Shattered Halls Shenanigans

Last night Lal and I (as Salthier) logged in and were trying to decide what to do. With being newly 70 there are a lot of options. Quests and dailies for gold (epic flight ftw). Quests for item upgrades or dungeon chains (Arcatraz in particular for my Verdant Gloves), or instances for drops and reputation.

Lal was oddly in the mood for a dungeon run, so we asked the guild for volunteers to run Shattered Halls where she had some quests to do, and Salthier is always happy to earn Honor Hold reputation. We got some interest and a little bit later we were inside Hellfire Citadel with two warlocks and a mage. I've done Shattered Halls a few times with Elionene. I had tanked it once just this last weekend. The one thing I make sure and have when I go to Shattered Halls is crowd control or a Paladin tank. Since I was tanking, it was glad to have mage and two warlocks with Succubi.

We made our way to the first boss without a hitch. The warlocks had some targeting issues while keeping up seduce along with puting damage on the main target and asked for some advice. I suggested a focus macro, similar to the one we made for Lal to Shackle Undead. It turns out they had not used a focus macro before, so I took a minute to help them set it up. They were quite pleased with the results, and it made CC for the remainder of the time a breeze. Maybe I'll post on Focus in an upcoming post. The more I learn about it, the more uses I think for it. Of course most of my information comes from other blogs and wow sites that I read or search for. But I digress.

After the first boss, one of the warlocks had to leave, so we got a mage from the guild to replace him. Yay! More Sheep! (or pigs, whatever)

The DPS of this group was outstanding. I was able to keep aggro on everything, but they always went down fast. We were tearing through fel orc gladiators no problem when we ran into a bit of a hitch.

The third group of gladiators was a little buggy. When they started to fight each other, they would run out into the center of the room. Now normally you would wait for the 4 gladiators to beat on each other to half health and then pull them. This is what I did. But since they had run out into the middle of the room to beat on each other, when I pulled them, 3 other mobs came with them. Instantly we have 8 mobs on us, 4 gladiators, 1 champion, and 3 other orc guys from the hallway. My first thought is that it's a wipe, but I'll try to make the best of it.

I grab as much attention as I can and the mages and warlock start laying down area of effect spells to kill the half dead orcs. I'm swiping and lacerating everything I can get in range of, but with 8 mobs I can't keep them all and one of the mages, and the warlock go down. Thankfully, the AoE seems to have dispatched the 4 gladiators at this point, and I start to think that maybe we can pull it out. As long as I keep the rest of the mobs attention, and Lal keeps healing me.
And that's when Lal got ambushed by one of the loose mobs and died. I grab the loose mob, and our other mage is somehow still alive, but I don't know how much longer I can last. And Lal says to me, "Should I use the Soulstone now? Or wait?"

Soulstone? Soulstone!

I tell her to wait for a second as I make sure all mobs are on me, but my health is going down fast. I say Now! and Lal pops up and starts healing, the mage and I kill the last 3 mobs, and it's not a wipe. 8 mob pull? No problem. Lots of fun, and everyone was having a good time. Props to that mage. I don't know how he avoided death! I think he was even surprised he survived that.

Exhillerated, we continue on and put an end to the Ogre boss. A few dead ninja orcs later and we're preparing to engage Kargath Bladefist.

I've killed Kargath succesfully twice. Each time, I had the group stand on the stairs and the tank focus on Keeping Kargath in the middle of the room. This time I tanked him in the middle, and the group spread out to the corners. One of the mages was on add duty at the stairway. The fight starts and things seem to be going well. We make it through the first Blade Dance just fine. Not too long after though, our mage on adds went down. I don't know the reason, maybe she couldn't keep on the adds, or maybe she got hit by too many blade dances, but our second mage picks up the adds and we continue to DPS on Kargath. It's going a little slower, and after another blade dance, it hits me. I can battle rez! So I wait for Kargath to go into his dance, pop out of Bear form, and throw a rez to our dead mage. She revives as I go back to bear, and Kargath finishes his dance and comes back to me. Within a few seconds, he's dead, and we are cheering!

That was my first battle ressurection and it was a lot of fun. It's amazing to get through a pull or boss fight gone bad by pulling out all the stops. We had a great group of people, and I'm looking forward to going back with them again! It's also incredible how well Lal and I can do as a team, communicating in real time without having to type things.

Beyond Highly Improbable

The first post of this Blog was all about how I had finally gotten my wife to play World of Warcraft with me. Since then, we've enjoyed countless adventures in Azeroth and Outland, made many good friends through our guild, and progressed to content I had only really dreamed of seeing when I first rolled Elionene back in late March of 2007. All of these are things that I thought I'd never do.

When I first started playing Warcraft, I didn't have a lot of time to put into it. I played a few hours here and there, but I was newly married, and we had just moved to Boston, so I was rarely ever able to put large chunks of time into the game. My little night elf hunter slowly but surely made her way to the mid 40s over a few months. I think I made it to level 70 in January of 2008 after 20 days played or so. That was a feat for me since I was a really casual player. During those months I had of course gone over all of the cool equipment and gear I could get in the top raids and things, but it didn't take long to realize the time investment that those raids needed just wasn't going to happen for me.

I wasn't too concerned. I'm on an RP server and the raid progression is slow there anyway. Moon Guard had only been around since The Burning Crusade came out, and it was well known for fostering a healthy role playing community that wasn't so hell bent on "beating" the game. A couple months before turning 70, I had lucked into finding a role play guild, Veritas, that was also eager to run dungeons and instances, things that I was beginning to appreciate but never had much time to do.

I fell into a routine of getting up before work and early on Saturdays before my wife was awake, using that time to play and level, and if I could find anyone, run an instance. I would post notices on the guild boards, but not many people wanted to run Blood Furnace with me at 6 in the morning. But then through an interesting set of circumstances, I met some people while doing Skettis dailies early in the morning. They were new to the server, and we helped each other get that silly prisoner out of tree tops a few times. Not too much later, I find they had joined their alts to Veritas, and as it turns out, they were from across the Atlantic which meant that 6 AM was more like 11 AM. Boom. I have a steady group of people to run dungeons with.

Before I know it, I'm leading a group of five people through Steamvault every Saturday morning for Cenarion Expedition reputation. Me? Leading a weekly dungeon crawl? Ha! We affectionately called our group the Crack of Dawn, and we still run together, though we've moved on to other dungeons. And that's because most of us that needed the CE rep got to exalted. And now my Night Elf is riding around on a freaking Hippogryph. I love the way that Night Elves look on these, especially for the lore of Warcraft. Makes me a little sad when I see horde on them.

Soon after starting the Sat. morning run. I got my wife to play with me. And now WoW has become our premium form of entertainment. She and I are both active in the guild. She just got her main, Lal, to 70 and decked out in Primal Moon Cloth and the Whitemend set. She's more than ready to heal Karazhan. Oh yeah! I'm in Karazhan too with Elionene! And Lal is set to join us in the near future. We may even do Gruul's soon, which would be my first official 25 person raid.

If you've read any of the blog before this post, you've read a lot of these things as they happened. It's just awesome to me that I didn't expect to ever come as far as I have. At one point, I wasn't sure if playing for an hour or two a week was worth it, but circumstances change and now we play all the time. So what's left to do?

Well, for a long time, I've wanted to play every class, and every race as well. There are still zones I've barely stepped foot in, and loads of quests I've never done. It seems daunting to think I'll ever achieve that goal, but then again, I didn't think I'd ever see anything beyond a 5 person instance either. Or that I could convince my wife to play with me, and she LIKES it. So it might take awhile, but I'm looking forward to the challenge knowing that anything is possible.

Meet the Characters - Driya

Driya is Lal's up and coming Shadow Priest alt. Originally Lal only wanted to be holy, but after grouping with a Shadow Priest and feeling the effects of Vampiric Embrace, she wasn't so sure anymore. Thus Driya came into existence as a solo toon for Lal, since we were taking care to level Salthier and Lal together. When Lal wanted to play without me, she could play on Driya.

Driya is Lal's niece and is much younger than Lal, having a less serious demeanor. Basically more fun and more easily excited. Although a Shadow Priest, Driya is not more evil or darker than any other priest. She is simply utilizing an aspect of her priesthood that is more associated with the offensive against evil than the defensive recovery of harm caused by evil. At least that's my best interpretation of what Lal's intention is for her. Perhaps I could have her write up a post for Driya herself!

That's all of our main characters. I hadn't intended to have so many Night Elves, but that's just how it fell out. I actually would like to start some other alts of different races, and with two 70s under my belt, that's probably going to happen soon. We actually just started two Draenei that we intend to level together. I'll save that for another post though.

Meet the Characters - Salthier

Salthier came into existence to keep the monsters from attacking Lal. He puts his big bear butt in the way, and she makes sure that said bear stays alive. They are married, life-mates, a committed couple, whatever the proper term is for Night Elven culture. I've yet to come across any official word on that.

Over the last few months, Salthier has seen a lot more playtime than Elionene by virtue of the fact that I spend most of my time online now with Lal. That's fine with me as I have come to love tanking. I'm still getting better at it, but the more I learn, and the better I do, the more I enjoy it. He's recently hit level 70 and is gathering gear to head into Kara with the guild. He actually just got honored with the Scryers to give him the shoulder inscription for tanks. Salthier is now unable to be critically hit. Woohoo!

As a druid, I wanted him to be an alchemist. Normally I would have paired this with herbalism, but Lal wanted to be an herbalist so we sort of have crisscrossing professions. Salthier is an Alchemist/Enchanter and Lal is a Tailor/Herbalist. Together we make an awesome team, and it plays well into their characters need for each other.

I don't have an exact age, but I'd pin Salthier at somewhere between 1,000 to 5,000 years old. Younger than those at the War of the Ancients, but old enough to have been around awhile before the more recent wars. He fought in the Battle at Mount Hyjal alongside Elionene's father. Elio's father died in that battle, and Salthier was the one to inform the family. Though there are no blood ties, Elionene considers Salthier a sort of Uncle and calls him as such.

Salthier was trained as a warrior, due to an inability to learn the Druidic ways earlier in life. After Hyjal, he traveled, spending time with the humans of Stormwind, and learning of these new allies from across the sea. It is here that he discovered the art of enchanting, and became familiar and enamored with the human culture. Through a series of dreams, he was led back to Kalimdor and touched by the hand of Cenarius to begin his training as a druid. To assist and aid him in this journey he reconnected with a friend from long ago, Lal, who was currently entering the Priesthood of Elune. His prior training as a warrior led to the Bear becoming his preferred druidic form.

That brings Salthier current with the timeline. I still like the ambassador to the humans part of it and eventually want to get him exalted with Stormwind, and riding around on a horse! It is likely that Salthier will become more of a main for me, and Elionene more of an alt, as we head into Northrend. It just seems like how it will work out as he and Lal continue to explore this world of theirs.

Meet the Characters - Lal

Lal is my wife's first character, and recently hit level 70. Woot! When I finally got her to agree and play with me for 30 minutes, she told me she wanted to play a pretty race and focus on healing instead of killing. The Night Elf priestess seemed to fit the bill, and to play along with her, I rolled a Night Elf Druid. I figured if I could tank, and she could heal, we'd be set for life.

That 30 minutes turned into a few months and both of those elves are now level 70 as you can read below. Lal took a liking to professions, Tailoring in particular, and worked her butt off to reach 375 in her mid 60s. She is shown to the right wearing her very own, hand-stitched, fancy Primal Mooncloth set. She's also maxed out her other professions of cooking, first aid, and herbalism, and is working on her fishing. I have to give her props for that because professions are something that I've never taken the time to meddle with. Elionene is a 375 leather worker, but did that long after she turned 70 and still hasn't leveled cooking or fishing past 100 or so.

Currently, Lal is gearing up for Karazhan, but with the PMC set is pretty much ready to go. She worries that her stamina is a little low, so we're working on quests and dungeons to provide her with upgrades to the last bits of older gear she has.

Lal has also been a hit with the guild. They were excited when I told them I was getting my wife to join me in game. At first Lal was hesitant to join the guild, but she soon did and has loved it ever since. She's always willing to help out when she can, and has really gotten good at the art of healing.

She's new to role playing, so Lal is still finding her voice, but she's come leaps and bounds from when we started with talking in character on guild chat and having conversations over /say. It's a lot of fun, and provides us with fun filled evenings of online gaming.

Meet the Characters - Elionene

Elionene Lunaris is my first character and what I would consider my main. When I started playing, I created several class/race/sex combinations and after playing a few levels on each, gravitated towards the hunter class. Of course later I discovered that men playing female Night Elf hunters can be a bit cliche, but by then I had invested too much time to rethink my decision. I figured as long as I didn't act like a tool and a huntard, I should be fine, and I haven't had any issues with it since.

It took me over six months to reach 70 with Elionene, but there were at least a couple months of absence from the game in there, including a real life move. Shortly before reaching 70, I found the guild Veritas by reconnecting with the Guild Leader, Shinorah, who I had instanced with in a pick up group in Uldaman months before. Being in Veritas made a huge difference in making the game more fun for me, both because of the social aspect, and the generosity of guild members with items and instance runs.

I'm a role player (I play on the RP server Moon Guard), and thus I like to have backgrounds for my characters. Elionene actually has her own journal that I put in a blog. The link is in the sidebar to the right.

She is a Beast Master hunter, 41/20/00 specced. I leveled beast master and enjoyed it so much, I never bothered to try the other specs, though I have an idea of the pros and cons of each. Currently she is my farmer and raider, but she also leads an early morning group of adventurers each Saturday at 7 AM EST called the Crack of Dawn. We rep grind in certain dungeons for whatever everyone needs. We're working on Honor Hold rep at the moment. These early morning runs have been some of the most fun instances I have ever done. The group is great, and we learn the instances so well that we can complete most of them in 90 minutes or less, easily.

She's seen the first half of Karazhan, up to Curator, and snagged the Beastmaw Pauldrons and the Gloves of Quickening from there. But I'm probably more proud of reaching 375 in leatherworking and crafting my own Ebon Netherscale set.

I couldn't post about Elionene without mentioning her owl, Lethan. He's been her one and only companion since Teldrassil (with a slight upgrade in Felwood). I never trained any other pets, but that's because I never saw the need. He does a ton of DPS for groups and provides great aggro for when soloing. He can be a bit tempermental, but she wouldn't have it any other way.

Something is Going on in Northrend

I haven't been ignoring all of the recent news about the Wrath beta starting up and the wealth of information on classes, zones, professions, and a plethora of other new things in the next expansion. WoW Insider seems to be as good a place as any to get all the information you could hope for. I have, however, been cautious about how much info I read.

I think I've decided that I want to go into Northrend just like my character will be going into Northrend. Basically, blind. I started playing Warcraft in April of '07 after the Burning Crusade was already out and people had left Azeroth behind. I found places like WoW Head, and WoW Wiki rather quickly to help me find quest objectives and boss strategies and general 'how to' information. It helped me to level quickly, and it helped to know what I was doing when I got to a boss fight so I didn't look like a n00b.

But with Northrend and the expansion, I'll be going in at pretty much the same time as the rest of the player base. Obviously things will get onto the web from the beta, but most of us won't be experiencing it until Blizzard finally pinpoints their ominous release date. I want to explore Northrend without coordinates, complete quests from just the quest text alone, and work out for myself the strategies on bosses in dungeons. It's going to make it harder, but it's going to make it a lot more satisfying when I complete that quest, or kill that boss.

It might mean it takes me longer to reach 80, or have to endure several wipes before I can finish an instance, but I'm looking forward to a fresh new start in the frozen north.

Salthier, a close second

Rawr indeed.

Salthier is now my second 70! He leveled on trash in Mechanar after we had already killed the bosses and I saw that he was just a few thousand points away from leveling. Cheer! My party congratulated me and then we rallied in Shattrath where the wonderful Atvia gifted me with both the vest and the leggings of the Heavy Clefthoof set! I had made the boots earlier, but this was an amazing gift. Thanks Atvia!

Now we have so many things to do it's hard to decide where to start. Gear up for Kara? Roll those Draenei alts we keep talking about? Max out those professions? Earn gold for epic flight? Quest our eyes out!? The list is endless, but it's sure going to be fun doing it.

Lal's Achievment

If you had told me a year ago that my wife would have a level 70 character in World of Warcraft, I would have laughed and said, "Yeah right, in my dreams." Well folks, somebody pinch me, but I don't think I'm dreaming. Last night in Nagrand Lal achieved level 70 upon the completion of the first Windroc hunting quest. Here we are next to Shado 'Fitz' Farstrider, the lucky NPC who had just given Lal the last bit of experience she'll get until Wrath of the Lich King comes out.



Of course the first thing that Lal did when she dinged 70 was to run back to Shattrath and pull her Primal Mooncloth set out of the bank so that she could be the most styling priest she could be. She'd made that set several levels ago and was eager to put it on. Now she's rocking over 1100 +heal and 172 MP5.



And then after getting dressed, the most logical thing to do was run to Wildhammer Stronghold in Shadowmoon Valley and learn how to fly on a fancy gryphon! Between the two of us (as Salthier had learn to fly at level 68 for a low cost, druids ftw) we easily had the gold to get Lal her 225 flying skill and a pretty Snowy Gryphon to ride around on.



Salthier is now 69, and I hope to get to 70 this weekend. We have a whole lot of questing and instancing ahead of us to get geared up for Karazhan runs, as well as to save for our Epic mount and flightform. Lal was slightly disappointed that she couldn't gain experience anymore. She really liked gaining those levels. So I imagine we'll have a couple of Draenei alts rolled in the near future to begin the process all over again! She wants a mage, and I think I'm going to be Shaman. Then we can start the saga of another duo!

Karazhan Revisted

I don't know how I forgot to post this before, but since my last post about my first time in Kara, I've been there twice more. And each time it was from the beginning with some fine members of Veritas. I absolutely love this instance, and it grows on me the more I'm in there. The music is great, the layout is fun and the place is just gorgeous. The boss encounters are challenging, but not so much that you give up on them. And when you finally down the boss, you feel great. Before I went in here, I read The Last Guardian which is all about Medivh and Karazhan. It was a great primer for the lore and NPCs in Kara.


A view of the opera house from behind the seats. Love the ceiling and chandelier and the pipe organ on the left.

Within the last few months, my guild has started regularly running Karazhan. Elionene was already geared enough for it, but the timing of the first group's runs just wasn't good for my schedule. On top of that, Lal had just started playing, and I was really excited to be leveling my new Druid, Salthier, with her.

Eventually, we had enough people and interest for a second team, and they chose a time on Saturday that made it possible for me to sign up! So in I go with 10 people also mostly new to the instance. We weren't sure how well we'd do. I was prepared for massive death, but hopeful for better. A couple of our members had been to Kara before on alts or in old guilds, so we weren't completely blind.

Our first accomplishment was to down Attumen without any wipes on trash or the boss. We were ecstatic that we'd done it on our first try! Thrilled to bits, we continued on to the Banquet Hall to confront Moroes. I'd read up on this fight and knew that he had random guests with him. As it turns out, he had several of the harder to control guests this time. WoW Wiki has a good page on the different guests, suggested kill order, and why they are dangerous.

I don't remember the exact guests we had, but I know it involved at least two of them that could release the others from traps and shackles, thus meaning we had to utilize our Crowd Control to the best ability. The other two were harder hitting mobs, and of course, Moroes. We wiped once, tried again, and wiped at 1% on Moroes. Argh! Third time's a charm though! and Moroes and his guests went down. Pats on the backs all around and then, holy cow! It's already been 3 hours? Yeah, time to call it a day, but for a group that's first day in Kara saw two bosses go down, we were pretty happy with ourselves.


Yes, that's Elionene, naked on stage in front of however many ghostly spectators. No, she's not putting on a show. I was the sacrificial lamb to discover the opera for the night, and I didn't want my nice armor to get any dents.

Two week later, we team up for Kara again. Today's goal is Curator. We take down Attumen quickly, and one shot Moroes. He had easier guests with him, which we were thankful for, but we could tell we were getting the hang of it. Onward to Maiden and she went down without too much trouble. Then we walk into the Opera Hall. I love the way this place looks, and it's fun to take part in the "play." I volunteered to walk out naked on stage, mainly because I had the bag space to disrobe. For those who don't know, the opera event can be 1 of 3 things. In order to determine what it is, so you can plan before hand, you send one person out first, removing the armor to avoid repair costs when you inevitably die from facing a boss mob on your own.

We had Romulo and Julianne, which was exciting for me because the last time I was here it was the Big Bad Wolf. After being brought back to life, and putting my armor back on, we discussed how it would work. Julianne would attack (and die) first. Then Romulo comes out, and he dies. Then they BOTH get up and attack at the same time. The trick is they then have to die within 10 seconds of each other or they will resurrect with full health. Scary! Our first attempt, we got to the third phase and somehow just lost it. We all died, but one of our healers was either Soul Stoned, or maybe he was a Pally and bubbled, because we didn't have to corpse run. On the second attempt, we agreed to get Julianne down to 10%, and then focus on Romulo so that we could kill them together. But somehow, each of them lost health at about the same rate, meaning we killed them pretty much together anyway. Go us!


Isn't this hallway amazing? And that's the Curator lumbering towards us.

It was getting late, but we were almost to our goal so we hacked and slashed our way to the Curator's room, and what a room. A lot of us had tried (and failed) to get Ahune down during the Fire Festival, and we often heard the he was like Curator on steroids, so we were pretty sure we could do this. Our first attempt, we didn't have good enough focus fire on the Astral Flares that Curator sent out. We went through 3 evocations before he enraged and killed the tank, and then dispatched the rest of us. Our last person died with Curator 2%. Doh! On the second attempt, our warlock changed up her tactics, using direct damage on the flares instead of DoTs, and we positioned better so that the flares were easier to kill. This time we had it, and the Curator went down!

He dropped The Gloves of the Fallen Defender. We had one priest healer, and both of our Main and Off tanks were druids. The main Tank was our leader, and was really hoping to get them, but was willing to let the roll determine the winner. However both the priest and the off tank bowed out, having both received upgrades earlier in the dungeon. Even though Tier 4 would have been better for any of them, we were all excited that our Boss Bear got his gloves. The next day I saw him in Shattrath sporting his Gauntlets of Malorne.

By then it was late and we'd been in there for nearly 5 hours, but we'd reached our goal. We discussed going on to Chess (where I'm hoping for some boots to drop for me!) but we'd already done enough and there was always next week. I can't wait.

Almost There...

Lal hit 69 yesterday farming eels and other things while I was at work. Salthier achieved 68 just the night before so Lal is almost a full level ahead of me now! We've been having a blast in Terokkar doing all sorts of quests, and running various dungeons in Auchindoun. I only ever ran these once before with Elionene, so it was almost like learning them for the first time. That and I'm tanking them now instead of shooting things full of arrows. They also have very few bosses. Both Auchenai Crypts and Sethekk Halls only have two bosses each in normal mode. Mana Tombs has 3. Regardless, it's always fun to run with guild members, and I'm really enjoying the role of tank. Lal is also loving the role of healer as far as I can tell. She's contemplating a Druid alt to be restoration.

We just about finished up quests in Terokkar last night. There are a few chains we have to finish up, but I think we're on the last part of all of them. Some of them have been a lot fun, like dressing up as orcs to invade the Shadow Council, or helping some dwarves dig up a drum when the dwarves seemed to be more aware of the world around them than most NPCs. Hopefully tonight we'll finish those off and head into Nagrand where the sun shines a little brighter and Hemet Nesingwary awaits us to do his hunting for him.

I guess it's also an achievement that Salthier learned his flight form upon reaching level 68. I can't exactly put my finger on it, but something about BEING a bird as opposed to just riding on one, makes flying so much more fun that it usually is. I'm looking forward to epic flight form, which a few other druids in our guild just got. Time to start gold farming!

Pics of the fun things we've been doing. Enjoy!


"If we master their dance moves, there's no way they will see through our disguises!"


Firewing point in Terokkar Forest earned the affectionate name of "Candy Land" from Lal.


Look! In the air! It's a bird! Well, yeah it is a bird. Sal, you're ruining the shot of Lal in her perfectly matching priest garb!

Blog addition

So I added this Featured Blog item on my sidebar and I wanted to take a minute to explain what it is. I was reading a post on WoW Insider about how to get your blog read more, and this was one of the things they highlighted. Basically it advertises other blogs that are out there. In return, I get advertised on other blogs as well. The way it works is a little more complicated.

It's called Entrecard. I created a profile on their site and set up my card with a logo for my site. I earn credits by going to other sites and "dropping" on their Entrecards. Basically saying, "Hey, I've been to your site." This can be done once a day. You also get credits for people dropping on your site, so it goes both ways and is polite to drop on sites that have dropped on you. So what are all these credits for? Advertising. Depending on how popular the website is, it costs a certain amount of credits to advertise on their site. (And by looking at it, I think it's based on how many pending adds they have queued for the site.) So for example. I purchase an add on a WoW Blog, and for 24 hours, the picture on THEIR Entrecard, is for my site, and it links here.

What you will see on the sidebar is a picture and link for blogs that have requested to be advertised on my site. I approve all of these, so it's not like anyone can just throw up an add. But that being the case, I'm still figuring it out. The first add was for some hip-hop site which is cool and all, but I would like to keep the adds relevant to WoW if at all possible. It will probably take some time before things level out and I have more WoW sites asking to advertise on Good Morning Azeroth.

Why did I do this? I guess I'd like to have more readers, and this seemed like an easy way to get word out there that my site exists. I also like that it doesn't involve paid advertising. It's more of a community notice more than anything, and maybe it will direct people to other interesting blogs. I know it's already done that for me, showing me more warcraft sites that could be interesting and fun to read.

Stay on target

In the last week Lal and I have achieved a few WoW milestones. Lal is now a 375 Tailor and Herbalist and has succesully created all three of her primal mooncloth pieces. Of course she can't wear them until she's level 70, but we're making good progress towards that as well. She's currently at 67, and I'm trailing along behind at 66 and 2/3s. The disparity in our levels comes form over a week of Lal farming Bog Lords for motes of life while I was at work. She needed the motes to make the Primal Lifes required in her tailoring, but a side effect of the farming was her gaining an additional 400,000 experience and who knows how much Sporregar reputation while Salthier was sitting in an inn somewhere. I don't really mind. She's happy being in the "lead" anyway. :)

We've made our way to Terokkar Forest in quest progression. A couple of nights ago we spent a lot of time killing worgs for their non existent tails and picking up "Olemba" seeds, which we could never remember how to say correctly. We terrorized a bunch of Arakkoa who refused to dro their feathers, and learned a lot of new recipes while staying at Allerian Stronghold. We've yet to venture to the Bone Wastes and Auchindoun, but after last night's guild meeting, we did jump on the opportunity to go with some guildies to Old Hillsbrad.

I've read a lot of the WoW books, and the story of Thrall is really interesting to me. I tried to explain the basis for the instance and how we were helping restore the timeline to Lal, but I couldn't really get it out right, and I think I just confused her. I tanked the instance and had a lot of fun, although we struggled a bit at certain points drawing aggro when weren't ready for it. In the end Thrall was saved, and the timeline was corrected and Lal ended up with some nice healing shoulders that matched her robe. She also snagged a new mace, so it was a pretty good drop night for her.

One of the fun things about Old Hillsbrad is that Night Elves didn't arrive in the Eastern Kingdoms until more recently, so while in the instance you get a special buff that makes you look human. Lal became a blonde and another of our companions bore a striking resemblance to Chuck Norris. I however, was a bald and aging man. I wonder if we were to go back if I would look any different? I hope so, because I think we may go back some time. After the last boss was down, 4 of us went to Southshore to take in the lore scenes, and have a few drinks at the bar. We ended up congretating in the town hall and having fun with the human emotes and sayings that we'd never experienced much before because I don't think any of us had rolled many humans. It was a lot of fun; there are some pitures below.

Tonight I think we're heading to the Mana Tombs, although Lal might be running Underbog before I get home. I'll have to do a little research and see what kinds of things I'm looking for in these instances.



There's Sal as a balding human, and Malrah as Chuck Norris. Lal's back is turned, but you can see her pretty blonde hair.


"Salther, please. You have got to stop doing that awful human dance!"


Lal, lamenting over her hair color.