Low point

On Saturday I was struck with the desire to bring my lvl 65 hunter (my very first WoW character, rolled the day after the game was released) out and try to finally get him going again. I bought 145 emblems worth of heirloom items, paid for normal flying, and then tried to figure out how to play a hunter again. I lost interest immediately.

High point

Rolled a new warlock instead–yes, this is on top of my other alts: the 42 druid, the 41 shaman, the 48 mage, the 80 DK–I have Alt-ADHD.

Spent the better part of yesterday leveling it with Cendra’s new rogue. Was pretty fun, and I love all the spells it has at such a low level. I’ll probably play it until 40 or so and then get bored.

Low point

Saturday I threw together a somewhat impromptu Undying run. Razuvious was the raid weekly this week, so turns out half the people invited were saved already. Finally decide we’ll just 8 man it, everyone’s pumped for a fun drunk raid, and we go to do Razuvious first. While manning one of the Understudies, my pet frame was turned off and I couldn’t drop mine in time to save Zilga’s from dying. I pick Raz back up, we’re doing good, last 10% of health. Then I lose aggro, Razuvious runs over and instagibs a poor warlock and then before we can all flee to reset, the boss dies. I screwed up Undying on the first boss.

High point

Went and did ToGC-10 instead, finished it with 48 attempts left. Got a few upgrades for the warlock, who I hope will start raiding soon. One for the win column, overall.

Low point

After that tried a late ICC-10 alt run. Never got past Marrowgar because people couldn’t switch to spikes or avoid dying in the fire.

High point

No one got saved to a fail run.

Low point

Didn’t kill Putricide last night in ICC-10 (mains run).

High point

On our best attempt we got him to 26% and there was a marked improvement every attempt that didn’t have some crazy RNG screw up early on (ie, every “real attempt”). We definitely could have killed him with a lot more time.

Also, as you might have guessed, we killed Roface on 10man for the first time. We had a third healer in the group switch to actual heals for the fight and it reduced a lot of the “one healer dead = wipe” issues we had last week. Our first try we wiped at 7%, second at 1%, third a clean kill with no deaths. Was a thing of beauty.

Low point

Went into an AV yesterday to drop a Great Feast and score my Dinner Impossible achievement. Someone asks if there’s a tank and some tool responds he can tank it. Another guy says “Rhidach has 51.1k” (no wasn’t me) and the tool retorts “I’ll out threat him and live longer.” I kept trying to type in /raid a witty riposte (“Oh ho ho, so you think …”) but I failed to realize that you use /bg to talk in the battleground raid channel. I lose my chance to salvage my ego.

High point

I haunted him the whole way to Vann where he pulled and after a few seconds I pulled aggro by out tpsing him. He taunted back, the healers didn’t have enough time to react, and he died. And I lol’d. Oh, how I lol’d.

Nothing worse than the first day of work after a long holiday weekend.

This long weekend though was pretty productive, though. Not just for Rhidach but for my other alts as well. My shaman, for example, broke past 40 and finally got the ability to dual wield. The play style did an immediate 180 from slightly boring to an awesome flurry of pain. I bought for him two heirloom maces and enchanted both with Crusader, and with Windfury Weapon on both it’s just… awesome. That really is the only word for it.

I need to get this guy to 80 pronto so he can start farming Emblems of Frost–and thereby Primordial Saronite–for Rhidach. The main demands tribute!

Speaking of the Shaman, I’ve did a few random dungeons on him over the weekend. Each had about a ten minute wait, though was seemingly worth it for the chunk of experience and free blue item I would get for completion. The trouble was, of course, getting to the end of the dungeon. I had one really good SM Library run that got me all pumped for the system, but then the next one in the Armory was a disaster. The tank was a Ret pally (not necessarily a bad thing at that low level) whose idea of tanking dropping a consecrate and standing there.

Noticing he was not holding threat at all, I asked why wasn’t Righteous Fury on. “lol never trained it.”

Super.

Anyway, about halfway through the run the hunter finally drove the “tank” away by constantly casting Eyes of the Beast on his pet (a dog named Kitty) and sending it ahead to “scout” thus pulling mobs. So the “tank” quit and eventually I just had someone pass me lead and got Cendra to come in and lay a level 80 smackdown on Herod.

Finally, once I was high enough to be sent to Uldaman I started to see real tanks with–I am aghast–actual SHIELDS on. And what’s more, they use Righteous Fury or Defensive Stance and actually hold threat and try to taunt mobs off you if you accidentally pull. Miracle of miracles.

At least random dungeons break up the monotony of leveling. I can only take so much Monstrous Crab hunting in the Swamp of Sorrows before I feel like I’m going to snap.

As for Rhidach, late Friday night I couldn’t sleep and got pulled into a ToGC-10 pug a guildee was stuck in along with Ildara. Apparently they wiped about 20 times on Twins with the orbs just killing people left and right. After too many wipes a wave of puggers left and I, Cendra, and some others from random guilds came in to fill their spots.

On Twins the strategy they were using was everyone go one color except for one dps whose job was to run around “soaking” the orbs others were not. Maybe that might work, but that one dps focusing on orbs wasn’t working on shields, and we had two heals go off because there wasn’t enough damage to bring the bubble down in time.

After the third wipe on this strategy I proposed what ES does for Twins: two groups evenly split. Tank them in the middle. Of course, we killed them with ease. Superior tanking clearly won the day. Ahem. In any case, one of the Twins dropped the heroic Greaves of the Lingering Vortex, the final piece of gear I was coveting from that raid. And being the only plate tank I had no competition for it.

Then on Anub we wiped a few times since it was like 3 in the morning and everyone was crazy tired. We got it on the third attempt though, and everyone was free to go after being stuck in there for what apparently was hours. Meanwhile I was there for 45 minutes and walked away with a primo piece of gear. Score.

This week looks to be pretty awesome: new wing of ICC (presumably) will make raiding a little more exciting again. Add some spice to the mix of the 1.5 hour clear. Putricide we’re probably going to put off until Thursday so we can do everything in 10man first where the stakes are lower and it’ll give us two days of raid strats to soak up from around the blogosphere/the forums/elsewhere. Totally going to play it safe with the limited attempts counter.

My first full work day in about two weeks (thanks to Prague and Thanksgiving) and I feel completely out of my element. I’m not prepared to return so abruptly to cube life. And blog life, for that matter. I know last week I was “back” and then I only did, what, three posts? Sure it’s a holiday, but I should have done a bit better than that.

My first second max-level character

On a happier note, last night I finally hit 80 on my death knight (who I rolled back in… wow… July). I’ve been a bit slow, obviously.

The impetus for this last minute alt burst is a good chunk of the regular raiders in my guild are obviously sick of doing the same five bosses every week (Icecrown *really* needs to drop this week) and were looking to shake things up a bit. Doing Coliseum with ten different characters who can’t easily consider the raid as “on farm” will definitely add some spice. It’ll be fun to gear up and progress a brand new toon.

When I picked up the DK again earlier last week I paid the $25 to change him from a Belf to Undead, mostly to evade the “lol belf dk” stigma when running pugs and the like. However, I’m starting to regret the decision, missing the grace and elegance of the… er, well, mostly the hair. Them Blood Elves have some pretty sweet ‘dos.

I’m loathe to throw away a total of $50 for nothing, though, so my penny-pinching ways will probably get the best of me and prevent future finagling. … We’ll see.

Oh, and can we talk for a second about how much easier 70-80 is now with Cold Weather Flying available at 68? I basically burned through every level, banging out huge swaths of quests at a time, with no time wasted running through packs of dazing mobs. It was sublime.

Calm before the storm

Right now in-game is pretty quiet. Like I mentioned, everyone’s crazy bored of the Coliseum, and raid nights are seeing a few more new faces than usual because some of the raid core doesn’t bother to log on. People are rolling and leveling alts, while others are just taking a break from the game altogether. Especially a certain holy paladin in my guild, who has done this for the second time now.

I’m not sure what’s more excruciating, the last few weeks of Naxx while waiting for Uld, or this stretch before Icecrown. Naxx at the end sucked because we were starting to regress, with people not showing up out of boredom and reaching their personal gearing goals, so we actually got to the point where we were consistently wiping in there. That was depressing. Now, thanks to dkp in part, I think, we haven’t had as many attendance inconsistencies. Still, it’s the same. five. bosses. every damn week. I cans only takes so much and I can’ts takes no more.

I’m itching to knock down the doors of Icecrown and get to work dethroning Arthas. Come on Blizz, let’s get this show on the road!

Armor’s epilogue

Wrathy brings up a fascinating point regarding the new theorycrafting done with armor. With this new mathematical understanding of the stat, it’d be possible to make a spreadsheet where you’d plug in various numbers (including a predetermined percent of how much damage in a fight is magical) and you could weigh armor, stamina, and avoidance (among other things) to empirically work out what kind of gear you want to run with in that fight.

The thought of becoming Excel jockeys like some Rogues I know scares me a little, but it adds a little flair to our craft other than stamina, stamina, stamina. I’ll be following this effort in earnest as it develops.