Guild Drama

I didn't actually do very much in the game last night, just some auction work and Meeloo's daily quests. However, I found out that the group 2 raid organizer, Moonfirespam, left the guild and took his buddies with him. I guess he had a bust-up with the GM, Decayed, about people signing up for raids and then not showing up and wanting to punish them for it or something. I don't know the details, but our raid organizer has left with a few of his friends.

The upshot is that the group 2 raids are now being organized by a different guy, Dragonscale. He's been the raid leader most of the time, so it should be fine, as long as we can get the people together to go. This week, Wednesday night.

In the "making money for my epic flying mount" category, I got a random recipe drop that's going for 1500 gold on the AH (don't know if it's selling for that) which I put up for 1000G. I also managed to finally sell one of the damn cards I bought, so some profit is starting to show.

Shade and $$

We took down the Shade of Aran in one shot (yay!). We tried Illhoof and failed. We tried Prince and failed. Many gold were spent in repair bills. I wish we had a more consistent group to do this with. Our tank is learning, but he needs gear and needs practice with the fights.

I took my level 4 druid to Thunder Bluff to act as my auction house mule. I gave him a stake of 500 gold and a few items (including those damn cards that I can't sell). He's got some inventory and about 490 gold now. We'll see how quickly he makes it back and starts showing some profit.

wierd night

Kara last night was just plain wierd. It started out pretty normal, as we downed Attumen and Moroes quickly and easily (or so we thought...). But things started getting wierd when we hit the Maiden. Group 2 has never wiped on the Maiden. Ever. We proceeded to wipe 5 times before we finally got her down. I don't know if it was the new main tank, or everyone being a bit lazy and sloppy, but it was just not at all smooth. The main problem seemed to be positioning, as her chain lightning was arcing all over the place *and* I wasn't able to dispel her holy fire easily like I usually can.

At any rate, we eventually did get her down when Moonfirespam stepped back, stopped DPSing and added a 4th healer to the mix. He threw down some HOTs on the tank and we all managed to survive to the end.

That's when things got odd. As we were getting ready to clear our way to the Opera, trash mobs started respawning on us. From behind. Moroes-linked mobs, who shouldn't respawn after we down Moroes. When we finally got to the Opera, we were unable to enter because "Moroes is still alive". Uhhhhh.... We got his loot!? We tapped a keg next to his dead body?! At any rate, several people opened help tickets and we sat around for 20 minutes waiting for someone to help us. Eventually we got some help, but the best the GM could do was to have us all leave the instance for 30-45 minutes and do some sort of "soft reset" of the instance. It's not precisely clear what that means, as two different GMs told us two different things. Maybe Moroes will be alive again, maybe he won't. Certainly, all the trash mobs will need to be re-cleared. Blech.

So, all in all, a very strange evening in Kara. On a good note, I've managed to sell off almost all of my auction house buys, except the cards I bought, which are low-volume, high margin items. I think it could take a few weeks to get rid of them. I'm almost at break-even already, even with the outstanding stuff to sell, so I don't feel like I've done too badly.

At least we got the shade

Group 2 downed the shade of Aran last night. We brought in a "ringer" from another guild, since I guess the sign-ups were weak. Cannibalsnax is an uber mage from another guild and he helped us out. I was bummed that TwoToedJoe didn't get into the raid, as we really could have used a backup tank in the group, more than another dps. Even with our ringer, we failed to take down the Prince, even with 5 or 6 tries.

Kara resets tonight and we'll probably easily down the first 5 bosses tomorrow when we run it. I don't know if the first 5 are just significantly easier than the rest or if we've just done the fights enough to know how to keep them under control. I will say that the Shade fight and the Prince fight involve a lot more thinking on your feet and are a lot less "turn the crank" than the first 5 fights, so it might have something to do with that. Hopefully practice, the return of our regular group make-up and some general gearing up will get us there eventually. I'd really like to have Kara on "farm status" for group 2 by the time patch 2.3 comes out and Zul'Aman opens up.

rediscovering the AH

When I first start playing WoW, I had a great time playing the AH. I use the Auctioneer addon extensively and used it to buy low and sell high (most of the time). Occasionally I'd make a bum purchase, but I think that's to be expected. I guess when I started playing my priest in earnest, and when Blizzard made it so that you had to be a high level enchanter to disenchant high level items, I kind of gave up on playing the AH.

Well, the other night I rediscovered the fun. It's nice playing the AH when you've got 600 or so gold to work with. I can make some larger purchases and hope to turn them around for a tidy profit without worrying about running out of funds, since there is very little on the AH I can't buy at this point if I feel it's a good deal.

On my first night back on the AH, I already made a boneheaded purchase by trying to corner the market in Greater Magic Essence (I think that's the one). My fundamental error was blindly trusting Auctioneer to give me perfect information. It said that there were very cheap items available. I looked, and sure enough, compared to what I had scanned, there were a lot of cheap lots on the AH. This should have been a red flag right away. One cheap lot means someone is underpricing. 50% of the items being "cheap" probably means that Auctioneer has data which is not complete. I proceeded to try to corner the market (mistake #2) and bought up all the "cheap" lots. Long story short is that I'm taking a bath on them. I think my total losses will be less than 10-20 gold when I actually manage to dump everything I picked up, so it's not a hard lesson, but it's one I won't forget, since I hate having to truck around 5-6 stacks of worthless (to me) enchanting materials that I paid too much for.

Anyway, even with the mistakes I've made already, I'm having a blast playing the AH again in between Kara runs. Hopefully I'll get my methods tuned up and have an epic flying mount in no time! (I currently have about 600 gold and probably another 2-300 in stuff that I'm trying to sell). I think I started with 650 two days ago.

Update from Wednesday

Nothing too interesting. I did my daily quests and some other quests in Nagrand. I also received my Whitemend Hood from Romulox and starting accumulating materials for my Whitemend Pants.

Tonight, mostly likely no WoW, as we're playtesting boardgame prototypes at Ben's tonight.

monday/tuesday

last night: daily quests then bed
tonight: first 5 bosses in Kara. Not as smooth as some nights, but pretty smooth. No gear dropped for me.

I sent the mats to Romulox for my Whitemend Hood. It's close to 1000G in materials. Got the last primal might donated by TwoToedJoe. We had a good chat tonight. Turns out he has a PhD in chemistry, so we have a connection there. Nice to see I'm not the only over-educated WoW player around.

Dailies, Crafting

Started doing the Ogri'la and Skyguard dailies in earnest yesterday. I also crafted my first Spellcloth (for a guildie) and did my usual Primal Mooncloth crafting. I now have 10 Primal Mooncloth banked, as well as 2 Primal Mights (from the AH). Soon, soon I will have my Whitemend's Hood. Well, as soon as I feel like ponying up the cash for rest of the Mights and the Primal Nether.

An evening of frustration

Last night, I caught the end of the guild's first guild-only run into Gruul's Lair. This basically meant that I got only 1/3 the total repair bill as the rest of the guild. We failed to get the High King down. In my opinion, our gear as a whole isn't really up to the task yet.

After an hour of flailing in Gruul's Lair, group 2 headed to Kara. We took down the Shade of Aran pretty easily and worked our way up to the Prince without much trouble. We then beat our heads against the Prince for a couple hours, but never got him down. We did get him down *below* 1% on one of the attempts, but an elemental dropped right on top of us right at the end and we just couldn't quite get it done. We wiped when he had about 4000 hp left. Tuesday, we start afresh back at the beginning of Karazhan for our usual cake-walk through the first 5 bosses.

Thursday night

Forgot to post yesterday. Thursday night I skipped out on gamenight (due to exhaustion and lack of gamenight participation). I played a small amount of WoW...did a quest or two and ran Underbog with some guildies. I had some lingering Sporeggar quests in UB, so I finished those up.

I forgot...

to mention that the guild didn't run any Kara last night at all. I assume due to lack of healers. Had a talk with Moonfirespam about scheduling and learned that he's planning on alternating Mon/Wed/Sun and Tue/Thur/Sun as the raiding days. This week was the Mon/Wed/Sun schedule, which was a bummer, since I was unavailable on Monday or Wednesday this week, due to D&D and Werewolf. Ah well. There will be plenty of Kara for me, I'm sure.

Werewolf & Beerfest quests

Not much playing time last night. In fact, if Portland Werewolf hadn't ended early, I wouldn't have played at all. We had a low turnout for werewolf for some reason and a couple people left early. So, we called it about 9:15. My only WoW playing was to do the daily beerfest quests, allowing me to buy my little pony keg. I also crafted my primal mooncloth, since the cooldown had elapsed. I want to get a Whitemend's Hood crafted for me by a guildie, but whew, those primal mights are expensive (100G each on the AH and I need 5 of them. bleah). Seems like my best bet to get out of my green hat, though.

Probably no WoW tonight, as it's gamenight.

Raid and Beer

A very successful first 5 in Kara last night. No boss wipes (I think one full wipe on a mis-pull of trash on the way up to Curator and one half-wipe on a mis-pull on the stairs before Moroes). Attumen, Moroes, Maiden, Opera (little red riding hood), Curator in a about 3.5 hours. It was a fantastic group and we had a great time. After every boss, Twotoedjoe tapped his brewfest pony keg and we all got as drunk as we could before the keg ran out.

While we were tearing up the first 5, group 1 was struggling through the same content. We were getting the update from Machinegun whose brother is in group 1 and he gave us the wipe update. They started 2 hours before us, but they were still working on Curator when we quit at 11:20. Since they are generally better geared than we are, I'm guessing that their class makeup wasn't quite right.

I got two drops, some bracers which are not a healing upgrade, but are a stam upgrade and a new healing cape which I spent 250 dkp on (little red riding hood's cape, I think).

Tonight, no WoW, due to the Portland Werewolf gathering.

No Prince for you!

Or Shade of Aran, either. The Kara group was not set up well to do the Shade or Prince. We only had 2 healers and if one of them went down (which happened a lot in the Shade fight), then the other couldn't keep everyone up. Additionally, we didn't have a warlock to banish the elementals, who proceeded to chew up the party pretty quick near the end of the fight. Suffice it to say, we didn't finish any bosses last night. They're going to try again tonight, but I won't be there, due to real-life D&D at Erich's place. The raid leader (Moonfirespam) has said that he won't run it if they can't find 3 healers, so my guess is that group 2 won't actually do any Kara tonight. We'll be back on Tuesday for the first few bosses again after the reset.

BGs and Mech

Last night, I did a bunch of Arathi Basin, then a run through Mech. Mellow and good, all in all. Didn't lose a single AB, either. Tonight, Kara, and maybe Prince finally.

Quests, Instances

Last night, I did a few more quests in Zangarmarsh (more opened up when I got to be friendly with Sporeggar). I got a whisper from someone asking me to heal for Steamvaults. Since I need the CE rep, I said sure. The group was not very good and when we wiped on the first boss, two people didn't run back, but waited for me to run and res them. I chewed them out for it and then one of them said "well, you didn't heal us, so we're even". I told them to f*** off and left the group. My first heal pulled aggro on all the mobs in the fight, causing me to spend all my time keeping me and the main tank alive, rather than healing the rest of the party. So, of course they died and we wiped. IMHO, the tanks fault for not keeping aggro (at all).

A few minutes after I dropped that group, I got a request to heal Shadow Labs. I said sure, since I need Lower City rep, too. I told them I didn't have time for the whole thing, and they said ok. We made it through 2 bosses before I had to leave, pretty successful, I think. The 2nd boss in Shadow Labs is really fun, mind-controlling the whole party periodically and having us beat each other up.

No WoW tonight due to gamenight.

Kara again

The guild went to Kara again last night. I am in group 2 for the guild, but we still sailed through Attumen, Moroes, Maiden, Opera (yay, 1st guild group to do Wizard of Oz), and Curator. We had a few glitches, but pretty much one-shots on the bosses, which is pretty nice for a new group with a few people who had never been to Kara at all. A few good healers and a great tank and super DPS will get you a long way. I got a great drop of an awesome healing Mace (Shard of the Virtuous). A solid night, all-in-all.

Return to questing

No raids going on tonight, so I decided to go back and start doing all the quests I missed on my way to 70. I made about 60 gold in 3 hours in Zangarmarsh, just questing. I think I'm almost done with all the quest lines in that zone. Soon I'll hit Terokkar and clean up there. After that, probably Nagrand. The questing is soon going to get annoying and difficult with my holy priest.

Found out that my old guild from Turalyon has broken up. I imagine that my leaving, along with the loss of the raid leader, probably put a bullet in its head, although it was already falling apart before that.

On a non-WoW note, blogger doesn't work very well on my old G4 Powerbook. I hope I can replace it soon.

Gruul's Lair

The new guild joined forces with another guild last night to attempt Gruul's Lair. We got the first big boss down to 5%, but after 3 hours of attempts, we decided to call it and try another day. This is the first raid I've been in with 25 people. It was chaos, to say the least. I chalk most of this up to the fact that it was our first attempt, and that most of the people hadn't done any 25 man raiding before. I'm sure we'll get better.

Our main trouble was transitioning between focusing on the various mobs as the fight progressed. Especially for me, my healing assignments were not particularly clear and even when I thought I knew what I was supposed to be doing, finding my next healing target was not easy. I often had to run through the fight to the other side, dodging various and sundry AOE attacks from the mobs, to get to where I could heal my next target.

Anyway, it was a fun learning experience and I'm sure we'll down him the next time.