Turkey

I've been playing a fair amount over the holiday weekend, but haven't managed time to blog at all. Curiously, the holidays and my pushing for 80 set off a desire to play in my kids who have been begging for turns on the good computer and the wow accounts. So we swap around during the day and then I've been trying to concentrate on leveling at night.

Maybe that'll ease up now since I finally dinged 80 last night. I pushed hard to 79, but then repsecced prot on Thanksgiving evening and spent the night running a whole bunch of instances instead of grinding out quests.

It took a solid run to get the hang of the new tanking rotations. And I took the opportunity to move around some of my key buttons, which also meant a lot of missed keys over the last couple of days. But I'm getting used to where the buttons are now. I decided it was relatively optimal to keep my most frequent keys on '2', '3' and '9', '0', '-' and '=' with the middle ones being the less often cast. I seem to be most comfortable tanking with both hands on the kbd, although in multi-mob situations, I frequently have to reach back and forth for the mouse.

Over the last couple of days, I also started looking into the proble of the new defense cap of 540. Not only that, but it takes 4.8 pts of on-item rating to get a single point of def. It's not a trivial target. I looked up some quest & rep item blue replacements. Got a couple of pieces of the crafted tanking gear (thanks to Barantir) and started re-gemming.

While I was wrestling with the problem, I learned about the new BoP JC gems made from Dragon's Eye. These are 'prismatic' (any color slot gems) that carry a whopping 27 def or other really high stats. And you can now have 3 of them in your gear instead of 1. That pretty much solved my def problem. Or it will when I get all 3 socketed. You get them through doing the JC daily quest and you only get 1 per day.

If I've calculated correctly, I'm actually going to overshoot the 540 mark and get to undo a 'downgrade' to an old lvl 70 blue +def trinket. At first, I was annoyed that there is no new JC trinket with +def, but the Red Monarch Crab as +63 stam, 2 gem slots and a +300 dodge on use. Yeah, I'm going to go with that together with the old lvl 70 +def trinket.

So I think I'll be ready gearwise to raid very shortly. I wonder what the new consumeables will be -- flasks, best food buffs, weapon buffs (do we still get those? I remember a rumor about taking them out of the game). I was briefly tempted to try to push towards getting a quick visit Naxx run in this weekend to explore, but a few of our core raiders are going to help out OotC tonight in their first Naxx visit. So we'll give everybody a few days to gear up and prep and plan to go in loaded for success on Tues/Wed.

If I understand it properly, there are 4 wings. Two are considered eays, two harder and 2 final bosses. That sounds a lot like ZA. That makes me feel pretty optimistic.

I'll try to get in some Heroics this weekend and keep skilling up the professions. It might even be time to start fishing and cooking again.

Things I wish I had remembered earlier

I hadn't really thought about it when the blue text scrolled up saying my skill in 2h swords went up another point. It always surprised me, then I'd remember I'd leveled and raised my skill cap. And then it finally dawned on me that when I respec prot, my 1h weapons are going to be badly unskilled. Boo.

It's a bit late to shift over to leveling prot and I think it was a good decision not to in the first place. Prot pally dps was nerfed post 3.0, pre-WotLK and I haven't seen any further tweaks that seem to reverse that. Prot warrior dps is still good, I hear. Plus warriors can dual wield, so they can probably mess around and skill everything as they level. Maybe I can go back and skill up on the lower level daily pvp quests or something after I hit 80.

The other thing I remembered belatedly was you can cast an enchantment on a scroll now to make it easier to give to other people. Jr was messing around with his DK looking for a profession and I suggested Inscriptions might be fun. He started skilling that up and I saw over his shoulder the enchantment parchment ability. I've burned a lot of enchanting mats recasting mid-level enchants on my gear. I guess I'll stop doing that now.

I hadn't intended to worry about professions, but I'm melting everything I get and skilling enchanting helps clear out my inventory. Maybe I didn't miss much of an opportunity since the enchants I've been skilling with were moderately lame. But they're getting better, so I'll save them and give them our or put them in the guild bank.

Jr and I logged Beros on this morning and dinged 77. Hooray for finally being able to fly again. Elpheba had mentioned that it actually made the late level questing go faster. I hope he's correct. I'm certainly looking forward to being able to fly over the random mobs to get to the quest locations. Especially since I'm generally out of rest exp these days.

So far I've been exclusively focused on solo questing. And I've also basically refused to upgrade any gear. I haven't seen a major upgrade yet and although the quest reward greens are getting closer, I'm philosophically opposed to replacing a purple with a green, so I'm melting them on principle.

But I think it may be time to change the game plan shortly. At 78 or 79, I think it may be time to start running some more instances again in order to get some decent blue gear to take to Naxx. I'll probably respec prot for those as well and get back into the tanking rhythm (and skill up my sword). I'm still cautiously optimistic about possibly making 80 this weekend even though I expect exp comes slightly more slowly in instances than solo questing outside.

76 & Zul'Drak

Short night last night, just barely made 76. Trying to push for 77 or as close as I can get tonight. Hearing about how easy Naxx is is making me itch to raid again.

Random leveling conversation: I was grinding quests in some mine or other and saw a toon named Holycraap (or something similar) which I vaguely recognized. Turns out it's Prima's alt, who raided with us back in the day. She asked how the new guild was going and I said it was going well so far. She suggested that we'd do well in progression. I appreciated the compliment but was wondering how to gently inquire as to the source of her optimism when she volunteered, "because you guys are stubborn."

Well yeah, stubborn, sure, I'd like to think so. Maybe I should change the guild motd to that when I get on later to stubbornly grind more quests in Zul'drak.

BTW, I did the "ride the big giant" quest last night that was pretty good. It still took me 3 tries, though, because I was getting overrun by small mobs and had trouble targeting the healing storm clouds. Is everybody else having occasional trouble with these specialty riding/vehicle style quests or am I just a doofus?

Maintenance day

No, not server maintenance, maintenance day in the Beros household. A lazy Sunday goes a little something like this:

* Get up, have breakfast with the kids while Mrs Beros heads to exercise class
* Little ones distracted by the tv, log on, ding 75 and get Islowlykill to queue me for AV to ghetto port to Dalaran
* Insulate the leaky back door. New door sweep and weatherstripping. Watch Caillou with my 2yo.
* Fail to find an AH in Dalaran, port to IF to train and look for gems for JC quest. Only one Dark Jade on the AH and it's 65g. Wtf? The other green gems are 10g.
* Head outside and rake a couple of bags of leaves. One of the rakes broke and my 5yo appropriated the handle as his staff. While I'm raking, he's patrolling the backyard in his own virtual world as an all-powerful mage. Yeah, you don't need online gaming when you're 5, you can make VR in your head on demand.
* Check the AH again, 2 more Dark Jades are up at 40g each. At least the market it moving in the right direction.
* Shrink wrap the leaky windows in the living room.
* Check the AH again, prices down to 17g. Grab 2, hearth back to Dalaran, get on a bird to Valiance Keep.
* Shrink wrap more leaky windows in the living room. Change some light bulbs.
* Turn in JC quest, log my bank alt and mail back all my food and enchanting supplies. Level each of them up a little bit. Burned up all my Cosmic Essences and greened all my cooking recipes.
* Shrink wrap the dining room windows. Look up the manual for the new rug scrubber (misplaced) so that Mrs. Beros can clean the rugs in front of the tvs (dogs + kids snacking = rugs need cleaned).
* Convince Jr to log his DK off for a few minutes, show him one of the the daily pvp quests in Grizzly, head over to the quest areas out East.
* Dinnertime, then little kids to the bathtub. Jr back on his DK.
* Jr getting bored with leveling in Zangarmarsh, agrees to let me log Beros. And even takes over the kbd for me when I have to go tuck in the little ones.
* End up spending an extra hour with my 5yo who can't fall asleep.
* Come back to find Jr knocked off a half dozen quests, parked Beros by a quest mob and headed to bed himself.
* Chat with Mrs. Beros and Jrette about Disneyworld travel, holiday plans this year and travel in general for the future. Jrette likes to travel and wants to hear about the travels Mrs. Beros and I went on when we were young.
* Log back on a couple of hours later and get back to the grind...

I expect I'll ding 76 tonight, I logged about 4 bubbles shy. With luck, I'll find a nice starting quest hub in Zul'Drak where I can knock off quests in bunches. Won't be a late night tonight, though.

I've tentatively decided to stick with my current professions. I'm pretty sure the Enchanting ring-buffs are a solid advantage. I'll gamble that high-level JC will let me make some trinket/necklace that will be best or near-best in-slot. Inscriptions was tempting for the extra Glyph, but it'd be a huge effort to start over and I suspect I'll have plenty of other things to do for awhile.

So I'm more than happy to cut any green gems anybody needs in Northrend. A few more cuts and I can start getting the blue recipes from the trainer. I'll plan to grind it myself in a few days via the AH if I don't get any customers (which I might not since I'm not the only JC around). I'm burning mats spamming enchants on my own gear and will happily share with anybody standing near me. So far, I've melted every drop and quest reward. I guess in a few levels, I might start getting upgrades. In the meantime, it's a reasonably steady stream of skilling mats.

75 in Dalaran

Ground another level staying up late in Grizzly Hills last night and with a little help from Darsonsind. Everybody had been talking about how much fun the escape/escort quest from Silverbrook was, but since I failed it twice before getting through, I'm not bragging so much.

Late in the night, Dethnotronic tracked me down and forced me to level up my JC. Amusingly, he confused my Questhelper by giving me a Huge Citrine, which I need for a JC quest and now the addon thinks I should go back to the Blue Logging Camp to get another.

He also tried to queue me up for AV so I could get a free ghetto port to Dalaran, but it didn't pop for >30m so he flew to me to cut. He re q-ed but I was finishing up quests when it popped 15m later.

I logged of 10k short of 75, but remembered to turn in 2 quests this morning (to ding) and then got Islowlykill to q me again for AV. Took another 25m, but worked finally.

Tonight I can get the lay of Dalaran and work a bit towards 76, but can't put in another quite as long night. Ditto for tomorrow, but Wednesday could be good. I don't think I can keep doing a level a day for the next week, so it might be a few extra days to 80. But I'm catching up a little bit at least.

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.