much interest with WoW... until now I've allowed her to drive her little lvl 5 cow in Mulgore, and that was it.

On PVE, a few Ulduar runs, but nothing new on the horizon. Mirmiron is still up, and Ulduar 25 is not working, ppl are slacking too much.

One guildie is pushing ppl to try to be more aggressive, asking for hard-mode runs, which is actually a great idea, but not with much support until now. We did one last night, and may be getting 2 conquest medals will give ppl a push forward.

On PVP, i'm totally stalled, my partner hasnt showed up, and I've got 75K HP and nothing to spend it, as I still got 1399 rating. Damn.

Luckily, I had the Midsummerfest achievements to do, but they are too easy, I completed them in one day.

Tbh the hardest thing is to solo Atune, the Frost Lord, in Slave Pens. Soloing is out of the question. I dualboxed it with a lot of healing, and took me 4 attempts to do it. Now I got the hang of it. It's a damn thing as I can only do 2 trials a day.

Oh well, nothing else new on the Western front, except the release of patch 3.2 info and my fucking back pain, that's getting worse again, and not allowing me to sit for more than a few minutes without medication. Fuck it.

Kick my ass

To begin with... I still have four lvl 200 items.

Yesterday was one of those days... I spent 3+ hours in Naxx25 half-guild/half-pug to get a chance on KTZ head to complete my T7... did the most dmg while I was there, and finally... two heads dropped from KTZ, and fuck, I missed the roll.

That made me think on the purpose of helping alts from other guilds or guild newbies gearing up from blues/greens directly to 213 while I'm stuck with 200 gear, and then having to roll with them with 1/N chance.


Then I went to Ulduar, did everything perfect, coming 2nd overall behind a great DK but again, my good will prevailed over my gearing needs, and I gave up Razor's cloth head to others that lacked dps... later I went to check it, and found out the head was the best head in game for me at this moment, with some tweaking. I also found out that some of the "others" had equivalent gear, and had done half the damage.
And exactly the same thing happened with a dropped wand in XT-002 later on.

Should have gotten the head/wand, should have bidded more /Kick /Kick /Kick /Kick /Kick

As a fellow hunter said.. we're too good to noobs.

I was never good bidding watches and tshirts in thailand LOL

In my old guild, items had fixed DKP prices, and ppl would whisper their wish to the master looter, and then a council of officers would check on the wishers, their gear, attendance, etc, and give it to whoever "deserved" it the most. It was fallible, yes, but avoided things like DKP burning, and credited ppl like me that don't wish to fight others over a stupid thing like a virtual gearing item, or think others deserve it more, for guild helping purposes.

After last night, 10-raids showed up to be more appealing than 25-raids.
- Ppl have to know what to do, or they wont succeed. No slackers.
- The speed of fight is higher, we kill more bosses per hour.
- Rewards are given to whoever needs it the most, discussed, or rolled with 50% chance, not bidded. So, more my style.

To make my wow mood darker, today I went for arenas to get from 1450 to 1500 rating, and ended up with 1399, after a sequence of discipriest + pala/rogue combos that me and my fellow mage simply couldnt handle. And the worst part of it is that I didnt buy the +1400 rating furious item, coz I wanted to spend it on the +1450 item.. and now I got a bunch of honor to spend and not enough rating. Seriously, it can't get any worse, can it ?

Wait.... this means, I'm not actually having fun playing atm. or at least, playing it like I am now. So... better stop to think wether my time is worth this crap.

The Frozen Wastes of Midnight

25 years later, I'm again a Champion of the Frozen Wastes, not in Midnight, not in Icemark, but in Northrend.

This week I went to Eye of Eternity with a PUG, and owned it easily.

Phases 1 and 2 are too easy to be commented, phase 3 is a bit of a problem for a newbie there, but it was ok.



The last days I've been hunting rares for the Frostbitten achievement. Only 9 to go.

PVP wise, the ladder is slow above 1400. 1500 is within reach this week, lets hope we make it.

PVE wise, we're stalled, guild is lacking something to push forward. There's will, there's only 2 bosses left before Yogg Saron.. but "casual" means ppl show up when they can, there are no fixed days, so we never know when we can go or not.

As to pets and mounts:
PETS:
I'm stuck with 65 pets, 10 to go.
5 of them can be the Argent Tournament ones, but boy it's painful to get to 200 medals. And then I still need 5 more, from fishing dailies or AH or farming like hell for the dragonlings.
MOUNTS:
53 at the moment. Yesterday I made a computation and... I can get 95 pets, by paying 10K gold, and assuming I get the ZG mounts, the zhevra mount and the baron mount.
I'm farming reseach medals for the 2 Halaa mounts, the 170 medals I already have after using a funny lock-only "ability".
But from 95 to 100.. there's simply no way I can do it, unless I go for the expensive Argent Tournament mounts (100-150 medals each), and it's simply crazy.

As time goes by

I've spent the last days dedicated to raiding and arenas and not doing battlegrounds at all, while finishing the Argent Crusade shores, ie, become exalted and get the Crusader title. Far too easy, but a good money.

In the end, I'm still short medals to buy all 5 pets, and I'll need nearly all of them to get the 75 pets from my current 61. Got an Azure whelpling for 800g, and a the Dalaran horde-only kitty for 1000g. Boy that sucks. The rest of the whelplings I hope to farm and get from eggs.

Arenawise, I'be been running with a guildie mage, and learning on what can and not be done, like e.g. that mages can't polymorph druids, and that a dps duo is in general better burning the opponnent dps than killing the healer while the opponent dps is loose. Boy are healers hard these days. 1300 rating, going smoothly up.

Raidwise, a lot of improvement. Got myself a decent Soulfire MH and another Ulduar ring, Naxx HC wand, bringing my average gear to 210, and my spellpower to 1803.


All bosses seen and learned up to Freya, it'll be a walk in the park from now on.
Thorim is our current stall point, and no solution for the arena mobs yet.



I had a misstep on Hodir, where I simply kept getting too much damage, while ppl talked about runes and the need to run away, but I couldn't see any fucking runes, only some falling rain sometimes and then a snowy platform. After some searching, it turns out that Blizzard decided, for 3.1, to add a nice "checkbox" on video settings "Projected Textures", and tooltip it with "disabling this will greatly improve performance". Fuck it, I unchecked it... and guess what.. that shit setting disables rune viewing on Hodir, so I was most time on top of runes, getting screwed :(

It's a pity that we don't have enough geared ppl for 25-Ulduar, our latest tries there was a wipe, after one successful clear of the first 3 bosses. Our leader decided to set class officers, so I've now got the job of making a health checkup and tip list for our fellow and future lockies, so we can help'em improve their dps. It's not possible to see ppl dps'ing below the tank level, it simply won't work.

Zul'Gurubing

This week I decided to look for Zul'Gurub and go towards a solo/dualboxing the whole instance, starting of course with the mount bosses.

And guess what, both down at the first try in PVP spec + PVE gear, dualboxed The'kal and soloed Mandokir.

How ?



On Thekal, my priest keeps mana burning the damn Zealot that likes healing the boss trio. It takes a while to set it up coz the zealot only needs 200 mana to heal. Let felguard get aggro on all of them, pop metamorphosis and pull tiger adds to kill them with fire aura. Then, I do a dance near the wall everytime felguard gets stunned and the trio comes for me. When both are nearly dead (5-10%), remember to 2-dot all 3, because when felguard or you gets stunned the ress timer will elapse when one dies and he gets ressed. On Part2, tank and spank, pop metamorph for the tiger adds, that's all, folks.

Mandokir it's even easier. Set the add on passive by the speaker, make the pet do a white strike on him and go passive again. Mandokir will not aggro until speaker is dead, so you can go up and kiss his ass if you want, and then jump to the little platform, setting a teleport circle. Then kill the speaker. Mandokir and his pet will agro the felguard but will pull you shortly to him. Teleport back to the platform. Shortly after, pet will just ignore you and then it's tank+spank to the end. Felguard can handle it so easily, just health funnel, set curse of weakness, and keep nuking. In my case he actually teleported to my little platform, as well as the felguard (!!!) so I jumped and then went up the stairs and nuked him from the top of the zigurat.

No mounts. But a nice rep farming on trash+boss+coins, so exalted is not a dream now.

Today I'm gonna try other bosses.. may be up to Hakkar.

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Yesterday I went to see Ulduar's Kologarn.
Easy fight for a ranged, but died once on the beams when we killed him, by walking backwards...shame on me.
Prio 1: Get out of the fucking beam, strafing left and right or tbh I like the oval walking better, and on 10-men, there's a lot of space on the right side. Ah, and NEVER walk sideways+backwards. Did it once and died.
Prio 2: Nuke right arm. When arm is dead, aoe adds... giving time for warrior to aggro, or you're dead meat and waste time => Keep soulshatter handy just in case.
Prio 3: When nothing else moves, nuke boss.

Felguard was ok here.. except may be when he died suddenly, I think because of a nearby beam. Passive imp might be better.

Alternative strategy is to kill the left arm instead of the boss, since he looses 15% for every gone arm, making it easier for the healers.
It's a hard fight for the poor melees, coz of the nearby beams, and for the healers, coz of the arm grabbing.

Fun too.

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Last but not least, went to Emalon Heroic and got my first furious item, and as well as top dps as bonus.

PVE
11 x 200 items
6 x 213 items

WTB >213 gear !!!