At last my arm is complete!

... is what I would have yelled had we A) Gotten the Prince down and/or B) he dropped the bow.

Neither event happened. In all three attempts on the Prince, who usually goes down fairly easily, we had terrible luck with inferno placement and just kept wiping... and since we didn't have a warlock, we had skipped Shade... so we eventually had respawns and not enough interest to re-clear all the way to the Prince.

So my ennui continues - as you can tell since I write this post 5 days after the fact!

In the meantime, I have been spending some time with my Shaman in Dustwallow Marsh and as much as I like the quests, I just can not stand the quick respawn rate on all the MoBs... I mean you kill your way to the objective and while you are sitting down and getting your mana back the mobs respawn behind you and jump you... and you've already killed them once! So frickin' annoying.

Well I've hit level 38 with him and there doesn't seem to be much left in that area so I will be moving on... maybe to Stranglethorn.

In the meantime, have a happy holiday... maybe a nice new year and I hope to have many, many more posts in the coming year.

(Don't get the reference in the title? Go see "Sweeney Todd")

I miss the loot!

It's been months and many runs and there has not been a hunter drop of anything I have needed in a long time. If not for the belt I bought from PVPing, I would have no new gear to speak of.

I am getting up there in Badges of Justice so I may get the Shifting Camouflage Pants in a month or two!

It seems like a long time ago when Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix dropped for my group (and I wasn't there) and there have certainly been a bunch of Prince deaths since, but has he dropped that bow again? Sure, the one other time I wasn't there -- a rogue got it.

I have not gotten any real loot in so long I forgot how it feels to put on that new piece of armor, flex and see how much your DPS goes up.

I think maybe that is tempering my excitement for the game and my ennui about keeping up with this site. I would really like to be writing 4-7 entries a week, and now that work is not quite so busy I certainly have time for it, but I just don't have the motivation. So on Sunday, everyone say a little prayer to Elune for getting me the Bow and if it drops, I promise to write 5 entries of some sort next week.

Without internet, do we exist?

Arggghhh! for the last week I have had severely limited service to the internet as my throughput of cable seems to have been throttled back to nothing!

Generally in the afternoon, we have some TV on the cable boxes and some connection to the internet, but not really enough to play WoW. By 8PM, the cable boxes are useless messes of pixelation and the cable modem is a doorstop.

Comcast comes today to hopefully fix the problem, but I don't have high hopes... I think they are going to tell me that the cable has to be re-run from the hub... which means under three driveways and the last time that happened it took three months to complete.

Verizon did lay fiber optic in front of my house, so if it really becomes a problem, I can go that route.

But what about poor Mervyn (and Kelvyn my level 34 Shaman who is exploring Dustwallow Marsh) do they still exist if I have no connection to them?

I suppose as long as no one logs in as me and types "DELETE" they are probably somewhere in the nether.

It's just I miss them -- hopefully I'll be back soon

DRAMA

First I must apologize: I've had a general malaise hanging over me and just haven't felt like writing. This simple post has taken me over three days to complete. Maybe I'm coming down with some kind of holiday bug or WoW ennui? In any case, I appreciate you coming here and taking the time to read my works, even if you're all lurkers and never comment. On to the Post.

Every since my guild decided to really focus on end-game progression there has been problems and grumbling within the guild. We've had a smattering of /gquits and a lot of screaming in private channels on vent.

In part it is these 25-man teams that just seems to be made to exclude people, in part it is the fact that no one seems to be able to agree on raiding nights, I'm sure there are other reasons, but it seems like everyone was on edge for quite awhile. And then something happened; it was the kind of thing that, depending upon the reaction, could pull the guild apart or make it more cohesive. Luckily, the latter came about and, at least for a little while, end-game raiding complaining quieted down.

What happened? you ask. Well, I'll tell ya.

My Guild does not use the DKP system, we use the Suicide Kings, which is basically a list. The person on the top of the list has the first shot at the loot, if they take it, they drop to the bottom of the list and everyone else moves up.

This story involves a well respecting member of the guild, funny, good at his role, a favorite of the officers, a class leader and the designated disenchanter of Tokens for his class.

A T4 shoulder token dropped and no one requested it, so this person, who was at the very top of the Suicide Kings list, took the token in order to DE it.

So he turned in the token for gear and then, instead of disenchanting it just sent two void crystals to the Guild Bank AND THEN SHOWED UP THE NEXT NIGHT FOR THE RAID IN HIS NEW T4 SHOULDERS. So in essence he took the gear without suiciding himself down the list.

As punishment, the Guild Leader and officers present made him DE the gear then and there and then suicided him to the bottom of the list and asked him to leave the raid.

Many people in the guild thought this was too lenient as the guild charter says that any "Ninja" type move will be grounds for expulsion from the guild.

Of course, this was just the Officers' first reaction they had not had a chance to debate the issue they continued to have a very somber raid night.

When the incident was revisited and discussed amongst the membership and officers a decision to /gkick was decided, even though the culprit claimed all along that all he wanted to do was just "check out" the shoulders, however, his protest rang silent and his regardless of his motives his actions really rocked the guild.

In the end, he quit before he could be kicked, but in a final goodbye on the forums he never owned up to the fact that he did something wrong... in fact, he claimed he was /gquiting because he felt he had been treated unfairly (by being made to DE the item and then be suicided to the bottom of the list).

This was a likable, funny, person who in leaving the guild in such spectacular fashion, he brought such pain and angst that he actually brought us all together... at least momentarily.

Sticking it to Your Allies

Let’s all admit this right here and now... there are more people in our guild, in our party, in our raid on the trade channel, etc that we just want to gank, than there will ever be on the opposite side of the server.

As a hunter we have a wonderful tool called Misdirection, in which we can put aggro onto anyone in our party or raid. I usually like the people I play with, so I only jokingly announce that I am casting misdirection on the healers, but there have been rare instances where I just want to send a whole bunch of MoBs against an annoying mage, warlock, rogue or priest just because I can. So far, I have controlled those urges, but maybe one day I will follow through on that threat.

However, I feel it will be ultimately unsatisfying… why? Because while misdirection is nice, you’re not shoving that knife blade into the toon yourself, and it seems only fair that you should be able to do that.

The other day, in the chat channel, I saw someone write, “Hunters are useless I always kick them out of any party I am in.” I started to write in response, “Misdirection on …” but then I remembered I was on my level 30 shaman and that wouldn’t make sense, plus other hunters said a few things, nothing as threatening as I was going to write, but they defended the class nicely.

On a related note, I was farming Netherdragon Scales up in Netherstorm and it is just strange to be attacking M0Bs that are green. They walk by you; they say “Hey how’s it going? Thanks for defending us down there in Shadowmoon.”
“My pleasure, you gave me a great mount for doing so,” And then you send your pet on them, kill them and skin them for their dragon scales… it seems rather heartless.

ZA, 2.3 QQ, etc.

Man, it's been a hell of a week.

The meeting at work went great... thinks for asking.

Since I had to work late on Tuesday, in my downtime, I grabbed the laptop that is pre-loaded with WoW, updated it with the patch, got on-line made my [Quiver of a Thousand Feathers] put 100 feathers up on the AH (at 40 gold a stack), did the cooking quest and stationed myself at the Light's Hope Chapel and logged.

Got home Tuesday at 8:30PM, plopped myself in front of the computer and set the patch to install, turned and asked my wife and children how their day was. Turned back to the computer when the patch was done, got a few new add-ons, put my headset on, logged in and was ready for Zul A'man.

We had a really good time there too. We downed Nalorakk in two shots (he dropped the [Robes of Heavenly Purpose]) and then we moved on to Akil'zon, and we tried about four times to down him, got him to 24% on one of the attempts. We were happy with our performance. The other guild group didn't make it passed the waves of Amani'shi Warbringer so we were pretty proud of ourselves.

Before bed I farmed the [Pattern: Bag of Many Hides] and checked my auctions (jerks had undercut my feathers). Eventually I lowered the price to 25 gold per stack and they sold no problem, I also sold a ton of Heavy Knothide Leather (they would sell as soon as I listed them) and one of those nice leatherworking bags for 445 gold (that won't happen again, the price has already dropped to 250!) So I made about 1,000 gold in two days, through some nice planning on my part.

Of course, I got some serious and deserved Spouse Aggro in the morning for coming home and ignoring the family.

New Topic: Okay... so the hunter forums are all in an uproar because we lost the following abilities: Double Trapping and Feign Death Drinking. I never double trapped, although things do sometimes walk into my traps unintentionally so I think this change is not a real well thought out one, since our CC is not very target specific, plus it seriously nerfs the Survival tree. The FD Drink thing, I also never used. I would put a Superior Mana Oil on my weapon and use Elixir of Draenic Wisdom, Aspect of the Viper, plus some fel mana pots to make sure I had enough Mana for the long fights. I never liked how the FD drinking took you and your pet out of the fight, so no loss there, but the crying that is going on on the forums, after all our great buffs in 2.3, is personally embarrassing to me.

Finally, I will be away for the next week doing the Family Thanksgiving thing, so I will miss our next two ZA runs... Alas. I will try and post in that time, but if I don't get a chance to, I'll be back in a week.

Patch Day, working alot, Working late, oh my...

Okay, so I have 80 minutes before a big meeting for which I have been preparing for quite awhile, hence the slow down in posts.

I will be working until 8PM tonight get home at 8:30 and go to ZA, assuming everything loads in correctly, at 9PM.

I have two posts already written in my head (one about allies one about guild stuff) but no time to put them down on "paper".

Maybe tomorrow.