What a Morning!

It started out boring enough...just out doing my dailies, working on my Champion's Seals for more mounts when a couple guildies decided they wanted to go to normal Trial of the Champion to try and obtain a trinket. So we formed up, but decided, rather than Trial first, we'd do the daily heroic and daily normal at the same time in the Oculus. So off we went. And when we formed up, it was decided we'd go for the 20 minute timer for Make it Count. After quickly downing the first boss, I started the stopwatch and I never had a doubt that we'd make it. We tried a new strategy which I had never tried before and it worked wonders. Here's a quick overview:

• Make sure you know which drakes you want beforehand. We had 2 amber, 2 emerald, and a ruby. It doesn't really matter which you pick, but having 2 amber drakes makes it really easy switching back and forth on the channeled spell and high damage spells. Of course you want the ruby to keep aggro and the emeralds to heal.
• Once you know what drakes you want, immediately go up to the center platform. Previously, I had always been in groups that want to clear the outer platforms first. But no! Go to the middle. By clearing the middle, it gives you an easy way to go from outer platform to outer platform.
• Once you have the center platform clear, go back and then fly straight out to a platform with constructs. By flying straight out to it, you can then fly straight back after you have cleared the platform. Kill as few drakes as necessary to get to the edge of the platform, clear it by pulling the mobs to the edge, and then go back to the middle.
• Repeat for the second platform. Once you're back in the middle, fly around to the second boss and fly straight out to him. Clear most of the drakes above his platform so he doesn't call on them to help during the fight. Quickly kill him and then immediately fly up to the next section.
• Once you are on the next section, land directly on top of the image. He won't aggro until you hit him, so make sure everyone gets there, hit him, and clear the adds. Rince and repeat all around.
• Once you're ready for the third boss, again, land right on top of him and when you're ready, hit him and start DPS. When he lays down his first frost bomb, kite him behind the pillar closest to you. Now, if he lays more frost bombs, ignore them. Heal through them. When he teleports, you're already behind the pillar - wait for him to return and kill him.
• With the boss down, start killing the whelps. You need to get most of them down before engaging the boss as they can do stacking damage. Get ready to engage the boss and then go! You should have about 4-6 minutes left at this point. I think we had 5 minutes left and it took us 2.5 minutes to kill him. So down he went with 2.5 minutes to spare.
• When you're working your way up to the boss, don't worry about loot. Just have someone need it all and then distribute at the end. Every second counts (kind of - you have some leeway, but not much).

So after we quickly rolled through the Oculus, we headed over to the Trial to try and get Eleazarjr a new trinket. Of course, it didn't drop, but we steamrolled that instance as well and then went outside to try it on heroic. One quick run later, I ended up getting both Needy and I've Had Worse. Needy was a long time coming as since the patch, I've been "needing" everything. Since we can now trade soulbound items for 2 hours, I just need everything and trade it or disenchant it. A couple hundred items later, Needy was mine.

As for "I've Had Worse", here's a couple hints - during phase 1, kill the add right away. He only has like 50 or 60k health - so he goes down quickly. Phase 2 is where you'll most likely lose this achievement. It was pretty easy with two mages and two pallies, but this strategy should work for most - right away, start AOE. That's the only way to take all the ghouls down before he can have one explode. Both pallies immediately had consecrate down and both of us mages popped mirror image, dropped a flamestrike on the Black Knight and then used a Blizzard. Once the tank had to move to get out of a death and decay, I switched to arcane explosion to give greater mobile AOE. So all the ghouls went down and it was ours!

So after that, I quickly finished up the dailies I had started, turned in my daily dungeon quests, and was done for a bit. A very good morning. Plus, I got this nice achievement last night (it's pretty easy):

To get The Faceroller, take Eadric down to about 30k health. Make sure there's no DOTs on him and then stop DPS when you get under 20k. The tank shouldn't even be hitting him. Now wait for him to target someone to throw the hammer at. Dispel/trinket out of/spell reflect/grounding totem when Eadric starts to channel and the player targeted will be able to catch the hammer. Your action bar will change and you just need to hit "1" to throw the hammer back at him. This should finish him off and "The Faceroller" is yours!

The Push for 7,000

Last week, we accidentally got a couple achievements while doing heroic Ulduar, so my push towards 7,000 achievement points is going strong. It started on Ignis - I was on construct duty, so it was my job to blow up the constructs when they became brittle. However, one of them got out of my line of sight behind a fire pillar (I just lost track of it), so when the call was made, it was too late for me to go shatter it. Our awesome offtanks quickly picked it up again, made it brittle, and before you knew it, when I shattered one construct, the other one that had been awoken by Ignis was shattered as well. So there we had Heroic: Shattered.

We continued on and we reached Kologarn who refused to let us pass. Normally, we focus all DPS on the right arm and down him that way, but recently we've found that just as he's about to die, his left arm has been DPS'ed enough via incidental damage (swipes, consecrates, death and decays, etc.) that if we just add a bit of DPS to kill the arm, all that damage is transferred to Kologarn and he goes down quicker. So when I saw we were close to killing Kolo and I saw that his left arm was getting low, even when the right arm popped up, I focused DPS on the left arm, knowing the call to kill the left arm would come when the right arm went down. With the extra damage I was able to provide to the left arm before the right arm went down, we were able to get Heroic: Disarmed.

Then, last night, while fighting for control of Wintergrasp, I realized after all was said and done that I was just 8 honorable kills away from 5,000. So this morning, I headed out a little early to the Strand of the Ancients and quickly dispatched of 8 hordies to pick up 5,000 Honorable Kills

Of course, while striving for achievements, I'm still doing my Crusader dailies each and every day (actually, Saturday was the first time since the patch that I didn't get my dailies done - ale comes first). A day before though, while out there, I found my evil twin! Finneal (achievement comparison) was there and he looked almost exactly like me! Just with more achievement points! I can't let that stand. But we did have some fun and we both popped our mirror images just to confuse some people and seeing eight little dopplegangers running around was a sight to be seen.

Lastly, last night, I went into a quick VOA since I really didn't have anything else to do and even though I don't need any items from there, it was fun to do single target DPS. Usually in Ulduar, I have to do crowd control, DPS some bomb bots, or just do things that don't allow me to go all out. Well, on both Emalon and Archavon I was pretty much free to do as much DPS as I could and it showed. I easily topped the damage meters and was quite happy with my performance. And all of this was done without an enchant on my purty new Runescribed Blade.

Emalon:

Archavon:

79 Days

It's been exactly 79 days since patch 3.1 was released. 79 days of doing the daily fishing quest. 79 days of doing Argent Dailies each and every day, without fail. Never missing a day. And finally, after 79 days, Marcia decided it was time to reward my dedication...Strand Crawler is mine!

Now...Barlo, you still owe me two crocs.

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??

Another Crazy Night

It all started out innocently enough. I picked up my fishing and cooking daily quests in Dalaran and headed up to Icecrown for the Argent Tournament Dailies. They were quickly completed and I went back to Dalaran to fish in the sewers for some Corroded Jewelry. It wasn't fun as there's usually 10 to 20 other people fishing down there so you can't just listen for your own bobber. So after about 10 casts I was getting antsy and annoyed with the whole process when finally I fished up the jewelry. But what came along with the jewelry?? A Giant Sewer Rat! Finally. After spending countless hours fishing by myself down there in the sewers without any luck whatsoever, I get the rat after spending just a few minutes while looking for Jewelry! Old Ironjaw, I'm coming for you next!!

So that left me with just a cooking daily to do. I sent some cooked rhino dogs over from my banker, only to find out they were Mighty Rhino Dogs. But time had run out. It was time for Ulduar. Luckily, on the way up to the Ulduar entrance, there's quite a few rhinos out there so I quickly picked up my four rhino meat and got ready to start a new ten man raiding week.

The plan for the night was to attempt Flame Leviathan and XT-002 on hard modes. So we got assembled, got into our vehicles, and headed out. We left just one tower up and proceeded to one-shot the Flame Leviathan earning us some nice Emblems of Conquest along with some nice loot, including Firesoul for my nice new main hand weapon.

After the Flame Leviathan, it was time to start working on XT-002 in hard mode. We were able to break his heart each time when trying, but his resulting "Heartbroken" mode is quite taxing. First you have adds to finish off before you can focus on XT, then you also have to worry about void zones left by gravity bombs and light sparks left by light bombs. On top of this, his tantrum hits for more damage and he also has a short enrage timer. After a lot of attempts (probably 8-10), we were really getting the fight down - knowing when to use cooldowns, where to drop void zones, if we should kill the light sparks or not (I think you have to, but focusing DPS on them makes it tougher to get the XT-002 down before his hard enrage timer). Eventually, we abandoned the hard mode. We might not have the gear at the current time to do it or we just need a lot more practice healing through all of his various attacks. We did learn one important thing though. And welcome to Tiddly's first boss fight explanation with drawing...


So here we have XT-002's room. You enter from the south where it says "Entrance" and have four scrap piles around the room. He usually stays near the stairs at the north side of the room. What we found is that if you pull him over and tank him between two scrap piles on the side of the room, he will only spawn adds from the two scrap piles furthest away from him (denoted by the incoming red arrows). During our multiple attempts, he spawned various levels of trash. During one attempt, he spawned one group of small bots (easily killed with one Blizzard). During another attempt, all he spawned was one bomb bot. But then during one of our last attempts, he spawned 2 sets of small bots, one bomb bot, and one pummeler. So your spawns will vary from fight to fight, but he will only spawn them from the two scrap piles with arrows. Never from the two piles right next to him.

So with this information in hand, and knowing we could take the heart down to almost killing it, we set out to see if we could get Must Deconstruct Faster. And the short answer is, yes, yes you can. We killed him in 173 seconds, well under the 205 required by the achievement. With adds spawning from only two scrap piles, I was easily able to take them down on each pass with our offtank picking up the pummelers and since we were able to do so much damage to the heart, we basically chained heart spawns. If you manage to do enough damage to his heart, it will immediately take him from 75% to 50% and spawn the heart again. You can then take him from 50% to 25% and so on. So yeah, 173 seconds. Not too shabby. But unfortunately, not hard mode.

We continued on, one shot Kologarn, headed to the Iron Council and two-shot them and then went over to Auriaya where we quickly one shot her. We had about 30 minutes left so we decided against going for Mimiron's trash and went back to take on Razorscale and try and get A Quick Shave. So yeah, one shot that. Not a problem there. We got him down to 67% on his first landing and easily got him under 50% on the second landing and destroyed him after he landed. So that didn't take the 30 minutes we had left. So let's go over to Ignis.

The first time we killed Ignis we zerged him. It's not a quick zerg, but you can do it - ignore the adds and just focus fire Ignis down. This time though, we thought it'd be a good idea to kill him the correct way. And...one shot. So that pretty much ended a great Wednesday "pre-clear" night. Our Wednesday night group is new and the sole purpose is to clear out the early bosses in Ulduar so our Thursday night Gold Team run can work on new content. For example, we have everything down right now up to the Tier 8 bosses. So tonight we'll probably work on Freya and then Mimiron with Thorim or Hodir coming next week. But even though we were done in Ulduar, we weren't done for the night. Not with the Alliance controlling Wintergrasp.

Let's go get some Tier 8! So we headed over, lost one player, picked up a pug mage (drats! competition on Tier 8), and quickly one shot Emalon. Tier 8 dropped for our healy druid, Dylana and he becomes the first in the team with any pieces of Tier 8. We then played around with Archavon who is a joke these days, got an offspec piece of Tier 7 for our pug mage, and I got a PvP cloak (because you know how much I PvP...).

And thus ended our fun night of raiding. In the end, I got a few great achievements, including Three Car Garage on our Flame Leviathan Hard Mode take down and I'm sitting at 6,420 points. Tonight, Freya and Mimiron are on notice and tomorrow the 25 man Gold Team makes our first foray into Ulduar. And then Saturday, Crusader Tiddlywinks. A fun few days coming up.

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.

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...

The Daily Circuit

Every day starts in Dalaran. I do the daily cooking quest and then venture out to find more dailies to do. My circuit starts at Moa'ki Harbor in Dragonblight where I do the Kalu'ak daily quest. I then fly over to Kamagua and help two sea cows find true love for more Kalu'ak reputation.

A quick trip up to The Argent Stand in Zul'Drak for Troll Patrol, and 900-1000 reputation, is next. And then a quick flight from there to Dun Niffelem to do the Sons of Hodir dailies. There's currently 5 for me to do since hitting honored which yields 1600 rep. From there I have a choice - either go to Icecrown for dailies or port back to Dalarn.

Usually, I'll port back to Dalaran to do the other leg of quests. I fly to Unu'pe for the last of the three daily Kalu'ak quests, and then fly up to Sholazar Basin to do my three Oracles quests. Once done there, then it's on to Icecrown for more dailies.

Upon arriving in Icecrown, I have 7 dailies left to do. I haven't quite figured out the dailies that I'm going to do on a regular basis, but there's plenty scattered throughout Icecrown to keep me busy. Also, in just 4 days, I'll be fully exalted with the Kalu'ak which will leave me with 10 dailies to do in Icecrown or, the alternative...

Wyrmrest Accord reputation. I figure on my way down to Moa'ki Harbor to start the day, I can stop in at the Wyrmrest Temple for a quick daily and then I after completing my loop, I'd port back to Dalaran and instead of going to Unu'pe, I can go over to Coldarra and do the Wyrmest daily there and then up to Sholazar Basin.

Either way, I'll be staying busy for quite a while. After my loop, without counting Icecrown dailies, I receive the following rep on average:

Argent Crusade: 900-1100 based on different Troll Patrol dailies.
Kirin Tor: 150 from the daily cooking quest.
The Kalu'ak: 1500 with just 4 days left until max exalted.
The Sons of Hodir: 1600 with quite a ways to go, but these are fun dailies.
The Oracles: 1700 with 12 days left until max exalted. I won't be switching to Frenzyheart though until I have all the pets that can be obtained from the Mysterious Egg

The Path to 77

Last night, I reached 77 seasons thanks to some fun in the wonderful Sholazar Basin. A wonderful region of Northrend that is lush and green. A huge step up from the closest zone I could compare it to - the Un'goro Crater. I had made it my mission last night to take revenge on D.E.H.T.A. for making me go love all those mammoths in the Tundra, so I teamed up with Hemet Nesingwary to destroy some beasts.

Upon arriving at the Nesingwary base camp, I was surprised to see there was no flight path, despite hearing there was. Luckily after fetching a motor and some other parts, I was able to rebuild the flight path and could use it for an easy escape from the basin back to Zul'drak for leveling. Of course, first I had to kill a bunch of rhinos, sabers, snakes, crocs, and whelps. They all succumbed to my awesome power and I easily breezed through all the quests I was given. The reward wasn't quite worth it, however the achievements were: The Snows of Northrend and Hemet Nesingwary: The Completed Quests.

So then I returned to Zul'drak for some leveling and found an absolutely amazing group for the Amphitheater of Anguish. Not only did we quickly blow through everything they could throw at us, but we also had hordies trying to steal our kills and kill us while we were fighting. We quickly dispatched them, even destroying them when they outnumbered us 7-5 and we were fighting the finall boss of the Amphitheater. It was great fun and I finally have a new weapon: the Chilly Slobberknocker! What a name! But it was without an enchant! For shame, young Tiddlywinks, for shame! So I gave out a bunch of free enchants to my buddies Weser and Ryshat, got Enchanting up to 400, and gave myself a nice enchant of Enchant Weapon: Exceptional Spellpower. Oh yeah, I also got the achievement, Of Blood and Anguish.

And now for some updates on skills and achievements:
Enchanting: 400
Cooking: 410
Engineering: 381
First Aid: 441
Fishing: 389

2,851 quests out of 3,000
414 dailies out of 500
6,170g out of 10,000g

Lack of Updates

I know I've been slacking, there just hasn't been too much to write about. The Gold 25 Man Team went into Gruul's & Magtheridon's Lair and absolutely destroyed the place. With so much time to spare, we ventured into SSC, cleared all of the trash without any real effort (though nothing! dropped - no Marks of Illidari, Nether Vortices, patterns, nothing), and we got to the Lurker Below. We had just one shot at him, most everyone was new to the fight (I have seen it a few times, never seen it successfully done), and we got him down to about 70%. Next week he dies.

I had a chance to make it back into Karazhan after a few weeks off and picked up some badges. I'm approaching 50 badges now from Karazhan, Shattered Sun Supplies, and random bosses (Gruul, Setthekk Halls, etc.). So now I'm contemplating making more changes to my gear.

The one item I'm considering is the Boots of Incantations to replace my Boots of Blasting. It's a loss of 25 crit for a gain of 12 stamina, 1 intellect, 23 spirit, 4 spell hit, and 16 damage. I just need to get to 75 badges and I'll make the switch.

I'm also considering losing my Spellfire set, but I probably won't as I'd only upgrade two pieces and the stat changes don't really make too much sense at this time.

One other change I'm looking to make quite soon is to switch out Enchant Gloves: Spell Strike for Enchant Gloves: Major Spellpower. I'm pretty certain that with one more Great Lionseye, I'll be able to make the change. It's a huge upgrade as usually hit and damage are traded at a 1:1 ratio, so 20 damage for 15 hit is something I'll be looking into next week.

Should be interesting to be out of town this weekend. It's been a while since I haven't played at least a little on any given day. In fact Sunday will be the first day since the patch I won't be able to complete the daily fishing quest. That stupid quest is the bane of my existence. No good reward yet. No pets, no nothing. At least with the daily cooking quest I was able to get a recipe a week, whereas it's been almost a month now without anything good - no new line, no hat, no pets.

Pets, Pets, Pets

With my latest acquisitions of the Hyacinth Macaw and Crawdad, I am now in the top 50 pet collector's on a single character as tracked by WarcraftPets.com. I am currently sitting at 62 of 79 possible pets. Who knows how many times I will have to fish to find those four pets, but I am fishing every day and still nothing - not even a hat or recipe.

Once Again, Left in the Dust

Yesterday while completing the quests for the Shattered Sun Offensive, there was one quest I was not able to complete - Gaining the Advantage. Once again, similar to the Netherwing quests, there's a daily quest just for gatherers. So Tailor/Enchanters like myself get left out on a daily quest, left out on reputation gains, and just left out again. Why not have us turn in a special bolt of imbued netherweave that only tailors could create? Or enchant an item that the Offensive could use as they battle against Kael'thas?

Assuming all things equal, I'm sitting at 1,600/3,000 reputation on my way to friendly and someone who can mine/herb/skin is sitting at 1,850/3,000. I can only get 1,350 rep today, someone who can gather can get 1,600. They will be friendly and I'll be a day behind. Maybe two days behind when they get to Honored. So any enchanter/gatherers will be able to create Large Prismatic Shards from Void Crystals all that much sooner.

I guess it's just a minor gripe, but I don't see the point in having daily quests that can be completed by a minority of characters out there. Why not just add another one that can be completed by all?

20 Quests and Counting

After all was said and done tonight, I'm halfway towards friendly with the Shattered Sun Offensive, the Gold Team killed Gruul, and I completed 20 of the 25 daily quests.

Did the cooking quest, the fishing quest, the quests in Nagrand and Netherstorm, the Ogri'la quests, the Skettis quests, and a majority of the Netherwing quests. I did one PvP quest in Hellfire Peninsula and I also was able to turn in one of each of my PvP tokens for even more gold. After all the quests, minus the gold spent on large prismatic shards, I think I made over 200g tonight and it was all quite easy.

I should find out tomorrow if I won my Oozling and at this rate, I should be able to purchase a couple Hearts of Darkness for my Mantle of Nimble Thought sometime soon.

No New Dagger...

Well, I had forgotten that the new badge vendor isn't available during the first part of the siege on the Sunwell Terrace. So even after buying 5 prismatic shards for my enchant, I cannot buy my new dagger. But that's ok, I had fun over on the Terrace, did some extra daily quests, gained 1600 rep with the Shattered Sun Offensive (yay, already over halfway to friendly) and did even more daily quests.

I did the fishing quest, but did not receive a pet today - but I'm sure I will soon. I then did the Nagrand and Netherstorm dailies, did the cooking daily, went back to Shadowmoon to do more dailies there and as of right now, I have done 13 of 25 possible daily quests. We're getting ready for Gruul's now, so I probably won't do many more, but it sure is nice to be able to buy 5 large prismatic shards and make 60g on top of that with daily questing.

Are Daily Quests Leaving Casuals Behind?

With the new patch coming out soon, a post at WoW Insider.com asks if the daily quests are leaving casuals behind. I left a long comment, but thought I would explain my daily questing rationale.

To begin, I usually log out in Shattrath - mainly due to the fact that I can port for free back there and then just start whatever I need when I log on and I can usually sell some enchants while standing around at the start or end of the day.

Since I'm in Shattrath, I'll pick up the daily cooking quest and check the daily battleground. If it's AV, I'll queue. If not, I'll evaluate my options based on the daily cooking quest.

If it's Kaliri Stew, I head to Skettis to get a Kaliri Wing while bombing and searching for the prisoner. If I don't find the prisoner while bombing, I don't do the escort quest. If it's Demon Broiled Surprise, I'll head to Skettis and do the bombing run and look for the prisoner. After bombing, I'll then take a free ride to Blade's Edge and finish the cooking quest while doing the four daily quests there. If the quest is Spiritual Soup, I'll again head to Skettis and bomb while searchinging for the prisoner and then head to Netherwing Ledge. While there, I'll pick up the quest to disrupt the twilight portal. I'll then head to Nagrand and cook up the soup and kill the 20 agents.

With Skettis finished and Blade's Edge done in one, I'll then head back to the Netherwing Ledge as the most money can be made there. I'll pick up all the daily quests there then head directly into the mine. Doing the two quests in there are the best way to start your farming - awarding 30g for a relatively small time requirement. Plus, the greys that drop from the mobs there usually vendor at the end for 4-5 more gold. Add to that the mobs frequently drop greens, blues, and I've also seen two purple BOE's (one pair of Leggings of Beast Mastery I found sold for 1000g on auction).

After that, it's a toss up as to what to do next. I might fly around a bit and booterang some mobs, if I haven't done Blade's Edge dailies, I might fly up there and complete those. More often than not, I'll gather Netherwing Relics as the mobs that drop them also supply me with netherweave or I'll head up to Netherstorm to collect mana berries if that is he daily cooking quest.

But once the Sunwell Plateau is opened to visitors, I will be spending the bulk of my time there working on rep and earning money through dailies.