It's been a while...

2 weeks without a post. Well, I have a lame excuse, but the truth is, I haven't been playing much. I've gotten pretty burned out on WoW right now and I've been playing a lot of Torchlight and New Super Mario Bros. Wii. But, with the Harvest Festival coming up this Sunday and Blizzard's anniversary (with the new pet) coming soon, I'll probably be on a bit more in the coming weeks. However, even if I am on, it'll probably be to just do dailies to continue to work on buying the last few mounts I need from the Argent Tournament.

That being said, patch 3.3 started downloading yesterday for me, so Icecrown isn't too far away - though one blue post has slated it as still a month or more away - and with it we'll have some new achievements to work on, some new dungeons to crawl, and a new raid to wipe out. Personally, I think I won't really be interested in WoW on a daily basis again until Cataclysm. There's just too little to do these days.

Back in the old days, there were grinds that took ages, there were pets to shuffle around in your bank, mounts to keep in your bags, and gear upgrades were few and far between. With the dumbing down of the game, you don't really have to worry about bank space, you don't need to care about which mount you carry with you, and every time there's a patch - even minor ones - there's new gear that can be bought with emblems or easily farmed with little time or skill involved.

Sure, I'm still having fun raiding with my 10 and 25 man (well, last night was pretty frustrating as we put in over 20 attempts on the heroic Faction Champions (10 man)). Our 25 man group is making progress as well. We clear the Trial of the Champions in good time each Friday, and though we've been doing VoA and Ony, we'll be skipping those in the future to put in more time clearing the last two bosses in Ulduar or continuing our work on the Trial of the Grand Crusader.

So I apologize for the lack of updates, but recently, there really hasn't been that much to report since I'm usually just logging on for Thursday and Friday raids. And with next week's raids canceled because of Thanksgiving, I might not be on at all for a while after I finish my Harvest Festival achievements. I still love the game, I just miss some of what it used to be. They've taken the grinds out of the game and replaced them with easy reputation gains and easy gear upgrades. At least the heroic modes still challenge us from time to time.

Achievements and Harvest Festival?

Last night, I quickly logged in looking to do the Harvest Festival achievements, only to realize that the Harvest Festival has no achievements and the achievements that were classified as "Harvest Festival" have now been properly updated to read "Pilgrim's Bounty." So that was a let down. However, the one Harvest Festival quest, to honor Uther was pretty cool, I just don't know why it's a week-long event and why no achievement or feat of strength is associated with it. Similarly, why no feat of strength for acquiring the Green Brewfest Stein? I have one for my yellow and blue steins...

Last night, after a quick run of Halls of Stone for a couple of Triumph badges (which also got me to 36 emblems which in turn bought me a new ring - Band of the Invoker), we thought, let's give this damn Less-Rabi achievement another try. In the past, we had spent hours trying to get the interrupts down correctly, and after two tries last night, we finally got it. Basically, it just took a lot of DPS and a little luck.

For our team, we had our warrior tank interrupt the first transformation - but not right away! The first cast time of transformation takes about 3.5 seconds, so we had our tank wait until the last possible moment to interrupt him. By this time, he was already under 50% so we didn't have the usual 50% transformation. Also, right after the interrupt went off, he knocked us all down, stunning us for a second or two. Immediatly after the stun, we used our interrupts and we got lucky because at that very moment, he attempted to transform. He was at about 20% by this time, so we quickly burned him before another 3 or 4 seconds passed and he had no time to do another transformation. So just two interrupts got us what is probably the most difficult part of Glory of the Hero these days.

After that, Aenador had just one achievement left for her Red Drake, so we hit up Ahn'kahet really quick hoping to get Volazj's Quick Demise for her. When I originally got it, we had a perfectly reflected Mind Flay which helped us get him under 33% while he was casting his first insanity, so we only had one insanity to deal with and we killed him in about 1.5 minutes. This time, I'm not sure what exactly happened, or how exactly it happened, but we killed him in 21 seconds. We had some sick DPS, a nice heroism, and in the end, he didn't get any insanity casts off. It's always fun to put out 7,000 DPS in a 5-man. Congrats Aenador on the new mount!

So now all I have left is Split Personality and Zombiefest. Both should be relatively easy to complete, but we just need to get a group together. Hopefully this weekend I'll finish them off and finally get my red proto drake.

As a follow up to yesterday's post, our 25 man cleared the Trial of the Crusader, then we quickly went and cleared VOA for some more T9 gear and then we went to Onyxia. To my surprise, we one shot her (after wiping earlier in the week in a 25 man PUG). We had just a couple people left up at the end, but she went down and we all rejoiced! So here's the most recent achievements:

I think next week, we'll try for Upper Back Pain or Three Sixty Pain Spike. Should be fun.