Mission: Terminate Sons of Gruul

After being done with the Netherwing on my main and being not yet eligible to do it with Team Minion, I was a bit unsure what to target next. I have not yet touched the Ogri'la quests with any character but have helped others to do the last few bits before the actual Ogri'la quests.

When I went for Grulloc, I got swashed. He does too much damage for the felguards to keep up in threat with the healing that they need. Luckily the quest item can be picked up wether you are in the party with the looting rights or not, so I could be a bit creative. I asked nicely and found a druid guildmate who was willing to lend me a paw on this mission. A short while later Grulloc, Maggoc and Slaag were down and I went back to the Ring of Blood to turn in the completed quests.

Next up where the quests that I had already helped with as tank. The summoning of the ogre warlock Vim'gol and afterwards the final son of gruul, Skulloc. The fight with Vim'gul is a bit tricky. Five players have to be in fiery circles around the altar to summon him and to interrupt his power-up at 50% health. The warlock does damage to all present players and pets, and the circles are further apart than casting or Prayer of Healing range. I put one character into each circle, with the toes as close to the altar as possible. As soon as the summon was complete, I ran forward to the center with Captn to be able to heal all chars with Prayer of Healing. At 50% I had to spring back to be in position to interrupt his power-up. Then I could finish him. For Skulloc I had a guildmate help again to work around the threat issue and viola, Orgi'la here I come!

The ogres gave a party to mark the occasion. =]

Cheers, Captn.

Not dead!

While I have been playing as much as before, I have been focussing on playing my warrior Ivl rather than Team Minion. You can see one rather graphic archivement in the picture here. What you can not see directly is all the goodies I collected and the stack of heroic badges being almost tall enough to reach the Gnomeregan Auto-Blocker 600.

As I type this, Team Minion is en-route with the team to Cosmowrench to utterly annihilate some quest mobs though, so its not like I gave up on the project, I just gave it a break while doing many other things in game.

Cheers, Captn.

Altherac Valley here I come!

'Amazing, absolutely amazing!' is the summary I can give for the expedition I made to Altherac Valley on Thursday evening. Xzin mentioned the other day that 'there is allways AV' which made me consider this destination again for my team. Sure, you can not longer join AV as a group, but if you join the queue at the same moment your chances of getting into the same battleground are good. So far I have not had any chars left to sit one out.

How often have you wished that anyone in AV would just come over to where they are needed to take a graveyard, tower or whatever? With five chars at my disposal, I do no longer need to worry about that part. Since AV is huge and people tend to scatter all over, having focussed killing power is a definite advantage. Nowhere as good as when doing the same thing with the guild's PvP group (which I should have remembered without Xzin's reminder) but then considering the difference between able PvPers at each char coordinating over TS and me playing my five chars by myself, that should not be any surprise.

It gave me a very welcome and needed relief from a a very tough couple of days at work where I needed to rush to meet a couple of deadlines and could do little else but work and sleep. Horray for the deadlines being archived and the weekend being here!

/goes to queue for AV

Captn out.

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.