Ulduar Achievements

A couple of weeks ago, Ashielle decided to put together some 25 man Ulduar achievement runs. I missed out due to other engagements, but was able to make it this last Friday and Sunday.

So on Friday, we started with a fresh instance, and because they had done Orbituary the week before, we instead tried for Dwarfageddon and Shutout. I already had Shutout, but it was nice to get Dwarfageddon. We then went to Razorscale for one of the more tedious achievements, Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare. We got 18 dwarves on our first run through and quickly got the other 7 on our second try with the kill.

So we went on to XT-002 and got Must Deconstruct Faster, Nerf Gravity Bombs (already had), and Nerf Engineering (already had). We then went to Kologarn and after a few attempts, got With Open Arms. That was certainly interesting since you can't kill his hand, you can't break out more than 3 or 4 groups when he picks them up and it turns into a DPS race against those that die in the hand.

We then back-tracked a bit to the Iron Council and did the hardest of the three kill modes (and the only one I still needed): I Choose You, Steelbreaker. And with that awesome run done, we called it for the night.

We gathered up late Sunday after everyone had celebrated Father's Day and started on Auriaya. We quickly got Crazy Cat Lady after an accidental pull/wipe and then we went over to Hodir. After a few attempts with people learning the fight (yes, we've been doing this with people who have never seen Ulduar), we got I Could Say that This Cache Was Rare and I put out 18,000 DPS for the fight. Woo.

Last up for the night were some attempts at Thorim. On our first one, we got Siffed since that one is pretty easy to accomplish. Beating him with Sif down is another thing. But on our last attempt of the night, past our scheduled quit time, we got Lose Your Illusion. So another hard mode down. And not only that, we had our little mind controlled Dark Rune Warbringer, we all got Who Needs Bloodlust?

I'm looking forward to the 25 man run again this weekend as we'll get Orbituary (another 40 points as I have not done Flame Leviathan with any towers up) and hopefully the Ignis speed kill (skipped since they did it the week prior). Then we'll move on and hopefully get to Freya and maybe (gasp), the hardest of them all, Firefighter...

So I'm a happy gnome sitting on 8820 achievement points. I really need to get back into the BG's and get some more points there, but I've just been taking a break from Warcraft so no BG's for me as of now. Ashielle is also putting together a 10 man Ulduar group with people that have the drakes, so we'll be going for the other achievements that aren't part of the meta which makes me happy too.

Lastly, it's the Midsummer Fire Festival right now, so I'm working on getting another pet, the Frost Chip. Unfortunately, you only have one shot at him per day, so I will be really upset if he doesn't drop from the bag in the 14 attempts I have at him over the next two weeks. Yesterday, in my first bag though, I got the Frostscythe of Lord Ahune which is really cool, but ultimately, just takes up another spot in my bank.

Master Cook

It's been a while since my last update, but in the mean time, I've completed Glory of the Ulduar Raider (10), Gurubashi Arena Grand Master, and done a couple PvP achievements, but I finally did the 8 or so hours of grinding necessary to get my Brood of Nozdormu rep up to Neutral. Which means...Scepter of the Shifting Sands questlines.

Which also means...Dirge's Kickin' Chimaerok Chops! I now know every recipe in the game for cooking (except the rogue-only Thistle Tea). So I'm a happy gnome.

Current stats:
Achievement Points: 8,615
Mounts: 117
Pets: 141/144

Everything in One...

You'd think now that I've been playing a lot more, I'd be updating the blog a lot more, but there just hasn't been that much to write about.

Gear: Got four pieces of T10 today. Woot!

Pets: Got the one pet from the new Love is in the Air mini-boss. It was our fifth and final summon of my first day running the boss and I rolled a 100 to beat everyone else out for the pet.

Achievements: Got both Toravon achievements when he was released, finished up the final Love is in the Air achievement (Tough Love), and with Malygos being the weekly raid quest, today I got You Don't Have an Eternity (10) by 4 seconds.

Raids: Our 10 man has made progress on Putricide and have him to the 3rd phase on a regular basis. But we usually run out of time to attempt him more. So this week, we're clearing through Saurfang tonight so we can focus on the next wings on Thursday for our full raid. Our 25 man is also making progress. We have made good progress on the Blood Princes, but still do not have Festergut or Rotface down. But as each week goes by, our DPS and healing output goes up, so we'll get them down when the time is right.

Weekend Round Up

What a fun weekend it was. Ok, maybe not. I already have abandoned my new year's plan of running a couple hours of PvP each weekend - but then again, I was exceptionally busy this weekend, so maybe next weekend. But, I did log on long enough on Saturday and Sunday to get my dailies done and do the random heroic. On Saturday, the day had finally come, after grouping with 4 random people, Looking For Multitudes was complete and the Perky Pug was mine! So there I was playing with my new Pug and I see a Cracked Egg sitting in my inventory. It had been there for a couple of days, just waiting to be opened, so, expecting some yolk, I opened it and...Reins of the Green Proto Drake is mine!

So now that I never have to buy a Cracked Egg again, maybe I should switch back to the Wolvar - at least it'd make me do more dailies each day to get back to exalted. Oh yeah, I knew there was something I forgot. I finally hit exalted with the Explorer's League. The Frostborn will be exalted soon and running Icecrown, hopefully I can get The Ashen Verdict up quickly, which will give me 39 exalted reputations and I'll struggle to get that 40th. I'm closest with The Scale of the Sands, but no one runs Hyjal any more so it'll probably be Ratchet rep that I'll grind out for #40 and then I'll work on finishing off the three other goblin reps.

It Came from the Pug

Welcome to 3.3 :) I know it's been a while since updating, but not much has happened in the past few weeks. Our 10 man continued a bit in ToC(H) and Ulduar working on Firefighter (I subbed in with another 10 man team for the Firefighter completion). Other than that, we were patiently waiting for 3.3 and Icecrown to arrive and now that it has, well...not much has changed.

I'm still logging on periodically to do my dailies, but mostly I'm logging on every day to complete the random heroic and get my two Emblems of Frost. I did the weekly raid last week as well and have done the daily heroic every day except patch day when servers were horribly unstable. I've also done a couple of the new 5 man instances - they don't interest me much since there's no gear in there - I just want the achievements from them.

On the achievements front, I passed 8,000 points, picking up some easy dungeon points, Looking for More, 1,000 Stone Keeper's Shards (finally - now to work on finishing the Wintergrasp meta), and on Saturday, Dylana and Gillen from my wonderful guild finally helped me finish The Burning Crusader by bringing my Lower City rep up to Exalted. I now sit at 36 exalted reps and a couple more should be coming soon. Hopefully I can hit 40 soon.

Other than that, I fished a bunch this weekend and still no turtle, bought two new pets from Breanni in Dalaran (working on the Pug), and no new mounts. Hopefully our forays into Icecrown this week will be fruitful and we can also go back and finish up the Ulduar hard modes and get a shot at the rusted proto-drake.

2 Week Update

So, as you might have figured out, I'm one of the many suffering from WoW burnout. I log on every so often to check some auctions and maybe run some dailies, but for the most part, I've been logging on only on Thursdays and Fridays for raids and then spending the rest of my days playing different games like Civilization III (yeah, old school fun) or Torchlight (yay for Diablo clones).

So, with that being said, there has been very little progress on my character. Mount upgrades are not going to happen because I'm not running the Argent Tournament dailies. Pet upgrades are not going to happen because I'm not camping spawn points. Achievements are not going to happen because I'm not grinding anything or even online to attempt different achievements with guildmates.

However, logging on for Thursday nights has afforded me a great many new achievements. We've scrapped our Trial of the Champions runs on Thursdays and instead, we're focusing on Glory of the Ulduar Raider. In our last two weeks, we've made significant progress.

Last week, we started with a new raid ID, so we of course started on Flame Leviathan. It took us some time and some luck (just as to which vehicle he picked to target first) and we got him down with all four towers up. We then continued on to Razorscale and, though the fight was insanely long, we got Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare. We then continued on to the Assembly of Iron, and since we had done Steelbreaker the week before, we did Molegeim this week. And, luckily, I remembered to use my Iron Boot Flask for But I'm on Your Side.

Continuing on last week, we then skipped past Auriaya and went to Hodir who we absoultely destroyed. I think I did another 8 or 9k dps and we got Aravic his first sigil. We called it at that point and were ready to return this week.

To start this week's attempts last night, we went straight to Ignis for a couple of people who had not done the achievement the first time we did it. The first time we attempted Ignis, we got him down with just a couple of seconds to spare. This time, we got him down in under 3 minutes. We then moved on to Auriaya, quickly one-shot her with both her guardians up and then moved on to Thorim. We then moved to Freya.

We had never attempted Freya with any guardians up, so it was a new fight for all involved. We knew the basics - she'd have more powers, hit harder, the adds do more damage, etc. It took us a good hour to learn the fight, but we did it. She went down and gave us tons of flasks and other good gear. With just an hour left, we had Mimiron to go. After a few attempts at the hard mode, we gave up for the night and opted instead to go get Koralon and Onyxia.

And you'd think we'd one shot Koralon, but due to a healing mix-up, we wiped once and had to come back in to get him down. He dropped nothing of consequence, so we quickly headed over to Onyxia. On our first attempt (yes, it took us 2), we were absolutely destroying her. So much so that our healers and tanks weren't ready when she landed for phase 3. We burned her in Phase 2 so quickly that she didn't have a chance to deep breath at all. Unfortunately, she landed quickly, did a fear and we got some extra whelps, and the healers and tanks weren't ready to transition.

So, try 2 went much smoother, unfortunately, one person got hit in the one deep breath we had, so we didn't get the achievement, and we probably missed the 5 minute timer by just a few seconds (unfortunately, a DPS went down in phase 2). But a new cloak did drop for me - Fluttering Sapphiron Drape which is a significant upgrade at the one slot I was still using an ilvl 219 piece.

So in the past few weeks, we've made great progress on our proto drakes. I expect us to get Mimiron down next week and hopefully Vezax. Yogg will be tough for us, as we've only gotten him down one time in the past. With one less keeper (probably Freya), we should be able to do it with our better gear, but it could still be a week or two until we can see Algalon. So that's it for Ulduar...

Pets! Two new pets were released at the Blizzard Store this week. I of course bought them both as soon as I could and I love my little Pandaren Monk and Lil' K.T.. That brings me to 124 of 131. I'm still looking for some cheap raptors on the auction house, but I haven't seen any recently. Maybe I'll camp out in Un'goro Crater this weekend looking for a new one.

On the subject of microtransactions, I have absolutely no problem with the way Blizzard is handling the matter. I don't mind paying $10 for a pet or $20 for a mount. In fact, I welcome these transactions over the trading card game. The cards from the trading card game are extremely rare and, if bought on eBay, cost much more than $10 or $20 or even a $50 mount that Blizzard might offer (though at some point, you've moved away from microtransactions).

As long as they steer clear of offering gear or other items that directly benefit your character for cash, I don't see how anyone can complain. Pets, mounts, and tabards are all purely cosmetic. Offering these items for cash is a logical extension of their business plan and perfectly acceptable within the way the game is played.

Even though I have been on a break of late, I did log in for Day of the Dead. It was easy to quickly power through the one achievement and get the Macabre Marionette (which still works today even though it isn't Day of the Dead any more). And with the Ulduar achievements and the Day of the Dead achievement, I've quickly made progress and I am now at 7,865 points.

The Greatest Kitty

Tonight was our normal gold team run and after we annihilated the Trial of Champions along with Icehowl and Jaraxxus on heroic, we ran into a wall again on the Faction Champions. We did make progress, but didn't get them down. We of course got Ony down again, and after the Alliance took back Wintergrasp, we cleared the Vault of Archavon.

And...on Archavon...the mount dropped! And I rolled a 45. And Vetarra rolled a 95! And even though I whispered the raid leader and told him not to let her pass it to me, she did, and he forced the mount on me. So now I am the proud owner of the Reins of the Grand Black War Mammoth.

It was also a great day today as Breanni sent me a nice new penguin in the mail! Mr. Chilly is my 122nd pet. And he goes quite nicely with my 104th mount.

Additionally, on our way through the Trial of the Crusader, we picked up Three Sixty Pain Spike (10 player) and Salt and Pepper (10 player). Hooray for achievements.

7500, 100, Title, Pet

So, as everyone probably knows, today starts Brewfest! And, with Brewfest, comes achievements, violet proto-drakes, and pets! So this is probably the best day of the year for me. So I started with the two easiest achievements - eating and drinking!

I then continued on with another two easy achievements - since I already had three pieces of Brewfest Regalia from previous years, I just had to dance drunk in Dalaran, port to Shattrath and then jump off a bridge.

So I was left with just two achievements for my awesome Brewmaster title! First up, I defended the Brewfest grounds from the Dark Iron Dwarves and then we went to get even more revenge on them by entering into Blackrock Depths and defeating Coren Direbrew. And with that, What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been was complete!

And with that, I saw new mail, brought out my Argent Squire to get to my mailbox and retrieved what is probably the most beautiful mount in all of Azeroth, the Violet Proto-Drake. He's purple, flies at 310%, and is just downright amazing. Here he is in Netherstorm in all his beauty:

So with the proto-drake, I have now reached 100 mounts! And of course, with 100 mounts, comes a reward of a 101st mount! So I now sit at 101 mounts.

So there are my 100 mounts, however, before learning my 100th mount, I checked my achievement log, and there I sat, at 7500 points exactly. Such a beautiful number. But my 100th mount achievement takes me to 7510.

Of course, with Brewfest, comes an all new pet! My very own Pint-Sized Pink Elekk, my 121st pet. Just 7 elude me still. They will be mine!

97 Mounts

Got my Quel'dorei Steed last night. And yesterday I was wondering what would get me to 100 mounts. Well, I forgot about all this gold I've been hoarding. I can easily go buy a Grand Ice Mammoth, but I'd really like to save a bit more for the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth. But with Brewfest fast approaching, I won't have enough gold to buy the Mammoth and get 100 mounts on Sunday with the Violet Proto-Drake. I think I might hit up Vetarra or Aenador and see if I can dip into their cash reserves in exchange for a modest 10% return on their money. I only need 3,000g or so. And I could probably pay that back at about 1,000g a week (plus interest).

Either way, I just want to hit 100 mounts and get it over and done with. And then when the 100 pets achievement drops with 3.2.2 or 3.3, I'll already be there ready for that achievement.

Bullet Point Updates

• The Gold Team went into the Trial of the Crusade last night and after honing our strategy, finally took down the Faction Champions. They certainly are not a pushover. We had the boomkin, disc priest, healy shaman, warlock, rogue, and ret pally. Our original strategy was to take the shaman down first, but we found that bursting down the priest was easier. After him, we switched to the shaman and when he was down, the team was left without heals and could easily be killed. I think it took us about 7 or 8 attempts. Our first 2 resulted in no kills. We killed the priest on our 3rd try, and from there on, it was just a matter of learning the proper way to fear-bomb, CC, silence, and focus down the individual champions.
• After the Faction Champions, we had the Val'kyr Twins. We were a little wary of the fight since we had heard they were easy, but they had just been hotfixed.

  The following bug fixes to Val'kyr Twins were just deployed, and they will increase the overall difficulty of the encounter.

  • Surge of Light and Surge of Darkness were not being cast properly on Normal difficulties.
  • Light Vortex was doing less damage than Dark Vortex.

  Along with those two major bug fixes, we also increased the rate with which the Concentrated Light and Concentrated Darkness spawns.

  But we went on and downed them on our third attempt - our first was used to just learn the encounter. Our second attempt featured a couple of deaths as we still learned the exact way to take them down, and our third was perfect. So next week, we await Anub'Rekan and look forward to then tackling the Trial in heroic mode.
• I received Grunty from my Blizzcon goodie bag - unfortunately, due to a family vacation, I did not attend any of Blizzcon. However, Thursday night it was fun to meet up with many in-game friends at a local sandwich shop. Perhaps more on Blizzcon thoughts later.
• I finally received Snarly's Bucket from Old Man Barlo. This now completes my crocolisk collection!
• I spent countless hours on Monday camping Takk the Leaper. Then I realized my addon was misconfigured, so he probably spawned and I didn't even know it. I have it set up correctly now, so I should not miss a raptor spawn any time soon.
• Achievements have been on hold for the most part - but we might get some tonight in Ulduar as we will most likely be attempting some 10 man hard modes.

Finally! 3/4

So, it finally happened. That mean old man Barlo finally decided to reward my countless times doing his Crocolisk quest with Muchbreath's Bucket. So now I sit at 3/4 crocs with just Snarly to go. Off to hunt more raptors. I'm certainly not paying 3,000g for them on the auction house.

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.

3.2 is Here

So patch 3.2 arrives today. There's a new 5/10/25 man raid instance, new Argent Tournament dailies, new mounts, and new pets. I'll probably farm the pets this weekend and maybe do some extra dailies each day, but other than that...probably just continue in 25 man Ulduar and step it up to 10 man Coliseum (since we finally got Yogg down - yay!).

The only thing I'm upset about is they're going to drop me about 150 achievement points and I'll be back under 7,000. I think with the new Coliseum achievements, it should be easy to get back over 7,000. We'll see when I log in tonight! Can't wait!

Well I'll Be...

I never thought I'd see the day, but there I was, in Arathi Basin with my pocket healer (who didn't stay in my pocket like I trained her...), Xenoxa, and we were just going back and forth with the horde. 2 bases to 2. 1 to 1. 3 to 2. 2 to 3. At one point we had 4 to their 1, but quickly lost that advantage. But as we neared the end, the horde hit 1800 resources about 1 minute before we took back a third node and we hit 1800 not soon thereafter. Then it was a race to the finish. The horde had 2 minutes, 30 seconds until they won, but when we capped and held that third base, the timer switched over. We knew it would be close, at one point, Xenoxa pointed out it'd be 1980 to 2000. What a let down that would be.

But in the end...1990 to 2000! We won! And I got an achievement I never thought I'd see: We Had it All Along *cough*. And not only that, I had picked up the daily battleground quest two days earlier for Arathi Basin, so I just went and turned it in and received Call to Arms!. And with those two achievements, I broke the 6,800 point barrier. Not long now until 7,000!

Of course, the Summer Fire Festival isn't helping much. I finished my fires and juggled my torches, but I can't get the last achievement which requires a full set of Fire Festival gear. I currently sit at 45 blossoms and can only get 10 per day. There's 12 days left, leaving me just 165 blossoms, 35 short of the sandals I need. Hopefully Blizzard will fix this soon so as to not penalize those of us who did the fire festival fires last year. I also can't summon Ahune so I can't get my pet either...

Midsummer Fire Festival

This Sunday, the fire festival returns to Azeroth. Last year, I spent a whole day visiting every elder and collecting all the coins I could. Well, apparently I missed an elder. Somehow I missed the elder in Ashenvale for the Flame Warden of Kalimdor achievement. So I just have to visit the one elder in order to achieve The Fires of Azeroth. Additionally, I will then have to dance around a pole wearing the set that I purchased during last year's event. After that, I have to juggle a torch for a mere 40 seconds and I will be the Flame Warden!

After that, all that will be left is to kill Ahune a few dozen times in order to get my Scorched Stone.

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...

100 Pets and Hodir Down

Just a quick update...last night, I received word in game that there was a member of the horde who wished to trade Argent Tournament pets. In exchange for a low listing of the Mechanopeep on the neutral auction house, I would have a chance to buy the Sen'jin Fetish. And thus, I received my 100th "official" pet (I still like to count Don Carlos' Famous Hat and the Bloodsail Admiral's Hat as "pets"). Many thanks to Taranwayward for the trade!

After that was finished, I headed up to Ulduar for our run. The night before, we cleared Flame Leviathan with one tower up, XT-002, Kologarn, and Freya in an abbreviated two hour run time. I was lucky enough to outroll Brellis by just one point and won my T8 gloves, Valorous Kirin Tor Gauntlets, and now I have more hit rating than I know what to do with (I resocketed some gems and now have no +hit gems...).

So last night, we went straight to Hodir and had little trouble with him. He dropped a couple of tanking items and we received Cheese the Freeze and I Have the Coolest Friends. We then went back to our nemesis, Mimiron. We spent the next 2+ hours wiping on him. We consistently got him to phase 4, but ran into issues each time. Learning how the P3Wx2 Laser worked exactly, how his ranged attacks work, etc. The problem also was, while we could consistently get him to phase 4, we had issues in phases 1-3 occasionally which would end up forcing us to wipe the raid so we could start over and wasting more of our time. During our best attempt, we got each section to about 20%, which is good, but not that good. I know we can do better, but our massive amounts of melee DPS on this fight make it very tough to master. We forced Vetarra to go respec boomkin, but still, that left 5 melee players as we had 2 ranged and 3 healers. With the rockets, proximity mines, and AOE effects, that's a lot to heal and avoid. I'm pretty sure next week, we'll do the same - clear through Freya or Hodir on night one, then hit up Thorim and Hodir/Freya and finally Mimiron on the next night.

That stupid bot will go down!

Bunch o' Updates

After Wednesday's amazing run, we went back into Ulduar on Thursday to continue our domination. Unfortunately, the new bosses of the place put us in our rightful place. Though we were able to conquer Freya after taking over an hour on her trash and another few wipes learning her first stage, we decided to then venture back to Mimiron who had destroyed us the week before. Despite quite a few tired souls, we spent well over an hour on him, wiping over and over. Mostly in the first stage, sometimes in the second stage, and rarely in the third stage. Just as we were about to call it, we got one more attempt on him. And though I'd love to say we took him down, we did not. But, we did get our best attempt of the night, taking him to the fourth, and final stage and I'm quite confident we'll get him next week.

After concluding our Friday night 25-man runs in Naxxramas, the gold team moved on to Ulduar this week. I didn't have high expectations as I've heard of many great guilds running into walls after Flame Leviathan. However, our team is quite amazing. We quickly dispatched of the Flame Leviathan and then moved on to Razorscale. It took our team a while to learn the fight, since for a good chunk of the raid, it was their first time seeing these fights. After some trials and getting him to within 500k of dying while down two DPS slots, we picked up some extra players and promptly took him down with the full 25 man complement.

After Razorscale, we moved on to XT-002. He gave us some issues as we struggled with positioning early in our attempts, but it didn't take us long to destroy him and stop his play time. Where to next? Ignis of course! I was actually very pleasantly surprised at the speed which we dispatched Ignis with. Unfortunately, it was nearing the end of the night and we had to leave Ulduar with the first four bosses down. I truly believe next week we'll get Kologarn and the Iron Council down with this team.

Early the next morning, I awoke knowing that I had just one more day of dailies to go until I could earn my Crusader title. I quickly headed up to Icecrown and completed the dailies earning my title and amassing 6,500 achievement points exactly.


I then continued on my business, doing other daily quests, getting denied by Old Man Barlo on my hunt for crocolisks, and working towards 100 more cooking awards to buy a Chef Hat...

This morning, I woke up early, continued to advertise in Icecrown that I am buying Argent pets for 2,000g each and finally got some takers. So I now am the proud owner of all 5 Alliance-side Argent Tournament pets. It cost me 6,000g, but they're mine! And tomorrow I'll hit 40 more marks which I can purchase another Alliance pet with and hopefully work out a trade for a horde pet. 5 more of those pets to go. As it stands now though, I'm at 99 pets. So which ever horde pet I acquire first will be my 100th pet!

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!