Bael'Gar.

For about a week now I've been playing my night elf priest pretty exclusively. She was sitting at level 30 for months, but the new patch and the ability to get a mount at 30 was motivation. I've been trying the constant "instancing" approach and it's going good...mostly. (More on that later.) So Tack has run me through an instance or two when I couldn't find a group and on Saturday it was time to return the favor.

He is working on a new character named "Stryder" which is a human warlock lvl 50. So I decided to run him through the Blackrock Depths with Cerwyn. We rolled through most of it really well.

It is an extensive instance though. I can't believe the quantity of content. After like 3 hours we had only made it through about 1/3 of the place. Lord Incendius and "the Vault" were the highlights for me. I've never went as deep as we did and I really felt that thrill of seeing "deep" content that I usually don't get to.

Towards the end we sort of got separated and decided it was time to go shopping IRL anyways. Since I'm a 70 I was able to sneak past all of the mobs and get a peak at Bael'Gar (pictured). This shot was taken about .2 before I attacked...and killed him. Unfortunately he spawned some little minions and they were the death of me. Good times.

OMFG! I'm back.

Hey.

/wave

I'm trying to compose the millions of events that have happened in the last few months.

Pvpness...inch by inch.

Old draft I never posted from April. ---->

I'll start at the beginning. I've been spending a lot of time in Nagrand farming Thick Clefthoof leather, because it's one of the easier ways for me to earn money for an epic flying mount. Somehow this evolved into a rep grind for gear with Aldor and the Consortium, which somehow lead me to try "take Halaa" to hand in some dust...or something. Anyways, Tack and I had a really exilarating evening killing some horde. And it was strange to be so thrilled to earn honor. Like, "Omg, I've got like 46 honor...oh wait now it's 63." (These specific numbers are purely fabricated by me...but they are in the general range.)

And then it occurred to us that we could get much larger amounts of honor much faster by running battlegrounds. So for a couple of weeks we've been running battlegrounds.

Speaking of links.

I've been meaning to mention this for ages. A couple months ago when I was writing more frequently this chick named "Mania" left some comments on my blog. Huntard moment on my part. It's Mania! The goddess of Azerothian pets.

To put it in perspective. Long before I'd heard the name BR...what's it again?'s name I knew all about Petopia. I really don't think hunters could survive without it. Literally every pet I've had has been selected off of her site first. (Well, except Thor...but that was destiny.)

Unbelievable. I thought she'd be waaay to busy making appearances and signing book deals to stop by such a small blog as mine. So I'm thrilled that she's been here and hopefully will stop by again.

Trouble's a brewin'.

Has anyone heard the news? Some sort of sneaky abomination terrorizing the locals up in Tirisfal Glades. Burning villages and plundering for fun. /whisper Don't worry it's really just me. ;) /stop whisper.

So I started this new blood elf rogue. (The picture is totally inaccurate.) I seriously haven't had this much fun since I started Cerwyn. Rogues are very different than other classes. There are all of these cool things like lock picking and poisons that I haven't even experienced yet, but I'm just so excited I can hardly stand it.

So I've been searching for rogue blogs, because I basically have no clue what I'm doing. (I just know it's fun.) So I searched BRK's recommendations and found "A View from Behind". The site is really great and I've already picked up tons of information. So he's linked in my sidebar now. I also linked "Toxification", because he's got a pretty solid sense of humor...and as a bonus he knows what he's talking about.

Those darn PUGs.

So last Friday night I ran my first instance since turning 70. Tack came with and we had to piece together a group since we are still not in a “real” guild. So we picked up a tank, a healer, and another hunter. We ran Shadow Labs. I think it was Shadow Labs…is that where you start getting the Karazan key fragments? Ah, anyways. It was bad. Like really, really bad. So our tank couldn’t keep agro on anything and our healer couldn’t heal much and the hunter traps just could hold.

The only bright side was that I was out DPSing everyone by at least 200. Which felt really good for about a minute. Since our tank was having issues it meant that the priest and I were top on the stomping list. So really it just meant I was dieing first and most frequently.

So this brings me to my questions about the dynamics of a group. In my mind, a group theoretically should function as follows: the tank holds the mobs, the healer heals the tank, and the dps burns down the mobs. If there are multiple mobs the group should use crowd control to cut down the number of mobs that the tank needs to deal with.

In our group, the tank was taking on one mob at a time leaving all the others (sometimes 3 or 4) to be trapped or tanked by the pets. Of course this didn’t work and we wiped multiple times before everyone just flat out quit. ( = No key fragment for me.)

So a tank should be able to take on more than one mob at a time right? Or can’t they? I’ve never done these high-end instances before and I’d like to get some feedback before I jump to conclusions.

In the tanks defense, I do believe that he was a nice person and felt really terrible that he wasn’t doing well. I think he was making an effort and for whatever reason just couldn’t get it to work. It turns out that the 3 people we picked up were all in the same guild and the other two were talking trash about him in guild chat (super uncool), which he found out about and felt terrible and it was all very sad.

If anyone could share some experiences that would be awesome.

Pet Skills MIA.

Sometimes I fear that I don’t post any useful information on this blog. So for the sake of being useful here we go. (This isn’t really aimed at the level 70 expert hunters as much as the newbs and huntards.)

A long time ago…at least 20 levels ago. I was trying some different combinations of moves and decided to throw some commands off of my pet’s action bar. Claw and growl to be specific. I can’t remember, but I think the purpose was to deactivate them. Well, I’m sure most of you know that this doesn’t work. They are still active, you just can’t see them. So then at some point I wanted them back on the bar so that I could turn them off and on properly. So I attempted to open my Spellbook > then my Beast Training book > then grab the appropriate icon and drop it back onto the pet action bar. Didn’t work. Wtf? So since this method made sense…the program must be broken. ;)

Well, believe it or not the program was not broken and the correct way to fix this is to open the Spellbook and there will be two tabs at the bottom of the window. One for you and one for your pet. So select the pet tab and from here you will be able to select your pet skills and drag them back onto the bar.

I felt like sharing this knowledge because last weekend I was in a group speaking with another hunter. This particular hunter is a mix of Marksmanship and Survivalist. It was interesting because he happened to have a cat identical to Caedmon. Cool, right? Then he claims that he’s going to get rid of it, though. It’s been “bugging out”. In fact, this will be the 6^th pet he’s dismissed recently. /furrow brow. That’s weird. So after further investigation I discover that some of the actions on his pet bar have “disappeared” and he can’t get them to show up again. So he keeps replacing pets trying to get them back. Now in all fairness, perhaps there is some sort of pet-action-bar-wrecking bug that I don’t know about. But it’s likely that he’s just been running around Azeroth wasting time and food, taming then releasing perfectly good pets, because he doesn’t know about this little tab. So anyways. I did try to quickly explain the solution to him before we got busy killing foes. Ah, and now it’s time to write about my newest adventure in PUGism.

The big boom.

70.

Yep that's right. Me. 70. Finally. 70.

Did I mention 70 and me?

Anyways, I had great aspirations to grab a screen shot of the big moment. I even practiced and got my technique down to a science. Send in the pet > start firing > alt Z > pivot camera > ready. When I grabbed the shot it had all the big flashing lights....but in reality I got the frame after the big flashing lights. I was pissed for a minute and then I remember I'm 70. :)

And then there's my new traveling buddy.

So what now? Funding for an Epic Flying? Instances? Building rep? Suggestions?

Case of the Fridays.

So….on the last post when I said, “To be continued…later this afternoon”, I meant in a month. So in that case I’m early. :) Seriously, sorry for the delay.

Too many stories to tell. Ok, so Catja came out of retirement and we had some short lived fun. First, I wasted some time earning Darnassus Reputation for my Saber mount. To many people this may have seemed foolish, but for me…a girl…this particular girl...it was essential and I have no regrets.

Ummm…what else? We respeced frost and hit 50. I like frost a lot. I think it’s exactly what I expected. Less dps, more survivability. I had enough talent points to get “Ice Barrier”. This is key. Basically I kept it on at all times and it’s much easier to take on 1, 2, or even 3 mobs at a time. And the mana conservation is great. However, for whatever reason I just can’t stick with that character. So she’s back in “storage”.

And then the other alts…

Ellektra – Level 13 human warlock.

DorisMoloris – Level 10 gnome warrior.

Eirwyn – Level 21 blood elf warlock.

Antigoni – Level 13 blood elf hunter. (yay hunters!)

Kaielyn – Level 8 night elf hunter. (yay more hunters!)

Ummm…I know there’s more.

Malifecent – Level 6 undead rogue.

/* Edit - Her name is not Malifecent...it's Desdemona. Apparently I haven't played her enough to remember her name. :) */

And then the diamond in the rough….

Cataryna – Level 25 night elf priest.

She is actually the second character I ever created. I think the priest class was hard for me to play back then because I didn’t understand how to play Wow in general. Now that I understand some of the strategies and whatnot this character has jumped almost to the top of my favorites list, second to Cerwyn of course.

I’m specing her Shadow for right now.

Is it time to go home yet? I wish you all a happy Wow playing weekend. :)