Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Achievements and Other New Things

I've been a bit lax in posting lately due to a few reasons. Mostly I've just been using my time to play more with the patch changes, and I've doing less blogging from my day job, which is probably a good thing. :D

Good things have been going on though. Hallowe's Eve is here and Lal and Salthier have been enjoying the festivities. Actually, Driya has been enjoying the free experience from trick or treating. Salthier is obsessed with getting the achievements for the holiday done. I have the continent of Kalimdor to finish trick or treating in, but I've done most of the other things. Just need to grab a squashling and get transformed by a few more wands. Thankfully the mask achievement is going to soon not be needed for "The Hallowed" title. It seems almost impossible to do if you can't trick or treat constantly.

Karazhan on Friday was a full clear, all bosses, including some spider boss in the basement which we did with six people after we were done with everything else. It's a lot easier with the patch. We did have one wipe on Nightbane due to some aggro management issues.

I've been slightly dissapointed with my new hunter abilities. As soon as I could, I tooke Elionene up to Netherstorm and tamed my new Moth pet. I want to have at least one from each of the new pet trees, and this was going to be my Ferocity pet. I love my moth. I named her Sophora after a type of plant that moths can eat, but is poisonous to other creatures. Weird, I know. But then I started having issues with the auto cast function on my pet abilities. Serenity Dust, the moth special ability seems to not work properly, and it might be due to a bug in which the ability is too high of a rank for the moth's abilities. Rabid only auto casts if the pet has aggro, so it has to be manually hit during raids and things where I have a tank. I tried adding it into a steady shot macro, but even that has been a little buggy.

I also tamed a plain old brown Ashenvale Bear for a tenacity pet. I named him Kukalaka, which sounds a bit silly, but is a reference to Star Trek: DS9. On Sunday I took a couple level 60 guild members and tanked regular Ramparts with my bear. It was fun, if a bit chaotic, but he did excellent on the boss fights. Having specced 51/10/0 Beastmaster hunter, I plan to get a Chimaera and a Rhino for exotic pets. I just hope that the bugs work out, and that I can get more comfortable with all of these abilities. To say nothing of the pet bar being too small to include them all, so I have to make macros to put on my already full action bars. /sigh

In some other interesting news, you may recall that Lal and I rolled Draenei alts some time ago, Nadyezhda and Bogdan. Bogdan was to be my healer, a Resto Shaman. Since then, Lal has preferred to play on her main and not give much attention to the Dranei, which mean I never played Bogdan because they were a duo. I still wanted to paly alts, so I made a gnome rogue and played him to level 20. It was frustrating at first, but I started to really enjoy being sneaky. Then Lal, feeling sorry that I didn't have a healer to level made a good suggestion, and I took her up on it. Bogdan was only level 13. So I deleted Bogdan and rerolled him as a Paladin (future tank I think) and leveled him solo to 12.5 and then parked him where the old Bogdan was on Bloodmyst isle. Then I created a brand new Shaman to level solo as a healer. Her name is Khristin. Bogdan and Nadya are not forgotten, and we'll level them some day, but this gives me the chance to level Khristin on my own so I can have a healer, DPS, and tank character all at top level. I'm going to have to work hard to get Khristin to 70 before Wrath, which in all reality probably won't happen, but I'd like to at least get her close to 60.

One thing that his new patch has done though is made the game a whole lot more busy. In fact, Moon Guard is starting to see queues. Long ones. Sunday night we waited 40 minutes to log on. I'm hoping it was just the new patch, weekend, and new holiday event that contributed to that. Yesterday we still had a 10 or 15 minute wait though. We'll see what it's like tonight!

2 comments:

Beltayn said...

Interested to know more about the bear tanking. Think it's actually viable for groups in the future or just a novelty?

-Gundersson

T.J. said...

Well, having just read at www.bigredkitty.net that someone's gorilla tanked Gruul, I would say it's actually viable. Tell you what though, I'll post today about the experience since it's interesting to me and others.