Tuesday Night (8 Feb) - Hitting The Dungeons

Tuesday Night (8 Feb) - Hitting The Dungeons

The painting bug has struck the Mrs again. I knew it was only a matter of time. We've painted the entire house now, except for one bathroom and the bedroom office of the Mrs. The bathroom is mine, and I've waged a covert war to keep paintbrushes out of it. Which is why I enthusiatically agreed to help her get her room ready for painting. If she's painting her own room she won't be painting my bathroom.

Her room also has a modest walk-in closet, which is, of couse, filled floor to ceiling with boxes full of stuff we had forgotten we had. Since we want to use the closet to get her stuff out of the way of a paintbrush, my volunteer help suddenly turned into a task to clean out the closet. Oh joy. Actually, I like organizing things (my problem is that I don't much like to keep things organized), so the closet was a challenge for me. That took most of an afternoon, and then another couple of hours to pack the space I'd created with all of the stuff in her room.

We did decide to get rid of some things. We were big Star Trek Next Generation fans a few years ago and had purchased the entire seven seasons on VHS - one VHS a month. No, DVDs didn't exist at the time, and no, dinosaurs did not still roam downtown San Diego. The tapes are still in excellent condition and are now something of a collector's item. We're hoping to get a collector's price for them.

I also had a tabletop scale model of Tiger Stadium that the Mrs had bought for me a long time ago. I loved it, but it was the size of a large coffee table when assembled and there was just no where to display it. That, and about 2600 baseball cards I discovered I still had went up for sale as well. My collection of Strat-o-Matic baseball cards, which I've been collecting since the 1968 season, I defended with my life. I got to keep them, but I had to agree to let her keep years worth of National Geographic magazines. Frankly, though, a good bit of the stuff in the closet was junk we had no intention of ever using again, computer odds and ends that I kept meaning to do something with, and a lot of old paperwork that made sense to save at the time but was mostly just a fire hazard now.

The room has been scoured of stuff now, and today (Wednesday) we'll move the furniture out of the way so she can start painting. Then I get to organize her room when I cart all her stuff back in.

My main computer is still at the shop. I'm hoping to hear back from them today, at least to find out what they think is wrong. In the meantime, Sista logged in Tuesday night hoping that the lag on the older computer wouldn't be so bad as to ruin her chance at some battleground and dungeon fun.

Sista and Kiren have been leveling faster than Unbleached, primarily due to a time zone difference for Unbleached; she has to leave an hour earlier than Sista and Kiren. In that extra hour we can usually get in a couple more dungeon runs and even some pvp. As the evening started, Sista was level 37, Kiren was level 38, and Unleached was level 31. To move things along, Kiren agreed to step aside for level 63 Daeth, a mage that has been getting a lot of game time lately, to run a quick dungeon to help level Unbleached. Sista came along as well, of course. The dungeon was Razorfen Kraul (RFK), a mid-thirties level dungeon. It was a fun run, and it was awesome to watch a mage tank - well, things mostly died before they got close enough to Daeth for any tanking. Daeth then gave way to Kiren, and we dialed up the random dungeon finder and got Uldamen. Now that the patch is live, guilds can get guild experience whenever at least three guildies are in the dungeon group. So we picked up a few guild experience points for those runs. It wasn't a lot, and our guild may never get past level 1, but it was a start.

After that, Unbleached, who made it to level 33 on the evening, had to leave. Kiren and Sista hit another dungeon, and this time we got Dire Maul. Dire Maul, in Wild's day, was a level 60 five man dungeon that was quite challenging. At level 70 Wild even tested his expertise as both a bear and cat druid, looking to get some kind of mats or a quest or something - I forget what it was. I'll have to look that up sometime. Anyway, he did solo parts of Dire Maul, but that was long, long ago and not only did he not remember much about Dire Maul, it had been forever changed by Cata. Dire Maul was now rated a level 44-47 dungeon, although there are three wings, and mobs in some wings are high level 30s. I would guess that we started in the West wing, and may have wandered over to the North wing as well. I wasn't sure since it had been so long, and Kiren was getting to see it for the first time. The East wing has it's own door and can't be accessed from the other two wings. The old school dungeon is well designed, with mulitple levels and plants everywhere - both decorous and deadly. We were joined, of course, by three other adventurers. We started cautiously, but after a pull or two the healer told Kiren (who was tanking) that he could pull at will. From that point on we crashed through the place. We got lost at times, and had to backtrack more than once. There were also five quests to do, more than most dungeons offer, and getting all the pieces done for those took some time as well. It was great fun and I'd love to go back there again.

After Dire Maul Sista and Kiren did one Warsong Gulch pvp battle. It was a long wait to get a battle, and when we finally got in it started badly for us Alliance. The horde took an early 2-0 lead, and then the battle deadlocked. The allies rallied and took over mid-field, seemingly able to kill horde at will, but the horde defended their flag well. In the end we lost 2-1 when time expired.

Sista reached level 40 and Kiren is just a kill away from 40. And Sista did not experience any lag at all. Don't let the Mrs know that, though, I'm angling for a new computer.