Thursday (24 Dec) - Christmas Eve Action

Thursday (24 Dec) - Christmas Eve Action

Happy is not sure what is happening with the Auction House, but prices are going through the roof. Happy set a new record in total gold for single day sales this morning (Thursday). While that is nice, what is not so nice is that Happy is burning through stock at an incredible rate, and I've already had to start rationing how much I post for sale. With prices at such as unreasonably high level Happy also has to be very conservative when buying additional stock as I just don't trust that these prices can be maintained, and I don't want to end up having to sell stock at a loss when this bubble collapses. For example, I had a safety net of 200 large prismatic shards in stock, but am now down to my last stack of 20, even after I forced prices up from under 5g to over 20g each. And every shard I put up for sale gets bought. I know, everyone should have these kinds of "problems" but I can't make any gold if I have no stock left to sell.

JB and Philly have been helping Wild out in collecting the ingredients he needs for the many cooking recipes he must make. Wild will be posting status of his cooking achievements toward his goal of earning the title of "Chef" as he gets things done.

Wild's Culinary Progress Report:
4 of 11 Achievements accomplished
29 of 91 recipes served

Accomplishments since last report:
Completed Achievements: The Cake is Not a Lie, and Captain Rumsey's Lager
Recipes made: chocolate cake, rum, crunchy serpent, shortribs, and bad clams

In addition, Wild found time to sign up for the daily random Heroic dungeon early this morning. He signed up as DPS only, as I was curious how long it would take to get a group as a non-healer. The answer? Instantaneously. I'd barely taken my finger off the mouse from clicking "Find Dungeon" when up popped the message asking Wild to Accept. You aren't told what dungeon you will be ported to, or who is in the group, so going the random dungeon route is a little bit like opening Christmas presents combined with Halloween - you're excited about the gaily wrapped box, but there is still a little bit of trick or treat when opened.

The dungeon was Azjul-Nerub, the bug dungeon that Wild has done a number of times now. I still don't have many random dungeon runs under my belt, but for those I've done the thing I find the weirdest is no one bothers to find out who the tank is. In this group there was a paladin, a warrior, and a death knight. The group leader was the paladin, and with no other healing class in the group he had to be the healer. Yet when we started he did the initial pull, instead of whichever of the other two was the actual tank. Asking who was tanking in party chat never gets a response. Strange.

Wild chose the warrior as the tank, and with three mobs descending on us Wild focused fired on the target the warrior grabbed first. Bad choice. Wild immediately pulled aggro off the warrior, the big bug attacked me, along with a second bug, and with the pally having his own problems Wild had to break out of moonkin form to try to heal. I didn't make it, and died. The pally died not long after that. We didn't wipe completely, but it was not a good start.

"Hold aggro much?" asked the pally sarcastically of the tank, which by process of elimination had to be the death knight. "I wasn't ready for your pull," the DK responded, which was probably just as sarcastic a return, since the last person who should have done the pull was the healer, even if he was a heavily armored paladin. So ok, let's try this again.

The DK did the pull this time, Wild set the DK to be his focus, and I was able to pick up the targets correctly after that. We cleared the first room and the first boss, which is actually the toughest fight in this dungeon (JB and DER know this from personal experience, having tried unsuccessfully to two man that encounter). Then our DK said he had to go afk for a couple of minutes. We waited three minutes, and when he didn't show the impatient pally talked the hunter into tanking the second boss, Hadronex, with the his pet. The DK returned while we were in the process of wiping when the pally couldn't keep the hunter's pet alive. Players were openly grousing now in party chat, and things weren't looking good.

However, we went after Hadronex a second time and killed him. Which made the next thing that happened surprising. "I don't have time for this," announced the pally healer, and quit the group. The hunter, who was also our leading DPSer, also quit.

When players quit under the random dungeon system, the game immediately asks if those who remain want to stay, and then goes looking for replacements. You can keep going from where you are currently instead of having to start over, too. One of the three of us remaining decided not to stay, so we were down to just Wild and the DK. In seconds, though, we got a priest healer and two more DPS. We were back in business.

There was just one more boss, Anub'arak. He can be a pain with a bad group, and for all practical purposes we were a new group and had no idea how we would perform. We killed Anub, though, with no deaths, and Wild got his two Frost emblems for completing the daily random dungeon.

All told, Wild spent 40 minutes in the dungeon, from accepting to final kill, perhaps ten minutes more than it should have taken, but still not that bad. Wild's 1742 DPS was nothing to get excited about, but it was second only to the departed hunter's, so Wild finished 2nd out of the five DPSers in the two part group. I'm still trying to convince Wild that doing random dungeons as a DPSer is a great way to get moonkin experience that he sorely needs. Stubborn cow, but I think he's coming around.