Man, how I missed that sound.

As my faithful zombie minion posted, 10 Sidhe Devils decided to poke their nose inside Ulduar, and due to an unforeseen set of circumstances, I had my chance to go in with them. Bosses were downed, gnomes were puked on, and a good time was had by all. A few minor upgrades were gotten; now I have to figure out what the hell my hit actually needs to be, and where I can get more expertise, and aaaaaaaah. Hit rating is the bane of my existence. (And for the record, yeah, I know to be yellow-capped it’s 1% Draenei racial + 3% Nerves of Cold Steel + 4% from gear = 8% yellow cap, I’m mostly dramatizing. I think I’m okay - but I desperately need to find some expertise again.)

We originally only planned to go through three of the Siege bosses (Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, and XT), but then we were doing so well, we figured, what the hell, let’s down Ignis! And after Ignis, well, that was as far as we had prepared because we had originally planned to stop there… but everyone wanted to at least see inside, so I walked people through the couple trash packs before Kologarn, then Kologarn himself. The Devils did a good job downing Kologarn while I hovered around as a corpse! (Rubble AOE = ouch.)

And I should explain the minion thing. As the fight began against XT-002, Jess caught an unlucky light bomb while, I guess, out of reach of the healers, so she died. Shortly thereafter, I also caught a light bomb, and offset a bunch of my damage with Anti-Magic Shield + Gift of the Naaru + being in range of a healer. However, as I turned around to run out of range of other people, who should I run into but Jess’s body? Well, I hate to see someone have to sit there and do nothing, so I gave her the gift of life; or, rather, unlife. She’s quite a good zombie, if a bit mouthy. ;)

Here’s some more screenshots.

Nothing really extraordinary going on, just progress in fits and spurts. A brief rundown…

• Have just about completed moving the alts I have any interest in playing over to the Sidhe Devils on Kael’thas. My warrior made the trip today, while my warlock made the trip earlier and is forced to (shudder) spend some time as a gnome, because he can’t be a damned werewolf yet and I just don’t really like humans. Soon… soon!

  • Fun fact, on this note: faction transferring gets you every flight point in Northrend that doesn’t need to be unlocked. He who had never left Howling Fjord suddenly has FPs in every part of Northrend, excluding (as I said) ones that have to be unlocked - Sons of Hodir, Shadow Vault, and so on.

• Been playing my rogue a lot, too. I’m leveling her up to 60+ so I have a pocket pickpocketer (see what I did there?) and, as a personal challenge, am leveling her in the battlegrounds. It’s a little bit slow at times (do not ever seek a Warsong Gulch after 1AM server time unless you feel like getting roflstomped) but at least it’s fun. And sometimes, the achievements just roll in:

And yeah, my big thing, as shown to the left side of the blog (if you haven’t visited, you really should), is that I’m currently working on Insane in the Membrane. It’s time-occupying, but it’s really not hard, and after awhile grinding through Dire Maul repeatedly just gets to be automatic. I think I’m killing ogres on muscle memory at this point. It’s why I need a rogue.

* Getting exalted with Shen'dralar is actually proving _easier_ than freeing Knot enough times to get goblin rep. At this rate, even if I turn in a crapton of Ogre Tannin for ogre suits, I'm STILL going to end up exalted with the book nerd elves well before I do the goblins. I'm going to end up grinding pirates or Venture Company mobs anyway, I can already see it in my future. 

• In real life, I’ve been planning my Halloween costume with my roommate (it’s awesome), and preparing songlists for his big birthday bash in November. I also just celebrated my own birthday (much drinking of the alcohols occurred, and then my roommate and I attended a kickass Jay-Z concert), and have rounded the corner into 27. So far, it feels a lot like most of the years previous. I also need to do an update of my game progress page, as a lot of things have been updated or finished, and primarily if I’m at a console, I’m busy failing miserably at Demon’s Souls for the PS3. It’s Nintendo Hard (and even that might be too mild a term), and yet I haven’t found myself wanting to ragequit it and sell it back or trade it to a friend.

Yet.

So what’ve you been up to?

The lovely Saresa proffers up this Shared Topic at the Twisted Nether Blogcast and on Blog Azeroth, which in turn was proposed by Skraps from the hilariously named ShamWoW:

I am sure this topic has been covered, but among all my other fails I fail at searching.
I have noticed a string of my recent posts covered how I fail, often epically. I would like to see how others fail.
I think it is very good for newer players to see how those of us make dumb mistakes, even though we have been at this for quite a while.

Never let it be said I’m not a resource to others. Let’s see how badly I’ve failed, shall we?

• After the Great Talent Reset of 3.0, I spent 20 minutes wondering why I couldn’t summon my Felguard. At least I wasn’t alone in the confusion.

• You know, I’m noticing a trend. Just last week I took a long time trying to figure out what was missing from my bars when I respecced Unholy, then once I figured out it was Unholy Blight, I couldn’t figure out where the button was. Did they change it so badly that I needed to return to a trainer? Only after several rounds of the “open spellbook, open talent sheet” dance did I actually mouse over the now-passive talent.

• My ghoul was once a continuous source of fail for me. I used to have a pet attack macroed into most of my strikes. That is, until I figured out that if I didn’t have a target (say, because my current target had died), and I was aimed towards the next pack of trash, my ghoul would promptly leap into the next pack of trash with a sort of glee.

• I also used to do this with my felguard in Kara constantly. I remain amazed that my guild at the time didn’t hunt me down and kill me.

• Speaking of that guild, my recruitment story was a fail. Y’see, leveling up, I had actually completely skipped Hellfire Ramparts (which is really not hard to do at all). So when I got invited to do Heroic Ramparts with the people who would later be my future guildmates, I of course didn’t know about Omor the Unscarred’s Bane of Treachery. So I may have sorta-kinda caused a wipe by getting it cast on me and standing directly in front of the tree druid. To be fair, no one told me not to stand in front of the tree.

• There were also a few times in Kara that I failed to watch where I was going and fell off ledges, usually into the library. Whoops.

However, I never - ever - moved in a Flame Wreath. That, after all, would blow up the raid.

A while ago, Thermaltake announced that they (in conjunction with BMW) would be designing and producing a new, revolutionary computer chassis design, called Level 10. Instead of the standard chassis model - big box, everything in between, the same racks and hardware in the same places we always expect them - the Level 10 would almost invert the build of the standard PC. A central tower with multiple compartments, as you can see to the right, for the power supply, hard drives, optical drives, motherboard, everything. It’s the PC you know and love, but easier to access. Stylish, striking, and - as John Gruber puts it - “the first interesting PC design in recent memory that isn’t even vaguely an Apple rip. And it’s a true design — a rethinking of how things work, not just a layer of decoration.”

Of course, with the BMW design comes the BMW price - these babies are expected to retail for $700 in mid-October. Funnily enough, my birthday is in early October, so if anyone is feeling extremely generous… ;)

As for the rest of us, Maximum PC unboxed one and took lots of photos from start to finish. It looks absolutely enormous, which was the most surprising part for me. While I’ll probably never get ahold of one, I have to admit it has gotten me thinking about how workable the “central pillar” design is, perhaps for a more custom chassis. Maybe a DIY project?

I mentioned on Twitter that a guildie of mine had gotten kicked from a PUG because druids can’t tank. Luckily, I remembered to screenshot it, so here’s proof:

Incidentally, in case you’re wondering if it was a problem with this particular druid, it was not: he tanked two heroics for me later and did a fantastic job - one of the best bear tanks I’ve had the luxury of smacking mobs around with.

Someone should please tell our guild’s co-leader about this new and startling development in what druids can’t do, because apparently he’s been laboring under the mistaken impression that bears can tank. Thank goodness a random person on the internets has corrected us all!

It fixed itself.

Brewmaster!

Hooray!

So I woke up early this morning, thinking before I left for work I could finish off the Brewfest achievements and be Brewmaster Rajaat. A word of warning to anyone who was planning to save 250 tokens by buying the full Brewfest Garb in order to complete Disturbing the Peace, then selling the clothing back within 2 hours for a refund: don’t bother. I don’t know if it hasn’t worked since the beginning of the week, or if it was a hotfix or something with the Ony patch, but it no longer works may no longer work EDIT: I may have just gotten screwed. Thanks, Blizzard. As soon as I completed the achievement, my Brewfest Garb became nonrefundable. (Well, to be fair, my hat already was. I bought it early in the week.)

Hey, guess what? Yeah, it’s just me. My stuff can’t be sold back but plenty of other people can. Fanfuckingtastic.

So, yeah… 10 tokens. Now to ram race and daily quest my way back to 200 for the Brew of the Month Club, and 100 after that for the pink elekk. I should be able to get it done in 6 days or so, assuming I don’t get boned out of a full ram ride like I did last night.

Oh well. At least I have my other new title to keep me warm at night. And, uh, titled.

Last night:

Then, two attempts later (note to self: install a screenshot addon):

Got that one in just under the wire, eh?

Looks like I managed to shoot right past my one-year “blogiversary” without even noticing: my first post here was on September 4th, 2008.

I’ll have to make a very small cake with one candle in it. Perhaps a cupcake.