73, 74...

It's still coming pretty quickly, but I expect leveling to slow down some shortly. I'm hoping to hit 75 before the end of the weekend. Might take another week, even if I can sneak in some extra play time over the holidays (in-laws permitting).

Of minor leveling note, I found I am still able to solo some lvl 73 & 74 elites without too much trouble. I also ended up working with a Deathknight who tried to solo the big bird in Dragonblight (74 elite, 100k+ hp) at 72 and wiped. Together and him tanking, we took it out easily.

I recently realized I haven't been near a trainer in a long time. I wonder what spells/ranks, I'm missing out. I'll probably have to take care of that some time too.

But I think I'll head to Grizzly Hills tonight first.

72 and off to Dragonblight

Should hit 73 fairly shortly. I think I don't have to get up early tomorrow, so if I can fight off fatigue, there's a shot at 74 tonight. Solo questing + Questhelper, ftw.

A couple of people are hitting 80 shortly (gratz Islowlykill on first Noctambulist, pre-gratz to Dethnotronic who's right behind him). Maybe the first week of December will be our first Naxx raid? I'm assuming Thanksgiving next week will make some people hit or miss. I ought to be able to finish the levelling grind over the holidays with a little luck and be ready to go.

Back in town

I didn't get to play more than a few minutes from Orlando, so I seem to be pretty far behind in the whole levelling game. I was able to chip away some and last night got on for a few hours and managed level 71 and almost halfway to 72.

The vacation was pretty good, but because we tried to do a fair fraction of everything in Disneyworld with the kids, I was on my feet walking all day every day and just worn out in the evenings. We were able to manage a decent mix of stuff for the littlest one (characters, shows), and bigger kids. My 5yo discovered he liked roller coasters -- his first one, Space Mountain, was rapidly followed by his 2nd, 3rd and 4th. The bigger kids were worried at first about getting on some of the bigger rides, but we worked it out over the visit.

I should be around more and concentrating on trying to level as quickly as I can. I ought to be able to get in a couple of late nights over the next couple and maybe sneak in some extra playtime over the Thanksgiving break. It doesn't look like it takes too long to really level in total hours. The guy who wrote the guide at wtbblue.com says he got there in a day and a half /played. So my plan is to race to 80 if I can and then when I have some extra spare time in December, I'll go back and fill in the skills and/or rep areas I end up skipping over.

I'm idly wondering about whether I should be adjusting my professions again, too. I'll need to look up the various BoP things you get at max skill, but for example, if there aren't new uber JC trinkets, the few BoP gems aren't super valuable I don't think. So, I'm wondering about the extra glyph slot for inscriptions or even the stam boost to mining (did that make it into the patch? I remember it being proposed).

Northrend

I got my copy of the expansion last night at midnight local, hanging out in GameSpot with probably around 150 warcrafters. It was kind of funny to talk specs and raids and such with the people around me in line. At least I didn't see anybody from any of my classes.

It installed and patched faster than expected and I was on a boat to Northrend pretty soon after I got home. We decided to run the Nexus together (Uglykid, Sherider, Galein, Islowlykill). I pointed out I wasn't prot spec anymore, but it wasn't hard to do the tanking thing ret spec with sword and board. Until the final boss anyway, when I had to port back to SW and get my real tanking gear.

In the end we got everything down and I got about a third of a level of exp, which seems pretty quick for the first day. I suspect it'll slow down a bit towards the end, but it doesn't look like it'll take a month to hit 80.

It seems like exp builds faster doing quests outside (maybe less so if you have rested exp), so I think that'll likely be my levelling focus. But first, I'm going to need to take a few days off for a family vacation. I might be able to sneak in a late night hour or two, but basically, I'm offline until next Thursday. I'll probably be half a dozen levels behind or more, but at least I'll have lots of rested exp, heh.

Expansion day

Technically, I suppose it's expansion night. I'll be heading out to Gamestop around 11pm or so to pick up the box as soon as they'll release it. The store says they're releasing it at midnight local, but I wonder if they could be induced to cheat -- since the East cost stores are giving it out at midnight local (11pm here), who would know if they let it go a few minutes early?

As an aside, I wonder how crowded it will be and/or if I'll accidentally run into any students from campus that I recognize.

I expect massive server instability tonight, so I'll be satisfied if I can get it installed on the 2 comps and then probably just try to log on to verify it's working.

Last night there was a extended round of server instability. I guess it took them longer to install Northrend than expected. Also they bugged a bunch of the pvp gear somehow and lots of it was available for free, heh. Mostly for clothies and hunters, it seemed, but there were a couple pieces of paladin gear too. I hung around online a little later than I intended to to knock of the last 2 close rep grinds I had my eye on: Consortium & Sporeggar. That got me to 18 Exalted. Someday when I'm bored at 80, I suppose I can go back and work on the city reps or fill in some of the other missing ones (Kurenai, Timbermaw, maybe even Arathi Basin).

Illidan down, srsly

Now, that was as rewarding a kill as we've had in a long, long time. I confess that I had my doubts. And they were mostly about me and my ability to do my job FR tanking in Phase 2. Phase 2 is known to be the bottleneck and it really is a pain in the ass. You could say that we spent the last 3 days waiting for me to learn my job. Then everything else fell into place pretty quickly.

The Phase 2 tanking isn't really trivial, although I had hoped I'd get the feel for it more quickly. You have a small useable area to kite-tank the elemental around while it leaves high-dmg flame patches on your last position every ~10s. You move around "painting" the area and trying to keep track of where safe places remaining to stand are, while making sure you don't trigger the enrage either by getting too far from the glaive or the other elemental. You have to deal with the fact that about 30% of the time, the entire screen is invisible due to the flame spell effects. One of the things that came slowly, was building up a mental map of the tanking space in my head so I could maneuver basically blind -- I knew roughly where the next safe place was and as long as I wasn't disoriented, I could get there without seeing the screen.

You also learn the edge of the fire patch effect and get better at minimizing the fire dmg. That's an incremental thing where minor mistakes just use up a little more healing. But the stupid Eye Beam is not incremental. You have to spot its spawn, identify the trajectory, identify the next safe place and get there *fast*. And there's a little bit of adjusting to the other tank's eye beam. When Dethno was dodging (and he was better at it than I was), I'd move my elemental to the inner ridge to reduce the enrage possibility and I'm sure he was doing the same.

By the last pulls, I was starting to plan my kiting path from the beginning so I'd know where I'd be when the Eye Beam first spawned to get maximum time to react and intentionally leaving the inner ring open to move to if it went to Dethno's side first. I was also getting the hang of running blind into the spell effects on a hunch there was a safe spot on the other side. Eventually, it was working. Other than one random mis-timing (I was too close and with my back to the Eye Beam spawn point and died), we got Phase 2 pretty much under control by the end of last night.

And everybody else learned their jobs quick. I was very briefly worried after the 3% wipe and a couple of subs we had to make (late subs can be raid killers), but we had experienced people ready to jump in and pulled it together.

As an aside, I'd like to bitch that this fight is really Blizzard busting out the hate on the tanks. Not only do we get to farm up a full set of FR gear (spending badges or money other people don't have to), but Phase 2 is just plain mean. Nobody but the 2 FR tanks has to do anything complicated --- forcing us to react to the eye beams on top of the kite-tanking and adjusting to each other's positioning is harsh. I'm guessing every guild that killed Illidan went through a long phase of everybody just waiting and watching the FR tanks wipe the raid over and over. And any casual-style guild with rotating tanks is going to suffer even more.

None of the other notable boss fights are as particularly harsh on the tanks. Vashj, Kael'thas, Archimonde, even Illidari Council are all hard on everybody without particularly singling out a couple of resist tanks for abuse. But at least we managed it in the end.

The other thing I can mention is that last night's victory "feels" slightly different from my perspective as nominal GL of versus nominal main organizer of l8raid. I always felt a sense of pride in "my peeps" when l8raid managed a new victory and maybe it's a little more so today because we're together in the guild.

I'm moved to briefly reflect on the brief history of Noc. About 5-6 weeks ago, I had given up pretty much on l8raiding following some less-than-promising extra-puggy raids on Lady Vashj (my sense was that even as we got the technical aspects down, we didn't have the dps to finish it because a lot of our best dps was worn out from pug raiding). We were farming bears in ZA and running alt-KZ for random amusement while waiting on the patch and expac. I decided it was finally time to pull the trigger on the new guild. I wanted to help hold our group together and also thought it might boost morale a little bit in anticipation of the expansion.

The reponse was actually a bit more than I expected, more people flowed in to join. But I sensed a little bit of "cool to join the new guild" that didn't necessarily predict we'd be raiding again soon. But that's ok, forming the new guild was exciting on it's own.

Then 3.0 hit with the buffs to players and nerfs to bosses. And achievements. Achievements presented the possibility of going back to the Old World for killing some overlooked bosses and a reason to do it. Thinking it'd be fun and good for general morale, we fired up those raids and it was indeed great fun. We mostly rolled, but found a few tricky points that made us actually stop and think for a minute. But only a minute or small handful of attempts. MC, BWL and AQ40 all cleared in a week (one night-ender in BWL at Flamegor, one night-ender in AQ40 at Twins).

The raids were full, people were laughing and we had some momentum. So the next natural step was back to the T5's where we could try Vashj & Kael'thas in their nerfed state. I think it took us 2 nights on each of those, but one week later we had a bunch of people with the title, an unexpected bonus. The following week, we followed our momentum back into Mt Hyjal. I confess I was nervous. I had been unable to fill a MH raid a few weeks earlier -- would the fatigued raiders be willing to dive back in? Yes, and we cleared easily to Archimonde. And there we hit our roadblock. We wiped for a few nights, feeling occasionally close but no cigar. IIRC, we went back another week but ended up redirecting back to the T5 instances as an achievement favor for people who missed the first ones.

Bloc had been agitating for more Black Temple. It was supposed to be easy now, he pointed out. Other similar groups like OotC were plowing ahead there, maybe we can too. But I thought our new-found excitement to raid was largely achievement-driven and really, what are the odds we'd beat Illidan if we couldn't beat Archimonde?

With one week left before the expansion, we came back to BT. On our first raid night, Tuesday, Gurtogg was our first new victory there in a long time -- we hadn't set foot in the instance in at least a month or more. On Thursday, we pushed through Reliquary of Souls, Teron, Mother Shahraz and stopped with wiping on the Illidari Council. On Saturday, we beat the Council and found ourselves at Illidan but got no traction. Sunday we came back and wiped for 2 more hours. Monday we came back one more time and on the very last pull of the night (the warlock tank announced he was passing out after that pull regardless), we finally put everything together and somehow we won again. 5 raid nights, 6 new bosskills and 1 major achievement: Black Temple cleared.

A nice start to our little guild. Working together for 3 solid nights of occasionally-frustrating moments ought to be a preview of what we'll see in Naxx and beyond. With hopefully lots of more similarly gratifying achievements, too.

31% and counting...

Even thought we got close, it was a very disappointing evening in BT for me. I personally killed our chances for winning about half the time we were working on Illidan by resolutely failing to get out of the way of the eye beam. It shouldn't really be that hard and I'm pretty bummed about sucking so badly. Especially given we have so few chances left to do this.

With a little luck we can get another crack at it tonight. I'll feel better if I can at least not be personally responsible for the majority of the wipes. Bleh.