New alt leveling attack

With Wrath looming and us spinning our wheels, our Kara group fell apart months ago.  Because I have all the gear out of Kara I could use, I was only doing it for badges.  Now, I don’t have a good reason to, play my hunter, other than run-thrus and some dailies. 

A RL friend of mine re-rolled on my server.  The mom of our of our guildies started playing.  She wanted to play a priest but was having a hard time leveling, so she started a pally.  The pally is mid 50’s, but the priest was low 20’s. 

I had a warrior at 10, a pally at 22, a rouge at 37 and a mage a 66. 

The three of us teamed up.  My RL friend on a new lock, “mom” on her priest, and me on whatever is close to them.  They have been out leveling me because I have switched to run them thru things.  I played with my warrior until I got them to Deadmines, then my mage AOE’s deadmines about 10 times for them.  Then I played with my pally until they were ready for Stockaides.  Again, the mage did a dozen stockaides runs with them. 

I got them to 30ish then started playing with my rouge.  We have been burning thru STV, and are all 39-40.  I think we have a VERY solid group.  A Lock, a priest, and a UBER twinked rouge.  Dual Fiery enchants, clefthoof armor kit on the pants…I don’t hurt for stats. 

Last night we were running around doing the STV quests.  This is the first toon I have leveled up thru here since the big buff a long time ago to leveling speed 20-60.  Holy Crap.  On my hunter and mage I went thru STV from about 30 to 40.  I had to do about every single quest to get all 10 levels so I could start in Tanaris. 

As an example of the huge nerfing that I did not know about, when you get to the last quest in the  “mastery” quests (i.e. kill raptors, tigers, and panthers), you get a quest to kill a named boss.  Those used to be Elite and exceptionally hard to kill.  It took 5 man groups, or a 3 man group with 2 in their 40’s.  They were a test of skill to solo them, and were exceptionally difficult.  It took me 4-6 tries to solo them as a frost mage (the survival kings).  We found them with this group and they are no longer elite, and they are not any harder than the last group of mobs you had to kill 10 of.  That sucks. 

Another thing, I used to fear the one entire side of the zone.  There were these badass elite ogres that were REALLY tough.  Kiting and killing one as a hunter was a test of strength.  Fighting your way into that cave took an over level 5 man group.  It was a place of death.  Last night we swept thru there like a wood chipper thru a bag of marshmallows. 

I’m getting pretty good with this rouge.  I like sapping. 

AFter how bad we swept thru STV I think I need to get on the forums and scream NERF ME!

Misdirection kinda broken

I don’t know when this happened, but I’m not that happy.

Lets say I’m somewhere there are groups of mobs, and I want to send as many of them at the tank as possible. 

Old Scenario:
I cast misdirect.
I target one mob in a group of 3.
I pop one single shot.
All three mobs bee-line for the tank.
I target one mob in a group of 3.
I pop one single shot.
All three mobs bee-line for the tank. I target one mob in a group of 3.
I pop one single shot.
All three mobs bee-line for the tank.

So, I can misdirect three groups to the tank, taking advantage of the fact that the groups are linked, and so I only have to aggro one of them to send the entire group.

That has changed.  Now, Misdirect only gives the aggro of the DPS to the tank.  The pull still belongs to me, so now it goes like this:

I cast misdirect.
I target one mob in a group of 3.
I pop one single shot.
One mob bee-line for the tank. The other two come to me. 
I target one mob in a group of 3.
I pop one single shot.
One mob bee-line for the tank. The other two come to me. 
I target one mob in a group of 3.
I pop one single shot.
One mob bee-line for the tank. The other two come to me. 

So, I do the same thing as before, but now instead of 9 mobs on the tank, I have 3 on the tank and 6 on me. 

This is bad.

This was a Great strategy I use to help clear lower level instances when running people thru things. For example in SM I will start sending my bear around one side, and start misdirecting mobs from the other side to him, and meet in the middle and DPS everything at once.  Now, I have to meet in the middle, get him to attack everything, then back away and DPS.  It is a pain in the butt.

I’m a geek but….

Ok, this is an alien thought for me.  I’m usually all for gadgets and gizmoes of any type.  I have a $100 universal remote, and in college carried a zipper dongle that detected wireless signals. 

But

This

Has

To

Stop.
My wife just went on a new kind of birth control.  It is a thing you (I’ll leave out the graphic details).  Anyway, you have to change it like every three weeks.  No problem right?  We are adults.  We have a calendar, she has a day minder, we both use Outloook which has that friendly reminder system….Apparently, that is not enough.

The company that makes the birth control offers to send you a Timer.  It is like a small alarm clock that you leave somewhere, and it reminds you when you are supposed to change the thing.

Is that good enough?  NO.

My wife decides to get the “Premium” reminder.  It cost $45 (more than the actual birth control itself).  It is a large purple thing that you leave on your desk. It has a large LCD screen that displays the timer.  You plug it into a USB drive, and it has software that runs with it.  The program was taking up more memory than WOW was when it was running. 

What the HELL?!?!??!

So, $45, and an ugly thing on my desk, and a USB port taken up, and a large chunk of system resources committed to reminding someone of something that happens every three weeks. 

It’s not like there needs to be split second timing either, when I say three weeks, it means three weeks plus or minus 3 days. 

Now, my parents used to get Schwan’s.  They came every other week between 5:45 and 6:00 like clockwork.  The highly complex reminder system that Schwan’s used was a little orange sticker dot that they had pre-printed with their logo that they would give you to stick on your fridge. 

I was just at Office Max.  I happened to see some of these sticker dots.  They had a pack.  Each sheet was 6 dots wide, 12 dots tall, and there were 10 pages of dots.  That pack was $2.  720 dots for $2.  Now, the fancy reminder cost $45.  That would be 23 packs of dots, or 16,560 dots.  Assuming that you use one dot per three weeks, that is 49,680 weeks worth of reminders.  My wife would have to be on this birth control for 955 years 5 months before she ran out of $45 worth of dots. 

I’m sure in 955 years she will not be that concerned with birth control.

For the first time in my life I said that a gadget was a bad thing.

A good gauge.

I hit 60.  About 8 months later I started into MC.  During that time I hit a lot of BRD, Scholo, Strath, and farmed a lot of gold to get crafted gear.  I did the MC thing for a while, until BC came out.  I got to the point I could solo around a decent chunk of BRD.  I know that is not the hugest accomplishment, but I was happy with it. 

I spent way too long getting to 70.  I did not do that many instances leading up to 70, because my play hours were spread thin (I was planning a wedding).  Once I hit 70 I went on a stint where I did a ton of lower instances.  Coilfang became a second home for a few weekends.  After getting into Kara and stalling we did quite a few heroics.  When we stalled again a lot of people started playing alts more. 

I did not have any Kara gear yet.  I ran people thru BRD and UBRS, and a lot of the other almost level 60 instances.  Because I had spent so much time grinding in those places, I had a good sense of the difficulty.  It was really neat to see how much easier it had gotten, and it gave me a good sense of how much stronger I had become. 

Now, I have almost everything out of Kara I could possibly want.  I have two of the tier 6 equivalent badge pieces. 

This past weekend I decided to work on some rep with Drenai, to work on getting my elephant mount.  (a dwarf on an elephant…how cool is that!)  I also wanted to get the Lifestealing enchant for my lowbie pally.  So, my mage friend and I head to Strath as it has good cloth, and chance of the mats for Lifestealing drops.  Holy CRAP.  I could not BELIEVE the difference.  The difference between 60 and 70 was dramatic.  The difference between Green / blue geared 70 and Kara geared 70 is just as dramatic. 

I was in shock.  I could (as a BM hunter with CRAPPY crits) one shot some of the mobs with Aimed Shot crits.  I burned down one of the bosses, and the mage complained that she could not even get a stack of scorch debuffs up before I had it down.  The mage died a lot due to her itchy Arcane Blast finger, so she was completely red on gear, and we did not get a chance at Baron. 

The ONLY thing that caused some grief was that damn trap where the gates fall down and the cockroaches / rats attack.  I almost died.  The one frustrating part was when the one boss Mind Controlled me and I decimated my mage friend in about 2 seconds. 

I think that tonight I may have to make a 2-man 45 minute baron run.  I’m going to run him until I get that mount.

Hi my name is Lump, and I’m a mount addict

I have a problem.  I like mounts.  I want to have every one in the game.

I know that I’m about to miss my window on the Bear mount, and the odds of getting a ZG raptor, or the phoenix mount are slim. 

I’m working on getting rep to get all the faction mounts. 

I have the:
Ram (I’m a dwarf)
Horse
Nightsaber
Gryphon
Netherdrake
Netherray

Last night I realized that I could be pimping on an elephant if I work on my Exodar rep.

I headed to Strath with my mage friend.  I came back with 20G, a gab of greens to sell, and 11 stacks of runecloth to turn in. 

I had not been there since I was almost level 70.  Since then I have geared in all epics.  Holy CRAP does that make a monsterous difference.  We rolled thru there like it was deadmines.  In fact, the only trouble we had was when the one boss mind controlled me.  I turned and decimated my mage friend in about 3 seconds, before she could sheep me.  I turned back to the boss, popped BW, a trinket, and laid the smack down nice and thick.

I’m 60% thru honored now.  I think I may wait on these until the release of the expansion.  I heard that they are implementing a low level quest tracker, so I can go to the Dranei starting area and run thru all the quests for rep.

Completly Forgotten

I had completely forgotten how much I did not enjoy doing dailies.  The only fun part was seeing if I could come up with the most efficient routes to complete everything. 

-Get everything in Shatt
-Fly to Stormspire in Netherstorm
-buy up the limited items at the vendors there
-If I have the mana berry cooking daily fly there and do that one
-Fly down and decimate stuff for the Sunfury attack plans
-fly over and get the mana cubes.
-fly down to Nagrand and slay a bunch of clefthoof for the Nether resudue from skinning them
-change hats and look at the little yellow glowey balls
-fly back to Shatt and turn everything in
-port to sunwell, grab all the quests
-run over and do the two bombing ones
-run around getting mana remnants and re-activating the sentrys.
-swing back and turn those 4 in. 
-head to the gate and slay the demons, impale the leader, and get the lay line.
- go under the bridge and slay the bloodelves on my way to getting the lay line in the middle.
-Ride out and slay the male Naga’s for the keys and the females for the bubbles on my way to getting the lay line out there. 
- turn everything in and use the scroll to port back.
-fly out to the Netherwing area, do the booterang and pick the bushes (herbing).  If I have enough herbs turn that and the booterang in. 
-Head into the mine and do the two quests there while I skin for the flayer hides. 
-turn those in, and pick up the one to kill the 20 guys in Nagrand.
Apparently I forgot all that, because it took me 3 hours to do all my dailies, and I used to be able to do them all in about an hour and a half.  I must have flown to Shatt about 30 times. 

It is coming back slowly.

Strange searches

Ok, so I am a noob at this blog thing.  I just discovered the wonder that is the “dashboard” here on WordPress.  I have been reading thru the wealth of information it gives me on there.  One of the things that stood out to me were the “Top Searches”.

These are the things that people have searched in and found my site.

1) Morose fight.
This is a good one.  I have given many in depth descriptions about the Morose fight from the perspective of a hunter.  I think because it is a good solid fight. 

2) Will hinter pet break ice?
Not sure where this one comes from.  I’m guessing that some hunter wants to know if his pets damage will break an ice trap.  If a hunter is seriously wondering about that, then they REALLY need to find something to read to help them.  Seriously.  I’m very glad that this person found my site, and I hope I can help.

3) goat fitting DVD
This one threw me for a loop.  So, off to google.  There, on page 3, about half way down…my site.  I really have to wonder where in life someone has to be to be Googleing “Goat fitting DVD”.  What do you need to fit a goat into, that requires a DVD training video of some sort?  Who makes a video about where you can fit a goat?  Or what you can fit on a goat? 

Oddly enough I found the words that hit.  It is obvious where the Goat word comes from.  The Fitting word came from when I was telling about how the plumbing fitting burst making it rain in my bathroom.  The DVD came from the post about how lazy I am, and programming my universal remote to run my DVD player.

Celebrating my return

I decided to celebrate my return to WOW with an epic slaughter. 

Friday I was joined on my server by a RL friend.  She was shocked when she got to Goldshire and discovered a set of 18 slot bags and a couple hundred gold to get her going.  I played with her on a noob toon I had. 

By Sunday morning she was level 17.  I logged into my 65 mage and took her to Deadmines.  That was fun.  I needed that.  After forgetting which button was which and getting myself killed doing the Shattered Sun dailies I needed a morale boost.

Later on Sunday “mom” logged in.  Mom is called mom because she is the mother of one of our tanks.  She played his mage for a while when we were short on Kara runners.  She had a good sense of humor, and helped us out quite a bit.  She started her own account a little before I left.  I gave her a gift (a large chunk of gold, and some bags) as a thanks for all the help.  She was glad to see me come back. 

So, back to the story.  Mom is now level 52 on her pally.  I asked her if she wanted to tag along on another Deadmines run.  She brought her 18 priest.  They had trouble looting as fast as I was killing.  That was fun.  Three runs later they were both level 19.

We decided that it was time for Stockaides.  Then someone else logged in.  I invited her to join us.  She is a 54 Druid.  Great!  She came to join us.  She would jump into bear form, and run around gathering up 3-4 rooms of bad guys while I got 1-2.  We would meet in the hall, I would frost nova, then blizzard.  Usually one volley of blizzard would leave a pile of corpses that took 3 minutes to loot. 

We were having so much fun we ran it 5 times.  My friend and Mom both hit 20 during the last run. 

What was a GREAT way to come back.  I got my friend up to 20 in one weekend, and she is sporting about the best gear she can.  I got “Mom’s” alt up to 20, I rna mom thru BRD and got her two blues, and I laid about a thousand bodies down…their last memory being my Arcane Blast.

p.s. as a mage, Arcane Blast, and Ice Lance are GODLIKE in low level instances.

Good News

Ok, two pieces of good news:

I’ll start with the little one.  YAY, I just bought a washer and drier!  And, the coolest thing of all….They are MINE.  I am the first user.  It is not second hand, hand me down, used, or even re-furbished.  These puppies are Brand Spankin New! 

Ok, now on to more relavent news.  I Know that my posts have been sadly lacking recently.  For that I apologize.  I started this blog as a primarily Wow hunter blog, with some comedy and rants inserted for flavor. Since switching to Age of Conan, and with the whole buying a house thing, AND the being SWAMPED at work thing… I have not had much time to write, nor much to write about. 

The move and work have simply sucked up my time.  Less time to play, so less to write about, and less to time to do that writing. 

Switching to AOC means that I was a noob again.  I did not feel writing guides and tips as a noob, because I know that anything I am learning now will be replaced once I get higher in levels.  I did not feel qualified to write a guide.

So, here is the second piece of good news.  I’m going back to WOW.

Conan is a GREAT game, and I probably would have stayed with it.  I enjoy being a guild leader.  I enjoy the combat in Conan more.  However, I have a few Real Life friends that have joined me in WOW (one from another server, and one that is about to start their first account).  In an effort to make more RL friends, I’m going back to WOW to play with them. 

As such, I will be playing a game that I know a Ton about, so that should start breaking free this drought of posts. 

I hope that my friend that is new to WOW gets on soon, because I want to do the recruit a friend thing for a few reasons.  1) Leveling up an alt quickly seems like fun.  2) Having them level up fast is good.  and most importantly 3) I WANT THAT MOUNT! 

I have a mount collection.  I have the ram because I’m a dwarf.  I also have the Nightsaber mount, a horse, netherdrake, Netherray, and the cenarion hippogryph.  I want that mount!

So, [/toast] here is to more inspiration.

Spore

Dear internet:
Get Spore. 

That is all.

No…seriously.  Stop reading this and go get Spore.

It is probably in stock at Best Buy (there was about 20 copies when I got there yesterday at 5pm.)

WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE???!?!!?!?!!

Ahh…you think being broke is a reason?  Fail.

Beg / borrow / steal the money.  Sell your “collectables” (who the hell wants those McDonalds Garfield glass mugs circa 1987 anyway).

Sell blood, sell eggs / man fluids, sell your hair, sell your clothes, sell your children.

If you have to kick a puppy into a woodchipper to get a copy of Spore…DO IT.

If you have to sell your car and walk 23 miles thru [the hood / a snake infested swamp / Detroit ] to get there…DO IT.

If you are quadriplegic and have to sell your wheelchair, and drag yourself 23 miles using only your teeth…DO IT.

I installed this game about 6:30 last night.  I played until 1am.  My alarm is supposed to go off at 7.  At 6:10 I woke up when someone up the street honked their horn.  I looked at the clock and decided to get up so I could play for 45 minutes.  I would have called in sick to play, but I was actually sick two days last week…so that is a bad idea.

I have already e-mailed my wife “Hey, that thing you are thinking about asking me if we can do tonight, the answer is no.  I’m going to be bust playing spore.

So, last night I started a game.  You start out as a little single celled amoeba.  You can be a herbivore or a carnivore.  I chose carnivore.  I ate a bunch of stuff, getting bigger and bigger.  Every once in a while you mate which lets you enter the creature editing screen.  You start out with a little mouth and a tail.  By the end I was covered in poison spit balls, spikes, and covered in teeth. 

I worked my way onto land.  I gave myself big Raptor like running legs, and covered myself in spikes.  I slaughtered and ate anything I crossed.  I ate a dozen species into extinction.  I kept adding more and more spikes and weapons.  I was a tank. 

When you get to the tribal phase your physical shape is determined, and has nothing to do with the rest of the game.  You fight to control your little country.  I quickly dispatched the 5 tribes in my area with a vicious abandon of all diplomacy. 

In the next mode you create vehicles and wall around your city.  You fight to dominate your planet.  I created tanks that were slow moving gun ships, then boats, then an armada of planes that laid waste to anyone in my path.  In under an hour I had decimated the four other civilizations on my planet and made it into space mode. 

That is where I went to bed.

I got up this morning and created my space ship and did the first few missions, and have now created my first colony on another planet in another solar system. 

In less than 12 hours I went from a single cell organism to creating a colony on another planet. 

I think that tonight I will try a herbivore and attempt to use negotiations to take over my enemies.