Spiderheart hit level 80 this afternoon while doing quests for the Brunhildvar in Storm Peaks, an area and set of quests I continue to love.
Later in the day, I did my first heroic-level tanking, for acquaintance sin the Nexus. At first I stank. Then I stank some more. Gradually I didn't stink quite so much. We finished up downright okay.
I have a lot to master yet.
Yeah, as most WoW players know by now, the public test realms are active and people are poking at the material lined up for patch 3.1. (We're currently at 3.0.8, for the rest of you; Blizzard's practice is that .0, .1, .2, and so on are the substantial ones, with new dungeons and stuff.) I'm letting them pass by, as part of my philosophy of focusing on what's most rewarding to me. Others can hassle the technical problems, the sheer volume of participants, and the ongoing changes; I'll pay attention, some, as we get close to a release date.
If you want to see PTR fun (and it can be a lot of fun), go check out Eleanor Holmes or someone. I'll be here chuggin' along.
I know there's not particularly a lot of call for felcloth anymore, but I wanted to make shard bags for a couple warlocks in Red Harvest, so went to rustle some up. Remembering a previous bit of advice I'd encountered, I went to the east wing of Dire Maul, going in through the back door at Lariss Pavilion and just hitting the satyr-infested part. I scored 24 pieces in two passes, and got to admire the scenery as I went.
The big priority of Red Harvest as a guild is to do fun stuff. Recently joined-up friends transferred over some existing characters, and we've been helping fill out their gear, quests, and so on. Today three of us (Spiderheart; 78 death knight; Jaldorn, 77 shaman; Akaa, 73 holy paladin) took Radovan (63 rogue) through Hellfire Ramparts and Blood Furnace.
Now, I write about Akaa from time to time. Her player has this feature: she is really at her best when she feels excited and challenged. It's tedium that drives her quality of play down. She's been reading Banana Shoulders (and incorporating advice in e-mail from Elle, for which much thanks), and poking at advice and accounts of play, and she really wanted to try pushing it a bit.
So we pushed it.
This is all the enemies in the room with the switch that unleashes Broggok, the big floating eye boss in Blood Furnace. Other roundups I didn't get good screenshots of included sets like "everyone in that big platform in Ramparts before the paths to the last two bosses". The only one we really had trouble with was "everyone in the curving hallway with fel orc transformation booths"; the stuns + the silences added up to significant trouble, and Jaldorn saved the day with timely self-rez and healing. Apart from that, more or less everything fell without a lot of fuss, but with enough workout for Akaa that she felt it was really worth the effort to come along.
That was so much fun. I was already looking forward to taking part in Jaldorn's long-held goal of working through all the Outland instances, but now I'm doing so even more.
As you can see:
I owe my non-WoW-playing readers a post about the achievement system, along with other stuff. The short form is that you get these points for accomplishing discrete tasks. Thus I got 15 points when Spider earned exalted status with the Kurenai, and simultaneously earned another 10 because it was the tenth group she'd gotten exalted with.
The Kurenai are one of the groups that sell mounts to those exalted with them. Check out Spider on her new cobalt war talbuk:
I can't remember right now if this is actually the first time I completed the Kurenai grind, or the second. Still a novelty, in any event, and one I'm happy to have done.
Let me tell you about my guild. I'm really happy with it.
We are a small group: we have, right now, seven folks who put in some significant play time each day and an eighth who plays as his work schedule allows. (I'm told that growing a small business from "just me" to "me plus a couple of employees" is a whole lot of work. I believe it.) We span a couple of decades in age and the mainland US's three time zones.
One of the great pleasures of my life is making connections between people I like who hadn't known each other. Red Harvest is becoming sort of a core sample of my years playing WoW, with people I've known anywhere from a few months to several years, plus at least one I knew for a long time before WoW came along. And people seem to be enjoying each others' company.
What we all share...well, one of the things we all share is an appreciation for the fragility of camaraderie. We know, for instance, not to invite in friends of friends without some prior screening. We know that it's very hard to make any decisions at all on a basis of equal footing with more than, oh, a dozen or so members. We know that we're fortunate in being able to foist the work of raid organization off onto the raid alliance, leaving us free to be social and thinking about 5- and 10-person challenges only.
The name is a Dashiell Hammett allusion because that's the way I roll. :)
We operate in a way that is, I think, distinctive to the mature part of a successful game's lifespan. All of us already have at least one level 80 character, and we've done most—not all—of the instances and raids available so far. We know how this stuff works. So now we all feel at leisure to take these characters and do exactly what we want with them at exactly the pace we want. Making progress at it, too.
Feels good.
Death knights get their own special mounts. I'm really happy with Spiderheart's, as seen here over Shattrath City in the company of guildmate Jaldorn:
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