Better late than never

Yes I know it’s Sunday, part of being at home is I completely lose track of time, throw in the  confusion of Christmas and I only have the vaguest idea when in the week it is.

So lets round up last weeks targets

Level Dax to 80 (aiming high here) I’m not sure what the issue is but I’m feeling very bored with Dax at the moment. I jump on her run around aimlessly for a bit maybe do one or two quests and then log out. Leveling Ari through Northrend was a doddle, also a bit on the boring side but with T6/sunwell gear I  accepted I overpowered areas tuned for fresh 70’s in greens and blues. Only Dax *is* that fresh 70 and its just as easy for her as it was for Ari. Maybe I’ll pop across to Howling Fjord and try the Eastern side of the continent again.

Use the mats she farms to get Ari’s professions up to 450 We’ve not farmed enough mats but we have visited the AH for them. Inscription is at 426 and out of trainer recipes so I need to mill the ink for Northrend Discoveries but the prices for herbs are pretty high still.

LW is lagging at 414, again no easy skill up recipes and I’m finding the whole 5 borean scraps = 1 borean lather, 6 Borean leathers = 1 Heavy Borean Leather annoying when I need between 3 and 4 HBL for each recipe.

Get Gwen’s mining & engineering up to 300 so she can start leveling in Outland I decided to vary this so Gwen is in Outland working towards level 61 and then she’ll pop back to the Hinterlands for some more mining skill ups, she’s currently at 225 so not far to go but endless circuits of Hinterlands was doing my brain in. Especialy as it seemed whatever hour of the day I picked I was following behind some other DK (it always seems to be DK’s) also mining for skill ups. Engineering is at 208 I need more mats to push it further and decide if I want to specialise in goblin or gnomish engineering, or if it’s worth specialisng at all.

Complete the Merrymaker meta achievement on Ari Yay I did it. In the end the hardest bit was getting hold of a hat, or rather a group wanting to do Nexus. I’d read that some 80’s had soloed her on normal so I tried it, and to my shame couldn’t find her and got clobbered by adds. When I did it with a group I realised I’d prowled past her disc a few times thinking she was somewhere else. It’s done now, we found a dark place for Ari to don the costume and eat the mince pie, it’s really not Ari’s “thing” dressing up like a Christmas elf.

Sort out the fishing achievements Ari needs Well this ended up as a post all of it’s own, a sort of mini guide. Ari has completed The Lurker Above, 250 Fish, Outland Angler, The Scavenger, Northrend Angler, Old Crafty (a total of 7 casts with the crocolisk daily) and Old Man Barlowned, since last Friday.  Meh its  4pm server time & I haven’t even logged on yet, so no winning Booty Bay this weekend. Still got a ways to go to complete the achievements but I’m on course.

So what have I been doing, well messing about on alts mainly, not that I’m sure any will survive past the festive season, working on Cooking achievements alongside Fishing. Though as I’m missing the chocolate cake recipe, a rare BOP drop from cooking dailies, I’ve no hope of completing the Meta.

Oops nearly forgot I also achieved Hemet Nessingway: the Collected Quests, backwards as I’ve had the Northrend ones for a while, then I went and finished off the Outland ones before  finally picking up the missing pages for the Azeroth one. I still think not doing that to avoid having the book foisted on the world of Warcraft was the right decision, back in the day, but as theres’s a published copy in the Nagrand camp I clearly failed.

Oh and picking up pets with the help of the Oracles. I’ve had two eggs hatch now (and a third in my bag already) so have a White Tickbird Hatchling and a Cobra Hatchling bringing my small pet total to 48 of the 50 I need to get Stinky.

I’m not setting any new targets this week, the three undone ones will stand but I think it may be a week of messing about rather than focussing.

It’s time for action

We’re on a raid break from the 22nd to the 7th and I’m on leave from now to the 5th of January. So its time to stop faffing about on Dax with little sorties into the Tundra for herbs and skins and get leveling. So these targets are for the next fortnight, or maybe longer

1. Level Dax to 80 (aiming high here)
2. Use the mats she farms to get Ari’s professions up to 450
3. Get Gwen’s mining & engineering up to 300 so she can start leveling in Outland
4. Complete the Merrymaker meta achievement on Ari
5. Sort out the fishing achievements Ari needs

That should keep me busy over the holidays.

Patchwerk want to play

We downed Patchwerk on Heroic last night. I may have said this before but I find the 25 man Naxx a slight anticlimax after the 10 man. You’ve seen the boss and learnt the fight on normal mode then you go kill him with more back up on heroic.

Still a guild first is a guild first, we’ve already cleared the Spider and Plague Wings, I seem to have forgotten to mention those though, and of course completed Naxx in Normal 10 man mode.

We also downed Grobbulus the second boss, erm I kind of forgot to take a screen shot of that as I was busy admiring my new shoulders the Mantle of the Fatigued Sage. Thats the last bit of my T6 gone now. I do look a tad clownlike at the moment though. I also got some new bracers Swarm Bindings off  Anub’Rekhan earlier in the evening. So both needed enchanting.

The shoulder enchant was a bit expensive as I had to mill 6 stacks of AH herbs to get the two icy pigments I needed for Snowfall ink to make the Master’s Inscription of the Storm . At which point I remembered I was still hated by the Sons of Hodir, the faction that provides shoulder enchants for non scribes.

I sort of remember this little fact every so often then do nothing about it,  but I took myself off to WoWwiki to find out what I needed to do, and basically it was  click on the strange nugget I’ve been carrying in my bag without noticing for the last 10 days and complete the questline. So now I’m friendly with them. Not likely to be one I grind as their main rewards are the shoulder enchants but at least they don’t hate me any more.

Talking rep grinds, I made revered with the  Oracles and am carrying a  Mysterious Egg around in the hope it’ll hatch something companionable and have identified my next pet source.  I need to complete the  Higher Learning Achievement which should net me a  Kirin Tor Familiar.  I may even have 50 before the patch introduces the new 100 pet achievement.

As to the weekends focus

Get a UI page up on this blog with my addons listed to make the next  rebuild that much easier I did it. It’s a bit rough and ready still and has made me wonder what else is out there in add-on land that I may find myself unable to live without

In case of Emergency…

I know it’s Saturday, I had a panic last night. There I was about to kill 30 Frenzyheart and my AOE wouldn’t work.  Then I realised anything that needed me to left click on the game window wasn’t working.

Okay I’d just loaded an add-on so I disabled it, nothing, disable all add ons still nothing.

Go to the  forums to check the techninal, bug and in-game problems to see if anyone else has a similar issue. Nothing

Check on Dax, the problem is only with Ari so not my mouse. Feel a GM ticket coming on so do the pre-emptive deleted Interface/WTF/WDB see if that fixes it. Nothing

Put in ticket and then while alt tabbing waiting for a  reply run a google search on – ‘left click’ wow – Yay I found the answer, well the fix anyway  reset all keybindings to default. Cancel GM ticket

Pew finally I can  left click again. Only all my settings are gone. I probably could have pulled them out of the recycle bin and gone my merry way but I collect a lot of rubbish in my addons folder as I try things out and then decide not to use them, and I’ve been slacking on updating add-ons while leveling so the evening was spent rebuilding my UI.

Of course when I rebuild I forget some addons that I take for granted so I have to go look for them when I notice the lack

So one task this weekend. Get a UI page up on this blog with my addons listed to make the next  rebuild that much easier

Some things I’ve achieved since last week, yes I do get stuff done even if it’s not on the list.

Ari has got both Inscription and Leatherworking up to 400 for the BOP enchants on shoulders and bracers

She also got “Kicking it up a Notch” the Outland daily cooking quest, I’d been checking most nights for the manalicious berries quest since achievements came out to when WotLK shipped and not seen it, slacked off on checking while leveling but been calling in for the last couple of weeks hoping he’d want some berries. Finally done. So thats one more achievement on the Cooking list ticked off. I need to do a bit of focusing on them what I’ve got not got towards that meta achievement is somewhat random, but secondary professions are things to work on when other stuff is done.

We also picked up “That takes Class” I had everyone but a Death Knight before WotLK went live and I was only in the BG’s to test the addon.

Master of Arms

Did pretty good this weekend

1. Master of Arms – Raise 4 weapon skills to 400 (one down 3 to go) This probably took the longest to actually do. Just beating on Azure Scalebanes in Crystalsong, forever and ever. It didn’t help that I discovered I had no maces in the bank (thought I’d kept the healing one that Prince dropped but obviously I’d cleaned it out at some point). So had to get myself a grey one so I had something to hit with. It’s the last point that takes forever but I now have maxed skill in staves, daggers & two hand maces.

The Keymaster – obtain 11 named keys (10 down one to go). The one I was missing was in Outland. For Shattered Halls, probably the only heroic key that’s quest related, The final bit involves  ‘firing’ the key in a body of a dead fel reaver. There’s a trick to soloing this that involves kiting the fel reaver into a bunch of horde elite. Just as I was about to try it some Death Kinight beat me to it. The elites finished the reaver  off and I hopped on in and fired the key.

To all the squirrels I’ve loved before (10 critters missing). This involved a tour of some fun places but was pretty straight forward. The last critter on my list was a parrot only found in Un’Goro Crater and not too many of them there either.

Critter Glitter – tame 10 critters in 3 mins. Heh just pure silliness this one

They were pretty good at keeping up with me in travel form though

I also managed  World Explorer, earning me an epic tabard and a new title ” the Explorer”.

Was able to give  some time to Gwen as well, getting her mining up to 172 & her engineering up to 198. Picked up the schematic for Mechanical Squirrel off the AH so Ari has 44 pets now & Gwen has a nice little earner in making them