The Achievers

Things have been falling into place a bit for my guild and myself, and we've achieved a few milestones.

On my mage alt, after repeated checking at irregular hours, I got the Higher Learning achievement and the pet that goes with it. While I usually am not a big pet fan, I think I might use this in my roleplaying, since it kinda looks like a "mage voidwalker". Yes I look like a warlock in this screenshot, but I'm not.


Our ICC10 team managed to down the Lich King, though yours truly didn't have the time to join them, I can probably tag along on some other run sometime.

Also in the course of last week, our healing lead and beloved co-GM managed to get his last Valanyr fragment, and we went to complete the darn mace for him. This was actually the third time I saw Vezax or so and I was on interrupting duty on it, so that was nice and stressy, but in a suprising twist we managed to get the Shadowdodger achievement as well so it all paid off.

We did Yogg-Saron with three keepers up so the guy would actually have a chance to throw the mace at Yogg rather than stressing about the raid dieing (we were already running kinda low on healers that night).



With Val'anyr crafted and The Lich King's ice cold blood on our hands, we can officially close our WOTLK raiding, almost anyway. When Ruby Sanctum comes out, we'll have to down whatever that dragon was named again, and a 25-man LK kill would be nice, as would protodrakes / frostwyrms, but I don't really see it happen to the major part of our guild.

That being said, as the officer team, we can probably review our WOTLK raiding career now and see what we want to do differently in Cataclysm.

Unmercey 7 and other rogue videos

I watched Unmercey 7, which Rogue-Rogue linked to in their latest blog entry.

The subtitle of the video (Unmercey 7: Hana) confused me at first. I figured it referred to the flower in the description image, because 'hana' is 'flower' in Japanese. The problem with this is that Unmercey is a Chinese player, not Japanese, so it didn't make sense - it should have been 'huā' (I have no idea what tone it is in Modern Chinese - I just know it is this one in archaic Chinese .. go figure). Turns out it was reference to the last song in the movie, which was a JPop song. Ah well.

Anyway. The video featured some refreshing Shadow Dance spec footage. Assuming the players he duels have a decent amount of resilience, he is still getting 5K ambushes off, which I found fairly suprising. With the (justified) nerf to Overkill and our burst as Muti/Prep, perhaps the more burst-biased people might spec Shadow Dance.

This Sub spec also has shadowstep for increased mobility (though I do wonder if it weighs up against Fleetfooted). I must admit I preferred some of Unmercey's earlier videos: Unmercey 5 & 6 both showcased some very creative moves like FoK-Vanish-Sap to flush out stealthers.

This movie didn't showcase that many new moves, but it did prove that a subtlety build can be just as viable in the right hands (and with the right amount of keybinding, no doubt).

There's some other good rogue movies out there as well. Akrios from Rogue-rogue has some neat ones (though I think the only up to date ones are a few random arena footage ones) and Krymu is also a popular name in the rogue movie scene.

Meanwhile I am still stuck with exams. I passed my archaic Chinese exam yesterday, and the next one is friday: business economics. I'm doing some 'when I get back' planning for WoW, but I'm running out of ideas since my armory isn't up-to-date and I can't remember my PvE gear that well anymore (especially enchanting and gem choices are foggy)

Random collection of awesomeness.

Now that I got my raid report out of the way for today .. time for something completely different.

The naming blog meme
Found on Sideshow&Syrana who found it on Killing 'em Slowly: a meme in which you tag three other bloggers and they have to tell how they chose their names.

I haven't been tagged yet so I'll take the liberty of tagging myself for the sake of this post. My druid's name, Azretha, is from the spell Archimonde uses to destroy Dalaran. Using my own idea of transcribing the Eredun used in this spell .. when he raises his hand in the air to drop the sand and create a replica of Dalaran, he says (or how I would transcribe it anyway) 'Belar sumares az'retha rakass ib'na' And that's where Azretha came from, though I changed the 'e' to sound like 'ay' so you pronounce it as-ray-tah.

Aeltyrs name is a lot easier. It's just an anagram of Tyrael, the archangel from Diablo II. You know him from the minipet, too.

Then as a final one, my warriors name, Kaguzuchi, comes from an anime influence. More specificly, it comes from an attack by Shishio from Rurouni Kenshin called Tsui no hiken: Kaguzuchi (Third Secret Sword: Kaguzuchi), and the kaguzuchi is reference to a fire god if I remember correctly.

I would hereby like to tag the following three bloggers for this meme !
Zaltu from One Rogue's Journey
Dinaer from Forever a Noob
Eskel from Gone Rogue
Tell us where you got your names !

RP event: The Silithid War
I would just like to shed some light on this as well. I attended the start of this RP event, a march to Silithus, and I had a lot of fun. You can find some screenies by me and my guildies here.


Epic flying mount
As a closing paragraph a small note on my monetary status here. Despite buying a Mongoose enchant for my Greed and respeccing, I have managed to sell enough junk and I hit 4000 gold. If I could now force myself to do enough dailies I should finally be able to fly my bronze drake by the end of the week.

Back to combat

While I still haven't had the chance to test the new patch (I have no DVDs to burn that anime on so I'm a bit stuck at the moment), the constantly updating patch notes have assured me of one thing: I will respec combat.

First of all, I don't like the Hunger for Blood changes. As it stands now, it's a self buff, costs 15 energy, and lasts one minute, but requires a bleed on the target. This means a 15% damage nerf on trash. (Unless someone else applies a bleed or we open with garotte.) Combat was already stronger on trash, now it's just clearly better.

Second, they've added some talented melee haste into Lightning Reflexes. 3 ranks means 10% melee haste. This works even better with the recent buff to Slice and Dice.

And third, Mutilate isn't that much better as one would like. While it is potentially better in a tank and spank fight where you just stand around and DPS, there's a lot of fights out there (and in Ulduar as well I guess) where a lot of crap is happening and that's just not possible. Worse, there's a lot of abilities out there that can make your HfB and SnD drop (like Maexxnas Web Wrap), severely nerfing your damage until you can get them up again (especially with SnD having been buffed to 40% and HfB having been buffed to 15%, it's even more of a blow when they fall off).

And last but not least, bigger weapons just look cooler than small daggers, k?

So I'm gonna have to nag at my guildies to run Heroic CoT with me, so I can pick up Greed for my Main Hand. With my Mongoosed Librarian's Paper Cutter in the off-hand, that should make for a fairly decent combo to start the combat life with.

As a final note I'm getting closer to my epic flying mount again. I had reached 3500g, but made some investments in the AH, and currently only some of them are selling. Perhaps I can sell them during the weekend.

Then I can start spending money on enchants and the likes :p

Achievements: yay or nay ?

I finally made some time to reply to Pixelated Executioner's Shared Topic, namely my thoughts on achievements. Now, I know, this sounds odd since I already did a post that was full of achievements, but I usually don't pursue achievements for the sake of pursuing them.

I will go for achievements if they add to my character (examples are Fool for Love and For The Alliance).

I won't go for the Violet Proto-Drake for example, because it's too much of a bother.
If someone were to offer me to try some achievements from Heroics while in the particular instance, then sure. But I won't actively put a group together to try and beat them (an exception is the timed run for the Bronze Drake).

I use the Northrend questing achievements as an indicator how many quests are left in a zone. Like recently I gained the Grizzly Hills questing achievement, which was the cue for me that Grizzly Hills was mostly robbed of quest money and it was time to move on to other zones. I'm trying to get the achievement, but not for the sake of the achievement.

On that note, I've hit the 3k gold mark, so 2k more to go before I can fly my Bronze Drake !

PvP achievements
These are basicly an exception. When in a battleground I will try to pursue these, usually because it is the only way I can maintain my sanity in there. It gives me some extra motivation to go for the objectives instead of giving in to the general mindlessness that some battlegrounds turn into.

Raiding Achievements
A bit of an annoying topic. Some achievements you just get for clearing stuff. In a way, I'd like those. As a memory that I've been there, for when my loot has long been sold to vendors and we're raiding T9.
But the others ... well they're nice of course. Some of them are a nice challenge for the raid. However I think actively trying to get 'The Immortal' for example puts an unnecessary strain on the raid (and the healers in particular).

Conclusion
(You didn't skip the rest and went straight to this, did you ?) I would say some achievements are worth going for if they add to my character, and they are a good way of staying busy or getting more of a challenge out of something, but some achievements are really just there 'just because' and I don't think they are worth achieving just to achieve them.

Aeltyr sneaks and attempts to pick your pockets while you're reading his diary.

Return of the rogue

I am soon returning to the game, and I was posting a reply to Zaltu's To-Do List on what I will do and have to do when I get back, so I figured I might as well post it here too, and add a few things.

Level
Yeah, still 78, so I gotta get those last two levels! Should be cake though, I haven't even seen half of Grizzly Hills, and I have Crystalsong, Zul'Drak, Sholazar, Storm Peaks and Icecrown left. I'll probably respec to Mutilate (despite having just specced Combat because I got Fang of Truth) so my dagger skill is maxed when I hit 80.
Since I'm mostly in Borean Tundra / Howling Fjord blues, I'll probably hit Storm Peaks and Icecrown so I can get some decent quest reward gear.

Get gear crafted
Easy as pie of course, I'll hit the AH for some materials and give them to a friendly guildie. Specificly, I'm looking to get the Eviscerator's set crafted. Some of those pieces I will probably use as fillers before I hit heroics and raids.

I'll also get at least the Trollwoven Shoulders crafted, I think.

PvP
If my memory serves me right, I have only a few marks to go for a shiny Black War Steed, and a few thousand honor points for a Hateful Gladiator's Cloak of Victory (which will again be a nice filler for PvE purposes too).

Instance
Gonna put on my Kirin Tor tabard and go to town in lv 80 instances, for rep and some gear so I don't look like a total idiot when doing heroics or leeching epix in our guild raids.

Fish and cook
As much as I hate fishing, I'll probably have to do it, because buff foods don't make themselves !

Aeltyr feels the ice is slowly melting. Soon, he will be able to break free from his frozen state !