Picking up and running it smooth.

Delirium did a 12 man AQ20 last weekend and we were very happy with our results. More or less all the bosses went down in a snap except for Buru, for whom it took a little practice to do the kiting. The whole crystal pulling thing was also not understood the first time, but we got it the second time smoothly. Im happy with the rate at which the guild is moving and progressing. I think we got our focus fire, crowd control and aggro management to a good point at which we can start looking into karazhan as a serious thing. We are going to try and make a raid group for the following weekend. If we cant down Attumen, then at least we can get some more practice at a more balanced lvl 70 scale.

Haven't posted in a really long time.

So I went MIA for about two weeks recently from this blog and almost forgot it amidst all that has been going on. Several important things happened since the last time I posted. First of all, we finally hit 70 and oh gosh how impressive was that experience. Ecstasy, flowing valleys of milk and honey, all the women that we could ever wish and more flashed in our minds...but seriously, it was just another swirly thing with golden light. So there we stood, dumbfounded as to what we were going to do next in our epic quest of character improvement. The fact of the matter is that Blizzard made this game super easy, perhaps too easy to level. When we hit 70, we were just beginning the Nagrand quests, meaning that we have an entire mile stretch to go in order to finish the quests in Shadowmoon, Blade's edge, Netherstorm and even Nagrand. From my experiences so far and instances before 70, for the most part bosses are ridiculously easy. The only two encounters that we ever had extended trouble with were Nazan and Blackheart the Inciter, both of which are easily manageable by changing gear from +int, +dmg to something much more +dmg intensive that burns your mana very fast but leaves your harmless to your friends.

So what are the plans now? We started our karazhan key chains and are almost done with them (up to the black morass part) and are trying to do the same with the guild that we were building up. We had a guild 10man ZG and although the instance is outdated, it fares very well at allowing you to teach the basics of raiding to people who have never done it before. The results were interesting. Even though we were 70, from what I saw, the execution of each boss was perfect. Jeklik got bashed and moved around, Venoxis got separated and moved, Marli's aggro wipe was picked up by an offtank, Tiger boss' three add phase one was done well, Hakkar's MC got feared and everybody was poisoned. The only tough fight was Panther, but thats because we completely forgot to mention that she will Kill-Mark somebody. We're pretty proud of how the guild did in ZG, although we did notice some hefty problems. The most important of which being focus dps. Too often we saw multiple mobs being dps'd at the same time, which obviously creates its own problems.

This weekend we are planning to do AQ20 to do a little bit more "raiding", get in touch with more interesting/difficult fights and hopefully fix the focus fire problem.

Impressions over the last few days.

Started taking screenshots last night, and realized that there's a lot of really beautiful/comical stuff in BC as opposed to how rare this kind of material was in classic. Once again, gg Blizzard.

Btw, the music in old hillsbrad is amazing.

Congrats to blizzard on a job well done

We are finishing up Terokkar forest with our quests (which is kinda sad since we're already level 68, meaning that we have 4 entire zones to go through, and we didnt even touch anything past mana-tombs). That run on ramble behind there, makes Hellkrew recognize blizzard on how good of a job they did with content going from 60-70. For the first impact, the massive amount of quests and content that presents itself to players is staggering. Quest after quest after quest of endless content, lore and combat. Interestingly enough, this brings us to our second huzzah to blizzard. All this new stuff isnt pointless, its freaking amazing. The bomb at the firewing town? The battle between auchindoun and sha'tar SW of the exploded city? The storyline flow is great. Heck, the graphic effects are freaking amazing. The battle mentioned just now, with all the draenie spirits being siphoned and used to empower a corrupted vindicator who is entombed in a huge tomb literally STEAMING shadow energies? Way cool. Tomb of light and the power ball that summons the guardian and later devours restless spirits? Yes please. The murloc quest in Zangarmarsh where the dancing murlocs own the daggerfen village? Way to guy little guys. Instances arent too shabby either. We're not even done with this place...we still have 5 zones, 10 dungeons and 4 raids to go through. We <3 BC.

Congrats blizzard on a great expansion.

PS. Omg, blizzard...sand gnomes? Whoever invented those buggers is a genius, give him a huge box of chocolates. Also poison the chocolates because killing the damn buggers doesnt give experience.

Hellfire...err...Hellfrost?

So I gave into the temptation. I was continuously dueling this frost mage outside stonebreaker in terokkar and I was having a pretty hard time. Sure, I could definetly beat him, and If his cooldowns were against him, the match was mine... but still. So I gave in and when I hit 66 (update 66) I specced Hellfire into frost. 2 words can describe the change: freaking ridiculous. In all honesty, Hellfire, the master of flame and lava, pyromancer of molten fury is now Master G Ice Cube. From a solo PvE perspective, its not as good as fire, since fire's 2shottiness is more fun. From a PvP perspective, its like black and white. More surivavability, more instants, more utility, more CC, more CONTROLLED burst etc. Still gotta try group pve.

Quick update

Went to a college fair, my insight pretty much brings my favorite options down to Wharton (UPenn), Stern (NYU) and BU (boston). We'll see how that goes. Anyways, Mage is 65, warlock finished his enchanting rods and has tailoring up to 247. Finally finished Zangarmarsh quests, moving to Terokkar...should be interesting to finally get out of that swamp.

Leveling With your Friends

http://wowgrrl.com/ made a post about how her character was leveling with members of her guild and this made me think about how I am leveling and how that's working out. Starting out from level 1-60 I leveled more or less with my friends' Undead Priest right by my side. We were able to go through most of the quests in Azeroth (admittedly we did skip entire zones and some instance quests. Most notably EPL, Silithus, North Barrens, Gnomeregan and all of the 60 instances except for BRD and DM). The experience was fun and effective, our classes were able to synergize pretty well and allowed for firepower, healing, aoe, kiting etc...hell, even magetank ;). At 60, my other friend's warlock finally caught up to us and all of outlands it was 3 of us leveling together in instances and all the quests. Oddly enough, when he joined us and started playing, it all of a sudden felt much much more difficult to do this playstyle. Not only does each mob kill equal less experience to you, but its also much more difficult to coordinate 3 people as opposed to only 2, especially on quests with low drop rates or when you have to pick up x items on the ground. Instances seem to be the easiest, and best, way for us to level. However, because we are going to school on weekdays, we are forced to quest on weekdays (1.5hrs playtime) and zerg the instances on weekends. Although its still fun, and the experience is good for the most part, it seems like blizzard designed the outside Azeroth around two players. Honestly, going from 1-60 with 2 players seemed very very fluid, perhaps much more so than going solo. The group exp system and rest system made it easier to make up shared mob exp and many quests were done faster/easier than they could have been otherwise (mage/priest duo of Araj in WPL when we were 58 :D). Although its still fun, and the experience is good for the most part, it seems like blizzard designed the outside Azeroth around two players.