A master, a trinket, and a candle

This past weekend, I finally ended up getting Master of Isle of Conquest! Woot. The tabard you get from this is actually kinda pretty I think:

Jess asked if the madness was now finally over. Not really... because now I am onto grinding out wins for Master of Alterac Valley. Its going to suck because AV matches take much longer than Isle matches. But grind, I must... and I will!

I also bit the bullet last week and bought Darkmoon Card: Tsunami. Does this mean I've given up on Tyrande's Favorite Doll? Mmm probably (screw you archaeology). I honestly can't remember the last time I did archaeology. Anyways, from raiding with this trinket twice now, I absolutely love this trinket. LOVE! In retrospect I probably should have bought the tsunami card earlier.

Strangely enough, with all the gold I have, I'm generally quite cheap in game with buying stuff. Perhaps I like seeing the summary gold total on Altaholic keep going up. But given that I was at 280k gold across my toons, I figured heck, maybe I can afford it. It was funny though after I bought the trinket (for 18k) because I freaked out a bit to see my gold total go down, and did some frantic AH-ing over the next couple of days to bring it back up to 275k. Yes, I know... I know... its a sickness.

I can tell that things have slowed down in WoW through my dealings on the AH. Just from my experience in selling things, I think a good number of folks have left the game, less number of new folks are joining, and raiding seems to have slowed down. I'm actually looking forward to 4.1 so that people get new gear from the new 5 mans, thus needing to buy gems again.

Finally, when I have extra time, or more precisely, when I need a break from going for pvp achievements, I've been working on doing zone quests for Loremaster. I was doing Westfall over the weekend and I thought the quest stories there were quite well done.

But I came across this quest which was a pleasant and unexpected surprise. I immediately thought about Tam and Gerard because the quest reward I chose was:

I'm now carrying the candle around in my bag. And it makes me smile every time I see it.

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Doing my part to keep Chicago lighter

Check out this map (yes I love maps) that charts the profanity level of the US by looking at tweets. The darker the area, the less profane, the lighter the area, the more profane.

So what is causing me to curse up a storm? Tol Barad and archaeology.

First, Tol Barad. Yes, yes I know the design is broken and changes in the patch are coming. But you know what the patch is not going to fix? The utter utter stupidity of Alliance on Drenden. I don't understand how they still don't grasp the concept of Tol Barad. Hey, standing with 30 other people in ICG may cause you to not die, but you know what? We're not going to win.

The alliance on the server also are so ridiculously slow to react. If we do get a big group to take over a spot, 90% of those people stand around there and wait for it to fully go alliance instead of getting a group to quickly run to the next obvious spot that the Horde is going to defend.

Yes, arena and general battlegrounds make me swear. But it doesn't even compare to the swearing that Tol Barad causes. And to the rest of the Alliance on Drenden, the patch changes to Tol Barad are not going to fix your f'in stupidity. FFS.

Secondly, archaeology. On a slightly positive note, I did get Ring of the Boy Emperor. But I am still at it for Tyrande's Favorite Doll.

I know all of the nightelf dig sites like the back of my hand. I have completed Scandalous Silk Nightgown a ton of times, the most of any common night elf item. I mean really? Are you trying to tell me something O Cruel Cruel RNG?

It's a funny (if funny actually means sad and devastating and crushing) thing, this archaeology. While your brain tells you that you should just give up because you're never going to get the item you are going for, there is still that tiny tiny sliver of hope in your heart that keeps you at it.

Those couple of seconds while you are creating an item and you see that bar go across your screen... right before the bar is completed and the next item appears on your screen... you hold your breath and for a second genuinely believe that you're going to get something good. But then you get another crap item, and you feel foolish for having believed even for those few seconds.

It's those couple of seconds of hope that Blizzard is exploiting with archaeology, keeping all of us still at it. Damn you, Blizz. You should have just called it hope-ology.

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Patch thoughts

Yesterday my Snow Leopard CD finally came and after a 3 hour install of the CD, 10.6 updates off the web, WoW optimization, and then the patch install, I was ready to log in. 10 minutes past our scheduled raid time.

I had an idea of how I was going to spec, but hadn't looked at glyphs. So I frantically ask Beru which glyphs I should use, while the rest of the guild is waiting for me. I didn't have enough time to reforge or gem into spirit, but I run pretty spirit heavy anyways, so I thought I might be ok. I figured someone could switch my weapon enchant into Heartsong during the night if things were bad.

Joking around with others pre-patch I was honestly worried about my mana. When I am oom, I am very very unhappy. And how does that saying go? 'When momma aint happy, nobody is happy'? While I was getting my shit together of course Lorosia has to chime in that in preparation of the changes, he had to bring a certain Archaeology trinket just in case. F'in Tyrande's Doll...

By the time we got our shit together we only had time to do 4 bosses in DS. It's a good thing the bosses were also nerfed, because there were comments like:

* What, hit went back down to 15%?
* Hmmm I haven't reforged to expertise, mastery, (insert other stat here) yet.
* What the fuck, Grid isn't tracking my hots! (Big guess who made this comment).


However despite our fumbling, the bosses seemed easier than a week ago, though I didn't notice any huge increase in our dps. The dps can correct me if there was. Oh and can I just say, I knew we were losing the guild summon thing. But to lose the double duration on our flasks? Bullshit! Lorosia mentioned that we could console ourselves instead with its replacement, The Doctor is In. As Kal would say, what a complete screwjob.

After the raid when I had some time to really look at some things, I realized that these new talent trees essentially remove the need for me to have a pve and pvp spec. For a long time I've been saying I wish we could triple spec, so that I could have a resto pve, resto pvp, then feral tanking spec. And in a sense, these talent trees are kind of three specs for me because I've been given what I think of as pvp abilities in my "pve" spec.

This does give me some concern around how bad the bgs are right now. Has anyone done a significant amount of pvp? I didn't have time last night, but I'm curious. With nearly every class and spec getting this melded pve/pvp spec and all sorts of new abilities from the talents and the new glyphs, is pvp just insane? Bubble mentioned that he was in a bg the other day where no one died since we are taking less dmg but they haven't incorporated the offensive pvp stat into the gear yet.

Finally this whole account wide achievements, mounts, and pets thing. There is a part of me that thinks that the account wide stuff is cool, but there is another part of me that is partly irritated by it.

I really kind of wanted my main, K, to earn the 100,000 honor kills on her own. I wanted it to be an achievement recognizing her insanity in going through all those bgs. So when I logged into my alts and for all my toons to have the achieve now, it somehow meant less to me.

True, this means that I can go for 250,000 honor kills easier, not having to worry about which toon I'm on. And I can see this being easier for guild and raid leaders, in that we can ask folks to switch different toons in and out depending on what we may need. Sure, not having to do all the holiday achieves on all your toons is nice.

But ultimately while I play all my toons, in a way I think of them as separate individuals. I think in a way I've given them a personality and story in my head for each of them. So now for my alts to have all of K's pvp achievements, in my mind, these toons didn't "earn" them. It somehow takes away from certain goals I might have had for them at one time.

Keredria was the very first toon I created over five years ago. Despite highs and lows with buffs and nerfs, she had always been my main. In a way, this almost feels like we are losing some of that "main" vs "alt" designation.

I don't know, its a bit hard to explain. I'm not 100% against this account wide stuff, but I'm far from 100% for it.

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I just might be crazy enough

Look! I am finally exalted with AB.

It's funny that the image of this achieve is a guy screaming. Interestingly enough my statistics say it took 426 ABs (of which 205 were wins) to achieve this. I kind of thought it would have been more than that.

Anyways. So now what? Well, I am just one achieve away from getting Master of Arathi Basin as well as one achieve away from getting Master of Eye of the Storm. Its EOTS BG weekend this upcoming weekend... so you know where I'll be. Do you think I'll be spending a lot of time this weekend yelling at idiots going for the middle? (Is the sky blue?) Why yes! I believe I will!

Anyways, assuming I eventually get both of those, this means I have two options. Am I crazy and masochistic enough to go after Battlemaster or Justicar? Seriously the thought of doing enough Warsongs to go after either of those achieves pains me deeply.

Perhaps I need some advice from fellow bloggers, Gnomer who has Battlemaster and Pugnacious Priest who has Justicar. But can I really stay sane through that many Warsongs? Will I come out at the other end of this in a straitjacket muttering "Warsong... oh warsong..."? Possible. Very possible. Maybe I just start farming Warsong and see what happens?

In other news I was online when Chanti discovered Tyrande's Doll. I can't complain too much because I never ever do archaeology anymore... well scratch that. I can complain all I want! I looked up my completed artifacts to find that I have completed freakin' 140 common nightelf items with no doll. The bulk of this archaeologizing was done probably 3 months after Cata release. Since then I've been giving archaeology the big fat middle finger.

Perhaps what I could go back to doing is alternating archaeology with queuing up for Warsong Gulch. Or would that just be doubling my pain? But I do want to "finish" archaeology. Sigh.

If you need me I'll be in a corner consoling myself with the only doll I've got, a "gift" given to me by either Chanti or Lororia (I can't remember which... and they wonder why I have a thing against pallys).

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Relative difficulty of heroics and creepy scary archaeology voices

A couple topics today.

1. Relative difficulty of heroics

I was curious as to whether there was some listing of the relative difficulty of them. I came across this from wowwiki:

Sure relative difficulty, is well, uh... relative. Of course its going to depend on your gear, or perhaps your group composition. I've only been in Deadmines once and that was a long time ago when the group was very very undergeared. So maybe I think its hard, but wouldn't be hard for us now.

But uh really? Lost City and Blackrock Caverns at 4 stars? Harder than Deadmines or Throne of the Tides? Though I guess some my questioning of these ratings may only be specific to certain bosses... like having enough dps for the last boss in Throne of the Tides or Commander Springvale in Shadowfang.

But on general, my vote for the relative difficulty from easiest to hardest would be more like this:
- Vortex Pinnacle and Lost City
- Halls of Origination and Blackrock Caverns
- Deadmines, Throne of the Tides, and Shadowfang
- Grim Batol and Stonecore

2. New guildies

Surprisingly enough we have gotten a decent amount of interest in our little guild. We've added a warrior to the guild, which decreased the average guild IQ quite dramatically. But we also added a shammy healer, so our IQ is back up to where we were before. I am hopeful that we will be able to raid by the end of this month.

3. Scary creepy archaeology voices

So yes, I am archaeologizing (I love making up verbs!) like a mad woman to try to get Tyrande's Favorite Doll. The RNG aspect of it all is yes, creating some outbursts when I continue to get crap nightelf commons or rares. There might have been an outburst last night that went something like this:

"The nightelf rare I get is the windchimes? Really? Really? F U ARCHAEOLOGY! F U!!!!

Anyways, I'm archaeologizing the other night while Jess and Sam are on vent with me. Now I've had this happen a couple times before, but I brought up the fact that sometimes I get creepy scary voices when I pick up a keystone. I think the first time I got "You... will... die" whispered in my ear when picking up a troll keystone, I about fell out of my chair. I've also gotten voices from picking up nightelf keystones, though they are sometimes unrecognizable to me in terms of what they're saying.

So I ask Jess and Sam if they've heard these voices. And we asked Nkm on guild chat if he's heard these voices. None of them have! So I go and try to look up some evidence that I'm not going crazy. While Sam insists that I found "this evidence" on wowschizo.com, I found some validation on the comments for Troll Tablet on Wowhead. Some quotes from the comments:

"The voice you're hearing is the whispers of old gods. More specifically, I believe the ones we're hearing are a combination of the sounds you'd hear inside AQ40 (C'Thun) and Ulduar (Yogg'Saron)".

Accumulated quotes from picking up various keystones.
- "It was your fault."
- "Your friends will abandon you."
- "You will die."
- "Kill them all before they kill you."
- "They have turned against you. Now take your revenge."
- "Trust is your weakness."
- "You will betray your friends."
- "Hope is an illusion."

I swear, the voices are creepy as hell. I'm not sure why my guildies haven't heard them. But see, I'm not the only one! I'm not crazy! I'm not this guy!

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