Perseverance. We Has It.

It took 15 tries, but we finally got Kologarn down last night.  (Personally, I think he died because he felt sorry for us)

I’ve also come across some wonderful daily news – you remember how I thought the cooking and jewelcrafting dailies had been changed to require level 80?  Well, it turns out it was a bug.

The level requirement for the following quests has been appropriately set to level 65: Shipment: Wicked Sun Brooch, Infused Mushroom Meatloaf, Mustard Dogs!, and Cheese for Glowergold.

Kringle and Pringle can go back to earning their keep.  (Hurrah!)

Did anyone ever play the Bejeweled addon for WoW?  I introduced it to my guild while we were progressing through Mount Hyjal and Black Temple, and it was entertaining to get the achievement messages from the most unlikely players while we raided (and sometimes at the most unexpected moments).  Anyway, they (PopCap Games) have released a new one:  Peggle.  (I can’t wait to see my guilds response to this one)

Three more days of Tournament dailies, and both Mingle and Dingle will have their second faction raised to Champion (Stormwind for Mingle, due to her choice to only ride horses, and Gnomeregan for Dingle because an engineer will only ride a Mechanostrider – until you can joust on a chopper).  Incidentally, I’m getting quite good at the mounted combat now – defeating the four champions is almost a one-shot thing.  I’m also able to down the Boneguard Commander for Battle Before The Citadel single-handedly (provided I don’t pick up any scouts when I pull, or while I kite him).

Hopefully I’ll find out if we’re running a second Ulduar 10-man group tonight – signups for it haven’t been very comforting so far, so it’s still up in the air.  On a related note, I took Dingle in for 10-man Vault of Archavon last night, and we managed to one-shot Emalon this time – my performance was a lot better, apart from some hiccups taunting the replacement adds off a paladin who picked them up to kite towards me after we downed each charged one.  No T8 for me, although I did pick up the PvP chest from Archavon (which I can’t see myself using, to be honest).

For now though, ‘tis time to get a-dailying!

/wave

No raid tonight? What to do?

So far I’m enjoying 3.1.  Ulduar is great, fishing is fun, new dailies are something different to do.  They’ve even added a direct flight route from Dalaran to Sholazar Basin.

I’ve had a play with the new boss in the 10-man Vault of Archavon on Dingle, and I’m sure it’s more fun to dps than it was to tank - I was designated add-tank, and it really was a tough fight for me; keeping aggro on the mobs I had was easy, but a very restricted camera angle made targeting respawned adds something of a challenge.  But we did manage to down the boss, and one of the druid’s in the group became the first in the guild to pick up a piece of T8.

We had another bash at Razorscale last night, and between the hotfixes (increasing the enrage timer to 10 minutes, and making the iron dwarf casters only do their chain lightning when stationary) and our increasing competence, we managed to get the boss down to 9% on our best attempt.  Admittedly we were caught off-guard by the enrage several times, as it’s not in the Deadly Boss Mods timers just yet, but it’s nice to be able to consistently get that far.

Out of curiosity I decided to put the fishing changes to the test, and picked up the fishing daily on Dingle, who was a fishing virgin at the time (with 0 points of fishing skill).  It took about 50 minutes (not including travel time back to Dalaran to train), but she caught the Ghostfish and had leveled to 142 fishing in the process.

The changes to the tailoring mount, the flying carpet, have made it as useful as a traditional mount now (they’ve removed the mount and dismount animations), so it’s been set as Mingle’s default mount – I’ve been waiting for this change, as I loved the look of it but the delay in mounting/dismounting grew very annoying, very quickly.  On a related note, if I can ever save up enough I’d love to get the Chopper for Dingle – what better mount for an engineer, after all?

One change that has disappointed me is that the Dalaran cooking dailies are now only available for level 80 characters; bankrogue Pringle and hunter Kringle will have to finish leveling before they can continue doing them.  (Curiously enough, the jewelcrafting dailies are still available for Pringle, who’s only level 75)

So I guess it’s time to put a little effort into leveling those two – I’ve respecced Kringle (beastmaster again, my favourite spec), and replaced his pet gorilladin with a turtle (now that Thunderstomp, which made the gorilla so useful, has been made available to all Tenacity pets).  I’ll fire up Jame’s Leveling Guide later and see how we do – Kringle is level 74, and is about half-way through Howling Fjord so far.

No more raids until Sunday, so I’ve plenty of time to play with my alts.  Should gain access to the next tier of Tournament quests with Dingle and Mingle today as well, so I’m getting closer to the shiny new mounts.  For now, though?  ‘Tis dailies time!

/wave

Too much of a good thing?

One of the things you get used to, when you have multiple alts at (roughly) the same level of progression, is doing dailies multiple times. The one that comes up as regular as clockwork for me would have to be the cooking daily.

Now, I currently have six characters (I won’t refer to OCD if you won’t) who get to do this each day and (apart from the inevitable issues that ensue from trying to do it when Dalaran is crowded) it's actually not that bad. The only down side would have to be trying to decide what to actually use all the Dalaran Cooking Awards for.

With only two useless cosmetic feasts (the Small Feast and Gigantic Feast respectively) providing skill-ups above 425 cooking, the grind to level high-end cooking is currently pretty awful (although patch 3.1 is going to go a long way towards fixing that, at least in theory). I do try to keep at least a full stack each of Great Feasts and Fish Feasts on Mingle for raiding, but that doesn’t require very many spices (and is easily provided by the contents of the Small Spice Bag from the cooking daily reward).

I also tend to keep a stack (divided into four stacks of 25) listed on the AH, which gives bank alt Pringle an extra 140G or so every few days, but the market doesn’t really support any more than that – at least, not without having the price drop unpleasantly.

Fortunately the awards don’t take up bag space, so it’s safe to just let them accumulate (which they’re doing very effectively – they appear to breed so effectively Tribbles would be jealous).

But when it comes down to it, I think I’m just grumbling about nothing – they don’t take much time, don’t take up bag space, and do provide an additional (small) source of income. Just wait until we get the patch 3.1 fishing changes and new dailies, though. Then I’m sure I’ll have something to really complain about.

Or at least, something to compete with the cooking awards for bag space. I can hardly wait.