Archive for the ‘Misc’ Category

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.

I was leveling my warlock, Crane yesterday in the Wetlands. He gained two levels (from 24 to 26) and I had a good time. One interesting event happened while Crane was still level 25 in the Excavation Site. He had his voidwalker, Kragnos tanking a raptor when he was set upon by Sarltooth. Now, as I wrote, he was level 25, and Sarltooth is level 29. I figured I was dead, but I managed to Fear him over and over again while helping Kragnos down his quarry. Once he did, we finally turned our full attention on Sarltooth.

We killed him and I lived! Yay! It was a productive evening.

Lug was busy last night. I took him across Thousand Needles, reaching level 30 there and then up to Ashenvale to reach 31, and finally back down the Thousand Needles to kick around for a while and work on 32. This is my favorite pic from last night, it shows Pig tanking a Searing Infernal for me while on the quest Never Again. The quest was a relatively easy (aside from an accidental overpull in the shrine, which pit Lug one-on-one with one an Infernal. For once I didn’t panic, and managed to trap him in ice. I quickly helped Pig kill our original target (a Roaming Felguard), at which point he picked up the Infernal before he was unfrozen. Hooray for strategy!

I encountered packs of Alliance players twice during my play. At one point while in Demon Fall (the area with the Felguards and Infernals) I was watched by a group of three alliance players (a mage, a druid and something else), who just stared at me killing demons before heading into the quest area. Maybe they were wishing it was a PvP server so they could kick my ass. If they weren’t, a group of higher-level Night Elves (levels 33-35) in Thousand Needles definitely were. They brought mobs to me (which was pointless because the mobs they fetched weren’t threats to Pig and I) and then tried to stand atop the mob to trick me into attacking them. However, none of them ever went into PvP themselves, so I couldn’t attack them if I wanted to. Oh, they got out their weapons and gestured wildly, the hunter acted like they were going to shoot me and Pig, a druid turned to cat form and followed me around… it was downright amusing. I calmly killed the mobs they brought and sauntered on my way. I never saw them again.

Sometimes I wonder if what they say about the Alliance being bad at PvP is true. And then I remember Gav’s my main, and he’s been Alliance for two and a half years.

Maybe that’s my answer.

I’m kind of depressed. It seems that all of the WoW blogs I read have writers in the Cataclysm beta. Alazar is approaching it’s 2nd anniversary and has over 250 posts to date, and yet I sit on the ouside looking in. Alazar’s not big, but it’s been around the block. This is the kind of thing I think about when I read about folks testing and reporting on the beta left and right.

Anyway, here’s a quick pic that I took with Lug riding his Kodo in the Thousand Needles the other day. I thought it was a great pic.

Nice, huh? It was a beautiful morning.

Gav was back in action tonight and had another memorable experience. I queued for a dungeon and 23 minutes later, I reached the Trial of the Champion. I died in the jousting phase when I was knocked from my horse and trampled. I quickly re-zoned into the instance and we blew through the champions and the mobs around Paletress. but she was tough. She summoned a shadow Cyanigosa who promptly beat us down. We finally killed her but it took forever. Paletress herself was a pushover. Finally, the Black Knight arrived.  We shot right through his first phase and were doing ok on the second phase until the ghouls he summoned got loose. The spread among us and killed two of us – a DPS and our healer. Another DPS died shortly after the third phase began. That left a bear druid and myself to two-man his last phase. Y’know what?

We did it.

Yeah, we kicked his last form’s ass, but it was touch and go obviously. When it was over the bear was under 40 HP, and I was down there, too. It took my Bubble, a runic healing potion, a handful of Flash of Lights and a lot of luck to keep me alive. We did it though. Yay! We then rezzed everyone and passed out the loot.

It was a good run for all, with no poor attitudes or arguments. That’s how a run should go.

Except… maybe with a little less stress at the end.

I just spent three and half hours playing WoW, and still didn’t accomplish what I set out to do. My goal was to complete the Noblegarden meta, but I came up one Blushing Bride short. I thought that Dressed for the Occasion was needed for the meta, so I spent two-plus hours farming eggs around Kharanos, outside Ironforge. When I finally figured out it wasn’t needed, I’d gotten 275 chocolates, two white tux shirts, a pair of black tux pants, three spring circlets, four spring flowers, three blossoming branches and five spring robes, but zero elegant dresses. I had found my spring rabbit’s foot earlier, so I got that achievement, and I met some random dwarf priest out in Un’Goro Crater and we helped each other get hard boiled.

I then wandered back into Dalaran, and opted to go to Wintergrasp and see about maybe joining a Vault of Archavon raid. I didn’t, but while I was sitting peacefully in Wintergrasp Fortress’ inner sanctum, I was jumped by an Orc warrior. He got me pretty beat up, but I got to the transporter and  escaped outside the inner room to heal. I buffed myself up and then headed back in to face him one-on-one in a fair match. He was pounding on an AFK dwarven hunter, so I hit him with Hammer of Justice and promptly beat him down. Yes! The dwarf gave me a high five as he got back to his keys while I was finishing the Orc. With healing spells, a good stun, and strong melee powers (plus the ever-popular bubble), some days it’s good to be a paladin.

It’s finally happened – I’ve snapped. I knew it was coming, I just didn’t know when. What am I talking about?

I’ve gone back to Alazar’s roots. Well, color scheme-wise, anyway.

Other then an old, old ‘written on papyrus’ look Alazar once had, this bl0g has long sported a blue-and-gold look. I tried to go to a more neutral red-and-brown look, but I finally had to go back to what Alazar was for so long. And y’know what? I think I like the results.

As I was flying about Northrend, running dailies, a guildie was getting achievement in Ulduar. I congratulated him, of course, which set off a chain reaction that was fun and educational. You see, he was trying to kill Ignis the Furnace Master for the weekly raid quest. As fate would have it, his 25-man raid had a DPS spot open, so I was invited. I was unsure about how much help I could be, but I joined in anyway.

This is about where I found everybody, right at Ignis’ doorstep. We got our act together and – after some random arguing over engineering loot –  we set forth to slay the beast.

We did it, obviously, and I got an achievement, to boot. I thanked my guildie for inviting me, and then a weird thing happened. We got talking about my DPS and my gear, and he started lending me advice on how to improve them. I paid attention as best I could and he helped me set an upgrade path via emblems. I found out that for my first upgrade, I need 50 Emblems of Triumph, and – at that point – I had 12. I ran a string of heroics to try and get some more, and it was interesting to say the least.

First up was Azjol-Nerub, which progressed as one would expect a dungeon to go – steady and uneventful. The second one I ran was wild. A pair of players from the same guild were heading up the run and they were trying to break some kind of world speed record, it seemed. They were blitzing through mobs, gathering a ton in one place before turning to fight. This caught the rest of us off guard, but we kept up. Once Keristrasza was dead, I had was up to 27 total Emblems of Triumph, only 23 short of my goal. I queued up again, this time with the server due to go down for Tuesday maintenance in about half an hour. I ended up in Gundrak for the first time, and died on the first set of mobs. Our tank wasn’t very good, our healer had lag issues and our mage went AFK right at the start. We killed the first boss (with the healer and the mage dead), but then the server announced it was going down in 15 minutes. Soon, everybody began bailing and left me alone in the dungeon.

I ‘ported out and logged off as well, with 28 Emblems of Triumph, plus an achievement from the first Gundrak boss. Tonight I hope to get the lost 22 emblems for my new gear. Onwards and upwards!

For the last eight and a half hours, I’ve been fighting WoW tooth and nail. I, like many players, am struggling to log in. I attempt to load Gavelier, but when I get to the loading screen, the loading bar fills up and then sits there. Forever. You can find more rants and raves in this topic on the WoW forums. I’ll check back in if I ever get back into the game.

On another note, I forgot to mention that after my run through the Old Kingdom the other day, I used my frost emblems to grab the Libram of Three Truths. It seems to have upped my DPS against Cult of the Damned mobs near the Argent Tournament by over a hundred or so DPS. Sweet!

Aw, man.. I forgot to post the most important thing I’ve done since patch 3.3.3 hit – I built Jeeves. It was no big deal once the Titansteel cooldown was lifted. Now I need to try him out sometime.