Antechamber Clear

Last night, the Gold Team, fresh off a stomping off bosses on Wednesday night went back in, eager to learn some new fights. First up was Auriaya, the Crazy Cat Lady. After a couple of quick wipes due to massive incoming raid damage and also another couple of wipes before switching strategies, we took her out. In the end, the strategy of not killing the Feral Defender (it does die due to raid splash damage), worked very well for us. We were able to get her down after two attempts with our finalized strategy and she was nice enough to drop the Raiments of the Corrupted. I wanted these as I knew they were an upgrade and I rolled an 85. Yes! So I tell Matnocuido to roll, figuring if they're an upgrade for me, they'll be an upgrade for him. And what does he go and do? Rolls a 92. Of course. I don't know how he does it, but he always out-rolls me. However, he was nice enough to pass them over to me (he doesn't want to break his 4 piece Tier 7 bonus quite yet) and I happily replaced the Gown of the Spell-Weaver. I gain 20 stamina, 3 armor, 11 crit, 4 hit, and 8 spellpower at the cost of 8 intellect? Hell yeah.

With the new item, I also resocketed a few items, throwing a Runed Scarlet Ruby in my new Raiments and also in my Sandals of Crimson Fury, replacing a Rigid Autumn's Glow. My hit now sits at 340, down from 368. At 368, I was hit capped regardless of who was in the raid - however, there's always a draenei in the raid, so my hit cap is 341 and I'm perfectly fine being 1 point under the hit cap. I like to live dangerously like that...

So after Auriaya, we thought, let's go see Mimiron. Bad idea. For starters, his trash is insanely hard. After a wipe or two here and there, we made it through and then we tried to read about the fight. Mistake #2. He is probably the most complicated fight in Ulduar. So we all paused, watched a video on him, and then thought, hell, we can do this. Wipe after wipe after wipe later, we could not do this. We did manage to get him to phase 3 one or two times (I can't remember - they all blur together), so I'm certain we can kill him with more practice. However, I think next week, I'd rather go see Freya and give her a little kiss.

Once you get through the Antechamber of Ulduar though, there's so many beautiful sights. The first here is just as you start to come to the Keepers of Ulduar, then two of the tram that takes you to Mimiron and then two of Mimiron's workshop.

Patron Tiddlywinks

Yup, done already. Thought it'd be much harder to get School of Hard Knocks, but it just took one visit to each battleground and a nice death knight to drop the flag for me to pick up on EOTS and the achievement was mine.

I also thought that Daily Chores would be annoying, but apparently, the tooltip is wrong and you just have to completely 5 daily quests with your orphan out, not on 5 different days.

Additionally, in Shattrath, I was able to earn Veteran Nanny as my pet collecting had started a couple years ago. So here I sit, Patron Tiddlywinks with little to do for the rest of the day.

Another One Bites the Dust

And down goes the Iron Council (or is it the Assembly of Iron?)...We got I Choose You Stormcaller Brundir just because he was the last one alive (all three have their own achievements) and with that, we called it for the night. Despite our lower-than-usual DPS, we still managed to blow through the Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, XT-002, and Kologarn as well in just under 2 hours. Not bad since a lot of the people there were still learning fights and/or strategies.

This morning I awoke a bit early and since I was just 3 seals away from 25, I quickly did those dailies. Earned 5 seals, and earned Exalted Champion of Stormwind. Just Darnassus and Exodar remain. I chose Darnassus, just because they were next in line, and got the frog-kissing quest and will be just 1 seal away in 4 short days. Hopefully when I get exalted, the Exodar daily quest will be a different one than the Darnassus daily quest so I will only have 4 days of seal collecting instead of 5. So at worst, I have 10 days of questing to go, at best, 9 days until I am an Exalted Argent Champion of the Alliance.

Also this Weekend...

I went to Blackwing Lair. It was a quick run, but what made this one different from previous runs is I was there at the start. Usually, I'll see people running BWL and join in in the middle or towards the end and I always miss the third boss, the Broodlord Lashslayer. Because of this, Only One May Rise has been sitting in my quest log for ages. And Sunday, I finally completed it. Which is good news, but also bad news.

Because now that it's done, I can work on The Path of the Righteous. Which means I can start bringing my Brood of Nozdormu rep up to neutral. When I finally raise it to neutral, I can begin work on the Scepter of the Shifting Sands questline which I am really looking forward to. I can't wait to finally get started with such an epic questline involving multiple dungeons, quests, and encounters. If only I didn't have to collect upwards of 13,000 Silithid Carapace Fragments that drop from the bugs in the hives at the rate of 1-4 per kill. Assuming an average drop rate of 2.5 per bug, that's 5,200 bugs to kill.

Current progress: 5,950/36,000 = 30,050 rep to go, divided by 500 rep per turn in = 61 turn ins at 200 fragments per turn in = 12,200 fragments left divided by 2.5 per bug = 4,880 bugs still to slaughter.

Another Busy Weekend?

Dang, going back through my screenshots and such, it's quite surprising what I got accomplished this weekend. It started Friday with the Gold Team going to 25 man Naxx. We quickly cleared it, but had some fun when we got to Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad. On Sapph, we turned off mage armor, frost resist auras, and anything else that would put our frost resist above 100. After one wipe due to the tank somehow dying, we came back in and quickly took care of him, earning Heroic: The Hundred Club.

We then quickly moved to Kel'Thuzad and thought we would keep our achievements going and proceeded to have the most hectic KT fight I've ever seen. We decided to go for Heroic: Just Can't Get Enough and though we lost one person during that, he was rezzed and we continued on. I unfotunately died somehow from a mana blast that hit me for 20,000 damage. I got rezzed (and it was a good thing they picked me up), since at about 20%, he Ice Blocked our paladin who was tanking two of the adds. So those adds got free and we lost a healer before the main tank, Aravic, was able to pick them up. So we had Aravic tanking KT and two adds for a while until the other add tank could peel one off of him. And we continued the fight like that. Then all hell broke loose. With KT and an add on him, Aravic went down. I immediately went invisible to drop all aggro. Let the healers die I say! I quickly returned from invisibility and DPS'ed with all I had. And we did it. Somehow, a few of us DPS remained and were able to take out KT without a tank. We had just enough to power through him as he moved from target to target one-shotting them. We would have gone to Emalon next, but the Horde held Wintergrasp so we called it an early evening.

Saturday took me back out to Icecrown where I became an Exalted Champion of Ironforge. The day also saw me get my 40th Champion's Seal which I used to quickly purchase pet #91, my Mechanopeep. I had hoped to get a 10 seal bonus like I did when I became a Champion of Gnomeregan, but no luck. Apparently you only get the 10 seal bonus on your first Championing, so it will be 8 days from Saturday (next Sunday) until I can get my next pet - I think it'll be the Elwynn Lamb - a nice change from your normal pet. With becoming an Exalted Champion of Ironforge, I also hit 6,000 achievement points.

Later in the day I was invited to the Black Temple, and after some struggles on the later bosses, we made it to Illidan. Unfortunately, coordination was poor and even though we got him to stage 4, we never got him down and after spending 5.5+ hours in there, I had to leave. It was just too frustrating, and in the end, they never got him down.

Sunday of course brought with it Noblegarden so out to collect eggs I went. I found a nice spot in Dolanaar that I was able to camp with 5 eggs within reach without moving. I quickly picked up over 250 and found everything I needed. I got my Tome of Polymorph: Rabbit for 100 chocolates, but found the Spring Rabbit's Foot in an egg and all the clothing except the dress in eggs. I then went out, did the other quests and quickly earned my title of Tiddlywinks the Noble. After doing my daily quests and taking some time off, I awoke late in the night and went to Azure Watch where I found very little egg competition, and on my 2nd egg, I found the dress and completed every Noblegarden achievement. Yay!