Archive for the ‘Gavelier’ Category

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Gavelier is back. Alazar lives again.

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.

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!

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.

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….

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.

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.

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.

Gav was in Northrend on Monday for a while. He mined up almost 90 pieces of Saronite Ore – with not a single Titanium Ore among them – and generally stopped by a few places he’d not been for a while and may never come back to. One of those stops was Sholazar Basin and the Oracles camp. I bought one last egg from them, for old time’s sake. It cracked open this morning and voila! Instant Green Proto-Drake! Times like this make it feel like the game doesn’t hate me personally.

Then I get screwed on quest drops for an hour and remember, oh yeah – it hates me. Bad.