Whirly: good to go

Back into Temple of Atal’Hakkar we went. This time to kill Hazzas, or was it Morphaz, doesn’t matter, we had to kill them both together for the Mage and Priest quests. As hard as those two were I don’t think they were any harder than all the groups we had to go through to get to them. Mark voted it the hardest series of fights we’ve ever been through. That’s no small statement as we’ve gone through years of EQ, EQII, AC2, AO, DAoC, SWG, Toontown (don’t ask), FFXI, and now WoW. It was something that’s for sure. It tuckered me right out.

I read somewhere, today, about a Warrior who says he does two or three instance runs every night. I suppose, in an earlier age, he would have been flogging himself in the evening for entertainment. I like a good instance run, but a couple of hours is my limit. Ahh, to be a young whipper snapper and able to play 24/7. Wait a sec, never mind. I think I’ll take a nap.

Well, well, well, my Hunter made 59 today. I’ll have to thank Mike and his Mage. We needed to get the Mage some experience to catch up with the rest of the group, so the Mage and Hunter went for a run Saturday morning. Eastern Plaguelands seemed like a good place. We worked the Corin’s Crossing village, doing the undead there, till the Mage dinged 55. We then headed north, on the road, filling in our maps. We worked a little at Plaguewood then discovered Quel Lithien Lodge. We were hopeful for a flight path there, but no luck.

I came back later and soloed the Hunter to 59 working in the same area. I had one small hitch. I found a new instance, Stratholme. Might as well take a look. There were a bunch of skeletons inside milling around and I figured I’d try pulling one just to see what happens, you just never know with skelies. What happened was a large group decided to come beat on me. What a surprise to find that you can’t exit that instance the same way you came in, it’s got bars. I had to come up with an alternative plan real quick, I feigned death, one of the two Hunters get out of jail cards. That worked fine for me but my pet doesn’t know that FD trick. After everything settled down, I gated back to my bind point in Wetlands. It was good to sell off, but I had to walk back to the Plaguelands, from Aerie Peak, to get that last bit of exp required for 59.

Looking at a map here, I see a flight path to Lights Hope Chapel in Eastern Plaguelands. I’m going to have to look for that.

What a crappy start. I can’t believe we died while entering the Temple of Atal’Hakkar. Not in the instance, but outside in the hallway. You know how sometimes you’re hot and sometimes not? Well, it sure looked like we were in the not column tonight. We ran into trouble with our first Balcony as well, the one that spawns all the skeletons. We survived that, but it was way too sloppy. Then somebody flipped the hot switch and we were humming like a motor, a mob killing motor, for the rest of the night.

We took out the balconies and the halls around them with our contempt and laughter. We were invincible. Simmering in our own uberness, we could do no wrong. At least till we found something that made us vincible, but we didn’t care by then? I’d gotten all the feathers I needed for the Warrior quest so we didn’t need any more of them clowns anyway.

We head to the ground floor to see about the Priest and Mage quests, killing Morphaz. Here’s where we expected trouble. We are talking dragon kin now and there won’t be any crowd control to speak of. Two elites and 4 or 5 non at a time or more. I don’t think anybody was expecting much. Ha! We chewed em up. Ok, we didn’t chew them all up, but we did some and that was a complete surprise. We’ll have more time to work on them next visit. I expect we’ll put on a good, hot, show.

My 24 Priest had a quest requiring a walk to Ratchet, might as well take the boat to Booty Bay. Why not fly to Westfall? Presto, I am standing at the entrance of Deadmines scratching my butt, waiting for a group.

A 21 Druid invites and I accept. There is an 18 Hunter and a 29 Warrior in the group. The Druid thinks we need an additional player but the Warrior thinks we’ve got too many already. The Hunter is in Stormwind working on some quests. The Warrior wants it clearly understood that he is a mercenary and that the cost for him taking us through Deadmines is two BOP. He also expects that we roll “greed” on everything, even BOE, no rolling “need” at all. I’ve only been playing WoW for a year, so I had no idea what they were talking about, but it was clear, I wasn’t going to get any loot. I figured I’d pass on everything. After all, it’s only Deadmines. Who could possibly care about anything that drops in there? This morning I realized they were talking about Bind on Pickup and Bind on Equip.

The Hunter goes AFK, the Warrior goes for a smoke. The Hunter eventually gets to Westfall, but he’s working on an escort mission that isn’t going well. At one point I see he’s taking major damage. I charge off looking for him, I am a Priest after all, and find him sitting on the ground, barely alive, near Sentinel Hill. I buffed and healed him and ran back to Deadmines.

Patience and I aren’t friends. We don’t get along at all. I’ve always had this saying that, “patience is for cows standing in line at the slaughter house.”  Yes, I know that doesn’t mean anything, but it’s what I say. After 30 minutes or so of this foolishness I decide that I’m giving this group 10 more minutes to get started. It didn’t happen. 15 minutes later the Hunter is complaining and failing at his escort mission, and the Warrior is making it clear for the tenth time that he gets two BOP, and I’m all, “Thanks for the group everybody, good luck”, out of here. I gate back to Astranaar in Ashenvale.

It was one of my better Deadmines groups. I didn’t die once.

My Priest dinged 24 poking around in Ashenvale last night. After purchasing my spells and working on a bit of Alchemy I headed down to Stonetalon Mountains to finish a quest collecting venom sac from Pridewings there. I’d started the quest a few days ago but the Pridewings don’t drop venom sacs that often. The Pridewing are 21-23 and I was leisurely bumping them off while watching a movie, “Off the Map”, when a 19 Rogue sneaks up on me. “Are you collecting venom sacs?” she asks. Hmm, “yes.” I get an invite and, after some high speed hesitation, accept. I tell the rogue that, “I’ll follow you.” And off we go.

Either 19 Rogues are killing machines or 19 Rogues with a Priest covering their ass are killing machines because we both finished that quest lickety split.

After the thank yous we disbanded. The rogue followed me around for a little while, but my aimless wandering, heading in the general direction of town, didn’t hold her interest and she disappeared.

They opened six new servers yesterday. I created a new toon on the Oceania server just to do a census. There were almost 700 horde players. I’ll not be starting over on that server.

I’ve been working in Stonetalon Mountains recently. It’s a good place to go from 20 to 30 but it’s got a few problems. For the Alliance it’s so far from everything. You can fly into Stonetalon Peak from Auberdine but there is no place to get zzz rest there, that I know of. There is no direct flight path between Astranaar and Stonetalon Peak. You can run in from Astranaar but the road is less than safe with bears in Ashenvale and everything you can imagine in Stonetalon wanting a piece of you. Stonetalon seems a bit over populated, mob wise, though I hate to complain about excess mobs as that’s exactly what you want when grinding. It’s under populated, player wise, and that’s just fine with me.

I’ve passed through Stonetalon many times but this is the first time I’ve ever worked there. It seems to have plenty of quests so I’m keeping busy. I’m working on a couple of quests now where I get to blow things up. What more could you possibly want out of a game?

We decided to take it easy last night so we headed to Dire Maul. Not inside, of course, that would be death for three mid 50s like ourselves, but outside where the living is easy. There are lots of 60s in the area but they aren’t interested in the yard trash so we were able to fight unbothered, most of the time. We did have a wipe out when a 60 dragged a dog pack to us, but we are understanding people and only cuss in group chat.

Things were going so well I figured we should try going inside the instance. We had that run in with the big tree last time, where the mage was the only one left standing, and I figured we needed some payback. This time the only one left standing was the tree. We had a pleasant run back from the graveyard and I thought it would be good to try another entrance we’d found. This time we tried a little tree. It turns out the badness of trees can’t be judged by size. He kicked our butt.

All in all a successful night, us a whole bunch, them 3, or 9 depending on how you count it.

Ok, plan B sucked. I did a census on my new server Friday night and there were 709 horde players. When I then did a census on my normal “full” server there were 729 horde players. Huh? That didn’t make sense, so the first thing Saturday morning I did the same thing again and there were 1207 on my new server and 1214 on my old server. It looks like my whole plan to move to a less populated server was poorly planned. I did some further research and found a PvP server with 720 horde players. PvP has it’s only problems and I’m not sure I want to go there.

I’m working on plan C, there is a 20, now 22, priest involved. Somebody who hates pick up groups playing a priest? You can imagine how foolish I feel.

We all got our carrot on a stick. 3% speed increase, not really much of a thing considering all the work we put into it. Zul’Farrak has been good to us. We’ve gotten a lot of experience in there. I’m kind of sorry to leave it, perhaps my favorite instance so far. You can always see what’s coming with very few random surprises.

We then rode our newly speeded mounts to Dire Maul in Feralas, our first time really checking it out. It looked like it would be high for us with all the 60s going in, but in fact we did very well with the yard trash outside. We died to a wandering dog pack, but that was expected. We stumbled onto the entrance of the instance and decided to give it a look see. Happily, we were able to do a little work inside, but not much. We did kill that first big tree just around the corner from the entrance, but our mage was the only one standing at the end.

Mike, Mark and I came from EQ Test Server, it was a great place to play. There weren’t that many people, it was a friendly kind of place, most of the time. You could almost always find a spot where you were as alone as you wanted to be. I don’t like pick up groups, you just never know what you are going to get, and it’ll probably be bad. Sure, sometimes you meet great people, but that’s rare and the bad far out weigh the good. The boys and I have scheduled times to play. I don’t run into them, to play, outside those scheduled times very often.

My current server is full. I can not find a decent place to play, with my 58 hunter, that isn’t crawling with people. That’s so unlike the Test Server experience and my preferred play style, while soloing, that I find it distasteful. So what do I do? Leave my friends and play some where else when soloing? Yes.

I stated a new toon, Tauren Druid, on the least populated, regular server I could find. Things are going well. After two nights I’ve reached level 11. I’ve got room to play and places to go. We’ll see how long it lasts. I usually get bored with these side adventures at about level 16. This server will probably fill up, with people who play more than I do, and it will be difficult to find a place to play at 58 even here. As long as I’m having fun though. That’s what it’s all about.