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Grim Times in Grim Batol Turn Gold

GrBat_Boss

Gav found his way into his first Cataclysm dungeon tonight. Four guildies, including myself, took to Grim Batol thanks to the random dungeon finder. We were joined by a helpful gnome mage. Above you can see us ready to face a boss.  Big deal, he fell easy.  However, after our third boss, I was convinced we were done.

GriBat_NotDoneYet

After we put down Drahoa Shadowburner I was certain the dungeon was over. No, we had the real final boss left to fight. Great. We wiped twice in the dungeon (once when we overdrew and once when the tank backed into a second batch of mobs and I backed off a ledge to my doom), but Erudax would prove to be a true test.

GriBat_FinalBoss

Keep in mind that I’d never faced him before, and I’d not researched him prior to meeting him. What happened was comedy gold. Here’s how our first encounter with him went.

  • We attack him head on
  • I don’t see anything wrong with a DPS-heavy tactic, so I burn my Avenging Wrath and Guardian spells.
  • My guardian decides to freaking wander off from the boss
  • I decide to follow him to see what’s so damn interesting that he’s not hammering the boss
  • I see my first Faceless Corruptor and have a serious WTF moment

GriBat_Corruptor

“Oh,” I said. It was at this point, with our mage dead and the rest of our party hurt (and the Boss still alive and very well) that I realized I had to attack the adds for us to win. My guardian knew that, but did I? Noooo. So that’s all well and good, we just have to… oh, we wiped. Ok, next life we’ll kill the adds and win. Hell yeah! Wait, what the hell is a Shadow Gale? Besides freaking lethal, I mean. I lived through one thanks to my bubble, but the second one killed me. Damn. I asked what I should do about that, and our tank said to stand in the vortex it created, which is great because that’s the exact opposite of what I was doing. Next time, we were all on the same page and kicked Erudax’s ass.

GriBat_DownheGoes

No one was hardly even hurt that time. Funny what happens when you actually know the fight. I got an elementium lockbox during the run so I popped back to Stormwind and made some Volatile Seaforium to open it with. Inside was nothing exciting, so I offered to open a guildie’s box (they’d gotten one too). I visited them in Uldum and tried to blow it open in the trade window only to blow myself up over and over. I finally got it open, and that was that.

It was a good night and I’m glad to have that first dungeon run under my belt. Thanks guild!

Sights Seen – Mini-Gav and Mushrooms

MiniGav

After a trippy, mind-altering experience in Deepholme, Mini-Gav swears to lay off the mushrooms. Seriously. At least, until tomorrow when dailies reset.

Sights Seen is where you can share your best/most interesting screen caps. Please don’t submit screenshots with the UI, or pictures that have been doctored. If you’d like to submit a screenshot, please send it to our updated Alazar address, HERE.

The Tale of Death

TB_lookouts

This is a bloody post of death and murder. Well, attempted murder anyways. As you can see above, I returned to Tol Barad, but it was an ill-fated venture. We lost, I died, and it wasn’t allot of fun. I did get one good thing out of it, though.

TB_allstar

Hey now, you’re an All-Star, go… slay.. ahem (I hate that song, btw). Yeah, so I got that achievement. It was only a notch on my belt of death this day.

Ded_1freefall

Here I am, dead in Stranglethorn Vale of all places. I almost don’t want to tell anyone how I died here, but here it goes.  I was doing archeology and flying around STV. There were three in the STV zones and after doing the northern two I flew to Gurubashi Arena for the third one. Can you see it? Me, flying into the arena and getting PvP’d to death? Well, that’s not what happened. What did happen was I was flying in above the trees and got to where I wanted to start – and promptly dismounted. Yes, I dismounted for whatever reason, some 100+ feet in the air. I was so stunned at my stupidity that I forgot to bubble to survive. I was stared, dumbfounded. I have no idea what prompted me to dismount. I’m shamed by my stupidity.

Ded_2IFPVP

Now I’m sitting, watching over my corpse in Ironforge. Yup, I died in two places I shouldn’t die. Here I tried to fend off a Tauren paladin trying to attack the Midsummer Festival fire. He was originally just healing a goblin hunter, but once I attacked (with a dwarven priest behind me two ran away after buffing me) and our back-and-forth took us from the Hall of Explorers through Tinker Town to the entrance to the Deep Run Tram, back to Hall of Explorers, and finally headed towards  the Military District before I finally fell. I was working on a razors edge with my health most of the  fight but the moo-cow wasn’t. Looking at Recount afterwards showed that he was much, much more efficient then me. Way more standard hits, more crusader strikes, and he took less damage overall. He was a retadin too, but a much better, way more geared one then I. Dammit.

This wasn’t the most rewarding day.

Flatlining in Arathi Basin

Dying again in Arathi Basin

I’m so sick of Arathi Basin. It and Eye of the Storm are my two least favorite PvP battlegrounds. I’d rather wind up in Isle of Conquest, which I also don’t really like these days. I recently hopped into an AB battle for the weekly battleground and had a poor match. I had the third most honorable kills for the Alliance (that modifier is important, more in a minute), but died four times and only got 2 killing blows in under 19 minutes.  Whereas I had 16 HKs, over half of the Horde had 50+. The most killing blows on our side was 4, while three of the Horde had more then 10. Part of it is my lack of gear, but the big part is my dearth of skill. I’m not a raider so I use PvP as my aggressive outlet but the Horde on my battlegroup (not my server, so much, but the battlegroup as a whole) are really good. Either that or the Alliance on my battlegroup are really lousy. It’s frustrating.

I don’t do nearly this badly in Tol Barad, nor was Wintergrasp ever this hard. Sometimes I wonder why I bother.

Bad, Bad Tol Barad

TB_Chaos

Either Tol Barad has gotten easier since launch, or the Horde on my server still sucks like they did during the heyday of Lake Wintergrasp. I’ve been in two more TB battles since my win, and the first we nearly won and the second (today) we dominated. I didn’t contribute a ton to today’s battle for whatever reason but we did win. Oddly, I’ve never fought in a defensive match, so maybe it’s more even then it looks.

I’ve been working around the clock on my engineering and finally maxed it the other day. Today I spent about half an hour flying around Burning Steppes and Searing Gorge, gathering mithril. I came back with 106 pieces, some of which I smelted before auctioning and some I didn’t. I’m running on the assumption that established folks want to power-level a profession and don’t want to mine ore themselves, so I’m providing some for them. My thorium auctions sold in no time, so I’m trying it with mithril now.

Other then that it’s been quiet lately. I’ll check back in if anything interesting happens.

Engineering (and) a Win

EleHunt

I spent a good hour or so in Uldum this morning hunting for Elementium in Uldum.  I came back with over 100 ore, enough for five of the hard stuff. I even came back with a bar of Pyrium and a few gems, which was a nice bonus. I spent another half hour or so working on my engineering skill (which is why I was hunting Elementium). It finally dawned on me that I had been hoarding money (only about 2k gold, but still) towards nothing so I decided to put a chunk of it towards power-leveling engineering.  I made a Volatile Thunderstick, a Finely-Tuned Throat Needler and a handful of Heat-Treated Spinning Lures, upping my skill to 515. It cost me over a thousand gold but I wasn’t using it anyway.

After that, I noticed that a battle had broken out, so I lent my axe to the cause.

TB_ToBattle

For Tol Barad! I joined shortly after the battle broke out this time so I was an active participant. Almost too active. At one point I fought an Orc death knight and a Troll hunter for over a minute before I finally fell. They must have taken notice because the Horde would swarm me in team battles over and over, but rarely killed me thanks to timely healing and fighting by me and some serious help from my allies.

TB_Ready

I was swarmed over and over! It got frustrating, being no.1 target but since half of the time I lived (yes, only 50% of the time) I went with it. I helped kill quite a few Hordies, but got no honorable kills of my own. Dammit. I was too busy tanking them all to kill anyone, I guess. Thankfully it all turned out worth it.

TB_Win1

Yes, we won. Yay! I like to think that my keeping the Horde busy was key to the win, but in reality it was more likely that I didn’t greatly impact the battle either way. In any case, I’ve won my first battle, and you know I’ll be back.

Attack on Tol Barad

Tol Barad Attack!

Tol Barad! I entered my first match today and with two other players I got two kills with no deaths. Go me! However, I arrived at the last minute. Literally – there was only sixty seconds left when I got there. Damn it all.

Ghost Buster!

I had earlier been busting ghosts on the Peninsula, and that was fun. It wasn’t too hard, but when I was killing folks in that nearby ‘hood I got attacked by a villager and three bandits, all at once. Thankfully, a combination of Avenging Wrath, Hammer of Wrath, Sanctified Wrath, Divine Storm and Lay on Hands saw me through it. Yay!

You may notice that in the top picture I’m carrying a shield. Yes, I’m going prot for PvP again. However, I’m also considering trying to tank for the guild. We have a critical tank shortage so I’m considering learning how to do that. Wish me luck – I’ll need it.

The Return

uhoh1

The time of darkness is coming to an end. Light will shine on this world once more, as we enter a new age.

uhoh2

Gavelier is back. Alazar lives again.

Lurkerattack

So, what have I been up to? Well… dying mostly. Or coming darn close. While Thinning the Brood on Tol Barad Peninsula  I was routinely set upon by multiple Darkwood Lurkers and occasionally drew the attention of a Darkwood Broodmother. Fun. I didn’t die here though, thanks to desperate key banging and the help of a Draenei shaman once. I tried to clean up a nearby neighborhood and saw a hunter under siege by a number of mobs so I tried to help, but they quickly died, leaving the three angry mobs to be my problem alone.  I dove off a nearby ledge to a lower area and only one of the mobs followed. I killed that one as the other two finally made their way down. I killed them too, so again I didn’t die. So why did I say I’ve been dying allot? I’ve lived through every danger so far.

ready2die

This is why. The Isle of Conquest, my first battleground since restarting my subscription and I got my head handed to me over and over. Every encounter I got in ended with my death. I stayed alive for awhile occasionally, being a tough kill, but a kill I was. I had one killing blow (a lucky shot on a group kill) to 5 deaths. Five deaths may seem too few for the complaining I’m doing, but the Horde overran the game in short order, so it wasn’t a very long match. Dammit.

I also spent time getting my spell rotation down on one of the standard lvl 85 training dummies, doing 5k DPS. It’s a starting point, so we’ll see where I go from here. Off we go!

Alazar Absence

It may seem redundant to post this since I’ve not updated once this year, but I’ve not been playing World of Warcraft. The reasons are many but unimportant. I’m just here to say, officially, that Alazar is going into hiatus for a while. It will remain online, obviously, but I’m taking a official break from the site.

Why am I posting this now? Reverse psychology.

The last time I posted that I was leaving the game for a period of time and that I was suspending updates, I was back in the game and posting within about a week. We’ll see if that works this time, too.

Back to pre-85 Gavelier

Gav_DieDammit

Instead of leading off my first level 85 post with my latest hijinks, I’m instead going to fill in some gaps from my trip to the top. First off, there needs to a be a freaking warning sign next to the guy above. No, not Gav (him too, though). Caimas the (damned) Pit Master. I didn’t know he was a gimmick fight. I knew nothing of leading him through eggs to slow him down. Nope, I just stood toe to toe with him – for about three minutes. Damn was he tough! I had to keep healing, and hitting, and healing, casting Divine Shield,  and healing, and hitting, and waiting for Forbearance to wear off, hitting some more, casting Lay on Hands, using Avenging Wrath twice, hurling an inordinate amount of Hammers of Wrath, healing yet more, and finally living to see him die. I never want to fight him again.

Gav_OhNo

Oh no. No, no, no. I am NOT working with Flintlocke. There is absolutely no way. Have you seen what he’s done to rogues? And trees? I don’t even want to mention his use of the Chuck-Shot. Hopefully he’s not going to….

Gav_What

God dammit. There is no freaking way. This Paladin-Shot sounds far worse then the Chuck-Shot, the Remote Backstab, the Beaverstick, or even the Beaverchucks, mostly because it involves me getting in a cannon that Flintlocke is firing. That just sounds like it will hurt like hell.

Gav_Shot

AAAAGHH!! Yeah, I let him shoot me out of a cannon. I’m trusting, ok? The problem was, I was shot out into the middle of the freaking bay. I had to swim back, come back into the fort, and – get this – let him shoot me a second time. That’s not trust, people. That’s insanity.

And I didn’t even get a title for my work.

As a side note, I was a huge fan of Flintelocke’s Guide to Azeroth long before I played World of Warcraft. It actually inspired me to write my own web comic on Gavelier’s misadventures, Gavelier’s World of Warcraft (my favorite comic is this one, because it was so true). Dave “Fargo” Kosak, writer of the Flintlocke series on Gamespy was nice enough to read my comic and gave me some nice compliments on my work and some pointers to go by. Thanks again, dude!

I may one day either continue or reboot Gav’s comic, but it’s not likely at the moment – my hand-drawn comic is more important to me right now and it’s been in hibernation for a few weeks itself.

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