What a Patch

So..let's talk 3.2.

First off, all these people back at the Argent Tournament? What the hell? I know there's some new dailies, and I understand people being there for the new instance, but why was there a 4 group deep line at Chillmaw? Why were there tons of people battling over Commanders at the Citadel? It's not like these quests all of a sudden grant special powers for the instance. They've been around for ages and they've been ignored the past couple months leading up to the patch. And now they're hot again? It makes no sense to me. Sure, there's some new heirloom items you can buy with Champions Seals, but other than that, why are people running these again?

I know I ran them every day (except 2 or 3) since the patch and I have almost every Argent Tournament pet (still waiting to trade one more) and I've saved the rest of my Seals. So I had plenty saved up when the patch hit which allowed me to immediately buy my Argent Pony Bridle. I'm not quite sure why, but even though my Squire has a pony, he refuses to mount up with me. But he does give me access to a vendor, the bank, or my mailbox every few hours. Plus...

Speaking of achievements, I was pleasantly surprised to see I still had over 7,000 achievement points when logging in yesterday. The nice folks at Blizzard decided to count up all the badges I had earned and apply them towards the 2,500 Dungeon & Raid Emblems achievement. So I'm currently sitting at 925/1000. But because of the emblem and badge changes, people wanted to run heroics last night. So we first went into the Oculus because it was the daily and would reward two Emblems of Triumph. While we were there, on the final boss, we figured, why not go for an achievement? So that we did. We had one person die, but we got Amber Void. I also rode an Emerald Drake, so I'm one drake away from Experienced Drake Rider. After the Oculus, we headed down into the Nexus. On the first split of Telestra, we got all the images down in the right amount of time, but on the second one, one got away from us and we just barely must have missed the timer for Split Personality. But, on the bright side, we did get Chaos Theory later on.

So while looking through my achievements, scanning for new, easy achievements (there aren't any), I did see I got three new feats of strength. They're a little overdue, but I'll take them.

I continued on after the two instances to do more of the Argent quests (the new ones are pretty fun - and...easy) and then went to search out some pets. I picked up the new Shimmering Wyrmling up at the Argent Tournament for 40 seals. I also picked up a Obsidian Hatchling from Breanni in Dalaran and then I did the new orphan quests and ended up with my own little Gorloc. I would have preferred the Frenzyheart, but I chose wrong, so I'll be happy with a Gorloc until the next Children's week. With the new pet additions, I now sit at 112/126 pets collected.

New at the Argent Tournament

Blizzard today announced quite a few welcome changes to the Argent Tournament. Firstly, two new mounts for everyone! Woohoo. Granted, I still have a ways to go on my mount collection as the pets come first, but still, more mounts to get me closer to 100. Also a new pet at exalted with the Silver Covenant. Yay!

Also, new dailies for those of us who have earned the Crusader title, a tabard that will port you to the tournament grounds (which will free up my hearthstone once again), and an upgraded squire. You will be able to summon him just once every 8 hours, but he will be able to give you access to your bank, your mailbox, or a vendor. I'll really enjoy the vendor portion of it as I'll be able to go farming for rep grinds and such and be able to vendor items without leaving the grind.

Of course, everything is going to cost a lot of seals, so luckily there will be more dailies and therefore, more seals. I still need to get the five mounts at 100 seals each, the gryphon at 150 seals, and then I can work on getting the new squire for another 150 seals, and of course the new pet for (probably) another 40 seals.

It's been a while since 3.1 came out, but I have yet to miss a day of dailies. My seals are stacking up and I'm almost done with the horde pet trading, but I have a lot of seals to go. Oh, and curse you Marcia for not giving me a strand crawler. I've done your fishing daily EVERY day you've offered it and you still shut me out. Why??

A Busy Day

After spending most of the day running around various locations such as Tanaris, the Hinterlands, Winterspring, and Hellfire Peninsula, I had the ore and bars necessary I thought to power level engineering to 375. Unfortunately, I underestimated the materials necessary to build a couple of items I wanted, so I did end up spending about 150g on the auction house, but in the end, I got to 375 engineering and I have my Flying Machine and my Turbo-Charged Flying Machine, mounts #78 and #79.


I then quickly ran into Gnomeregan, got the Pet Bombling schematic on my first kill and quickly made my very own Pet Bombling, for pet #103.

Not content to sit at 79 mounts, I made my way back up to the Argent Tournament, spent my last gold and 5 champions seals, and bought a Swift Brown Steed for mount #80! 20 to go. 8 more Argent Tourney mounts, 2 tailoring mounts (I'm taking up tailoring when I drop engineering), and 5 PvP mounts (who knows when I'll ever have time to get all those marks), and I'm still 5 mounts short of 100. 100 is still probably pretty unobtainable for me at the current time. Kudos to those that have their 100 mounts. That's quite an achievement.


Speaking of achievements, I got one last night during our 25 man Ulduar run. Even though we only took down three bosses (we were down a main tank, an off-tank, and healing was a bit on the weak side), I managed to sneak in Take Out Those Turrets. I was hoping to make it back to a demolisher to get Three Car Garage, but even though a chopper was there to pick me up, I was covered in siege engines and couldn't make the transition. Oh well, next week!

Quick Updates

Today I got my Murkimus the Gladiator. He is amazing. That makes 101 pets. I also bought a couple of mounts, including the Turbostrider, bringing my count to 77 mounts. Still a long way to go to 100. Including the 8 remaining Argent Tourney faction pets plus the Argent Hippogryph, I'm at 86. Still a bit tough to hit 100...

4 Down, 1 To Go

Last night, I got my Exalted Champion of Darnassus title and luckily, for the fifth and final faction (Exodar - just because it's last in the row of NPCs), I will finish in 4 days. The key here is there are three random daily quests you can get from the factions - A Blade Fit for a Champion, A Worthy Weapon, and The Edge of Winter. Theoretically, you can earn 5 Valiant's Seals a day. However, when you turn in your 25 seals for The Valiant's Charge, you can then immediately pick which faction you are going to champion next. As long as that faction has a different quest of the three random daily quests, you can do it, allowing you to earn 2 extra seals on the day you switch factions.

The problem I ran into is that after finishing my first faction (the gnomes, of course!) I didn't get that extra quest, so I've been 2 behind people who got lucky that time. But just 2 seals back doesn't save you a day of quests. Luckily, when switching the next three times, I got the extra quest, so I'm 6 seals up right now and will be able to complete the last leg in just 4 days! So even if people got lucky each time they switched, they will be on the same timetable as me. All I know right now though is that I'm going to be up early Saturday morning to get my Exalted Argent Champion of the Alliance achievement and become...Crusader Tiddlywinks!

((And when I do get that, think of the achievement spam in Guild chat...Champion of Exodar, Exalted Champion of Exodar, Champion of the Alliance, Exalted Champion of the Alliance, and Exalted Argent Champion of the Alliance))

Also, this weekend, a grouping of the Gold Team and Group 2 went into 25 man Vault of Archavon and took down Emalon with ease. Unfortunately, no T8.5 for mages, but we had just one wipe due to a priest mistake within the first 15 seconds of the fight. We regrouped and essentially one-shot him.


In that Emalon fight, I was quite happy with my DPS. I've been experimenting with arcane and just haven't been able to figure out how to sustain high DPS with it. I ran arcane through the first half of our 25 man Naxx run last weekend and it just wasn't doing the damage I expected. I was using the right rotation and though it was tough to time my evocations properly, I did have minimal down time to regen mana. Yet each fight, my DPS seemed to be lower than what I could have gotten with Frostfire Bolt.

So I'm back to Frostfire Bolt because A) I think it does more DPS and B) I know the spec and rotations and know how to maximize my DPS with the spec. So here's where I ended on the Emalon fight.

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.

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!

What a Night!

So there we were, the Gold Team had gathered and we were just sitting around the campfire with nothing to do. The Argent Tournament quests were complete, the severed arm had been returned to Olissara, and Glowergold's cheese was safely in his hands again. So...what to do? Let's go to Ulduar!

We quickly formed up and decided that since we defeated the Flame Leviathan just after causing an overload last time, that this time we would NOT catapult our druid and shaman on top of him and just DPS him down. And so it would come to pass that the Gold Team would take down the Flame Leviathan in one attempt and earn the Shutout achievement. What next we wondered? Would we go and attempt Ignis and his flaming naughty bits or Razorscale and his breath of doom?

Since we had the most practice with Razorscale we decided she would be first. The first time through, we decided that we'd try and hold off on the harpoons until all of the watchmen and sentinels were down. However, they just kept spawning and eventually ate us up. We regrouped and adjusted our strategy to just make sure no sentinels were up when we used the harpoons and we easily took her out even though Dylana, our awesome healy tree went down really early. Eleazarjr and Jizo did an amazing job keeping us all up. And what should she drop for me? The Eye of the Broodmother! It's the second best trinket with only the Scale of Fates being better at this current time.


After Razorscale we once again assessed our surroundings. Flaming naughty bits or a spoiled robot? XT-002 it was. We quickly grouped up as Aravic had to return to Dalaran and took him on for the first time. We almost had him killed when some random enemies joined the fight and made quick work of us. We regrouped and then realized that we had not cleared the trash before engaging XT-002. We quickly cleared them, engaged XT-002 again and easily took him down. Utilizing a heroism on the first heart exposure enabled us to quickly get him down as when his heart was no longer exposed, he was already at half health and his heart was exposed again. When all was said and done, he rewarded us with two achievements - Nerf Gravity Bombs and Nerf Engineering! A pleasant surprise after taking him down in (almost) one shot (darn trash).


All in all, an amazing run. Tomorrow we shall gather for four more hours of fun. The Antechamber of Ulduar awaits us.

Tiddlywinks the Mercenary

Now wouldn't that be a great title? Unfortunately, I did not get it when I completed Mercenary of Sholazar last night. Now that it's done, I'm going to wait for Children's Week to come around to see what they'll have us do, then back to the Oracles to continue looking for the mount.


On a completely unrelated note, I love the Argent Tournament dailies. There's so much gold to be had for relatively quick work. The best part about it is you can do Valiant quests at the same time as Champion quests. For example, you can do A Valiant's Field Training and At the Enemy's Gates for Valiant's Seals at the same time as Taking the Battle to the Enemy and Battle Before the Citadel. So when you have to kill 15 scourge for a Champion's Seal, you automatically are done with killing 10 scourge for a Valiant's Seal. When you kill the Boneguard Lieutenants for Champion's Seals, you finish the quest for Valiant's Seals at the same time. You then go back and turn in each quest for the Valiant's Seals and receive 13g23s for each quest and then you turn in your Champion's Seals quests and receive 13g23s PLUS a Champion's Purse which has another 10g in it. Combine those with the jousting dailies, the Threat From Above, and any others that make you travel to SE Northrend and you quickly gain 5 Valiant's Seals, 5 Champion's Seals and you're up 132g61s. Love it.

Of course I do those dailies along with the new fishing daily and the old cooking dailies every day and I easily earn 150g a day just from 9 quick quests. Too bad most of it will go to repairs and consumables in Ulduar in the coming days...

A Busy Week

Last week was pretty busy. It of course all started on Tuesday with the Argent Tournament, continued Thursday with 10 man Ulduar, progressed Friday with 25 man full clear Naxx and 2 attempts at Flame Leviathan, extended to Sunday with a Sunwell clear, and finished yesterday with more advancement in the Argent Tournament.

Back to Friday, we quickly gathered up and discussed what our next move would be. Would we concentrate on 25 man Ulduar, or continue for a few weeks in Naxxramas, continuing to gear up players and, maybe more importantly, get gear for secondary specs. It was decided we would stay in Naxxramas for 2-3 weeks and gear people up as the week before was our first time downing Kel'Thuzad (progress bars on the right updated). So we pressed forward and cleared Naxxramas in record time. The week prior, we had taken time on Thursday to clear the Spider wing, whereas on Friday, we cleared the whole place in under 3.5 hours - a very good time for us. We had two wings down in under 1 hour. So with our record time, we decided to head over to Ulduar to see what was going on there.

We quickly formed up, explained the first fight and promptly...wiped on trash. We just got too spread out, so on our next attempt, we stayed together and easily made it to the Flame Leviathan. Unfortunately, some people had issues with their vehicles and we also had problems picking people up after they had jumped on the Flame Leviathan. So we didn't get him down on the two attempts we had before we had to call it for the night. I'm looking forward to having more time in there - we should be able to easily take out the Flame Leviathan, but I can see issues with XT-002 already (it's a healer check) and I'm hoping Razorscale is a little bit easier on 25 man than it is on 10 man.

Then on Sunday, I see someone advertising a Sunwell run in trade chat. Bleh, I've been before and even at 80, unless your team has good coordination, you're not going to get past Felmyst or some other later bosses (which you can zerg as well). But then Aenador messaged me from the group and wanted to see if I wanted to go. With her and others from Familiaris Incursio in the group, I felt a little safer and decided to give it a shot. And I'm glad I did. It was quite fun and I got to finally see M'uru, the Twins, and Kil'Jaeden. I also won a piece of Tier 6 which makes me happy and earned another achievement. I just have the Black Temple left now. Here's some pictures from the run:

(2, 3, 4, and 5)

Which leads us to Monday. After quickly completing the daily cooking quest in my search for a Chef's Hat (I'm now over half way there), I headed up to the Argent Tournament ready to become a Champion! I quickly completed the dailies, bested a Champion in a joust, and earned my title. Tiddlywinks of Gnomeregan.


With the Champion title achieved, it was time to work for another faction. Ironforge just happened to be standing right there, so I went to work for them. He only had one quest for me on the day, so I headed over to the main tent to see what else I could do. Ah yes, the Black Knight!

I accepted the challenge, went outside and picked a steed and awaited the Black Knight. And what happened next? I demolished him. Pretty disappointing. I feel like this was a real opportunity wasted - so did my other guildmates who bested him yesterday. But hey, it's 10 more achievement points, upping my total to 5,860.

After that, it was time to work on getting some more Champion's Seals. The quests are getting a bit tougher this time around. The jousting opponents are much tougher and trying to work your way through the boneguards near the Citadel is a bit tougher. But all the quests were completed, even the group quest with the help of the wonderful Vetarra and I got my 5 seals, bringing me to 15. Just a few more days and I'll be able to get my Mechanopeep!

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 :(