Dragon Soul Fun Run

Darkfall's Monday fun run was a quick jaunt into Dragon Soul. I'd originally planned on killing it all on Heroic, however we only had 7 people, so we went for a few achieves instead.

We had only five 90s in our raid, the other two being an 85 DK and Eeyan at 87. Despite this we handily stomped the raid. We did have two wipes, but honestly those were all in the course of trying to get achieves. I called for a wipe to try to get Holding Hands on Hagara, but I think you need a full raid of 10 people for that to work. We also had a wipe on Ultraxion when there was confusion about who was taking the second hit from Hour of Twilight. If we'd not been going for Minutes to Midnight I'd just have been hit by all of them. Honestly I had enough health and CDs to do that in Cata, and now in Mists it is really just silly how easy it is to deal with Ultraxion.

It was fun to see those fights again. I rewatched and enjoyed all the cut scenes.

My ulterior motive in running Dragon Soul was to get Eeyan more Elementium Gem Clusters. Eeyan now has 23 out of the necessary 60. So at 8 per run we only need 5 more runs, and then Daggers!

Also this fun run reminded me that I never did post the dialog from the last three bosses of Dragon Soul. I stopped at Ultraxion. I have all of the screen shots necessary, I just need to crop and post them. I'll try to get that done and posted sometime soon.

Another Pet Battle Update

I'm continuing my Pet Battle rampage. I have six different pets up to level 25. I've beaten the master tamers through Northrend. I'm up to 339 unique pets. This week I've been obsessing about it a little bit more than usual. You see, the Darkmoon Faire has a daily pet battle. For a ticket you can challenge Jeremy Feasel. He's got a Darkmoon tonk, a Darkmoon monkey, and a magical Darkmoon Eye. You may have noticed a Darkmoon theme, here are the Darkmoon Faire. Anyway the first time I fought him he soundly thrashed my pets. It was sad, but I'd managed to get exactly the wrong pets in the perfectly wrong order. So every pet of his had extra damage against my pets. At least it was over fast...

Anyway, this abortive fight reinforced the value of matching the pet to the battle. I'd already noticed that as I leveled up the master tamers were getting tougher, but this really drove home the need to pick the correct team for the fight. So over last weekend I went from four level 25 pets to six, with another two at 20 and 22. I've also got a whole bunch of pets sitting around level 10 waiting for their turn to level up.

Once I had a reasonable team it was a pretty easy fight, actually. Clockwork Gnome, Phoenix Hatchling, and Dragon Kite cleaned up handily. Regrettably for the days I've beaten the Darkmoon master tamer I've not gotten anything impressive in my pet supplies reward sack. There is a chance that you get the Darkmoon Eye, but I've been unlucky so far.

In addition to acquiring pets via battling I'm getting a few via other methods. A week or three ago I saw someone advertising the Mechanical Pandaren Dragonling in Trade Chat. I quickly snapped one up, and that little guy is now level eleven.

I've also gotten a couple of the Pandaren Spirits. Our Enh/Resto shaman is big into the pet battles. He had a few extra Pandaren Spirits. Apparently they are not selling at all well in the AH currently. So he offered to guildies. I expressed interest to he gave me the air and fire spirit. To thank him I made him a Jade Owl and a Sapphire Cub, which I was surprised to note he'd not actually gotten yet. In return he gave me a water spirit he'd gotten earlier. I'm not sure what to get him in return this time. I'll have to figure out something.

Kuan and Mornara have also taken a jaunt into Molten Core. Magmadar was kind enough to drop a Corefire Imp for Mornara. I amused myself by pretending for a moment that she was a warlock with an imp again. If I remembered her imp's name I would rename that sucker in a second. Possibly I need to trawl through the archives here to find that.

For Christmas I received several pets from the Blizzard store. I was happy to get the Cinder Kitten and donate to Sandy Relief. I also picked up Lil'Ragnaros, Moonkin Hatchling, Cenarion Hatchling, and Soul of the Aspects.

I'm so far most amused by my Moonkin Hatchling. You get both a tauren and night elf hatchling. I named the Horde version Earthen after the Boomkin of the same name in Darkfall. Earthen the hatchling is now level 25, and I've been dutifully reporting his leveling progress to the original Earthen. Though I didn't report all the times that I got him killed before I figured out the right team to fight the Darkmoon master tamer...

Will and Zor'lok down!

Last night Darkfall had an excellent raid. We'd killed the first five bosses in Mogu'Shan Vaults on Tuesday, and even had a bit of time left over for attempts on Will of the Emperor. So last night my plan was to kill Will and then head over to Heart of Fear and kill Imperial Vizier Zor'Lok.

The Will of the Emperor kill went pretty well. We changed up when we hit lust because that fight is so long. Having it twice was pretty sweet. I also got my act together and was a lot better at dodging the Devastating Combos. I'm still in need of practice, but I'm now getting far more strikes to use than I am getting smashed. And that really helps, given just how hard hit the tanks are in that encounter.


Imperial Vizier Zor'lok was a pain to kill. We'd worked on him before Christmas and almost killed him then. So I wasn't actually all that worried about getting him dead. No, the pain was that he bugged (hah!) out. We had a wipe on the third platform, and he kept his two mind controlled people and just stood there. They tried to get out of the MC by logging in and out and I tried kicking them from the raid. Nothing worked until I reset the whole instance. So we had to clear that trash twice; fortunately it's not horrible trash merely annoying.

After my pain and learning with dodging Devastating Combos on Will it was amusing to see people having trouble with the Attenuation on Zor'lok. Both are pretty clearly telegraphed, but still tricky to dodge if you get behind a little bit or don't see the telegraph soon enough.

Dragon Kite!!!

I discovered this afternoon that Blizzard did actually did make the Dragon Kite a fightable pet!

I know this was supposed to happen with the 5.1 patch. However, when I checked after that patch it wasn't actually fightable then. I moped a bit and then forgot about it in my attempts to get my main battle team to 25.

But today I was randomly wandering around the eastern kingdoms trying to get all the pets captured, and happened to look at my dragon kite. Lo and behold! it was fightable!

Now my dragon kite is level 9.


What, if anything, should I name it?

Update

Sorry for the long hiatus, but between work and my family visiting for Thanksgiving both DraNgNon and I have been quite busy. I know all three of our readers were sad. :P

*Raiding*
Darkfall continues to raid. We're 4/6 in MSV, and working on Elegon. We're also still trying to a 25man going. Last week we actually managed to get a 25man formed and had decent success with the Stone Dogs, however, between the server going down, disconnections, and people not being as observant as they should be we didn't get Feng dead. Dropping fire in the ranged group is just as fatal on 25 as on 10, but there are a lot more people available to be unobservant enough to do it.

Monday nights are still fun runs. We are working on the Cataclysm meta achieves. There were a lot of raids in T11, so it's taken a bit to make sure that we get all the necessary heroic and non-heroic achievements. Currently we're only missing Four Play from Glory of the Cataclysm Raider. We did kill Al'Akir with the feedback buff on him, but the achievement is currently bugged. I had been worried about getting the Omnotron achieve, but it is so easy to stomp those raids when you've got a full raid of 90s with current raid gear. On normal the trons died before the second boss activated.

This past Monday we hit up the first few bosses of Heroic Firelands. Possibly it would have been easier if we'd hadn't been doing 25man with only 15 people. But we still did get the first three bosses down. (Shannox, Beth'tilac, and Rhyolith) Alysrazor, however, really does need closer to a full raid, what with all the different things to kill.

*Alts*
Khyrie and Tylara are 88. They have gotten access to the Vale of Eternal Blossoms and are spending some quality time leveling up their professions. We parked them for a bit until Morn and Kuan reached revered with the Shado-Pan and bought the Grand Commendation of less rep slogging. Eeyan and Telt are chillling in Valley of Four Winds and will probably be the next ones to get some love. Viljo and Ikoli are just barely into Jade Forest, but will shortly make the Hozen their friends.

What with all the raiding, and dailies, and pvp, and valor to get it's really hard to make time for the alts. It is important to make time though. I suspect that if I don't start doing fewer dailies my last wisp of sanity is going to blow away.

*Pets*
I've gotten a battle pet team up to level 20. Fang, Clever Girl, and Ember are now trouncing their way through Outland. Kairon, my long neglected hunter, is chaperoning them around. If the pets get too much bigger I'm going to have to level him to keep up with them.

I have some vague ideas that I want to smash through the old Vanilla raids. I haven't had a chance to thoroughly inspect what pets drop where in the vanilla raids, but MC is pretty easy to smash, so I figure it'll be speedy with Kuan and Morn.

I am eagerly awaiting for Pet Theory to be updated. I have to admit that some of my pet battling enthusiasm has slipped away without this addon to make the UI reasonable for finding out what pets I am missing in what zones and what quality pet I already have. Possibly I'll be forced to update it myself if it doesn't get fixed soon.

Iron Mantid

There is an achieve: Stay Klaxxi. It is to complete 5 daily quests while buffed with each of the different Klaxxi augmentations or enhancements. The different paragons give these buffs, and you can have both an augmentation and an enhancement on you at the same time. So you cannot complete this achieve until you're revered at least and have freed all the paragons.

Most of these buffs are pretty nice. How nice you think they are depends on your spec, and also your playstyle. A few of them are not all that useful, but again I'm sure that is influenced by the fact that Morn is a tank and Kuan always runs around with her. So we can quite easily and quickly aoe down large groups of mobs.

However my favorite, the bestest buff in the ENTIRE world, is Iron Mantid. It's an enhancement given by Malik the Unscathed. He is the second Klaxxi Paragon you bust out of the amber, and this buff is one of my favorites in the entire game.

Iron Mantid:
Absorbed, blocked, dodged, missed, parried, redirected, reflected, and resisted attacks against the bearer cause Bladeturning.

Blade Turning:
Upon reaching 10 stacks of Bladeturning, deal damage and stun all nearby enemies.

This is the buff of tank AoE heaven. The more mobs you pull the faster they stun themselves. You're only limited by how many mobs you can get together at one time. And with all the groups, patrols, and fast respawns in the Dread Wastes that is not much of a limitation at all.



I just wish there was some way I could pick this as a talent for regular use.

Pet Battle Update

Fang the Worg Pup, Ember the Phoenix Hatchling, and Clever Girl the Fossilized Hatchling make up my main battling team. They are all level 13. As I contemplated before, I ended up benching my Spirit of Competition and bringing my Phoenix Hatchling on to my pet battle team. Between captures and random faffing about I have various other pets at random levels. I'm trying to get a secondary team picked out, but it's really hard when the vast majority of cute pets are all beasts.

Leveling

My pet team is making its way through the Kalimdor zones. I've beaten all the trainers up through Southern Barrens. I've got the quests to go defeat the separate trainers in both Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms. However, I'm not quite ready to actually go head to head with those trainers. I think I could beat the one with the lowest level pets, but that is the only one.

While I level my pets I've been doing my best to catch every available pet in a zone. It took me a while to get the phoenix caught up to the rest of the team so I've gotten a pretty good set of rare pets.

The only pet I've failed utterly to capture is the Giraffe Calf in Southern Barrens. It can spawn anywhere in Southern Barrens, but is very very rare. So rare, in fact, that despite leveling my team from 10 to 13 in Southern Barrens I've not seen even a single one.

Battling

When I had all three pets at level 12 I tried another pvp pet battle. It was rough but Clever Girl and Ember will still alive at the end of it. Fang unfortunately has no heals, so while he can shield himself, he can't regain any health.

Addons

I actually only have one addon that I use for the pet battles. Pet Theory gives you better sorting options, but most importantly it'll show you the quality of the pet you're currently fighting. It will also add the highest quality of the pet you have captured to your minimap and to the pet tooltip during battle. And it shows quality colored borders for the pets in your journal.