A Helluva Week

Vacation was outstanding. Beautiful weather, fun RL stuff, fun WoW stuff. Although the kid got scared and backed out of a helicopter ride over the falls (seconds before daddy paid for the tickets, FTW!!!!!!!), she did have the courage to ride the giant ferris wheel that overlooks the natural wonder. If you're ever up for a laugh, try to get a 3 year old to pronounce Niagara. Its a hoot.

Ok, highlights of the WoW week.....where to start where to start?

Karazhan

Smashed up the place some more. Killed Prince pretty easily, although the positioning of Infernals is sorta like ordering from the drive thru. They F you at the drive thru.

In bigger news, Nightbane is dead. I had the extreme pleasure of staring up the dragon's @ss for 11 and a half minutes as a corpse during our 14 minute first kill. Holy frustration, Batman!!!!! Proud of the team. Ready to smash something at being cornered by some Charred earth and then being feared right into a tail swipe one-shot. Grrr. but in the end, Yay!

Netherspite is all that remains.

And then to start off the next raid week, we cleared everything up to and including Shade of Aran and Illhoof on our first night, which basically signifies that we can consider Kara to be only a 2 night event.

Zul'Aman

With Nightbane down, we're pretending that we've cleared Kara. Sure, one boss left, but whatever, we're anxious.

New raid schedule is 2 nights Kara, one night ZA.

First night in ZA, what a blast. The music score constantly reminds me of something out of Red Dawn. Wolverines!!!!!

Pretty big jump on the difficulty scale from Kara. Died several times on trash. Died several times on Nalorak. Only had 2 healers, which for our level of gear progression, is probably just on the fringe of do-able. This night, it came out on the not-so-do-able side of the fringe.

43 gold worth of repairs. 80 gold in elixirs. 25 gold in foodstuffs for me and Condoleezza. 12 gold in oils and scrolls. 5 gold in arrows.

2.5 hours of fun in a new challenging instance. Priceless.


Shrimpin' Aint Easy

Unless you're a 375 fisherman. Which I now am. Look out, Mr. Pinchy, here I come.

249 Resil

Went out and bought three of the new blue PvP gear items available in patch 2.4 to put together a resilliance set. In my PvP set, I'm at 249 resilliance. The difference is just remarkable. So much more staying power in BG's.

I'd solo defend AB nodes against three attackers.

I ran back lots of WSG flags.

Defended towers in AV.

The difference is huge, and made BG so much more fun.

And I return to the Arena

Just a few days after getting my PvP set, a long lost friend logs in and pst's me for the first time in months. He was my arena partner before he took a WoW break. I haven't arena'd since.

So now we've got a 2's team WeHeartWelfare.

Haven't played yet, but I'm hoping to win 3 of 10 games per week to maintain sanity and a steady stream of food stamps arena points.


Exalterated

The folks over at the SSO just adore me. They let me buy gave me a new necklace to show their love. Pretty cool when it procs, but does leave me 8 points under the hit cap.

And the real big news....

I finally caved in and went Skinning / Leatherworking. Dropped Mining, took up skinning. Spent a day or two traipsing around Azeroth one-shotting low level stuff for skins. Ding 375. Dropped Herbalism. Cried for an hour or two. Took up Leatherworking. Spent a day or two using mats farmed while levelling skinning, grinding the buhjeezus out of the scorpids in the Blasted Lands, and then killing every Clefthoof in Nagrand about 150 times. Ding 375.

I did cheat and buy a few stacks of Thick Leather because that was just getting tedious.

Also cheated when a yellow recipe at level 372 failed to give me a level up on THREE CONSECUTIVE TRIES. Frustrating. Got sick and tired of slaughtering Clefthoofz. Bought a few stacks of Thick Knothide Leather. Joy.

The jury is still out on whether I'm happy with the choice, but that's the fuel for another post.