Gruul Down (With a PUG)

Last week, after finally seeing Gruul taken down, I received my Earthen Signet (it goes well with the Blazing Signet that had been sitting in my bank). Just as I was about to call it a night after running a few quick dailies, Aracely messaged me and asked if I wanted to go to Heroic Underbog. Since I knew he had a great group already put together, I obliged and forced myself awake for a little while longer.

So not only would I be able to complete the quest, The Cudgel of Kar'desh, but I could also gain a little more rep and get me a little closer to exalted with the Cenarion Expedition (one of the few factions in the Outland I'm not exalted with). After turning in all my Coilfang Armaments, I am within 1,000 rep of exalted. So close.

So while I was able to turn in the quest and get one step closer to being a Champion of the Naaru (Vetarra received her title last night with the quest turn-in - CONGRATS!), I also got rep, and...Quagmirran's Eye dropped. Now, I've recently been using Icon of the Silver Crescent when fighting trash mobs and during everyday grinding, as I don't need the extra +hit that the Scryer's Bloodgem provides. However, the Icon really doesn't get put to full use. I use the extra spell damage whenever I remember to activate it, but sometimes, that can be 5-10 minutes between uses...not very smart. So the nice thing about Quag's Eye is that it has no "use" requirement. It's all on equip.

The Icon of the Silver Crescent adds 43 passive damage while the Eye only adds 37, but the eye also procs to increase haste by 320! for six seconds. According to Lhivera's page, with my current stats, the Icon adds 3 more DPS over the Eye. However, those 3 DPS are conditional on maximum usage of the "use" of the trinket. Unfortunately, like I said, I don't use the trinket to its maximum potential. So I'm thinking I'm going to use Quag's Eye for a while and see how it stacks up. It'll be really tough to figure out how it does do in comparison to the Icon, but it will be one less thing I have to worry about activating during fights.

((Yes, I know you can put the Icon in a macro so it will activate if available during every fireball, and maybe that is a better option for me, but for now, I'll try the Eye. I like to save my trinkets for certain points where I know I can get full use of the "use" feature, but if I'm not using it as much as I could, then waiting for those times doesn't make sense. We'll see how the eye stacks up.))

Festival Tailoring

After a quick run around the southern part of the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, I amassed 20 coins and bought two patterns of Festival Dress and Festival Suit. I now sit at 257 known tailoring patterns. There are 301 possible recipes I could know. A nice 85% of all recipes. A lot to go though...and none that easy to find.

JubJub!

((My apologies for the lack of udpates. I've been slammed at work and as such, missed Gruuls, Kara, and Zul'Aman last week and have already missed Gruuls and plan on missing Kara tonight - however, some stuff has happened...))

On Friday night, after taking a week off from raiding, I awoke with the need to set some things on fire. The lovely Amatsuterasu messaged me just as I awoke, requesting my presence as mage tank for High King Maulgar. I obliged since I knew it was the only time during the week I would be free for Gruul's Lair. I quickly donned my stamina set from the bank and received a summons and was ready to go. We had some problems with the initial pull as this new group I was with did things in an odd manner. They used a Paladin to go in and initiate the fight. He would then bubble and I would have to try and grab Krosh off of him. The first time it worked, but my heals were not enough as the only healer on me was having mana issues. After I went down, the attempt was called. The second time through, the pally pull didn't work as planned (I think a hunter jumped the gun) and Krosh was sitting in the middle of everything. I was able to keep aggro and stay alive, but with his fire novas, anyone near him was toast.

The third time through, we got it all down, and Maulgar went down without a problem. Our first attempt at Gruul went quite well as we had some people who had never seen the fight and they needed to just see what happens once to figure it out. Our second time through, we finally took down Gruul. And while he dropped two Leggings of the Fallen Defender (I do not have good luck with Fallen Hero drops), it was nice to see him go down. The only problem is, I couldn't figure out what they did right and what our raid does wrong. I'm thinking it's a pure DPS problem as we have more people who are focused on having fun and gearing the way they want, rather than understanding how their class works and how to maximize their DPS. There's always the same few people at the top of the DPS charts, and there's always the same few people who are contributing far too little. Gearing them up would help I suppose, but if they don't understand how to use their abilities to the maximum benefit of the raid or how to watch for multiple events and avoid certain things, it's tough to progress. Also, if you aren't willing to take the time to learn the fight, and have the add-ons that should be required, how are we expected to be able to progress in a timely manner?

After Gruul's though, we were polled to see if we wanted to continue on that night. So, I was able to see Serpentshrine Cavern! We didn't have the necessary tank gear to take down Hydross, so we skipped ahead to Lurker. For the majority of people in the raid, it was their first time seeing SSC, so we only had time for two shots at Lurker, and we didn't get him down. But I have now seen inside SSC and look forward to going back again.

On a completely unrelated note, though I have been collecting pets in my spare time, including the Spore Bat and my beloved Bananas, I hadn't really been going around and picking up lots of random pets. However, last weekend, I took it upon myself to travel to Netherstorm, Exodar, and all over to obtain as many pets as I could without spending a fortune. As of last night, I had collected 41 of the 73 pets available to me. I have excluded 8 pets as I cannot get EU only pets, Engineer only pets, or the Panda or Zergling as I chose the Diablo. And as much as it hurts to do so, I excluded the Blood Parrot. As I am already at maximum hated reputation with the Bloodsail Buccaneers and I am also revered with three of the Steamwheedle Cartel factions, there is no possible way for me to grind to friendly with the Buccaneers and then back again. If I had known about that option earlier in my career, I would have done that, but it is much too late to do so now.

But back to my pets. Yesterday, the Darkmoon Faire arrived in Terokkar Forest. I hopped over there, turned in the Dense Grinding Stones I had saved up and caught up to Flik as he chased his frog around. I bought a Tree Frog and a Wood Frog. I then made the trip back to the Grim Guzzler, a run I know all too well from grinding Thorium Brotherhood reputation, and bought some Dark Iron Ale Mugs. I threw one at the feet of Morja, her pet Jubjub arrived, and I was able to get a Spawn of Jubjub. In seven days, it will hatch and I'll have my very own Jubjub! However, this weekend, I was not aware that I could get Mojo just by blowing a kiss to someone outside Zul'Aman and now I'm quite upset. It may be a long time before I get to find Mojo inside Zul'Aman itself, but one can only hope.

Tonight, I might continue my search for a Firefly or start questing for a Smoldwerbeb and Worg.

In the realm of recipes, nothing too new to report. I bought a pattern for the Black Belt of Knowledge yesterday. Probably will never craft one, but I'm getting closer to all the recipes...

Today also begins the Lunar Festival in Azeroth. There are no pets to be had, but the important thing are the patterns. One year ago today, I was but a young mage and my tailoring skills were not high enough to earn the patterns. There is both a Festival Suit and a Festival Dress to buy. Oddly enough, these are not soulbound, but I have never seen them on auction...perhaps I will collect extra coins and sell a few of these throughout the year like the Green Winter Clothes pattern I'm saving.

Love is in the Air also begins in a few days and that will be my one chance this year to obtain Peddlefeet...let the grinding commence.

New Enchants

Last night was fairly uneventful. I camped out in front of Mythrin'dir in Darnassus waiting for him to restock Enchant Shield: Greater Stamina. It took him over an hour to find one in his stockroom, but I finally acquired that bind on pickup recipe from him. While sitting there in the city, I saw a lot of enchant requests, including one for Enchant Bracer: Major Defense. Realizing that this is a fairly common recipe I didn't have, I headed up to Netherstorm and killed a few Nullifiers until it dropped. With that complete, I went to Felwood, upped my reputation with the Timbermaw a bit and then called it a night.

Waking up this morning, I saw Enchant Shield: Shield Block on the auction house and I bought it with the money I was saving for a tailoring recipe. But since I had not seen that formula on the auction house before, I figured it was quite rare and I snapped it up. Three formulas in 2 days isn't too bad. Leaves me at knowing 190 of the possible 217 enchanting formulas - 87%.

In this first installment of my add-on spotlight, I am highlighting a recently discovered add-on from one of the greatest Warcraft-related sites, WarcraftPets.com.

What is it? The MiniPet Addon is a perfect addition to my ever growing pet collection. Basically, whenever you zone in or out, portal, die, or whatever, it reminds you and places a small box at the top of your screen you can use to summon a random pet in one quick click.

Installation: It's quite simple like any other add-on and it takes up very little memory space - hardly any really - doesn't register in my top 10 resource hogging add-ons.

Drawbacks: Just one - it can't always tell if you have a pet out or if you misclick. If you click the button to summon a pet while moving, the button goes away as it thinks you summoned one. Also, if you are flying around and lose your pet, it can't tell the pet is gone. However, the nice thing is, with this add-on, you're much more aware of your pets and realize when they do go missing much sooner than before the add-on was installed.

Following up on our successful outing into Zul'Aman on Saturday, the Gold Team returned on Wednesday. The instance was fresh and we were ready to go and finally get Nalorakk down in 20 minutes. Unfortunately, it just wasn't our time. On the last pull before Nalorakk, my sheep broke really early, immediately lay down an immunity totem and I couldn't resheep him. With the immunity totem out, none of the other mobs went down and I was immediately killed by lightning bolts. We quickly ran back in, but we were about 5 minutes too late after we one shot Nalorakk. We continued on, had a little problem with the gauntlet (we made it through in one run, but I didn't survive the whole way through - nor did Nefernetcher - the perils of AOE'ing the eagles down). Once at Akil'zon, we one shot him - our first time ever and we were prepared to head towards Halazzi.

We quickly cleared to Halazzi without incident - I got to enjoy a 300% haste bonus a couple times as well - and we strategized our meeting with him. As this was only the second time we had ever faced him, we went over everything in meticulous detail. On our first attempt of the night, we got him to Phase 3, but when a healer went down, all was lost. We quickly regrouped, talked about what could be done differently and what we saw going on in that first attempt and we downed him the next time through! In just three meetings with Halazzi, he was down. Our healers did an amazing job with the Holy Fires, DPS did great with the totems and we have made progress once again in Zul'Aman. He dropped a healing leather item, but our tree was already wearing the Robes of Heavenly Purpose, but we forced the leather item on him anyways. The one great drop of the evening was Akil'zon's Talonblade which went to our main tank, Aracely. I quickly put Mongoose on it (oddly enough I was walking around with enough mats) and the blade seemed to work quite well on Halazzi as I was unable to pull aggro even without Salvation on (if I really tried though, I probably could have).

((As a side note, I added two more random images to the banner rotation - Me and Vetarra and Me in the middle of a row of Elekks

Later today...my first add-on spotlight post - why not since everyone else seems to be doing them?

I also have turned the "Journaled at" text into a permalink in case for some odd reason someone wants to link to one of my posts.))

Talk about domination. Last night the Gold Team rolled into Karazhan and completely cleaned the place up. We rolled through every boss except Attumen (skipped) in about 4 hours. No wipes. Took on many fights and a couple bosses with just 9 people, and walked out with some greatly upgraded gear for new recruits and 22 badges to boot.

Nefernetcher and I were determined to put up big numbers and by the end of the night, we didn't quite reach our goal of doing 50% of the raid damage, but got close. I came in right about 28% and Nefernetcher was at 20% or so. Like I said, domination.

Nefernetcher was also running a nice damage meter that recapped the boss fights and on Prince, I did 100,000 more damage than the next closest person. Of course, we got lucky with infernal drops and I didn't have to move at all (pretty easy just sitting in one place while the tank does his thing).

In the end though, another run without Soulfrost or Sunfire, but 22 more badges puts me at almost 100 again after buying the Icon, so I need to see what I can waste them on.

Also, after returning to the city, I resocketed a couple of items, replacing an epic gem with a rare one and adding another Veiled Noble Topaz to my robe which puts me within 2 points of the hit cap (I saw too many resists last night). I then saw an advertisement in chat for a pattern for Gloves of Spell Mastery on the auction house. I quickly went to look at the price and it was only 280g! I borrowed 100g from Dylana (yes, I've been slacking on my dailies) and quickly snapped it up. Since I had never seen the pattern before, 280g was a steal in my eyes. After buying it, the seller messaged me asking if he had under priced it. Since Wowhead lists it at 250g, I told him I didn't think so - as no one will buy it to make it - people will only buy it to be a completionist - like me. He found it in a locked box and made a quick 280g off it. Very nice, and it rounds out my epic world drop set nicely. I still have quite a few patterns to go and no gold to buy them with right now. Back to Netherwing dailies!

Saturday night, the Gold Team convened once again and finished the last two bosses of Karazhan that were left untouched on Tuesday night. Illhoof didn't go down without a fight as he sacrificed our warlock near the end and I was close to being out of mana and couldn't help too much with the imps. He did die though and our druid friend made off with a couple new items (though the staff didn't drop). We then went up to Netherspite and again he didn't go down as planned. Our warlock (again causing problems) got stuck in a void and died so I had to pick up the blue beam early. That made me unavailable for the blue beam during the second phase so our hunter picked it up and we subbed a warrior in at the last minute. A druid scooped up the warlock so he was available for the third phase and it was easy from there on. Rook picked up a nice ring and I can't remember the other drop.

With Karazhan clear, we quickly headed to Zul'Aman to see if we could attempt the timed event. It was going perfectly as we were clearing trash when our tank disconnected. After he was able to get back in, we knew the timed event wouldn't happen so we took our time and explained everything in depth as we had some new people along. Nalorakk gave us some fits, but we got him down on the third attempt, and though I thought I didn't need anything from the first two bosses, he dropped something that made me a very happy gnome: Executioner Enchant!.

We then moved on to Akil'zon, cleared the gauntlet without any problems, and had three shots at him. No luck. We recleared the gauntlet again in one shot and took him down after two more attempts. As we moved on towards the third boss, our tank and hunter disconnected and couldn't reconnect. ((Apparently there was a large AT&T problem Saturday night)). So the raid was called, but we are getting much better with Akil'zon's strategy and he should be on farm status quite soon.