Alliance: 60

And Silithus was as good as I expected it to be. Lorilai gonged 60 and a few moments later Ishiro did as well.

Then I spent the rest of the night telling people that “No, I don’t want to join your raiding guild.” Do these people just sit around doing a /who on level 60 priests? Some of them were even kind enough to inform me that if I was interested I would need to respec as a Holy Priest. Hmm… lemme think about it… No.

Seriously, it was really irritating and it probably is not going to stop.

The night was very cool other than that, and was a perfect example of why I love these games. There is this quest chain in Silithus, Noggle has been poisoned and the person helping him needs to find a cure. So first we go get samples of certain spiders and scorpions. No luck. So we try some other spiders and scorpions. Ah-ha! He’s cured, but in all his confusion of running away from a nest of scorpions he stumbled into he’s lost his pack and would like it back. It turns out there is also a wanted poster for proof of the defeat of Deathclasp, a scorpion who has been doing alot of killing. So, Lori and Ishiro head down to Bronzebeard’s camp (we’d been there before) and looked around for this nest of scorpions. When we find them we also find Deathclasp. So, we prepare for battle… charge in… and everything is going well, until it goes horribly wrong and both of our spirits are wisked away to the graveyard. Hmm… new plan. See, Deathclasp is a level 60 elite, and he’s got a 58 guard and a 57 guard. And at this point we are still level 59. Having been messing around in Winterspring before coming to Silithus, we both have mechanical yetis. I blew mine in the previous fight when things started to go wrong thinking the extra damage might help out. It didn’t, and its going to be a while for it to refresh. But Lori has her yeti, and I have my mechanical dragonling (yay engineering!). Last time, we foolishly tried to fight Deathclasp first because I forgot the basic rule: If the elite is a caster and the guards are not, kill the caster, but if the elite is not a caster, kill the guards first. Essentially, casters always have less hit points, and a caster elite will tear you up with spells and mostly you can ignore non-elite guards for a little until you finish. An elite warrior, however, is just going to take too long to kill, so the tank should get aggro, kill the guards, then fight the elite. And with a yeti and a dragonling, the second time we were easily victorious. Booyah.

I love single group and duo play, because its extremely dynamic, often chaotic (unless you are methodically pulling single mobs and snoozing away the exp), and almost always satisfying. And the paladin/shadowpriest combo that I’ve seen a number of people shun works very well for us. Other things might work better, but so what? And then to have this brilliant night of duoing sullied by the spam of guild invitations looking for heal-bot number X to raid Molten Core… ugh. Even worse was having to hear back the responces when I would tell them “No, I don’t plan on doing any raiding. Single group and PvP are what I’m into.” Genius replies like “LOL” and “No raiding? What’s the point of playing then?” and “Loozer”, and lets not forget “U just ding? Wait a week and gimme tell when u bored. U change mind.” Whatever…

Alliance: Silithus and Tradeskills

The land of Silithus has been very good to Ishiro, as he is pleasantly making his way through level 59, well on his way to never needing experience again… until they raise the level cap that is. Its exciting. I’ve never been at the level cap of an original game before.

But, Silithus is a very dreary land. I guess it is a testament to the art skills of the guys at Blizzard that this desert wasteland actually depresses me. Or maybe its that the Hive bugs are a constant reminder that I actually sat through Starship Troopers 2… on purpose.

Besides the levelling, I have been doing what I can to work on Ishiro’s tailoring and engineering. Since I’m not rich enough to buy felcloth from the market, nor bored enough to farm it, my tailoring these days consists of making mooncloths when I can, which is one every 4 days. I can usually find 2 felcloth in 4 days. Engineering on the other hand is going even slower. Lorilai is an armor smith, and her skilling up is using all the materials, and since she’s the miner she gets first dibs. I did manage to make myself a mechanical dragonling which should be a fun toy once an hour.

I really want to spend more time in the PvP battlegrounds, but I think getting 60 first will be a good thing, because as much as I love the BGs, I’ve always felt like a runt. Well, soon, runt no longer.

Alliance: Making My Way to 60

Ishiro of the Holy Order of Come Get Some Mutha Fu… I mean, the Shadow Priest has been palling around with his Paladin buddy Lorilai. Its funny, but when you don’t play for like 2 or 3 months, it seems like the 200% experience bonus just never ends. We’ve gone from 56 to almost 59 over the course of a couple of 3-4 hour game sessions. Of course, all those quests worth 4,000 – 6,000 exp each don’t hurt. If this keeps up, I expect us to hit level 60 within the next week, maybe two, all depending on Jodi’s work schedule.

One thing I can’t stand though is all the damn Horde. One of my pet peeves in WoW is really appearant right now. We are messing around with in Silithus and Winterspring, two places where either the Devs got lazy or just ran out of time because its neutral towns and both Alliance and Horde get the same quests. I suppose we could play on a PvP server where I could do something about that, but open PvP just grates my nerves. As it is, I had to repeat a quest 4 times the other night because it was an escort quest and a group of bored Horde kept killing the NPC. We could have fought back, but 5 level 60 Horde would have wiped the two of us at 56 all over the mountain side. Anyway… 60 will come soon enough for us, and then maybe we can level the playing field a bit.

The Journal

So, I am back to playing WoW a little more consistantly, or at least I hope that I am. For the time being, I will be playing two characters. Ishiro, a human priest on the Durotan server, is currently level 57. With him I mostly play battlegrounds and run quests with Lorilai, Jodi’s paladin. And then there is Ishiro, an undead warlock on the Eitrigg server, who is level 26. My plan there is to level him up and do battlegrounds and run quests with Lochie, Jodi’s warlock.

Essentially, I like battlegrounds and I hate raiding. A brief sojourn back into first person shooters (thanks HL2!) reminded me that most games are relatively boring once you learn the tricks of the game engine, but when you come up against another human being things can get interesting. My only grip with PvP in the context of MMORPGs is the disparity between casters and melees. In a traditional FPS everyone is on the same footing. In RPGs melees can run and jump and strafe and hop around the world like a jackrabbit on crack, but casters mostly have to stand still and pray they can not get interrupted and keep the target within the field of vision. It might be okay if casters we much more powerful, but as a priest, I’ve been killed enough times with a single weapon swing or in a matter of seconds to know that it just isn’t true. But I’m learning to deal with it.

That said, from here on out, everything posted in this category will be concerning what I’ve managed to do in game for either the Alliance or the Horde.