3.1 Tournament, Crashes, and Minipets

/hugs to all my fellow Hokies out there.

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Instance Crashes and Stuck Characters

Raiding this week has been quite a frustration, as the instance servers keep crashing around our ears. Kaelynn is still floating around in limbo from Vault of Archavon last night (Wed).

Quoting Blizzard's official announcement on the matter,

If you are stuck in-game, please submit an in-game petition with the following information: Always use the ‘Character Stuck’ button when you submit this kind of petition. Include the name and realm of the stuck character. Include where your character was before they got stuck Mention whether you are stuck at the loading screen, are unable to remain in-game, are trapped on terrain, are unable to find your body, or fell ‘through the world’ If you are unable to log in to your character at all, please submit the petition from another character. If you are attempting to raid Ulduar or another raid instance and 'realm first' accomplishments are not a priority, your experience is likely to be smoother if you wait until conditions stabilize prior to raiding actively.

Major content patches always seem to do something like this, with WoW. Kitarha (my husband) said to me last night, "If we rolled out a system at work and it did this, we'd be fired." I suppose that is the difference between people paying for the exact content vs paying for general content/framework: the rush to get it out and keep customers out of interest, vs loosing customers from it not working.


Minipets and the Tournament:

Some fun stuff up at the new tournament grounds in Icecrown, though it irks me how the limited faction dailies of 5 tokens/day are holding players back and drawing it all out. I understand Blizzard's reasoning of not letting content slip away so quickly, but at 40 tokens per minipet and we can't even collect THOSE tokens yet, it saddens me as a pet collector. It certainly doesn't help that the quest-givers in the faction inns can be kited outside and slaughtered by the opposing faction, without it even flagging the killers on a PvE server. /sigh.

• Tip for those of you just starting the jousting stuff: read what the NPCs say when they're teaching you how to fight the dummy targets. The melee one can kill your mount.

• Tip for those who haven't been up there yet: go FIRST to the big pavilion on the far western end of the tournament grounds, and the NPC there will then send you to your appropriate horde/alliance pavilion on the far eastern side.


• The tournament grounds are in the far north-eastern corner of Icecrown, up past Sindragosa's Fall.

Anyway, I do need to get my feral druid to 77 so she can fly up there and participate in the quests; I may ride her up there before leveling her, though, and hope they let me quest as a 76. We'll see.


Sprite Darter Egg:

I did farm up one of these yesterday on my moocow. It took something like 10 minutes to do, just waddling up and down outside the evil moocow village in Feralas and dropping Insect Swarm on each of the quickly repopping sprite darters in the area, letting the DoT tick them down as I moved to the next. In comparison to the hours spent on the chain to hatch the egg on Alliance side (a quest chain few Alliance even seem to know about!), getting the little faerie dragon for a horde right now is insanely easy. I'll be getting one on my rogue tonight, likely. If you have a horde character, I recommend going out and farming one yourself before they decide to nerf the droprate.


Westfall Chicken:

Another pet for Horde to go get now. This is another one of those little-known Alliance pet quests, and even on Alliance side, when you described the quest to someone, 90% of the time they thought you were pulling their leg. Horde were able to get the pet prior to the feed vendor in Brill, but only if an Alliance did the quest for them, since the egg reward is sat upon the ground, lootable by anyone. The quest is as such:

1. Purchase Special Chicken Feed from the farm in Westfall or from the new horde feed vendor, William Saldean in Brill.
2. Locate a chicken critter.
3. Spam the /chicken emote at the chicken. Macros work well for this. Just keep spamming it at the chicken... it does need to be alive, so don't kill the chicken!
4. Eventually, the chicken will pop up a quest marker over its head. It wants Special Chicken Feed.
5. Upon turning in the quest feed to the chicken, an egg will appear on the ground.
   
6. Loot the egg, grats on your new pet!

Healing Experience:

Well, as I said, most of the time I've been crashed, or waiting outside the gate for the instance server to open back up, so I've not really had much chance to see what healing is like with the changes. We killed Flame Leviathan on Tuesday night, but as I was piloting a demolisher and launching my rogue buddy through the air (WHEEEEE!), there wasn't any healing going on until we reached the earthquake-stunning PAIN that was the Molten Colossus trash mobs directly following the boss. Then, the server crashed.

On Wednesday, we couldn't even enter Ulduar, as the instance was down. We decided after much waiting to go poke into the new wing of Vault of Archavon, and I finally got to play around with some healing spells as we began to clear trash, all the while tweaking/fixing mods and error messages (had to turn off Grid's aggro alert status). I kept swapping around between different spells, seeing how my mana did, trying to decide if I wanted to try to use only WG or Rejuv for the raid so I could get new numbers on revitalize, so on each trash mob I was doing something different. Jaemon, holy pally, suddenly asked me in vent how I managed to triple healing done in a single trash mob, and I lol'd. "Yeah, uh, I'm messing around with stuff right now, heh..." ...it was the first mob I'd bothered putting the 3-stack of lifeblooms on the tank.

We get to the boss, wipe a couple times because we were so melee-heavy and the adds were on the other side of the room from the boss (so they'd get all charged up and bomb the raid before our dps could get to them and kill them), and we were about to pull a 3rd time when the instance crashes.

I tried for 2 hours to log back in, gave up, and went to watch Ghost Hunters. :) If she's still stuck when I get home from work today, I'll submit a ticket, cuz I have dailies to get done!!