Chef Tiddlywinks...Finally

So last night, after finishing up my daily cooking quest, I went to buy the Worg Tartare and Fish Feast recipes thinking each would cost 3 dalaran cooking awards. Worg Tartare down, one recipe to go. What's this!? Fish Feast is 5 cooking awards? And it requires 450 cooking? Oh noes. I'm only at 437.

So off I went to hunt rhinos. After amassing 52 rhino meat (I had 24 Northern Spices, so I wanted to make 24 small feasts to hopefully earn those last 13 points, and I wanted 4 rhino meat left over for the cooking dailies), I then quickly fished up as many Nettlefish as I could in 30 minutes on three hooks. It was quite a few more than the 48 required which is perfectly fine with me since my raid food of choice is Nettlefish. Then to find some Arctic Salmon - not a problem. Fished up 48 of them and hurried back to the Ledgermain Lounge to look for the last book I need for Higher Learning. I quickly started cooking small feasts and earned the 13 points I needed in just 17 feasts. So there I sat - at 450 with 4 Dalaran Cooking Awards...

To prepare the the fish feast cooking in the morning, I then had to venture back out to catch some Mussleback Sculpins (luckily it uses Arctic Salmon and Nettlefish too, and I had those left over). I fished up the requisite amount, killed a couple of worgs for my Worg Tartare and went to sleep, waiting for the daily the next morning.

So early this morning I awoke to Infused Mushroom Meatloaf and luckily had just 2 chilled meats left, I gathered the mushrooms quickly, got my 5th dalaran cooking award, bought the recipe and was rewarded with Chef de Cuisine, and then cooked up 4 fish feasts for The Northrend Gourmet and, of course, Hail to the Chef!

Here I stand on the shore of a peaceful lake in Crystalsong forest with my latest pet, the adorable fawn (reward from Lil' Game Hunter achievement for 75 pets).


Yesterday I mentioned my trip to Tempest Keep, and not only did I win the Robes of Tirisfal, but I also won the Ethereum Life-Staff which you can see in the picture of me below:


As an additional bonus last night, while briefly perusing the lists of achievements, I found two new ones! Pest Control requires you to go around all over the world to slay pests such as maggots, beetles, spiders, and roaches which was quite time-consuming, especially since I couldn't find a larva for the life of me. I went into Naxxramas, but couldn't find one without going past some enemies, so I went back to the Ghostlands, where after about 10-15 minutes of running around searching for them, I finally found one.

The other achievement is a follow-up to To All The Squirrels I've Loved Before entltied, To All The Squirrels Who Shared My Life. Similar to the "loved before" achievement, you have to go around and /love a bunch of critters - most of them scattered through Northrend, but a couple in some more obscure places. After a quick loop of Northrend, I went over to the Swamp of Sorrows to find a toad and got the achievement. With the Chef achievements this morning, I hit 4,700 points exactly!

Random Thoughts

• The past few days, I've been hanging out in a channel on our server called Bookclub. With their help, I've been able to gather 7 of the 8 books required for Higher Learning. I even took lead of the channel for a while on Saturday night and Sunday as I kept the timers updated and coordinated camping of books by people in the channel. Suffice to say, I really haven't had as much fun outside of raiding for a while. The thrill of the hunt, the camaraderie, it was quite a fun experience. Hopefully tonight I can get my last book and my newest pet and while it'll be sad to leave the channel, I hope my contributions made over the past few days were helpful to the community.
  
• Today is patch day. And with it, I will be getting my Hail to the Chef and Chef de Cuisine achievements. Lately I haven't been sporting any title as they all seem to be pretty commonplace and boring these days. I'm hoping to get Champion of the Frozen Wastes this week if we can down Malygos, but if we don't, or at least until that point, I'll be Chef Tiddlywinks.
  
• Speaking of achievements, leading up to last weekend, I went 6 days without an achievement! SIX! I was stuck at 4,500 achievement points for the longest time. Luckily I've gotten back on track with some heroic achievements, some reputation achievements, some battleground achievements, and even some old school achievements. So now I'm up to 4,620 achievement points and with the Lunar Festival coming Saturday, I should blow by 4,800 with the holiday and profession achievements.
  
• Speaking of Old School raiding...last night we went into Tempest Keep for the achievement. I joined a little late, getting there just in time for High Astromancer Solarian and we easily blew through her and the trash up to Kael'thas before running into trouble. One of the main issues we ran into was our Death Knight tank and off tank. Neither can use a shield so the fireballs and pyroblasts were eating us up. Luckily we were able to make it through a couple times, but then he'd start throwing us around and just doing too much damage to the tanks. So we called in reinforcements. We added another 10 people to our group and with 21, we downed him (a mix of levels from 70-80). In the end, just 6 of us were standing and my heart was pounding like none other. Sitting there, trying my damnedest to nuke him down and get those last few points off his health...it's a shame my damage meter and timers broke during an update right before I logged in - it would have been interesting to see what my damage was like on that fight - I certainly love seeing strings of 10k+ crits. In the end, it was me and 5 others left alive that defeated him. And with that, I earned my acheivement, got Kael's Vial Remnant for The Vials of Eternity, and I should still have a shot at my Hand of A'dal title since I've been carrying around the quest for ages. I also screwed up the rolls at the end which I felt horrible for, but I did walk away with my first and only tier 5 piece, the Robes of Tirisfal.
  
• I'm a bit miffed with one of the changes in the patch today. They're going to be awarding full reputation gains for grey mobs. So what does this mean? Well, I've spent countless hours killing furlbogs, trolls, and undead to get my 32 exalted reputations. Now, anyone and everyone can go back to these old rep grinds and level them 5 times faster than I was able to. It will make all my hard work completely worthless. Even though I know I did the grinds before the patch, no one else will, and we'll suddenly start seeing a lot more people exalted with a lot more factions. On the bright side, I could probably finish up my Zandalar rep a bit quicker now with fewer gold invested in coins and bijous, but that's the only place it benefits me while everyone else will have easy grinds for the Argent Dawn, Bloodsail Buccaneers, Timbermaw, Zandalar, Kurenai, Sporeggar, etc.

Cooking - Complete!

So, here I sit, with one Dalaran Cooking Award to my name and not a recipe to use it on (when I get 3). As we already knew, the Chef achievement is broken as it is impossible to complete The Northrend Gourmet. But I have done as much as possible right now and I look forward to the vendors having a couple new recipes for me in the near future.

To be prepared for those recipes, I'll just have to visit a vendor to make my Kungaloosh and I'll have to do some fishing tonight to be ready for the Fish Feast. I'll also need to kill some worg and gather some meat for the upcoming Worg Tartare recipe. The Kungaloosh recipe will be available from a vendor if you have completed The Taste Test (which I have) and the Fish Feast and Worg Tartare will be available for Dalaran Cooking Awards. So in 5 or fewer days, I'll have the requisite Awards ready for purchasing the recipes and I will be able to hit exactly 45 recipes for the Northrend Gourmet (I sit at 42/46 right now). I'm also at 157/160 for the Chef de Cuisine, so these three recipes will also get me that achievement. And as I sit at 66/100 Dalaran Cooking Awards, it will take me approximately 24 or so days to achieve 100 Dalaran Cooking Awards to completely finish the Cooking Achievements.

Hello, my name is Tiddlywinks...

...and I'm an Achievement Junkie. Yes, that's right. I'm addicted to those little achievement points and I passed a nice milestone this weekend. It all started Saturday morning as I forced some guildmates to go to Drak'Tharon so I could finish up my Northrend Dungeon Hero achievement. And, it was done...


And while we were fighting the second boss (attempting an achievement), this nice little achievement popped up for me:


So that was a nice run. We continued on to the Halls of Stone so Phosphorex could get his Northrend Dungeon Hero (also obtained Northrend Dungeonmaster at the same time) and on the last boss we completed Abuse the Ooze, so we spammed guild chat with a LOT of achievements after that dungeon clear.

The next day, as I realized last week how close I was to 1,000 daily quests, I put in the time both Saturday and Sunday to do 20+ quests and I was able to achieve my 4,500th point with 1,000 daily quests.


So here I sit, with 4,500 achievement points. And tons to go. I started to work on some Arathi Basin achievements, but got frustrated and hardly made it through one game as the Horde were stomping us. It's just too hard to have fun in there unless you have a pre-made or get lucky and join a group who is semi-competent.

Naxx Quick (Almost) Clear

Last night, the Silver Team went back into Naxxramas with a goal of clearing all four quarters in our allotted time. And we accomplished our goal. And even got in two shots on Sapphiron before having to call it for the night. We had a couple of new people with us, so it was awesome to see so many one shots on the night where we gave just the shortest description of each fight. I'm confident tonight we'll quickly clear the Sanctum, Sapph and Kel'Thuzad, and then we'll have some fun on Malygos (a fight I have not yet seen).

Last night, out of the few upgrades available to me in Naxxramas, I got two! First, the Tier 7 shoulderpads dropped from Loatheb (leaving just two upgrades in the game, one drops from Malygos (Heroic) and the other are the Tier 7.5). I also found the amazing Blade of Dormant Memories from Patchwerk. After quickly enchanting the weapon with +50 spellpower, my shoulderpads with the exalted Hodir enchant, and throwing a +16 hit rating gem in, I still dropped due to losing 34 hit on my weapon. Hopefully The Soulblade doesn't drop from Kel'Thuzad tonight because it'd be tough for me to take it over someone else who didn't get the Blade last night. Plus, the Soulblade is a bit more healy with the spirit, but +461 damage is a huge upgrade.

Speaking of damage, after killing 13 bosses, tons of trash, and two tries on Sapphiron last night, I basically tied with the ret Paladin in our group. I output 16.2m damage whereas he had 16.1m. It's pretty funny to see how close we got after all the bosses. For the full run, I averaged 2426 DPS, our Ret Pally 2394 DPS, our Death Knight 2276 DPS and our Hunter output 2241 DPS. We absolutely tore the place apart. Including achieving Arachnophobia without really trying that hard. Though we did have some big AOE pulls, we could have done it quicker.

Naxxramas (10) Clear!

In just three short weeks (5 days entering Naxxramas), the Silver/Gold Team has cleared Naxxramas. Last night, after quickly clearing the Military Quarter, we hit up Sapphiron for the first time and took him down in 4 attempts. The first couple were us learning the fight, the third was a freak accident where Sapphiron cleaved/swiped just as we engaged and took out our healers, and on the fourth, he was down. Quite an accomplishment as we had heard of other groups of good players from other guilds taking up to 20 tries to learn him in his entirety and take him out.

After that, we quickly hit up Kel'Thuzad and had him under 5% before a freak accident where our tank got frozen which ended up in a wipe as he also had the three Anub'Rekhan looking beetles on him and they couldn't be controlled in time. The second time around though, he posed no issue as we disposed of him very quickly.

Our raid leader/main tank now has the Malygos key and I'm looking forward to the Eye of Eternity. Before Naxx last night, we quickly took out Sartharion with 9 players (just 2 healers) and I'm thinking with a third healer we could tackle one or two drakes up for the fight. The encouraging thing about last night is we have found a good healer replacement for a priest that had to leave for her guild runs, so we're set there and also, during Sartharion, I didn't see anyone get hit by the lava waves, so our coordination is doing quite well (as we could also see with only 3 (real) tries at Sapphiron).

With the recent addition of my Plush Sash of Guzbah, I felt my DPS increase a little last night as I averaged 2400 DPS on Sartharion, 2900 on Instructor Razuvious (I believe this is from the Living Bombs detonating on the two mind controlled mobs), 2460 DPS on the Four Horsemen, and 2730 DPS on Kel'Thuzad (again, probably from Living Bomb detonating on the three beetles that were within range).

With regards to loot, nothing really dropped for me last night. We saw a lot of healy plate items, and there was the T7 gloves which went to the lovely healy tree, Vetarra. Right now, the two piece Tier 7 bonus is doing quite well for me as I usually don't have mana issues, so I can use my mana gems as an extra damage boost (I just have to watch out though because my trinket shares the same cool down, so while I could use the mana gem while my trinket is used, I can't get the spell damage bonus from it while the trinket is in use). So right now I'm not looking for huge Tier 7 upgrades, but I'm looking to get another piece so if I replace my chest piece (hopefully I can get the Gown of Blaumeux off the Four Horsemen at some point), I can retain my 2 piece bonus. Though, from my spreadsheet, the Tier 7 helm, shoulders, and gloves are all better than what I'm currently using, so if I could piece together two more pieces for the 4 piece bonus, I'd be more than happy to have 5% extra crit damage.

Silver Team, Take Three

What was supposed to be a quick, two hour pre-clear for Sunday's longer raid turned into a fun four hour three wing clear, including a new wing clear, the Construct Quarter. All that's left for Sunday is the Military Quarter and then Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad. After quickly blowing through the Arachnid Quarter and the Plauge Quarter, we ran into some troubles on Globbulus (more learning the fight than anything) and on our 4th (maybe 5th) attempt we got him down - almost had him on the second to last attempt, but our DPS was just a little behind.

Only one item dropped on my upgrades list, the Tier 7 shoulders, but I lost a roll to the rogue in our group, and I just hope he can use them (I think he may be swapping them in and out on trash/boss fights). I guess we just need more people to realize that not all Tier 7 pieces are better than items found in heroics just because they're Tier 7. So while the rogue might use them on bosses only, it's a significant upgrade for me and with the gloves, which I hope to get soon from Obsidian Sanctum, I'd almost have the 5% increased crit damage, which, since I crit almost 50% of the time, is a huge DPS boost. With a 310% crit modifier on Frostfire Bolts, I'm not sure if the increased 5% goes before or after the 310% crit modifier, but either way, it's a large DPS boost, but I'm still two pieces away.

On another note, man is Loatheb fun. I got in about 25k damage before getting my buff from the spore and I didn't lose the buff for the duration of the fight. What's that mean to me? Oh, just 90% Frostfire Bolt crits. Hot Streak here, Hot Streak there, Hot Streaks everywhere! It's a great fight (though the healers seem to think otherwise).

But all in all, great progress for the Silver Team, we might have a full clear on Sunday should we master Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad which would put our clearing of Naxxramas at three weeks. Not too bad, considering we're still switching people out at times and we don't have a set 10 man group every day yet.

On a final note, yay for mage DPS. The following chart is my damage done for all bosses in Naxx tonight while clearing the three quarters.

AchievementTracker.com

Finally, I've been waiting for a site like Achievement Tracker.com for a long time. I can now see where I stand on my server, in the United States, or in the World (104, 17455, and 36,662 respectively). Of course, it hasn't been updated since December 26th and I now have 4,235 achievement points - which puts me at #80 on the server.

But I'm working my way up. I plan on finishing the Outlands Dungeon Hero and the Northrend Dungeon Hero achievements this weekend and I'm also working on bringing my rep back up with the goblins through Dire Maul runs so I can get back to work on my Loremaster title (there's just too many goblin quests on Kalimdor).

Then, not sure where I head for more achievements. Maybe PvP? It's not my favorite thing to do since I'm really not all that skilled at PvP, but it would be fun to knock out some of the easier achievements for quick points - and even start to work on some of the tougher ones.

And for the curious, here's a quick link to my realm's achievement tracker.