WoW

Let’s hear from you, the readers today. I’d like to know how many of you fall into the category of casual players who are just going to stumble upon level 60 and do SOME end-game content. How many of you are hard-core raiders who have done or are wanting to take down Onyxia, ZG, Majordomo, and hit AQ as soon as it opens on your server?

Inquiring minds (mind, actually) want(s) to know.

What a frustrating evening. All I wanted to do was turn in the quests to Haleh in Winterspring. After 5 corpse runs, I still couldn’t find the rune in the cave. Look it up on Thottbot, Stupid, you’re probably thinking. It’s not that at all. Much worse. I don’t know what it is about the rune, but my video card does not display it. In order to get the quest, I followed a 60 hunter over the rune because it simply was not there.

After 3 more tries, I tried resources online and found the wall-climbing exploit. They fixed the exploit in 1.9, but people were still claiming that they could do it with their epic mounts. Others said a regular mount with a carrot. Whatever it takes, I don’t have it. I tried for more than an hour AND had a 5G repair bill. Actully, more than that, because I finally decided to resurrect, so now I have to repair my Imperial Plate set that was in my bags. I’ll just have to follow someone again.

I have had a visitor that found my blog because of the Google search:

gitr done

w00t!!

It has been quite a weekend, not in the area of leveling, but in loot and quest lines. I think Gitr was in about 10 raids over the weekend from ZG to BRD to UBRS. He is almost done with the Onyxia questline and has to go to Winterspring again and get kicked to next Tuesday.

First thing first: kill Bael’Gar again to apply the skin to his body. This raid was a feat in and of itself. It took forever to pull together just 5 people to go. Our healer admitted that he wasn’t paying attention, either, but then again he is an officer and gets a lot of /t’s.

On Friday afternoon I got help from our uber druid to kill Deathclasp in Silithus. I’d tried unsuccessfully with Talion, but as priest, he didn’t have any crowd control. What a difference it makes when you pin down the boss and take out his thugs first. It didn’t take long to finish my quest with his help.

Off-topic, I logged in as my new warlock to finish his voidwalker quest. As he was completing the quest in subduing the voidwalker, he dinged 12 and got to have a great time training for him and for warlock skills. I only got to try out life with a personal tank for a while, but Elwynn Forest was laughable on my way to the mines. He was taking on 5-6 Defias at a time. While on the subject of alts, I think I’ll level Grimr to 40 for mail armor and get his alchemy all the way up, but skip on over to warlock or druid for my next Kargath alt project. I did promise Pathos Hammer that I’d level little Gitr ASAP, too.

After I logged back in, I went to help Lorepriest, a 49 priest in our guild, in Un’Goro. All I can say is that I really like grouping with a personal healer. He said he liked having a personal tank, too, so it was quite mutual. I was getting about 200 rest xp per kill to boot. At one point, I went after 2 raptors, then saw a cry for help, as he had 2 on him, and in the process of dropping them, stepped on the egg pile while we were on that quest. In the end, we killed 7 at once. What a team! He’s now 50, and I’m looking forward to helping him more.

In the end, it was all good and the running of Windsor was pretty easy to do. Off to Stormwind.

In SW, we had to wait 15 minutes for Windsor to get back from another walking/butt-kicking. When he did get there, a PuG guy clicked the “!” before 3 of us got to click his “?” to complete our quests. So we had to wait again.

Now, on to Monday evening and night. UBRS!! I couldn’t get a group going for UBRS, so I saw an invite for “one last tank and we’re ready to go.” I jumped on it, and they took me without question at level 58. I think I’d heard that can be a point of dispute in some raids, but they took me without question.

Let’s start out with the death roll:

That made my night, but it didn’t stop there. We made our way to The Beast and dropped him in fine form. That was a fun fight. It was the first boss I fought who I could run UNDER. I never saw his head or how much damage I was doing. I’d say the fight lasted roughly 30 seconds and no one died. Sadly, he didn’t drop Finkle’s Skinner.

Then we moved on to the General and made pretty good progress, but then again, I don’t have anything to compare it to. I do know that people weren’t dying very often and I never got the sense that things were remotely out of control. Maybe it’s because I’m getting more seasoned in instances or that this was a really good group.

While taking on Drakkisath, I had a record crit and was actually the killing blow.

That was pretty wild, and I got the blood drop to finish my quest that I came for. The loot was just a nice bonus. Raid over. Here were Gitr’s stats:

He was within 2% of the MT in damage taken, but my damage done was woefully low for a fury tank. I spent a good amount of time just running from target to target that was almost already dead. The second raid would not be the same story.

We finally got to do the raid with a couple of in-house people, with Tiadar the hunter leading the raid. A few people came over from the last raid, so we had a pretty keen group. This time around was pretty much the same story, but with some more nice drops for Gitr.

Note to self: when fighting just off the bridge, don’t have your back to the vast expanse below. We killed the General just as easily as the first group, raid over. There wasn’t anything for me in those drops, and The Beast still didn’t drop the Skinner.

I tried to make my way to Winterspring to turn in the quests from UBRS, but decided that sleep was more important. I’ll get those done tonight and hit 59 with relative ease.

Gitr hit 58 Friday night and did a jailbreak today. I ended the night with Marshal Winsor revealing “someone’s secret” (no spoilers here). I’ll write more tomorrow if I get a chance. My grandparents are here tomorrow and Monday, so we’ll see how Gitr plays out.