Weekend (31 Jan) - Got The Blues

Weekend (31 Jan) - Got The Blues

Ever have one of those periods of time when you just can't seem to get in gear (pun sort of intended)? Wild is in one of those funks and it's spread to the rest of his clan. Wild has seven daily quests that he has been pretty good about getting done every day. Two are the cooking and fishing quests; the other five are to earn Dragonmaw rep. Wild will reach Revered with Dragonmaw with one more daily, which he'll get on Monday. An i346 ring awaits Wild at the Dragonmaw vendor. But these dailies are about the only thing I can convince Wild to do.

Wild can also get an i359 necklace and i359 leg gear once he reaches Exalted with Dragonmaw. That takes 21,000 rep. At roughly 1400 rep per day, it will take Wild about 15 more days to get there. Wild can shorten that considerably if he would just do two dungeons a day - the regular/normal and a Heroic. Wild can get extra rep (quite a lot) by doing those dungeons. Not only that, Wild could upgrade an i333 off-hand to i346 with 950 justice points. Wild can earn 70 JPs each day by doing a random normal dungeon. Wild has a few JPs left over, too, so it would take only 9 days of one normal dungeon per day to get enough JPs for that off-hand upgrade.

When Wild is in game he'll answer the call if there is a guild run getting started. If there isn't, and if Wild has gotten his dailies done, then he'll likely logout and disappear for several hours. JB and Sista both want game time, but since Wild "should" be looking for dungeon work, there's a reluctance to bring in any other toon. Been through this before, and it's mostly self inflicted, and in part it's because raiding is still somewhat iffy and without progress right now, and that's what usually keeps Wild going. Anyway, I'm hoping that dangling all that gear in front of Wild will draw him back into the hunt.

Wild was still trotting out excuses, though, blaming RL distractions. My aging Linksys cable modem was starting to have drop out issues. They were rare (a couple of times a day) and short (just a few seconds) but it was enough to DC me in WoW when it happened. The Mrs noticed the drop outs as well. We also have a shared drive where we keep things like our image folders and backups. That drive went belly up recently and I needed to get that back into working order as well. Third, we upgraded our cable TV system this past week so that the Mrs can watch her DVRed shows in any of the three rooms where we have a TV. It also coincidentally upgraded us to full HDTV, even though only one of our TVs is Hi-Def (the one in my office). Does this sound familiar to anyone? I'm thinking I already mentioned this but I don't see it in the blog. Oh well.

So, all of that took time. The Linksys modem is now gone, replaced by a wired/wireless combo cable modem from Motorola. I was also able to get rid of the separate wireless router I was using, as well as eliminate a router extender that was also hooked in. Not bad, replacing three boxes with one. And the signal has been clean and steady.

Then I tackled getting a new external hard drive connected into the network for our shared drive, and the time it took to reload all the stuff we'd had on the old defunct drive.

See, I've been busy!

JB did manage to break into the game for a little while on Sunday night. A little research had turned up a trinket as a quest reward in the very area she was in, Mount Hyjal. So, in addition to making her usual herb run through the zone, she did a little questing as well. When she made level 81 a few days ago she received the spell Unleashed Elements. This one spell (plus the boost to level 81) upped her DPS by nearly a 1,000! UE is an instant, ranged spell, so JB uses that as her opener when she is closing to melee distance, and follows that with flame shock (another ranged instant spell) which gets a huge buff from UE. Now in melee range, JB delivers Stormstrike, her ace melee attack, follows with lava lash, and by that time flame shock is off cooldown and JB can strike with earth shock. JB is a heckova lot of fun. She did have a period where her UE stopped working, and that baffled and frustrated her until she noticed that her weapon buffs had expired. JB dual wields two weapons. She buffs her main hand with Windfury and her off-hand with Flametongue. UE requires Flametongue to be active or it won't work. Once JB fixed that she was back on the attack.

JB got her tinket, too, i272 with +143 agi. It replaced the last pre-cata gear she was wearing. JB is fully cata geared now, at least for her melee set. The healing set is still a meager concoction of mostly bad gear, but quest rewards will help improve on that over time.

Druids seem to be taking over Wild's guild. On Saturday afternoon there were 13 level 85 guildies in game - six of them were druids. Three of them Wild doesn't know.

Happy was getting worried that he was running out of felcloth, a key ingredient in Satchel of Cenarius, an herb bag that sells quite well for a 24 slot bag, because the larger herb bags sell for double to triple what Happy sells the Satchel for. All that could change if he can't get felcloth.

Normally Happy can buy felcloth on a regular basis for around a gold each. There's never been a lot for sale, but Happy got enough to keep Wild in mats to make the Satchels. A particular group of mobs in Azshara account for most of the felcloth. Farming them was easy, but it was slow work as there weren't that many mobs and the drop rates were low. Happy kept watching as the prices for felcloth continued to climb up to as high as 8g each, and the quantity available got smaller and smaller.

The pickins' got bad enough that I did some research and was going to assign some lucky toon to farm the stuff to get stocks back up. What I learned, though, is that the mobs in Azshara changed with Cata and felcloth no longer drops there. The only other place where felcloth could be found was in Dire Maul. Dire Maul has also changed, as it is a lower level dungeon now in Cata. It's been confirmed that felcloth does still drop there, but a full clear only nets a half-dozen or fewer. That's a lot of work/time for very little payback. As long as Satchels sell, Happy will pay what he has to to get felcloth. I doubt Blizz cares enough to make drop adjustments, so its unlikely to change.

Wild's guild continues to grind guild rep. Early Sunday morning Wild was in game when the guild achieved level 14. The main effort right now is to complete the achievement to craft 1,000 cata level flasks. We are just under halfway there. Once we get the achievement the guild will be able to make Cauldrons of Battle, which raiders can use to gain the benefit of a flask. I suppose it's convenient, but I wonder at it's true usefulness. The 10 man raid version has 7 uses, so that means at least three raiders have to provide their own. It takes four flasks to make the cauldron, so in effect there are only three flasks worth of benefit. However, this gets better as guild level increases - at level 10 cauldron flasks last 50% longer; at level 20 you get 10 uses instead of 7; and at level 22 flasks last twice as long.

Wild continues to follow his former guild, FS, as well as the guild offshoot of FS, WC, formed by a top FS raid leader. Wild's MM guild has the upper hand in terms of guild leveling. MM is at level 14; FS is level 12, and WC is level 11. In terms of raid progress it's hard to tell. MM has yet to defeat the Baradin Hold boss, which both FS and WC have downed. None of the three guilds have cleared any of the other raid dungeons, but I can't tell if any individual bosses have been brought down.

In MM there was a small tiff after last week's raid on Bastion of Twilight (BoT). We have two guildies, Fn and Bd, who do the raid leading and tanking for the raids. Bd is focused on Baradin Hold and on the trash in BoT as the means to improve on gear. Fn felt that we should start putting emphasis on Blackwing Descent (BWD), which is the multiple boss raid dungeon that most raiding guilds are starting with. We've made one quick look inside BWD, wiped on the trash, and haven't been back. One answer would be to start a second raid group and do both, but we lack the extra two tanks we'd need. It's not that we don't have other tanks, but none have stepped forward to join the raids. If only Sin or DER ... oh well. ;-) I also suspect that, given the numbers that sign up for raids (other than Baradin Hold) we simply don't have the interest to establish two raid groups. At least not until our first group starts killing bosses.

On a personal level Wild's former guild leader and friend, P-Jo, has returned to the game after leaving for some months due to serious real life issues. She's worked her way to level 85 and Wild sees her in game now and then. She stayed with the FS guild despite an offer to come to MM. It's kind of ironic that when Wild was still with FS he was often told that P-Jo remained in FS only because Wild was still there. Wild isn't in FS anymore, but P-Jo is. Lady Hunter, another friend who was the most persistent in recruiting Wild to join MM, is having RL issues of her own and has not been around for weeks. Wild is happy with MM, and knows he has a raid spot, where with FS Wild would have been a fill in at best. Though Wild has always preferred the 25 mans, the loot is now the same for both 25 and 10 mans, and few guilds are likely to raid 25 man unless they have bosses they feel can be farmed for the higher percentage of drops.