2.3, Flying Mount, and Tanking

Yesterday, being Veteran’s Day here in the United States, I was off work, so I figured that gave me a free pass for my blog as well. But by doing that, I’m going to have to make this a mish-mash of a post so I can cover a couple different things.

Patch 2.3
I fired up the old World Of Warcraft program on my computer this morning just to make sure that 2.3 has gone live, which it has. I know some people complain, but I love that the Blizzard Background Downloader did most of the work way before patch day. I think I only had to download 2 mb or something trivial like that (as compared to the over 200 mb patch that it is).

I think our guild, as a whole, is pretty excited about the whole patch. And I’ve stayed on top of most things on the PTR where when people have said, “Hey, did you know…?” I was confidently able to answer, “Yup.” And from what I’ve heard in the raiding community, it seems that this is one of the patches that has been able to be tested the most (at least for the new instance) since there’s a lot of guilds that have cleared Black Temple and whatnot. So, it will be fun to start playing in there, even if the instance server crashes once or twice.

And the guild vault will be a great place to store goods both in the large guilds, all the way to the 1-man guilds that have sprouted up all over. (I’d love to see numbers on how many new guilds started up over the past few weeks and next few weeks.) 2.3 is really just full of win.

Flying Epic Mount Update
Well, with dailies and a whole bunch of easy quests in Shadowmoon Valley, I was able to hit 5000g on Saturday night. I was also fortunate to find some purple BoE cloth bracers (totally forgot the name, and too lazy to go look it up) in Blade’s Edge which I empowered with Apexis Crystals and put on the AH. The buy-out was 550 with a bid start of about 450. It sold for the bid, and I was able to get both skill, and new riding mount.

I also started on the Netherdrake quests. In two days, I hit Friendly; I got really lucky with finding probably about ½ a dozen eggs. So, I now have something like 6 daily quests there. Not sure I’ll have time to do all of those each day, but it certainly opens up some money making possibilities from quests there. Heck, at this rate, maybe I’ll have enough for my flying epic mount if I ever get my priest past level 64.

Uldaman
My Shaman got to go play in his first instance since Dead Mines. And, I actually co-tanked it. The group we had was two Shamans (level 44), a Druid (level 38), a Hunter (level 40), and a Priest (level 44). The Druid was the main healer, and while I was the Main Tank, the other Shaman probably pulled agro and tanked ½ the time as well. (In this case, pulling agro was a good thing.) The Priest, my wife, was pretty much in shadow form busting out the damage the whole time. We made it through most of the instance by ourselves. It was a good challenge, and lots of fun. If I have the time and appropriate level friends, I love to do the instances at the appropriate level. They’re kind of a bore if you always have somebody walk you through. (Of course, there’s a few, such as Dead Mines, that I could probably live without seeing ever again.) We did call in reinforcements for the last two bosses. We go the 4 statues down to just 3, and then the other Shaman went and got his level 70 hunter to wipe up the rest for us.

The group was all RL friends, so that was fun as well. But afterwards, I remembered that it may have been more level appropriate for the hunter and druid to run Scarlet Monastery, which I haven’t run yet. Oh well. Like I said, it was a lot of fun, and I don’t feel bad that we called in help for the last two. I’m only a wannabe tank, after all.