Secrets of Shadowbolting

One of the scariest sights in wow these days is this guy:

Cause you know he’s just gonna wipe the floor with you. We had a decent group but after spending about 3 hours in ZA, people were tired, we were getting sloppy and messing up the initial pull and having people die. So we called it and told Malacrass we’d be back another time.

We then admired Wrass’s hair color. It’s just the perfect shade if you started blonde and had a bad chlorine moment.

We also poked around in Bot for a bit and found that the curse of tounges kind of sucks when you don’t know who the kill order is being sent out against.
/apologize Kadvan for getting him killed cause the healer wasn’t sure who had the kill command against them.

Slightly off topic yet not at the same time…Last night was a happy hour for the office. Somehow karaoke was a part of this fun and one of the guys decided to give me a stage name.

Vuur was known as Tiffany Stardust for the remainder of the night. I was told it was very fitting. In turn I named a certain pally tank Oscar the Grouch which I was told was also fitting.

“Tiffany Stardust and Oscar the grouch present Def Leppard’s Pour Some Sugar on me….”

yeah.

In other news, Vuur’s mini wow-vacation is basically over and she will be back soon to terrorize the masses.

Ok for those blog stalkers out there.

Friday night was a fast kara run. It went well, we killed everything and I was called out for being too nice and polite.

Oh, and I also rolled 2 99′s on loot I didn’t need but was getting for the DE anyway. Instead of trying to explain, I just made a nice pretty picture of the highlights from the evening.

Because a picture can say a thousand words, I figure I’ll shorten my writing and let the pictures speak for themselves.
Below is a quick recap of my day.

Someone was asking around for the +15 spell damage to bracers enchant. I didn’t have it so decided to start farming. Apparently the ogre’s thought I was someone important and decided to fall over and die for me. I really didn’t mind too much except I still did not get the enchant. More farming is needed.

We always joke around about Biscuit’s (or fbcarbon in this case) loaded dice. Well Nixx/Nightly has been close behind in the loaded die rolls as well and this roll for the recipe was just so priceless I doubt they will ever be able to repeat the magic of 3 rolls of 77. We were laughing about this for a while.

After downing gruul and realizing we had 25 geared people, we went running around SSC for a bit. While waiting for a few people to finish the walk of shame from the graveyard, an impromptu dance party broke out on one of the platforms. Everyone was getting into it and it was a great stress relief in the middle of a raid.

Since we could, we went to go see Vashj. A couple overeager mages accidentally pulled her while the rest of us just sat back and laughed. With all my history of crocolisk petting, I figured more water like creatures were best to stay away from. i admired from a distance and was fine with it.

While setting up for Lurker I brought out my Spirit of Summer pet. We then had to go back to the main island for buffs and my poor spirit got stuck. It was very sad. On another note – demon pets can’t swim. I had Betlia out and attempted to go from the small outer island to the inner island. She could not get up out of the water and was being slowly cooked to death so in pity, I sacrificed her. It was better that way.

The new fun of the night was going after Lurker. We had a fishing party and caught some big fish. Unfortunately the roasting and cooking side of the party was not as successful unless you count the raid being roasted. We were having some issues with the adds – dotting sheep, trapping sheep and not the other myrman, rampaging myrmen in the center isle…. it was a little ugly but for a first try, I think we did great getting him to 65%.

One of my friends who knows and completely understand my warcraft addiction sent me a link today. I giggled at part of it but the paragraph about the battlegrounds totally resonated enough that I feel compelled to post it here.

“Just this week I’ve been fighting in battlegrounds — special areas where armies clash and 12-year-olds question each other’s sexuality — over and over just for a chance to win a tiny little flying dragon. This dragon doesn’t fight on my behalf or give me powers or anything. He just follows me around. In real life I try to avoid being tailed by parasitic flying creatures, but in the game I seek it out, even though I hate battlegrounds.

And really, what does my little dragon tell the other people in the game? The same thing it tells you — I spent too much time playing Warcraft. “

Read the whole article here

Oh yeah. That’s me. An addict. Though in all fairness, I did get my little dragon guy after only 1 battleground. I did not spend time grinding just for the pet.

Seriously. Why me?

The thing that made this even more amusing is posting about this in guild chat and having one of the other officer’s who knows me too well asking if it was a Draenai character acting like he was 12…. inside joke but for those in the know, it makes perfect sense and is quite hilarious. I was just standing in stormwind with my 2 toons trying to play the auction house when this happens.

In other news, flayer’s dying in semi circles make awesome forts. When i saw how they died, all I could think of was SNOWBALL fight! Yes flayers may be a little squishy, but they were the perfect size for defending your territory.

Can you imagine the botantica all snow covered? Those flayers would be a perfect base for the most amazing snow fort. Add that to the glowing background around you and super cool.

And yes, the beach boys are awesome, they sing very well and this is a completely true statement. Think of it as giving a new 70 a netherwing drake. It just wouldn’t be pretty. They’d go out and go zipping around flying faster than advisable and crashing into trees and mountains.
It’s just not a good idea.

So I have seen a few of these posts about the WoW Character Auditor and I figured I’d go check it out. I tried doing a guild inventory but it only selects the first 40 it sees so I got a little pickier and selected our top raiding team. Once it came out it was mush. People were all over the place and it was tough to see. I took out a few people in the second screen shot to make it a little more visible and then broke it down by classes.

Now, a few things to note. This goes off armory stats – whatever you logged out in is what it just grabbed.
I don’t quite agree with everything it says for gear specifics and changes, but in general, it seems to be ok.

I DO however like the fact that it seems to think the majority of our raiders are very well geared for MH/BT.

–more edits will be coming on my comments on each section — to be finished later, it’s just eye candy for now.

The first attempt at showing how the guild in general looks for our top raiders. Did not work out nearly as nicely as planned because so many people have similar gear and it evaluates people in order. The people who were listed first in the group are at the bottom while those who were listed later appear on top.

I tried to take out a few people who were listed on top for clarity’s sake so you could see a few more of the people underneath those that were at about the same level. While i’m happy we have so many, I wish we could spread it out just a little more.

Mages
Another one of our popular classes, having Vallah at the head of the pack again does not surprise me.
Most of the mages are all pretty close. The placement of biscuit gear wise vs performance wise is a little surprising but I am wondering if this is spec related. I didn’t really dig into all the details as to how they were rated but this could prove entertaining to look at.

Hunters – Our most popular class, the hunters are all pretty well geared. Navek and Von lead the group as expected and while Elex just respecced survival, I think that has something to do with his placement in the list. Wrass, Elex, Rafter and Krak are all real close with Erwinde lagging a little behind. Judging by what I know of the raiders, this does not surprise me at all.

Rogues/Lock/Warriors (oh how we’re hurting)
This again does not surprise me given raiding history and our lack of competition for mains in these classes. Right about what I would expect. I’d like to be able to get more competition in these classes so people can see how they rank a little better. Maybe i’ll redo the audit with some of the alts included.

Pallys and druids. This is pretty much the list. I tried adding Ros into the list but for some reason she’s coming up as a warrior tank….weird. will look into that

Priests – I was pleasantly surprised at our priests. In fact gear on a couple of them wa not exactly where I had imagined, but it was interesting to see a gear check.

One thing that I will make a point to mention is that gear does not make a character. It definitely helps, but the raiding mentality and mind set is definitely an unmeasurable trait by gear alone.

It’s very interesting to see what it thinks for your class and character though. From gem stats to enchants to gear choices for your build…. go play!

Barney is a dinosaur from our imagination
And when he’s tall
he’s what we call a dinosaur sensation…

/cough. I mean… I guess he’s more a dragon than a dinosaur but they look similar right?

Anyway, we go to pug a mag run the other day with a couple of other guilds. Vuur the recruiting queen goes to town and brings 3/4 of the raid from both Blizzard if Oz and Raiders Reborn. We work out assignments, give it a go. WIPE!
expected, it’s a pug. first time is never perfect. We try again, change some things up, rebuff and go.

WIPE!

Happens. Morale is still high, we’re running with 5 healers and we’re trying. We get to the cave in section – mostly everyone survives but we lose a key hunter clicker….
WIPE!

couple more tries, it’s just not happening and we call it to try again next week.

However, for a pug, there were a lot of really geared people who knew what they were doing. We coordinated, we executed and we’ll definitely get it next week. Props to Doomstay for setting that up.

And more props to a certain tank for taking all the guild invites he received as praise of a job well done and sticking it out with us slackers. We’re really not all that bad. Promise.

While The kara run the other day was not spectacular, I would like to point out the fact we had maiden down in under 2 minutes. This is partly due to awesome tankage, awesome heals and bringing the dps.
woot. Considering we had 3 alts on this run (OT, heals and dps) I was happy.

Can’t say much about the rest of that run though, so I won’t.

I always though the cooking and fishing professions were a waste of time. I never had any interest in them – they took too long and I didn’t see the benefit of them….until I hit level 70 and started raiding. All of a sudden, blackened basilisk was my new favorite food. Occasionally I could go for a Poached Bluefish or Crunchy Serpent to mix things up.

I’d been quite content with my level 80 cooking for a while until I realize that I’m running low on basilisk and there’s an upcoming raid. I run to the AH to find out THERE IS NO MORE BASILISK for sale! There’s also no bluefish, no serpent, no soup. This is very traumatic as I only have 4 basilisk bites left and this is so not enough. Luckily a few people in the raid had some extras so I was able to sneak on by, but the prices in the AH have been awful. So I decided to power level cooking.

With WowWiki’s cooking page open on the side, I park my butt in stormwind and look up recipe’s that I have. Nothing good so I visit the cooking trainer and he has a few that I can use. Back to the AH to find meat….
The best way to power level cooking is really quite simple. Know what level is the next trainable level (75, 150, 225, 300, 375). Obviously the tougher recipes you have to make less of for the experience and gaining a level. If you are level 80 and you need to get to 150, a 75 recipe level will hold you over until about 125 in which you can pick up a new 125 recipe to be orange or yellow to get you to 150.
But Vuur, what recipe do I get???

Simple. You go to the Professions – cooking section of the AH and sort by level. You find where your cooking skill is at (yeah I started at the equivalent of a level 20 toon….) and you look at the recipe’s available. Before buying up everything at that level, search for the reagents on the AH so you know if you can even make them or if you have to farm them. I was able to successfully work my way up to 225 with this strategy in mind. After cooking up the lower level items, I’d throw them back in the AH to recover the cost of some of the reagents. They usually sold pretty quickly.

At 225 – artesian skill, you have to go out to gadgetzan to get a quest. BEFORE leaving – pick up your [Giant Egg]s x12, [Zesty Clam Meat] x10 and [Alterac Swiss] x20 in anticipation of this quest. I almost panicked about the Swiss not being in the AH until I remembered Trias’s Cheese shop in stormwind. Of course they sell cheese! Including alterac swiss (meanwhile I’m kicking myself for throwing out half these cooking supplies in the past week after running a bunch of lower level instances with people earlier).

I ended up getting stuck at 225 for a while because there was NO [Tender Wolf Meat] in the AH. Back to Tanaris I flew to farm Blisterpaw Wolves for the drop. I put the blueberry on aggressive and one shotted wolves for a while until I had manged to gather up 40 pieces of wolf meat. The rest of the leveling went fairly painless and someone was nice enough to have all the cooking books in the AH as well as my Blackened Basilisk recipe. I’m still looking for skullfish soup, but 2 hours, 200g and I’m a new chef!

After this, it was quite necessary to sell stuff in the AH and do a couple dailies to get money back. Dailies are fun to grind with a pally. He’s either grabbing everything and having me AOE them down or watching me and my demon run around and 2 shot everything and tossing a heal or 2 on my demon and I. Very nice. I’m still wanting my own dragonhawk mount. The drake rocks but could you imagine flying this guy around the outlands? You’d totally be the coolest kid on the block.