Busy Weekend

Out of town again, so I don't know how much I'll play this week, but a couple of bullet points on the weekend:

- Ran LBRS with a pickup group, which ended up being a moderate success - it's an interesting, if long, zone.

- Ran Underbog with more wipes than I usually like, but we made it all the way through, I got a nice new set of throwing knives, and dinged Friendly with Cenarion Expedition.

- Got through all the Midsummer quests except for the dungeon-run one, including the steal-the-enemy-fire ones, and now have the pieces of a totally over-the-top angel-of-light suit, complete with halo :)

- Finished the Draenei starting areas (as much as I could - many of the quests seem to be race-limited, which was disappointing), finished a number of other nagging quests, and am very close to hitting Exalted with Gnomeregan, and am confident that I can hit Exalted with Exodar fairly easily after clearing Zangarmarsh.

Not exactly racing towards 70, but I enjoy setting my own wacky goals :)

Noobishness

Spent the last couple nights running the Draenei starting area - it's definitely, like the BE starting area, a step up from the first set. More interactivity, more interesting quest lines - I'm enjoying it. Even if they nerfed the rep rewards, unlike ALL THE OTHER starting areas :P

Quick Wins are Fun

I had to work a couple hours of overtime last night, so I hopped on, ran one WSG with my pally, won it, and hopped off. I'm catching the rhythm of Warsong Gulch as a healer, as opposed to a stealth ganker - Blessing of Freedom? Rocks. I still need some practice before I'll be really useful, and I'm certainly not twinked enough to be really uber, but I'm having fun.

Another long weekend

Only ran one instance - Blood Furnace - but FINALLY got a piece of gear I could use out of it. My first socketed item, too. Finished the rest of the quests in Hellfire Citadel, dinged Exalted with Darnassus, and then ran WSG a bunch of times on my Horde Pally, which was fun, although it's annoying running 10-19 when you're not a twink.

My plan, after consulting various charts and strategy guides, is going to be to run Slave Pens and Underbog several times each to get my Cenarion Expedition rep up before starting all of the Zangarmarsh quests. I also want to run Scholo, Strat, and BRD again, but I'm not going to sit around and wait for those. While waiting for groups I may see what WSG is like in the 60-69 bracket these days - I expect it's dead, since there are no rewards above 60 other than the title you get for maxing all three Azeroth battlegrounds reps. Which I am totally not going to do. Really.

Completionism Strikes Again

Not willing to sign on for another late night instance, I took care of my AH business and wandered around a bit. Completely failed to solo the group quest that I am now TEN LEVELS OVER, and decided to do something a little less challenging.

Like noob quests.

Seriously, I spent an hour and a half last night finishing all of the quests in Dun Morogh. Got my bow skill up a hundred points or so, dinged Exalted with Ironforge, and felt like the biggest loser ever -but also felt kinda good that I'd gotten it done. I think I have a problem.

A General Rule

The guy whose first question to the female toons in the group is "Are you a chick IRL?" is, invariably, an asshole. Last night's BRD run was no exception - we got to Windsor, then had to add in the Wipemaster General, and did not get much further before he wandered off to respec and I bailed. I feel bad about bailing - to a degree - because the rest of the group was really very solid, but it was after midnight and I had no desire to sit on my thumb for 20 minutes while the "tank" screwed around in Ironforge.

(No sign of the Scholo folks from the previous evening, which was no surprise...)

Scholomance

Did some minor housekeeping last night, went fishing, and ended up hooking up with a Scholo group. We got a bit further than the last time I'd gone, but didn't do any bosses or actually finish any quests before our tank bailed. We sort of casually talked about doing it again tonight - I don't have my heart set on it but if I'm on and they're on, I'll run it again.

Notes

Actual work stuff delayed this post, so the details aren't all that clear from this weekend, but I know I did the following:

- Ran Strat Live (we didn't finish the last boss, but I cleared two of my quests)
- Ran BRD (Short run, did Bael'gar and talked to Windsor. Bael'gar is a PAIN.)
- Ran Ramparts (Nice and smooth, minus some minor personnel juggling in the middle. No good items to equip, although I got a BoE blue out of a chest)
- Cleared several quests in Hellfire Peninsula, including the bombing runs, which were fun.
- Cleared some of my rep-gain inventory, dinging Friendly with Thorium Brotherhood (mostly to get the three stacks of Dark Iron Residue out of my bank) and Honored with Argent Dawn. Also in the process of running Ramparts dinged Honored with Honor Hold, netting me a nice sword.
- Cleared a few more Azeroth quests here and there - my quest logs are pretty low as a result, which is a nice change. I still need to kill Obsidion, though.

Overall, it felt like a productive weekend, even though my server was down for several hours on Saturday. I got the house cleaned, too!

Blizzard Pwns Thottbot

No, really. First thing I'm going to do when I get home is turn off data collection - why provide it to a third party when I'm getting it straight from the source?

Ran a couple of quests last night, nothing of serious interest. It was nice to be able to jump in for an hour, feel like I made progress, and log out when I felt like it.

A good pickup group

I didn't really plan to get much done last night, but a solidly leveled group was looking for one more for Blood Furnace, so I joined up. It was one of the best PUGs I've done - smooth as silk, cleared the whole thing. Didn't get any particularly good loot but the quest reward finally replaced my lvl 45 Sergeant's Cape. I didn't discover til after we were done that I was the replacement for a mage that had wiped the group on the second pull and stormed off threatening to report somebody. In contrast to him, I was apparently a god :) And it's a great instance to be a rogue in - I handled the crowd control with no difficulties, and we never had a pull we couldn't take.

It was fun to run a group successfully that had a less-than-typical makeup, too. We had a Warrior as main tank, a Shaman off-tanking, a druid healing, another druid doing ranged DPS (and probably off-healing, too) and me doing CC and melee DPS. Everyone filled their roles with no issues. Overall, a very satisfying run.

And I did it with just one shot of Vanish left in the tank, and never had to use it - now THAT'S a good group.

Stuck in Azeroth

I thought I was done with it - I really did. But I finally got around to clearing up some of the old group quests that had been sitting in my log for twelve levels, and now I want to clean up more zones. Damn my completist urges. At least I got everything ready for another BRD run, should I ever desire to do such a thing.

I also got in a very bad Scholo/Strat group - we wiped three times in the first two rooms of Scholo, decided to run Strat instead, wiped at least five more times, and finally I gave up. Half an hour later, I discover that the remaining members of the group have found a 70 druid and a 65 mage and are chugging merrily along. Grr. I still want to clear those instances, but I'm expecting it to take a while.

I do enjoy knocking out all of these quests and moving forward along the various attunement paths, but it is mildly frustrating that I don't progress in any other way - I don't get enough xp to notice, and of course anything less than a lvl 60 blue or, probably, purple, is going to be worse than what I already have, with the exception of some special-use trinkets. It's not like I raced through the game and am now paying the price by having outleveled the content - on the contrary, I've taken my sweet time and still there's way more content at 60 than I'll see before 70 unless I give up on leveling entirely. This shouldn't be a bad thing, but it puts me in a weird place - I don't want to move further into Outland while I have all of these Azeroth quests hanging around. I guess I'll just continue to bounce back and forth. I do wish Blizzard rejiggered the old 60 content to keep it fresh for people in my shoes who came to the table late, though. As it is, no one but the congenitally stubborn has avoided BC this far, and once you have BC, why run the old content at all?