PvP alts and the AH

I haven't been playing all that much lately.  At least not the paladin.  Over the last few months my guild has not been doing very much in the way of content.  My arena team has managed to get up to ~1660 or so but unfortunately my rating is only 1585.  I have been leveling some alts for fun and to try and learn more on the different classes to see how to beat them.  I have also tapered off on the auction house somewhat.

As a guild we got the first part of ICC 10 through Deathbringer Saurafang but, other than that not much.

The group I do arenas with was being insane and doing three teams.  A, B and C teams.  My paladin is on the A team of course.  My alts that are 80 are on the other teams.  Did those mainly to get gear but topped out on them when we hit rating requirements.  The "A" team managed to get some fair matches (within 100 of our rating) one week while I was on vacation and went 9 of 10 which is why my rating is below the team.  But, I did manage to get the 1550 achievement.  Unfortunately I am currently 15 points below 1600 so hopefully we can get that soon so I can get the PvP chest before the season ends.  Also, we are holding on to a high enough ranking to get the challenger title if we don't screw it up or the scale pass us by.

I have my alts moving slowly up:

Paladin, Warlock, DK, Hunter and Rogue all at 80.  Mage at 44 Priest at 42 Warrior at 23 and Druid at 21.

Ah has gotten boring so I stopped making glyphs and enchants and basically just selling my stock off.  Sitting around 86K  My scribe has all recipes in the game.

Thats all for now.  I will try to post more in the future.

Personal patch results

After trying out the new battleground, five-man and some dailies (including the new mount quest-line) I am kind of underwhelmed.

 

It does seem like the DPS drop wasn't as bad as I had feared.  This is probably due to the last minute change to the SoCor to make the damage actually ramp.  Though I did notice an overall DPS drop in all fights but extended boss fights.  The PvP burst loss does hurt though I still can handle most people.

 

The new five-man has some interesting mechanics in it though I think a little more time could have been spent on the scenery.  It is only one room.  It was cool the first time I went in and the announcer guy called out my name and went through his little speech.  But, the third time and beyond I was just wishing he would skip it.  The drops are good but, overall most of the dungeons in Northrend, outlands and even the old world had more thought put into them.

 

I will say the new battleground is pretty fun to play.  The new idea of launching or dropping into the enemy keep is pretty neat.  The different capture points for different vehicles and resources are interesting.  I should probably read about the idea behind the battleground to get a better idea of what is going on though.

 

I am currently champion for 2 cities (Org and Silvermoon) and working on UC.  The dailies are starting to wear on me though so I am not sure if I will get the crusader title.  I have the ambassador title already so all I need is the valiant seals and the argent crusade rep.  I wish there was some other way to build up those things.  We will see if I make it the 14 more days it is going to take.

 

I am currently two days into the path for getting the venomhide mount.  That is annoying to have to go back to ungoro, silithis or tanaris to quest those.  I found a short cut in sholozar basin in that waygate thing.  I just go through that jump down the mountain and ride over to the flight point or southern ungoro to do the daily.  Not sure if that waygate thing works for everyone or not.  But, it is worth a try to save the run from CoT (the first short cut I tried) to, at the closest, western tanaris but possibly farther.

 

In case anyone is wondering I have not set foot in a raid since my return to the game.  My guild went once or twice but I didn't have the block of time to commit to a raid.  Maybe someday.  Until then I will just continue heroics and dailies.

Achievements

I have been somewhat of an achievement junkie this last week. At the beginning of the week I decided I wasn't going to wait any longer and went to Ice Crown and got my last 3 quests for Ice Crown: The Final Goal by soloing some more 5 man quests. These were the ones were some ghost chick hovers above an arena floor and you take the quests and she flies up and you kill a bunch of baddies, turn in, pick up another quest and so on. This in turn gave me Loremaster of Northrend.

This weekend I decided to work on some old world rep by doing the starter quests in Trisifal Glades which got me to exalted with Undercity and as a side benefit got me the explore Trisifal Glades Achievement. Now, I know I could get me rep by just doing the Argent tournament dailies. Meaning NOW I know I didn't when I started.

One of my guildies made level 80 on one of his alts this weekend so he wanted to do some heroics I was able to influence the choice of Heroics and after a couple of hours Halls of Lightning, Oculus and Old Kingdom are scratched off the list and bam I have the Heroic Dungeonmaster achievement completed. Along with that we got the Lightning Struck and the Timely Death achievements done. Meanwhile I got exalted with Kirin Tor for that achievement.

I started working on the Argent Tournament thing and got Argent Valor last night along with learning that now when I do the dailies I will be getting Horde city rep (small amounts right now since I had to start with Silvermoon who I am already exalted with)

I was doing my cooking and fishing dailies everyday so, I got the 500 fish achievement. With the Emblems I got from the heroics we were doing I got the Libram of SoC which gave me the superior achievement.

All in all I got 14 achievements in 7 days. We'll see if I can get anything like that this week.

If someone is hitting people with a big hammer it is always better to be the one who is swinging the hammer.

Weekend questing and Naxx-10 raid

Weekend Questing-
I decided to try to finish off the quest achievements in Northrend this past weekend. I got Stormpeaks done and the other zones were already done and got a good chunk of Icecrown done. I only have around 20 or so left to get that achievement done. Unfortunately I may run into issues without a group as it appears that a lot of the quest chains require a group. During the process of doing these quests I made around 2000 gold so I am doing ok on money again.

Monday Raid-
We went back to Naxx-10 again and gave Instructor another shot. This time we did it no problem. Our GL/RL thinks that when we tried it last Thursday it was bugged since he didn’t have any problem using the controlling crystals this time. We got him down in one shot this time. Nothing dropped for me this time. Next we tried Gothik the Harvester. After about 5 failed attempts we called it and went and gave Sartharion a try. Cleared the adds and engaged the boss. We died the first time but, on the second try we succeeded. The drops were a 22 slot bag, a bag of emblems, tier 7 shaman chest, and a spirit trinket. I rolled on the bags but, lost both. After that we called it a night.

Observations
One thing of note was that before the raid I went ahead and changed my glyphs to the ones recommended in most places I have looked. I also changed out a couple gems to blue level ones. During some of the trash pulls around sarth I noticed my DPS meter going up to 3500. I have not seen anything that high except in those gimmick fights where some mob or another gives you crazy buffs. I definitely like that number. I think I will go give some GC some gold and finish out putting the blue gems in my slots. I think I will also get the T-7 gloves for emblems and enchant and gem that up. Hopefully I can pull off some more numbers like that.

Weekend report

Another weekend is gone. I decided to do the entire honor your elder quest series and realized that that is a large time investment. I ended up finishing all of them except a few the ones in the Northrend instances. I will try to get those done fairly soon. I wouldn’t mind getting another title besides Jenkins. While doing the quests I ended up getting exalted with org and getting close on UC.

We ran some heroics as a guild but, I didn’t get any gear ups for my main spec. We did AN, Gundrak, Drak’tharon keep.

I have been doing the daily cooking quest everyday and for the last 6 or 7 days it has been the same one. I am about sick of making a plate for the gathering at the legerman.

I really need to figure out a gear upgrade plan for my paladin instead of just saying I need to do it. My plan is to make a list of all my gear. Find what the best gear I can get from a heroic is. Use a formula I got from somewhere to rate the amount of improvement each gives. And finally, rank the gear by amount of improvement. My fear is that there is not going to be that many pieces that give an improvement in heroics.

Right now my plan is:
1) Finish the lunar festival achievement
2) Make a gear plan
3) Work on finishing the quests in Northrend
4) Run heroics to achieve gear plan