Gilnean Like Me

I don't want to play alliance, but this almost makes the Worgen interesting:

old faces reappear

Rahlenti started playing again! Even better, he app'd to Darkfall and has yesterday joined the guild! yay!

Clara agreed with me on the Alliance lameness. However that is no good as Khyrie is her only druid. So yesterday she re-rolled Naranon and started him leveling up.

beyond Silithus... way beyond

So yesterday we decided to clear the last of the outdoor Silithus quests with Vhaas and Khyrie. Just as we went to turn in Silithis brains and rubbings, a couple guildies farming Sanguine Hibiscus asked if we wanted to go through Underbog with them.

We were intending to swap to Kuan and Viljo but decided sure, why not. After a relatively painless run (that was my third time ever in non-heroic UB) in which I moved a lot of Vhaas' buttons around, we had each picked up a bunch of upgrades we couldn't equip for another level, and Belore hit 60!

The next level didn't seem too far away, and we were having fun, so we ended up staying on the Alliance toons. Now they are 63 and have mostly cleared the Tehemet(?) quest hub. We got the Telredor flight point as well. That's a very pretty place. I was a bit surprised that they quests diverge from Horde quite a bit.

Meanwhile Belore is quite behind in his abilities! This afternoon we will go pick up the taming needed for that. Then swap back to Kuan and Viljo, who very much need to farm mats up for raids.

Mining

Last night Hyjal was down so I took a look at where Khyrie is. She is parked in Silithus with Vhaas until they finish the quests there. Also the thorium is quite rich in the hives there so we have some vain hope that she will be able to mine the money for Vhaas to get epic riding skill and mounts for both of them.

Anyway a stack plus of Thorium later Khyrie prowled out of Hive Ashi. Cat form does have it's advantages. Also the bugs are no longer elite so it's pretty easy for even a resto druid to prowl in, kill the single mob guarding the thorium, mine, and prowl to the next mining node.

The ore was smelted and sent to Hokushi so hopefully there will be more money for epic riding soon...

Alliance Elves

On Friday night Vhaas and Khyrie continued their adventures in Outland. The humans and dwarves in honor hold are too depressing to deal with, so aside from a quest here and there with really nice rewards we are skipping them.

However the draenei at the Temple of Telhamat are much nicer. And they give elephant rep, I mean Exodar rep, for Vhaas. So we wandered around doing their quests until we hit level 62. Ravagers, flayers, and anything else in our way was slaughtered as we quested.

I will note that our night elves are pretty severely undergeared. Blacktalon the Savage was hard to kill when the two of them were level 61.

Anyway, after leveling and turning in quests Vhaas and Khyrie went back to Darnassus to train. And from there the two of them went to Silithus to do some of the last few quests they had there.

All in all it was a relatively relaxing evening of questing.

Elephant here I come

I was busy with RL things yesterday and got stuck. So I decided while I waited on getting un-stuck I'd get Vhaas her coins. As a result Khyrie and Vhaas ran around Azeroth for quite a while, gathering coins for the lunar festival.

While we were at it, whenever we were in areas where the mobs were still green, we went on a killfest. The xp wasn't really good for lvl 61 player characters, but it was fantastic for the level 50-some pets. Now Dorano is 60, and Belore 57 I think. And Vhaas' Exodar rep is 7800+ Revered!

Today we logged them in to finish the coins, and woe, the Lunar Festival is done! But with Dorano 60, we paid a visit to Hellfire Penninsula. Did a couple HH quests, and ran to the next flight point. Which is all Exodar quests, woot!

Meanwhile I discovered my hunter macros no longer work quite like they did when I wrote them. Good thing I found that picking up coins, and not in some lvl 60 instance when I would be the idiot by pulling early.

Today I am almost done with the RL things. So now I turn back to Kuan, who need just 4 badges to upgrade his boots, which would be nice before another try at Void Reaver tonight.

the other side

On Greymane, one of our guildies is actually new! And he hit 69 Wednesday. He sent out a mail, wheee, I am 69!

The email thread quickly disintegrated as one of the tanks cranked about dying 5 times in Arc helping someone else who wasn't ready to run the instance get a Kara key and he was no longer willing to do that and repair bills and blah blah blah.

This upset both Clara and I as it held echoes of the attitude which drove us both out of KTSNI earlier last year, and this blog off Livejournal. We pushed back on his attitude and there was some sniping.

Finally, I mailed,

o for pete's sake. how many times did you die? when I get home
tonight I will put the gold in the guild bank.

Turns out he'd died 5 times. So I put 30g in the guild bank to cover his repairs. I pulled it off Tris, so Tris now has like 19g to his name. Wow, I still won't take these toons to Outland without Epic Ground mounts. It feels like they will never get there.

Meanwhile, the guildie who hit 69 felt so bad for starting the thread. However most of the folks in the Alliance guild are good folk, and soothed him, and said no don't feel bad. We are actually excited for you. I told him hurry to 70 so he could fly! Flying rules!

Saturday in Azeroth

Clara has not been feeling well, and the weather was icky, so Saturday turned into Wowday. The intention, was to use it to farm up what we needed for upcoming raids.

First, we took the Alliance toons and set up bags, banks, auctions, etc. Then Clara logged in Teltanara just in time to see one of our guildies announce she wanted her hunter alt through Heroic Mech and needed a healer. She hadn't gotten a group together so I figured why not? and logged in Eeyan. One of the guild locks came (yay, Mech is so much easier with a lock) and we pugged in a tank in blues and off we went!

It was slow going and Eeyan died lots (the Destroyers are apparently immune to Kick and Silencing Shot), but we didn't wipe unduly for a bunch of alts in blues, and we did end up downing all the bosses. Eeyan got 4 badges and a Nether! The group worked pretty well, so we swapped out the lock for a rogue from the tank's guild, and Eeyan for Kuan, and headed down to Caverns of Time for some Black Morass action and some rep.

While we were there, our guild shadow priest (we only have one!) asked for a Heroic Mech run for rep, so once we completely Black Morass Clara swapped to Viljo, the hunter alt swapped to her healy pally, and we ran it again! Hm, I don't even remember who tanked. Amazing how much easier Heroic Mech is when everyone is in epics, though. Turns out the shadow priest didn't even have Sha'tar revered, so now he does, and he went posthaste to pick up his Glyph of Power. That made me happy as he's part of our 25-man raid...

After that we did, actually, do a little bit of farming. But then it was time for a Guild PvP event. The Pally class lead loves to PvP, and we formed up a raid and tried to take over the Deeprun Tram. I'm not so sure we succeeded. But we did get to ride it about for a while. At one point the only other folks we saw on the tram... were other Horde. A new discovery for me: when Horde dies on the tram, they have to corpse run from Eastvale Logging, and entering the tram instance does not recover the corpse, you have to find it too. Anyhow once we were bored of that we raided Darnassus. Horde can access their guild bank from there, go figure.

After that Eeyan and Telt did some regular questing, but by this time it was after midnight, so it was time for sleepies; Clara was starting to feel ikky again. But quite a bit of progress and fun! I think Telt ended up picking up enough badges to get the [Bishop's Cloak]. Eeyan still doesn't have enough badges for anything. That's OK though. Probably once he gets a few more I will blow them on the cloak, instead of stockpiling them for offhand daggar.

gnome banker ftw!

So, we did move our Alliance toons to Greymane. I was an idiot and nuked my AD gnome banker without pulling the 20 or so gold that was left off her, d'oh!

Once we were on Greymane, we again reassessed where these toons were in terms of questiness and gold. And unless we want to entirely ignore game design, they were, well, all in Silithus, in terms of quest progress, gearup, money, etc. Now, Silithus might be 6 minutes from Thunder Bluff but Alliance is not nearly so lucky. We parked them and went back to our fun toons on Hyjal.

So these last few nights, I have taken a few minutes before bed to roll another gnome banker. Run him through the starter area, get him big enough to run to Ironforge. Finally I got him there during Morning Coffee today! Tris and Vhaas just dumped bags, spidersilks, and auctionables on him, and he is all set up.

He's a mage, this time. I dubbed him Dinkusmagus. Heh!

...now, if only Clara could set up a banker alt. Then the Alliance toons can sit there and get poked once or twice a week and grow their gold until they can afford epic ground mounts. *nudge nudge* Ah, well, Viljo needs gazillions of primal manas and Sunfury signets, so perhaps not quite yet.

Greymane ho!

So our Alliance toons really are neglected. Part of the problem is we have found Honor Hold offputting. Part of the problem is the AD guild, after trying to be a raid guild, fell apart. More of the problem is that AD Alliance seems to be dramarific. The bulk of the reason is that they are not as interesting as our Horde toons.

But they are in the 60s and it's tragic they are shelved. So, we have been talking to coworkers who are transferring their guild to Greymane, and they sent a mail: they want Alliance toons to augment its membership. I talked to the person making the announcement, and we are welcome to join even though they are raiding Kara and we are only playing the Alliance toons casually.

Darkfall is raiding until Wednesday, so we expect Thursday to transfer Vhaas, Khyrie, and Trismestigus to Greymane, after cleaning up banker alts and belongings etc.

exalted for the very first time

so Vhaas is my 4th lvl 60 character, now. I used to make fun of people with so many high level characters, but now I suppose it's par for the course what with leveling guides and the race to Outland and whatnot.

training for a lvl 60 hunter was always expensive. but now with Tranq Shot a trainable ability, instead of something one must down Luci to get, that was crazy! the gold meter I run tells me training Vhaas was roughly 53g. (roughly becuase, I had bought something or repaired as well) anyhow, that's 10% of the gold required to learn Journeyman Riding (i.e. get an epic ground mount).

Vhaas and Khyrie are thus sans mounts, and have quests queued up for 4 zones in Azeroth and I haven't even counted how many instances. BRD onward, really. so, they will not be going to Outland anytime soon; which is OK as we have the others to play, and I don't think we've really played Alliance past this point anyhow.

to continue. after training and taking care of in-town things, they headed to Winterspring to clear some of the quests there. one of the quests is an Alliance-only escort in Owl Wing Thicket that explains the relationship between Elune and the owlbeasts. what it doesn't explain, of course, is why one has to kill so damn many of them during the escort, but there it is. at the end of the quest they were sent back to Rutheran to turn in, and thus I now have a character with Exalted on a rep bar as Vhaas dinged Exalted with Darnassus.



that was pretty stunningly easy compared to poor Kuan, who despite my best efforts and running all of Zagarmarsh, remains far far away from exalted with his own faction. but still, exciting. what will happen to the Darn reputation Vhaas earns now? will it just be useless? I've heard it spills over to the other faction rep, but I've not seen any documentation to that effect.

I guess I will find out. too bad it isn't Dranei rep, though. I want Vhaas on an Elekk...

everything turns grey

it occurred to me yesterday that last night Zalona would be offline. so at dinner I suggested that Wendelina come out and help Vhaas and Khyrie clear the rest of Sunken Temple - the bottom part that nobody likes.

Wendelina couldn't log in til later because of RL things, so we killed some time running around Blasted Lands doing the Fallen Hero of the Horde questline. (weird how Alliance doesn't get the first part of the chain in SoS; all they learn is: stupid Horde got their asses kicked.) here's some trivia: the Fallen Hero of the Horde's name is Trebor.

finally Wendelina logged on, and we cleared our quests in the instance, huzzah! (observation: Wendelina does, probably by habit, that PvP trick, frostnova then jump jump back) I had Vhaas bring out Belore, her lvl 50 wolf, which is her instance pet. I was hoping he'd catch up in level a little bit. but no!!! everything we killed other than a boss (level 50) and a wandering hakkari snake (51) was grey.

now, it seems to me that Blizzard needs to pay some attention to the game balance in the existing game play in Azeroth. in the pre-Wow-2.0 world, level 48 was green (xp and/or honor) all the way up to 60. so for our lvl 58 night elves, a large part of what we downed, which generally consisted of lvl 48/49 elites with a boatload of lame lvl 45 adds, was clearly designed to have delivered experience. but the 2.0 changed, which tightened up the xp- and honor- earning brackets, wrecked all that. I have been noticing that affecting other instances... by the time a character is big enough to handle Uldaman, the entire pre-instance is grey...

I know, it sounds like whining, but honestly. the dranei and BE starter areas are expansion content too. but once those races hit the 20s they exit those areas, to find quite a struggle leveling up without some very precise planning, if they don't want to spend a lot of time killing grey mobs to finish collection quests.