A Hunter's Story

“Shuffle to the left, and shuffle to the right, and hide!” – InspiredOgre.

Yeah, totally cool. Finally gots one! Not counting the massive amounts of fish and things fished up prior to achievements & stats, my 9,488th fishing lewt item was a Sea Turtle!!!! Zomg!!! Can’t believe it! So long I’ve been just fishing in the hours I wait for LFR to pick up a group… I dunno what to do during that time anymore! Wowzer! So cool! Thus, I took a bunch of pics, lol. Here ya go:

Wow. Can’t believe it’s Friday already. Been a crazy week, but since I say that pretty much every week, maybe I should say it was a normal week… Only difference was that I held a 2-day event with 15 different departments that we had about 400 people go through. So yeah, just a little crazy… Thus I think this is a perfect time to do a “What do you do when you’re bored?” type of post, since I’m so busy with everything else, lol. So here it is, in no particular order:

• Level an Alt – Not a top priority for me, since I have three 80′s all geared for ICC. And between the 3, I can do each role (DPS/Tank/Heals). But we are working on The Insane, so we need to get our rogues a couple levels higher.
• Level fishing – Already have Salty on 2 characters, but why not go for a third at some point, right? Besides, this past weekend Lady X randomly said “I want to try the Booty Bay fishing contest on an alt” since she only has the Salty title on one character. So we teamed up & she won it. Now all she needs is the right daily in Outlands to come up and she’ll have the title on 2 chars too!
• Do a random achievement – Did this one not too long ago. But seriously, just flip through. There are so many out there that it’s fun to take your main and go do something random, literally just for the achievement.
• Farm – If I’m bored already, I might just put on a movie and farm. I’m still looking for Loque, but farm ore, plants, etc. Good way to make money, though it might make you even more bored…
• Read a book – Pick a good path and run in circles. Might make you dizzy, but might keep you entertained. See how fast you can make the circuit. ‘Sides, you might end up with a pet out of it! Warcraft Pets has a good article on it.
• Tank/Heal – Sometimes I’ll just hop on my tank or healer and do randoms. It helps 4 other people, gets some extra badges. Nothing really special, but maybe it’ll make you feel good that you helped decrease queue time for someone else.
• Think up random GMOTD’s – Heh, don’t need to do this in our guild. We just need to have more than 1 person on vent and this one happens pretty naturally, lol.
• Do something else – get up from the computer and go do something else. Clean the house, watch a movie, play outside, get some extra sleep… The list truly is endless, lol.

So anyway, there’s your Friday post. A list of things to do when you’re bored, or when you should be working instead of writing a post like this because you have lots to do but are avoiding it for a few minutes, lol.

Huzzah! Finally, after lots and lots of work, grinding rep to get quests and all… We have Loremaster! Gotta love the “PWN” right smack dab in the middle of the screen too! Lol. Lessons learned:

1. Do Loremaster first, before The Insane or Bloodsail Buccanneers.
2. After Loremaster, finish up Steemwheedle Cartel up to exalted
3. Then do Bloodsail
4. Then do the rest of the Insane.

Why do I suggest that order? Because already have Bloodsail at Revered, and Steemwheedle was at Hated. So we hit about 650/700 quests in Kalimdore and it became real hard to find the rest to finish up. Had to grind back Ratchet & Everlook to Neutral in order to get and finish the rest of the quests. And, since we want The Insane, we’ll have to continue grinding all of them up to Exalted. Of course, I can’t complain too much because… well… we’re completionists, so we’ll want them all at 999 Exalted anyway, but doing it in the above order would have been easier. But anyway, psyched! Now we just have all the other grinds left… Seriously going to be insane by the time we’re done…

Had a couple slower groups last night, when running for the Frost Badges. Didn’t mind too much, because it made it easier, but it also made me think about how fast we’re now running dungeons. Makes me think back to the days of doing a trash pull, getting mana back, doing a trash pull, etc. In some ways it makes me sad that the dungeon’s aren’t really challenging, that we can just crush through. But at the same time, there are new challenges – like how fast you can go, how large of a pull can the group handle, and so on.

But the other thing I realized is that WoW slowed down a LOT for us this week… Been working on Loremaster. Which, of course means we had to get back to grinding up Steamwheedle Cartel. We got it down to about 650/700 quests in Kalimdor before we hit a wall and couldn’t get any new quests. So here’s my tip for the day – do Loremaster before The Insane. And if you want to make it even easier, do Bloodsail, then Loremaster, then The Insane. But really the key is doing Bloodsail first, before you’ve burned all the quests that’ll give you rep w/ the Cartel. That way you only have to grind up to Neutral, and can quest a huge chunk. But yeah, regardless, grinding the quests & rep makes the game go slow. My tip for that, is to put on a movie, get a comfy chair instead of your computer chair, and put the alcohol w/in reach, lol. Ok fine, not too much alcohol, but a beer or two can make the grind go by quicker. Or maybe that’s just because I love beer, lol. But the comfy chair idea is really good. Lady X agrees

Oh, and sry for not dropping in links. I’m at work (yes, on vacation and I’m at work at night… already stated I wasn’t too happy about a few things…) and not even at my desk, so no mouse, no power, and I have to monitor like 10 ppl. But oh well, c’est la vie! And ‘sides, home soon, WoW soon, and Loremaster soon!!!

WeWt! Violet Drake #2. Last night Lady X & I got the drakes on our first alts. Hard to believe a year ago we were already starting to get all the holiday achievements on these 2 in addition to our mains! Since this char is a Pally, that means I get 20% over the 310% drake for a nice clip at 330% speed!

It’ll certainly be nice to go faster when flying, though the dungeon finder and the fix to summoning stones has made that a little less necessary. But when flying out for the fishing daily or farming and such, it’ll definitely be a help. Just a few more weeks or so until we get it on our second alts. Can’t wait, but at the same time – what will we do during the holidays if we don’t have to run around doing crazy stuff on 3 characters each?!?!

WeWt! Monday we picked up a nifty little achievement. I consider it quite an achievement because, well, we did all of the achievements within it ages ago except for one. Stupid Moorabi. Was it a hard one? Nope. Our challenge was really just that the group of us that had been working on the various achievements didn’t really have the stuns. That, and that we never seemed to all be online at the same time, with no one saved to GD. Literally for months we’ve been trying to get around to finishing up the achievement and just haven’t gotten around to it, or the time or two we did, the few stuns we had didn’t work out (and usually the dps was too high, so that he’d switch forms and then die before we could all stop & wipe to try again). But yay! We finally did it! This means I no longer have to take Gal through for it, so I can at least take my paladin, thus adding 1 stun to the mix. Not much, I know, but my wife can also take her warrior instead of boomkin so there’s a few more stuns there.

So looking back at all the achievements, I don’t think any of them were particularly hard. Mostly it just needs everyone having coordination, and doing the right things at the right time. Or, luck. Especially with the ease of getting gear and cranking out higher dps, many of them are a lot easier. Got this one for two pugs last night, for example.

So speaking of hepling PuG’s get achievements, last night I also helped someone get the one for completing HoR. I felt so bad for the poor group! I end up in it through LFG. First thing I see in chat is “Hello competent person!”. Needless to say, they had already wiped about 5 times and hadn’t yet downed Falric. They had a healer who couldn’t heal it, and then a tank who couldn’t tank it. Normally, I wouldn’t make a statement like that since I wasn’t there, but based on their performance while I was in there, I would assume those are probably pretty safe bets. They knew where to stand, I didn’t have any trouble grabbing agro, and it all went pretty smooth. It was pretty funny though, when by the second wave they were already saying in chat “Yay, we finally have a good tank!” But considering we didn’t wipe in the whole dungeon, that might be why, lol. I really felt bad for them though. They obviously had been trying for a while. But in the fight with Falric, one of the dps died. Not a problem, we almost had the boss down anyway so it was fine. However, his body somehow went through the wall. Not ‘to the other side’, I mean through. So he was out of LoS and we couldn’t rez him because spells don’t work through the wall of the dungeon. Since the gates close, this means he was out of the fight for the rest of it until Marwyn went down. So we were plugging along with only 4, and on the 9th wave, as the mobs start running towards us as normal… 2 of them change paths and run to the gate. They get to the gate, everything disappears, gate opens.

Wtf?

I can only guess it’s a glitch that if someone is standing on the other side of the gate they can somehow pull agro, and the mob went through a week spot in the wall, thus resetting the instance. No clue. So now the poor group had to start back at wave 6. Told you I felt sorry for these guys! I’m just glad I could help though, and we went through the rest of it fine. Almost got the timed achiev for them too. DBM said we still had 22 seconds left when Jaina cleared the final wall for us, but I really haven’t figured out exactly what point you have to be under 6 minutes. It seems it’s a time somewhere between when she takes down the wall and when the LK steps up there, but I don’t know. Doesn’t matter too much though, the group was just ecstatic that we got through, let alone with no wipes. Of course, it’s things like that which make me almost feel obligated to tank – like it’s my duty to tank randoms each night just so more people can get in dungeons because I have a tank. Either that or it’s just that I like being able to help people, lol.