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.

Not dead yet

Hello dear readers!

Just a message to confirm that I'm not dead yet - real life is quite busy (exams and now resits) and so is WoW (finally raiding Ulduar 25!).

I bought a new computer and it took me a while to find my photoshop install CD so this post doesn't have a proper pic to accompany it.

Recent Achievements

Some noteworthy achievements I obtained since my last post... let's see...
We finally got around to downing the city leaders again, so I got a black war bear.
I noticed I only needed a few more heroics for it so I did the right heroics and got the Champion of the Frozen Wastes title.
I worked towards the Argent Tournament dagger and got the title Aeltyra of Stormwind in the process - not particularly something I was aiming for, I use it as my PvP title but meh.

Gearing up

I also worked on my reputations and such a bit to get my gear up - the bracers from Wyrmrest Accord and the boots from Argent Crusade.
We did Naxx and the loot gods granted me two fist weapons (Calamity's Grasp and The Hand of Nerub) so I am combat specced now, and the badges got me a new ring.

Raiding Ulduar

Immortalis (the reincarnation of Athanatoi) ventured into Ulduar25 for the first time last week, and I was there. Due to a lot of people already having done most of the fights on 10 man, we downed the bosses from the siege of Ulduar without much of a hassle. The sunday team got down the antechamber (I wasn't there) and yesterday we had a few attempts on Thorim and Freya (no kills sadly).
Still lots of fun, though.

Non-rogue stuff

I tanked some normal instances on my death knight and I quite enjoy it. She is now 74 and I'm hoping to have her ready to do heroics by 3.2
With the badge change, a lot of people will be wanting to do heroics for them, but they won't need the gear anymore - so I can tank for them, roll on all plate gear I want, and get badges of conquest while I'm at it.

Because my healer was a guildie with a fairly high level alt (77 is high for Nexus and UK) he was bored throughout most of the pulls and thus we upped the pace a bit.
Eventually he just kept pulling stuff himself, and I still managed to pick it up. It was chaotic, but fun! The first boss pull in UK was borderline suicidal (pulling the room and the boss with it) and a few of our PuGed DPS died (sorry guys) but the runs went smooth and quite fast otherwise.

Shocking news

Aeltyra lets out a hacking cough.
Suprise! Yes, dear reader, I have a small confession to make.The picture you see on the right is an accurate depiction of my character. I had a sex change. Now, Out of Character this is easy to explain: I was tired of the male character animations and wanted something more visually appealing.

But In Character? (For the people unfamiliar with RP, imagine yourself being an actor. Your in-game avatar is the character you act out. Thus, In Character is things your character would do / think etc) I don't think Azerothian technology, or magic for that matter, is advanced enough to pull this off (besides blaming magic is way too cheesy). Even if it was easy to explain HOW I did it, explaining WHY I did it is still a riddle.

There are other options of course. You could just treat it as an entirely new character, which is probably what I'll do. The womanising behaviour of my character cannot be transfered to a female version of that character, or she'd be some kind of weird, obnoxious lesbian. I think I will explain that this is the twin sister of my male character, or something. Input on this is welcome however - make those brain cells work!

Remind me to change the header image to reflect these changes.


In other news I was taken into an Ulduar progression raid yesterday evening. Our target was XT-002 Deconstructor. I am horribly undergeared for this fight, but I guess they just wanted to do me a favor since I don't raid a lot anyway.

It's a pretty straightforward fight for us rogues: nuke the living daylights out of him. You can CloS both the Light Bomb and the Gravity Bomb, but since the last is more dangerous I prefer to save it for that one and just run when I have the Light Bomb. Other than that it's a good idea to keep an eye on your back, if a lot of scrapbots are coming dangerously close it might be a good idea to get in there and throw a Fan of Knives at them.

We lacked a bit of a punch to really down him, but we definitly improved over our attempts - while we could barely hit 30% on first attempt, the last few attempts were 10%, 8%, 12% ... etc depending on how many scrapbots he consumed before he faceplanted all of us.

DPS-wise I have no idea how I did, because I had disabled Recount for some reason and there is no option to take a WWS yet if I remember correctly. This was also the first fight in which I have exchanged Tricks of the Trade with another rogue, giving some very nice numbers on the Heart phases when combined with Heroism, Blade Flurry and Adrenaline Rush.


As a final note I've been doing more PvP now that I don't have to worry about respeccing costs, and one noteable thing is a Warsong Gulch match in which I was given the Iron Man achievement as a little present from my guildies (thanks guys!). I'll be happy to spend some time in there helping the others that were present to get the achievement as well.
The way we did it was pretty simple really. I stayed in defense in our flag room (a bit risky but I have a lot of 'oh sh-' options). I had to stay alive the entire match, so if a Horde attack didn't look safe, I stayed in stealth. Meanwhile my guildies bulldozered through the Horde as one block, and with a protection warrior and a bit of dedicated healing, they got the flag to our flag room and handed it over to me so I could cap it.
Let's just say it's pretty stressy when you have one flag left to cap and you have to stay alive no matter what :p

PS: If you have found this page because Google found the words 'sex change' and 'lesbian' and concluded this was some kind of obscure site: HAHAHAHAHA
Aeltyra points at you.
Aeltyra cackles maniacly at the situation.

A week of PvP

Aeltyr casts Blind.
Oh, sorry. Didn't see you there!

I recently said to myself: self, we don't want to grind money. We don't have the time to look for instance groups. Let's do something fun. Let's respec and do some PvP.

And since you can't argue with yourself (try it - you're always right) that's exactly what I did. I respecced Mut-Prep, got me some nice PvP oriented glyphs for a relatively cheap price, put on my super awesome Eviscerator's gear and hit the BGs.

And I'm doing well. I bought the Titan-forged Boots with Wintergrasp Marks (though no enchants or gems yet .. on any of my PvP gear) and after a few evenings of battleground switching I also bought the Hateful Gladiator's Belt.

I got some more achievements. Arathi Basin Perfection (not bad for PuGing), Storm Glory (again, not bad for a PuG), Damage Control (it didn't bug out for once), Stormy Assassin (rough and long game so I got to switch around a lot) and Take a Chill Pill (didn't even notice he was berserked)

But most of all, I had fun. I spent money and I'm thus further away from my epic flying mount again, but it was worth it. I'm gonna keep PvPing, perhaps until I can buy another Hateful piece, or until I get bored of that.

On another note, I will be guest-posting on Big Hit Box relatively soon. Like, when I can think of a subject to write on.
Big Hit Box is a melee blog, a source of information for those of us who like to be in the face of mobs (or .. in the backside actually. Don't DPS from the front.). So ret pallies, rogues, warriors, druids, shamans, melee hunters .. err perhaps not melee hunters.

So suggestions on topics other than melee hunters are always welcome - what would you like to hear about ?

Aeltyr casts Preparation.
Aeltyr casts Blind.

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.

The Love Fool

I have a confession to make. I wasted my time on getting this title.

Instead of questing to earn money, doing dailies to raise my reputations, or instancing to gear up, I dashed around the cities, giving love tokens to everyone (and I really mean everyone). Was pretty fun trying to find an Orc Shaman or a Troll Rogue, too - in the end I camped the graveyard in Wintergrasp, found and sapped an Orc Shaman and showered him with rose petals, and I had to sneak into Orgrimmar, and climb up the gryphon tower to find a Troll rogue.


But I did it because it fits my character. I'm on a roleplaying server, after all.
My character is a mix between Duffman, Johnny Bravo and Duke Nukem, only he is not as muscular as them. He does share the trait with Johhny Bravo of thinking he's sexy but failing horribly with every girl he starts talking to.

Anyway. I did get some gearing up done, namely I managed to pick up another Librarian's Paper Cutter that was underpriced, and I did enough heroics to get my Mirror of Truth. I also hit Revered with the Knights of the Ebon Blade so I can buy my Arcanum now. I'd prefer to wait until I get a headpiece that can take a metagem before I spend money on that, though.

I've also started leveling my Fishing and Cooking further -I stopped doing that when I hit Outlands- because I'd like to be able to supply my own buff food. That way I just have to buy flasks (at least until I switch from Mining/Engineering to Herbalism/Alchemy) and I'm ready to raid.

I'm signed up for the Malygos/Naxxramas run of Thursday, so we'll see if I can get in to do some stabby DPS.

Did any of you (try to) get this title?

Not dead yet

No, I'm not dead yet. I just have been very busy, both in real life and in game.
Since this is a WoW blog, I'll concentrate on the in-game stuff, and I'll tell you my story using achievements I gained in these few weeks I've been playing WoW again.

PvP
I felt in the mood for PvP when I got back. As I had said in my previous post, I got me an Eviscerator's set, bought me two Traditional Flensing Knife, respecced Muti/Prep and hit the road.

I got Call to Arms.

The reason I didn't get this earlier is fairly simple: I always forget to pick up the daily.

I joined a raid with the people from Beyond Defeat and hit the Horde capitals, netting me three leaders - I sadly had to leave before we killed the Elf, so no bear for me yet.


After some mucking about in Wintergrasp for some honor and Stone Keeper Shards, I respecced again to a Muti raid spec, minus of course the two talent points I was missing because I was still 78.

PvE
I hit Storm Peaks to do the Sons of Hodir opening questline, because I was told it's pretty awesome, and also started questing in Icecrown a bit.
Both felt extremely slow on my little snowy gryphon (the bad part about switching your alt as your main I guess) but eventually I did hit the big 80.


So then the next task was doing normal instances to gear up for heroics to gear up for raids. I bought my Hateful Glad's Cloak as a filler cloak until I can get a decent one crafted or drop.

My guildies were kind enough (or desperate enough) to invite me to some heroics anyway, despite my DPS being barely that of the tank.

I also was invited to a casual 10-man Naxxramas run because the rogue that was supposed to come had some PC trouble and had been installing WoW for a few hours, but still wasn't there yet. We did Plague and Construct Quarter, and I got the T7.10 chest and some nice shoulders.



I bought a Librarian's Paper Cutter and got it enchanted with Mongoose (no funds for two of those sadly)

Some other day Alliance managed to drug Horde and conquer Wintergrasp somehow, and the guildies formed a PuG to VoA 25. I, of course, was there. Outrolled the only other rogue in the raid (he's better geared anyway) with a 96 and got me the T7.25 pants. (Yay set bonus !)


So yeah, it's been quite a productive week. I gotta get some stuff gemmed, and really gotta get my cooking up, other than that I think I'm good to go to ride along the weekly 25 man Naxx farm runs.

PS: One of the heroics I did was CoT Strat, and yes we did the timed run, and yes I won the drake. Let me tell you, it sucks having that thing in your bags and not being able to use it yet. But at least it'll be there when I quest my 5K epic flying together. No silly gryphons for me !