She did what now?

So last night, fun times.  I was in an odd mood so I was bitching at my guildies more than usual.  I swear, the crap that they put up from me is amazing at times. 😉

 

So my sweetie is obsessive about collecting mounts and pets.  Since there is a chance of a mount drop with the brewfest boss, he, of course, “MUST” get that mount.  He got the ram on his hunter, who is the “true” collector, but he “NEEDS” the kodo.  Can you see my eyes rolling throughout that entire paragraph?

Since he wants the mounts we have been trying to do the brewfest boss every day.  We get a bunch of guildies and then keep switching out all of our toons that are 75-80.  Some times we can get over 10 summons.  Fun times, fun times.  He has yet to see the kodo drop for him.  We still have until this weekend, so wish my sanity luck ;-).

 

So last night after doing a couple runs on Tatia with my guildies, they let me run with Millea to get some badges. 😀  We grabbed a friend to heal (since our other late night healer was also on his DPS toon) and went into VH.  My overall dps was barely over the tank.  I think she did like 1500 or so.  I was very sad.  But I remembered that overall doesn’t count and checked out the boss fights.  We had the void boss for the first fight, Millea did 2560, and was #2 behind the ubergeared blood DK.  We got the water boss for the 2nd fight, so 226 dps!  Woot! Go me! >.>  On the final boss she managed to pull off 2870 dps.  This was with a warrior tank, boomkin, blood dk and holy pally.  Go me! ^_^

 

We ran vault on Saturday and since the dps we had just wasn’t cutting it, we brought in another healer and I switched to Millea from Tatia and got to pew pew.  I am so glad I did because the T8 gloves dropped for locks :D.  There was so much hit on those gloves that I was able to remove 3 hit gems.  Huzzah!!  I was able to boost up my spellpower, haste and spirit with my new gems.  So this VH run was the first run where I had the new gloves and the increased stats.

 

Back when I first started learning about gearing and stat ranking I went to EJ.  The way I was reading and understanding things was affliction warlocks were supposed to gear with this hierarchy in mind:

• Hit (until capped)
• Spellpower
• Crit
• Haste
• Int/Stam/Spirit

Well I apparently didn’t comprehend that those stats were backwards with crit and haste.  I derided haste for the longest time.

 

Yeah I have changed my tune. >.>

 

I upped my haste from below 200 to 256, unbuffed.  My spellstone adds haste, and I’ve been doing heroics with haste food.  My old rotation could get 2, maybe 3 shadowbolts off before I had to reapply haunt.  Now I’m getting the minimum of 4 in with occasionally a 5th when I am really on a roll, on top of any nightfall procs.  That is a significant boost to my dps.

 

Yeah I have become Haste’s bitch. ^_^

Late post is late, kinda

Yeah I fell asleep without making a new entry, oh well, it is up now! 😀

 

Yesterday I bitched and moaned about our lack of participation in our raids and got a ton of feedback.  Thanks guys for all of your input! 😀  I really do appreciate it!  I decided to schedule the Ulduar raid for Sunday around 5:15 pm EST.  We might end up having to pug a healer, but I wont know until Saturday night.  Keep your fingers crossed for me.

 

My friend Andrew, who got me playing WoW, changed servers from Bloodhoof over to a RP server since that is his thing.  I made a few characters over there (warlocks of course) to play with him and to attempt to RP.  Until I played with him on that server, I had never RP’d.  I still have no clue what I am doing.  I was in theater in high school, was even on the improv team, but had never RP’d.  I still cannot wrap my mind around what exactly you do.  Don’t get me wrong, I know the mechanics, but the implementation of the mechanics just doesn’t make sense to me on how it works.  Guess I am just too right brained for it.  Remember I’m an accountant with no artistic talent. >.>

 

What I would do when I would play with him and we would have to RP was played a slightly more irritating version of myself.  Yeah I know, lame, but I didn’t know what else to do!  Although we were leveling in Westfall and we started RPing with a random player in front of the fire pit and she complemented me on my RP skills.  I told her that it was my first time RPing and she said she had no idea.  I guess I wasn’t too far off from my personality apparently.

 

How my friends put up with me I will never know.

 

Anyway, this was not the point of this post (I ramble if you haven’t already noticed).  The point was that Andrew mentioned to me yesterday that he MIGHT (being the imperative word) bring over 1 or 2 of his level 80 toons from the RP server back over to Bloodhoof so he can raid with us.  His friend might also bring over her Disc priest.

 

****GLEE****

 

Now I know this hasn’t been decided yet, but I am so excited by the possibility of it happening that I had to share. 😀

 

So Andrew, you better come back to Bloodhoof!  We need you!

Le sigh

I told myself I wasn’t going to bitch, but I am anyway.

So Saturday of LAST week was supposed to be EoF’s first venture into Ulduar as a guild.  We got a total of 5 sign ups.  It got called and rescheduled for this Saturday (09/26).  We started out strong with 7 sign ups with 2 more maybes.  That was fine, we could find 1 or 2 people to pug from our friends list, awesome.  Boom, we lost one of our tanks.  No biggie, we have friends who can tank.  An hour before we started our 3rd healer got wife aggro and was told he couldn’t come with us.  No one else was particularly interested in finding replacements, so we called it.

Is it just our guild or do other non-hardcore raiding guilds have this problem with sign ups?  There is a ton of interest, but no one signs up.  Or if they do sign up, something happens (not always in their control) that causes them to not be able to do it.

I know that RL is more important than WoW, but damn if it doesn’t just ruin my Saturday.

 

Now I am facing a problem.  I want to reschedule the run for this coming week, but there are several problems with that.  On our normal raiding day, Saturday, I was invited to get my sing on with Arrens over at http://arrens.net/.  Since I happen to love to sing (despite not being very good at it) I accepted.  So I am out for Saturday.  Now while I would like to think I was important enough to call a raid, I know I am not, however, I am one of 3 geared healers the guild has available.   Since we will need 3 healers for Ulduar, the guild will either need to call the run, or PuG, if I am not available to run.  Arrens asked me to hang out on 09/26, but since I knew we had the run set up, I told him I would come next weekend.  So now I cannot call off on him (and I don’t want to) so I will need to not go on the run.

No problem you say, schedule it for Friday night.  Well apparently our MT (not Mis, but the other one, he is better geared) has plans for Friday and him and his son (very well geared mage) will not be able to come. 

 

Ooooooooooookay, so what now?

 

I had family stuff to do on Sunday so I did not log in to gauge the guildies on what would work best for them.  We have been knocking out the lower level raids with our fresh and under-geared 80s on Friday nights and Saturday afternoons, but the pile of us who are over-geared for Naxx and OS want to do Ulduar.  I know several people are worried we will stay in the Naxx limbo for a long time.  I am kind of worried myself.  We have the personnel to do Ulduar, why we cannot get the damn run off the ground just makes my head hurt.

I have a few options that I am thinking of doing: (1) setting the run up for Saturday as usual, go until I have to leave to hang out with Arrens (shitty thing to do) then leave the raid and have them either call it or pick up another healer;  (2) set the raid for Sunday around 4:30-5:00 pm EST (server time) and see who we get to sign up; (3) set the raid for Tuesday or Wednesday night and risk not getting enough sign ups; or (4) set the raid for 2 weeks out and just set up a Naxx or Old School raid for Friday and Saturday.

 

I’d like to get input from my guildies, but frankly no one uses the website except for Mis and myself, and unless we have something set up on the calendar, there aren’t enough people online where asking would make sense. 

 

HEAD HURTS! >.>

 

I am not even an officer and I am spazzing out.  *sigh* stupid responsibility trait.

 

FRUSTRATION! - DO NOT WANT!

Screenshot Friday

This lovely shot is brought to you today by my lovely mage Calieah.

 

Enjoy

So pretty

What to do?

So yesterday I got too busy with double heroics that I was too tired to write a blog before I passed out, so I am sorry that today’s wasn’t on time.

But it is here!

For the longest time I hated jousting and sucked so badly at it.  Part of the reason was I learned to play WoW using my friend Andrew’s keyboard set up.  He is left handed and used the 10 key pad with his left hand and the mouse with his right.  I am right handed.  So I used the tab key with my left hand and my right hand switched between the 10 key pad and the arrow keys.  As you probably know from experience, this is not the easiest way to play.  I had no concept of using the mouse.  This was the first computer game (outside of the Sims and a few other games like CIV) that I had ever played that required keys and the mouse at the same time.  So I had no idea that using my left hand on the top number line was easier than using my right hand on the 10 key pad.  I’m an accountant, I love me some 10 key action.  I can actually use the 10 key pad faster than I can type, and I can type pretty damn fast.

So how does this relate to my original hatred of jousting?

When you joust they automatically bind the jousting keys to your first 6 keys on your home action bar.  For me this was the first 6 numbers on the 10 key pad.  What this meant for jousting was I either had to use my left hand on the 10 key pad (no coordination, felt “wrong”) and keep my right hand on the mouse to move (at this point I had learned how to mouse turn).  Since the hand placement was uncomfortable I was failing, and failing big time.  I easily did the first round of quests.  It isn’t really all that difficult to joust with a stationary object.  When it came to beating the valiant for the next round, I just couldn’t do it.  Everyone in my guild gave me pointers, my (now ex) boyfriend tried helping me.  None of that worked.  I wanted to joust, I wanted to move up in the tourney, but it just wasn’t going to happen for me.  Rick (my ex) finally felt bad for me and did the joust to defeat the valiant for me, but refused to do my jousting dailies for me.

This still left me with the same problem.  I still could not joust.  Only now I was on the next level and didn’t have the easy stationary jousting dailies. >.> Yeah smart move there <.<

So in frustration I gave up and went back to leveling my druid.  My warlock still has not moved from her position with the tourney.

I knew the main problem was with my key set up.  I tried switching things around and moved my spells from the 10 key pad to the top number pad, but even with lots of practice, it just wasn’t comfortable for me so I switched it back.

Fast forward several months.

My druid was now 80.  She was as geared as I could get without raiding Ulduar/ToC and all of her Northrend faction rep was exalted.  I still wanted to do dailies for the cash though.  Since my original objective for starting the tourney was the gold from the dailies, I knew I needed to learn how to joust.

I then had a spark of genius (or common sense, you pick) and decided to just change the home action bar key bindings for jousting and I could change them back once I was done.

Brilliant idea!

With the suggestions and visual instructions from guildies I actually succeeded in jousting.  At first I was chasing the guys around and spending all my time wacking them with my lance instead of charging and sheild breaking.  It wasn’t pretty and it was taking me forever and a day to get my dailies done.  Which kind of defeats the purpose of quick and easy dailies.  On top of that, I was getting irritated with the constant changing of key binding.  It was becoming a hassle to keep switching my keys back and forth.  I finally decided I was going to L2P with the top number keys.  I had to completely reorganize my spells (they still look like I have them in the wrong place) and then start practicing as much as possible with the new set up.

I am all about order and organization in the game.  When I pick up something and it goes in my bag it gets immediately organized.  My bags, my bank tabs, even my guild bank (both personal & guild) tabs are all organized in some sort of pattern or grouping.  It drives me nuts to have messy bags.  Now that I am no longer the guild bank officer I cannot “fix” EoF’s guild bank tabs and it drives me up the wall every time I go to look at it.  I do my best to keep it organized with my limited access, but my fingers itch to move things between tabs. >.> Yes I have a problem, trust me I know, it keeps getting pointed out to me.

So the fact that my spells were in the “wrong” place drove me nuts for about 2 weeks.  It has only been fairly recently that I have been able to not cringe and have to fight the urge to move the spells back.

Mind you, this is all on my druid.  I still cannot play with the top line on my lock.  It just feels very unnatural.  I know part of it is because I don’t do heroics or raids on my druid in boomkin form, so I only end up using like 4-5 keys with her.  Verses using 6-8 keys minimum on my lock.  My fingers just don’t stretch that far on the top number line.

You are probably asking yourself “what is the point of this rant?”

Nothing.

I just wanted to say that I could now joust. 😀

Locking it up

On Monday I was called in to play my warlock for the heroic daily since my healer had already done it.  Let me tell you, it was very odd going back to dpsing after healing almost non-stop for the past few months.  I don’t even do dailies on Millea anymore, it is just so much faster running them on Tatia.

While I didn’t fully forget my rotation or what I needed to do, it just wasn’t the same.

We did heroic Nexus, which I usually don’t do very well on dps wise.  Before I had gotten my druid to 80 I had started seeing some sweet numbers on my lock.  I think I managed to crack 3800 dps in a 5 man and I even beat the elemental shammy in the group, which is quite tough to do because he usually does 3500-4200.  I didn’t think about it at the time, but I was fully buffed in these runs.  We had a pally, ele shammy, resto shammy and mage, on top of me having a fish feast and flask on.  Yeah major overkill on 5 mans.  I ran Nexus yesterday with just my buffs and the ele shammy’s totems.  I did 2100 on the first boss, 2200 on the 2nd, 1700 on the 3rd (which kills your dps with all of those stupid rifts that dont count towards the boss dps), 2100 on the 4th boss, and 1900 on the final boss (which considering most of my spells are “stand still and cast” isn’t too bad for me), WTB more instants!

Considering the other 2 DPSers in the group were very well geared and doing great DPS themselves, I didn’t really do that bad.  If we wouldn’t have killed everything so damn fast I most likely would have done better.  After all, affliction locks are known for being boss killers.  The longer the fight, the better we do.  Shame everything is put onto speed mode.

There is this part of me that wants to refuse to heal the Naxx run on Friday and instead come on my lock.  She needs gear and badges big time.  She needs tender love too.

 

 

Not that kind of love!

 

Welllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll maybe 😉

Blarg went the blog

My original plan was to build up extra posts so that this wouldn’t happen, but Brewfest happened, so oops!

Why did this have to happen this way?!

 

So you get to see some pictures of my sweetie and his pets instead.

Isn't this just the sweetest picture?

I got him that bear cub and this pet on Saturday.

I like to think that I am adorable

Prompting him to remember to make 2 engineering pets, and thus get himself the 75 pets achievement. and Bambi:

75 pets and all I get is Bambi?

I will leave you with this little gem I found in general chat in STV:

Look OUT!

Thoughts and musings

Way to be redundant >.>

One of the problems that Call of Fate had was lack of attendance.  We had geared players and enough max level characters to pull off 2 10 man runs during BC.  Right before Wrath came out attendance dropped off to where we were lucky if 5 people were online at the same time.  Since I was not a raider with CoF during BC, I really cannot speak on the raids, or what happened in them.  All I can comment on is the problems we had with getting new members.

Call of Fate was a casual, family guild, who occasionally raided.  They recruited several people towards the end of BC with an eye towards raiding more and progression.  Then as soon as they got some raiders, everyone decided they were burned out and stopped coming online.  Suddenly we had new raiders in our guild who couldn’t raid.  Several of them stuck it out and stayed on for several months.  I think they were just hoping things would suddenly turn around and people would come back online.  Eventually they realized that no one was coming back anytime soon and they bailed for actual raiding guilds.

When Wrath came about several guildies came back online to start leveling in Northrend.  We actually had people online again.  It was nice having everyone back online.  This lasted maybe a month, if that, then CoF went back to being a ghost town.  We tried recruiting like-mined people into the guild.  They lasted 1-3 days before they realized that most people online ever was 4 or 5.  By this point I had hit 80 on Millea and started doing heroics with another guildie who had a level 80 prot warrior.  Him and I ran with 2 other guys from another guild just about every night.  Sometimes we would get lucky and another guildie would be online and we wouldn’t have to PUG a dps, but more often than not we had to PUG someone.  The bright side to that is Dily and I were able to build up a pretty decent list of players on our friend’s list.

Then (as most of you know) Mis decided he was going to finally create his own guild that he had been talking about for quite some time.  The day we all were /gkicked or /gquit from CoF there were around 10 of us online.  It was almost like old times.  People who hadn’t been online in months were suddenly back and we had people to do things with.  Gchat was once again the hilarious dirty-mouthed cesspit of fun it used to be and we were refreshed and ready to raid again.

This lasted all of a week. >.>

I was made the scheduling bitch of the guild.  It was my job to schedule raids, heroics, etc.  I immediately started asking everyone (in-game and on the website) what times were ideal for raids.  Two people replied to me.  Both of these people had odd schedules that didn’t fit within the majority of the people who were still coming online to play.  So while I thanked them for answering me, it didn’t provide me with any “real” help.  Since I still had to put raids up for people to sign up with I started putting them up at arbitrary times.  As you can probably guess, this was not the best way to get a full roster.  Without input I didn’t know what else to do.

We started out strong with our raiding.  We walked into OS our first time as a guild and one-shot everything.  We went into Vault and cleared both bosses.  We were pretty proud of ourselves.  So we thought “Hey lets go do Naxx!”  Ok, Naxx run up, 3 sign ups.  Hmm maybe it was just a bad time.  Well lets go back and do OS with 1 drake up.  After several wipes on Sarth we manged to pull it off.  “Let’s do Naxx tomorrow!” Ok, Naxx run up, 7 sign ups.  “Well that’s not too bad, we can PUG a few people.” Note, the “few people” were an OT a healer and a dps. >.>  We manged to clear out spider wing and construct wing in that first night.  One shot all but one boss.  Everyone agreed for a time for the next day where we would tackle the military and plague quarter, possibly even Sapp and KT.  One shot Instructor & Gothik, then proceeded to wipe on 4 horsemen for about an hour.  We finally got them down once we figured out the correct strat and had the correct people in position.  Went on into the plague quarter and killed the first boss before calling it for the night.  We extended the raid for another week just so we could go back and wrap it all up without having to redo everything.  Woot! full clear of Naxx . . . while everyone else who raids is busy in ToC >.<

We scheduled another run in Naxx for 09/05, again 5 people signed up.  We had to PUG half our raid.  Echo of Fate has 20 level 80s that are geared to do Ulduar 10, 15 that are geared to do Ulduar 25, and yet we cannot get 10 people online at the same time to do anything.  Hell we even have a few people who are geared for 10 & 25 man ToC.  How is it so damn difficult to get anyone online?

When EoF was set up the former GL of CoF (and Mis’s BiL) was made the recruitment officer.  It is his job to recruit for us.  Get us more like-minded people.  I am still waiting for this to start.  Mis wants EoF to progress in raiding.  I want us to progress in raiding.  I know most of the guildies want us to as well.  We will most likely never be a hardcore raiding guild.  I know I wouldn’t want to be in one despite the fact that I take raiding waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too seriously.  (I never before thought of myself as one of “those people” who freak out when the raid screws up.  Luckily for my sanity, and my guild, my sweetie pulled me aside and pointed out what I was doing.  I’ve since calmed down a bit, but I am still pretty bad about it.  I just push the vent button less :D)

I was talking with my sweetie about this problem EoF is having.  He said that people in our guild want to complain that we don’t have enough raids set up, but that once we do set them up they don’t “feel like” playing.  Basically they want to raid when they feel like it.

How in the hell do you work around that?

One of people CoF recruited back in BC who left to raid is still a friend of mine.  He was chatting with me the other night.  He told me that we needed to recruit heavily if we wanted to raid.  But that just brings us back to the original problem.  Anyone that we recruit to raid is not going to be happy with the little that we raid.  They will want to raid, raid, raid.  It will be a mis-match from the get-go and just cause problems.  My friend told me I just needed to join a raiding guild.  My reply to him was I want to raid, but I don’t want to raid with other people.  If I cannot raid with my guild, I don’t want to raid just to raid.

The sad thing is unless we make some sort of change, or magically find a bunch of people who have the same mindset we do, I don’t see EoF progressing much. 

Which makes me a very sad tree.

Ok who made the tree cry?!

Screenshot Friday

Nighttime in Icecrown

My babies

Now I love babies.  LOVE them!  I want several (hear that sweetie ;-)).  Unfortunately I don’t have any real life babies, so I lavish affection on my in game pets.

Mommy loves you!

That is my first baby raptor.  I wish you could name your non-combat pets.  Not that I have a name for them (I am NOT that crazy . . . at least NOT yet) I just want the option.

Who is mommy's precious? Yes you are!

A few weeks ago my sweetie’s best friend asked me if I wanted to go in with him to get my sweetie a  Chopper.  I agreed and immediately started finding ways to come up with 6k gold to pay for my half.  Now I am not a huge AH player, but I do have a pretty good idea what stuff sells for on Bloodhoof (which is such an odd market) at least for the most part.  Millea is a maxed out tailor and enchanter so I ransacked her bank (and my personal guild bank) for stuff gathering dust (lol) and threw it up on the AH.  I had a half stack each of the 3 speciality cloth from Northrend, a ton of lower level enchanting mats, and a bunch of bags.  All of it went on the AH.  I managed to sell 10 pieces of cloth for over 100g each in one day.  That was pretty cool.  On top of the gold I had saved up, and what I could make from grinding out dailies on both of my 80s, I was able to come up with my 6k gold in about 3 days.

When my sweetie got his Chopper he was so shocked and excited.  He couldn’t believe we would do that for him.

In thanks for my part in getting it for him, he went out and farmed me up some raptors.  The first one is the Razormaw one pictured above, and the other, which is my favorite is the Darting Hatchling

You are my favorite!

He is the coolest little pet around.  Out of the middle of nowhere he will just run off.

Where in the world are you going?

But he always comes back to mommy!

"Mama"

 My sweetie really is the bestest!

Whew, things are getting a bit steamy here!