Wednesday (27 Apr) - Playing Catch Up

Wednesday (27 Apr) - Playing Catch Up

I've gotten behind on reporting on the Wild Family, so I'll get right to it.

Full Force Hunter Fortress - For the first time in several weeks we had all four hunters in game for our weekly Tuesday night contest against the Alliance. We found ourselves in Arathi Basin. It was a good fight and we won! But that was all we had time for, as the queue times were quite long.

Kire and Java had been mostly out of action of late, so it was great to get the two paladins together for an extended dungeon tour of Blackrock Depths (BRD). We arrived in a group already in progress, which was a little odd since everyone was at the starting point. We spent a good bit of time going through and finding bosses that had not been killed. Eventually, though, we decided to reset BRD and start again from the beginning as it was just too confusing not knowing what had been done and what hadn't. Four of the five of us stayed for the reset, and we added a new fifth player. BRD, I've said before, is very long with a ton of bosses and many unique and fun encounters. I can't say we found and beat every encounter, but will did a lot of them over the course of close to three hours (as long as a typical raid). When we finally stumbled out of there - tired, worn, bloody, we were quite satisfied. Both Kire and Java picked up some gear upgrades and both leveled from 54 to 56. A good night.

With Patch 4.1 in place - yes, the patch did arrive on Tuesday morning, if I forgot to mention that yet - there was discussion about using the increased honor point gains (pvp honor points earned were doubled) to purchase more heirlooms. Wild canvassed the Family to see if anyone had enough honor points laying around to buy, say, the Dwarven Hand Cannon that Wild sorta promised Bean he would get for her. Well, Wild did not have much in the way of honor points at all. JB was better off. She had 1,633. Philly, who pvps more than anyone else in the family, had 2,608. Too bad we couldn't combine the two. Wild had Philly check the cost of the Cannon - 3,500 honor points. Sigh.

Philly, being the good girl she is, agreed to do some pvp to see how quickly she might get those 3,500 points. I must remind everyone, though, that Philly is level 80 and would be battling in the 80-85 bracket using mostly pre-Cata gear. For those in the know, she did have just over 900 resilience (a critically important stat for pvpers), which was good but likely far less than those she would be fighting. Philly's main spec is Shadow, but she queued for a random battleground in her off-spec, Holy, as a healer.

It took a very long time to get a battleground. I think when it finally popped Philly was trimming her nails and considering a trip to the stylist. The BG was Eye of the Storm, and it was already well in progress - and we were losing. Philly dived into the fray. We did eventually lose, but despite coming in so late in the battle, and dying a ton of times, Philly still finished second in total healing. Philly had a lot of fun, and plans more trips into the Battlegrounds. Unfortunately, she only gained 25 honor points, bringing her total to 2,633. At that rate it will take a very long time to get to 3,500 points.

Shevils and Bean also have some news. IRL (in real life - Bean just learned what that stood for) we've been working on getting the two outside fence gates repaired before we go on our trip. We use a company that contacts local businesses and have had great success on other projects before. They recommended a company, we met with the owner, discussed what we wanted, and expected to get a bid in a couple of days. We didn't hear back from him, and with time getting short we called to make sure we didn't miss an email or phone call from him. He said he thought he'd sent us a bid, but when he checked discovered that he hadn't. He promised a bid, but it was odd that he did not sound all that enthusiastic. We got the bid on Wednesday in email, and it was at least twice the cost of what we would consider reasonable to repair two gates. It was almost half the cost of what we paid to put fencing around our entire backyard, including the two gates! Clearly he didn't really want the job, but it was annoying, and the delays have put us in a position where we're going to have to leave the gate repair until we get back.

After getting that very unsatisfactory bid, there was only one thing to do. Go kill stuff!

Shevils and Bean decided to do some pvp, then remembered that Bean had reached level 20 and moved into the 20-24 bracket, while Shevils was still level 18 and in the 15-19 bracket. Undeterred, I said that it wouldn't take long to get Shevils to level 20, and Bean said she'd hit up a BG on her own while Shevils did that. Then I remembered another fact of life for turning 20 - Bean could now get a ground mount. Sure, Bean could join a BG without one, but she'd be at a disadvantage as everyone else in the battle was certainly going to have a mount.

We got that all sorted out pretty quickly, though. Shevils made a trip to the Northern Barrens, slaughtered a few dozen mobs out on the plains, and headed back. In Orgrimmar Shevils trained for a mount and bought his "Trike" which is the standard ground mount for the goblin race. As soon as Shevils showed off her mount to Bean, Bean just had to have a mount as well. As a blood elf, Bean had to go to Silvermoon City to get her mount. The two of us hopped on a zeppelin headed for Tirisfal Glades on the other continent. From there we grabbed the Teleporter just inside the walls of the Undercity, which took us directly to Silvermoon City. We got a little confused trying to find the Riding Trainer. We knew the Trainer and mount seller were outside the main gate of the city, but weren't quite sure where. After a little exploring, we found them. Bean got her Hawkstrider mount. Ok, so Bean actually bought all FOUR of the Hawkstrider mounts for sale, each one colored differently. She decided she liked the black one the best, but can change mounts whenever the mood strikes her.

Then, of course, we wanted to do a battleground with our new mounts. It took more than thirty minutes for us to get a Battleground. Not only that, it was bugged. The popup window for clicking "Enter" to get in played hide and seek, popping up briefly and then disappearing and reappearing. Both Warsong Gulch and Arathi basin invites would come up. Sometimes it would show long enough to click on it, but it still wouldn't let us into the battleground. Clearly Blizzard was having some problems with the patch. We played around with it for more than a minute, and came close to calling off the whole thing when we finally succeeded in getting into Warsong Gulch.

We played hard and took out our fence frustrations on the Alliance. It was good medicine, even though we eventually lost. The next project for this pair is to get each of us paired weapons. At level 20 we can dual wield - that means wielding a weapon in each hand. At level 20 we can also get a second combat pet. Bean is pouring over the Petopia web site, where everything one could ever want to know about combat pets can be found.

Somewhere around all that there was a raid. Wednesday nights are with the MM2 guild (Wild is an invited visitor, not a member). The target was Throne of the Four Winds. We had come very close last week to beating the first encounter, even killing two of the three genies. We still did not have a full win, however.

To make a long, sad story short, we made nineteen attempts, and still fell short. It was like musical chairs. It seemed like on every attempt, one of the groups would make a mistake, and it was a different group each time. Recall that there are three platforms, each with a genie on it, and our ten person group is divided up with some of us on each platform with specific roles. We had spectacular successes on individual platforms on almost every attempt, but some other group would always have some kind of trouble. Wild made his share of gaffes like everyone else. We just could not put together an attempt where all three groups played error free. And as it stands now, we are not good enough yet to survive a single mistake. It has to be perfect. I will give credit to the whole group - and in particular the raid leader, Bd - that we were able to make so many attempts because everyone in the raid was very prompt and quick to get ready for the next attempt.

Now, I know that ya'll will scoff and give Wild unbelieving stares, but Wild really WANTS to get into a Heroic dungeon. Two new dungeons (actually redesigned "classic" raid dungeons adjusted for level 85s) became available from the patch. They drop i353 gear and Wild would love to get his hands on some of that. Wild figures he would even like those dungeons because in his much younger days he raided those two dungeons many times, still remembers a good bit about them, and enjoyed doing them.

I expected there to be MM guildies around with the same hankering to get into those places and see what we could do. But there weren't. There was never anyone around, or they had not yet reached the i346 minimum gear score required to get into them. I have to say that one of our tanks that is usually available has been sick all week (which could affect the Friday raid, too), but I was very disappointed at how few people were around. It is getting to summer, and like us, there may be folks on vacation, etc. Wild hoped for a guild run all week but could not get one. I don't really want to PUG it - those Wild has talked to who've tried have said the dungeons are very tough - but that may be what I have to do.