Milestones

I've hit a number of milestones in the past few weeks, which means you all get a photo array post. In other news, sometimes I wonder that I'm lucky to still have a guild tag - they're probably getting tired of me triggering 2-3 achievements at once on a regular basis. (Good news, guys, I'm running relatively low on achievements I can do.... ;))

Dungeon Reps

I hit exalted with the four major dungeon reputations a while ago, and have been running without a tabard on to try and round up that last bit of Alliance Vanguard rep. I suppose I cheated via working on daily quests heavily while I was leveling, and running a ton of Heroic Violet Hold instances (I've killed Cyanigosa on Heroic eleven times, and I've been on a number of failed PUG's in the mean time), but I'm still a bit surprised that I finished this one before finishing all the heroics.

Elder

As I wrote last week, I didn't have serious trouble with the Lunar Festival, it just ended up taking me a while to clear out the time to run the old dungeons. This effort ALSO got me.....

Classic Dungeonmaster

I can't actually say that I deserve this one retroactively, because I never did Uldaman, either while leveling or solo at 70 (until 3.0.8, it required 3 players to open the door to the boss). Still, it did kind of feel like a run down memory lane.

Good pants at last

Archavon chose to gift me with a pair of [Deadly Gladiator's Silk Trousers], perhaps in the hopes that I would stop farming him every week. (Good luck with that, big guy, your drop table still contains many items that I would be happy to loot. ;)) My condolences to anyone who is trying to scrape together a 1810 arena rating to get these the old-fashioned way.

These pants blow my old [Sorrowgrave's Breeches] out of the water, provide a blue socket for the all-important meta gem requirements, AND I don't need to carry around a pair of PVP pants anymore. This also vindicates my decision not to kill myself going after heroic Loken for his pants. I'd still take a pair of Frostfire legs if Uncle Archie drops em, but pants are no longer a crisis.

Timbermaw, the easy way

I'll admit, I do finally understand a bit of why people feel their accomplishments are diminished when things are nerfed. I got about 7K reputation from killing enemies of the Timbermaw last night, which was a solid 10 times faster than the progress I was able to make before patch 3.0.8 (especially since much of that was at level 70, and I do kill stuff faster at 80). I actually had to kill a few extra furbolgs for beads and feathers after I hit revered, to get enough for the final turnin.

Last run for Northrend Dungeon Hero

I actually spent literally hours looking for a group for Heroic Oculus before finally getting one last night. I guess this one can be rough because the final boss is a vehicle fight, which means that you can't out-gear it, and that makes people reluctant to PUG. Klep had some trouble with it as well before he finally cleared it, so it may just be an unpopular dungeon.

The actual run wasn't the smoothest ever. The hunter showed up with mostly broken gear and claimed to be so broke that he had to vendor stuff from his bags to pay the repair bill the first time he died. Then we had a bit of a scuffle where two separate players refused to pilot the green healing drake for the final boss fight. Because the fight is done on dragons with the vehicle interface, you can fly a drake that isn't your current class role (tank/heal/DPS), but these two REALLY wanted to fly the tank drakes for some reason, and one eventually switched to a DPS drake (which was STILL not the healing drake we actually needed).

I finally wound up flying the second healing drake myself, despite serious misgivings since I had neither flown the green drake before nor done the fight on heroic. My choice turned out to be a good call because the guy flying the other green drake consistently failed to keep up either of their two debuffs (a life-tap DOT that the green drake needs to pay for his heals and a 25% damage debuff on the boss), so I guess I can say that I earned that last notch towards this achievement.

The Black War Mammoth

I was LFG for the entire time the Alliance owned Wintergrasp earlier in the evening but wasn't able to get a group for any of the three dungeons I was after. The Oculus run finally happened about 20-30 minutes before the Alliance was scheduled to attack Wintergrasp, but I wasn't expecting it to make a difference. Turned out, we were able to loot Stone Keeper shards from the final two bosses, which gave me the last shards I needed to buy my mammoth.

I forgot to take a screenshot of the achievement for buying it, but I'm including a shot of the mount in action, so you can see exactly how practical it is to ride around on. :)

Blog Expansion

As threatened last week, I released my 200th blog expansion yesterday. It did, in fact, "add hundreds of words to the verbose archives of PVD" (1273 according to the word counter), and "discuss the incentive structures in one or more online games". According to Larisa, this puts me 40% of the way to the Chatterbox title. Good times all around. :)