Attempting Loremaster

Loremaster was one of those achievements that was in the back of my head as a someday kinda thing, would be nice to have but not too urgent. That all changed when Cataclysm was announced, suddenly all the quests were going to change and if I wanted to do it I now had a deadline.

One of the reasons for our faction change was to see the game from the Horde perspective, this included all of the original quests. So when the faction changes were available I said to myself this would be a perfect opportunity to complete the achievement and experience the other sides' questlines. Perfect ! However, I was in for a shock when I saw the numbers; I had lost so many quests that even starting the achievement seemed too daunting.

I eventually did start and managed to find quite a bit of time this weekend to complete a bunch of zones in Kalimdor. I finished Stonetalon, Desolace, Feralas, Silithus, Ungoro & Tanaris. Now, this was just the first pass, quests that are immediately available or can be picked up by completing chains within that zone. No quests that required leaving to do something and than coming back.

My plan is to do the first pass on all of the zones, than do the same in Easterm Kingdoms. I will follow that up with quests for all of the instances (which will have the effect of also getting the achievement for all of the instances.) After that I will start following questlines and tracking individual quests.

My life was made infinitely easier by a new feature that will be available in 3.3. A new command that Addon authors can use to query the game to receive a list of quests that have been completed. Finally, we will be able to get detailed information on quests we have completed. There is an awesome addon called Everyquest, which when used from day 1 can be used to track what quests have been completed and which have not. The author has now added the functionality (currently only on the PTR) to use the new function to get a list of quests you have completed. That is what I did, I transferred a character to the PTR, downloaded the client and got a list of what quests I have completed. I than transferred the addon database to the live client and had me an up-to-date list which I have been going off of.

On a side note, my Mysterious Egg was kind enough to gift me with a Green Proto-Drake Mount this weekend. If I ever receive a Proto-Drake Whelp pet I will be finished with the Oracles. Once I get to Exalted that is.

Catching Up

The trouble with blogging is when you fall off the wagon you tend to fall off pretty hard. My last blog post was written 2 days after my daughter's due date, so while she wasn't born for another 8 days I did have a lot on my plate.

Fast forward to now, almost 3 months later and quite a bit has changed. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail since I don't see the point, especially since anyone who is likely to read this knows about it already.

To sum up:

• Daughter born Aug 7, 2009 @ 1:00 AM MST, 8 lb. 13 oz. 21" , named Sadie Piper.
• Druid Sonar becomes new raiding main, Feral DPS spec.
• Most of guild and all of our raiding team faction transfers to horde side of Altar of Storms, new guild - Devolve
• Sonar becomes Tauren druid named Pinkshift

Current projects:

• Loremaster, currently working on Kalimdor in Stonetalon. I would like to complete this achievement before Cataclysm changes everything. I have a long way to go since the faction transfer dropped me by over a 1000 quests.
• Resto set, would like to be able to heal when the circumstance calls for it.
• Guild is currently working on HToC10, stuck at Faction Champions. Also working on Glory of the Ulduar Raider, stuck on Mimiron.

There, we are all caught up. Now I can go forward. Hopefully.

Last Week's Progress

Impending fatherhood still being just impending, I have found some playtime for Sonar in the last week. My primary goals have been:

• Improving PVE Feral DPS Gearing
• Progressing toward the Crusader title for the 3.2 tourney
• Levelling Engineering

I actually made some strides toward better gearing for Feral DPS which included:

• Spending 25 Champions Seals on the Alliance Staff (I believe the best weapon for ferals short of Naxx+)
• Purchasing BOE wrists using Emblems of Valor (Thanks Ellevis).
• Enchanting Weapon, Gloves, Wrists and Cloak
• Having Blue make me Trollwoven Spaulders
• Spending 15 Emblems of Heroism on Idol of the Ravenous Beast

Now I just have to try and replace the green/blue items and get some gems.

For the tourney I am now Champion of both Darnassus and Exodar and should be champion of Stormwind later today. I've been working on Argent Crusade rep through dailies and wearing their tabard during heroic runs. Next up is Argent Dawn rep thru multiple Baron runs, (and hopefully a mount ).

I got my engineering to 436 and now just need to make Army Knives until 450. This will cost me a fortune in Saronite but whatever, at least I can now make myself cheap bullets for Tax. I was also able to make myself 2 Sonic Boosters for my Tank set, yummy +81 Stam.

Egg Update: This week's Mysterious Egg yielded a White Tickbird Hatchling - Pet#20. (last week was Old Yoke).

A Necessary Slow Down

No posts of late, mostly due to limited play time on Sonar. With my impending fatherhood I've found time to raid once or twice a week and little else, and if I've had time I haven't had much energy. When I have had time and energy I've been working on Argent Tournament dailies. Sonar is a Champion of Darnassus and is ~halfway to championing Exodar. I would like to achieve the Crusader title or at least the requirements for it by patch time, but we'll have to see.

Outside the AT dailies my plan is to begin working on the Loremaster achievements, probably Kalimdor starting with the Dranei starting area.

Luck

A little background.

I started playing Wow in January shortly after the game's 1 year anniversary after getting bored with CoH/CoV. I tried out the 10 day free trial and was hooked very quickly and soon Wichita started playing with me. Now, as anyone who played back in the Classic Wow era, gold was not easily had, so in order to be able to purchase your mount at 40 you had to be careful with what gold you had. On top of that, Wich and I were extremely noobish and especially early on had little idea how the game worked. I would vendor all unnecessary greens and rarely purchased anything, especially not bags.

In this light, we had a little test. If a bag dropped for our characters in the first few levels, this was a good sign and the character was a keeper. If not, we should reroll. Therefore, any characters that I have that are from my early days would have all passed the luck test. Sonar is currently the oldest chracter that I have that I still play, transferred from Haomarush to AoS at level 35 and occasionally levelled and finally up to max level recently. Sonar would definitely be the only character I have on AoS that would have passed the bag test.

Now to the point. I mentioned the test because my current main Taxiderm would have failed miserably. I think she would have actually lost a bag somehow. Very infrequent drops and when they do I am almost guaranteed to lose the roll if I have competition. I really noticed when I started levelling Sonar again mostly because she is really lucky. Tons of green drops while levelling, quite a few blue drops (15+ from Level 60-80) and in the few instances she has run, good gear has dropped and cleaning up on the greed rolls. Last night in Heroic UP I started feeling bad because of how many rolls I was winning.

In some RPG's I have played there is a primary character stat called Luck that influences rolls for combat and feats and stuff. So I have to ask, is there maybe a hidden stat in Wow that influences loot rolls and drops and stuff ? I doubt it, but looking at the extreme difference between Taxiderm & Sonar I start to wonder.

As for Sonar's activities, last night I finished all but the last quest in the epic flight form questline and as soon as I get enough Lower City rep to get the Heroic key I will be able to run Heroic Sethhek for the Raven mount. I need about 450 more gold for dual-spec which I probably won't use at all till much later but still good to get out of the way. I got an epic belt in Heroic UK last night and I won the roll on a BOE Physical DPS cloak in Ulduar, so Sonar got that.

It figures as soon as I think "that would be good for Sonar", Taxiderm finally wins a roll.

The Flying ... She is Epic

So after a couple of nights of questing, completing both Zuldrak and now Sholozar Basin combined with actually trying to sell some of my green & blue drops on the AH instead of to a vendor, I now have my Epic Flight Form. Woot !!

God, what a difference. The last couple of quests in SB have quite a bit of travel around the zone to them, these were made quite easy with speedy birdy. I also began the daily quest grind to gain Oracles rep, it took me 3 tries to solo Heroes Burden, although I only died once (first try). On the second try I followed some advice from a poster on Wowhead who said I could Shadowmeld after freeing the NPC and let him tank for a while allowing me to heal up. Nope. Reset. @#$%^.

Now the next step in my plan will be to continue questing, of course. I now require 1000 gold in order to purchase dual-spec. I also have stockpiled a fair amount of green items that were scheduled for the AH but I think I will redirect them to my enchanter so I can start stockpiling mats for the inevitable enchants needed on gear. I think I will also start questing in Storm Peaks next so I can work on my Sons of Hodir rep for the Shoulder enchants. I have also began the Epic Flight Form questline in Outland so I can eventually do Raven mount runs.

Things are definitely going fairly well.

Ding ... 80 Plus Other Stuff

Having a couple of extra days off is really useful for getting some good levelling done, thus I managed to Ding 80 Friday night. It was rather anti-climatic since it was very late and almost noone was on, although I did get a congrats from someone on an alt that I didn't recognize, WTB notes on guild tabs.

I then proceeded to ... just keep on doing quests. I still need more gold for epic flying and actual questing is much more fun than just doing dailies, plus it increases my quest count and improves my gear, if only barely. Last night I finished questing in Zuldrak for the first time on any character, both times before I skipped Zuldrak so I definitely wanted to do those quests this time. I found the zone quite pleasant actually, the long storyline ending in the Gundrak quest was quite engaging. While questing in the zone I got a tell asking me if I wanted to run the Amphitheatre of Anguish group of quests, since I hadn't yet done them I was definitely interested, but it turns out they wanted me to tank, something I hadn't yet done although I am partially specced for it (my feral spec is a psuedo cat-bear spec designed for soloing elites as best as possible.) The run went surprisingly well, noone died and the 80 rogue only a couple of times pulled aggro and each time a quick growl got the mob back on me, yeah !!!

I also finshed the Midsummer achievements earning the title of Flame Warden, I ended up with enough blossoms to get all the achievements as well as the purchaseable pet and the dancing firey dranei thingy. Also during the Ahune run, which Ellevis was kind enough to help me with, the scorchling pet dropped and I outrolled him FTW, sorry Wich.

The plan going forward is to keep questing until I get epic-flying, than I shall quest some more for dual-spec. Than I shall keep questing until Northrend is done, moving on to TBC zones until they are done too, this should take me quite a while, lol. I also need to get better gear, I'm going to need some decent tanking gear for soloing old instances and I'll need resto gear for raiding (at some point maybe), feral and/or balance gear for faster questing. I think I'm going to have Taxiderm craft a bunch of leather gear for all sets and see how long that lasts me. Hope to get into some alt raids now that I'm 80.

So much work to do. Oh well, its fun though.