Friday (31 Jul) - Cowboys and Aliens and Bosses Oh My!

Friday (31 Jul) - Cowboys and Aliens and Bosses Oh My!

The good news is that the new Harrison Ford/Daniel Craig movie "Cowboys and Aliens" is a much better movie than you might think from the title. I really like Craig and Ford, and those two convinced me to give the movie a shot. Craig is the wanted gunslinger sporting an alien bracelet with no memory of what it is or how it got there. Ford is the cattle baron running roughshod over a town long past it's glory days. Add in a town trying to save itself, a bandit army, and Indians, mix in an alien encampment of District 9 like creepies bent on irradicating the human vermin in their way, and you have a wide prairie of action, fun, and even a little scary horror. Yes, there is a bit of silliness at times, but on the whole this is a great action flick with not only good leading actors but a very good supporting cast as well. There are even a couple of memorable lines.

The bad news is that the Friday night assault on Bastion of Twilight was a completely forgettable event. We could have used a few good gunslingers. We fell short in two areas - our pally healer wasn't feeling well, and we had to substitute him with a modestly gear shaman to complete our healing team of Wild and another shaman, who was pretty decent. The healing team was good enough, but we would have been a lot better with the pally. Not that it made much difference in the end. Where we really came up short was on DPS. We had one warrior DPS, and all the rest of the DPS were rogues and hunters. So, 7 of our 10 raiders were comprised of shaman, rogues, and hunters. Not really an issue in itself, but over the course of the night it was obvious we didn't have the DPS to make any headway. Only two DPSers could barely get over 10K DPS, and not consistently at that. The rest ranged down to around 7k healing. We started with the Ascendant Council, made five attempts, and never got closer than 10% despite some agonizingly long fights because we would go into phase 3 with far more than the 25-28% health we should have had on the P3 boss. When the evening began Wild was certain we would be taking shots at and perhaps killing Cho'gal Friday night - but it just wasn't our night.

On Saturday I rescued my computer from the shop and took it home. The good news was that there appears to be absolutely nothing wrong with the hardware - they even put it through a 24 hour high stress burn in period and it never failed. Their guess is that it's a manufacturer driver issue, but they also said that sometines the "sleep mode" is the culprit, and so that is now disabled. Bottom line - if it happens again the computer will have to be sent back to Acer, as I have now exhausted every other option. Keep your fingers crossed.

Happy's paychecks to his family have taken a serious dive in the past week plus. The Horde Auction House has been eerily quiet with very little buying going on. Usually that means sellers are dumping prices, which is when Happy swoops in and grabs the under priced items. That isn't happening, at least not yet. Wild has spent a large chunk of change, too, on those i365 items and toys from the dailies along with the enchants and gems that went with them. Happy is starting to feel a bit squeezed.

What that means in part is that Wild is going to be doing the Dailies again. The Marks don't mean much anymore, but what Wild forgot to take into account is that all those Dailies pay cash gold, and it adds up to some pretty nice walking around money.

The Alliance AH, by contrast, is hot right now. The arbiter of that success, Lost, has done a wonderful job riding that wave of buying and returning her cash reserves to it's highest level so far, quite an accomplishment considering her horde cousins nearly wiped out that cash on a big order Wild needed some time back.

On the Hunter Fortress front, Jocelyne is itching for some action and is close to level 25. I'm holding her back, but we should think about when we want to roll our toons over to level 25 and the next bracket.