world first!

we were in IF training up (66, woohoo!) and doing some shopping when an urgent call went out in /1 for everyone to come to the military ward. "horde?", we thought? we mounted up and rode over to check it out. the scene we arrived upon was epic. a raid and a half worth of valiant heroes banded together to battle the greatest foe IronForge has ever faced. naturally, we charged right in to do our part. it was a long and hard fight, but in the end the might of the Alliance prevailed and the dreaded Heroic Training Dummy was beaten down. obligatory kill shot below.



world first! you saw it here...

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saved!

a few hours after we submitted our ticket, we were contacted by a GM:



she got us fixed up (plunked Daelan down outside the gates of IF) and then left us with this:



gotta love GMs that role play /grin

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teething woes

we're in the software biz, so naturally we expect a few rough edges on patch day. what we are experiencing now is a bit beyond our expectations, though...







so, here's what happened... we hearthed form IF to Shatt and noticed that no one was around. as in, no players, no NPCs, no critters... nothing. Shatt was a ghost town. there was no general chat channel (though we could still whisper people), we couldn't mount... we could run around and use abilities, though. so, we ran out of shatt thinking that maybe a zone change would reset things. got into terrokar forest and things were still borked. so we logged out and logged back in... and here we are.

we tried taking a step, full expecting to fall endlessly to our death, and instead ended up just running in place... without a way to stop. our next thought was to try the auto-unstuck feature (since our hearth is in cooldown), but that didn't seem to do anything. we are so hosed...

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/facepalm

things not to do while instancing:

- do not show up drunk.

- do not proclaim to the group, loudly and repeatedly, how drunk you are. also, see above.

- do not get out-dps'd by a tank who's 3 levels lower than you (yes mr. 65 warrior, we're looking at you).

- do not turn party chat into a cyber session. if you must cyber, confine it to whispers. bonus points for amusing mis-tells. btw, that "hot" female drae priest is most likely played by a guy...

- do not whirlwind next to the sapped/repentanced mob.

- if the tank tells you not to stand in the green shit, do not stand in the green shit.

- if the tank tells you he's going to corner pull, do not stand in the doorway and swing at every mob that passes you.

- if the pull goes bad, take it like a man and DI the healer. do not bubble and run like the sissy we all know you are.

- if you see a land mine, do not feel compelled to step on it.

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the price of progress

back when we started Daelan we joked about how we should have named him "Moneypit" due to his taking up two crafting professions instead of the usual crafting & gathering profession combo. we didn't realize just how true that was until we got deeper into blacksmithing. now, we've leveled other profs before - tailoring to 375 twice (mmm... frozen shadoweave!), engineering to 375 once, alchemy and enchanting to 300 (back when that was the cap). it's an expensive process, especially if you don't farm your own materials. none of those experiences prepared us for leveling blacksmithing, however.

horrendously expensive doesn't begin to do blacksmithing justice. we assumed that the costs would be similar to leveling engineering since they use most of the same materials. naturally, we were very wrong. the mithril stage wasn't too bad; only needed a couple hundred bars for that. once we got to thorium we hit a wall, though. to get from 265 to 300 blacksmithing you need on the order of 500 thorium bars. five hundred! a stack of 20 thorium bars averages about 26g on our server (ore is even more expensive). so, for just the thorium alone, that's about 650g to get to 300 blacksmithing; we haven't even started using outlands materials, which is where the really expensive part of the leveling process begins. a good chunk of those bars (150ish) goes to buying blacksmithing plans from the thorium brotherhood. this makes it that much harder to recoup some of your costs as you have fewer crafted items at the end of it to show for your investment.

luckily for us, we have a few 70s in our stable who are miners. we went out and did some thorium farming this past sunday. for 4+ hours we did nothing but run a mining circuit around WPL and EPL. we ended up with 320 bars plus a bunch of odds and ends (gems, arcane crystals, tons of dense stone and a handful of greens from mobs that got in the way). we can't imagine what it must have been like for blacksmiths back in the pre-TBC days when all the mobs were the same level as they were. definitely would slow the process down having to fight your way to every thorium vein... anyway, 320 bars for 4+ hours work (and let's be clear: it was work, not play) seemed a bit tedious so we bought the rest of the thorium we needed to get to 300 blacksmithing off the AH.

next up, getting engineering to 300 (we're at 280-something now).

money. pit.

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new (old) content

Daelan reached 55 seasons last night, but it was not a pretty process. we found a quest line in the blast lands that we'd never done before. we'd seen it, but back in the day it was a group quest (parts of it, at least) and since we hardly ever travel with a group we'd never bothered to do it. however, since patch 2.3 a lot of former "group" quests are now solo-able content (elites aren't elite anymore, etc.). so, we decided to give it a whirl this time. besides, it fit in nicely with the 2nd stage of our lvl 50 warrior quest (killing mobs in the same area).

so, we go around merrily killing mobs... and get ganked by a warlock (70; in full merciless glad gear, naturally). ok, fair enough. we were close to the road leading to the dark portal and it was an opportunity gank. meh. we rez and get back to killing and a short while later get ganked again. belf hunter this time. we had two mobs on us when she walked up, watched us work the mobs for a bit and then decided that we weren't dying fast enough or something. in goes the pet, we give the hunter a couple of token whacks and we're back having tea with the spirit healer. wonder if there's a frequent dier program we could sign up for... once again, rez and get back to killing (lots of mobs to kill) and we get a visit from a lvl 63 prot warrior. death by devastate spam. curse you cruel world! at this point we're just happy that the blasted lands is a fairly small zone; makes for shorter corpse runs.

we finally wrapped up that quest line only to learn that there's another one right after it (and one after that, too, according to wowhead). so we accepted, 'cause it was new content for us, and that's where the real fun began. back to where we were killing mobs, only now we had to carve a path right through the middle of them and into a cave they've taken up residence in. hmm, this is going to hurt. we make it about 1/2 way into the cave and then get an unlucky 3-pull (one was hiding behind a rock). we almost get things under control when a patrol catches us in the arse, we run out of health potions and we go down. meh, bad luck. run back, rez and clear the rest of the way into the cave and we find our quest mob and 2 guards. switch over to tanking gear and in we go! ... and down we go. quest mob has a 75% armor pierce ability and we picked up an add. ok, crappy start but we can do this. we run back, find a safe spot to rez and try focusing on the guards first this time instead of our quest mob (most of the damage seemed to come from them last time). our plan didn't quite go down the way we'd hoped and we took another visit to dead-ville. run back, rez and ZOMG RESPAWNS ON TOP OF U... dead. crap. we needed a break (and health potions), so we spirit rez and hop over to IF to train (we'd hit 54 earlier). quick stop in the AH for health potions and to look for gear upgrades (why in the name of all that's unholy is plate so gods-forsaken expensive on our server?! 150g for a green, level 50 chest piece?! ugh.) and we're back on the bird to the blasted lands.

we battle our way back into the cave, slice and dice the patrols (yes, we see you mr. I'm-hiding-behind-a-rock-waiting-to-eat-your-face-when-you-turn-around mob) and get to our quest mob; our decomposing skeletons still on the ground as a reminder of our less-then-stellar earlier attempts. tanking gear... check. defensive stance... check. houston, we are go! we go for the guards first and ignore the boss, use a health potion half way through the 2nd guard and then it's just us and ugly. it got hairy towards the end and we were down to 5% life with 1 minute to go on our health potion cooldown, so we popped our intimidating shout/bandage macro and prayed... "oh crap, he's immune to fear! ... but we're still bandaging ourself... ?!" we got a lucky break; ugly decided to try to repeatedly cast mana burn on us instead of ripping our head off and we got a full bandage in. smacked him around a bit more and VICTORY... and that was step one of that quest line. next few steps have us running off to azshara to go swimming or something. we're not sure if it was worth the aggravation and 1.5g repair bill, but it is new content for us and we got a war story out of it.

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"Daelan died"

we saw that message a lot on sunday. more times than we can count, really. first, there were the gankers in swamp of sorrows... the 70 mage near the green whelpings, then the 70 warrior, then the 70 warlock and finally an entire horde kara raid. then there was another 70 warlock on the way into blasted lands. then there was that 70 priest in stv... now, we expect to take our licks living on a pvp server and all, but great googly moogly! that was a bit much.

between all the gankings and deaths caused by silly mistakes, bad luck and learning the fine art of playing a warrior, we may well have set a new personal record.

in the past we've taken great pride in our ability to avoid death while questing, even when soloing content that many players would find difficult. looking back on it, we realize that a large part of our past longevity was due to taking full advantage of the survival abilities of whatever class we were playing at the time. warriors, though... yeesh. no pets to sacrifice, no haul-yer-ass-outta-dodge abilities, no insta-hide or play-dead skills, no healing abilities (draenei aside) and no real crowd control other than a short fear that requires 1/4 of your rage bar. you pretty much just have to sit there and take it or run like a sissy and pray you don't get dazed before the mobs leash. or at least that's how we've been rolling so far... we're pretty sure we have a lot to learn, though.

in other news, we hit 45 and finally had enough arms talents to pick up mortal strike. wow. we're sure it's due in large part to the big axe were swinging, but mortal strike crits are just... juicy! 700+ on a soft target (poor imp). mmm, mmm, good!

speaking of big axes, we're also about to replace ours. being human (racial bonus to swords and maces) and also having talent points in sword specialization, we've been waiting to get our hands on a good two-handed sword to replace our axe. one more level (47) and the wait is over... we just finished crafting a [Truesilver Champion]. it's not as slow as we'd like, but it's good enough and it allows us to start taking full advantage of our spec and racial bonuses. we also cooked up a [Light Earthforged Blade] for when we have to go sword & board. the only downside to all this sharp-edged, shiny goodness is that our weapon skill with any kind of sword blows right now. we'll be spending a lot of time laying waste to deadmines in our to work on that.

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