Isle of Quel’Danas vs. Molten Front

I decided to do a little questing on Elgar and thought I should take him out to the Molten Front to see if they had any good prizes for him.  I hadn’t quite finished the questline to unlock Molten Front, but was pretty close.  I got to the point where it was, did some of the quests, went through the portal, did the first set of dailies then went to talk to Malfurion who told me I’d need 150 marks of the world tree to unlock the next phase, I opened my currency tab.  28 marks.  Fffff—-

I was quickly reminded why none of my toons had ever unlocked anything beyond this first phase.  Molten Front just isn’t that much fun.  And even if I had unlocked it for one toon, the idea of doing the same thing over and over for the other 6 toons…oh hell no. 

I know others have done it, good for them, maybe they only have one toon to do it on or one that they “care” about.  But man, I can’t even muster doing it everyday.  But that’s also because I don’t play every single day.  So the process would be really long, and REALLY monotonous.  By the time I’d unlock all the quests and phasing on one toon I’d be so sick of it I’d never want to do it again.  So choose carefully Elgar…

I think back to when Isle of Quel’Danas rolled out.  The whole island was there, and it unlocked as the whole server completed a set number of quests.  Each day, all of my toons could contribute to the greater server cause, unlocking the next phase as soon as possible.  And as the server progressed, the island was cleared of demons and opened up.  But if Schubert came three weeks later than Elgar to the party on the Isle, they were both able to do the same quests as it was marked by server progression, not by individual progression.  Vendors opened up as you progressed as a server. 

I liked Isle of Quel’Danas.  I liked the concept behind it better too.  So for all my alts that came after, they had access to everything the server had unlocked.  There was no individual grind to get to the point where you could finally reach the instance.  For an alt-oholic like me, Isle of Quel’Danas was a much better roll-out than Molten Front.  I had several toons make it to exalted with Shattered Sun.  I doubt that I’ll have many, if any complete all the quests for Isle of Quel’Danas…I just don’t have that mentality. 

On a sort of related note, I’m still waiting for them to have shoulder enchants be BoA.  I’m sick of Dailies for Therazane and I’m sick of their tabard.

Thoughts on Raiding, Dailies

First off, congratulations to Crits and Giggles for completing all of the content up to 4.2!  Not only did the Friday/Saturday raid get Nefarian down on Friday night, but the Sunday/Monday group was able to get Nefarian and Al’Akir down.  This completed the pre-4.2 content for both raid groups.  I am so proud of the groups and though they finished after 4.2, they did well getting as far as they did prior to 4.2.  Congratulations to all and congrats on the new mounts earned for the guild!

So I went raiding with the Friday/Saturday group on my Warlock.  He had maybe a half-dozen epics and then mostly heroic dungeon gear, but a few normal items as well as a green wand.  Damn you Blizzard for your lack of wands at 85.  Seriously. 

The experience was mostly good.  Nefarian isn’t a very complicated fight, compared to something like Lich King.  It’s all about managing the cooldowns and kiting the adds.  The group was pretty well-organized and though we had several of us that had never done it before, including one tank, we progressed and got it done.  We went over did some firelands trash for a bit, then went to kill Al’Akir.  Saturday we did BoT downing Choga’ll and finished the whole place in about 1.5 hours.  Not a single piece of DPS cloth dropped.  Sad day.  The good news is that with the changes to the way I was doing rotation and therefore some of my glyphs, I really managed to do better than I thought.  Not too shabby for having gear that wasn’t ideal. 

While seeing this content was fun, and a good time, I honestly have to say, I don’t know how you people do this.  Raid, every week, hours on end.  At about 1.5 hours into our 4 hour scheduled raid, I was done.  I started to get sloppy in play, I was tired, restless, I wanted to have someone say, “Okay, we killed Nef, everyone have the night off!”  But you people are relentless!  Ha!  I mean, if you love it, good for you, but I was quickly reminded why I play the game the way I do.  Raiding is not for me.  But kudos to all that can do that, throwing yourselves mercilessly towards death repeatedly often for nothing.  Wow.  I’m not sure if I should be scared of you, or respect you.  Ha!

It was a good experience though, and I was glad I could help the group out, at least with Nef.  I’m pretty sure I was pretty useless on all other fights we did.

I also wanted to comment on the dailies in Firelands.  I love the progression of the druids across the firelands, the storyline is pretty good, and it feels good too, like things are moving, the world is alive.  And it looks like an epic battlefield out there.  Good job Blizz!  However, I do wish it was more Quel’Danas style, where the server as a whole worked together to open up the next section, the next vendors, etc.  This is crazy.  To have to do this repeatedly on each toon to get my 150 marks?  Insanity.  No thank you.  I’m pretty sure that I’ll send one or two through it and that’s it.  If it was server progressed, I would probably do it on more toons, to help the cause, but knowing that each one will have to do this repeatedly to unlock it for himself?  No way.  This is when the game starts to feel like work to me and not like fun.  I would rather dig up archaeology finds than repeat those dailies for months on all my toons.  So, I give them credit for making the area feel epic, however boo to it being individual and not server wide progression.

Back at work today, good times.  Was a busy weekend with raiding and fire festival stuff.  I finally got Flame Warden on Elgar…should have done it on Rossini, but as always I resort to “next year…”

An Interesting Night

Due to the protests continuing, the kid I mentor spent the night last night since his mom was going to sleep in the capital.  He asked if he could stay over so as to not have to stay home alone and I agreed.  I have additional comments on parental responsibility here, but I’ll keep them to myself.

Anyways, so with him over all night I had to figure out exactly what we were going to do with the evening.  His goldthorn business is still running strong, so I knew he wanted to get some herbing in eventually.  But I dragged him through Setthek Halls at 67 and then Shadow Labs.  A few quests in Nagrand and a few in Netherstorm and he was 68.  His character is technically ready for Northrend now, I suppose I’ll drag her up there eventually, but he is set on making her farm goldthorn and selling for a profit.  Though he’s doubled his price on the AH and perhaps that’s too much and they won’t sell now.  We’ll see!!

While he was off farming herbs I looked over to Drak’Thar server to make a toon to sometimes harass the other bloggers over there.  I toyed with an undead hunter but I can’t get over their look, so I decided to make an orc:  Troutorc.  He’s a hunter and I’ll be honest, his little boar is adorable.  I got to level 5 before midnight and decided to log back to Elgar transmute a Truegold and then go to bed, but then I thought…hmmm…what’s this Tol Barad people are always talking about?

Alliance controlled it, though I don’t know what that really means?  And I got a bunch of quests which I will do.  No flying there made it a little weird, but I managed and soon realized that unlike other times I can’t really quest here in Disc spec.  Things took WAY too long to kill so I switched to shadow and did a few quests.  They were okay, but I should come back and do more of them eventually because I like pets and I hear they have a seagull!  Good times! 

So all in all it was a weird night of all sorts of things happening.  Tonight it should be a little more routine, some archaeology, some questing, and some dailies.  Maybe even some scary PvP leveling with the Horde!

Halls of Suck

I loathe the Halls of Lightning.  I mean really loathe it.  But it was our normal daily yesterday, so it only seems right that I go for it with the guild, but they wanted to do it on Heroic.  I loathe Halls of Lightning on regular that I had completely avoided doing it on heroic with Elgar.  But it was time to face it.  I figured I could make it.  But I wasn’t thrilled.  Loken in particular is annoying because of my lack of and now totally nerfed AOE ability (yes singular) as a Disc priest. 

Did I mention I hate this place?  We had a few casualties along the way but pretty much every time we did it was due to AOE type damage.  Seriously, I hate that place.  We make it to Loken, but we wipe on him, I was the first to go down.  Grr.  So we try again.  It’s not looking much better, but I blow some major cooldowns and manage to stay alive along with much of the party for nearly the whole fight, he’s at 60k when I die, we have two DKs left, one pops army of dead while the tank blows his cooldowns.  They manage to finish him off just before one last lightning nova that surely would have killed them.  I have to give a shout out to both of them for finishing him off.  I was more than happy to see him drop and through the whole instance I managed to pick-up three achievements.

I still hate HoL.  After some congratz from the achievement spam I told the guild that now that was done, I don’t ever have to go back, I have the achievement, thank you.  They laughed.  I wasn’t kidding.  I’ll go back as DPS, but I don’t like to heal that place at all.  I loathe the Halls of Lightning.

Troutwort of Stormwind

I’m still having a little trouble understanding how Trout has been my focus lately.  It’s always been Elgar once they both hit max level, but I’ve really put more time into Troutwort again since Elgar reached a level of gear that I feel makes him fully capable of healing any and all heroics, sure there’s always room for improvement and I still do heal with him, but doing quests or dailies with him is less than thrilling.  The other day I was following someone to Icecrown so they could show me something and I was like, where’d you go?!  We were in a phased part and I couldn’t see him, he said “Oh you haven’t quested here?”  I chuckled and said, “Oh ha ha, Elgar doesn’t quest.”

Troutwort does do the dailies and his new favorite is the Argent Tournament.  Though lately, he’s been getting slacky and has’t been going to joust the Scourge.  But he did get enough badges for a new weapon!  The Argent Tournament staff seen below is what Trout is using, though it’s “technically” a feral druid staff, I have yet to see something that is easy for me to attain with that much agility.  But twice now, I’ve been criticized for using ”a druid weapon” and then tried to explain that it’s the best weapon I could find without raiding.  This is one of those scenarios where I must have just got caught by bored people inspecting my gear as I run around Dalaran or Ironforge.

Trout has earned the “of Darnassus” title and started his Argent dailies for Stormwind since it was his next closest reputation to exalted.  He finished up the dailies to earn the right to represent Stormwind, but didn’t reach exalted reputation.  So I headed back to Stormwind and over to Northshire Abbey to do some of the starter quests.  In less than an hour I had earned over 5000 Stormwind reputation and reached exalted.  Those low level beginner quests really like to hand out the reputation!

He started in on Gnomeregan as well, time to head back to Dun Murough to get some of that easy reputation too!

Speaking of low levels, the patch 3.2 changes to mount requirements and speeds is going to be much welcomed for all my alts.  I actually don’t have many alts left that need leveling up and mounts, but still.  It will be a nice and welcomed change.  I can’t view the pages to link at this time, but they are discussed in the WoW forums if you care to check out the “official” announcement.  I’ll try to add a link later from home, where websites are not blocked.

Troutwort

Trout has been out and about lately working up money towards his epic flying mount.  I’ve never been any good at playing the auction house as it always seemed more like work to me that it seemed like fun.  I sell things when I have excess and craft things to sell as well.  But I’ve never really done the whole buy low and resell high thing.

In order to get cash, Trout decided to take up the Argent Tournament folks on their offer for fame and gold.  It paid off!  Not only did he get a great little title, but he’s now able to collect the champions badges so that he can possible get a new weapon for himself.  That agility staff looks so yummy, even if it was primarily designed for druids, I’ll take what I can get!

On a side note, I was able to take out a stabled pet that I’ve had around since they introduced all the pet talent trees.  I wanted to have a pet from each tree.  Grizzlethorn (bear) whom I’ve had since level 24 became a tenacity pet, and I went out and tamed a Wasp in Zangar for DPS in dungeons, though his non-stacking buff doesn’t exactly make him the best choice – even if he looks really cool.  For my cunning pet…well, I didn’t really like the choices.  But decided that perhaps the web from the spider could prove useful in PvP or else in a pinch for a quick trap (I really do need a macro for that).  But I dug out the spider who had been rotting since level 70.  He became level 75 when I pulled him out.  Yay!  And thought that the dailies I was doing might be an easy way to get him up a few levels.  He’s at 78 now (I think).  His name is Kiwi, because he’s green and hairy.  And though he’s not an ideal pet by any means (40 second cooldown on web?  gross) I do love the way he looks and his name.  So I’ll level him up to 80 and then probably stash him away as I turn in for a real dungeon pet (don’t tell the wasp–he’s out too).

Speaking of Fishing…

Our daily fishing the other day was the Jewel of the Sewers quest.  By far the most easy of the daily fishing quests in Northrend.  For fun, I logged on all my level 70+ characters and picked it up.  I figured I would eventually get around to it on all of them.  I was suprised though to see that my little mage Schubert had skill of…oh crap, he never trained fishing at all.  But he still had the fishing pole from the eels in Outland in his bank.  Borka and Kittykat picked up the quest too, as well as Trout and Elgar who normally do it anyways.

In the spirit of this past weekends fishing trip, I spent some time fishing it up on all of them the other night.  For Schubert it was 126 skill ups before be caught the jewel, Borka and Kitty were less but still many points required.  Unfortunately, none of them got very good prizes in their bags of fishing treasures.  But it was good to get them some skill ups. 

Trout has been doing the daily fishing a little bit more frequently on his quest for gold for epic flying.  He was doing the Terrorfish quest last week when jumped by a rogue.  I once was told that hunters are the anti-rogue, but I can’t understand how that could be?  I kept flare up nearly constantly but I’d be stun-locked before I knew what happened and death ensued.  Several others near me were doing the same fishing daily and so we partied up.  We did kill him 10 or so times before he called in his BE rogue friend and between the two of them and cloak of shadows, vanish and sap, and us fighting with fishing poles in hand, we just had too much trouble.  Eventually some gave up since the rogue just kept on coming back, and the others of us caught all our fish and headed out as well.  But the little rogues were persistant little sh!ts and would gank the person running to the flight point when they finally decided to turn in. 

Personally, I didn’t get it, because I don’t play like that nor do I get any kicks out of killing other players.  Hence my terrible PvP skills.  Especially in a situation where obviously the fishing people have no interest in the rogues. 

To end with one last fun note, eating Magic Eaters while fishing can have fun effects especially during the wild magic debuff.  Who knew dragons could fish?!?