"Life" Outside WoW

Tis the season to be sick.  Without going into details, suffice it to say that I haven’t been feeling well.  That’s my only excuse for not blogging on Friday when I had said I would.  But on to other things.

I know this is a WoW blog, and I usually only talk about WoW related things.  I know I’ve ventured out into Starcraft 2 on a time or two, and even talked about some board games here and there.  But I may venture out a bit more today.  (Yes, yes… I’ll get back to WoW in the New year.)

Last Wednesday, my wonderful wife took the kids and went to her mother’s house so that I could have an all-day guy party on Thursday with friends that were around for Christmas.  It was a really fun day.

I got the killing shot on two Battlemechs when we were playing Battletech.  (I really wish I had more local friends that played that board game.  Haven’t played it in years, and used to all the time.)  We took on Onyxia in the WoW TCG, but with only 4 decks.  With our mostly white cards, we probably needed a 5th to make it happen.  Got to the last phase of Onyxia and only needed 11 more hit points to kill her.  (With all phases, she has 100, I think.)  Played some Sid Meier’s Pirates.  (Fun game.  Played the old one a lot.  The new one has some nice, updated additions (like graphics you can actually see).)  And even got some WoW time in as well.  It was an awesome day.

I was feeling sick since Monday, but Friday hit me especially hard.  Hard enough that I slept a lot and stayed home from work as well.  (No sleeping on the job for me.  :P)  But got in a fair amount of mindless Wow as well.  (Farming anyone?)  The family came back mid-afternoon; and by the evening, I thought the kids would enjoy seeing the Pirates game, so I headed off to my local Best Buy to pick it up.  On a curiosity, I went over to the video game section first to see if they had Rock Band for the PS2.  I was slightly amazed to see 8 PS2 boxes of Rock Band.  I grabbed one and headed for the check out.  I guess I’ll put Pirates off for a few months.  Lol.

Rock Band is a lot of fun.  Kind of challenging to do the drums, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it.  All of the equipment is actually PS3 compatible, if I ever want to buy one of those.  The mic doesn’t work, but I headed over to the EA support site, and they’re shipping me a new one.  It was kind of really easy to replace the mic.  I had read there were a lot of equipment issues with the PS2 version.  I wonder if somehow there’s a special PS2 version of the mic, and they just didn’t bother including it in my package for some reason.  Like maybe those were in short supply or something.  Maybe that’s just a conspiracy theory.  At any rate, great fun.  And if you have an opportunity to play, I would highly suggest it.

Supply and Demand - Rock Band edition

Christmas was quite successful this year at my house.  The wife said it was her best Christmas ever.  The kids have played with all their toys and seem generally excited about them.  And I blame Amazon for not getting my big present this year.

Let me preface this paragraph by saying that it’s standard practice; I understand that.  When something new comes out such as a video game, then there is a chance that there will be more pre-orders than there are actual units.  Well, my wife pre-ordered Rock Band for the PS2, but Amazon came back to her at the beginning of December and told her that they were canceling her order due to too many pre-orders and not enough actual units being shipped to them.  My wife and my mom have spent time every day searching for another copy of it for me.  I recognize all the hard work they put into it.  They even went to Circuit City once to pick one up after a confirmation through a phone call, only to find out that it was the PS3 version.

So, I now have permission to go buy one, I just have to find one.  Ah yes, I can certainly go buy one for $400 through a seller on Amazon or Ebay, but I’m not that impatient.  Furthermore, price gouging like that really doesn’t sit well with me, even if I’m the one making the profit; so, I don’t buy or sell stuff like that.

The other option, I suppose is to buy a PS3 and then buy the Rock Band bundle for that one.  Since it’s been out longer, I’ll probably even have an easier time buying an Xbox360 and then the bundle for that system.  But Rock Band is the only console game that I seem to be remotely interested in buying at present, and it’s been that way for awhile.  Sure, I’ve also been into all of the Guitar Heroes games, but that only required a PS2.  And while the downloadable content would be very cool, I can’t justify spending what would amount to about $600 just for one game.

So, I’ll wait.

I also got the Nostromo n52 SpeedPad for Christmas.  I have to pick up a USB hub to support my cable management system (I have enough extra ports), which I’ll do today so I can start playing with it.  I’ll take some time to play with it before I write up a review on it or how I use it.

And for my last point, after opening only 3 Ethereum Stasis Chambers, I got a Mark of the Nexus-King.  That puts me one step closer to summoning Yor.  I’m not sure why I have this obsession.  Just the last reputation that I really want besides Netherwing, I suppose.  (Which is slowly progressing as well.)

Trudging Through Consortium Rep

Not a whole lot to report today.  I’ve been working on my Consortium rep in order to be able to summon Yor.  Yes, yes, you can summon him without being exalted, but that’s just a one-time charge.  Being exalted (and getting through a few quests) gets you the permanent summon, and he has a few great rings that I know some of my guildies can use.  Plus, being exalted gets you more gems on a monthly basis, so hopefully I can get there before the month is over.

And unless I’m missing something, there’s not a lot of ways to get Consortium rep.  If I can get a Heroic Mana Tombs run, I guess it’s only 4.2 runs there.  Or I can turn in a set of 10 Zaxxis Insignias 40 more times.  There’s still a group quest or two that I haven’t done for the Consortium, but if I’m gonna get a group, I might as well do Mana Tombs, right?  At any rate… I’m not far.

So, this week will be light on blogging, probably Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  But Merry Christmas everyone!

High End Crafting Mats

I probably should have done some research on my own Auction House before posting this article, but instead, I’ll use the cheap imitation of WoWEcon.

Another one of the services I offer is that I maintain the sticky post on my realm forums for all the crafted items that people can produce and that can help others.  Lately, I’ve noticed that one of the raiders from our realm has been getting some high end patterns that will allow him to produce some of the items that have an item level of around 141.  Most of these crafted items seem to require at least one Heart of Darkness.  Those Hearts only drop from Mount Hyjal and Black Temple.  For my realm, that means that there’s only 4 guilds (or roughly 100 people) that can get any of those Hearts at all.  Per WoWEcon, at least somebody’s putting them up on the AH for about 500g a pop.  So, that means that my Bracers of Nimble Thought would cost me about 2000g.  (I can farm the rest of the mats myself.)

First of all, I was a little surprised to see these on the AH at all.  I figured that the guilds would keep them all to themselves providing the materials to guild crafters for epic, home-grown items.  I guess there’s always the possibility that these guilds have used all they can, and want to cover the repair bill for everyone for a night.  They know they’re going to get more (an 8% drop rate isn’t too horrible).  Maybe only one of the guilds has been lucky enough to get the pattern drops.

At any rate, even with my new-found wealth at having my Flying Epic Mount, I can’t imagine spending 2000g on bracers.  Furthermore, I have the Bands of Negation, so I’d really only gain +5 Spell Damage and +2 Stamina, lose 2 Intellect, and gain 28 spell haste.  (And armor doesn’t count for PVE.)  Hmm.. for 2000g?  Yeah, I think I’ll pass.

Who's Fault Is It?

I had this kind of random idea, so I decided to post it both here and on my guild forums.  Check me… I’m reblogging.  Lol.  The question is this: Who got you started on WoW?  I’ll go first.

I’ll back up a bit and explain my MMO history.  I was initially against spending a monthly fee for a game, although I liked the idea of always playing with real people and not just AI.  When Everquest II came out, my boss at the time, who had played Everquest for years, helped give me the small push to play.  He said we’d group and be able to do stuff together and whatnot.  For the 6 months or so that I played, I think I grouped with him twice.  But I really enjoyed the guild I had found and the online friends that I had made.  I also really enjoyed the idea of playing with other people.

During that time, a good RL friend (Hi, Jimbo) played with me and then quit.  About that time, Guild Wars came out, and the idea of no more monthly fee appealed to the both of us.  We played it for a bit, got to level 20, and then found that the maturity level of the players just wasn’t all that great.  Who knows… maybe we just didn’t find a really active guild, I don’t know.

My best friend (Hi Elinor) had been playing WoW since beta, and at about that time, his brother (who I also grew up with) decided to start playing WoW as well.  It was only a matter of time, and I’m sure I was going to pick up the game very, very soon; but conveniently enough, my wife bought it for me for my birthday.  And I’ve been hooked ever since.  So, to answer my initial question, even though my wife bought it, I’d say my best friend was the one that got me started on WoW.  Who’s fault was it that you’re now hooked?

Heroics at about 60%

I was having a conversation with a few guildies last night, and I realized that I really haven’t completed a lot of the 5-man instances on heroic setting.  I’ve completed all 15 of the expansion instances on normal mode, but only 9 or 10 of them on heroic.  And the Underbog (being one of the 9 or 10), I’ve completed multiple times, but only when you could do the speed runs straight to The Black Stalker.

The guild mate I was talking to has completed all the instances on heroic except for two of them, I think.  While that’s cool, I’m not 100% sure that’s really a goal of mine.  Do I care that I haven’t killed Murmur on heroic?  Is it really that important to free Thrall when the odds are even more against us?  I’m exalted with all of the associated factions of those instances except for the Consortium.  (More Heroic Mana Tombs anyone?)  There aren’t really any upgrades in those other heroics for me.  Yeah, I still get badges, but I can do that in the “easier” heroics just as easily.  I don’t know.  Where’s everyone else on this subject?

Zul'Aman Guide to the First 2.5 Bosses

After killing Nalorakk on Sunday, and Akil’Zon last night, we thought we’d head on over to Jan’Alai, the Dragonhawk boss in ZA.  I waved at Jan’Alai, and looked menacingly at him, but that was about as close as we got.  For those that haven’t gotten here yet, let me give a few updates on some of these bosses in ZA.

Nalorakk
He’s known as the Bear Avatar.  Getting to him, isn’t too tough.  You have to have two well geared tanks, but the pulls are pretty basic.  There will be groups of up to 4, so you’ll need to have some CC in there as well.  Some of the mobs will get off their bear mounts when the mount is almost dead, and the tank will have to pick up those as well.

The boss himself hits very, very hard.  You need two tanks for this fight.  One tank will take him in the troll form, and the other in the bear form.  Essentially, the bear form has a bleeding ability that’s pretty rough, but the troll form has an ability that increases bleed effects by 100%.  You also need to have both tanks on top of each other to divide the damage of Brutal Swipe between the two tanks.  Then, they just taunt them off each other at the appropriate time.  He’ll also randomly charge people, but that shouldn’t be too much of an issue.  Finally, there’s a silencing effect, which shouldn’t be too bad either.

Basically, if you have a group that can take on Prince Malchezaar, you’re probably okay.  If both tanks could tank the Prince, it’ll probably make Nalorakk very feasible.

Akil’zon
This is the Eagle Avatar.  Getting to this boss, is probably half the battle.  There’s a gauntlet type event that only ends once you kill the Amani’shi Tempest.  Along the way, you have to kill 4 sets of Amani’shi Wind Walkers and Amani’shi Protectors.  (1 of each per set.)  Meanwhile, you get a steady spawn of 2 elites and a bunch of non-elite birds.  We found that one tank would pick up the Wind Walker and Protector while the other would pick up the two that spawn in the back.  We’d also have a paly (any spec) consecrate to pick up the birds.  Kill, the Wind Walker and Protector and then one of the spawned elites, and then pull the next set of Wind Walkers/Protectors.  The biggest thing to remember, is to stop the Wind Walker from healing.  If you can do that, it’ll probably be an easy fight.

Akil’zon is a little more difficult.  The less melee you have the better though.  It’s a 1-tank encounter, so best to have a second tank that is a hybrid so be able to maximize DPS (druid) or healing (paladin).  The more people are spread out, the less damage they’ll take from the Static Disruption.  He has a few other abilities and even summons eagles (which you can basically ignore), but nothing you really have to worry about much, except for the Electrical Storm.  Everyone has to collapse in to the person that is lifted in the air by the Electrical Storm (you can see a shadow on the ground), but you can’t stand on top of each other or the Static Disruption will get everyone.  So, you have to continually expand and contract.  The other tricky thing is that the Electrical Storm is every 45 seconds to a minute, so if you contract right at 45 seconds, you may get hit with a few Static Disruptions before he decides to use the Electrical Storm.  The first few hits of the Electrical Storm don’t hit too hard, so you don’t have to immediately be in the protection, but you do need to get there quick, or else you’ll start taking a lot of damage.  It’s a long fight, but not too difficult once you get the movement down.

Jan’alai
The Dragonhawk Avatar.  I’d love to be able to tell you first-hand knowledge of this one, but since it was another gauntlet type encounter, we didn’t get to the boss yet.  There are these patrolling Scouts that respawn fairly quickly.  They’re non-elite, so you can kill them pretty quick, but they also run fast.  And they run straight for these drums.  If they hit the drums, they pull in a lot of reinforcements.  We got through the first few groups, but we’re still learning placement and whatnot.  We didn’t spend a lot of time there on this one.  So… even though we didn’t quite get through all the trash, we’ll call this our 0.5 part of this guide.

Meeting Guildmates

Last night, I jumped online a little late for a ZA run to find out that one our main healers had a system failure (hard drive we suspect) on his desktop, and he was in the middle of downloading patches for his laptop.  He was patching from version 2.1, so it was taking awhile to get everything.  While I had yet to meet the guy in RL, I knew that he lived less than a ½ mile from me.  I jumped into the Vent channel he was on, and told him to come on over.

Within 10 minutes, he had come over.  We hooked his laptop up to my network, transferred the patches he needed, and then sent him home to actually apply the patches.  It probably saved him an hour or two of downloading.

He’s a neat guy; I think I’ve always liked him (at least as far back as I can remember).  He’s been in our guild for months and months.  I keep saying to myself that I should find some excuse to actually meet him, but I just never do.  So, I guess that was my good excuse.

I suppose that this isn’t the first Wow friend that I’ve met in RL.  I got to know my friend DadGuy through Wow, but he works with my best friend, so I knew he wasn’t an axe-murderer.  And I suspect that this guild healer isn’t an axe-murderer.  (Only time will tell, right?  Lol)

So, I guess I was simply wondering how many people actually go out and meet their Wow guildies in RL?  And I’m not talking about in a romantic way.  Just in a “hey, I wanted to meet my WoW friend” way.  Or a “Come on over and I can help you out” way.  Anyone?  Or am I a total freak of nature?

Don't Be An Idiot

I was thinking a lot about an article over at The Forgotten Monk.  As much as it applies to WoW, it basically said, “Know when to give up.”  His last line is “Don’t be an idiot.”

To 10 people running into Gruul’s Lair expecting to kill High King Maulgar and Gruul, let alone the first trash mob, I’d say, “Don’t be an idiot.”  Now, granted these 10 people may not have a clue what the instance is, so they may just be uninformed, but isn’t that basically what an idiot is?

But for my focus, I’m going to pretend that I’m not an idiot.  Yesterday’s Heroic of the Day was Shattered Halls.  I was minding my own business, hanging out in Shat when I got a random whisper from a guy asking if I wanted to do Shattered Halls.  Turns out two of the guys were from a guild that’s rated top 10 in progression for alliance and the hunter they got is from the top guild on our server.

To make a long story short: We had some difficulties with the instance, but when we lost our main tank, none of us could readily find an easy replacement.  We could have grabbed some random PUG, but we were all pretty tired.  In a group decision we decided that the 2 badges that we got would be sufficient for the night.

Kind of along the lines of what Jimbo posted in the comments yesterday… get the right gear for the right instance.  Use the Badge Gear to your advantage.  Oh, and don’t be an idiot.  ;)

Heroic Dailies

For whatever reason, I’ve been focusing on the daily quests a lot lately.  There’s obviously a desire for me to finally get my Netherdrake or get my epic flight form for the druid, but the rep and the money aren’t the focus of today’s post.  Today, I’m going to talk about the daily heroics.

Pre-patch 2.3 (when the daily heroic and 5-man quests were introduced), there always seemed to be a huge desire to run Heroic Mechanar for the “easy” badges.  If you completed the whole instance, you’d get 5 badges.  If you just did the easy stuff, you’d get 3.  That’s not bad for an hour’s work.  It seemed that I was running roughly the same instances for the same elusive gear, and happen to be collecting badges at the same time.

Now that patch 2.3 has had enough time to settle in, I’ve realized that it’s been really nice having a daily heroic.  It’s almost as if it’s the suggested heroic of the day.  You get 2 more badges for completing it, you get 25g, and if you should happen to need an additional PUG (or two), there’s usually plenty of people in the LFG tool for that instance.

There other nice thing that I alluded to is that it gives you a chance to see some of the instances that you might not have seen before or for awhile.  Haven’t seen Hellfire Ramparts since level 61?  Guess what?  It’s the heroic of the day.  Haven’t seen Thrall in Hillsbrad Foothills since you helped the last group of guildies get Kara attuned months ago?  You’ve now got to go there for an Epoch Hunter’s Head.

While I know this to may get old, at least it spices things up a little.  It helps you get a few more badges.  And it also helps give some motivation for some of those 75-badge items you’ve been drooling over.  So now there’s one more reason to do your dailies.

Making it Easy

In the real world, it is much easier to make money when you have money.  In it’s simplest form, if you have $10 million dollars sitting in a simple savings account at a dividend rate of 1%, you’d make roughly $100,000 per year.  Of course, you’d probably get a much higher rate than that, but you get the idea there.  While people of lesser RL assets may be playing Flip this Tree House, savvy investors may be making a few million dollars on flipping businesses.

World of Warcraft is much the same way.  While it’s not always the money you have that makes the big impact, but the level that you’re at.  Quests at level 1 provide a few copper at best, where quests at level 70 generally provide no less than 5 gold.  At the copper rate, it would take eons for a level 1 toon to save up for a mount.  (Thank goodness that the money scales and we have 39 levels to raise the funds.)

Then there are these daily quests that I’ve spoken of that can be an awesome profit center.  Expecting a night of wipes learning a new boss?  Great!  Do a couple dailies, and you’re set for the night.  But wait, there’s a catch… you have to be level 70.

I’m not proposing that this changes.  I’m merely pointing out the ease of raising money once you’re in a particular situation.  Furthermore, once you’ve laid out the 5000g for the epic flying training, you can start working on the Netherwing and open up a whole slew of other daily quests.  In fact, if you do 7 quests, you can get 55 gold in quest rewards alone.  That’s not even counting all of the gray drops or other greens that you might find.  Plus, you can still do 3 more daily quests for even more cash.

I was reminded of this last night when I thought I’d go help out the guild by farming Primal Life.  After what seemed like an abnormally long time to get 10 motes, a friend pointed out that in that time, I could have done a number of daily quests, bought more Primal Life than I had farmed, and increased my rep with Netherwing as well.

I don’t have a high level miner, that may be the exception to this rule, but… Farming is for Suckers.  Go out and do your dailies.

Akil'zon Down

Last night, we ventured into Zul’Aman, and we finally downed Akil’zon.  I’d post the picture, but since I don’t have direct access to Blogger1, it’s kind of a challenge.  /sigh.  The main issue that I think we were having was to make sure that everyone bunched up for the Electrical Storm.  We’d either all bunch up and he wouldn’t do the storm for a few seconds causing massive amounts of damage due to Static Disruption, or he’d catch somebody in the Electrical Storm that was so far away from everyone else that by the time we all got over there, it had killed at least one person.

We had him down Sunday night to about 2%.  I’m not sure what exactly happened in the end as I wasn’t there for that night.  Last night, it really seemed like smooth sailing once we got some of the kinks2 worked out.  Congratulations to Simiavus who won the Chestguard of the Hidden Purpose.

Notes
1. I’ve been contemplating changing domains as a number of my fellow Bloggers have.  My main reason would simply be to have direct access to my blog again.  It probably won’t be until after the holidays, but if you’re going to subscribe to my blog, sign up via http://feeds.feedburner.com/zanderfinswowcasualraiding, so that you don’t get left behind.  And if you've already subscribed, take the time to update the address.  Thanks.

2. I generally play Wow on my couch on my laptop.  It’s a couple years old, but still does a great job… mostly.  As we were headed up the gauntlet to the Eagle Boss, I was main tanking and getting about 5 fps.  As I engaged Akil’zon, that dropped to about 2 fps, and I couldn’t even tell what was going on at all.  I had told the raid, but we didn’t want to lose out on chances due to my downtime of changing computers.  When I couldn’t even tell if I was successfully lacerating, it was a tell-tale sign that we would wipe.  We wiped.  I switched to my desktop.  I got a rez, and then tanked at my no less than 30 fps.  I really need a new laptop.  Lol.

WTB AH Greens

It was a busy weekend with the holiday season, events, and a Christmas concert, so I didn’t get too much noteworthy Wow time in.  The one thing I did accomplish was to get a group to go back in and defeat Pandemonious.

I logged in late Saturday night and asked a few guildies if they wanted to come in to Heroic Mana Tombs with me.  We ended up with me (the tanking druid), a mage, a holy paladin, a resto druid, and a pug warlock (everyone else was in an instance).  I told the pug that my focus was killing Pandemonious.  With my remembered gear, a few other AH greens, and a Shadow Resist Aura, I was sitting at about 240 Shadow Resist.  Granted we did have two healers, but I was taking considerably less damage then our other tanks that tried this boss.  It was almost trivial.

The funny thing was that I was mostly in green AH gear.  It seems that Blizzard has provided all these great resist gear items for plate wearers of epic and superior quality, but for the leather tanks, they get random drop greens that have stamina and resist on them.  Maybe I just have to get over my prejudice towards the purple items.  The same can be true for the tanking mage in the fight with High King Maulgar… just a lot of green plus stamina gear will usually do the trick.  So, maybe it’s situational, but don’t underestimate the green items you see drop.

On another note, I got the recipe for the Stormchops from the daily cooking quest.  I made a few, but have yet to see them in action.  I suppose it will be of most use to my Enhancement Shaman when he gets another 3.5 levels (level 55 requirement for the Stormchops).  I also got a world enchanting drop of Enchant Weapon – Potency.  I used it since I didn’t have it, but at a Auctioneer value of about 600g on my server, I may have made the wrong decision.  Is +20 Strength really worth it?  Well… I have it if anyone wants it.  Heh.

Heroic Mana Tombs and Gear

So, I guess it’s just my week to complain about Heroic Instances.  Last night, I got in a guild group to help with the previous day’s Heroic daily quest (that somebody still had) of Mana Tombs.  I’d been in there a few times before.  I knew the instance was tough too.  And sadly, we didn’t even make it past the first boss, Pandemonius.

We got the general strategy down: don’t attack when he has his Dark Shell up.  The hunter and I (on Leiandra) stayed at max range so we wouldn’t get hit by the Shadow Bolts.  Our paly tank would just get eaten up, and the druid healer had a hard time healing him.

He deals all shadow damage, so with the proper resist gear, he really shouldn’t be too bad.  Of course, our tank only had about 80 shadow resist, so that was probably a big part of the problem.

I checked my druid to see how much resist gear I had, and came up with about 80, and that was with Mark of the Wild.  I forgot about a bunch of pieces that I had in the bank that would have brought it up to about 170.  And I bid on two more pieces that were on the AH that would push me way over 200 with still a good amount of stamina.  (Armor would be useless for this fight since it is all magic damage.)  I’ll have to try tanking him with my full shadow resist outfit.  I’m sure the fight will still be a challenge, but it’d mean that the druid wouldn’t have to spam heals on the tank.  I’ll have to let you know how that goes.

Where'd it Go?

Today, I just got busy with a lot of different things.  So, I’ll use the cop-out and tell everyone about my guest post over at World of Matticus that got posted late yesterday.  I’m really not sure where the day went.  But since I technically wrote two yesterday… yeah… we’ll see you tomorrow.

Group Composition Matters

Primogeniture has had a number of new recruits, and we’re slowly getting to the point where we’ll soon be able to put Gruul’s Lair back on farm.  Even though there were a few people that weren’t online yesterday, we still had enough to run two full Kara groups, and I even got to bring in Leiandra (yeah!).  My group composition happened to be 1 Prot Paladin, 1 Prot Warrior, 1 Holy Paladin, 1 Healing Priest, 2 Shadow Priests, 2 Mages, a Hunter and a Warlock.  In case you weren’t counting, that was 3 Shackles, 2 Turn Undeads, 1 Ice Trap, and 1 Banish (when the occasion would arise).  It made the instance quite easy.  We killed everything through Opera, but since we got a late start, decided to put off the rest for another night.

After Karazhan, I recruited a bunch of guildies to help Justicar get that one more badge.  We headed into the heroic instance of the day which happen to be Mechanar.  The group that were interested happen to be me, Prot Paladin, Resto Druid, Rogue, and Enhancement Shaman.  “Me” being Justicar, that’s a lot of melee power.  So, I figured I’d get the badge another day.  We skipped Nethermancer Sepethrea (is she even possible on Heroic), and went straight for Pathaleon the Calculator.  We couldn’t seem to down him, what with our rogue that kept stabbing us all in the face.  So, when I was ready to give up, it was suggested that I grab Justicar, who was parked just outside.  I tanked Pathaleon, Talek tanked the adds, and he was dead in one shot (with that group).  We attempted Sepethrea, but our first attempt wasn’t fun, and we were all very tired.

But before I logged off, I turned in the daily and purchased my new bracers.  For some strange reason, at about 2 o’clock in the morning, I decided to check my blog and update some of the non-links that I had.  Only then did I read DadGuy’s response that I should save up for the Waistguard of the Beast.  He’s right.  He’s almost always right when it comes to Wow Theorycrafting, and even more so when it involves Druid Tanking.  My only consolation is that with the number of active tanks we once again have, I’ll probably go back to Leiandra full time, since I’m just a mage at heart.  So, who knows how long it would have taken to get the other 25 badges?  Oh well.

Upgrades!... almost

So, with all the tanking my druid has been doing lately in Kara and ZA, I thought it would be a good idea to see how many Badges of Justice I had and if there were any good upgrades for me.  Before last night, I had 29.  And a really great upgrade would be the Band of the Swift Paw (Shouldn't it be "Bands" - plural?)  So close.  Only 6 more badges to go.

We had enough people to run Kara online, but since they were saved in different instances, neither group had enough.  So, we looked at the Heroic of the day and found that it was Hellfire Ramparts.  With the guildies that were online and not in an instance already, I grabbed Leiandra to DPS through Ramparts.  We had to PUG one person, but I had a great warlock on my friends list so it was relatively painless.  We had our pally tank, our ret pally*, myself (mage), our priest, and the aforementioned warlock.  Our guild's not lacking in pallys atm.  It was fairly easy.  We died a few times due to bad pulls just before the split to the two bosses, Omor the Unscathed and Varuzden & Nazan.  The pat there makes things a little tricky if you can't remember the last time you ran the instance.  :)  So, 5 badges and 25g later (after turning in the quest), it was a pretty good instance.

So good, in fact, that before we had even finished splitting the loot from Varuzden, I was planning to go back in with Justicar (my druid) to get a little bit closer to the 35 badges.  This time it was all guildies: Druid tank, Shadow Priest, Rogue, Hunter, and Tree Druid.  So, we had 3 forms of CC which helped a lot.  I'm still learning how to solo tank in 5-man instances, so there were a few wipes.  But overall: successful.  But, as I've seen in the past, it was just fun hanging out with people from the guild.  We were mostly chatting and having a good time.  They understood my noob-ness, so it wasn't a big deal when we had to run for our corpses.  So, again... 5 badges and 25g later, I'm now just 1 badge away from finally not having blue bracers.

*Our ret pally has actually become a great asset.  Not only is he great as a person (always willing to help out the guild and other players, and understanding if he's not included in every run), but his DPS is also actually quite impressive.  If I'm not paying attention (read: being lazy or 1/2 falling asleep on a run), he'll beat Leiandra in DPS.  So I'm certainly not saying that all Ret Pallies are great, but I am saying that they can be.

Links Fixed?

Almost 2 months ago, I had to start e-mailing my posts to my blog since I don't remember to do it from home, and the company I work for has blocked all Blogspot traffic.  We also use... umm... an inferior e-mail program (in my opinion) than the one that most of corporate America seems to use, so links can't be easily posted in like I thought I could do.  I guess I don't link as many things as I thought I did since it's taken 2 months for somebody (2 people actually) to point out that my links aren't working.

So, as to Friday's post of the top 5 things... head on over to The Forgotten Monk to see the top 10 things that I posted.  And if that link doesn't work, I'm ditching Lotus... errr... the e-mail program that I'm unfamiliar with, and I'll figure out another way.  And in case it didn't work, my post can be found at the following: http://www.theforgottenmonk.com/top-ten-things-i%e2%80%99ve-learned-from-recent-video-games/

p.s. I'll work on fixing past links for those that might want to go back and see anything.