Solidstar Dings 73, Sarth+1D Down

Well it's been an interesting week. Solidstar has dinged 73, still in Borean Tundra. I've actually gotten the achievement for doing N-quests there (can't post link atm :( ) so I'm done with BT - time to move to Dragonblight. I'm still leveling Frost and it's not bad, can kill mobs and my damage-in vs. self-healing from Death Strike ratio is low enough so that I don't have downtime (or rarely do).

However it's boring and the few PuGs I've done were not much fun, so I've decided to go back to my favourite which is full blood. This should help me level a bit faster :)

In guild news, my guild downed Sartharion with 1 drake up. This is big news and a hard achievement for a 10 man raiding guild and I've very proud of the guild for pulling this off. I was not in the raid that day - the cost of having to get only 10 people together for a raid is that there are always a few spare left out. Since I had been raiding a lot and there were 4 healers online I passed on my spot.

However the MT in that fight was a druid from one of the best 25-man raiding guilds on the server, who came to help as his alt is in our guild. Without him I am not sure the guild would have managed, and in addition we are losing our paladin MT in 2 weeks for a period of 2.5 months as he is going for an extended trip in South America. That will leave us with no real good MT, as our current other tanks are either not as geared, not as good/experianced players or currently can't play (we have a druid tank with a dislocated shoulder :( ). We need a good tank quickly...

Hopefully our tank troubles will be solved and we'll keep the positive momentum we got from downing Sarth+1D. Keeping fingers crossed :)

No Real Update, Not Upset At All

I haven't blogged for a week so I'm starting to feel I should write about something, but there really isn't anything solid (hehe ;)) to write about. Sure I've managed to level Solidstar's alchemy a bit but he's still not at 450 so nothing to brag about. In addition he's still level 72, I've had little time to play him (or WoW at all) in the last few days.

It's interesting though and I actually happened to talk about it to a guild mate this evening. He told me it must be a bummer to have little free time to play WoW. Times was, I would have agreed with him.

But if truth be told I'm not feeling that way. WoW tends to suck you in and drink up every bit of free time you have. It really wouldn't matter if I had even more spare time, I still wouldn't manage to do all the in-game things I would like to do. So, given that fact, I've reached the conclusion that it is actually better for me to have only a little free time to play. That way I am forced by RL to play less, which is healthier and stretches the available content more. I'm certainly not distressed about Ulduar coming only in patch 3.1, who knows how many weeks from now. I have herbs to farm on my main and Malygos to take down, Naxx to farm, alts and their professions to level up. I do whatever feels fun and enjoy raiding with my guild and I have no problems about new content being far off. Heck I can always try to grind achievements if I want to :)

So I guess I would suggest to people who play WoW a lot - if you don't have a busy job or kids or another reason that forces you away from your computer and WoW, go find that reason. In the long run, you'll feel better for it.

Solidstar Dings 72

In between raiding and playing on my main I've managed to also get some play time on Solidstar and he is now level 72. I've been leveling in Borean Tundra but also doing instances as a tank.

I've had (surprisingly) mostly positive experiences with the PuGs I've done. Not perfect by far but I've managed to tank most of Nexus, all of Utgarde Keep and most of Azjul-Nerub. The Nexus run I had to leave before the last boss, sucked for the people in the PuG but what can I do, I didn't notice the time when I started the PuG and I was signed up for a guild (Malygos) raid so had to go. I did a couple of other Nexus runs but I was DPS in those, not tank. UK was easy, I actually dinged 72 at the beginning of it so did most of it as a level 72. The DPS did a good job and we basically tore through the place. No wipes, no ninjas, good feelings all around :)

AN was a suprise. I was invited in a /w to tank it when I was level 71. As the instance is a level 72-74 instance I thought I was too low and told the person /w me so. However I was willing to try and he invited me. Turns out the group was rather strange. There was myself, a (DPS) shaman who was the one who invited me, 2 paladins and a shadow priest. It turned out both paladins were healers. Furthermore after only a few fights it became obvious that the shadow priest had a DPS so low I could probably get better DPS with my mage's wand. However the 2 paladins and the priest were all from the same guild and barely spoke English. Not willing to break the group yet I tried. At first we wiped on the waves before the first boss and I was sure we were wasting our time (we basically had only 2 DPSers - including myself). But we made the others realize the importance of breaking the webs around people and pretty soon we were at the first boss and then past him. The second boss was actually easy (although the trash before him were a bit of a challange). I think having 2 healers helped since I was 3 levels lower than the bosses and some of the trash so I was taking huge amounts of damage.

However at the last boss we wiped a couple of times, the shaman who was the party leader went AFK and never returned and one more person had to leave so I decided to call it a night. So not a perfect run by far but I think tanking AN first 2 bosses at level 71 is not a bad achievement :)

Misc. Small Updates

I've been a bit too busy in RL to update this blog but there are various updates as I have been playing:

• Solidstar has dinged 70, yey :) Of course I've been playing in Northrend since level 68 so nothing much changed.
• Actually one thing did change for him, I went already and got the epic flying skill and the DK flying mount. It pretty much pushed me down to a big fat ZERO gold on all my chars but hey what's gold worth if you don't spend it right? :)
• My guild has cleared Naxxramas 10 man and in fact we're quick enough now to clear all 4 wings in one night. Solidfaith is getting better gear all the time, even got Hammer of the Astral Plane from Kel'Thuzad which is just about best 10-man 1H mace for healers. However...
• Sapphiron is still giving us trouble, we've downed him twice so far and both times he required multiple tries before we got it right. Then last night we went with a 3rd healer who was not as good as our regular healer and just couldn't stop wiping. Not just his fault both myself and the other regular healer made mistakes which killed us and of course the raid (since such massive healing is required in this fight). Well I'm sure we'll do better next time.

Well that's pretty much it for now. I hope we do Malygos 10-man soon so I can update on that fight, it sounds like an interesting fight :)