Kingslayer

Darkfall went into ICC tonight with a 10man raid. It was simultaneously frustrating and a cakewalk. The normal modes were way easy, and we had people who didn't care about either heroics or achieves. So we got the first 6 bosses on heroic, and then people wimped out when we wiped once on heroic Putricide. And there were a few people who through either malice or mistakes messed up some achieves. But we did get On a Boat and Portal Jockey so it wasn't a total loss. We also actually managed to kill Sindragosa on our first try despite having two people who'd never seen the fight before.

But, best of all, we killed Arthas the Lich King.

Our first try was not so great with people not letting me get the adds. So both me and the warrior tank, Wian, were obliterated by the disease during the transition to phase two.

Our second try was much better until we got to the second transition. Then a bad frost orb knocked 2 of our 3 heals and several dps off of the edge. Only Kuanchichi was left to heal, and Kuan was out of mana. So Wian went down, and a few more dps dropped. I grabbed Arthas and started tanking and kiting the spirits. Between my plentiful uses of cooldowns, self-heals, and the few heals that Kuan was able to toss my way I managed to stay alive for the next 10% or 15% of Arthas' health. Kuanchichi was super healer and even managed to toss heals on the only other remaining dps, so there was someone around to actually do damage. Miraculously we managed to bring Arthas to that magical 10% of his health where he decides to stop messing about and just oneshot us all. And then Tirion did his kill stealing thing and we won. The cut scene was also excellent.

I'll have screen shots and dialogue up later. It was pretty awesome.

Simple Pleasures

It is the simple pleasures that keep us going from day to day.

For example, just now I was flying around Mount Hyjal, as Viljo, looking for herbs. However, a some alliance person picked my Cinderbloom. I was rather annoyed, but I saw that he was flagged, and the same level as Viljo. So, of course, I landed, dropped Dragon's Breath, and then proceeded to pew pew and counter spell until he made a very nice dying dwarf sound.

Extra credit bonus points: it was a dwarf shaman that I killed. :D

Shadow's Edge

((This is from a while ago, but I realized I wasn't getting any farther with it and wasn't going to get any farther with it right now. Maybe later I can come back to this, but for now here is what I have.))
*******************************************************************************

Mornara has undertaken a quest from Darion Mograine. With his direction, she gathered the acidic blood from two of the Lich King's creations, Rotface and Festergut. She also gathered Arthas' old weapon, and a large amount of Primordial Saronite. Once she gathered all of these things Mornara and Darion forged them into a mighty axe, Shadow's Edge.

Now Mornara is slaughtering the minions of the Lich King in Icecrown Citadel. She is harvesting their souls to strengthen her new axe.

~~*~~
"Come to me, pretender! Feed MY blade."

Mornara falls out of her hammock in The Filthy Animal and lands on the floor with a thump. She is covered with a cold sweat and breathing raggedly.

She blinks blearily and rubs her hand over her face. She considers going downstairs for some bitter cactus cider, but she knows that even if she does get stinking drunk she won't get to sleep again. Not tonight. Not after one of those nightmares.

Instead Mornara straps on her armor and slings her axe across her shoulders. She heads out of the inn and starts walking to the Tradesman's Quarter of Dalaran. Its early enough that the sky is just starting to turn pink and gold in the east. There is still deep purple over most of the sky and a few of the brighter stars still shine in the west.

The few people out this early are all either too busy or too sleepy to flinch and make signs against evil when they see her. After wandering through the city for a while she stops at a street vendor and gets a roll and a hot drink. Mornara makes her way to one of the public parks. There she sits on a bench and stares at a statue of some dead archmage while she eats her breakfast and the sun starts to come up.

Once her food is eaten Mornara drops her head into her hands. The dreams started when she accepted that quest to reforge Arthas' old hammer into an axe. Perhaps she should have stopped when Shadow's Edge was compete. But Highlord Mograine had spoken of an even stronger weapon, and she hadn't been able to resist the lure of all that power. And now that she's embarked on the quest to create Shadowmourne the dreams have turned into nightmares that no amount of exhaustion or alcohol will keep away.

Mornara sits up and pulls her axe from its harness on her back. She looks at the grip with its inset gems of her own cutting. She stares at the blade, where she had etched the runes for health and defense. The dark metal didn't reflect the early dawn light. For the hundredth time she wondered if the souls of the undead she slaughtered in Icecrown Citadel felt pain as they were pulled into the axe. Or if it was a relief after the torture of the Lich King. She shuddered and reslung the axe over her shoulder.

A tribute to persistence

Sometimes it just pays to be stubborn. We really did want the Starcaller title, and tonight we went and got it.



Note how our hands are still glowing form bloodlust? I got disconnected halfway through, and hit bloodlust as soon as my UI was back upon login, just to have the achievement ding. Which is partly why the screenshot is messy too. I thanked everyone for waiting til I was back online and got a good laugh.

That's Mornara standing to Kuan's front right.


After this, for good measure, we picked up Obsidium Sanctum with drakes up, and then down'd Halion. The former was also a guild achieve, but the latter did not. It did clear a quest from our logs though!

Deepholm Impressions

I like Deepholm very much. Perhaps I'm biased by who sends you there, but I'm willing to do just about anything Thrall asks.


Fly into a spinning watery vortex? Thrall said to, so lets go!


Vortex seems to be turning to magma? Well, Thrall said this had to be done, so we're doing it.

Once you're there you've got to repair the damage that Deathwing did breaking out of Deepholm. This is not easy to do, especially since you face hostile wildlife, Twilight's Hammer, and unfriendly inhabitants.

In fact one section of the inhabitants, headed by Therazane the Stone Mother, are particularly unhappy with you.



Deepholm was where both Kuan and Mornara maxxed out their gathering. Though I strongly suggest that making sure you're at least 475 in gathering before you go there. I neglected to do that with Mornara and had a frustrating evening flying over many nodes that I could not mine.

Vashj'ir Impressions

Vashj'ir is a water zone with three sub-zones. The entire thing is all underwater. Early on you get a water-breathing and swim-speed buff to help out with what would normally be a rather hostile environment. You also get a mount.


Mornara is borrowing someone else's mount here. Her own mount is similar but different colored.

One giant suggestion I have for this zone, if you are with other people, is to USE RAID MARKERS. I can not remember the number of times in the early part of the zone when Kuan and Mornara were swimming about and trying to find each other.

"I'm over here."
"Where? By the big seaweed?"
"No by the shipwreck to the East."
"I can't go any farther East."
"Er, shipwreck to the West. I got turned around!"

Then I put charms on our heads, and we could find each other. Of course we still never knew where the other one was since we both were darting off to grab herbs and ore whenever the map lit up. And having druids ninja all the nodes. Stupid Night Elf druids.

All of the subzones were pretty well done. Vashj'ir, unsurprisingly, is very naga centric. I liked the naga quests and I liked that the same NPCs followed you through the whole zone.



The last quest or two of the zone was pretty annoyingly bugged. It involved a sub and some cut scenes and a battle. But it wouldn't happen if any other player zoned into the sub while you were there... Fortunately they fixed that and we finally finished the zone.

Gear Rant

I was trying to write up a few impressions on Vashj'ir and Deepholm, the only two zones we've finished fully. I've got those posts half done, but the rest of them will have to wait. I kept having to go back and edit out rantyness. So I figured that I would just get the rant out of my system now.

Okay.



It's been just under two weeks since Cataclysm came out. Mornara and Kuanchichi hit 85 on Sunday around noon-ish. Considering that we didn't take any time off of work during this time, I think we leveled pretty speedily. We have been doing professions, messing about a bit with archaeology, and playing alts. Eeyan, Teltanara, Ikoli, and Viljo are all 81 plus change, and they have been working on their professions too.

In short we haven't been rushing, but we have been making steady progress. And more importantly we have been having fun.

When I hit 85 I don't expect to be greeted with "hurry up and gear so we can run heroics".

I play WoW because it is fun. Not to get crap about speed of level or quality of gear. I'm not trying for server first or guild first or anything like that. I just want to relax and kill stuff. Or heal. Or tank.

If you give me shit about not being geared enough so that I can come play with you, you will go on my goddamn ignore list. You will stay on my ignore list until, at minimum, I feel like I am geared enough. Maybe, maybe, I will take you off when I can comfortably run heroics or raids.

WoW is a multi-player game. It is fine to ask if people want to do stuff with you, or if you can do stuff with them. However, if you give them shit when they are doing things at their own pace, you show that you think it is a single-player game and that you think everyone else is there solely to cater to your needs. I don't want that. I'm not going to fucking take that.

Horde Friction

Garrosh is stirring up a lot of unrest within the Horde. He insults Sylvanas and all the undead. He killed Cairne. He exiled Vol'jin and made him so angry he swore to kill Garrosh. I don't think Garrosh has managed to piss off the Blood Elves yet, but I can't tell if that is because he hasn't tried or because they still think it's worth their while to use the Horde. I'm really not sure why the goblins joined the horde, or what Garrosh's motivation was for inviting them. Especially when Garrosh is so xenophobic he got rid of the Trolls and the Tauren, the Orc's oldest allies.



But as you can see Garrosh's attitude has entirely filtered through the orcs. They don't really trust any of the other Horde races. And if you're not entirely with Garrosh, you're clearly against him...



Stupid stupid Garrosh. /scowl

Mount distraction

So in Vashj'ir it's possible to get underwater mounts, which is quite cool. But these mounts never work outside of Vashj'ir. And of course a flying mount isn't so useful underwater.

I decided I wanted one button for either a flying mount or the swimming mount. This was quite a challenge! First I just tried it. That fail'd. Then I grabbed this mount macro from Wowwiki:

/run if not IsMounted() then local g,f,s={g,g,g,},{f,f,f},{s,s,s} local t=GetRealZoneText()=="Vashj'ir" and s or (IsFlyableArea() and not IsShiftKeyDown()) and f or g CallCompanion("MOUNT",t[random(#t)]) end
/dismount

This macro seriously does not work. The primary problem is that GetRealZoneText() doesn't provide "Vashj'ir". It provides, like, 'Shimmering Expanse'. And there are three such zones. Thus began my adventure in experiments with Lua. I tried defining a list of zones and putting a for loop, but it just didn't work.

Finally I got something working, with help from my guildie Point, who did most of the heavy liftingexplained to me that {g,g,g,} is really a hash, not a list. the for loop needs two variables iterating over an iterable expression.

/run local t={16,18}; local zones={"Shimmering Expanse","Abyssal Depths","Kelp'Thar Forest"}; for z,n in ipairs(zones) do if (n==GetRealZoneText() and IsSwimming()) then t={1} end end CallCompanion("MOUNT",t[random(#t)])
/dismount


EDIT: Actually that doesn't work either, it doesn't dismount right. Here's the final one.

/run if not IsMounted() then local t={16,18}; local zns={"Shimmering Expanse","Abyssal Depths","Kelp'Thar Forest"}; for z,n in ipairs(zns) do if (n==GetRealZoneText() and IsSwimming()) then t={1} end end CallCompanion("MOUNT",t[random(#t)]) end
/dismount


Post-Shattering Screenshots

Blasted Lands has a Hot New Orc Fortress!



Many of the zones were entirely changed with Deathwing burst out of the Elemental Plane of Earth. Consequently, many quests changed. A lot of them were revamped or the quest givers were moved to a more logical location. A whole slew of new ones were added. But the biggest change for me is that the breadcrumb quests have been altered en masse. Instead of someone suggesting that you move to the next hub or zone, there will often be some sort of transportation to get you there. This is especially true with the lowbie quests.



So far the only non-starter zone i've done fully is the Northern Barrens. The whole place is very much on rails. It's not a bad thing, it's a lot more coherent as well as more streamlined. However there is a definite progression, and you need to be following it. The quests are quite well done and do actually flow rather well, as well as have some great quest text.



No I'm not going to tell what the steamboat is for or how you get to ride it. You'll just have to do the quests! Its a fun ride though. :D

Troll Druid

I rolled a troll druid. Her name is Khyrie. I did this pretty much as soon as it was allowed, but I've been a bit distracted and haven't played her much since. So poor little Khyrie is only level 12.


However it turned out that giving her red hair was a mistake. Red hair leads to the grey cat with a red mane, which is ok. However it also leads to the green bear with a red mane, aka the Christmas bear. Source: Tree Bark Jacket, a very excellent druid blog.

So Khyrie has already been to the hairdresser:



I went with the pink hair for the least garish bear and cat combo. And if you're gonna go pink, the anime haircut is definitely the best one to get. :D

the Plan

We decided our expansion plan Tuesday evening, but I didn't post it becuase work sort of interfered with execution here.

As Clara already posted, except without precise nouns, Kuanchichi and Mornara went to Vashj'ir, since that's where the shamany folks wanted Kuan to go. Eeyan and Teltanara, who neither yet have Crusader nor the Icecrown questing achieve because we are slackers, have been parked in Icecrown to work on those. And Viljo and Ikoli are parked in Orgrimmar, they will go to Hyjal per the Warlord's command board.

How we are trading off on these we're not yet sure, nor have we tried any PvP since Cataclysm dropped. Kuan and Mornara are already 81 and all 6 are building up rest. We've been basically trying to get Eeyan and Telt some dailies and a handful of non daily Icecrown quests in before bed. However becuase guild rep apparently trumps any other rep quests could give, Eeyan might not get his last Exalted rep from the Valiant dailies. Viljo and Ikoli have been cooling their heels. I imagine it will all pick up after today, when we'll have more time.

Random Pre-Cata Screenshots

With summer and end of expansion doldrums the server population drastically shifted towards horde. I'm not sure if it has shifted back fully, but it certainly seems a bit more balanced since the Shattering.


A number of our 80s got the Pilgrim's Bounty achieves and meta achieve.


Mornara didn't hit level 80 until well after ICC was out, so we had to go back special to get the Naxx achieve for her. It was done as part of an 8-man achieve run. Rather fun all told.


We managed to get all of our level 80 characters the pre-Shattering achieve. Basically if you helped defend the home cities you'd get this achieve by default.


I'm very sad that the 4.0 patch removed many keys. All of the Azeroth keys are gone now. The only keys left are the Outland and Northrend ones. The Keymaster achieve is entirely gone as well.

Level 81

We followed the Earthen Ring Shaman's vision and went to Vashj'ir. Silly us for going to the water zone. We forgot how much we both hate swimming quests. But pretty soon we found our Sea Legs and were happily questing about. It was crowded, but still fun.

Also Mornara got her 10th mount: Abyssal Sea Horse. Mounts make any zone better, and this is no exception.

plenty of time to spare

The Expansion Cometh!

We will have the Cataclysm expansion in less than 3 hours!

Clara and I decided that yesterday we would go after certain... prerequisites. Namely, getting the Glory of the Hero achieve on Mornara and Eeyan!!! We started out going after Less-rabi, and fell in with a pug that was farming Bilgewater Cartel rep. They were all quite happy to take the time to get whatever achieves anyone in the party was missing as long as we kept chaining the random heroics. We did this for the latter part of the evening.

In the end, Eeyan got Less-Rabi, Share the Love, Watch Him Die, Respect Your Elders, and Zombiefest!, and Mornara got Less-Rabi, Watch Him Die, Abuse the Ooze, and Zombiefest!. We each are one achieve away from Glory of the Hero and will be working on those two as soon as I finish this post.

Oh, and we got quite a bit of Bilgewater Cartel rep, too. Good, I think their tabard is sort of ugly.