Whee
I don't have a lot of opinions this week, most likely because I'm exhausted but oh well! The guild's raiding is in full swing, downing 5 bosses last week, hopefully adding a 6th this week. I got a nice pair of shoulders, and enough points to buy my tier legs, so everything is going pretty well. I like most of the encounter designs (minus some favor to ranged, and some really shitty threat mechanics that one-shot me a lot but are avoidable now that I know about them :P).

The instances are pretty and I'd show you except I forgot to upload my screenshots again. Doesn't that sound like me? So I'll do that later tonight.

The other thigns
My DK finally got 525 enchanting, and we have a massive amount of shards (if no other mats because someone used them to level enchanting), so I should now be able to create all the enchantments we need for our gear (yay!). Next I probably need to level my paladin to 85 to gather green drops, as well as continue her herbalism to level my druids alchemy. After that it's probably focusing on my DKs blacksmithing for cheap belt buckles, and the shaman's leatherworking for leg enchants (I nearly screamed when I saw epic leg enchants going for 1000g... I guess it has a rare ingredient?).

Nuu kitty nuuu
Lots of druid nerfs in the patch notes for 4.0.6, but most of it I feel pretty neutral about. The bleed changes were actually a slight (probably unnoticeable) buff, most of the big theorycrafters think that the bear nerfs will bring our threat in line with prot warriors so that's reasonable, and I don't really voluntarily pvp enough that I'll probably see a big change with the shapeshifting gutting. That loss of fear immunity on beserk is going to suck a bit in SKF tho >:|

But like I said, not a whole lot of opinions to be had!

Hamigad, it's the new year. I'm sort of a big bag of failure because I didn't feel like updating during my vacation at all.

I had a motherboard replacement, which in turn required a hard drive upgrade. Which I did without grabbing files from the old one. It's a nice bit of 'oops' that I'll try to fix tonight, but essentially boils down to that I am aware I'm missing several weeks of screenshots, and they do exist, but I can't really easily get to them quite yet.

Oh right! Raiding!
Last night was Eventually's real first go at raiding, and actually it was pretty damn fun. We did more than anyone was expecting (I was astonished we had enough healers!), and while it wasn't wipeless, Omnotron and Magmaw both went down. We only had a small bit of time left so we wandered over to Maloriak (...who I swear looks like a really bad Alexstraza cosplayer), and got him to around 35% on our best go. Not too shabby, hope to see him down on Sunday, and then on ward and upward!

WTF Forums
I went to post up progression on the realm thread (it's sort of my thing) and discovered that the person who had taken it over last month had disappeared! So I made HMMMMM noises and decided to make my own. We'll see if it takes.

The new Blizzard forums are sort of annoying for this task, and I'm wondering if it's on purpose. A realm progression thread, especially one as UNNECESSARILY SPRAWLING as Spirestone's (I tried to keep something close to our old format) takes up several posts. So what I did was get the first one ordered as I wanted, post, and then claim the next three posts quickly so I can go back and edit them.

The thing is, large edits seem to intentionally throw back an 'Internal Server Error: 500'. I can make small edits, like adding an underline tag, but after a whlie the server simply refuses to accept large edits adding anything (deleting is fine), like the final of the four posts which was the old 'rules' for eligibility. Maybe I'm placing malice where ignorance is really the case, but it's damned annoying.

What I have now does at least fulfill the job better than the old thread, so fine, I guess I'll just live with it. I just wish I could format it prettier :/

And the rest
Right now most focus is on my druid. Her tanking and cat sets are actually mostly finished, with the cat set needing a few more points for new pants, and the bear set completly devoid of updated trinkets. Overall pretty nice.

I'm not sure what I think of current gearing spreadsheets, as both Mew and Rawr seem like they're not quite finished (though, I'm not sure Mew ever has the intention of suggesting gear like Toskk did). Overall choices seem a bit tight in any case, so for the moment it doesn't matter that much.

My DK is 85 and casually poking at normal instances when I have the energy for it. Tanking as blood feels very simple, though I've found many annoying mobs in instances that are immune to death grip. A guildie hit 85 on their prot warrior shortly after me, and wanted to tank instances for practice. So I found myself in a set of greens, no glyphs, speccing into unholy and reading an EJ page on their dps rotation that I still don't really understand, and pulling some ridiculous DPS despite it all (what I'm saying is either my feral needs a buff or unholy is INCREDIBLY OP jesus).

My paladin is sitting at 82 mainly because my vacation is over so I don't really have time to maintain a third character. I really do need to finish leveling her though, so I have a maxed herbalist to support my druid's alchemy. Poot.

Each character has gotten a thorough bag and bank cleaning as I prepare to take them out into Hyjal, and it's amazing how much crap I've kept over the last two years on each of them. So much trash!

Yawnnnn

Through everything I've still been collecting cheap Darkmoon cards from the AH and building decks. Keeping in mind that I'm collecting for two people, I haven't gotten very far, but at the moment am sitting on 16 completed decks and several very close to completed decks. We also have a nice stockpile of thorium widgets from my farming for arcanite crystals two months ago, so if I'm smart we'll sometime remember to turn them in and free up guild bank space.

Screenshots

Catakizzums!

Oh boy it's Friday and the Cataclysm has come.

Isn't it great?

So, I haven't gotten to play crazy amount this week - December is just a really busy time for me (the 8th was my birfday :3). Right now I'm sitting very close to dinging 83, hopefully will be somewhere in 84 by the end of the weekend, we'll see. No huge rush and probably doing it all ass-backwards anyway!

My boyfriend and I finished Hyjal last night and moved into Vasj'ir, which means we're bigger than everyone else there and can shove them around. Hyjal was a very nice zone with a cool story, I'm not sure how I feel about Vasj'ir. It's neat, but there's so much color and clutter everywhere that I have a hard time concentrating :P

My long lost love

This post is so late in the day because I spent my free time making a loot list! OMG. I haven't had one of those since.... well T9's been wiped from my memory so maybe that's why I haven't had one in a while.

A loot list is a wunnerful thing. It's like having Christmas everyday - you know exactly what you want and you wrote it out and the heroics are never going to give it to you. Constant anticipation and constant disappointment.

All kidding aside, I like the loot list because it allows me to determine beforehand, using stat weights found on the appropriate blogs or elitist jerks and plugged into wowhead, whether or not something is an upgrade. It's time consuming but it keeps you from holding up the group or taking something you don't need later on.

It doesn't have to be a pretty list, just something you understand, I put mine in a notepad file. I also keep little files of my achievements, as well as one that tracked raid attendance for my 10 man while we were working on 'Glory of Whatever'. I love my little notepad files.

I went through and ranked all the pieces for each of my specs (being an OT is fun like that - TWICE the disappointment for the price of one!!!!), and have a section that separates everything by zone so I know exactly what I'm looking for in each one. I have no idea why I'm so excited about it, but I am.

(Picture Unrelated)

I wasn't expecting to be able to play my main this week, so I had started a worgen druid, who's only level 11 at the moment. She isn't hideous but she is hillarious. I'm torn between being disappointed with the poor level of work that went into her (one face type with the constant snarling that bear druids have hated forever, one hair color...), but I find the whole thing so goddamned funny that it's hard to be angry.

The best problem with her so far has been /lol has produced a sound I suspect is supposed to be /chicken.

Overall the quest design has been nice, and the zones have been put together well - though Gilneas does have you do a lot of running. Eep.

As an aside, I'm undecided how I feel about starting the comic thing again. What I did for this one took a lot less time than the old version, but it's still more intense than just the weekly doodle. Also it's hard to be funny enough to want to draw it.

We'll see I suppose.


Screenshots of the weeeeek

Still going doublebubble on these. I actually took close to 100 this week, had a rough time narrowing it down to just 14 :O

Hmm... #321 seems to be missing. I guess I'll find it later tonight :D

Picture Unrelated

My first coherent thought about 4.0.1 was that it had better be at least as fun as Spore, Command and Conquer 3, and all my old psd files combined, because it had to occupy the space formerly taken by them (my first incoherent thought read something closer to 'amigadamigadamigad').

This is sort of like asking a trip to Coldstone Creamery to be at least as fun as a root canal, but I wasn't in a great mood after about 9 hours of trying to convince my laptop to download the patch.

Particular appreciation must be had for Command and Conquer, which fought for its right to live right to the bloody end - crashing Control Panel every time I told it to uninstall, and then, when I decided to do things 'the old fashioned way', screaming that the Recycle Bin was several sizes too small for its hips.

I finally got in around 10PST, in time to watch the server toss everyone out again. God bless patch day!


Feral Droods

So far I've spent most of my time focused on pulling my main back into working order. All the alts are mostly getting ignored until next week, when the Hallow's End event starts, but until people simply stop showing up, my guild is keeping its regular raid schedule.

Our first raid night of the week was last night, which is a night the usual OT can't make. So I spent the majority of the night as a bear. 4.0.1 Bear feels a whole lot like 3.3.5 prot warrior. It's not necessarily hard, but it is more interesting than spamming two buttons for trash. Overall I liked the rotation, and was very pleased with 'Vengeance', the attack power buff given to tanks that scales with raid size. It solved a lot of the annoying threat capping problems.

I'm not really a theorycrafter, I just pull together information from all over. Some good resources to be had for kittybears:

Mew - Kitty simulator - Mew is a direct desendent of Toskk, maintained by the most wonderful Yawning. It's a bit more picky than Toskk was, but this is supposed to lead to more accurate data. I'm hoping it will eventually have the gear suggestion functionality that Toskk did.

BadKitty2.0 - Kitty timer - Finally appeared this morning! BadKitty is an absolute must for kitty druids. It takes all your significant data - combo points, energy, debuffs, buffs, cooldowns, procs, and places it in one spot, instead of all over the screen. The author is starting fresh, so this is essentially a new mod with the old goal. It is in alpha, which has cut down on some functionality and features - but I promise you having it will be better than not.

Kitty DPS FAQ - Again by Yawning. Updated daily as minipatches work out balance issues.

ThinkTank - ThinkTank is a great pooling of information for both your tank things and your dps things. In particular you may be interested in:
Bear FAQ, Glyph discussion, and Spec suggestions.

Feral DPS concerns - Official forum thread headed by Yawning, based on the wonderful number crunching he does. Very civil discussion about concerns with feral numbers looking forward.


THIS IS INSANE

It turns out to take roughly 20 minutes to completely destroy your rep with goblins. After that it takes about 4 hours to get honored with Bloodsail Buccaneers. Luckily, the statue that rests out in the middle of the bay allows you a brief respite to pretend you're Charlton Heston. Drop to your knees, inspect your reputation panel, and scream DAMN YOU. YOU BLEW IT UP. YOU BLEW IT ALL TO HELL.

If you're of the generation conceived, born, and raised in a Hot Topic, you may prefer to sing the entirety of 'Poor Jack'.

If you, too, want to make sure you can never fly out of Gadgetzan again, I highly suggest this very detailed guide by Fannin.

The next step after Bloodsail was wandering over to Dire Maul, as it would cover both Shen'dralar and goblins at the same time. What this lead me to discover is 'insane' doesn't really quite describe how I feel. 'Insanely Annoyed' is somewhat more accurate. Doing this with a partner (which I prefer, as the two of us seem to keep each other entertained instead of depressed), means roughly 400 runs of the instance for goblin rep, and 164 librams (of which there are three types that drop.... and are unique... and don't stack in a guild bank >:|). We worked at it for a few hours before we grew tired of the nonsense. It left me with about one bar through hated with goblins taken care of, and 12 librams that required a lot of running :|

Somehow, knowing that this portion of the Feat is the worst and it all gets better after this does not make me feel better about it. AT ALL.

Loremaster

It required a lot of flying in circles. Well. No. That's not true. It ended up in a lot of flying in circles because I can't follow simple directions or devise strategies. I'm one of those people who wastes time by doing one quest, turning it in, then going back and doing the other quest that was right next to it. I get better when it comes to quests I've done before, but as Loremaster implies I'm doing it because I didn't do them before... I was really all over the place.

I don't really have any 'techniques' to share because I'm inept, but the process also becomes very intuitive once Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms are out of the way. The game clearly tells you what you need to complete, and once you enable low level quest tracking, it shows you where. If you're a few quests short, WowHead's comments section on each achievement always has someone who suggests 'Look and make sure you did X'.

But, in any case, I finished out Outland. What remains is a handful of quests in Northrend, which I think could be done in an evening. We'll see.


Long, Strange Trip

I've been working harder on this than Insane. Fishing is actually not that bad a hobby, as it's not very demanding. Streaming the latest episode of Caprica in the background helps it, a lot.

For the 10 man ICC hardmode group I ran (until this week when such things would have hindered the 25 man raid a bit >>), I brought fish feasts, figuring it was the best way to ensure that people would stuff buff food in their faces (had I been rich, in retrospect, I'd probably have brought flasks for everyone too :P). I would fish in Wintergrasp while 25 man raids were being built, as it was a decent place to pick up all the fish I needed.

This teaches you, very quickly, to rotate your camera view to watch behind you, rather in front of you. No one is going to land in the water on your fishing bobber, swim to you, and attack you. Many people are very happy to land behind you in hopes of giving you a firm ass kicking.

This is a habit I brought with me as I fished out in the old world. It wasn't really a requirement, and last night was really annoying - anytime the earth quaked I got a strobe effect as the camera bounced above and below the water line.

What this resulted in was, as my death knight was fishing out in Arathi, a wee 36 blood elf snuck behind me across very difficult terrain to get to the Keep. I didn't do anything about it. I was very perplexed as I watched him clamber over rocks, at first thinking he was trying to sneak up on me, but he made no hostile moves. Then I faced my camera forward and realized he was trying to avoid my line of sight on the more obvious route of the road. Not quite as clever as he thought it was, but I gave him points for effort and let him go on his way.

More seriously, I've pushed 3 characters to 325 cooking skill since I started the project two weeks ago. The longest stretch of it really is between 225 and 300, which is to be expected. The guide I'm using has me doing this out in the middle of the Bay of Storms in Azshara, however, so I'm enjoying my last few times in the zone before it's handed over to the Horde. My fourth character is right at 225 and ready to spend her hour or so in Azshara, but she's also my AH alt so I have to time it so I don't leave her with full bags in the middle of no where :P

It takes roughly 950 successful casts to gain enough skill to support leveling to 325 cooking. If you're stupid your first time doing it like me, you'll fish in the wrong spot for half an hour and get your 1000 fish achievement.

Not Quite a Tearful Goodbye

Remember that today, Blizzard finally officially announced that Zul'Gurub's rare drop Tiger and Raptor mounts, as well as Raptor pet, are being removed. This has been suspected for some time now but is finally official.

If you're interested at all, you're probably already farming the mounts on lockout. Best of luck to you. If you're interested in the pet, WowHead says it's a 1% drop rate, and I guess I believe it. My farming partner and I smacked all the raptors up on three resets while going in for mounts, and had two hatchlings drop. Be advised that ZG is an old instance with oooooold trash mechanics. The trash will respawn even with Bloodlord defeated. You can farm the hatchling even if you've already cleared it.

You might also consider that, since ZG is changing, you may not be able to gain rep with the corresponding faction anymore. Perhaps save your bijous and try to finish that off, in case it becomes a feat of strength. If not, hey, you're a rep close to exalted!

WHALPS

Since we're here! Also keep in mind that certain pets are somewhat unaccounted for.

You're encouraged to get your Emerald, Crimson, and Azure whelps before the Cataclysm as well. The mobs that dropped them previously are missing on the beta.




Screenshots of the week