it's that time again

meet Yarzill the Merc. ain't he pretty? when you hit exalted with the Netherwing faction Lord Illidan pops over for a little chat and reveals you for the traitorous wretch you really are. Yarzill here swoops in to rescue you from certain death and dismemberment at the hands of a very upset orc overlord. he then flies you off to shat in a victory lap of sorts and drops you off in front of all the netherwing drakes in lower city. you get your shiny new drake for free by talking to the one you want (you can buy the other colors later from a vendor back at the dragonmaw camp for the usual 200g fee).


we went with [Reins of the Violet Netherwing Drake]; thought it matched up nicely with shadowform. took us 11 days this time around (opened up the dailies on mar 1, hit exalted last night on mar 11), which is about 3 days faster than it took harl. the human Diplomacy racial definitely makes a big difference when it comes to rep grinding (25 to 55 more rep for each quest). the rest of the difference is probably due to better luck with finding [Netherwing Egg]s; we found at least 1 and as many as 5 each time we were doing the dailies.

we'll probably continue to do a few of the less tedious netherwing dailies as they're a great source of cash. we made 100-150g a day doing just the dailies, not counting any drops or herbs we picked up along the way. we're back up to about 3400g now and much of that can be credited to dailies. now we just have to figure out what to do next... it feels weird to not have a specific goal we're working towards.

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Kara!

Z finally got his kara key saturday and we had a chance to go play in KZ last night with our old guild. it was a last minute "hey, we think we're going to raid tonight. wanna come?" kinda thing, so it was a little rough around the edges. we made a mad dash to the AH on the way to the meeting stone to stock up on consumables and realized that we'd never really thought about caster consumables before. ended up buying some [Elixir Major Mageblood] (which was a mistake, but Harl can use 'em later), the [Schematic: Mana Potion Injector] for Harl (finally!), some [Superior Wizard Oil] (thought about going for [Superior Mana Oil] instead, but thought we'd try it without first and see what the mana situation was like) and a couple old-school [Flask of Supreme Power]s (they were way cheap compared with [Flash of Pure Death] and it's only a 10 point difference in spell damage). once we were fully raid buffed we were looking at +918 shadow dmg. mmmm, tasty. was even better when we brought in a shaman later on and had a Wrath of Air Totem at our disposal; zomg +1019 shadow damage! we wish that's what our stats looked like normally...

as far as the run went, it wasn't bad. they had cleared through morose on a previous night, so we started with maiden and then went on to opera (wizard of oz), curator, shade & chess; they all went down on the first shot. it wasn't always pretty, but we got the job done. prince was a different story. we made four attempts and never got him below about 40%. not really sure why he was so much trouble, but last night was just not our night for prince pwnage.

but what about "teh phat lewtz"?! we thought we'd be sitting pretty, being the only dps clothie in the raid (no mages or warlocks), but the loot gods decreed that it would be all healie gear, all the time. meh. we ended up with a couple bits of it anyway; the [Blue Diamond Witchwand] because none of the other healers needed it and the [Ribbon of Sacrifice] due to a very unfortunate error by the master looter. we still feel pretty bad about that, but at least it'll come in handy if we end up having to heal our way through the arcatraz again. we also picked up our first 10 [Badge of Justice]s. now we have to figure out what to save up for...

speaking of healing arc... never. again. we ended up going in as a healer because we really, really wanted our 3rd kara key fragment and putting together a group was like pulling teeth. we ended up with a prot warrior, 2 rogues, an elemental shaman and a shadow priest in healing gear (a little over +900 heals at the time). it actually went better than we expected it to, partly because the tank was awesome and also due to the shammie backing me up with a couple extra heals when pulls got hairy (that guy was on top of his shit. we love playing with people like that!). we did have one wipe right before the 2nd boss (damn you, aoe silence!), but all the bosses went down on the first try. that said, it was ZOMG STRESSFUL!!!1! we don't know how you full-time healers do it. we spent the entire run staring at health bars; praying they would stop going down and start going back up. one of our resto druids friends told us that she doesn't even know what the inside of most instances look like because all she does is watch health bars. bleh. major props to all you healers out there, but it's definitely not our bag.

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slow and steady

Z's steadily making progress in the gear department. last night we picked up [Sage of Terokk] (finally found a seth group), got our 2nd kara key fragment from steamvault and picked up a few more bits of healing gear along the way; we broke +900 healing at long last (+773 shadow dmg, on the face-melting side of things).

on the rep front, we broke revered with Netherwing after last night's dailies. the netherwing dailies are pure awesome. we do 8-9 each day we have time and pull in about 3500 rep and 150g at a time. our sparkly new drake is just around the corner! on the other rep fronts... well, we've got a lot of work to do. 4-5 runs of shattered halls will push us into revered territory with honor hold, which will grant us access to the +healing head enchant (yay, healing gear! /sarcasm). sha'tar-wise, we've got a long, long way to go before we can pick up our +spell dmg head enchant. sad, because our nifty [Spellstrike Hood] really deserves that finishing touch! we've got a fair ways to go in lower city rep as well (only about 25% into honored), but that only grants us access to some additional healing gear so no rush there. we turned in 7040 rep worth of aldor odds and ends last night, which brings us about 2/3 of the way through honored. still have a long grind ahead just to get the upgraded inscription. this isn't a priority for us, though, so we'll just turn in rep items as we find 'em.

our focus for the next few days will be netherwing rep, getting our 3rd kara key fragment (hello, arcatraz!), farming mats for our [Spellstrike Pants] and farming sha'tar rep (hello, botanica :( ).

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busy weekend

funny what a little car trouble will lead to. we'd originally planned to go play in the snow last weekend, but ended up staying home and playing a lot of WoW instead. and we were productive! we started our kara key quest and got our first fragment from Shadow Labs. in preparation for the last step of that quest line, we finally ran Caverns of Time: Durnholde. aside from just being a fun instance to begin with, this also got us some of the best pre-raid shadow priest gloves, [Tempest's Touch], available as a quest reward. a couple of gems later and these lovelies are worth 45 spell damage!

next up, we finally whacked Zuluhed and opened up the Netherwing dailies. you know the old saying, "it takes money to make money"? the Netherwing dailies could be the poster child for that expression. it takes 5000g (plus assorted repair bills) to open up them up. however, the money pours in once you start doing them. each daily quest is worth at least 12g. the vendor trash you pick up along the way, especially from the quests in the mines, also sells quite well; 2-3g per stack of things like broken fangs or slime. it's pretty easy to bring in 100g just by doing a handful of these quests.

after our second round of dailies and a couple lucky [Netherwing Egg] drops we hit friendly rep and opened up what is, quite possibly, the best daily quest ever: The Booterang: A Cure For The Common Worthless Peon. teh [Booterang], we haz it. we lovez teh [Booterang]. true story.

anyway, from there we went and joined up with a Shattered Halls group. we had 3 quests for SH in our log still and wanted to clean 'em out. conveniently for us, no one in the group had the key but we were on the last stage of the key quest! so, we went off and spanked hellfire's resident Fel Reaver and we got our [Shattered Halls Key]. the run itself went pretty well, except for a 15 minute pause mid-way through where we had to find a replacement tank. picked up some new healing gear from quest rewards, the [Runesong Dagger] off the ogre boss (nice boost for us, since we were still using our [Battle Mage's Baton]) and [Pattern: Spellstrike Hood] off the first boss. the pattern is especially timely as we were planning on having this item made for us this week. now we have to decide if we want to farm the primal nether ourselves (we were sooo close to winning the roll for one last night) or buy someone else's.

all in all, not a bad weekend.

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DING!

say hello to our newest 70. Zhered ding'd last night with a total /played of 9 days, 16 hours. conveniently, Z was questing in shadowmoon valley at the time so he hot-footed it over to wildhammer stronghold and sat patiently in front of the mailbox while we moved funds around.

remember that post we did a while back about making money? well, here's proof that it works: Z went first class and bought his epic flying mount, [Swift Blue Gryphon], within minutes of hitting 70. we didn't even bother buying the regular flying mount first. that's 6000g (800 to train expert riding + 5000 to train artisan riding + 200 for the mount). we also had to train our level 70 spells and gem out our new duds (pictured above). after all was said and done, we still have about 500g in the bank.

and now, we're off to start our kara key adventures...

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screenies!

we finally got photoshop installed (CS3 Web Premium Edition, oh how we love thee! /swoon), so here are the promised screen shots.


here we have the ever-popular [Festive Suit] in traditional red. perfect for those formal occasions or anytime a bit of flare is required. Zhered can now make these (for a small fee, of course).


and here we see our lovely model wearing the dashing [Festive Blue Pant Suit]. so cool it's hawt!

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would tour

last night saw Z embark on an epic world tour across azeroth in search of [Coins of Ancestry]. we usually don't do much of the holiday content, partly because we've seen most of it before and partly because we tend to be goal oriented and the holiday content is a distraction from whatever we're focusing on at the time (i.e., leveling up to 70... again.). the lunar festival offers up some pretty sexy tailoring patterns, though, and since Z's a tailor we thought we'd take some time out of our busy leveling grind and go pick them up.

due to a minor misunderstanding in a conversation we had with bell (our fault, not hers), we thought that we could get patterns for all of the different lunar festival outfits. at 5 coins per pattern we were looking at collecting 40 coins out of a total 50 possible. lucky for us, wowwiki just happened to have a travel plan for visiting all the elders.

some of the elders are tucked away in instances so we skipped a few for the sake of convenience. a few more are standing in the middle of horde towns, but the only really challenging one was in Org. we managed to pick up all the coins from horde cities without getting ourselves killed, but we weren't so lucky with the coin outside ZG. someone at bliz thought it would be funny to plant the elder in the midst of 3 60 elites with a knockdown ability. we probably would have made it if not for that stun, but as it happened we got eated.

about the time we were picking up our 39th coin, it occured to us that we should go look up what mats were required for these patterns so we could craft some of them up for a few friends. this is where we realized that our evening's quest was a bit... misguided. there are actually only two patterns that you can buy with coins (the red dress and the red pant suit). the rest of the dresses and suits can be bought with coins directly, but not the patterns for them. so, we really only needed 10 coins instead of 40. /sigh

we got our two patterns and made ourselves a suit and a few red dresses that we sent out as valentine's day gifts. we also picked up the blue suit for ourselves because it just looks damn good; we even happened to have matching boots (from our healing set)! bell was kind enough to point out that the patterns aren't BoP, so we'll go back to moonglade tonight and spend the rest of our coins on patterns for the AH.

and yes, we did take screenshots of our fancy new duds but we won't be able to post them until later this weekend. we're finally getting a new version of photoshop this weekend (/cheer), so cutting up screenies and such for the blog should be a much more pleasant experience now.

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getting there

Z is now 62 and we're just about done with hellfire. took a quick break to catch up on our tailoring... got up to 344. now it starts to get expensive ;)

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Into the Dark Portal

as we mentioned previously, our shadowpriest, Zhered, finally hit level 60 (61, now... yes, we're that behind on posting). perhaps the best part was that it was an exploration ding and it caught us completely by surprise.






we've read different accounts regarding whether it's faster to do 58-60 in outlands vs. the old world. some folks swear by hitting outlands at 58 and grinding your way to 60, some say go at 58 just to gear up from the first few quests in hellfire and then finish leveling to 60 back in azeroth, some say just stick it out in azeroth until 60. we're firmly in the latter camp (especially since the xp changes that went in with patch 2.3) so we kept Z questing in the plaguelands until he hit 60, wrapped up the few quests that we had in progress, dumped the ones we hadn't started yet and headed off to outlands with a new mount and an empty quest log.



so far, outlands has been treating us well. only ganked twice in the time it took us to hit level 61 (would have been 3 times, but the 70 hunter that tried it failed epically and we made it back into honor hold before he could seal the deal. /golfclap), our spell damage has more then doubled just from the first round of gear upgrades (from +100 even to a hair over +200) and we picked up our first dps trinket (we've macro'd it to our Vampiric Touch key so we 'remember' to use it all the time).

remember that little side-trip to outlands we took at level 56 to train master herbalism? it's paid off big-time. by the time we made it into outlands, our herbalism skill was already up to 357. that means we can herb pretty much anything we're likely to come across from now on. this is a much nicer position to be in than we've been in with mining in the past, where we entered outlands with 300 skill and had to pass up things like adamantite veins for several levels because we didn't have the skill, yet. if we level another alt up (gods have mercy!), we'll definitely use this strategy again.

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