Saturday, January 12, 2008

Gettin' Stuff Done

I had a pretty productive day today in WoW.

For starters, my little hordie Lunapike hit level 38 and I decided to wander off to Westfall in the heart of Alliance territory and give solo'ing Deadmines a shot:

Ooooh, shiny stuff for my mount fund!



Aaaand, there ya have it, solo'd at level 38. A new record for me, because Tawyn solo'd it at level 41 (being primarily Marks-spec'd at the time.) Other then a few bad mistakes I made on Mr. Smite, and a VanCleef fight that was nearly too close for comfort (let's just say my health was down to about 5%), the run went quite smootly and I got a lot of stuff out of it that I was able to put in the Auction House. (Hehe, and did you notice the mini-Tux in a few of the screenshots? I love it.)

I've been having a lot of fun with Lunapike lately; I've been playing her a little more often and I've been inspired with new character ideas for her, roleplaying-wise. I think I want to write a short story about her. There is a special meaning behind her name afterall, I bet you didn't know that. Well two special meanings behind her name; one of them is in-character and one is out-of-character. I'll have to talk about those in a future post!

The second thing I did today was net about 2500 honor in PvP on Tawyn, thanks to randomly winding up actually in the middle of a few Alliance EotS premades (and yes, a few good old-fashioned hard-earned games as well) and EotS being the PvP daily. I now have 100 AB marks and 100 WSG marks, which is the most you can carry, so I'm gonna stick to EotS and AV for now-- sort of sad because AB and WSG are my favorites, but eh. Some of my guildies almost talked me into blowing nearly all my honor points and 30 WSG marks on some good pants... almost... in the end I opted not to because I didn't want to spend that much honor, now that I'm finally on the downhill side of the grind for my crossbow. If I decide to be superhardcore I might even have it next weekend, but I'm certainly not going to be holding my breath!

The third thing was a guild clear of Mechanar. We did pretty well, I think, considering that only one of us had ever run it before. Sure we had some wipes, but we also seemed to manage to pull off some crazy miracles on what otherwise might have been even more wipes. Having us all on Ventrilo has been a big help also. There's little I find more intense in this game, than something going wrong on a pull and somebody tossing out some crazy idea over voice chat, and then having it actually work. I even got to do some emergency trapwork a few of these times, and I think I did a pretty good job of it, too.

So now I've got the first half of the Arcatraz key, and if things go as planned I will be getting the second half tomorrow. I haven't gotten any "phat dungeon lewts" in a while so hopefully those are in the cards, but on the other hand, I'm really just doing these instances for the fun of it and for the whole experience of doing one. The loot is just secondary.

I have to say, WoW has taught me more about teamwork than any school "group projects" or even any real-life, money-making job. The only other thing I have ever felt so much teamwork in, was Orchestra back when I used to play the cello in school. There were times when you were playing music when you just really "got it" and realized that you were all working together, playing parts that all sounded strange alone, to make a beautiful song. Instances in WoW (and battlegrounds too) are really the same way.

I sort of had a realization today in Mech. Basically I checked the damage meters about halfway through, because I wanted to make sure I was doing okay, and because I won't lie, it's always thrilled me to be on top. But today when I looked at the meters, the first thing I thought wasn't "Oh yay I'm on top /flex". Nope. It was "Wow... look at how well we're all doing." The meters looked exactly like they should. Nobody was doing a bad job. Three awesome DPS/CC doing their job and an awesome tank doing his job and an awesome healer doing his job, and together we were clearing this difficult instance. It was really a neat moment for me to feel that same synergy that I haven't felt since my Orchestra days.

And yet again I realize that a video game has taught me a life lesson. Now if only we can get more people in the general public to realize that games can be good for you! =P

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice! Now time to make a new one and get there SOONER! :)

If it weren't for time constraints, I'd have gone through the whole thing (or die trying!) much earlier. I've gone up to the Goblin Foundry and think I could have made it past there, if not for a missed Concussive Shot and a bit of newbishness of my part in not pulling the mob farther away from the boss to cater for such a situation...

And it was not even twinked, save for a +5 AGI and +3 INT chants, the remaining gear was plain AH greens with a +16 armor kit at best...

It's a lot of fun, but requires a LOT of time and hunters get to do it better than other classes because we can tank, heal and DPS *AND* we can see incoming patrols on the minimap before they get to us! ;)

Of course, doing it after 30~32 is even better: you get FD @ 30 and, by the time you hit 32, you can have both Intimidation and 2/2 Bestial Discipline...

I'll have to give it another try one of these nights, even though I'll probably need to negotiate a temporary disable of my parental controls as 2.5 hours won't get me to the end, unless I try and FD my way to the bosses! :)

Viktel said...

Congrats! That was a full day indeed.

Anonymous said...

very nice...1 question what addon are you using that tells you the item value off the loot..not rating buster but the 1 beneath that tells you the ammount off bids and the ammount was sold for in AH?

Pike said...

@ Anonymous - it's called "Auctioneer"

Anonymous said...

thanks and dam fast response :D