Thursday (4 May) - But Of Course, Says Wild, and then there is Philly

Thursday (4 May) - But Of Course, Says Wild, and then there is Philly

Wild took two weeks off from raiding, so of course Wild's RG2 raid downed Dragon Soul's 8th and final boss, Deathwing, on Thursday night while Philly puttered about in the unfriendly battlegrounds. It seems almost a shame to break up such a good raid team by putting Wild back in next week, but there are no ball games to get in the way, so Wild is considering signing up ... although he'll be pretty grumpy for a few days.

Philly was back at it again on Thursday:

Warsong Gulch: Loss, 61%, 3757 HP
Conquest: WIN, 67%, 3907 HP
Warsong Gulch, Loss, 67%, 3949 HP
Dailies: 70%
Deepholm questing: 81%

Horde pvpers have been pretty awful this whole week, but it's best to be philosophical about it. Philly should be moving up to a whole new brand of deadly battles once she hits level 85. Philly will be getting a starter set of level 85 pvp gear, courtesy of Wild's tailoring and Happy's money. The i377 gear will be quite an upgrade, given that Philly doesn't have any gear over i333.

Lunch Break:

Buy More JPs: 3574
Twilight Highland questing: 87%
Conquest: WIN, 92%, 3713
More Twilight Highland questing:

DING! DING! DING! Philly is LEVEL 85 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

PS - Philly, Wild and JB gathered resources and built a level 85 pvp gear starter set. She now has an i353 gear score. Philly is in desperate need of trinkets and weapons, but otherwise is in decent shape with about 2.3k resilience.

Just for practice, Philly entered the random battlegroup queue and was rewarded with a BG she'd never seen before: Twin Peaks. It took a few seconds, but Philly quickly realized that it was a different version of Warsong Gulch. Why haven't I ever seen it before? There are two reasons. One, it is level 85 only, and two, it's a Cata BG and neither JB nor Wild have done BGs in Cata. Strange but true. For the record, the horde lost that first battle as most of the team seemed as confused about what to do as Philly was. There seems to be some kind of defensive strategy at work, and if that's true only the alliance knew it. The horde wandered about trying to play mid while the alliance ran back and forth between the two bases capping our flag. It was fun, though, and the best part was that Philly did not run out of mana, which was an occupational hazard with her pre-pvp gear. Of course, not running out of mana could have more to with her being immobilized for half the fight than the amount of mana she had.

On Friday night DB and Philly got together for a couple of BGs. We won the first one and lost the second. The level of competition is much, much higher at level 85. Healers are a major target, and Philly was constantly attacked and "crowd controlled," spending a lot of time Feared, turned into a frog, Iced, etc. Philly has two methods to break many types of CC, but once they are used there isn't much Philly can do but wait until it wears off - if she isn't killed while helpless. Philly would have done better if she hadn't suddenly started having a user interface problem that still has me baffled. Everything was fine in the BG Philly joined right after reaching level 85. But in the two BGs on Friday night, Philly discovered that her "mouseover key" method of healing did not work when the target was Philly herself. In other words, Philly could not heal herself, which, obviously, is a very bad thing. In between the two BGs on Friday night, Philly tested her healing and everything worked fine. In the second BG, before the BG began, it was still working fine. Once actually in the BG, it would no longer work. I'm going to do some more testing, but this really has me stumped.