Mend Pet

This is my druid, Ayrshire.  Like so many druid alts out there, I’m raising her as my  “Brajana-can’t-afford-to-buy-flasks” herbalist/alchemist!  I also rolled her because I wanted a Tauren, and Twitter voted Druid over Shaman when I polled.  The highest I’ve gotten a druid is mid-20s, but hopefully this one will make it all the way, like my paladin before her!

Walk with the Earthmother!

Notice her attractive shoulders and chest piece? Yep, they’re heirlooms.  I ran some heroics over the weekend and realized I had exactly 200 Stonekeepers Shards, and over 80 Conquest/Valor/Heroism badges.  So I rolled out the Wintergrasp to grab her Exceptional Stormshroud Shoulders, and plopped down 40 Heroism tokens for her Stained Shadowcraft Tunic.  I originally thought the chest would only be available through the Argent Tournament, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn otherwise!

I’m really happy with the heirloom system.  I think it’s a great compromise between the extremists who say “All characters should start at level 55!” and the others who say “Leveling too fast is CHEATING!”

Where do I stand?  Well, I like leveling.  But sometimes it is just too time consuming.  I don’t feel like it’s a waste of time… and while you don’t exactly learn how to play your character as you would in a level 80 raid setting, you learn invaluable lessons and know the mechanics of your abilities front-to-back, so that when you do begin to change to the raid playstyle, it’s just the way you use the abilities that you have to learn, not what each ability is for.

A 20% increase to my experience gain does give me a noticeable boost, but it’s not as extreme as just jumping straight to 80 – I still have to learn to play.

Or, What To Do When The Xbox Breaks Down.

Over the weekend, Gadgets and I were spending our time working our way through the seasons of IT Crowd.  Unfortunately, the Xbox controller decided to stop functioning (yes, I tried changing the batteries!) leaving us stuck with nothing to do.

We tried hooking up his new 24″ monitor and watching on the computer, but with a broken soundcard… it just wasn’t going to happen.  Since we didn’t have 2 computers to play alts together, we decided to play AN alt together.

We turned WoW into a 2-player cooperative game… and it was awesome.

Here’s what we did:

Grabbed a set of dice.

Rolled a d10 to pick our race.  4… Gnome it is!

Rolled a d6 to pick our class… MAGE!

While I know there is a function built in to randomize appearance, we decided to randomize manually through each feature, because it was more fun to do it one at a time.

Then we took the first randomized name that wasn’t already taken.

Meet Carapinka.

But how do you play one character with 2 people?

Easy!  Gadgets took hold of the mouse, and he was responsible for targetting and turning.

I was in command of the keyboard, responsible for casting spells and moving forward and backward.

It took a bit to get the hang of it, especially since I’m a mouse-turner and he’s a keyboard-turner… but we worked quite well together.

Once we hit level 5, it was time to choose our professions.  Get out the dice!  To avoid some horrible combination like Jewelcrafting/Blacksmithing, we decided to roll for a gathering and a crafting profession.

We pondered over the worst possible combinations… Skinning/Jewelcrafting, maybe?

While we didn’t get the best combination (probably Herbalism/Tailoring for this guy), we didn’t get the worst either… Skinning/Enchanting.

At least he’ll be able to make his own wands.

And while we haven’t reached this point yet, we do plan on randomizing our talent points… to some extent, at least.

We’re also planning to join the first guild we see recruiting players of all levels.

It was really fun, and if you’ve got someone who you normally play with, I recommend giving this a shot!   It takes a lot of teamwork, but it’s like a whole new game!

I went home a bit early last night because I had a goal.  Ghugh was sitting at about 5% through level 79 and I was going to get him to 80 no matter what!  So after 4 hours of playing, I finally got my dear paladin to 80!  He’s got his epic flyer, he’s using his Titansteel CD, he’s spent his last talent point.

Oddly enough, my first reaction when my experience bar finally disappeared was… Now what?

This is quite different from when my Hunter hit 80.  When Brajana hit level 80 I had clear goals.  Get my hit rating capped, run Heroics with guildmates, get that stupid freakin’ crossbow from Heroic UK (it never dropped, BTW), start raiding.

But I don’t have goals for Ghugh.  Heck, I haven’t even decided if I’m going to make him a tank or a DPS!  I doubt I can gear him for both equally.  I also don’t really know any of my guildmates – they are my boyfriend’s guildmates, not mine. Which means Ghugh is lined up for a ton of PUGs.  Do I want to PUG?  I don’t know, I’ve never been such a huge fan.

In fact, once I hit 80, I did a couple more quests, I hearthed to Dalaran and did some banking, and I logged out to go watch some TV.  It was actually very anti-climactic.  I loved leveling my Paladin… will I love playing him at 80 as much?

If I’ve learned anything from all the priest bloggers I follow, it’s the importance of Levitate!

Re-roll Ferguson reached the fine level of 35 yesterday, picking up his floaty ability.  Sure, his gear isn’t pretty… but I promise you he is a priest!

We’ve got about 3 weeks left on the Recruit-a-Friend, and we’re going to try to get as close to 60 as we can.  So far, we’re pulling about 4 levels each time we play for 2-3 hours, so we’re making decent progress.  Having mounts is certainly helping now too!

Next stop is Nesingwary’s Camp and the rest of Strangethorn Vale… we are both thoroughly looking forward to doing it for the first time on a PvE instead of PvP server.

Spent some more time with the Paladin this weekend!  I didn’t get the 4 levels in 1 day I got last week, but I did managed to get him to nearly 69.  Woo, almost to Northrend!

I decided not to head out right at 68 because that’s when I had just started Nagrand.  Nagrand is my favourite Outlands zone – I’m not going to skip it!

I discovered something though:  They made the Nagrand quests shorter in 3.1! Remember the Mastery quests from Nesingwary?  You had to kill 30 of every beast in the zone?  No longer!  They’ve all been knocked down to 12!  Does this mean the DEHTA has finally gotten to Nesingwary?  I think so!

In fact, this holds true for several other quests in the zone that I’ve noticed so far – the poo quest is down to 8 poo instead of 15 poo, you only have to kill 8 water elementals and 8 shadow elementals instead of 12 each… they have just made it all a bit quicker.

Even more reason to continue leveling in Outlands before hoping on a boat!

In other Paladin news, I ran a Blood Furnace PUG on the weekend.  We started with 2 Death Knights, 2 Paladins and a Rogue.  If you haven’t already, you can read my theory on Death Knights and PUGs.  I got shoved into the role of healer, which was fine.  We had no tank specified – it was a Free For All between the other Paladin and DKs.  That was fun to heal.

Well, we made it past the first boss, and then we wiped because someone pulled 2 groups full of silencers and I couldn’t ret heal our way through it.

DK #2 has gone offline.

/facepalm.

But for once, the rest of the PUG wanted to keep going.  So we did.  And we 4-manned the rest of Blood Furnace with two half-tanks and a ret paladin healer, with not a single wipe.    Too bad for the guy who ‘disconnected’, just gave us more loots!  So my theory holds true: our PUG was actually more successful after we lost the second DK!

After this, I decided to respec my secondary talents for Holy rather than Protection.  There are two reasons for this:

1. I don’t want to learn how to tank for the first time with a PUG.  I would rather wait til 80 when I can go with people who will be patient with me and help me out.
2. There is always a huge shortage of healers while leveling and PUGing. If I can fill that hole, I will be much more likely to finish instances.

So, while I really don’t enjoy paladin healing compared to priest healing or paladin DPS, I can deal with it.