In to Ulduar...

Last night, the gold team formed up and headed into Ulduar for the first time. We weren't quite sure what to expect from the instance when it came to difficulty and so after getting into our vehicles, we were ready to tackle the gauntlet and the Flame Leviathan.


We quickly tackled the gauntlet and repaired our engines before engaging the Leviathan, and, he was EASY. Maybe a little too easy to start off Ulduar we were thinking. But we took our loot (I received a Lifespark Visage) and we continued on - or at least tried to.


We ran into an issue where we couldn't get out of combat, no matter what we tried, so in the end, we had to run all the way back to the start and out of Ulduar. Upon returning, we were able to take the teleporter to the Forge and we decided to see what Razorscale had for us. Unfortunately, not good news.

After multiple failed attempts, trying multiple different strategies, we gave up on Razorscale (his fireballs do a little too much damage for us apparently). We then went over to see how Ignis was doing and..umm..wiped a bunch on his trash. So yeah, that was a humbling experience right there. After finally getting those two molten colossuses (colossi?) down, we proceeded to then figure out how to get the rest of his trash down. We tried avoiding cyclones, but they kept going after the healers it seemed, so with healers down, we wiped a few more times. We finally got to Ignis, but it was getting late. Nonetheless, we got about 5 or 6 attempts in on him before having to call it for the night.

For those out there complaining that Ulduar is too easy because a couple guilds have downed Yogg-Saron, you're just wrong. Simple as that. Ulduar is fun, challenging, and exciting. I look forward to progressing further in the coming weeks.

Valiant

So with the patch, other than Ulduar, I haven't really found that much that interests me other than the Argent Tournament. To start, there's a couple quick quests to do and then you can pick up three quests which reward Aspirant's Seals. Once you have 15 of them, you earn the Argent Valor achievement and can now become a Valiant for your faction. So after getting my 15 seals (5 per day for 3 days), I now can start working on collecting Valiant's Seals, needing 25 to then challenge the Argent Champion. Once I best the champion, I believe I will be an Exalted Champion of Gnomeregan, thus becoming Tiddlywinks of Gnomeregan.


I'm believe I can get 5 Valiant's Seals per day, so it might only be five days (yay Monday) until I become a Champion of Gnomeregan, however, it is yet to be seen whether all nine seals are available each day. Once I become an Exalted Champion, I believe I'll be able to pick which faction I want to champion next. At 5 days per faction, it should be relatively easy to earn the titles with each faction. Also, upon becoming an Exalted Champion of Gnomeregan, I can challenge the Black Knight and earn It's Just a Flesh Wound.


Basically though, I'll be an Exalted Argent Champion of the Alliance in 25 days. Five for Gnomeregan, and then 5 more days for Exodar, Stormwind, Darnassus, and Ironforge. So in just 25 days I'll be done with the Argent Tournament. Of course, after the 25 days, I'll have to do the dailies every day to earn Champion's Seals in order to purchase my 5 faction specific pets (200 + another 200 seals to earn those pets to trade to the horde in exchange for their pets), then 250 more for the Argent Hippogryph and 500 more for the faction specific mounts from each faction - the Great Azuremyst Elekk, Swift Ironforge Ram, Turbostrider, Swift Darnassian Mistsaber, and Swift Elwynn Steed.

So that's only 1150 Champion's Seals...minus 50 from becoming a champion of each faction (10x5), and I only have to earn 1100. At 5 per day...well...that's 220 days of dailies - but there should be more dailies opened up once the coliseum is built, but who knows. Obviously the pets come first, so that's just 70 days of dailies, still a few too many for me.

So, have fun at the Argent Tournament - a nice long grind once you complete championing your factions. Yay!

Random Thoughts

On 3.1:

In all, other than the time it took them to patch the servers (which didn't matter to me since I wasn't available to play until 9 server), I was impressed with the patch. Most of my addons worked, only a few gave errors, and when I clicked through the errors, they all worked as intended. I started in Dalaran, did the daily cooking quest, and picked up the new daily fishing quest. It took me to Sholazar which was nice since I got my Frenzyheart dailies done at the same time. I then returned to Dalaran, turned in the quest, and then flew up to Icecrown for the Argent Tourney.

On the Argent Tournament:

Pretty darn cool. I easily breezed through the intro quests, picked up the other dailies, and quickly earned 5 tokens. The quest to obtain 15 tokens will be done on Thursday, so it should be nice to see what opens up after that. Dueling on horseback is pretty sweet and the dailies take you all over Northrend. The only issue we had was after starting the Black Knight quest line and going to Westfall, when we tried to hearth back to Dalaran, the Northrend server was down and I had to call it a night.

On WoWMatrix:

Yesterday, news was released that WowMatrix had been blocked by both Curse and WowInterface. I completely understand the reasoning behind blocking WowMatrix, and, ultimately, it was the right decision to make for both sites, however, the way they handled it was completely wrong. They waited until patch day to block WowMatrix. They had been planning for weeks (if not months) on blocking the application, yet they didn't alert anyone to that fact. They gave no one a chance to prepare for the application breaking. The kept all the end-users in the dark and waited until the worst possible moment for everyone to break a vital application.

Like I said, I understand why they did it. Simple economics. WowMatrix made it so you didn't have to visit Curse or WowInterface to get your addons and they lose income because of that. There is no other reason other than simple $$$. However, again, like I said, the way they broke WowMatrix was despicable. They chose to break the application without providing any viable alternative. The Curse downloader obviously only works on Curse and is quite gimped and installs addons you didn't choose to install. As for WowInterface's updater, well...they don't have one. They'll gladly shut you out of their network, yet provide no alternative. Kudos to you guys.

So they shut down WowMatrix, which was a simple, efficient way to download addons without providing an alternative and they do so on the busiest day of the year. And what happens? Both sites crash or slow to a crawl. Gee, who would have seen that coming? Both Curse and WowInterface reported bandwidth drops of 30% and up, however, both were unable to stay up as people who used WowMatrix flooded their sites looking for updates, and, in most cases, not finding them due to poor search results, slow sites, and outdated addon listings.

On Achievements:

On Monday a few of our regular raiding team got together to do heroic achievements. Still working on that red drake and all...we decided to try the spider lairs, Azjol'Nerub and Ahn'kahet. After repeated wipes on Watch Him Die, we skipped it and proceeded to easily get Hadronox Denied and Gotta Go!. Not too bad. Over in Ahn'kahet, we easily got The Party's Over (Phosphorex had to sit that one out) and Volunteer Work. Respect Your Elders took us two tries, but only because we had a slight healing issue in the main room, but we got it done. Volazj's Quick Demise will have to wait as that is a very tough achievement. I think we'll have to all go in as DPS as I had troubles getting the healer down in the madness portion.

Of course, last night I earned Argent Aspiration and Dual Talent Specialization. I was a little disappointed to see no new achievements outside the Argent Tourney and Noblegarden. There are some smaller ones like for Dual Spec and for the new fishing dailies, but nothing fun like in the last patch. Oh wells, I think the Argent Tourney and upcoming holidays will keep me plenty busy.

On Paladins:

On Monday, I met a fellow blogger in the game after she saw my spam in trade chat. Please take a second and go say hi to Platezilla. She has some very cool updates to read and an awesome story about her death knight Velanora.

Thus ends my rants, tonight, more Argent Tourney fun, and maybe some tries at the Emerald Whelpling out in the Swamp of Sorrows. Oh, and perhaps some manual addon updating since WowMatrix doesn't work :(

Mounts!

So I just found this awesome site to track my mounts. I don't think I could remember all of the mounts I have as I thought I had 75, but here they are:

Tiddly's Mounts

Not quite sure how I'm going to get to 100.

It also looks as if the URL changes each time you tally your mounts, so the link above could go stale quickly. But a nice site nonetheless that allows you to easily see what mounts you need and how to get them.