YAHOOHOO ! I'm over Nine Thousand !

A week has passed. The Brewfest event does not bring anything new. Anything at all ? No, something changed. After 5 days I was finally, after 3 years trying, able to get a BrewFAST mount! Not the Kodo, ok, but it's better than nothing.

I've been working on the Insane achievement, at my own place, slow and steady. I'm now revered with the Steemwheedle and honored with Shandralar, should be over at the end of September.

My PUG (kind of, it had ppl of the best guilds on my server) Ony10 and Toc10 were mostly sucessful, and I got some more achievements. TOC 10 was specially fun, because we did all the achievements for normal mode, namely the Anub'arak one, which involves killing 40 scarabs in quick succession, a hard achievement, if ppl don't know what to do. Because I was successful too, I got an invite for the Ulduar 25 run this weekend.













And I've just finished doing it ! During that, we did nearly 200 achievement points, I was able to finally kill Yogg Saron and to see Algalon in action ( we didn't kill it because the PUG had too many idiots, responsible for e.g. not reaching the Insanity achievement because one got MC at 1%, etc).



And the best part of all, Feat of Strength "It's over Nine Thousand".



Shame that I'm getting this done with no guildies.

Now my last goal for this expansion is "Halion down", but for that I will have to leave the guild for some days, or pay someone handsomely, since the guild killed it without me.

Last but not least, talents for Cataclysm are coming down soon and... I didn't like what I saw. They basically renewed warlocks in such a way that we have to learn everything again. Crap !

Back to classics

I'm having a good time with classical music again. Back to piano, back to the promenade festivals, etc. What does this relate to WoW ? I'll tell you.
I'm also back to classics, Dire Maul, LBRS, Zul'Gurub.

Part of it is because of Blizzard, which stupidly decided to cancel the Zul'Gurub raid and open the area to low level questing (with another idiotic sequence of killing X trolls, gather Y boxes, scout Z goblins, etc, to get a mediocre 50 silver and some greenish bad looking legs). So I'm back to ZG to try and get my tiger before the expansion kicks in. Good thing old Broodlord Mandokir gave me his dyno !

I hope the expansion arrival will be better for me than with WOTLK, when nearly everyone in my ex-guild Portucale started rushing towards 80 to raid Naxx while I was still leveling and sightseeing (when ppl start delivering quests without even reading them, and competing to see who's gaining more XP per hour, it tells me I'm n the wrong spot) so I was left behind and simply quit and left the server. Ok it was not just that, there was an idiot called Brujah leading my priest class, and we weren't exactly *friends*. Oh well, he left Portucale too.

I'm sad that my guild wasn't able to stand together and get LK HC down in ICC10 (and Ulduar) with the corresponding "Glory of the Raider" achievements and mounts. We did 50% of the jobs and then... nothing. What's even worse, I did not kill Halion in RS10 and with every idiot and his mother requesting the achievement to get an invite, it isn't looking any good. People simply stopped accepting raids and logging off, so here I am, going for an Insane achievement and .. joining pugs. Ok, one PUG. The leader created the raid invitation on the forum, clearly stating what we do in terms of achievements and that's it. So tonight, we shall do Ony10 and TOC10. As he seems to be from a hardcore guild, so it should work. Hopefully. /pray.

Insanewise, no more pickpocketing for me, I was able to transfer some boxes and farm LBRS for the rest, so I'm now EXALTED with Ravenholdt.

Shandra'lar and Steemwheedle cartel are going good, still lacking about 30 librams and pristine black diamonds. I have a little trick for those, worked once already, but I'll tell it only in the end. Spent too many argent crusade seals on mounts, and now I miss I hadn't. An e-mail every 4 hours is great to avoid trashing librams because they are unique. I parked my alts near the entrance but still it's hard sometimes. Now my engineeering pala with MOLL-E is in Silvermoon too, it will help.

Darkmoon Faire is the hardest, halfway to honored now, but farming herbs is a pain in Azeroth without a flying mount, and the low level card decks give little reputation (need 14 low decks to match an epic deck), so I will probably farm Outlands (Zangarmarsh and Terokkar seem like good spots) for the TBC decks.

Insanely hard

Some months ago, out of boredom in SDD, I ran Matadora through LBRS and got a few hundred boxes waiting for the day I would start the Insane achievement. Well, since I have time now, and as we are stalled in raids (kind of), I decided to give it a go, since I wanted to level inscription for Tarithel anyway, the only profession I missed.

So, I restarted reading what I missed and .. I started it.

- Bloodsail Buccaneers up to Honored, that was easy, 2 evenings in Booty bay and I got myself hated by all the Steamweedle cartel factions. Now I know how stupid I would have been for going 40 exalted using those. I went up to revered with all 4, and now I'm fully -36K hated ! But this time I will not kill thousands of pirates to get myself exalted. No, I will go to Dire Maul because I have to. By doing all this goblin killing in Booty Bay I got the nice Admiral hat and the Bloodsail Admiral title. I'm now officially a pirate, Yarr !

- Ravenholdt up to exalted. This one was easy too. I spent a few hours in Hillsbrad Foothills, killing Syndicate adepts, and I got revered. The missing 21K rep will be given by my rogue, which has a little problem: Matadora is on Chromaggus, a different server ! So packing is a problem, I will need all the inventory space for the boxes for more than 1 char. That's not too bad (it is, in terms of $$$ I have to pay Blizz, ofc LOL), I will also have to transfer Moonprince, my beloved engineer, because I need MOLL-E for the mailbox near Netcownt. I tested it on Chromaggus, and luckily, I can logout the engineer, but the mailbox remains in place for 10 mins, so there's enough time for Netcownt to use it and grab a lot of boxes from the mail... cooldown is 2 hours, no worries.

- Steamwheedle up to exalted. As I said, I will go for Dire Maul for this, probably 100 times, until Cataclysm starts, so I have a litle 3 months. OMG ! Once or twice per day, hopefully, will be enough for all 4 factions ie, Booty Bay, Ratchet, Everlook, Gadgetzan. I need (?) 36000 + 3000 + 3000 + 6000 + 12000 + 21000 = 81000.

- Shen'dralar up to exalted. This is the "libram part", also in Dire Maul. I have a few abominations from my Baron runs, but my problem are really the damn "Pristine Black Diamonds". I need 84 of those and they go by 300-500g each on AH!!! I was able to grab 8 from the LOM deceased gbank (I hope the Lords will forgive me for this little theft, I will try to replace it with something useful for anyone that levels chars in Cataclysm, may be Firak, Corleth or Raidan will return and can use some leveling help).

- Darkmoon Faire up to exalted. God knows I tried, since Vanilla WoW, to get exalted. But the tickets were a pain in the ass method, and so I stopped halfway to friendly. This time it will be different, I know I can get up to halfway honored by delivering Thorium widgets (more help from my engineer Moonprince) and then switch to the "Deck" delivery mode. Decks decks, I need cards for that. Again, I got a few from the LOM gbank, and those will help me to make at most 1 Deck (LOL!). Now I need 92 instead of 93...Nah, because Inscription comes into the scenery, since an inscripter can create low level cards/decks. They will give a lot less reputation than the epic cards/decks, but they are also easy to make. So today, I leveled Tarithel inscription above 110 and I started making green decks like mad (yay, 3 !) too check how easy it is.

All in all, I will use 4 characters in 2 servers, checking up to 4 AH and hopefully paying only for the rarest mats, trading gold for effort. I will use my own professions: herbalism, inscription, engineering and one specific class, rogue, for lock picking.

Elune be praised !

All ready ? set ? Go !

Heroic mood

In the last days, things have been pretty busy both in RL and in WoW life.

Lets stick to WoW: Our guild isn't zombie anymore. With people returning from holidays and such, we were gathered to push some heroic/achievement modes towards "Glory of the Icecrownd Raider" and "Glory of the Ulduar Radier", in ICC10 and ofc in Ulduar. Three hurras for that !

For ICC10, we managed to dispatch a few of them, so only 5 are left to get us all a Bloodbathed Frosthood Vanquisher flying mount. We still didnt kill Sindragosa HC 10, best we did was 5%, and with a bit + dps in P3 we would have done it. Hopefully it will be tonight.

As to Ulduar 10, it's been a long long time (more than 1 year) since I had been there for real, but luckily we went in with our leaders knowing the fights, so we pwned and did 8 achievements, one per boss. 5 remain, probably the hardest, including Firefighter and One Light in the Darkness. May be we have enough time and pwn it for the Rusted Proto-Drake.