Buying my way to Exalted with The Aldor

Starting a couple weeks ago, i decided I was going to grind my way to exalted with The Aldor so I could replace my nasty main hand sword (mine had +15 Agility, +23 Stamina) with something better.

Grinding Marks of Sargeras and Fel Armaments sucks. It sucks bad. I think i'd rather be stuck fighting the Inciter than burning hour upon hour for extremely low drop-rate items. I farmed in all the best places, but it was still going to take way too long to get the rep I needed to get the sword. For what it's worth, I was only part way through honored, so I needed a ton of rep.

This is where my perpetually level 37 mage comes into play. BigSissy sits in Stormwind to post stuff from my rogue on the auction house or to purchase items for my rogue. Every now and then I take him out into the world to quest, but he soon returns after getting his cloth-covered ass kicked. In fact, he's only about 9,000 XP from level 38.

As luck would have it, he had about 500 gold on him so I used him to buy Marks and Fel Armaments from the AH when the prices were low enough. On my server, stacks of Marks start at around 10 gold and Fel Armaments typically run around 17 gold each. Whenever I saw Marks or Armaments lower than those prices, I'd scoop them up and send them along to my rogue. During this time, I was also using my rogue to farm those same items in both Shadowmoon Valley and Netherstorm. Within a couple of days I had worked my way up to revered and within a few more days had gotten myself within a few thousand rep of being exalted. All in all, I think I spent around 500-600 gold, but I saved a ton of time. It was also nice in that most of that gold came from auctions of leather, metal bars and the occasional arcane tome or green/blue item.

Once I got within a few thousand rep, I figured I'd stop buying the armaments and marks and complete some Aldor-related quests. Unfortunately, most of the quests are group quests and I HATE pick-up groups. I did get some help from a friend, but finally bought the last few marks needed to take me over the top and into exalted!

So, after dropping 186 gold with the Aldor quartermaster, I'm now packing Vindicators Brand. As lame as it is, I'm still packing a green OH sword. Everything I've read says the best OH sword is Latro's, but I doubt I'll be getting that anytime soon. My current plan is to get my new MH sword enchanted with Mongoose as soon as I find out what the mats are.

I can't wait to get out and lay some smack down. :-)

Good SL (and Shattered Halls) run

Well, tonight I hopped on my rogue and before I knew it some guildies invited me on another SL run. The group consisted of a prot warrior, a resto druid, a shadow priest, a mage and me. We ripped through the first couple of rooms (again) and burned down the first boss with no problems.

Once again we ran into issues with Blackheart the Inciter and wiped a couple times. This time it was due to the druid only being level 68 and not having very good armor (mostly cloth items). After the second wipe the warrior and druid had to leave (husband and wife) so we brought in another druid to tank for us and another priest to handle healing. this time we cruised right through Blackheart and then had NO issues at all with Vorpil. Murmur was pretty easy except he hit me with Murmur's touch about 5 times during the fight. :-\

I did win the roll for the Wrathfire Hand-Cannon that drops off Vorpil. Not sure that I'll ever use it, but since noone could DE, we all greeded and I won.

Ater totally kicking ass with this new group we all decided to hit another instance. ths time it was The Shattered Halls. This was my first time in this instance and I thought it was pretty damn fun.

We absolutely kicked ass all the way to the final boss. The pace was quick and I think only our mage died once or twice. I scored the Cloak of Malice off the second boss. :-) mmm....good stuff.

Unfortunately we had a hell of a time controlling the adds on the final boss and ended up quitting after the second wipe. bummer.

Bad SL run

There's a reason I hate pick up groups (pugs), so I always try to run instances with good friends or guild mates. Of course, there are times when even a group of guildies perform as well as a pug and a recent Shadow Labs run proved that.

I dislike SL for several reasons, but the foremost is that fear absolutely, positively pisses me off. I get angry when I get feared. I get even angrier when I get feared multiple times in a single fight. It'd be one thing if the PVP trinket was on a 1 or 2 minute cooldown, but at 5 minutes, it's pretty damn pointless in a place like Shadow Labs. BTW, another reason I hate the instance is the fact that I've never been with a group that's cleared it. I know...that's pitiful...after all, it's not like it's a super-tough instance, but that's neither here nor there. ;-)

Anyway, I was playing an alt last night when I got a whisper from Tiff on her priest alt (pretty much her main now since she can't get her warlock into Kara) asking if I wanted to run an instance. Without getting any details I said "sure". The group itself was filled with people I've played with and they all know what they're doing. We had 2 priests, a mage, me and a pally. The first couple of rooms were cleared without incident, although we did wipe once on the first boss. I can do no DPS if I'm fuckin' feared all over the goddamn place. :-\

The mobs before the second boss were cleared pretty easily, although the pally running the show absolutely refused to take advantage of any freakin' crowd control. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Ok, I can see not using a sap...fine. It is a relatively risky proposition and once the mob is up, they can't be re-sapped. Fine. But if you have a mage (which we did), then use the damn sheep! I am of the opinion that the fewer mobs you have to fight at any given time, the smoother things will go. Ugh. To be honest, I did get a couple of saps in and they did help. :-)

Ok, if the second boss was a real person, he'd be a f***in' c**ksmoking piece of sh*t. ;-) GRRR...his constant "let's have some fun / incite chaos" bullshit causes me to go into fits of cursing. :-) The biggest problem in this fight is that the boss wipes agro so much of the time was spent chasing after the stupid boss and maybe getting one or two hits in before we were all hacking away at each other. More than once I ended up killing a healer or the mage during his "fun". Ugh. Not cool. I will say though that since were all in vent, we had a fun time with healers yelling (pleading) "don't kill me!" and me responding "there's not much I can do about it" and my toon got the killing blow in.

Yea, so we wiped a good 5 times trying to take this boss down. Everytime the tank and I got into a good position (backs against the wall so we wouldn't get knocked back too far and take a bunch of damage), the tank lost agro. Once again...ugh. It was a very disappointing run.
I will say though that we did get him down to like single digit % in health, but we just couldn't sustain the fight for the last few seconds we needed. By the time I left, my durability was at 2%. Thank God I don't have any epic gear because my repair cost with my blues was just a touch under 10 gold.

Since we were only there for reputation, it was no huge deal, but still...it's frustrating to go into an instance and get totally owned.

Progression

Geesh, in the very short time I've been back with BBF, I've gotten my last 2 key frags and run Old Hillsbrad. :-) Of course, guild drama is still there, but I've been staying as far away from it all as I can.

Hopefully I'll be doing a Black Morass run soon so I can be Kara-attuned, but everyone I've talked to says BM sucks ass so I'm not sure when it'll happen.

BBF isn't the most well-geared guild, so it may not be that big of a deal, but I'm happy to say I was #2 in damage (after a fire mage) during our short Steam Vaults run and #1 during our Old Hillsbrad run.

I re-spec'd before taking my vacation from the game and am pretty happy being a combat rogue, but I do miss some of the talents in the subtlety tree.

Back in the game

After taking close to two months off from playing, I renewed my account last night. I also rejoined BBF.

After SI disintegrated a few months back, a group of fomer SI guildies tried to keep things going, and they've actually had quite a bit of success in Kara, but it never felt like a guild for me. These guys, while all really cool, were focused on end-game stuff and not really helping others (unless it was killing horde).

So, before I left the game for my break, I was pretty damn bored. All I'd do when I played was farm for gold and rep. That gets pretty boring after awhile. Anyway, at the end of June, beginning of July, I went to visit a friend in Chicago and didn't really even think about playing until just recently.

I've kept in touch with Tiff and finally told her that when i started playing again, i'd join BBF (she's now a guild officer). So, after renewing last night and jumping in-game, she invited me. it was kinda strange. I wasn't sure how people would react to me coming back. I was happily surprised at the reception I got and so far, don't regret my decision to re-join.

I played for a couple hours last night. Almost all of that time was spent helping Tiff run some quests on her "new" toon -- a lvl 69 priest. God, I can remember helping her when she was in the 20s and 30s on that toon. At one point, we had some horde trouble, and after a quick call for help in vent, about 5 other BBF members showed (bringing our total to 8) and we laid waste to the horde. ;-) Good times.

Having fun

While I'm still guildless, I've been having fun lately. Besides the frequent trips to STV or Southshore to gank lowbies, I've been running a lot of the new quests and trying to gain rep and gold. A couple days ago, one of my friends decided to level his tailoring and needed some rugged leather so we both hopped over to Winterspring to kill yetis. Lots of fun until some dumbass 60 hunter decided to send his pet after me. :-

Yea...he died pretty quickly. Not sure WTF he was thinking. ;-) I think he was made because I "stole" one of his yetis.

Saturday night I played way too long (started at 9p and ended at 4:30a). Tiff asked me to join a BBF run to Shadow Labs...it was lots of fun, but no good rogue gear dropped and we had a lot of trouble on the final boss. I do have to say...the second boss sucks...sucks bad. Really bad. I did achieve my goal of that run by getting the first key frag for Kara (yea. finally).

I'm kicking around the idea of a re-spec, especially if I'm gonna be running more instances, but haven't done it yet. Tiff really wants me to re-join BBF and after the run I told her I'd talk to the GM when he gets back from vacation.

70 is just as boring as 60 was

Pre-BC, I described level 60 as the most boring experience. Well, now that I'm 70, I'm saying the same thing. Since the disintegration of SI, my time is spent either grinding for gold (which, BTW, is MUCH easier with a flying mount), ganking lowbie horde or playing an alt.

Granted, I enjoy playing one of my many alts, but I have to say I'm getting pretty fired up about playing a warlock. Geesh, even at level 12, I can still kick ass. ;-)

My old guild, BBF, continues to let me know the door is open if I want to come back. The fact is, I'm still hanging out with SI, mainly because I'm not playing that much and I'm still truly not sure I could go back. My buddy Trez joined up with a new guild, but that's only because he has both a prot-spec'd 70 warrior and a 70 priest that he's probably already re-spec'd to holy.

They said I could come along to, but that was just a pity invite. ;-) I turned them down because the guild master is a rogue, so that pretty much means I'd be screwed on instance runs, especially the big K.