Old Habits, New Addons.

It's usually during the in game holidays that I seriously start questioning my own sanity. The meta achievements are rarely difficult, but usually quite time consuming - RNG and travel comes to mind - and I'm pretty sure I vowed to only do the seasonal metas on my main character a while ago. But then I ran UK on my druid alt, and won this. I can't just not complete the rest, now can I? So yeah, I did the whole thing twice - my priest finished first, and my druid pitied her last fool late last night. Needless to say, I'm a bit fed up with the drop rate of Lovely Charms...

The other day MMO Champion posted a review of the addon Altoholic. I've heard about it before, and have considered trying it out, but haven't - until yesterday. I've been worried that it would take up a lot of memory, that it would be buggy, and have a lot of stuff I don't really need, but yeah, now I'm trying it out.

So far it's really good - it saves a lot of logging in and out if I want to see whether a profession cooldown has run out, if a certain character knows a particular pattern, or if that character owns a certain mini pet. While it does take up a bit of memory, it's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be, and I haven't experienced any bugs so far. The only thing I have to complain about, is that I'd like a better explanation of how to use the addon with multiple accounts. I've kind of gotten it to work, but both a more in-depth walkthrough of the whole process, and information on whether any future maintenance is needed, would be much appreciated.

OK, I'm off to get some food, and then I'm signed up for some fun in Ulduar :)

Branching Out... (heehee)

The snow that fell before Christmas is still here, and even more has fallen since. I don't think we've had a winter like this in "my" part of Sweden for atleast twenty years, and while it's very pretty...
...after more than a month of car doors frozen shut, a runny nose, and way too much snow, I want to pick up and move to Hawai'i.

While I haven't been able to go swimming or go out for a run lately, I've had plenty of time to play WoW. I've worked a lot on my priest - gearwise and skillwise - and I've found myself in instances more often than not in the past few weeks. In fact, I've started to feel confident enough in my healing abilities (and finally found the inspiration) to level that healer alt! That's right, my young druid is finally getting some attention!

She happens to be on an account with no level 80 characters, so last night, when she hit 77, was a big one. I've really missed flight form - on her, since she came to Northrend, and on all the non-druid characters I play - and as soon as I'd bought her Cold Weather Flying, I took her out for almost half an hour of just soaring. She doesn't have her epic flying skill yet, but it's definitely in the cards. Partly because I've had her pick up herbalism instead of tailoring (Having someone steal my herbs simply because they fly faster? We can't have that!), and partly because the epic flight form is sooo gorgeous :)

I've spent a bit of gold in the AH during the past week, picking up a few pieces of caster leather. While I'm fairly prepared for the difference in play style between my priest and my druid - reactive vs preventive, looking all saintly vs being a funky tree - I think the difference in gear level might be a bit overwhelming. Not that I've been doing any kind of hard core raiding on my priest, but given a bit of time, you can put together a pretty good outfit these days, simply by running heroics and doing the occasional weekly raid quest. This also means, of course, that gearing up a new level 80 can be a lot smoother than it used to be. Still, though - I'm trying to get my hands on as many iLevel 187-200 pieces as I can, and I'm hoping to get some lucky drops in normal dungeons - I'm definitely not prepared to start doing level 80 dungeons in the level 70-75 quested greens she's wearing now!

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to giving druid healing another try. Now, however, I'm off to go through my in game finances - it's quite possible there'll be some swift flying tonight :)

Happy New Year! (Better Late than Never, Right?)

Like many others, I've been quite absorbed by the holidays lately - there's been (and still is) a lot of snow, and the temperatures have dipped down to -24 Celsius a couple of times, so we're having a "proper" winter this time around! I hope you've had a nice Christmas and a lovely New Year's, and that 2010 will be a good one for all of us!

I've had time to continue enjoying the features of patch 3.3 - I'm still in love with the dungeon finder, in spite of the occasional bad PuG, and every now and then we've grouped up within the guild, and done chain-runs of random heroics. I have yet to make it through Halls of Reflection on heroic - those waves before and between the first two bosses are just incredibly frustrating - but I'm getting closer to completing my Northrend Dungeon Hero achievement, nice loot has come my way, and I've actually managed to get enough emblems of triumph to buy a few pieces of gear.

I've really gotten into the healing thing lately, and I'm getting more confident while doing it - a great feeling - but yesterday had its ups and downs. When I logged on for the evening, around 9pm, a full guild group was already heading off into a random heroic, and as people were busy leveling alts, pvp-ing or doing something else, I signed up for PuG-ing normal Pit of Saron. I'm very interested in replacing my priest's bracers with the ones that drop from Ick, since it would mean I can hold off on buying the really good and really expensinve ones a little while longer.

Anyway. The PuG went well, but after the last boss was down I started thinking (oh yeah), and after checking on Wowhead I found out that while me continuing to heal with the Overlord's Brand on me doesn't hurt any of my fellow party members, it does in fact heal the boss. The thing is, I use the Deadly Boss Mods addon to keep track of special debuffs, who's got mark of death/doom/boogies on them and all that, and DBM just says "Stop DPS" when the brand is on me, so I've drawn the conclusion that me throwing shiny light on the tank isn't included there. Well, I guess this shows that you shouldn't rely blindly on your addons, and that it might be a good idea to look up what certain spells actually do. The problem is, it seems to me that the boss insists on casting Forceful Smash almost immediately after casting the Brand, and that's when I really, really want to heal the tank... I suppose I'll just have to keep that PoM on cooldown, and my fingers crossed.

A little bit later in the evening I got into a guild run for a random heroic, and after picking up our emblems in VH, our lovely guildmaster organised us in a quick run to complete this week's raid quest. I've participated in killing Noth the Plaguebringer once before, but that was a couple of months ago, and at the time I was mostly having trouble keeping myself alive, so last night's encounter was almost a first :D After getting him down, we went upstairs and killed Sapphiron, and getting a fancy achievement at the same time. So, we were on a roll, and continued onward, into Kel'Thuzad's room. OK, I've never even read about this guy, and I was getting really tired, so when the other healer, a significantly more experienced druid, told me I didn't have to heal ****i, that he would handle that, I said "OK :)", and didn't think too much about it. Well, I did think it was a bit weird, a hunter having his own healer - I mean, while explaining the fight no-one had said anything about focus being on anyone except tank and offtank - but who am I to question these things? We didn't down Kel'Thuzad last night, for several reasons: People were there on slightly lesser geared alts, due to being saved on their mains; some people didn't have a range checking addon, so the frost blast-thingie was chained; we were only two healers, and while we're both overgeared for Naxxramas, I'm not familiar with the place, and I still have a lot to learn.

And yeah, I'm quite sure our lovely druid said **i, the name of the main tank, instead of ****i, the name of our chatty hunter, but my tired mind was easily convinced, and the rather similar names got mixed up. I do hope the hunter doesn't think I hate him, and I hope the druid doesn't think I'm amazingly stupid >.<

After having had a rather long break from druiding, the thoughts of branches, feathers and claws are starting to find their way back into the WoW-part of my mind again, and I've started playing my younger night elf druid a bit. Nothing serious - just a few quests here, some seasonal stuff there - but she might end up being my healing alt. I healed on my old druid for a while, but back then it was all about having lots of spellpower and keeping three stacks of lifebloom rolling, and it would be fun and interesting to learn to heal as a druid, after having gotten some experience as a priest. Anyway, I'll see what happens - either way, I'm planning to re-level herbalism on said younger druid, and thereby removing her tailoring skill. I don't like farming, but she's an alchemist, the prices on herbs have gone crazy, and I already have 450 in tailoring on my priest.

OK, I think I'll be off to see a guild officer about getting yet another alt guilded :)

Building A New Main.

I've spent the past few weeks doing a lot of new things, but also a lot of old things. It's been roughly a month since I first participated in a raid on Naxxramas - clearing the Arachnind Quarter - and about two and a half weeks later we cleared the Plague Quarter. Yes, a lot of the others had done the whole thing a zillion times before; no, I didn't survive the dance on Heigan, but ooooh, it was fun, and I learned a lot. And got some nice loot :)

However, when the guild advertised the regular Ulduar raid on the forums, I felt like too much of a scrub to sign up, and since those runs have seemed to fill up quickly in the past, I didn't feel obligated to do so. Then raid night came, they were lacking a healer, and since I was there, and actually had read up on the first few bosses, I got to go to Ulduar! Now, this isn't really news to anyone, but that place is huge!!! And there are shiny things, and a boss who does a bit of stretching while you're fighting trash, and a dragon (who one of the officers kept calling Moroes o.O) who kicked our butt all night long last Friday (the 13th - need I say more? Eh? Eh?). They cleared the bosses up to and including Kologarn on Saturday, though, while I had some real life to catch up on: TV and pizza is not to be underestimated :)

As I said, I've been doing a lot of new things, and the trips to Naxx and Ulduar are just that, along with a few trips into 5-mans, but there have been old things as well. One issue I'm having with the "new main"-thing is the fact that I've done a lot of things on my druid that I haven't (yet) on my priest. Some things I don't really plan to do again - Outland dungeons is one example, even though I wouldn't say no if the opportunity presented itself - some things I simply can't do again (Spirit of Competition and Clockwork Rocket Bot - I'm looking at you!) and then there are things I very much want to do.

The Outland "mount factions" is one major project I'm working on - still only honored with Kurenai, friendly with Sha'tari Skyguard, and only just started working on the Netherwing attunement questline. When looking up Ogri'la on WoWhead I was pleasantly surprised: Apparently you no longer have to go through the pain of killing all those sons of Gruul in order to get to do dailies for Ogri'la. You just fly up there and talk to them. Of course, if you want to become Queen or King of the Ogres, and neutral with all the other ogres in Blade's Edge, you still need to do the questline. I'm mainly interested in speeding up the rep grind to get Del access to more mounts and an awesome little pet, though, so making her Queen of the Ogres can wait a while.

There are a few things I'm planning, that I haven't done before, on any character. The big one is *drumroll* getting the Loremaster achievement! I've probably done most of the quests before, Alliance-side, but not all on the same character. There are also quests I haven't done at all, and with Cataclysm changing everything sometime next year(?), I really want to see things before they're gone.

As I've written earlier in this post, I've been doing a bit of healing. It's a lot of fun, and I have fallen hard for the priest class - my only problem is the game's lack of triple-spec :D Holy is lovely - Circle of Healing makes me all warm and fuzzy inside - and questing as shadow is the breeziest of breezes. But a couple of weeks ago I switched my shadow spec for discipline, and ooooh, do I want to learn it! Shiny, shiny bubbles and lazers? Yes, please! The problem is, I want to keep my holy spec, since it's awesome, and since I've so far only managed to grasp about 1% of it's versatility, and at the same time I still have a lot of the "harder" quests left to do in Northrend (and Outland), so getting rid of the shadow spec doesn't really work either. Hence, my plan is to do the high-level parts of Loremaster first, then trade in my face melting-skills for some bubbly ones.

OK, off to check some auctions, and then I'll try and get to work on that questing-project :)

Yaaarrrrrr!

I'm currently waiting for my tea to cool off a bit, down to a drinkable temperature. Meanwhile, I'm going through my possible "plans" in WoW. (Aren't I always, though? Well, anyway.)

As you probably know, I just joined a guild, and I'm loving it. OK, I'm still "the new one", but that's not too bad - whenever someone I haven't met yet logs on, they welcome me to the guild, and ask me how I like it so far - everyone's really sweet, and I'm starting to get a grip on which alts go with which mains. Also, the other night, I helped a couple of guildies with a heroic Sethekk-run. They're both druids, and after the mount, and since my priest isn't honored with Lower City, I too chose to play a druid. My old nelf girl was briefly taken out of retirement, prowled past trash mobs paw to paw with her newfound druid friends, and finally got the achievement for heroic Sethekk Halls. The mount didn't drop, but we had a good time, and I got to know my guildies a little bit better.

Yesterday I did the Tournament dailies on Bunnyhop - she's currently working on becoming a champion of Stormwind, the last one she needs apart from Argent Crusade rep - and since I haven't really bought anything with her Champion's Seals, I'm considering saving up for some heirloom gear. It'll still be a little while before I dare to venture into a level 80 heroic with any of my characters, and when I do, I'll probably want to spend my first emblems on gear for the toon who looted said emblems. But with Champion's Seals - there are a few nice pieces to get, but they're quite cheap, and seals are easy to come by - and eventually with badgers... Sorry, emblems - I can haz female gnome warrior with super fancy gear?

Yes, I want a tiny, female juggernaut :D

First of all, though, I hope to get my priest to 80, and get some more experience playing her.

After that? Well, only time will tell. I'm sure I'll be able to find another character to level up, if the mood strikes me (which it probably will). ;)

Also: Happy Pirate's Day!

Delayed wall of text.

A bit late, yeah. The plan was to post during the weekend, but then I was all exhausted from my friday (which included a funeral for a very old relative - her death was expected, but funerals are never exactly fun), and so, I'm blogging on a tuesday.

Yesterday I took a longshot, and applied to a guild. I think it's one of the oldest guilds on my server (the server opened in late january 2007, so not ancient, but still), and it's also one of those guilds you only hear positive things about - no drama to speak of, no serious idiots are seen with their guildtag above their heads, and its members come off as nice, smart, levelheaded and fun. They call themselves a "mature, relaxed guild of casual players", and that, along with the fact that one needs to write an application to be considered for membership, adds up to basically what I'm looking for. I got accepted as a trial member within an hour, and my priest was invited last night. In my application I hinted about having alts, and there's a possibility my younger druid will join their ranks in a bit. I just want to see how I fit in first :)

As I was exhausted last night, from studying, and from a bit of workout (my lower back has suffered a bit lately - too much time spent reading, too little exercise - something had to be done), I had to turn down an invite to Drak'Tharon Keep, and instead go to bed, I have yet to "physically" meet any of my new guildies in-game. On the other hand, I got to take part in the guild chat for a couple of hours, and that was fun - everyone seemed really sweet, and I'm looking forward to logging on later this afternoon.

It feels a lot like being the new kid in school, though, or what I imagine that it must feel like - everyone else know each other better, they have odd nick names, and you don't really know how things "work" yet. Yes, I'm horribly nervous, but aiming at laying low, being helpful, and trying to whip up the courage to maybe join in on some mid-70's instance run. It'll probably be fine, I just have to get past that initial period where I don't know anyone. And the nausea :D

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Now, about druids: When Cataclysm was announced, a lot of us were a bit shocked by the news that Kalimdor (and Eastern Kingdoms? I've no clue :S) is going to change a lot, that Darkshore will be flooded and the Barrens will be ripped apart. Now, I have quite a few alliance characters, and almost all of them have quested their way through both Darkshore and Ashenvale - I took my first character through those areas, and I've grown quite attached to them, in spite of the fact that all the running before the recent changes to mounts was mind-numbing.

My experience horde-side is very limited - I think I have a level 26 belf pally on some server, and about 20 lowbie trolls, tauren, undead, orcs and other belves scattered across different servers, so it's basically the same, short experience, over and over again. And now to the druid-part: I finally started my "real" tauren druid, a couple of weeks ago. She's level 23 and feral specced - oddly enough I've never leveled feral before, atleast not all the way - which is partly because of the awesome new kitty look. I've been talking about getting myself a (female) tauren druid for a long time, but with my comfortable network of alts and friends on the alliance side, the horde alts tend to not get the attention they need in order to actually reach some kind of respectable level.

I guess I could have said all this in a lot fewer words, i.e. something like: I've started a tauren druid, and I'm actually leveling her, so that I can see all the stuff on the horde side before Cataclysm rips the world apart, and leaves us with pools of lava. That would've worked too, yeah.

Anyway, I'm really excited about my new guild, and also about having my tauren girl work her way through the Barrens and beyond - it's a bit like starting to play all over again, mostly with the tauren project, but also with the guild - in short, it's all quite a thrill.

What to learn from rejection.

Just added a tag cloud, to the right, below the blogroll. Found the code, and an excellent guide, here. My labels-list got a bit out of hand, and didn't really fill any purpose, so it was removed a while ago. I much prefer the look of the cloud - I like to think it neatly organises the disorganised structure of this blog.

Today hasn't been a very WoW-ish day - logged in before lunch, did some Argent Tournament dailies - since I've mostly been doing laundry, and finally managed to get a hold of the person responsible for a job I've applied for. Apparently there are still people who think checking their inbox is "optional", even when they've published their e-mail adress in the paper, below words along the lines of "send questions about the job/apply for the job here".

"Ooh, I see you mailed me last Tuesday[i.e. more than a week ago]! Yeah, maybe I should read it - I'll get back to ya!"

Not exactly what you'd like to hear, especially when you suspect he's already given the available spots to the first people who happened to stumble into his office. -.-

WoW-wise, I've come to the conclusion that my priest will probably have to get dual-specced, and that shadow - in spite of the boredom that creeps up on me whenever I think about it - will be her secondary spec. At 80 I'd love to have disc as secondary spec - for pvp-utility, and tank healing advantages - but while leveling I think being able to both heal and dps will get me more pugs. And no, no matter how much I tried, I couldn't get into that pug by flaunting my awesome smite-crits :´( But I still have to say this: I'm amazed by how easy it's been so far, leveling with a smite-spec! Holy Fire + smitex3 = dead mob, and zero down-time as a result of points in Spirit Tap and Meditation, and it's still nice for healing! I think you need to be able to spec into the mana-regen and damage/crit increasing talents before it runs smoothly, though.

OK, I've got a cookie, and a glass of water. Time to check up on a couple of my characters, and then I'm off to bed.

I long for Northrend fashion.

A while back I logged on to Delinda, the priest who recently had jewelcrafting power leveled, and I noted how her outfit made her look like a street walker. Well, after the jewelcrafting adventure, I kind of got into leveling her a bit - it's probably surprising to some, and not to others, but leveling as holy dps is a breeze! (I developed a severe shadow-allergy when I leveled her to 50, so that was not an option..) She's now level 60, and has done a few of the earliest quests in Hellfire Peninsula. And this is what she looked like before hearthed and logged out:

"Hi, I'm Delinda - just your average, holy priest. And yeah, I like going out in public, wearing nothing but my underwear."

Hmm. I'm hoping for an upgrade. Soon. Preferably some kind of robe.

Fever + wealthy bank alt = win!

Oooh, it's been a while since I posted. Why that is? Well, it all started with a birthday dinner. Someone in my family turned 60 recently, and I had volunteered to help out with the preparations for said dinner. I didn't do a whole lot of cooking, but I did do quite a bit of cleaning. Anyway, the dinner thing went smoothly. There was, however, someone at this dinner who carried with them an evil, sneaky virus. So yeah, I've had (and am still having) a major cold. A fever of about 38, 4 °C, and all the fancy stuff that comes with it. I'm recovering, though, and today the fever is gone.

Yesterday I was a bit too tired for actual play, ie didn't have the patience required for the jousting dailies up at the Argent Tournament grounds, so instead, I put a crazy plan into work:

I have a lovely priest, a level 51 human, named Delinda. She's been a tailor/enchanter since... Always? Out of habit, almost every mage or priest I start, more often sooner than later, end up with tailoring and enchanting for professions. In Burning Crusade, being and enchanter was a BIG DEAL, due to the fact that you could enchant your own rings - a bonus regardless of the level of your gear, something that most other professions couldn't provide. Jewelcrafting was good in a similar way, but enchanting isn't dependant on sockets. Come WotLK, every crafting profession has a bonus like that (I think?) - leatherworkers have great wrist enchants, scribes have the shoulder enchants, blacksmiths have extra sockets and so on.

So, long story short: I realised I had three characters (one level 72, one 60, and one 51) sporting the tailor/enchanter-combo, and no active jewelcrafter, so I checked some online guides, mailed a whole lot of ore, bars and gems I had on a bank alt to the priest, along with a couple of hundred gold, and at about 11 pm last night she hit 350 in jewelcrafting. I haven't taken her skill beyond that yet, though, since the cost would be way bigger than her budget at the moment.

Now, all I have to do is level her up! Most people would have started in that end, but my bored, feverish mind didn't work like that. Oh well, I've heard tailor/jewelcrafter is nice for priests.