Update

Wow...it's been over a month since my last post.

Well, the last time I posted, my warlock was at level 30. Today (about 5 minutes ago actually) he hit 58 and is headed for the Outlands. :-) Of course, I'll have to hit Dire Maul at level 60 to get my Dreadsteed.

I'm also cruising along on his enchanting and tailoring, but I kinda stalled at 263 for enchanting. I'm just not getting the drops to DE for mats like I was.

As for my rogue...well, Kara group 2 hasn't been doing well. We're either short 2-3 people for our runs or we end up burning 3+ hours taking down Attumen and wiping on Morose. This past Monday though was a different story. Instead of rehashing it here, here's a link to a post I made in our guild forums:

http://www.clanbbf.com/viewtopic.php?t=53605

If you read that entire thread, it looks like I'll be running with Group 1 starting next week. ;-) Woohoo!

Playing a warlock

Due to level 70 boredom and no kara last week, I've been spending quite a bit of time playing my warlock. In the past week, I've taken him from level 22 up to 30.

Warlocks are cool and I'm trying to figure out which is more fun: a hunter or the lock. Playing ranged is a nice break from the in-your-face DPS or a rogue. Send in blueberry, dot, dot, dot, shadow bolt, rinse and repeat. Oh, and it's nice to be on the giving end of "fear". ;-)

And, OMG, I love soulstoning myself. ;-) I've been in some tough situations where I'm a long way from the graveyard and I've already sacrificed my blueberry...having that soulstone is a beautiful thing.

My lock is also a tailor and enchanter. I've really focused on progressing these skills so I start making some $$$. I'm finding enchanting a bit tougher to level than the tailoring, but both are still right where they need to be.

So...to sum up: ranged + fear + pet + dots + soulstone = AWESOME. ;-)

Kara

For the last couple of weeks, my guild has been able to get a second group into Kara. Unfortunately, we've always been 2-3 players short and have had to rely on pick-ups.

Our first outing actually started on a Saturday after our Friday run got cancelled because the raid leader had ISP issues. The Saturday run was ok even though we couldn't down Attumen. Our pally off-tank doesn't have the gear and kept dying. On one attempt, after Attumen mounted Midnight, I screwed up by hitting him before the tank got agro. He turned around and pretty much one-shotted me. ;-) Lesson learned.

I scored Grips of Deftness, but haven't worn them because my Fel Leather Gloves with gems are better. The group learned a lot on this first run and it helped on our second run the following week.

Last Friday we ended up pickin' up a fill-in warrior off-tank since our was unavailable. This really helped. We downed Attumen pretty easily, although I ended up dead for most of the fight. :-( I'm not even sure what hit me...

We moved on to Moroes and tried him 5 or 6 times. On our 5th attempt, the group got him down to 1% before wiping. The 6th ended up as a wipe. Again, we learned a lot from this run.

Our Saturday night run started out looking for a damn healer again. We found a pick-up healer, but he bailed on us after the 3rd Moroes attempt. Asshole. :-\ Jesus...it's not like every single group that goes into Kara kicks ass from the start. Grrr...

Anyway, after a futile attempt to find a replacement, we decided to help a guildie (holy pally) run BM so she could join us this week. :-) During the BM run, I scored the Hourglass of the Unraveler. :-) :-) :-) hell yea! That thing freakin' rocks.

Hopefully this week goes better and we actually down Moroes and move on.

Kara, here I come!

After helping a guildie run Old Hillsbrad tonight (totally kicking ass along the way), we hit Black Morass with me, a pally tank, a pally healer, a shadow priest and a lock.

On our first attempt (yes, meaning it took more than once) I ended up pulling agro on the fourth portal that came up. I didn't realize how large the agro range was on the Rift Lords, but I learned pretty quickly. Even after vanishing and pulling out all the stops, the stinkin' dragon would NOT leave me alone and eventually killed me. The group managed to take care of that particular portal, but the 1st boss was already out and no one had time to rez me, so the group ended up taking the wipe.

Second attempt was better. We actually got to the final boss, but for some reason, the healer ended up pulling agro and was almost killed right off the bat. While he was busy healing himself, the tank got killed and we ended up wiping.

Attempts 3 and 4 were pretty much the same kind of thing. Always close, but never quite close enough.

Attempt 5 - the group changed slightly -- we lost one priest and the pally healer, but gained a mage and a holy priest. It was smooooothhh. Not a single death the entire run. :-)

Good stuff! I ran to Kara to finish the quest line and now I'm ready baby and I can't wait!

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.