Busy Kae's

I have been rather quiet on the blog front lately, focusing my free time and energy on an unrelated project. Edit: evidently I need to find time this weekend to figure out what to do with my image bandwidth, heh. Rehosted a bunch of stuff over on Picasa, including the page background; I know in some resolutions it isn't stretching correctly anymore, but it will have to wait until photobucket's bandwitdth resets.

Anyway...

On the WoW-side of things, Vortex has been busying itself with achievements, some of the less-required ones like Getting Back to Nature and Nine Lives. We discovered that Auriya does have an enrage timer... she crit me for 537k when she decided she'd grown bored with us dancing with her, even with a person DC'd in the middle of two void zones (he actually gave me something to heal that wasn't just a wild growth or rejuv, heh).

We put some work into Algalon, which has been amusing. Our tanks have their swaps down; we're just working on polishing our raid-wide Big Bang movements. Inevitably someone will die to lag (I've run clear over a black hole, one side to the other, without it taking me, due to lag), or someone kiting a constellation over a black hole and closing it off when people need it, akin to slamming a door in someone's face while a death ray passes over your stoop. Thus, we have yet to really get far past Big Bang except to know we've got the tanks surviving. FYI, Green Rag Dolls can defy gravity when placed on the bridge leading to Algalon's terrace. As can fish feasts. They can lull you into a false sense of security, thinking you can defy gravity, too. And then you plummit to your death. I may or may not have done so, at some point.

While doing Razorscale for Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare for a couple raiders, the other healer and I yawned and danced for a while, and then noticed the NPCs were misbehaving:



Another raider also asked where I picked up my mini-treeform pet (the Teldrassil Sproutling). I told her I stole it off of Applebough in Dalaran... that one's for you, Averna!! Guildie: "O.o ...really?!" ...oh, I'm a horrible person.

Protos and Titles!

I have had a remarkably productive weekend, as far as achievements go. I have long been working towards getting a proto-drake mount as well as Loremaster...


I picked up Loremaster on Friday, along with several other achievements including Deadliest Catch and The Argent Champion. Sunday I turned around and finished off Glory of the Hero for my first ever Proto-drake mount (yay!), so I spent the afternoon circling Northrend on him while fishing.

Unexpectedly but quite happily, we also downed Yogg+1 for the final achievement needed for Glory of the Ulduar Raider, bagging me two protodrakes in one day! Yay! Vortex is quite proud of this achievement, as it is one that very few strict ten-man guilds have :) 3 of us spent about 10 minutes just circling Krasus' Landing in joy. And, yes, a guide as well as our warlock's video is in the works! Astonishingly, we managed it without anyone going insane, though I did have to battle-res the mage after she got SQUISHED by an unlucky add spawn in P3.

A very interesting thing I did note while playing with my protos is this:

The flying minipets from the oracles' eggs can fly in the air with you while you are mounted.

This is something none of the other flying pets can do, as far as I have noticed. Now, they don't seem to chase after you until you stop and wait for them to catch up, but it's certainly a change from the poor dragonhawks and owls and such which can't seem to get more than a few feet off of the ground!

Anyway, I'm quite content, and hoping to see Algalon dead in the next couple weeks as well, now that our focus has shifted off of Yogg+1. :)

Tuesday 3.2 Running Commentary

I will be updating as I play tonight :) Wif pictures!

Logging In:

• Pitbull 3.0, SCT, FuBar 3.6, and IceHUD had updates to download from Curse
• Stuck at retrieving character list for about 4 minutes
• Logging in with a full loading bar for 6 minutes (still loading), though hearing the dings of others logging in! Sitting in vent; a couple guildies are in the game and noting the NPCs have disappeared.
  

• PRETTY KITTY!

Children's Week

• Trying to find the NPC for the children's week stuff... ah, there she is! She's outside the "Alliance" bank and inn, standing by the statue in the plaza, near the fishing fountain. You can choose which of the two "children" you want to look after, regardless of your current faction standing... I chose Wolvar.

• Cowtip looks broken. :( Default tooltips are running, even though I told it to load out-of-date addons. Oomni says it's turned on (glad I installed Oomni before the patch, btw, so I don't have to log out to turn addons on and off!). Weird. Used LunarSphere to move the annoying game tooltips back to lock against the right side of my screen where they belong.

• Spent the next bit lagging all over Dalaran. And then lagging all over Dragonblight just attempting to talk to my Wolvar orphan, since I hoped lag would be less outside of Dalaran :)

Pup Kekek wants me to take him all over the world... in this lag? He wants to go hunting and being warrior-y. Silly Wolfie. FYI, wolvar pup is a problem child...

• The lag is lessening, but I'm wary yet of returning to Dalaran.

• Flying over Wintergrasp will flag you for PvP still, but it won't drop you out of flight form :D Horde also won WG while I was flying over it... and I got the mark of honor O.o Cool.

• Kekek wants a Paper Zepplin. Not sure he deserves it, bloodthirsty little fellow, but I guess it's not nearly as dangerous as, say, a gun. Or a rock. Of course, that is in Dalaran. Ughhh... don't wanna go there yet!

Raid??! Hello, Icehowl!

• 7:00 Others making noise about starting up our raid, though some are still trying to log in. Might get something going here in another 45 minutes with the Coliseum.

• 7:30 BLAH GRID ERROR! Grid's not showing more than 4 people in my raid and it keeps throwing an error up in my face :(
  

Interface\AddOns\Grid\GridRoster.lua:258: attempt to call global 'GetCurrentDungeonDifficulty' (a nil value)

• 7:45 I had to turn off Grid (and Headcount) due to the Dungeon Difficulty bug. Turned on Pitbull. Kitarha reports that RatingBuster was also throwing up errors, though I turned that off when loading in cuz I wanted to see the Blizzard one.
  

• 8:10 pm, I've tweaked Pitbull to show all the druid buffs (and thus my HoTs). It's not Grid, but it's functional. Now we're just dealing with AHMAGAD POISON! Those Jormungar are munching our tanks.

• 9:11 pm, Not One, But Two Jormungars! Achievement :) But it was still a wipe. I'm using a lot of nourish here to keep the tanks alive; the damage has been super-spikey. Not liking the HoT display on Pitbull, since it's showing all "druid buffs" rather than just HoTs, but I'm adapting...
  

• 9:25: Icehowl down! :) Our feral was dead the whole fight cuz he bugged and couldn't see the boss... or the fire... hehe! Little black kitty was flambéed. Scepter of Imprisoned Souls (Wand) and Gormok's Band (strength ring). We decided to go poke FL+4 after this, which'll be super interesting with the lag!

• Break time before Ulduar, I went ahead and edited my lua file as EricTetz suggested in the comments, changing the GridRoster.lua's "GetCurrentDungeonDifficulty" to "GetDungeonDifficulty". Did a UI reload from there and it was all better! /boots Pitbull raid frames back out to unenabled-land. Thanks again, Eric!
  

Raid 2: Uld? VoA? Eh.

• 9:52 Hearthed to Dalaran, back in lag-central. Attempting to purchase the pet raptor from Breanni and get little Mr. Bloodthirsty a paper zepplin. The raptor is 40g at exalted. I think the server's crashed, though... it just doesn't know it yet!
  

This guy was just swimming in place, hovering over the paving stones. I purchased a raptor, but it's not in my bags yet...

• 10:02, I managed to mount up and start flying to Ulduar. Partway over the Storm peaks, I purchased 4 Obsidian Hatchlings... oops. Ha. Pets for my raiding buddies!! Alas, no one is actually able to load into Ulduar. I'm hanging out on the steps until loading works.

• 10:12 I dueled our warlock so that he could practice banishes on me. His imp kept throwing fireballs at me, so I walked over and punched it. He cried "NOOOOOOOO, not Nokpit!!" and killed me for it. I mean, what, it's okay for his imp to turn me into a cooking fire, but I can't punch it in the face?? ;)

• 10:15 Instance servers aren't letting anyone in, and even the trade window for one of the raptors has been stuck open for 3 minutes now. Sooo we decided to call it. Kitarha wants to go watch Hell's Kitchen with me. So, hope you all enjoyed my ramble, good luck tonight with your own attempts to play!!

/wave!

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!!