RL interferes with blogging

Sorry, RL kept me again from blogging (if anyone read this at all *G*). But now I have some time so get it on!


My wife started playing again because she does not want to loose her character. So she decided to book a month and we got our druid/priest group to 76. We also did a few instances (Drak'Tharon, Violett hold and An'kahet) for the quests and some loot. Despite my wife wanted to heal in first place she decided to do some DPS because she wanted to learn the instances. But my druid is a tank/healer and so we had no problems to find groups fast.

I also searched for some videos on youtube to show her the instances before and give her some hints. An'kahet was a different story because we went in without preperation but it did not matter much. She did fine and her DPS was well over 1.1k! As a lvl74-76 without experience in instances or the knowledge of timers and FCFS! I will never understand how someone manage to do less than 1k at lvl80. *sigh*

Anyhow: Drak'tharon went smooth with me tanking and some random druid healing. As always druids got bored because I tend to pull carefully (not slowly, I love to use my rage instead of wasting it). But we had a warrior and a warlock who would ALWAYS use a different target, even charging or dotting a caster outside my swipe range. To bad they never died but I guess they did not learned their lesson.

Violett hold was a different story. Again a druid was healing (lvl73 and dinged 74 in the instance) but we had a lvl76 DK and a lvl77 (dinged 78) mage as DPS. And those two would ALWAYS start with some kind of AoE before the mob was visible. I had a hard time fighting against their threat and the mage had to iceblock a couple of times. First boss was easy (the core hound) but the next portal bugged and it took a while until we could proceed (at least we could!). Second boss was the void walker but the DK did a great job killing the sentries and he went down fast. My wife was doing 1.4k DPS on the bosses with her random rotation and I was quite impressed. Of course the endboss was no challenge and went down really fast.

After that the group wanted to play another instance and my wife agreed. So we entered An'kahet but the DK hat a disconnect and would not join the whole instance. We did not search for a replacement and finished the instance with four people. Again, my wife did a great job in silencing various casters and switching between AoE (more than 3 foes) or single target mode without any further advice. I did some nice pulling, never adding a second group and the mage lay down some serious DPS, this time with more focus or waiting a few seconds before he would start AoE. He iceblocked once at the second boss and I could hold aggro much better.

The final boss of An'kahet, the herold, was the one who made me a bit nervous. I wiped a few times in the past because no one could kill the tree (healer) and we would die in the insanity phase. Plus my wife is very inexperienced in PvP so I gave her the advice to survive with shield, renew and fear until we could help her.

The first insanity went fast because I used my berserk to kill three images at once and my wife survived without a scratch. The second phase was a bit harder because I had no berserk ready but she managed to kill 2 images before we could help her! I was impressed :-D After this we were 98% percent and did two quests to level up. Now we quest in Sholozar bassin but I am curious when we will hit 77.

Why? Because when we quested yesterday my brother asked me to join a BWL retro raid. I convinced my wife ("We can level tomorrow, today I will show you how I spend my time before I met you") and we went on.

First we had to do some UBRS for the attunement. Then we entered BWL (both time we had some trouble with too many instances) and the first boss bugged a bit because when he died the waves would spawn again. We killed Vael with a few adds (loosing 5 out of 7 due to BA, only my wife and I survived the explosions) and the supression room was quite annoying to her (moving sloooowwwwllllyyy and the knockback from lashlayer was frustrating, too). They pulled the first dragon when I was in the kitchen to get some drink and our healer was sneaking to the first boss because "I want my sword!" (he won the the untamed blade but was outside of the instance when all the rolls had passed). Because of this my wife died, not knowing what to do and the elemental shaman could hardly keep the tank alive.

We went fast through the instance but it was very chaotic. When we arrived at chromaggus our tank went for a smoke. We cleared some trash without him but waited a few minutes doing nothing. Because my brother would not let tank me I declared my wife and I would have some espresso.

When we came back, the fight was ongoing. My brother knew two people were afk but he had pulled regardless. The fight went chaotic with the debuffs getting higher and higher until my wife got transformed into a drakonoid. I never had seen this and somehow we wiped a few moments after this. When we run back, I noticed her still being transformed and confused what has happend so I asked her to quit the game ("Does not work" Me: "ALT- F4".. maybe I was not very kind but I feared this would not work) and now she was really pissed. When she entered the game again, she wrote some sentences in /p (because she does not know that only I could read it in a raid. My bad :-( ) and left the group.

By now she is still angry because she wanted to play a nice game and it ended in chaos with no fun for her. I wonder when (if?) she will play again :-(

To get some icing on the cake I got yelled because I did not explain enough etcetc and ingame my brother bugged me because she had left without a single word (I told him she did in /p because I forgot to tell her to post in /ra but now HE bugged me for not explaining enough ...). So I had some "fun", too and all because I wanted to show my wife a nice old instance .... *crap*

cheers,
chaoskas

Skill > Gear

A few days ago my brother started to play WoW again (his girlfriend has convinced him to play a bit) and decided to level his paladin alt. He made 12 lvls in two or three days and is 68 by now which I think is very imperessive. But the story I wish to share happend when he was 66.

I saw him online and asked to do some heroics. But he wanted to do Utgarde Keep normal with his paladin and so I logged onto my Deathknight (Blood Tank dual spec), ready to be healed by him. His girlfriend joined us on her hunter but it took awful long to find two DPS (in fact I rode from Borean Thundra to Utgarde Keep and found none!). We just wanted to quit the experiment when I found a paladin tank (respec to DPS again *g*) who asked a lvl76 to help us with the missing DPS.

So we entered the instance with a lvl 70 tank and a lvl 66 healer (mostly clad in sholomance or stratholme gear). We made it to the second boss without any wipes or death because my brother had no problem to keep everyone alive. I saw lvl 70 paladins with some kara gear do worse than him!

The second boss forced him to log onto another alt of him because both guys would one-shot him (we killed one and got the other down to 20% until we died). If they would use the normal aggro list we would have killed them easily. At this point, his gear was not enough to let him survive. But his skill was enough to get us to the second boss in first place. And this is something to remember!

It is always skill > gear. But sometimes a minimum of gear is required ... :-)

BTW the scrolls from the last post haven't sold yet. So I am sitting on a ~100g loss when I expected a ~400g win. Stupidity at its finest :-D

Cheers,
chaoskas

Stupidity at work

I did not play a lot last week (again, my wife would disagree) but yesterday I did make a very stupid mistake. Listen to me and don't do it on your own:

When I checked my gold-addon it told me I had about 20k to spend. But with serveral things to buy (gear and mount for my death knight and my rogue) I thought the safety margin was too low and I had to make some money. And I proceeded to make money like I was used to do two month before....

NEVER EVER DO THIS! I made a couple of stoneguard bands (worth ~17g each) and disenchanted them. But I did not check the prices and so the average profit of a single band was 15g! A net loss of 2g per band. How stupid!!

To cut my losses I made a few scrolls from the last stack of dust so I may end up with a minor win but next time I will check this in advance. I promise ... :-)

I also bought a few stacks of saronite ore to prospect them and get some gems. 100 ore and only two scarlet rubys (no other blue gems!). *sigh* At least this will result in 50% profit. You have to be lucky if you are stupid :-)

cheers,
chaoskas