Sha of Repetitive Dailies

Mornara and Kuanchichi have been level 90 for a bit now. We are doing our best to get them geared up. This involves a fair amount of heroics. We got the achieve for completing all Pandaria dungeon heroics the other night. I rather like the Pandaria heroics, but that is a post for another day.

Gearing up also involves a ridiculously large number of dailies. Klaxxi, Tiller, and Golden Lotus are all necessary and add up to a pretty large number of dailies. I wouldn't mind if there were optional routes to the necessary rep. In the case of the tillers you technically can just plant and harvest your crops, but at 55 rep per crop that's a long, slow way to get more veggies for feasts. In the case of Golden Lotus getting to revered is required before you can start on the Shadow-pan rep grind.

With Golden Lotus you have a mixed blessing. As you gain more rep with them more daily hubs unlock. However Blizzard learned the wrong lesson from Molten Front and the DK starter quests. So you can't do the new dailies until you've slogged through the older sets of dailies for the day.

I was complaining about this to a friend I often chat with at work about tanky stuff. I opined that by the time I finally managed to get enough dailies done with Golden Lotus and then Shadow-Pan the rep gear I was able to buy would not be all that useful.

Tanking-friend:
anyway, that's just the sha of despair talking
or maybe the sha of boredom
sha of repetitive dailies

me:
sha of repetitive dailies
a lesser form of the sha of boredom
or maybe greater form?

Tanking-friend:
the true form, imo
final phase
heroic mode only

me:
lol

Ah yes, the Sha of Repetitive Dailies. A fearsome and vile Sha. Be on guard!

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.

Goblins and Fish!

So the 4.0 Wow has dropped, and with it a lot of the quests reset in all of Azeroth. It looks like what Blizzard did was finally take into account the accelerated leveling from 1-60 and rework the quests so that the story lines fit in. And, of course, since Azeroth was shattered by Deathwing, and the faction leaderships have infighting, reworked some of the story lines to accomodate.

The old quests were removed - and often the credit for them, Kuanchichi's achieve points dropped by 150; Eeyan's quests completed total, by 830. And I was left at a loss what to do next!

The first and most obvious thing was to gather all the new and moved flight points. So I did that - on Kuan, the others still need it. But I finally settled on Steemwheedle cartel. I've wanted Kuan to get his reputation with that faction raised, and with a lot of the quests reset, that seemed like a good opportunity to get away from grinding pirates and Venture Co. kills. I've worked Kuan through a lot of the Kalimdor goblin quest hubs... Tanaris has changed a bit, well the eastern part, anyhow -


Another goblin cartel will join (have joined?) the Horde with 4.0/Cataclysm: the Bilgewater cartel. They seem to be fond of rockets -




They are also rivals to Steemwheedle. So some of the questlines trade off between Steemwheedle and Bilgewater faction. But anyhow, having goine through Kalimdor in a quick sweep, Kuan is now working the Booty Bay questlines, and is revered with both Ratchet and Booty Bay.

He also picked up a tabard, in Orgrimmar, for Bilgewater, since Horde factions can now be represented in dungeons with tabards much like the Northrend factions. Whilst in Orgrimmar last night - which, by the way, is rebuilding after the Shattering pretty much flattened it -

I thought I would pause and try a couple of casts for [Old Crafty]. And then I thought ooo, maybe that achieve is removed, so I looked. It's not removed. BUT I also found a freshwater fishing achieve! AND a salt water one! Damn that I didn't know this whist running around all of Azeroth trying for flight points! But anyhow, I haven't been able to get these achieves off my mind since. So, goblins must be set aside, I need to get all the non-Cataclysm fish for these achieves. Now.

Wait, why am I spending time on this blog post?

Kuanchichi the Diplomat

Kuanchichi is now exalted with Timbermaw Hold, earning him the title of Diplomat. He proved his talent with diplomacy by bringing an Offering of Peace from the Timbermaw to Thrall. Thrall was quite appreciative.

35 Exalted Reputations

Kuanchichi hit Exalted Ashen Verdict when Darkfall finally down'd Rotface last night.



Five more to go until his title.

Random observations

I've not jumped all over the game in the last 3 days since the patch dropped, mostly because of work. But I've played some and here is what I have experienced and learned. Most but not all of it is patch related.

• Northrend Inscription Research actually stops working, once you've learned all the glyphs you can use at level. Imagine my surprise to find out that now Ikoli is 73 it starts working again. So I've resumed building Ikoli's ... Inscription Resume.

• There are a lot of changes in Icecrown that aren't really part of the Citadel. A shrine, for example, has been added with Blood-Queen Lana'thel talking about a broken blade (Tolkein is rolling over in his grave). This is related to the new 5 mans in a way we shall soon discover; she is also a boss in Icecrown Citadel in the part not yet unlocked.

• Speaking of the new 5 mans, Sylvanas is the quest giver. Blizzard is clearly using a new voice actress for her; the difference grates on the ears since they did not replace her normal emotes.

• Timear is boring now and gives no quests. His stuff is replaced with random dailies you access from LFG. His achieve is now a Feat of Strength.

• Proof of Demise is now a weekly raid "...Must Die!" quest. Yes now I'm echoing the patch notes. The first one is Ignis. We will make sure to do these with Eeyan and Telt. That achievement is also a Feat of Strength. As far as I can tell there is no achieve for all the "...Must Die!" quests, which I interpret to mean they are leaving it open ended and will assign them in weekly server updates.

• The first boss in Icecrown Citadel, which has been acronym'd to ICC, is Marrowgar. New art - awesome. Old tactics - he's basically an uncomplicated combination of Leotheras, Patch and Najentus. We down'd him our first time in there, the second try ...after we got past the strategy writeups and realized what we were seeing.



• It appears that tabard rep now applies to all four Horde Expedition factions. I know, "tabard rep" is a misnomer as those reputation gains are what you get when you wear anything but a faction tabard. Anyhow Kuan & Viljo's Taunka and Hand of Vengeance rep shot up when they went into a 5man.

• ditto for some, but not all, of the Tourney dailies.

• Forge of Souls was a straight shot. I would rate it easy. But Kuan healed in a pug our first (and thus far only) time through, and he had to work for it; we had a few deaths and a wipe even. So some might dispute my "easy" rating. Honestly though, you're supposed to be struggling through an instance.

• Forge of Souls is pretty. Blizz continues to rock the art with the undead instances. I loved Stratholme in "vanilla" for all the detailed art, and I love this.



• The pug was cross-server! I hate pugs in some sense. The above screenshot is everything wrong with the pugs, as well as illustrating a lot of what I've typed in this entry. Notice the pug-badness even is contagious to me, there I was the healer, idle and targeted on Viljo. The lock is not targeted on the skull and has pulled a mob with AOE damage into the casters. etc.

Acceleration

Yesterday we played Tylara and Kairon mostly. Since going for Outland reps worked so well for Mornara and Ikoli, we decided to follow the same path with Tylara and Kairon. They needed everything.

We're starting earlier but they are wearing the Heirloom Shoulders, e.g. [Polished Spaulders of Valor], which has the 10% experience point gain. So yesterday we got them to Honored with Thrallmar, Friendly with Cenarion Expedition, and they went up a full level to 64. Weapon skills are falling behind, from the acceleration...

Hm, they're also catching up to Mornara and Ikoli. Time to play them next!

Exalted CC

Kuanchichi has earned the title "Kuanchichi, Guardian of Cenarius".



Yes, young Paduwan, those Encrypted Twilight Texts are good for something.

Son of ToC10 Fail

Friday night we took Mornara and Ikoli into Botanica, and killed two mobs, which is what it took to get Sha'tar Honored and the Heroic Key for Tempest Keep. While we did this, we convinced Rahlenti to walk us through Shadow Labs.

We had just embarked on this adventure when guildies put together another ToC10 run. This time they Rahlenti was going to tank, and since there was a mostly set of different people, we went to. They asked if Kuan was heals. I said "I can heal, but it is not my natural state of being." They got Eviljuls to be OT. She was worried about her health, but I wasn't really.

There were quite a few pugs, one at least I knew; a resto druid named Fleshwounds, whose lock is Doondoons and I've played with him on both toons plenty in the last couple years. So I felt better about this going in.

But we were still unable to get past the worms. Just total fail. A couple of the wipes were loosely my fault - Kuan died in the fire, once becuase he had a snobold and once becuase I was just too damned slow moving him - but after a large number of wipes, (mostly on Gormok, but a couple on worms) we gave up.

I don't get what the problem is, here. I don't think it's me, well other than the two wipes where I was in the fire...

Tabard of the Achiever

Viljo has had 23 tabards for quite a while now. And recently I decided that this was no longer ok. Viljo needed to have 25 tabards.

So Viljo convinced Eeyan to come to Heroic Mana Tombs and kill some mobs until Viljo hit exalted with Consortium. It turns out that even with decent gear at level 80 those ethereals hit pretty hard when you're only wearing cloth or leather. But Viljo and Eeyan persevered and Viljo finally got exalted.

Unfortunately Eeyan said no to going to run Black Morass or Old Hillsbrad on Heroic. Especially since Viljo needed 1500 rep, instead of just the 700 that Consortium was missing. So Viljo was slightly disheartened as he went to get his spiffy new Consortium tabard.

But then I though of where I'd gotten my 23rd tabard: The Argent Tournament! Granted the paladins there were mostly a bunch of poufs, but they still gave out Champion's Seals. So Viljo tootled up to the Argent Tournament. And spent some seals on a very lovely Orgrimmar Tabard.

With that 25th tabard Viljo got the achievement: Twenty-Five Tabards. And suddenly there was a mail in his mailbox:

From: Windle SparkShine
Subject: Quite the Achiever

I couldn't help but notice what a fine collection of Tabards you've managed to collect over the seasons. You might as well add this one to your collection. It's simply been gathering dust in my wardrobe.

And contained in the mail was the lovely Tabard of the Achiever, which will be the tabard that Viljo wears from now on.

Well at least until I get bored of it. Or find one that matches better. Or decide that I want to have a special tabard on for some holiday or raid. Or, you know, just swap on a whim. How do you think I got so many tabards to start with??

exalted EB and AC

The Deterrence raid last night got cancelled, so we took our 80s through some heroics. I saw Eeyan was reasonably close with both Ebon Blade and Argent Crusade, so I brought both tabards along.

Now Eeyan is exalted with both and has 10 exalted reps. I must confess though, it's kind of annoying, before WotLK dropped, Eeyan was way ahead of Kuan with Argent Dawn rep, and yet remains halfway there.

ancient quest chain

Eeyan and Teltanara spent some quality time in Silithus this evening, until he could finally drop the Duke of Cynders to get what he needs for the Three Kings of Flame quest.

While we were at it we discovered that rep gains for Encrypted Twilight Texts are astronomical. We'll be farming down there a bit in the next couple weeks on Kuan and Viljo.

Resumption of progress

We've been raiding with Kuan and Viljo a lot in Uld 10 and 25, and as a result that had gone through all our mats and led to character neglect for all the others. I decided enough o' dat last night.

Mornara has been mining a lot of thorium and sending it to Tylara, whom I've not checked in weeks. I logged in Tylara, who is now Master Blacksmith from all that Thorium, woo! And now she no longer needs to be parked in Silithus, it's time to start questing again. I rather think we will take the tactics Clara posted in the entry Missing Outland Reps for Tylara and Kairon, and level them up as a side effect of gathering the reputations.

Eeyan and Teltanara have been sort of sitting parked since he got his coolio fist weapon, other than grinding through rep dailies when we have time. Last night we got in a PUG and did Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle. Picked up some achieves and Eeyan got [Gilt-Edged Leather Gauntlets] which have so much hit that he was able to swap out his lvl 70 chest for a blue he had, and his neck for the Heroism badged upgrade. They both still have a long way to go with Northrend dungeon reps, though.

Missing Outland Reps

Mornara is 68 and Ikoli is 67, thanks to Midsummer and the massive XP from honoring/desecrating flames. So, in theory, we could take them to Northrend in a little while. However both DraNgNon and I enjoy playing characters through the leveling process, not just powering them to 80 and raiding. We realize however that there is no way we're going to get these two characters to finish all of the quests and zones in Outland before they should have moved on. There are four zones they haven't touched at all, and the three zones they have touched are only half done at best.

So we've decided that we need to concentrate on what is actually important for them to get out of Outland: Reputation. Specifically we want them to have enough reputation to get all the heroic dungeon keys, decent shoulder enchants, and the correct head enchants.

Mornara needs:
- Cenarion Expedition to Honored - *done*
- Thrallmar to Honored - *friendly*
- Sha'tar to Honored - *neutral*
- Lower City to Honored - *friendly*
- Keepers of time to Revered (tank head) - *neutral*
- Scryers to Honored (shoulders) - *friendly*

Ikoli needs:
- Cenarion Expedition to Honored - *done*
- Thrallmar to Revered (healing head) - *friendly*
- Sha'tar to Honored - *neutral*
- Lower City to Honored - *friendly*
- Keepers of time to Honored - *neutral*
- Aldor to Honored (shoulders) - *friendly*

Unfortunately they are both pretty far away on most of these. And there is also the offspec head enchants. CE revered for Mornara and Sha'tar revered for Ikoli. They are both especially far away on KoT and Sha'tar. Sha'tar will gain some rep as they turn in signets/marks for Scryer/Aldor. However the only way I know of for KoT rep is to run those instances...

Rogue AoE part CCLXXXVI

In lieu of posting anything of substance I will merely say that I've been having a complete blast with Eeyan's newfound AoE abilities. It's so overpowered it's silly. Here he is in Magister's Terrace.



Eeyan, Teltanara, and Cemaros have been farming older content, for mounts (hence the Magister's), pets, dungeon achieves, etc. It's pretty much: Cemaros Swipe, Eeyan Fan of Knives, Telt Holy Nova, through everything. Eeyan hit Exalted with Lower City, and Revered with Keepers of Time just this evening.



I probably should have done a lot of these long ago. o well.

Eeyan rep plan

Just a quick note as I never planned out Eeyan's level 80 dungeon reps - here are the priroties and why -

Ebon Hold - revered - head enchant
Argent Crusade - honored - cloak
Kirin Tor - revered - pants
Wyrmrest - exalted - wrist
Argent Crusade - exalted - boots

...don't care about Kalu'ak or Warsong Offensive other than to be completionist along with getting the rest to Exalted and Sons of Hodir are already Honored.

I don't really see getting Eeyan into a pug until he at least has the cloak, his gear is simply too horrible.

Reputations and Chaos Theory

Since Eeyan is big enough to run the endgame 5mans, and big enough to pick up the normal dungeon dailies, I decided he should be wearing a faction tabard. The one to go with for DPS melee is Ebon Hold so last night it was time to secure enough reputation to get the tabard.

The first order of business was to get to Ogrim's Hammer. After talking to the orc on Krasus' Landing in Dalaran they kindly sent Eeyan directly there in a mechanical flyer. Well, almost directly. Anyhow, Eeyan likes mechanical flyers. He hasn't forgotten he started out as an engineer.



Once there, Koltira sent him down to secure the Shadow Vault. It took longer than we would expect, as Teltanara came along, and so Eeyan was stealthing about picking pockets so she could get her own copy of Forbidden Love. But, we secured the Shadow Vault, Eeyan got his tabard, and Telt got her novel.

While this was happening a prot pally guildie was all "does anyone want to run something?" "why does nobody want to do anything?" "do you want to run vault or something?" I said "mebbe" to that last and he got all insistent, "yes or no," which I was disinclined to answer and which made me think he was young. But he did get heals and another DPS for Heroic Nexus so we decided we'd bring Kuan and Viljo.

We logged over, I cleared some bag slots for Kuan, and started flying to Coldarra. While in the air, he said "brb" and logged. We got there, and still no tank. 10 minutes later we replaced him and ran the instance.

The new tank was also a prot pally. He was pretty fun. He wanted to try Chaos Theory and since 4 of us didn't have it we were game. I'm an idiot for not screenshotting it. But we basically cleared all around Anomalus before starting and kited him all over the place. Good thing he's not leashed at all. There were so many rifts shooting lighting at us from everywhere it is certainly an aptly named achievement. But we did it... the druid healer really had his act together, nobody died and I only cast two heals during the entire thing.

Afterwards our tank wanted to run Utgarde Pinnacle. It was late, but sure. Our third DPS was a mage and he dropped out to deal with dailies and we replaced him with a ret pally. That was a very smooth run - Kuan took 0 gear damage - and even Skadi was dealt with - with two pallies that wasn't much of a problem. Somewhere in there Viljo got Winds of the North.

O yah. Our pally guildie who wanted to run something? Never did log back in. Sorta embarrassing, we'll remember that next time he's all "Why doesn't anyone want to run something?"

Anyhow, after all that, Kuan will hit Exalted with Kirin Tor today sometime. That's the last dungeon rep for him. I suppose it's appropriate that now Eeyan has to wear a faction tabard.

Children's Week has started!

We were in Heroic Halls of Lightning when midnight, 1 May, struck. 5 minutes later guildies started dinging with Children's Week achievments. Ah well, we were in HoL.

Our 5man had wanted to run multiple heroics, so after we got out of HoL we all picked up an Orcish Orphan from Orgrimmar and then headed back into Utgarde Pinnacle to get the Hail to the king, Baby achievement.

Clara and I decided we will get whatever we can for Children's Week on all four pairs of toons, and since today was rainy weather we sank quite a bit of time into advancing that goal. I think we will get all the quests except on Tylara and Kairon. I am not so sure about the PvP achievement, those will probably just be Kuan and Viljo.

But - much to guildie annoyance - Kuan and Viljo did both get the Veteran Nanny achievement. :-)

Speaking of Kuan, I'm really doing the quests in order to push the counter closer to the 3000-quest Seeker title. As a side effect, the Children's Week all-Horde rep rewards have pushed him into Revered with Silvermoon City. Pretty amazing considering how much I tend to avoid BE quests with him. But since he's Exalted with the rest of Horde, all the other quests that reward Horde rep (i.e. the Argent Tournament stuff, which deserves its own post) are starting to build up his BE rep as well.

So far, so good.

I took some relaxing time off work! Among my other activities was quite a bit of Wow.

Eeyan and Teltanara are now 77! They can fly in Northrend! And, they can use the blue crafted Saronite maces Eeyan can make. So upon hitting 77, Eeyan spent some quality time in Sholazar mining teh Saronite (and getting the Explore achievement). Now they are ready to hit Storm Peaks and embark on the life of Tedium farming rep for big fat blue Santa Claus.

Meanwhile Ikoli really needs to be 65 to go much further with the Inscription. Grand master requires level 65! She's 63 right now so I think we will be focussing on that as I expect Glyphs to sell pretty well in the window when the 3.1 patch drops. So she needs to Get On It.

Kuanchichi, meanwhile, finally has Argent Champion. He has now put all faction tabards aside so he can farm Horde Expedition rep. It's kind of sad actually that the only reason to go into the heroics at all right now is rep. The gear, the badges, the gear from the badges, enh.

Career-driven leveling plans

After some talk, we pulled Eeyan and Telt into Twisted Minds. Since then they have suddenly had a burst of activity, since we are no longer worried about missing raid calls, and are now well into level 76!!!

After clearing Grizzly Hills and careful examination of professions, we took them to Sholazar Basin for questing and Mining. Eeyan is now 436 Mining or so, and is starting to get the Saronite he needs to skill up his Blacksmithing. But that won't last.

When I was leveling Eeyan to 70, I realized that if there is one thing worse feeling than a reputation grind, it was a pure reputation grind, and I spent a lot of his time mid-60s farming Firewing Signets. So, what we will do once they hit 77 is pick up Cold Weather Flying and head to Storm Peaks to get big fat blue santa claus rep going while all those quests can still provide XP. They'll stay parked there for the duration (until Exalted, or 80) while we work on Mornara and Ikoli. Hopefully there will be mining, or at least Eeyan but if not that's OK; Telt is behind on Tailoring and the SoH dailies and runups will definitely drop some cloth.

Why not Tylara and Kairon? Well that's also profession-driven: Ikoli is now 360+ Inscription, but needs to be level 65 to get Grand Master. She's 62, and has Silithus + 3 Outland zones available for questing, we just need to take some time to get that done. Meanwhile Tylara is still 281 or so Blacksmithing, and needs a metric ton of Thorium for that, so stays parked in Silithus til that is done.

Last but not least, professions aren't actually what the game is all about, and I need to remember how to heal with a priest, and Clara needs to learn to tank, and for that we need to play these guys more than a half-hour here and there.