Whirly: good to go

The Temple of Atal’Hakkar is as expected, maybe a little easier. The Temple seems to be the dividing line between easy and hard instances. From here, almost every fight is a big-hard mob or a big-hard group. We were in automatic before with only three or four real fights a night. This change, to harder fights, is a good thing I guess, but it makes for an intense evenings play, we are tuckered by the end. Thinking for two hours is hard on old brains.

We’ve gone around the upper circle, killing the guys on the balconies for Marks Warrior class quest. We’ve gone below to the pool room. We even tried to enter the ground floor area , which is beyond our capabilities. The ground floor is one large group after another. We have no crowd control as they are dragons and the like. It will be a few more levels before we can succeed there. Mike’s Mage and my Priest both need to kill bosses on the ground floor for our class quests. We’ve decided the quest rewards aren’t worth the trouble, but what else is the game about if not quests for no good reason.

Mark returned to Vanguard for a month. His report is far from cheery. It seems to be the half-game it was at launch with little improvement. It’s sad really. We all had such high hopes.

Maraduon has been uneventful lately. We haven’t killed anything we haven’t killed before. We haven’t fought anything we haven’t fought before. It takes us two hours to get far enough in to do any business. We’ve all dinged 52 and it’s time to move on from Maraduon. Temple of Atal’Hakkar probably. The Temple was always difficult for our small group - large groups of mobs and walkers. It’s where we perfected the Mind Control trick to get through large groups. The Priest controls one of the mobs, the rest of the mobs kill him giving us one less to fight. It’s gotten us past groups we could never beat otherwise. If it fails, all the mobs are beating on the Priest and we’ll probably die soon.

I was working the auction house last week and found someone had inflated copper rods to 90 gold. I don’t know why it pissed me off, but it did. I have a high level Enchanter and it cost thousands of gold to get there and buy the recipes. It annoyed me that someone was trying to take advantage of low level Enchanters. I purchased a load of copper rods from the Enchanter merchant for 1s 24c each and put them on the auction house for 1s 24c. Oddly, they are selling like hot cakes, I’ve sold around 15. I’m not sure if I made or lost money, but that doesn’t matter. I can afford to lose a few copper. I had a bad-dream the other night. My account was banned for manipulating the copper rod market.

My solo Hunter has only made level 26, I’ve been working my Priest. I’m getting itchy for level 58 and Burning Crusade. We’ve never worked BC as a group. We are 52 now. Mark and I were doing the math. We figure we’ll make it some time in January.

Embarrassingly, I’ve been working on bringing up a new Hunter. How many is that? I don’t know. I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count that high. I already have a 22 Hunter on this server, but for some reason I don’t like him. I’ve decided on this server where I’m rich, over 4000 gold now, and it’s better to be rich than not. I’ve been using Joana’s Horde guide which, once you get used to it, works very well. My only complaint with the guide is I sometimes just want to mindlessly grind and not work some complicated quest. Not that I can’t grind if I want, but many of Joana’s suggested quests are part of a chain and you’ll regret skipping one later. Often, I just want to play for a short time. Joana’s system takes you out in the field for long periods. Which is ok, you can camp out there, but you’ll miss out on zzz-rest experience.

Why Hunter? They are killing machines - fast with little downtime. Given a little room, they are hard to kill. They run fast also. I’ve said it many times. With a Hunter, the fight is over there. If there’s trouble, “over there,” you can easily run away, leaving your pet to handle things. If you get far enough away before your pet dies, he will blink out, easily whistled back to your side ready for the next battle. A Hunter’s worry is ammo, pet food, and backpack space for loot.

Hunters don’t get many random group invites. I’m basically a solo player so that’s not a problem. Starting new toons lately, I’ve recieved many group invites. When I did a /who on the group invite-or, they turned out to be level 1 toons somewhere I wasn’t. I figured it was some kind of scam, and eventually accepted an invite just to find out. Yup, it was a script telling how I could have someone power-level my toon and how to contact them. Maybe I should hire them to run a few Hunters to level 22 for me.

Forget everything bad I ever said about Maraduon. Once we got past the plants, it was a great experience. We explored for an extra hour, we were having so much fun. Plus, Mark kept promising us that the guy we wanted was just around the corner. Eventually we reached that guy, Landslide. He was our last fight for the night.

We bypassed Noxxion again but took Razorlash who dropped a nice pair of shoes - Vinerot Sandals (50 armor, +12 int, +12 spirit, +12 nature resistance) which went to Mike’s Mage. My Priest would like a pair as well. Now that we have Razorlash on farming rotation it might happen - he drops a nice belt as well. After Razorlash we had a couple more of those 4 plant fights then were free. We jumped down the cliff when we reached Poison Falls and wandered the river, killing Shamblers and Hydra, until we came to Landslide’s area. We fought Subterranean Diemetradons (gators) and Behemoths on our way up to Landslide’s grotto. We lost this time, but it was close, and we now know what to expect. We might make 50 by our next visit, that should make a big difference. Level is king in WoW.

It was a great evening’s dungeon crawl. We’ve not seen new content for a while, but we never made it to, or past, Poison Falls before so everything was new after that. We were getting kind of tired and bleary at the end, but we were going on automatic by then so everything went smoothly. We play two and a half hours max. This run was three and a half, a very long “Raid” for us. I guess we are power gamers now. We’ll have to get a hat.

I cancelled my EQ2 account after reaching my goal of getting a monk to 20. The monk was 11 when I started so it didn’t take long. Especially as I was playing on test with it’s double experience bonus. I avoided cities, other than to buy food, drink and shrunkens (throwing stars). The cities are too big and complicated. Unfortunately, although you get your new skills for free, you need to purchase their upgrades in town. At least that’s my understanding. Without those upgrades my Monk was probably gimped.

I ran only one quest, another thing I dislike in EQ2. I prefer to just wander and grind. I probably missed out on some good questing money and gear. By avoiding much of the game, I had a good time just fighting with my monk. I think EQ2 is a good game. I just have too much baggage with it having played at launch, and twice, now three other times. If I were starting EQ2 fresh, with my friends, I think we could get many months of challenging fun. That’s not going to happen. We occasionally go back to previously played games, but it’s rare we return to a game we didn’t enjoy the first time. An exception would be SWG which we didn’t like either time we tried.

Our first visit to Maraudon in over a year wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. Horde players don’t have as far to run to get to the entrance as Alliance players, that’s a good thing. Mark remembered how to get in, thank goodness, so we ran the entrance maze with little fuss. The experience gain wasn’t as bad as i remembered, though the four corpse runs took a little out of our play time. It was more fun than expected. Our main problem is time. We can only get so far in a two hour session.

We gave Noxxion a shot. We were never able to kill him before, but couldn’t remember why, so we tried again. Ah, now I remember. He spawns a bunch of little copies of himself and we all die, that’s right. We skipped him after that. We had worked out how to deal with three Constrictor Vine, but with those and a Barbed Lasher we had trouble. We mostly succeeded by killing one then coming back from the graveyard for the rest. The Barbed Lasher has an AE knock down with a huge range. As casters, Mike and I have to be at max range to avoid it. Some of our fights were in tight spaces not allowing max range. It plays hell with long casting heals when you get knocked down.

Razorlash was our last fight of the night. He certainly puts out damage, I was chain healing Mark. Luckily Razorlash went down before I ran out of mana. He dropped something leather which I disenchanted. We are all bound in the Horde village in Desolace so we can get back easily next time.

We were all a few bubbles from 49 and decided that was a good target to solo to for next time. Where does a 48 Priest go for exerpience? I headed to Thorium Point, Searing Gorge. The mobs around the Point were 47 to 50. I worked a bubble and a half experience there, but it takes so long for a Holy Priest to kill I thought it would be better to head somewhere with a little lower mobs. I headed off to Hinterlands. I was going to do the turtles, but they were 49-50 and figured they’d be as bad as Searing Gorge, plus a lot of people hunt turtles. I ended up on the cliffs hunting the invisible 47 level dogs. It still took a long time to kill one. I got the job done, dinged 49, and ended back in Orgrimmar