I told you so

First, breaking news!

BAM!

(I completed both on 10/29/09 local time but apparently not on server time.)

The sad part is… there are some awesome quests that I want to finish up, so I can’t stop.

Even before the whole achievement thing started I had a personal goal to see every quest conceivable on at least one character.

So I’ll finish up this quest chain that I think will take me through the Dark Portal to hunt demons. And I’ll finish the quest chain that I’m doing for Tirion Fordring out in Eastern Plaguelands. And the quests from Chromie are amusing as I really am (in a way) from the future doing quests in the past for her.

But at least now I feel like some of the pressure has been lifted and I can bounce around as I wish.

Six Thousand

I’ve pretty well secured my place at the top of the Achievement Whore list in the guild.

One of the benefits of working on Loremaster is that it gives me an excuse to get into some of the older dungeons and raids.

The other night, my husband and I tore up Lower Blackrock Spire to take care of some quests.

I was able to get Mother’s Milk, but after letting a spider beat on him for about 30 minutes, he finally just killed her with that quest undone.

A couple nights later we planned on hitting Upper Blackrock Spire and, lo and behold, a guildy comes on and randomly asks if anyone is interested in getting the Jenkins title.

Um, OK!

So we take 4 of us into UBRS and thankfully, someone knows where we’re going.

Got a couple more quests out of the way. I think I am now attuned to Blackwing Lair, as if that mattered anymore. I also found a poor, little injured blue whelping and he started a new quest line. And what dungeon is complete without bringing someone’s head back to Orgrimmar?

And of course, I now have a new title entered into the rotation.

This quest text is full of win:

Bringing somebody’s head back to Thrall got me officially started on the quest line to go kill Onyxia (again). I’ve taken it out to the Plaguelands and now need to go back into UBRS and kill some more dragonkin things and collect eyeballs. Because I need a disguise. So obviously I need eyeballs. Duh. (Meanwhile, I’ll pay Ony a visit and kill her without the disguise. She dropped my helm. Again.)

The quest line from the little blue whelping took me back out to Winterspring.

I’m poking around the cave, looking for some blue rune I’m supposed to be standing on.

And I see 2 big blue dragons.

I can take them, easy.

Cast, cast, cast, cast.

Immune?

WTF?!

Oh yeah.

Old school blue dragons are actually resistant to arcane magic.

Oops!

Invis FTW…

Run over to the blue rune, which I can thankfully still see while invisible, and poof! I am now on a mountain top in Winterspring with some chick.

We have a little talk and she offers to ship me to the Plaguelands to talk to the next person.

So I’m expecting a portal, a swirly light, a cut to the loading screen and done.

Whoa!

Bitch sends me flying backwards through the air!

It’s always awesome for me when I do a quest for the first time and it does something unexpected.

That quest line unfortunately ended in the Plaguelands. Unless I want to grind chromatic dragon scales to get gear I can’t equip. Meh.

This brings our Loremaster count up to:

Only 29 left to go…

(And I actually got more done after that screen shot – I’m down to 12 left!)

And it shall be mine

Talking red protodrakes here.

Have a group willing to tackle some of our remaining achievements aggressively to finish out Glory of the Hero and get our drakes.

A certain Holy pally was nice enough to chart out what we needed:

The X fields are ones that are done, the blue fields are the ones that need to be done.

He even found a guide that covers all of them in detail.

Clarification on Questions

I find it hilarious that the posts I do as filler often turn out to be the more controversial posts I publish, at least judging from the comments.

The other day I did a post about how people are finding my blog using the search of “is my gear good enough for (random instance)”.

My philosophy on the search and its merits were alternatively blasted and agreed with. It would even appear that there were people who felt I was trying to say that no one should ask any questions about readiness to take on new content.

It’s obvious that my intent was missed by some. As an educator and a writer I cannot allow that to stand. So here’s take 2 on the gear question.

…

From the statistics page for my blog I can see what search engine terms people are using to find the blog.

Currently one of the most popular is “warlock T9.” Not really sure why or how, sorry to disappoint all you warlocks out there.

One that crops up periodically is the search of “is my gear good enough for (instance)”.

Example: Is my gear good enough for Ulduar 10?

LITERALLY – “IS MY GEAR GOOD ENOUGH FOR ULDUAR 10?”

Heroic at last

So fucking close… and I have no idea where the last 7 on Kalimdor are. I’m hoping that somewhere in Eastern Kingdoms I’ll get sent to the other continent to finish up a quest chain or 5.

My goal was to get both of these done before the end of the month. I was thinking for a while it wasn’t going to happen, but it just might. Just shy of 9 quests a day will get it done.

I was in Arathi last night working on the Myzreal quest chain and had to spend some time in a cave killing kobolds for some shards. Of course, with the shitty drop rate there aren’t enough kobolds to provide for a single person doing the quest. Add in the level 40 human paladin on the same quest and there really aren’t enough to go around.

I was in a good mood so I refrained from 1-shotting the pally. I did, however, make liberal use of snowballs and baby spice every time I came across her in the cave.

Now I’ve got to wonder, what was the player’s reaction? I made no threatening moves towards them, but had them targeted whenever they were in range and kept pelting them with harmless things.

Is my gear good enough for X?

Periodically I amuse myself by reviewing the search terms that people have used to somehow wind up on my blog.

I feel very sorry for some of those people – either they were sorely disappointed by what they found here or they must be very bored.

A common theme that crops up is the search of “Is my gear good enough for (name of random instance or raid)?”

I’ll give you an easy answer.

No.

You want a more complicated answer?

In a haze

First I had a happy post all written up and ready to go.

Then I had an angry post ready to spew venom across the screen.

Now…

I don’t know what I have.

I have an offer that is tempting.

There are a lot of possibilities in what is being very creatively waved about under my nose.

But it will undoubtedly burn bridges.

I have a lot of thinking to do.

…

Funny story.

Tier 10 – Psychotropic or daltonism?

Fun fact: daltonism is another name for color blindness, particularly red-green color blindness. Go wikipedia!

Anyway, if you’re curious about the set bonuses and base stats for the tier gear, I suggest you look elsewhere or wait until it’s been released live, then I’ll talk about it.

For now, it’s far more important to review the appearance of the new gear.

So without further ado, here’s a cropped image from MMO Champion to display the data-mined appearance of the T10 set for blood elf mages:

Orc girls are easy

I generally avoid the official forums.

They are full of trolls and the temptation to join their ranks is often overwhelming.

But I was watching the forums out of curiosity about the proposed enchanting thing (which I will not be talking about until there is more substantiated information) and another thread happened to catch my eye.

WWF Plate Belts! Oh… yeah! Snap into.

My inner troll seized control and I entered the thread.

There was some general moaning and groaning about the inflation of belt size, which apparently has been brought about since Blizzard is now using models for the belts instead of “painting” a strip around our waists. So the belts have to be bigger to accommodate the art.

I’m actually OK with the new belts. I hear they are retardedly over-sized on gnomes, but what isn’t?

A thread like this just begs to played with.

(It’s a pain to read – “If my belt is going to be that huge I want the option to wear it slung over one shoulder a la WWF/WCW.”)

(“But then your pants will fall down.”)

(“Can’t see them under my robe anyway. Are you even sure I’m wearing pants right now?”)

(“Soooo whatcha doing later ^_~ lol.”)

I was honestly expecting an attack on my armory – “yeah you’re wearing pants and they suck” or something to that effect.

Instead, I get propositioned.

Lok’tar, my friends.

BUSY

So much to do all at once!

If you’ve been hiding under a rock, you might have missed the start of Hallow’s End.

Thankfully I got my Hallowed title last year so the only thing I have left to do on my main this year is finish collecting all 20 masks. I’m down to 6. (Has anyone seen the goblin or worgen masks? I haven’t.)

Oh, and of course I need to go kill the Headless Horseman a bunch.

He’s been re-tuned to 80 and so have his drops, but the drops seemed more impressive last year. Maybe because I wasn’t raiding yet so my gear sucked.

This year I’m just after his mount, like everyone else.

And who can pass up the easy XP for leveling toons for completing the fire quest each day?

I think I’m putting out fires on 8 characters each day.