Archive for the ‘Achievements’ Category

Happy belated 4th of July, everyone. I slept thought most of the holiday because I’m a lazy dumbass, but I got up in time to see some fireworks in Stormwind this morning. Later I saw more fireworks, this time in Tol Barad.

I didn’t do great, as usual, but I got an achievement. We were on defense and were within a second or so of saving the match. The Horde had 2 building and was converting a third (Slagworks) and we were racing to convert Ironclad Garrison. We were literally just on the cusp of pulling control away from them – seriously, mere seconds – and they grabbed Slags and won. Dammit.

One of my guildies, Luciditii invited me to go run a heroic, and I agreed. I’d not run a Cataclysm heroic yet so I didn’t know how I’d fare. Another guild mate, Drannen joined as well so it was officially a guild run. Drannen (an elemental shaman) had pumped his DPS up and was eager to put his 10-14k to use, and I was eager to see it. Luciditii (resto shaman) came as heals, and I was my usual ret spec. It was, as I said, a learning experience to see if I was capable of running a heroic. Let’s see how it went.

Pâmëløt (an arcane mage) and Jaconsus (a prot warrior) rounded out the group. We cruised up to Corborus who wiped us once. I died because I got hit when he resurfaced which made me feel kinda dumb. Anyway, we killed him on try #2. I also died on Slashhide but the group took him out. Yay for teamwork!

This is where it got interesting. We took time to prepare for Ozruk so I read up on his moves in the dungeon journal. We did ok for a while, but back luck got our tank killed, and soon it was down to Drannen and I to kill him. Yup, two DPS against a boss. The funny part is that we were doing pretty well. I kept myself relatively healed, Drannen pitched in, and with me dodging and striking I swear we could have pulled it off if I hadn’t backed into a second group of mobs. That turned out to be too much and I died. Try #2 was a win and we moved on.

Our first assault on Azil didn’t go so well/ Between getting overwhelmed by adds, Luciditii’s  mouse going AWOL, and  those accursed Seismic Shards, we wiped. While waiting for Luciditii to find a new mouse I was back in the dungeon journal. Eventually I got bored and called out, “Luci! Luci, you better get back here, you got some ‘splainin’ to do!” It got a chuckle from Pâmëløt, anyway.

Round two, as in the last post-wipe battles was a rousing success. I ultimately didn’t get what I really wanted (a chaos orb). Jaconsus and I both rolled need and he got it.  Damn. I guess I’ll have to run a few more to make my goggles. In any case it was a good time and I look forward to doing it again sometime. Thanks guys for taking me!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was first to 81 in my guild. You all saw that. Unfortunately, I was third to 82, 83 and 84. Dammit. I came on on Saturday morning and was one of three or four level 84s. I was only about 12% through, so I opted to go to Hyjal, since I’d not been there and level my mining skill to 500. I ultimately got Coming Down the Mountain in the process and was over 70% of the way to 85. During all this I’d accumulated over 4k gold so I picked up Master Riding on my way to back to the Twilight Highlands. Finally I got there and picked up where I’d left off (after the beach quests with a certain dwarf who I’ll write about later). I quested like crazy and finally, at last, ding.

I had hit 85 first of all of my guild mates! I was so happy, and my guild master complimented me on it. So I got a completionist achievement in Hyjal, a Masters Flyers License, and I hit 85 first in my guild.

I’m all happy now.

That’s…. not a good thing, right? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Gav was in the middle of a two-hour archeology marathon and was on his way to Duskwood from the Western Plaguelands, where he hoped to ding 83 by digging up useless junk (just for the record, he did). I was just coming south out of the Searing Gorge when I espied a large wing in the skies above the Burning Steppes. I thought, stupidly enough, “Hey, maybe it’s a rare I can kill for kicks!” I got just a little closer and saw what you see above. Nope, can’t kill that.

Long story short, I Stood in the Fire.  Deathwing – 1, Gav – 0.

Dammit.

We take a break from our PTR coverage to discuss what’s going with Gavelier on Live.

I’m not going to open this post with the trite pirate speak, but it is Pirates Day in Azeroth. You can speak to any commoner to get a pirate costume for a short while or speak to Dread Captain DeMeza in Booty Bay to get a 12 hour costume. Make sure you visit DeMeza to get your holiday achievement.

You may notice that I’m going ‘sword and board’ in the above pic, rather then wielding my usual Tyrannical Beheader. That’s obviously because I’d been off playing in a PvP scenario. This time, it was my first excursion into Warsong Gulch. That’s a cozy little battleground, ain’t it? I took my Dread Corsair  buff to the battleground (after waiting 9 minutes!) and had a great round. Sure it was mostly because my team was awesome and the horde seemingly gave up towards the end of the match, but I still had a good round.

I also (because we blitzed the hell out of the place) got a couple of achievements: Warsong Expedience and Warsong Perfection. I say the horde gave up at the end because after pitched fighting around the middle of the zone on our first two flag captures, they were nowhere to be seen on our third run. We all just tailed the flag carrier into our base without seeing a single hordie.  I never died, which was weird. I got hit hard a few times, but never enough to drop me below 50% health. I credit our healers (a couple of paladins and a priest) and my stocking up on resilience with stuff like my PvP armor and the flask I quaffed. I did crap damage but was in the middle of everything for 19 honorable kills. I was using my Seal of Justice, so that may have contributed to my low damage output (that and I don’t have a decent one-hander) Aw well.

Here’s Gav, practicing with the Drill Sargent for Operation: Gnomeregan. I completed the quest chain last night (along with seemingly a million other people) and had a good time. Some of it was funny (Mekgineer Thermaplugg was humorous with his rants) and the action was dynamic. At one point we were at the gate to Gnomeregan and… the quest bugged. High Tinker Mekkatorque froze and then disappeared, leaving us dozens of us without his buffs to deal with a mob of elite level 80s. First off, when the hell did they get there?! I also want to know how Thermaplugg – all level 28 of him – is ordering around and controlling them. They could kick his ass and take Gnomeregan for themselves. Oh well.

Well, on try #2 we made it into the city, where we fought. And fought. And fought some more. It was just numbing AoE mob grinding down there. Finally, after another humorous rant or two from Thermaplugg, we had to evacuate when he irradiated the city again, this time with 20x as much radiation as the last time. So, what? What did we accomplish? Did we just waste our time? Gah.

I did do one other thing last night. I picked up a Titanium Razerplate for my gear set to replace my Breastplate of the Imperial Joust. Now I just need to gem it up and enchant it.

Great. The Oculus. I don’t like that place much, but that’s where the Random Dungeon Finder sent me tonight. I ended up in a slick group though, and we blitzed the place. We decided to go for some achievements and rode only Amber drakes into battle. I didn’t do great (my DPS was down for whatever reason) and right before we fought Mage-Lord Urom, our tank dropped. A full minute later, we got a new pally tank. Yay! He too was fast and efficient. This was an easy run! Except…

Lay Guardian Eregos shot me off my drake again near the end of the battle. Fortunately, my party was able to peal him off  of me before he could kill me, so there I was, on the  middle platform, taking pot-shots at him with Exorcism and Hammer of Wrath for the last 10% of his health or so.

Say what you want, but it worked. lol I got the Emerald Void and Ruby Void achievements out of the deal so I’m happy. I got two Forest Emeralds plus two extra Emblems of Triumph out of the Cache of the Ley Guardian, so it was a good run.

Oh, and btw: I completed Explore Northrend and got a snazzy new tabard for my troubles.

A good night’s work.

I returned to Wintergrasp twice yesterday. The first match was epically boring, because we had 25+ players and we saw a total of three members of the Horde: a death knight, a warlock and a paladin. That led them to have over 130k health a piece! It was like taking on some crazy elite mob. That made it hard to get siege engines to drop their towers (we were on defense) because there was just about no one to kill. We did though, and kind of just chilled until the timer ran out. It was the most lame WG match I’d ever been in

The seconds match I attended was more even. I got my 5,000th honorable kill this match, which is kinda lame for how often I do WG. We again chased the Horde around the map, slaying them left and right. Afterwards, I found myself exactly 2 stone keeper shards from my Black War Mammoth. Again, for how often I play WG I probably should have already had one, but I used to cash in my stone keeper shards for honor, and a couple hundred went toward heirlooms for my alts. Still, I’m almost there now.