Horde or Alliance?

Been a few days since any updates here, I have been enjoying some much needed time off of work and finally feeling much better after that nasty cold I had for almost two weeks. I finally was broken by the unrelenting beatdowns from the battlegrounds and I dusted off my totems and started playing my shaman again…I know, but this is a druid blog…well, yes, I have to say I am torn at the moment. I just got my 4th piece of gladiator gear for Tab and I am almost at the point where I am ready for some arena and here I go switching it up again…what can I say? I have altism and there isn’t any cure for it.

There was the big free character move to the brand spanking new server, Ghostlands, since my horde playing was on Blackhand I took full advantage of it. I even decided to create an all new character on Blackhand to play on the new server, he is a blood elf priest…I have a friend who is planning to make a blood elf hunter…going to start from level 1 together, we will see how it goes.

So far, the server is pretty nice, the BG Ques are a bit longer than I was used to for Alliance, but out of a total of 6 games we only lost 1 and that was in WSG mostly because we were outnumbered, but also cause the leader decided we should play defense…wrong strategy…

I respecced Drollam to a build I found online which is basically an elemental/resto hybrid. I will see how it works, so far I am pretty pleased with it. I get to heal with ease and also dish out the DPS if needed.

In other news, I got to help take out Omen in Moonglade for the Lunar Festival quest. Probably the toughest boss I have encountered so far…his HP were over 1 million? Yeah…

Other than that, still happily lost in the grind these days. Look for my updates about my leveling with my friend, should be some good times to share with you all.

WoW Log 28 Dec 07

Well I hope everyone has had an enjoyable Christmas.  I can’t complain really, Santa decided to bring me a late present, perhaps it was because he was so busy he figured I could wait a couple days and surprise me with a gift left on my porch…What was this gift?  Well it was a Logitech G15 gaming keyboard.  I am happy I got it, I am still tinkering with the different macros and bindings.  I went to the logitech.com website and downloaded the latest software and got everything installed, it automatically detected my two games I am currently playing, WoW and Enemy Territory Quake Wars without a hitch.  When I started up WoW the LCD display immediately showed me my current character’s stats, which is very cool.  Overall I am happy with the keyboard, the litup keys are nice too because I prefer to game in a dimly lit environment most of the time.  Usually the only light I have is from the television playing in the background.

Also, I picked up a new mod from the curse gaming mod site, it is simply called Quest Helper and it does just that, it helps you complete quests showing you the quickest routes and where to go and what to do.  In a way it makes questing too easy, but I have to say it makes life much easier, I have taken a lot less time looking up quest information on wowhead now giving me more time to get stuff done.

Tabeyus is level 65 now, I have done a couple guild runs into the Blood Furnace as a tank of course and I think I am getting better at it.  Last night there was 4 of us, our main tank a warrior, a priest, a hunter and myself and besides a few hiccups we owned the place.  I got a new set of shoulders off the last boss, rounding out my feralness quite well.  I can’t wait to get flying form…traveling through the outlands on the ground isn’t so bad, but could be so much better with air travel.  I managed to reach level 375 in alchemy over the past few days by buying the required mats to make the dreamless sleep potion.  One less thing to worry about later.

I also started doing a few daily quests with Giznad, since he has nothing better to do he might as well earn some gold for me, so I have been doing the Skyguard quests taking out the Skettis eggs and escorting the prisoner.  It is an easy way to get 20 gold every day.

Helzbelz is now level 26 and playing him has been a learning experience, testing out my healing abilities while in a group has been fun, I have found that the holy shield is my best defense in almost every situation besides when I want to make a jump from a high distance it doesn’t protect me from taking damage.  I am going to go with a shadow priest build for leveling and I might change that once I get to a higher level.

Until next time friends I will be lost in the grind and I hope everyone has a Happy New Year.

Back to Azeroth

Well, friends, gamers and anonymous visitors to the site, I have some news to share, whether that is good or bad who knows, but let me get on with it.  I decided to go ahead and get resurrected in the World of Warcraft.  A friend of mine sent me a scroll and I accepted and installed the game and downloaded the Burning Crusade, saved me from having the install it using the 4 CD’s since I didn’t get the DVD version.
The updating process actually was taking a while once I logged in so I went and found the file online, I think the 2.3 patch was around 692mb and took me about 45 minutes to download.  Compared to Lord of the Rings Online the game files seem to be a bit quicker to update, perhaps because Blizzard has had plenty of experience with updates or who knows…but the total process of installing, downloading, updating took somewhere around 2 hours maybe.
Of course, I can’t play WoW without a good UI mod, the trusted compilation I used forever was from LedMirage.net.  So, I went ahead and logged on the site and downloaded the latest version and installed that.  Now, I think I am ready to fire it up.
I login to the game and decided to start with my level 70 hunter, at first the mods were all default and there were all kinds of things on my screen, the quest minion was taking up a big part of the screen, so I found the setting to turn that off.  Then of course, the hotbars needed tweaking, the addon that does that is fubar, much easier to use then the previous program, which I don’t remember the name of it right now.  So, I do all the initial setting up and go to Ironforge and check my bank, I forgot how much crap I had collected…some of it useful, most of it I don’t know, but half of my bags are full of quest related items…jeez.
I use my hearthstone and go to Shattrath and remember how much fun it is having a flying mount…weeee!  I checked my friends list and there was actually a friend who was online that I remember, I sent a message and got a warm reply asking where I had been…hehe  It has been since March now and this person still remembers me, that is always nice.  I also remember being in a guild, I checked the guild tab and see that they haven’t disbanded but they have made a new guild, I went ahead and /gquit anyway, time for a fresh start.  The only thing that I really recall when I left was trying to level my pig I got from the eastern plaguelands.  So I went out and grinded on some beasts just getting a feel for my skills and remembering how to play until that old, so I decided to logon to my old friend, Tabeyus, my druid.
I login and the very first thing I see is a night elf rogue dancing wearing nothing but skivvies and of course I have to laugh, then she asks, “Do I have cameltoe?”.  I have no response…it is kind of strange, being gone for months and coming back to see that staring at you…surreal I would say.
I was still an officer in the old lost guild, Absolution, but once again, I am starting over new here, so /gquit.  The first thing I am trying to do is remember all of these quests I have started and where I need to go to do them.  So a quick trip to Thottbot.com helps out a lot.  Tab was level 61 and had just recently respecced from healing to feral.  I really enjoy the feral aspect of being a druid, going from either being a DPS dealing cat to a tanking bear is really fun.  After running around a little while in Hellfire Peninsula doing quests, (and making about 70 gold in a few hours) I went to the auction hall to see if I could upgrade a few items for cheap.  The gear I was wearing came mostly from drops in either Scholomance or Blackrock Depths, I ended up replacing about half of my gear for under 40 gold.  I also remember getting a lot of upgrades from questing in the Burning Crusade, so I don’t want to go all out wasting my money.
I found a level 61 hunter who was doing a group quest there in Hellfire and we ended up making friends, I am assuming it is a she, she said she was female and I have no way of proving that or not, so I will call her she for now…Over the span of the couple days I spent questing we did quite a bit of them either together or with a group.  I managed to pull of two ramparts runs and I got a nice new mace out of that.  I was the main tank for a blood furnace run and I now remember why I dislike PuG’s so much.  The group itself as a whole was fine, it was just the amount of time it took for us to get a complete group and actually start the run, the rogue we started with was AFK from the very beginning and would show up long enough to kill a single group of mobs just to leave for another 20 minutes…that went on up until the first boss, then he was booted.  We got by the first boss and took a break, total time invested in the run at that point was about an hour and a half.  We got another level 62 feral druid, he had about 8k health points compared to my mere 6600 hp.  But because the leader of the group thought I could use the “learning” I remained main tank and that was fine with me.  Then, after another 30 minutes go by we are halfway to the second boss and our healer, a paladin leaves abruptly.  We took another break and got a really good level 66 healing paladin, he was really good and knew what he was doing.  We burned through the second boss and finally made our way down to the last, forgive me for not recalling names, I don’t have a photographic memory, but right before the fight our fearless leader asks the paladin to remove the added shadow damage magic from us or we could die…the paladin said he has never done it before and that we would be fine, the leader simply states, Just do it.  The paladin replies saying, “You think I don’t know how to play this boss?”.  That was the last thing said, and so the fight begins, I charge in and take on the agro and the boss says, come closer, we all run for it, and he spews out this massive aoe cloud of stuff, we end up owning him and we are done…whatever dropped I didn’t need, it was a 2 handed axe, but at least I completed the exploration of the blood furnace quest.
I had to take a break after that almost 4 hour escapade into the bowels of hell…no it wasn’t that bad.
Oh yeah, I ended up joining my hunter friends guild, Pug repellant.  I thought that was a pretty funny name and she seems nice enough.  I am so happy to see a guild bank, that was really neat, there is a set amount of gold you can withdrawal daily for whatever you need and you can take out items so many times.  I deposited 20 gold in there since I am generous and don’t have a big need for it right now.
One really funny thing, and this one caught me off guard, was I was online last night doing a few quests in the marsh and I get a tell from someone in the guild asking if I was in the guild Absolution and I replied, yes, thinking that was odd, and he replied saying it was Tedrian, he was a druid in the guild and we were both level 60’s with the same gear and everything, I said wow, that is cool…what are the odds of that?  The character in the guild is his daughters, I asked if he was all decked in epic gear, he said yeah, he has been playing raiding and all that since last year.  It is funny how small the world really can be, you never know who you will run into out there.  I was thinking also, what if I hadn’t taken a break from WoW?  Would I be in a raiding guild?  Well, I don’t regret anything; I had a lot of fun in Middle Earth and made some good friends, after all that is an important part of playing MMO’s I think.

Larger (insert funny name here)

After much time debating and finally coming to a decision I ended up deleting my loremaster, Abellio, in order to create my newest character, Larger, he is a dwarf guardian with a long black beard and no hair on top of his head, after all, he always wears a helm, so who cares…plus I think it adds to the badass harley riding look I was going for…heh

The only thing Abellio still had that made me really think twice was his artisan level of jewelcrafting, but that really isn’t a big thing, after-all I have noticed that most of the jewellery I wear comes from completing quests after all, also, there are plenty of tinkerers in the kinship if I ever wanted to get items.

I know some of you are probably thinking why make a new character?  Well, to be honest, it is just my play style, there isn’t anything I can do to change it, so I accept it and enjoy the leveling process.  I decided to make him a metalsmith, since I don’t have one and always seem to be throwing away those recipes.  How is starting over from level 1 for the 6th time?  I have to say it really isn’t as bad as I remember, I did skip the introduction scene for the dwarves, where you go into the cave and end up meeting Gandalf who turns the troll into stone, it isn’t necessary and only gives you experience, not a big deal.

Also, once I hit level 11 I made my way to Bree to pickup the quests in Staddle and Bree-land, mainly because finding a group there is much easier and I know those quests by heart now.  I found a group of players to start Book 1 Chapter 1 and we ended up sticking together until finish Chapter 11 in the Barrow Downs, I was only level 13 and hadn’t died once so I was pretty excited about reaching level 14.  But, somehow upon stepping down the stairs inside the instance I was killed in one hit by one of the elite wights.  It was pretty crazy and I was stunned for a second trying to see how I died so fast, I guess I drew too much aggro, go figure, the tank getting the aggro, and our minstrel and captain couldn’t heal me fast enough to compensate.  Oh well, no big deal, I will always be the undefeated.

I am so glad I have a tailor and woodworker already created, I didn’t know you needed materials from those crafts to create the heavy armor and crafting tools.  I have found myself buying ore off the auction house to get my crafting up quickly, copper isn’t that expensive, not compared to buying ancient iron ore at least.

I reached level 18 the other day with Larger and upgraded my armor, I got the heavy shield from completing the Lallia escort quest, my total armor rating is over 500 now, which is pretty good for a level 18 character.  I think my level 42 burglar only has around 700 ac, but then again he can evade a lot of attacks.

I still have to yet to decide on a surname, some people in the kin suggested Member, and that is pretty funny, but I don’t know, I am thinking of something a bit more dangerous, like think of something a biker would be called, I don’t know, how about Steel, or Magnus or something…

Life after Death

You could say I have been so lost in the grind I couldn’t find my way out of it to get on here and write a little bit for you today…but than again you could just say things have been busy…and you could be right.  In any case there’s no need to fear, well you know the rest.

Where to begin, last time I left off shortly after the Book 11 patch in LotRO.  I have been a busy little bee ever since the patch, originally I bought a quaint little dwarven abode deep in the Thorin’s Hall homesteads, but that turned out to be even too dark for my tastes…hard to believe really.  So, I managed to accumulate the required 7 gold to purchase a large house in the bree-land homesteads and with enough luck a new neighborhood opened up with the perfect little cottage by a lake, so now I reside at 4 Garden St. Morglan, Breeland.  I have it open for anyone who wants to take a peek inside, just please leave the toilet seat up and take all empty beer bottles with you…someone decided to have a party while I was out grinding on reputation and made a mess of the place…I think I need to get a pet warg to keep the riff-raff out.

Of course you know my captain has been level 50 for a little while now, so what do I do since there is no point in doing quests?  Luckily Turbine doesn’t leave me bored, there is plenty to keep me occupied, the last patch was HUGE, I mean I still haven’t seen all there is to be seen since Book 11…I am still on Book 9, that is a long and winding trek to get these books done it seems.  I am not in a huge rush to complete them or anything.  Our kinship decided to try our luck at the 12 man raid in the riff…that turned out to be more than we had anticipated, multiple deaths and much crying and a little bit of frustration, after about 3 hours we decided we had been tortured enough and called it quits.  I have to say this dungeon was at about the same difficulty level of say AQ 20 man, reminded me of that sort of strategically planned attack style…but in other news, I have been milking the new decorations for all I can in the AH.  I am not going to go into details, it might be bad for business, but let me say I am not hurting for gold these days.

I have been playing my original character, Sean, burglar, he is now almost level 33 and I really enjoy playing him, and although he can’t heal very well, if at all, I still like the stealth and crit attacks he so wonderfully executes.

I promise screenshots of my home in the next post, I didn’t get any good shots before the server went down today, until next time friends, happy hunting.