Battle of the Crimson Watch

After I made that last post here things definitely looked better. Someone asked me if I could help with Ruul the Darkener. I used my warrior instead of Elaire and did that. Then we went on to the Cipher of damnation and I literally had my commands crossed and messed up big time. Then I swapped back to the usual team setup without my warrior and everything went peachy. Kinda nice to know that I can do the Cipher of Damnation finish by myself on the fly now.

After that someone asked in guild chat for the Battle of the Crimson Watch, a demon showdown that follows a drop of the nuisance named patrol through the Path of Conquest in Shadowmoon Valley. I needed that quest done for my team, but had learned to take the 'recommended players: 4' as a practical joke from Blizzard. We gathered a party of guildies plus my team as second party and did it twice, with the only casualty being one of my felguards. I guess average itemization has improved since I did it back in January. Anyway, nice to have the fancy tabards and to bag the 25g each.

I did not bother to reform 'Team Minion' before doing my 10 5v5 rated arena games. In the whole ten games I made about 10 kills. My best game this time around was with a -4 rating. Ah well. I will see how many points I loose due to my lower rating and then consider if I just spent 200g each week to get me closer to the Gladiator's War Staff.

Captn out.

EU-GM Eilanai on Multi-Boxing

It has been a few days since I had time to play. Too much work at the moment. On the good side, its not going to stay that way for ever, in fact things should be back to normal in about two weeks for me.

After being told 'I will lol when you get banned for that' shortly after I logged in, I did a bit forum browsing on the EU WoW forums and found THIS THREAD. In this thread a fellow multi boxer asks for clarification after being suspended after botting accusations.

GM Eilanai responds:
Hi Franchesca,

From what I can see the initial suspension was due to suspicion that you may have been using a third party program to control your characters, not for the multi-boxing itself. Since then, the matter was investigated by our Account Administration team and you should have access to your accounts again.

There is no problem with you playing multiple characters, as long as you are the owner of the accounts and are in control of them (i.e. no third party programs, and no macro-usage that is not normally possible in-game).

Have fun playing ;) Eilanai
Game Master // CS Forum Representative - EN

"The pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with.."

Nice one!

Just because posts on the offical forums have a habbit of decaying and I do not expect anyone who is sceptic to take my word on the matter, I added a screenshot.

I hope to have something worth reporting again soon =]

Cheers, Captn.

Oh right, pictures!

I will add a couple of pictures to the previous posts when I get home. I urgently need to return my attention to the real life meeting of my guild now which some kind Belgian members organized for the guild. /raises pint in salute

Captn out.

Teron Gorefiend

While running about in Shadowmoon Vally with the one or other objective, I was allways looking for ash to pick up. Collecting 15 of these per character was not so easy since they are not merrily spawning or concentrated in any one place. So I went after the few bits of ash that I was still missing and then started the actual quest chain. Naturally, killing the 15 Shadowmoon Harbringers took me no time at all, which sent me right on my way to do the bidding of the ancient shadowmoon spirit.

Getting the Gorefiend's Cloak and Gorefiend's Truncheon is fairly easy, I fumbled dismounting my dps chars for the ghost knights with the truncheon, but still made it without casualties on my side. Much more interesting is the encounter to recover Gorefiend's Armor.

Vhel'kur, spawn of Deathwing, who is in turn the big bad daddy to his cute dragon cubs Nefarian and Onyxia has Gorefiend's Armor. His ghost circles above the Netherwing Ridge. Standing on the tallest peak of the tallest hill on Netherwing Ridge, you have to ranged pull the dragon's ghost towards the hill's summit. On the first try I messed up the pull and got eaten before I could do anything dps wise. On the next pull I overnuked and my warlocks got shredded by the dragon's 3.5k hits faster than I could heal. On the third try however, I pulled him as intended, then sent in the felguards and gave them time to get a lead in threat. I had dished out two greater heals when I started attacking with my warlocks and the mage. This time everything went peachy. I got him down loosing only one of my three felguards in the process. Considering that the felguards do not have hit points exceeding two of his hits, that wasn't too bad really.

The reward for me on this chain was Evoker's Helmet of Second Sight, which is a very nice hat as far as spell crit and spell damage goes. Naturally I still have a better healing oriented green for Captn, but for the mage and the warlocks this is a clear improvement.

Captn out.

Team Minion

After giving all the nifty gladiator's gear a longing look I decided to see what I could do in arena's. I formed a 5v5 arena team for my five characters called 'Team Minion'. After forming it at the Nagrand arena, I entered an skirmish arena. Let it be said, that I was slaughtered very quickly. Not being arena experienced at all, I had left my corner on foot instead of mounted and faced an Al-Akkir pre-made that looked at me a bit puzzeled and then took my chars apart.

I will need to look at strategies that may give me some success chances, one thing certainly is improving the location of my mounting and dismounting macros. Tripple Seed of Corruption and three Shadow Burns and the one Fire Blast should be a nice welcome for any team, but I will have to see how things go.

On leaving my skirmish round, I got hammered by a horde team at the arena master in Nagrand. Arena noob that I am I wasnt aware yet of this being expected. Upon returning to my corpses and ressing outside the walls of the little enclosure, I had an undead shadow priest start attacking captn. I guess the rest of the pack was outside of his tab or V-healthbar range. I hit fel-domination, summoned felguards in 0.5 seconds and smoshed him flat in less time than it takes to read this sentence.

Then I made sure I got the hell out of dodge city.

I will see how it goes later in actual matches after I adjusted a bit to the rush situation and will of course let you know. =]

Captn out.

Cipher of Dammnation, 2nd Attempt

This week I spent some time working on the Cipher of Damnation and the Theron Gorefiend chains. My motivation to continue the Cipher of Damnation chain for it's own sake was not so high after the frustration I had met earlier with the earlier parts of the chain, the tubers in particular. Now, I have to say that the tubers must have been the absolute worst of the chain. The originally very horrible looking part with the naga's chests was not so hard after all. The keys are bind on pickup, but one can unlock a box without looting it, so I could just kill and loot the nagas and open all the boxes with Captn for the rest of the team.

The part with the blood eleves was relatively easy, with the rotten egg having a good droprate. I did of course make it more difficult for myself by heading over to the path of conquest and killing groups of blood elves there instead of going to the quest fortification as intended where the type of elves that drop the quest armor scraps are abundant. Ruul the Darkener slaughtered me in no time. I put that aside for later and did the next cipher part instead. I met no trouble at all with the demons guarding the next part.

As luck would have it, the guild's main tank was willing and available to help me with Ruul and the fire lord, so I could bag my fancy Staff of the Redeemer and Oronok's Ancient Scepter. An for me unexpected benefit were the nifty arcanist looking and stat wise better than my boring previous shoulderpieces that you get during the chain as well: Spaulders of the Torn-heart.

Captn out.

We are airborne!

After a bit more than three hours of questing in southern Netherstorm, the time had come to take a trip down to Shadowmoon Valley and get the fifth gryphon. Now I can move the team around with less hassle withhin zones.

Of course it is still a long way to swift gryphons - 26k gold do not just fall from the sky and maybe I will stop saving for it before I am a fifth of the way towards that goal, but hey, who knows. I had a look at the arena vendor today. I will see if I give it a go. With there being not much arena queue time, I think I can dare to field my chars as a 5v5 team. But that is for another day.

Captn out.

Level 70 - Gryphon time!

/dances with happiness. After completing nearly all Blade's Edge quests, I headed over to Netherstorm. There I worked the Scryer mana-forge chain, various quests around Area 52 and then the Kirin-Tor, where the last three team-members hit 70 when handing in one of the ghost-town quests. Captn was a bit ahead since I handed in the Nagrand dust for bags with him, netting XP each time.

I have to say that I wish that was all there was to it, but unfortunately I know now that I could have been at 70 much earlier, if I had stayed on track as noted above. I went to Shadowmoon Valley on Sunday morning and did the Path of Conquest chain. That worked beautifully. Then I started the Cipher to Dammnation quest chain. The first part was no problem, trapping the souls of the elementals actually does work for each char in one go. Then came the horror. The quest with the tuber roots, the pigs and the rock flayers. Not only do I need 50 roots, but the quest is just too frustrating. Uneven terrain. Spawn of attackable pigs next to agressive flayers. The range of the whistle for the pigs being allmost allways just too short to call a surviving pig. The pig spawn rate...ARGH. The next part was winning the key lottery among the naga five times in a row. That is the point where I said...some other time and moved back to Netherstorm.

If you have keen eyes or click on the thumbnail to see the full size picture you will notice that something is wrong there. I did not have enough gold to buy five gryphons. Even after a bit of scratching the coins among my other chars, I could find only enough for four gryphons. To avoid that I reinforce the impression that I would be discriminating Dlaire as with the XP in Searing Gorge, this time Blaire needs to be patient. I figure it wont be too long, since I can not finish the 20g quests in northern Netherstorm.

Cheers, Captn.

Level 68 - Finally!

The title says it all. I have not been making much progress in the last few days. Partly due to limited time. I could not play as much as I wanted, and I did actually go and do some other in game things besides leveling team Minion.

For a while I entertained the notion to save all the quest-xp money from now on. I started grinding around the Mana Forges in Netherstorm. On the bright side, I got my main's Scryer rep maxed out, grinding rep items worth 20k scryer rep in just over six hours. While that is quite nice, I did not make any noticeable progress regarding XP. 160xp per kill is just horrible, not matter how fast you kill.

So I forgot about the idea of trying to maximise quest xp gold. I will bag what remains, but until then I will use quest xp as primary xp source again.

Again, it is too late. Captn out.

Hellfire Citadel & Coilfang Reservoir

For a while now I wanted to re-visit the Hellfire Citadel's first wing, the Ramparts. I had tried this dungeon before with discouraging results. While I did manage to clear all the trash in about two hours and drop the first and second bosses I was not really happy with this. Firstly, I took about twice as long as the average group in their low 60s should take. Next, I had problems with the second boss and dropped him only after asking a friendly druid to replace one of my chars. The druid told me later that he didnt do that much, two or three decurses and a self heal, but still, I did not do it by myself. The final boss was just a mess with me being unable to dodge the fire. I am convinced that this was mostly due to my characters gear not yet being any good. While leveling to 66 the hitpoints of my characters and felguards has doubled and my spell damage has increased a great deal.

So I decided it would be time to give it another shot. I cleared the way to the second and third boss in about 50 minutes without any wipes and leaving Watchkeeper Gargolmar crushed under my collective heels. After carefully arranging my party in a semi-circle out of Omor the Unscarred's aggro range, I attacked. Two or three decurses done with Alaire by single clicking the respective healthbar did the decursing thanks to a nice add-on called Clique. The same add-on also makes healing using the mouse and passive targetting very convinient for me on Captn.

Then it was time to move on to our pals Vazruden and Nazan. While Vazruden did not have much time to be rude to anyone his steed and lord Nazan saw to having my party for dinner well done instead of rare. I litterally got roasted by his fire pits. Not allowing him to discourage me that easily, I went in for another try. This time I dropped Vazruden without any healing being done by Captn and had spread my team up front. When Nazan landed I sent the felguards to him and ran the party through him. Then I continued to hammer him with salvo's while pressing CTRL-2 in between to make the felguards move slightly before attacking again. It was not pretty. I lost two chars and two felguards, but put Nazan down.

After some rejoicing that I could finally get rid of the quest items hogging bagspace I went for the next wing of the instance. I found it to be actually easier on the micro-management, the hardest fight being the second boss with this four waves of pawns before he enters the fray. The trash and the last boss were comaritively easy. The last boss presented me with the Raiments of Divine Authority. Not that these robes would look very good, but hey, they are better for healing than the Goldwave Tunic that everyone gets as soon as they set foot into Outland.

Not being easily sated, I then entered the Slave Pens in the Coilfang Reservoir. Here I had more trouble. Mennu the Betrayer, the first boss in this instance is a totem hugging shaman. It took me three tries to get him down. The key was to give the felguards some lead time and only then gradually start to nuke as well as making sure that lava and healing totems were hit with Smite Rank 1 by Captn. The big lobster also known as Rokmar the Crackler presented me with less trouble by comparison, but also took me three tries.

At that point it was quite late and my concentration was waning. I decided to leave the rest of the Coilfang Reservoir for another day.

Captn out.

Level 66 - Blade's Edge Mountains

After completing reaching level 65, I had only very few quests left in Terrokar Forest and Nagrand. I completed the ones that were feasible and got a couple of boxes worth of XP together. Instead of then going for annoying collection quests, I took to the air with the public transport to the Orebor Harborage. From there I headed north to Sylvanaar.

The Blade's Edge Mountains are famous for being almost as horrible in terrain design as Azshara. People love to have a zone cut into little bits between which they can not easily move! I know I do. Anyway, I grabbed all the quests at Sylvanaar and directed my attention to the birdies, wolves and ogres in the area. This with quite a bit of random slaughter of anything that crossed my path brought me up to level 66.

Looking at the way I was playing my team, I decided to make some changes in the warlock spec. Simply put, I dropped all Affliction points and put them into Destruction instead. With my shadow bolt salvo's I recon I will get more out of having the improved shadow bolt giving the next five direct shadow damage spells 20% damage bonus after a crit. Especially since my warlock's crit rate is getting in a range where this is a worthwhile consideration. I have 22.22% now, but since one warlock triggering the effect does the trick for the others as well, its quite nice.

Piggy Bank Massacre!

Yesterday night someone was talking about the need to get another fast gryphon since the slow one just does not do the trick anymore once you know the fast one's speed. That got me thinking. Well, counting actually. I had taken approx 1k from my main when getting elite mounts for the team. Now each team character had around 800g from questing 60 to 65. Right on!

A couple of minutes later I could fly around giddy with joy at the speed. I put the speed to good use right away and did some night mining until I really needed to head to bed.

Captn, out.