WoW I've got things on my mind...

I'm not sure what to talk about first! I guess I'll just start typing and hope that I get where I'm going in the end. Be prepared for a long post! :)

Yesterday when I got home, hubby was working on some Loremaster quests on his druid. So I hopped on Asara and started working on quests in the Draenei starting area, trying to get to Exalted with Exodar. While I was doing that, people were actually talking in guild chat, and I chimed in a few times. Mostly goofing around, which felt good, as I've been very out of the loop with the guild lately.

After a while, hubby asked if I would come tank a couple of heroics on Saraabi. We recently left the small family guild that we'd joined for a much larger and more active one, in hopes that we'd be able to run more instances and stuff. He'd gotten three DPS from the guild, and just needed a tank. I was a bit loath to leave Asara, because I finally felt like I was clicking with people again, plus I was (mostly) having a good time running around pwning the heck out of low-level quests.

I finally decided to go, but only for a couple of heroics. I was tired, and tanking requires quite a bit of concentration, I didn't want to let the group down too much because my attention was wandering. So we decided to run Utgarde Keep and Utgarde Pinnacle, since they're very close together, and I'm comfortable with both, having run them before. We got an achievement in Utgarde Keep for not letting the first boss cast Ice Block on anyone, and quite a few people said grats and good job. I hadn't even realized that he hadn't cast one! The rest of the instance went quickly, and the end boss dropped plate pants that I already have, and a lovely tanking ring that I didn't have, but won.

So we moved on to Utgarde Pinnacle. Had some trouble getting in (stupid instance servers), but finally made it. Things went well, we lost the rogue on Svala Sorrowgrave for some reason, but that was it. No problems on the other bosses, including the end boss, who was nice enough to drop a Red Sword of Courage for me. So as much as I protested going in the first place, in the end I was really glad that I had gone. Plus the group of DPS-ers we ran with was super friendly and nice. They were all already friends, but they tried really hard to include us. There are a lot of people in the guild like that, actually. They'll grats people for the silliest things, like catching 500 fish. But you don't get an achievement in this guild when people are on and not see a bunch of green text congratulating you for it.

After UP, I went back to Asara for a little while before actually going to bed. I was sooo close to Exalted with Exodar, I felt that a couple more quests would probably do the job. Guild chat was a lot quieter because most everyone was in Ulduar. About a half an hour later, ping! Asara has earned the Achievement "Ambassador of the Alliance"! Woo! And.. one person said grats in guild chat. One. Person. Not even one of the people I'd consider a good friend, either.

See the contrast? It really bothers me that people I've been playing with for almost my entire WoW career can't be bothered to take two seconds to type /g grats! because they're so busy with their "srs bsns" raid and people I've been playing with for less than a week do so as a matter of course, regardless of what they themselves are doing at the time. They could have a macro to do it, but the point is, they do it.

Asara's guild used to be like that. I mean, there weren't achievements or anything back then, but the environment was much more friendly than it is now. There was an effort made by the officers to include people, there were social events, everyone just seemed a lot closer. Things have changed quite a bit since those days. Maybe they don't do those things any more because the majority of the guild doesn't want them. Maybe the majority of the guild is only there for raiding now, I can't really tell. There are a lot of newer people, most of whom were recruited to raid, so I guess that might be true.

It kind of hurts, to feel like such an outsider among people I've known for such a long time. Having Saraabi in this new guild is just illuminating the differences more and more clearly. This feeling isn't new, in fact I've talked about it with Asara's guild leader once before. His solution was to wait things out until I can raid again, because then I'll be included in raid chat and people can get to know me better. So that's.. maybe in a couple of months. Maybe never.

They only raid on nights when I have to work the next day, and I don't think I'm comfortable with that any more. Plus they outgear me so much, I'd likely be waitlisted even if I did sign up for a raid anyway. Saraabi and Lumae's new guild, though, they've already invited us to 10-man Ulduar. Someone asked me about it the other day, and I said I'd have to see, because we're 3 hours ahead of server time. But she said they raid it on Friday and Saturday nights. I'm tempted. I really am. I'd have to go as DPS, so I'd have to work on Saraabi's Ret spec, but I think it would be fun to go.

We'll see.

So many things to talk about!

Firstly, let me say a big Happy Birthday to my friend Gracie!

Secondly, it's hard to believe that Michael Jackson is gone. I grew up with his music, in fact, I have several fond memories of dressing up with my friends and dancing around the living room to the Thriller album. I hope that people will remember him for his music and not for all the mess of controversy that followed him around over the past several years. Time will tell, I guess.
And yes, I'm sorry about Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcett as well, but it's Michael Jackson's death that hits hardest of the three, so that's the one I'm dwelling on right now.

Thirdly, it's finally Friday. Thank goodness.

Fourthly, it's frickin' hot as heck outside, and I'm ready for that to be done. We're all crowded into one room in the house right now, to save energy on cooling the whole thing. Even a couple of days of decent temperatures would help.

Fifthly, if that's even a word.. I'm taking a tip from my friend Tisha and bolding the main topics of my little paragraphs, in hopes that it will help y'all read the parts of my posts that you're interested in. I know I have people coming here for wildly different reasons, so let me know if this helps sort things out please :)

Sixthly, last night when I got home from work, I hopped on Asara and instantly got a group invite from my guild leader. They were running a quick hit on Emalon before starting Ulduar for the night, and did I want to go? I checked with hubby first, and he said he didn't mind, so off I went. Fifteen minutes or so later, I had a new achievement, and we were looking at some loot. My guild is a bit different from others with regard to this, at least from what I've gathered. We actually earn DKP for it, and are required to spend it if we want a piece of tier gear that drops. My guild master says that tier is tier, no matter where it comes from. The PvP gear is on free roll though, as long as you can use it. We're welcome to PUG VoA if we want a chance at tier gear for free though. But if we run with the guild, it's by guild rules, which is fine by me. I don't have any DKP anyway, so I figured I'd just go for the emblems, and to experience the full boss fight, as I hadn't done that yet.

So imagine my surprise when he drops two sets of hunter gloves. Imagine my even greater surprise when winners are announced and I'm one of them, along with my class leader, even though there were four hunters there all told. I guess either the other two had them already or didn't want to spend DKP on them. The only downside.. is now I have to regem Asara yet AGAIN because the new gloves (and the new bracers I bought from the guild bank last week) have a lot more hit on them than my old ones. Time to get Saraabi out and go mining! :) Then she'll be off to Cenarion Circle to join hubby's druid and my baby alts over there!

Yahoo!

I just caught up my feed reader for the first time in months. At one point it was up to 1000+, but I hacked it down a bit at a time, and finally, it is empty. I'm sure in an hour or so, someone will have written something.. it tends to happen. But I think I'll have an easier time keeping up now! :) (edit - in the time it took me to write this post, 7 new things have popped up in there)

Thank you to everyone who commented yesterday, and to all the people who called last night to wish Emily a Happy Birthday. I don't think she really understood that it was her birthday, but I got her favorite dinner from McDonald's on the way home, and she is really excited about her party on Saturday. She wants a Princess cake.. thankfully they actually sell pre-made cake decorations for the Disney princesses, so I shouldn't have to go through what I did to make Andy's birthday cake! It was fun to do, but a road made out of frosting is leagues away from an actual princess. Though maybe I could do a crown, I think she'd rather have the actual recognizable princesses. And she wants chocolate cake!

Didn't really play a lot of WoW last night. We watched some TV with the kids, and played a little after dinner. I got my LW epics crafted, which cost me 500g, mostly in Frozen Orbs. I had one, but needed three, and they were going for 100g each. Everything's all enchanted and stuff too, ready to go for my next raid, which I think is Thursday. SI raids Wed, Thu, Sun, and Mon, and I think we'll make a regular habit of Thursday and Sunday.. because too many days of being tired at work is not good for me. The hours have changed since last year too, they only go until 10:30 server now instead of 11:30, but we're an hour ahead of server time, so it's still 11:30 at night for us. And if anyone checks Asara's armory and wants to know, her Giantmaim Bracers are in the bank until she gets another piece of gear with +hit on it. She's just barely below the 8% cap right now (2 points in Focused Aim), and I didn't want to respec AGAIN, so the blue ones stay until I get an upgrade for another slot that's got hit to replace what I'd lose by switching out my bracers. That shouldn't take too long, I believe the chestpiece from Argent Crusade has 40 hit on it, and I'm getting very close to Exalted over there.

After that I played my newest rogue for a while.. I swear I have too many alts to count. Malfurion is full, and I had just watched that video that everyone is talking about, the Craft of War: Blind one. It got me wanting a blood elf rogue, so I went over to a new server, just picked one at random, and created Caelesti. She's level 8 now, almost 9. I already have three or four rogues scattered around.. Macleod (human) on Norgannon, Vylette (Nelf) on Azshara, and Däta (gnome) on Malfurion, but I really wanted a blood elf. I doubt she'll stick around, my characters on realms other than Malfurion don't tend to get played much. Macleod is stuck at 23, Vylette is 9, and so is Däta. Yes, Draevyn (my belf mage) is level 63, but he was on Malfurion for a long time before he got transferred to The Scryers to play with my mother-in-law. But she's not playing any more, so I haven't had much of a reason to play him.

Not to mention I really want to get Saraabi to 77 so she can start turning in her Damaged Necklaces.. she's got two stored away that Alainds and Asara have found while doing dailies, and I have to admit I was a little sad to see that they don't stack. All the more reason to level her up, right? Plus hubby has two characters that he'd like her to play with, so I really should spend some time on her. She's only level 71 right now, but her mining is already maxed from running around Sholazar and trying not to die. She really does pretty well, she can take down level 76 mobs, as long as there's only one. An hour or so in there netted her enough Saronite to send to Alainds for some Saronite Arrow makers for Asara, which was great. It would be even more great if she could just fly around though, and make use of the epic flyer that I bought her near the end of BC!

But of course in the meantime, Asara's still got two trinkets from BC that need replacing.. I hate use-trinkets, so I've been hanging on to the two she has for longer than I probably should have. She's got the Dragonspine Trophy and the Hourglass of the Unraveler, both of which took a lot of time and effort to get. They're not bad trinkets.. but there are better ones, and she really needs to get on the ball about getting them. So much to do!!! XD

Weekend Update :)

Happy Monday everyone :)
Not a whole lot of RL news.. tomorrow is a special day though, so stay tuned for that post. Mostly we just bummed around the house, went grocery shopping, the usual life stuff.

WoW news..
Saturday was the finals of our guild "Spanish Inquisition Idol" event. Basically, it's a karaoke contest over Ventrilo. We had the preliminary round in like.. August of last year or something, so this was a bit overdue. We had seven competitors in the preliminary round, four of them went into the finals, and the bottom three went into a separate secondary category. I was in the bottom three of that first round. The prize for the overall winner was 1100g, and the secondary prize was 250g.

So Saturday I was practicing and practicing.. and I ended up going first out of everyone. It was down to me and one other person, due to fluctuations in guild memberships. I sang "Love Story" by Taylor Swift, and I ended up winning the 250g prize, yay! :) The overall winner ended up being a tie, so two people split the 1100g prize. I hope we do this again some time, because it was fun singing, if a bit nerve-wracking!

We also did a bit of raiding last night. All we had left in Heroic Naxx was the Construct wing, so we headed in, though we were a bit short on attendance. I think we had 22 people. We got to Patchwerk, but had some trouble, so after two attempts, we called it and split into two groups to run regular Naxx instead. My group managed the Spider and Plague wings in the time we had left, and I ended up with two new pieces of gear. Grand Widow Faerlina gave me some new gloves, and I got the tier piece from Loatheb! My first piece of T7, so that was super exciting. Hubby and I aren't raiding again until Wednesday, so odds are there won't be any more WoW news until then.

I hope you all had a great weekend too!

WoWing thoughts..

I was just flipping through the posts that accumulated in my blog reader over the weekend, and something over at Resto4Life stopped me dead in my tracks.

The next expansion is due out (by most accounts) some time within the next six months. That's not very far away at all. And the reminder served to make me completely stop and think about what I'm doing with my character right now, more specifically with my gear. Because to me, part of raiding, apart from beating down insanely large bosses, is doing the gear upgrade thing. There is always better gear available as you progress, and part of the fun is picking up some new shiny purple and adding it to the collection. There is also badge gear, which is supposed to be equivalent to T6 in its shininess. I have a couple of pieces of badge gear, and have been slowly saving up for one more, the epic chicken on a stick that is the Crossbow of Relentless Strikes. It costs 150 badges, and I was down to none in the not-so-distant past. I currently have 64, I think. So I've still got a ways to go before I can get myself that crossbow. It's something I have taken for granted, that now that I have the chest piece and a lovely ring, I'd be saving up for that ugly piece of work, because it is a pretty big upgrade, and will have an instant effect on my DPS.

Suddenly, thinking about the expansion coming up, I start to wonder if I want to get it. It will take me the better part of a month and then some to collect enough badges for it anyway, and the advent of the expansion will be that much closer, bringing with it more upgrades, and the likely tragedy of having to part with my hard-won purples for blue or even green gear on the trek to level 80. And once I'm there, beginning the raiding cycle all over again to achieve full purple shininess. Until another expansion is announced, and.. yeah. You get the point. Sigh.

I suppose I'll just have to wait and see what sorts of things will be available in the expansion, and judge for myself whether I'll be able to hang onto that crossbow long enough to make it worth the two months of Kara runs, rather than continuing to save my badges for an even bigger upgrade once the expansion hits. My brain hurts.

To (spend) DKP or not to (spend) DKP, that is the question!

Last night was an interesting night in TK. We started with everyone's favorite phoenix, Al'ar, who was kind enough to drop the Arcanite Steam-Pistol. At this point (already, augh!) I have a moment of agony over whether or not to bid on it. Stat-wise, it's not that different from my Sunfury Bow, being only one more agi and 4-ish more dps. Is this an upgrade worth 70 dkp, I had to ask myself, and ask fast, because bidding doesn't wait for me to debate stuff. It will take me roughly three raids to make this up, by the by, because of the way we run dkp in our guild. What decided me in the end was the +19 hit.

But Asara, you're at 140 right now, why do you need 19 more hit? Well, it's more about the other options I have in my bank at the moment. The main one being a ring, Angelista's Revenge. This is a big upgrade, stats-wise, over my Kara rep ring. But it's missing the 15 hit rating, which means (for me) right now, it's a no-go. I'm a dps class, and if I'm missing I'm not only not doing any DPS, I'm wasting money by throwing away arrows. So this gun, in that sense, is great, because I can switch out my ring and actually be OVER the hit cap of 142, instead of just below. So I'm happy, even though I'm not much of a gun person, and it means I'm going to have to farm mats to make myself an ammo pouch AND get a new scope. I'm going to come out much better on the other end, even if I will be extremely noisy (and not look NEARLY as pretty).

However, High Astromancer Solarian had different plans for me. She decided that she didn't want her Star-Strider Boots any more. These are a definite upgrade from the Fiend Slayer Boots I was still sporting from Kara. But.. I held back from bidding. Why? Because I had snagged a boot pattern in SSC the night before, and I was planning on making those as soon as I got the mats farmed up. Patterns are 20 dkp, and Solarian's boots were going to cost me another 60. I can't use them both. My CL disagreed, AND my CLA disagreed, so I ended up bidding after all. Sigh.

Now you're saying, come on Asara, an upgrade is an upgrade, right? Well, yes, that's true. And I am happy. The problem I have NOW is that my Kara boots had hit rating on them, 17, in point of fact, and the Star-Strider boots don't. Which means.. I'm just about right back where I started, hit-rating wise. I trade no hit on my bow with 19 hit on my gun, but lose 17 when I swap out my boots. And that means I still can't use the ring I just spent 60 badges on. /headdesk.

There is still hope, however. I will eventually be getting my T5 shoulders, which have 13 hit on them, as well as two red sockets. I could drop a nice orange hit/agi gem in one of them, and THEN I could swap out my rings. I was hoping that would happen last night, but of the three bosses we downed, Loot Reaver was the only one not being nice to me. He dropped double Defender and a Champion. Still, even if he had dropped triple Hero tokens, it wouldn't have mattered, as there were three other people in the raid with more DKP than me after all was said and done.

In the meantime I get to pretend I'm a gangster in a Dick Tracy movie, with my little gatling gun. :D Man.. I remember when being a hunter was easy. Mail? Agility? MINE. End of story. *sigh* Not anymore! And tonight is Hyjal.. hopefully the only thing I'll need to worry about is how much ammo to bring to last me until I get to honored with Scale of the Sands!