"Error: not enough disk space for installation"

Or something like that. After clearing space, and a ridiculous 8+ hour download for reinstall yesterday, I still do not have "required disk space" to install the update. I found another blog online that mentions the free space you need is equivalent to twice what your WoW folder currently is, because it's completely re-doing the way the client runs. It's all "temporary" data, and that's all well and good for people with umpteen-million gigs of hard drive space, but for us laptop users, 19GB x2 is a crazy stupid amount.

Currently, I am transferring all WoW data to an external hard drive with more than enough space. Found some forum posts that suggest this might be my solution. I won't be running WoW from the hard drive, I'll move everything back once it's done being a jerk about space. It's Thursday and I still haven't gotten to play the new stuff. I'll be getting on Super's computer later because I'm finally not going to be at work late and he'll be out, but I want to play on my own computer, re-ad my mods, etc. I'm so uber frustrated with this patch/update/Blizzard/WoW that I have to jump through all these hoops for TEMPORARY files. My computer is now stripped down to the basics, and by basics, I mean pretty much just WoW. I transferred all my music and pictures to a hard drive, this machine is now good for word processing, internet browsing, and WoW. I have a $1,200 Apple netbook now, and I'm not happy about it.

Will post again later if external hard drive was the solution to this insane problem.

It's Cata, yo

As the majority of the people now know: the Cata patch dropped yesterday. I'm sure many people are enjoying it (or not in some cases) even right now. I have yet to be able to touch it. Not because I've been too busy (although, that's the reason for the lack of posts in the month of September), but because of my laptop's lack of hard drive space.

It downloaded just fine last night while I was sleeping (had it at work, and didn't want to download it on the clock, silly me), but when it went to install, it couldn't because there wasn't enough temporary space free. My laptop is almost four years old, the total hard drive space is 80GB, which I think iPods are either at or have surpassed. The patch needed close to 20GB free temporarily in order to install everything, something I just didn't have, so I had to make space. I cleared my pictures, music, anything I didn't need anymore (which included old patches). I thought I'd be set when I got to work this morning (brought it with me again today, have to stay late and didn't want to be without something fun to do) and the login screen was new and I had to agree to the terms and conditions. Much to my dismay, I couldn't log in. At all. I could enter my info, push "login", and then WoW would quit. The installer had error messages about not being able to delete some older patches (which I had deleted myself, it seems, prematurely), so I think that was probably the problem. The only solution I could really find was to uninstall WoW, and download the latest client (which includes 4.0.1 and doesn't need 20GB of temporary space), and re-install.

So that's what my laptop's been doing for the last, oh, 4 hours. It's at 34%. 3.0GB out of 7.4GB. I desperately want a new one, something faster with far more hard drive space so I don't run into this problem again. Super got on last night when the servers came up, and got to play this morning I'm sure. I have yet to see what in the world my poor Kady looks like, I have no idea what I'm going to do to her talent tree.

I need food...

Spells We've Re-named :)

It's a game, plain and simple. I think sometimes serious raiders tend to forget that, forget to enjoy the game. We wiped non-stop on Arthas last Wednesday, but I had more fun than I've had raiding in a while. One liners left and right coming from the guildies, including a couple that made it to our Guild Message (sadly not all could fit!). The repair bills didn't matter, we were having fun. What a novel idea. Having fun while playing a game ;)

Here are some spells that we've re-named in the process of having fun with ICC.

Love Chain: Pact of the Darkfallen

Fire Farts: Swarming Shadows

CHOMP!: Frenzied Bloodthirst

The Clap: Necrotic Plague

I'll have to post some raid quotes another time, but they're usually quite hysterical XD

Waving Hello to Artie

Pictures from tonight's raid: Our first attempt at the big LK :)

Raid Progresssion

It's been a while since I posted how our guild is doing with raid progression. This post has especially good timing considering the progress we made last night :)

The tabard that Kady is wearing is her new guild tabard. Gates of Dawn and Broken Kingdom officially came together and created a new, merged guild called Run Away Little Girl. The old guilds still exist and have alts in them to maintain them, but we will be using the new merged guild, RALG, for the purpose of staffing both sets of raid nights. The merge paid off last night when the former GoD crew (now dubbed the "Wednesday" group), along with members from the BK crew, downed Sindragosa for the very first time! It took several attempts but eventually we mastered the fight and took that annoying, PMSing dragon down!

After distributing the loot, we headed over to Plague where we pwn3d Festergut and Rotface big time. It was like watching a choreographed dance, we were smooth, seamless, and kick-ass! There will be discussion next week as to whether or not we'll want to extend the raid lock and wave hello to the big LK (after the Prof. of course). We also have not yet set foot in the Ruby Sanctum (not as a guild anyway, the Thur/Fri group, and a few of our Wed raiders have pugged it, but that's the extent of it), and I'm eager to try that one out.

What do you do during que?

As a tank, or even a healer, the Random Que doesn't take very long. You get your frosties in no time at all and you're on your way.

As a DPS on the other hand, you can wait fifteen minutes or more just for one dungeon. What to do with that time? Sure you can do dailies or work on getting Loremaster. I do those sometimes, but mostly, I knit.

I took up knitting a month or so ago. Not as difficult as I originally thought and way more fun. I'm very much a visual person, colors and shapes attract my attention. Creating something, crafting something, being able to do it anywhere I go (without the annoying necessity of batteries), I was probably bound to pick up knitting one way or another. Ravelry.com is now another website that I've become addicted to, users can upload pictures of projects and share patterns as well as buy new ones. Very cool, very useful.

Chieftain Swiftspear and Frostfloe Deep

A friend on another realm was telling me today about a new thing that hackers are doing. A buddy of his had been hacked and when he had regained his account, one of his characters was dead in a strange cave in Stormpeaks. After looking around for a bit, he noticed what appeared to be several horde bots (characters being run by algorithms) running around and killing the elementals in the cave, Wailing Winds. Apparently they're a pretty good source of crystallized fire. What hackers have been doing is taking geared toons on accounts they've hacked up to this cave and just farming crystallized fire and putting stacks of eternal fire on the AH. What my friend found more interesting was the fact that neither he nor the buddy who had been hacked, had seen this cave before. After talking with some friends on the horde side (Camp Tunka'lo is pretty much directly south of this cave) they found out their friends didn't know anything about the cave either. Since checking wowhead.com would make too much sense for them, I did it ;)

The cave is called Frostfloe Deep. Inside the cave is the spirit of a Tauren named Chieftain Swiftspear. As a Horde member only, you get a quest from Xarantaur at Camp Tunka'lo to find Swiftspear and ask him about his memories. Turns out, the cave is a burial ground for the ancient warriors of Tunka'lo that has been taken over by a strange, elemental force. This force has been disturbing the spirits in the tomb as well as erasing Swiftspear's memories from life. He asks you to take his totem and close the rifts that have opened inside the tomb to restore the peace. You get sent back to Xarantaur after that to finish up the quest lines. It's really an interesting bit of lore, almost makes me wish I played Horde. Almost ;)

The mouth of Frostfloe Deep.

Chieftain Swiftspear

Dehlia - Level 80 #4

I have been having an absolute ball leveling and playing my warlock, Dehlia. Affliction is sooooo much fun! I hit 80 with her last Saturday while Alindras was over leveling her druid. We were supposed to go swimming, but with both of our toons halfway through 79, the call of 80 was too much to bear. We definitely skipped swimming altogether and once we leveled to 80, we didn't stop there. Oh no, of course not, we had to start doing the high-end dungeons (ToC, FoS, and PoS--we tried HoR but it was too much for our low gear) to replace blues and get emblems!

I still haven't gone swimming since Saturday, but I have been farming heroics!

Not a new comic, but close :)

Alindras drew this for me. I had the idea for the picture while we were on one of our failed attempts of the Dreamwalker fight. I think Heap had made a joke about helping the healers by using his frostweave band aids and that's when the light bulb went off above my head. Alindras agreed and handed me the drawing yesterday afternoon (which coincidentally was the same afternoon that she hit 80 with her druid and I hit 80 with my warlock XD). I LOVE it! :)

New modem = less lag!

Garaba's twin, Frost Armor Vendor (Priest gear)

Our internet has been wonky for a while. Last weekend was the last straw. It was only up for a minute or two before going down and staying down for much longer than it had been up. I hate Comcast. Too bad they're a monopoly in this area. Super was able to go to one of their service locations and just swap out the modem since we were pretty sure that was the problem and turns out it was. Thankfully we didn't have to schedule service guys to come out, with Super working nights (and sleeping during the day) and my crazy work schedule, it would have probably been weeks before service guys could actually take a look at our system. We raided last night with only a few lag issues (mostly Heap had them, he was on a hotel's internet) and FINALLY got the Prof. down for only the second time.

BIG NEWS! We've been in talks with BK about merging the two guilds (they have the same problems we do with finding people for the last one or two spots in their 10man raids) and creating a brand new guild for raiding. Both original guilds will remain intact for leveling alts and things, and the new guild will primarily be a raiding guild. Each set of guildies will retain their original raid night(s) with the added bonus of being able to help each other fill the remaining spots. No more pugs! After an incredibly productive vent discussion between the two guilds (each guild elected 3 people to speak in vent while others could listen and post concerns/questions in their respective guild chats, that way it wouldn't be a free-for-all and everyone's voice could still be heard), GoD has been invited to use BK's online forums to discuss new guild names. So far, there have been lots of good name suggestions made but no decisions have been made yet. My favorites has been "Set Sail For Epic Fail" and "I Stand in Fire" (neither of them were mine but I love them anyway!).

Altoholic Fail...

I apparently have 25 warlock trainers in my personal guild bank ("Spider Pride")...

Why Leveling Alts Makes Me a Better Healer.

Now that I've got a full set of toons that I can use almost interchangeably in our weekly raids, that is, I have a DPS, a tank, and a healer, I can say confidently that I am a healer through and through. However, I'm not completely ignorant of the fact that my other toons teach me about being a healer. What can a hunter and a warrior teach you about healing? Plenty.

As a Hunter/DPS, I didn't have too much use for healers in dungeons/raids unless I accidentally stood in the stupid or a mob got loose and I pulled aggro. I did like it when healers would throw up a heal or two on my pet, that made me happy that they acknowledge my pet was a valuable part of the party. Even if it was AOE-heals, my pet still got something other than Mend Pet and that was nice. From that experience, I don't think of pets (Lock pets included) as non-members of the party, if I can, I'll throw some heals their way. Or if I see a hunter rezzing a pet, I'll rebuff it. Hunters spend time with their pets, they level together, they quest together, they get to pick out talent points for them, pets are very important to the hunter, even if they're not Beast Master spec'ed. Keeping the hunter's pet happy also keeps the hunter happy. And if the hunter's happy, they won't misdirect to you on purpose...(I've been offered gold to MD to random people in the party/raid, which I've taken XD, but not usually if I like the person)

As a Warrior/Tank, where do I start? Tanks and healers have to be close, they need to trust each other, the tank especially needs to trust the healer. My method of healing has typically been to keep the tank topped off whenever possible, or at least be my main focus. The tank moves, I move. The tank doesn't loot, I don't loot. Only in extreme cases will I /oom and stop to drink. When I'm on my tank, the way I heal is only reinforced, especially when I get healers that can't keep up or have to drink after every other pull. As a Warrior specifically, I get to watch my rage drain as the healer's mana bar goes up. I get itchy, ready to pull the next group and refill my rage. I LOVE charging into groups and using Thunderclap. I HATE when I can't charge because the healer went AFK at the last second and I suddenly have to stop mid-pull and pop cool-downs. I tank the way I do because I'm also a healer and I heal the way I do because I'm also a tank. I make sure my healer has the mana they need and when I'm healing I make sure that the tank isn't slowed down by me.

If you read my previous post, you'll see that I have a new appreciation for Warlocks and Life Tap since I'm leveling one myself now. I had one sitting on my character page for a while, as is typical me, and I decided to get her more heirloom gear (only had the shoulders from leveling Kady, bought the robe and the staff) and actually start leveling her. It was a struggle to get her out of Redridge, but I pushed through and got to questing regularly. It's so nice to be leveling again, to have a goal to be working towards, something to do that's within fairly easy reach and that I can do at my own pace (not once a day for example).

Each alt that I level teaches me something new about healing and about my play-style, even if they only sit on my character screen for months eventually seeing only the "DELETE" window instead of level 20. But they only teach me if I'm willing to pay attention, like right now, I have no idea what makes Shammys happy because I haven't leveled one past the ability to turn into a wolf...

Dear Warlocks,

I hereby apologize for telling you to be more mana efficient. I take back what I said about stealing my mana for healing you as you LT yourself. Having been raising a Warlock lately, I now understand that your spells are expensive and LT is the only way to continue to put out damage sometimes. I've been really good about making sure any Warlocks I group with are always topped off now that I know. Thanks for helping me see the other side.

Love,
Kady




My Warlock is up past level 50 now and is quickly on her way to being my 4th 80. I'm having a ball leveling with her, even though Vanilla is soooooo tough to level in once you get up to the 40's. I just have to make it a few more levels to 58 and I can get the heck out of Azeroth and REALLY love leveling. I've been using Dungeon Finder as often as I can to help. I've found that I can solo a lot of quests that are actually well above my level (as in orange and red ones) so I run out of quests in a zone more quickly than I probably should. DF helps supplement questing nicely, not to mention the gear choices are way better and way more accessible now that everyone's into pugging low level dungeons. Between heirlooms and DF, I've been steadily leveling over the past several weeks and--for the most part--avoiding the zones that are painful to quest in (got out of Tanaris as soon as I could). I'm also now fairly comfortable running a lot of the low level dungeons without having to look at Atlas to find my way through. What's good about hitting the same dungeon over and over is that, chances are, your first time through there, you'll end up with a tank (or at least one person) who's already gone through it several times. By the time you're in their position, there's someone else in your pug who's running through for the first time and you can show them through. Having a group that knows where they're going helps orient you to the dungeon and running the same thing over and over, also does that XD

Children's Week, Twice Over

Finished Children's Week today, on both Lade and Kady.

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

Ok, done with that. Kady still needs Flame Warden before she gets her drake, but I did manage to get all of School of Hard Knocks done on THE FIRST TRY in each BG! Holy Crap! I think it was because I knew what I was doing this time, plus I could heal myself. I went Shadow which was tons of fun, must think about doing more BGs in Shadow...

Now I'm just having fun and taking my time doing all the quests the orphans give you so I can get more cute pets :)

Happy end of F***ing Children's Week!!! XD

Violet Drake

1 Year of Posting

I think this might be my longest running, consistently posting blog. Yay :) In preparation for this anniversary, I spent last night uploading some of my favorite screen shots to Flickr to create a gallery of my time played. It still needs work, but there's some shots of Lade while I was still leveling her (in crazy, mis-matched gear) and Kady while she was still human, among other things. I've got to get back to cleaning so I can maybe get my drake today, but enjoy the pix!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/canikeephim/

Daily Quests

Found another WoW comic that I'm now in love with :) www.daily-quests.com

Good news everyone!

After several, not-so-solid attempts at Prof. Putricide, we managed to get him down tonight! This was a very nice boost in our confidence, especially since we couldn't get past a specific point in the Dreamwalker fight. Each time we wiped on the Prof, we managed to get him a little farther down, each wipe we were farther into the fight than the previous attempt. We made tweaks here and there and managed to finally defeat him! This makes me happy because it's one more boss we know we can beat and it's one more boss closer to the Lich King. I got a new mace (Lockjaw) and paired it with what is technically a DPS offhand (Scourgelord's Baton), however I did the math (in between wipes) and I get more stats out of it than if I have my Mag'hari Chieftain's Staff. Wasted stat or not, my heals are still epic XD

Side note, Garaba and Nayana helped me get the EoTS part of the School of Hard Knocks yesterday. We attempted to get the other two, but I fail at BGs so Lade still doesn't have a pink drake. She is one step closer though, and that's good. I don't know yet if Kady will get it. I started doing the Children's Week achievements with her today, but only because I was bored and killing time before raid. I'm off work tomorrow and as a reward for cleaning the house, I'm going to allow myself achievement time later. We're also going to have an alt run in ToC, which should be cool, we'll also do the weekly (this week it's Ignis) and get some more frosties. All in all, a pretty good night tonight :)

School of Hard Knocks = Bane of My Existence

Capture the flag in Eye of the Storm
Assault a tower in Alterac Valley
Return a fallen flag in Warsong Gulch

are all that stand between Lade and her pretty pink drake (actually it's kind of ugly, but it's my only shot at 310% flying speed). I don't really see AV being very difficult, other than the queue to get into it (was in 3 BGs yesterday, didn't get it once, got WG twice). WG I almost returned the flag--twice, both times I wasn't quiiiiiite quick enough. I think EotS is going to be the most difficult one and I'm not looking forward to it.

Seriously considering not even doing it on Kady, but then again, that's what I did last year for Lade and could have had my drake ages ago if I had done it...

Celestial...Seahorse?

I thought it looked like a seahorse, lol.

Tanked ICC

Did not have quite the same reaction to tanking as I did to healing in a raid. We restarted our ICC lock this week (after continuing last week only to meet with nothing but wipes on Dreamwalker) and I took Emila. We got up to Sauerfang (a couple of wipes, which is rockier than we've been when everyone's on their mains, but overall not too bad) and one of our DPS had DCed during Lady Deathwhisper (ended up 9-manning her) and never got back on. We had one somewhat decent attempt at Sauerfang but it was pretty much doomed from the beginning. I managed to get a new mace and new shield, which (among emblems) was all I really wanted besides a taste of tanking in an actual raid. Soooo much different than tanking 5-mans.

The first time I healed in a raid (Naxx), I was hooked. That was it. I loved it and still do. Tanking...not the same. I still like tanking, but not as much as healing. For the most part, my 80's are all geared enough that they can do what they need in ICC (and as of yesterday, now they've all been through the first couple of bosses). Emila's gear still needs some work, and Lade's not that much ahead. It's not surprising that Kady's the one who's got the best gear. Garaba's always been ahead of me in the gearscore area, but it wasn't until I starting noticing the gear of people in the dungeon finder groups that I realized: I'm pretty dang geared compared to the average player. From listening to the WoW.com podcast as well as reading and seeing what people discuss in trade chat, a lot of raiding guilds raid more than once a week. Duh. I knew that. Some guilds still use DKP (something that had to be explained to my newb-self a while back). The hardcore raiding guilds--and by "hardcore" I mean "raids-more-than-us"--are only better than us because they've had more practice. We have a slower learning curve, which can frustrate pugs, but it works for us. I've thought of us as "behind" for a long time and yeah we're behind when compared to the hardcore raiding guilds. But some guilds don't raid even as much as we do. I don't know where we fall under "average" or "above average" as far as raiding guilds go, but I think we're doing pretty dang well, even if the Dreamwalker fight kicks our butt.

BRD Screenshot

We 5-manned Molten Core the other day and on our way there through BRD, we had the succubus open the door for us and I caught this little scene.
Not gonna lie, it made me giggle. A lot. And take a screen shot of it to enjoy whenever ;)

Lunch?

Dear Alliance,

I hate you for getting Wintergrasp at lunchtime. F*** all of you.

Love,
Kady


So Super and I were supposed to be on our way to lunch but we're still at home. Why? Because while I was in the shower, he got in a VOA-25. He thought I was going to take longer. I was starving before I got in the shower, now my health bar IRL is down to like 20hp >.<

Originally he told me he was only going to do "the one boss" but I didn't believe it. I was right. I'm still sitting here, waiting to leave for lunch. Half tempted to tell him to meet me there, but if I want cocktails (and I just might...), he needs to drive and I don't feel like taking a trip back to the restaurant tomorrow to pick my car up...


*Our internet just went down, serves him right, maybe I can get food now...

My only day off this week and it's maintenance day. /sigh

My next day off isn't until Saturday. Not that I was planning on playing all day today (I'm seeing "The Runaways" with my friend later), but I was hoping to get some dailies in and maybe level an alt. But sadly that is not the case. I read an article forever ago about "how to survive maintenance day" and one of the suggestions was "start a blog" lol. So I'll be posting a quick update on what I've been doing in the game lately and then I'll be off to marathon The X-Files (I love Netflix) and recapture some childhood memories ;)


Ladelyia - I've mostly just been doing some daily dungeons with her and leveling her Engineering. I've finally hit 450 and then last Sunday, Super's alt (Squeezetoy) and Lade both managed to craft Jeeves. We had both been getting up the mats together over the weekend, and the worst part about the whole thing was getting the Khorium needed for the Khorium Power Cores--none on the AH. :( Squeeze spent time in Nagrand attempting to mine it while I was at work, and by the time I got home, between what he had and what got put on the AH, we had enough to craft the little butler. :) Lade is also slowly collecting the mats for the chopper. She's got most of the inexpensive ones (and 8 out of 12 Titansteel Bars) and she also bought the exhaust pipe. Slowly but surely she's on her way to that motorcycle! I had toyed with the idea of giving the bike to Kady, since she was my main anyway, but the whole reason for leveling Lade's engineering was for the mounts (in addition to leveling tailoring) so that idea went out the window. I did however break down and buy the Sparkle Pony (Celestial Steed) so at least now all my toons who can ride have a pretty mount. It is BOA and applies to all future toons you make, much like the Onyxian Whelpling and Mr. Chilly and that was a big selling point with me.


Kady - I've been raiding with Kady and last week she got some offspec gear (again, got laughed at for what I considered "offspec" but w/e). Garaba out-rolled me on pants and, granted, we had the same pants on so technically it was the same upgrade for both of us, but he's got better gear than me all around anyway. So I was a little grouchy on that roll. Thankfully, after that run I had enough frosties to buy the tier pants, though I would have preferred to use them to buy the head instead if I had won the pants. Aaaaannnyyyyyyyway... I've looked up upgrades for my remaining 232 gear (only two things!). One upgrade is crafted (Sandals of Consecration) and the other can be bought with frost emblems (Purified Lunar Dust). While I should probably be saving to get the tier helm for the 4-piece bonus, 60 emblems is much easier to get, and I think I'll be using Lade's frost emblems to get me some Primordial Saronite for the crafted shoes. My gearscore overall will benefit more from upgrading the two 232s rather than upgrading the 245 that is my current helm (Helm of Clouded Sight). My new pants do not have spellthread in them yet and my shoulders are missing an enchant (just keep forgetting to go buy it), so those will help as well.


Emila - I tanked some Ulduar bosses with her on Friday! Calinette whispered me and asked if I had any toons that wanted some Ulduar achievements (BK does Ulduar achievement runs apparently) and I told him all my toons were not locked and he could have whichever one he wanted. He wanted a tank and so Emila got to set foot in Ulduar (not for the first time, FL was the weekly raid boss and I managed to get her in a pug for that one) and actually tank her first raid. We did FL, Razorscale, XT, Ignis, and Auriaya. I had a blast tanking. I was the off-tank in some fights and the main tank in others, depending on what achievement we were trying for and what I would have to do. The other tank's gearscore was much higher, so if it involved taking more damage, he did it. Emila's gear is getting pretty good now. She could tank ToC10 with no problem and probably handle the first couple of bosses in ICC (not Festergut though, not yet). Her trinkets are crap because good ones are so hard to find (been saving up her frosties for that), but a lot of her gear is 232. I can't seem to get any of the heroic bosses to drop the gear that I desperately need for upgrade. I'm still carrying around my Hammer of Quiet Mourning and my Titansteel Shield Wall for tanking. I've got better weapons in my DPS set! Speaking of DPS, Emila is also dual-spec'ed now, finally. Not that I'm ANY good at melee DPS, having gone from 1 to 80 as a pure tank (thanks to Squeezetoy as my healer) and really only having tank gear. I've got some pieces of DPS gear, but nothing that really helps me. I'm lucky if I'm above the healer for damage when I DPS...

That's all for now, time for some X-Files! :)

One more thing...

I forgot to mention that after Kady gets her Violet Protodrake (Lade only needs one achievement from Children's week and then she'll have it, Kady needs Midsummer) I'm only doing the EASY holiday achievements on my other toons IF I FEEL LIKE IT. They're like chores at this point, especially the ones that you get from random drops. The ones that require you do things and then you get them, those are ok, but the fact that some meta achievements need you to get something completely random, that's not cool.

Speaking of random: I want to quickly tell you about my favorite Easter memory from this year (IRL of course). It actually happened Good Friday rather than on Easter, but w/e. I watched a bunch of (fully grown) military men do an Easter Egg Hunt. They didn't put it on for their kids, it was put on FOR THEM. It was HILARIOUS to watch all these guys in their military uniforms running around picking up eggs going "I GOT SIX! I GOT SEVEN!". Made my entire week. So funny.

That's all.

OMG EGGS!!!!! (An Achievement Junkie's Guide to Noblegarden)

I'm currently writing this while on the flightpoint taxi, doing Desert Rose. Noblegarden is pretty simple. To become a Noble Gardener, you don't even need all of the achievements for this holiday. That's pretty nice considering one of the achievements is based on what you randomly get from the eggs (Sunday's Finest). For the most part, the achievements themselves are straight forward. The hardest one is going to vary depending on your server. My PvP server made Hard Boiled really hard last year due to the amount of horde who were corpse-camping people. This year, not so much (I went at 7:30pm).

I think my biggest challenge last year (and will probably be this year) was Shake Your Bunny-Maker. Some horde females are really hard to find. Dwarf females are also somewhat hard to find, but usually there's a way of finding them in chat and stuff. It also doesn't help that the Spring Flowers used to put bunny ears on the females have a 5 min cooldown. That's not cool, it totally doesn't help you when you're running up and down the streets of Dalaran stalking females and trying to put bunny ears on them! If you find the last two females you need, you have to wait 5 min after getting one to get the other, they could have disappeared by then.

The biggest things with Noblegarden is: DON'T ACTUALLY BUY ANYTHING WITH YOUR CHOCOLATE. Except the egg to hide in Stormwind, that's ok. And if you have all the other achievements (including Chocoholic), buying the tuxedo pants and shirt is ok for Blushing Bride. What's nice is the clothes for that aren't soulbound, so you can trade with someone and you can both get the achievement. BUT DON'T BUY ANYTHING ELSE. Everything you need for the achievements comes in the eggs and will drop randomly. Including the rabbit pet. Eat your candy. Typically the stuff you need will drop by the time you've gathered up 105 chocolates anyway (remember, 5 to buy the egg to put in SW).

And that's my cheap guide to Noblegarden. In the time it took to write this post, I finished the achievement (I had already started, but w/e). ;)

Happy Egg Hunting!

Soooooo healing...that's still what I do, right?

It's been a while since I've posted anything about healing. So, here's a post about healing! :)

I have noticed that healing still comes most naturally to me. DPS and tanking are fun, and I seemed to pick them up fairly quickly (and for the most part hold my own, I'm not sure how good I actually am), but healing flows from these fingers onto my action bar and through my mouse-over macros (thanks Garaba). I one-handed healed a random heroic the other day because I was eating. It was H UP and I was only throwing up Renews and--wow, I don't even remember the name right now, it's #3 on my action bar, it's the jumpy-around-heal that goes to up to 5 people. Yeah, 3. Occasionally I'd use Circle but only because it was easier than putting my food down. My gearscore is pretty high now, so a lot of the older Northrend heroics are so easy to heal they're boring. Which is probably why I'm working on gearing my tank.

I was DPSing on my hunter in H VH not too long ago and the healer was a priest who never left Shadow spec. She Shadow-Healed the whole dungeon. Granted, health bars weren't topped off (like I like to do), but nobody died, even during boss fights. I'm apparently not the only one who's bored with the heroics. I guess this happens when an expansion is winding down. I started playing a month or two before Wrath came out, nowhere near the level cap when it hit, Wrath pretty much popped my cherry in a couple of ways.

Wrath is the first expansion that I got to move through with my guild, together. A lot of us were leveling at the same time, but some were farther than others (*cough*Darwe & Heap*cough*). We were all new 80's around the same time and experienced gearing up through heroics together, before Dungeon Finder. Our first guild raids were Naxxramas and Obsidian Sanctum. We were working on Ulduar when Kady got geared enough to help and became my main. We never did finish Ulduar, Trial of the Crusader came out before we could and that held our attention. Well, most of us. There are a couple of us (Garaba and I mostly) who want to go back and finish Ulduar to finish it, but that'll have to be a pug I suppose.

And now we're raiding Ice Crown Citadel--which is the first endgame content for a lot of us. We were fairly geared as a guild when we started it, and we have a rather large learning curve, but we work well as a team and inevitably get through one boss after the next. Currently, we've gotten as far as defeating Rotface. We would have raided yesterday and hopefully gotten just as far again, but Hubby and I went to the movies (can't say no to free tickets to an early screening of "Clash of the Titans"!). I'm sure if I logged on right now, I could probably get in with Darwe's guild, but I'd rather wait for Hubby to get home with Little Caesar's and do some random heroics with him on our alts :)

So yeah, getting bored with conflicting raid schedules makes me roll alts while we wait for the new content to drop. I know I'm not alone. How do you kill time waiting for the next expansion?

Newest Level 80

Meet Emila, my new tank. A warrior to be specific. I'll post about her a little bit, but probably more on the viewpoint of the receiving end of healing. A tank's view of a healer, or at least, a reasonably critical tank's view of the healer. We'll see. So far, I've mostly been tanking high regular dungeons to get emblems and gear. I've tanked Forge of Souls and Pit of Saron in addition to the other Northrend dungeons. Have not yet taken on Halls of Reflection or Trial of the Champion (although I haven't done the latter because Dungeon Finder has not put me there yet), but I'm looking forward to it. I like tanking a lot, but not as much as healing. It's something to do on the side, when I need a break from healing, plus several people in the guild have alts they'd like to start bringing to raids and if I can get all 3 of my toons geared up, I will be pretty much interchangeable with anyone else in the raid :)

Dear Heals.

Dear Heals,

I need heals!

Love,
DPS

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Dear DPS,

I saw that you needed heals. I also saw that you refused to move out of the bright pink puddle of death. I decided that the tank needed my attention more.

Love,
Heals

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Dear Heals,

I'm going to pull the entire room at once. All 27 mobs. Handle it. K thnx bye.

Love,
Tank

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Dear Tank,

I'm going to sit and drink Kungaloosh while you pull the entire room. Have fun dying for not waiting until your healer's ready.

Love,
Heals

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Dear Heals,

I like to Life Tap myself to near death. I expect you to keep my health bar full, I need my mana to stay on top of the other DPS.

Love,
Your Favorite Warlock

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Dear Warlock,

I need my mana more than you do. Healing you when you Life Tap wastes my mana. Use a mana pot or learn to use your mana more efficiently. If I see you losing health, I will bubble you and that's it. You are not a melee class, you don't need my full attention.

Love,
Heals

New cell phone. One with a full keyboard. Hoping this will encourage me to blog more, especially since it looks like I can use more than 180 characters...

Healing Priests Get The Short End of the Gear-Stick... (QQ post)

Healing Priests get the short end of the stick when it comes to gear. Period.

First off, we're clothies. There is only one kind of gear we can use. We can't be like Druids and use leather AND cloth. Shammies get mail and lower, and Pallys get it all. Cloth, that's all we get. It's an exchange, yes, lower armor for more powerful heals, and yes, I chose to play a priest knowing the armor restrictions. That's not what I'm writing about today.

Today, I'd like to QQ a little bit about cloth gear with hit on it. In addition to only being able to wear cloth, healing priests have absolutely no need for hit and therefore gear with hit on it is not for them. If we want to roll on cloth gear with hit, it has to be offspec. Even if it's a huge upgrade. It doesn't work the other way around either. DPS classes that wear cloth can roll on any cloth gear and it's all mainspec for them, sometimes they don't even need the hit if they've reached their hit-cap. Healing priests already draw from a small gear pool, made even small by the fact that half the gear has hit on it.

Rolling against a DPS clothie is a pain, especially if there's no hit on the piece, because if I'm rolling on something, I need it, there is no other option for me. If I'm rolling on something, that's because it's 1 of maybe 10 things I can actually use from ICC or whatever the raid is. If I lose the roll on a piece of gear with no hit, I can't necessarily roll on the next piece of cloth, I definitely can't roll if it has hit (unless it's offspec).

Kady does have a couple of pieces of gear with hit on them, because all the stats were upgrades from what she had been wearing. My guild has yelled at me a couple of times for rolling mainspec on something with hit, mostly if it was against a pug or some other cloth DPS. I always end up getting the piece the third or fourth time it drops because everyone else has gotten it by then. I get third-generation leftovers, even though they're complete upgrades, all because of a few points to the hit stat.

I maintain that if cloth DPS can roll on gear without hit, I should be able to roll on gear with hit, especially if it's an upgrade. I'm talking a decent upgrade too, not a few extra points in intellect or something like that. If a few extra points in a stat is the only part of the upgrade, I'll roll offspec, but if it's a huge upgrade you better believe I'll roll on it. If Druids can roll on my cloth pieces because it's an upgrade for stats (and they'd be losing an armor class), then I can roll on DPS cloth pieces with hit.

/QQ

We has Skoll <3

While herbing in Storm Peaks on Kady yesterday, I happened to see a worg down in the corner of my screen as I was flying just north of Brunnhildar Village. At first I didn't think anything of it until I realized that worgs aren't something I normally see while herbing in SP, so I stopped and turned around. Much to my immense joy, I saw lightning on this blue worg's fur and squealed with delight! While my main is a priest, let's not forget that my first 80 was/is a hunter and I'm very aware of what the spirit beasts look like and how rare they are to find.

Super was about to start dinner but I called him out of the kitchen and told him to hurry and get on his hunter (Ulfgarz) so he could tame this amazing beast (he likes worgs more than I do, I prefer the cat family of pets). Unfortunately, Ulf does not have Beast Mastery. He's a Survivalist and having switched to leveling Super almost right after hitting 80 on Ulf, the gold for dual-spec went to Super instead. Lade, however, does have dual-spec. I got it on her specifically so she could tame the worm pet (who I think I actually named recently though I can't for the life of me remember what it ended up being...).

Super got on his hunter anyway and we partied up. I camped Skoll on Kady while I waited for Ulf to show up and camp him while I got Lade over there. Thankfully, Lade wasn't too far away in the Argent Tourny Grounds and I logged and brought her over as quickly as I could. I had a minor panic attack when I saw a horde flying towards me while waiting for Ulf to arrive, it ended up being a Mage and they continued flying, thankfully. I was worried that they'd see Skoll and want to kill him or tell a horde hunter where he was, but that was the only sign of another player that we saw the whole time.

I arrived on Lade, ecstatic to see that Skoll was still alive and patroling his little spawn point, as I knew he was because Ulf was busy guarding him. I hopped off my mount, set a freezing trap, and began taming. With no other players around, and the freezing trap holding, the tame was easy as pie. I had my sparkly new Spirit Beast in mere seconds and was off to the Tourny Grounds again to show him off. I spent the whole day today using the random dungeon tool and playing with my new pet (whose name is Aemilia, which comes from Shakespeare's "Comedy of Errors"). I've only seen one, maybe two, people on my server with this pet and I couldn't believe my luck to have stumbled across it the way I did, it almost makes me want to track down and tame the other Spirit Beasts. Almost ;)

Race Change and a Perky Pug

Besides doing Thanksgiving and Christmas achievements on two toons, I've been enjoying 3.3 changes, especially the new dungeon finder tool. But, first things first: who did I change?

One of my Christmas presents to myself was a race change for one of my toons. I've been thinking about doing it for a while, just as a change that's not a new alt (it's the same kind of thing as when I go get my hair cut, a dramatic change that's not actually too dramatic), and Christmas was the perfect excuse to spend some money on myself. I thought about changing Ladelyia to a Dwarf hunter, but if I was going to spend money on a toon, it was going to be a toon that I played a lot. I thought about my warrior tank that I'm raising up (dinged 70 the other day with my hubby's shammy!), but also didn't want to spend money on a toon that wasn't level capped either. That left Kady.

Kady, my pretty little Human priest. The one I raid with, the one I do dailies on. My main. Could I change the one I spent so much time with, the one I brought up from a little level 1 who started as a lark? Fo sho. It took a little while to decide which race to go with. On Lade, the choice would have been easy: Dwarf. I liked the idea of having a priest with Stoneblood, something I could use to at least remove the poisons on myself. I still liked the idea of having a pretty priest and I think the Dwarf females are cute, but not pretty. I already had a Night Elf so I didn't want to go there again (I'm not a fan of the ears or the unibrow) and that left having a Draenai.

Draenai. Aside from the hooves, there's not a sexier race than the Draenai imo. Tall, sleek, even the tails are sexy. My absolute favorite hairstyle with the female Draenais are the two pigtails, all of my alt Draenais start out with them. I also liked that I could have another HOT, Gift of The Naaru, to use either in my "oh-shit-heal-myself" macro or on another raid member. So really, there was no other choice, I now am the proud player of a Draenai priest. :)

(I didn't go with the two pigtails for Kady yet. However, she does have a ponytail and what appears to be 3 "bump-its" in her hair XD)


My Perky Pug.

OMG, it might be the cutest pet ever. I love the corehound puppy that everyone with an authenticator got, as ugly as it is, it's still adorable because it's a puppy. So it's ugly in a really cute way, or cute in a really ugly way, I'm not sure.

The pug looks like a real dog, which stands out and looks unusual in the visual style of WoW. But the part that won me over, besides the fact that you can see fur on it, was the fact that it rubs it's but all over the ground. It's hysterical. And the fact that I got it by doing random dungeons, earning emblems, and keeping my heals up to snuff, makes it even better.