Elkagorasa the Casual

Late Saturday night, I logged on to run Ulduar with my druid (level 100). I thought her combination of healing, and tank would make her a cinch for completing getting Glory to the Ulduar raider . Upon entering the raid zone, a guildie pinged me and asked if they (husband and wife) could help out. They both had the achievement and would be able to help. Sure! Liked music on this video. (Start - Zone in, check raid, 10-man, zone out, change raid to 25-man, zone in, talk to Brann, realized need to talk to Norgannon before!?!, zone out, reset raid, try again) While they got ready, I started the tank fight . On my warlock, this was easy. I was able to DPS down the tank and move on quickly. Some reason, in bear and cat, I could not do take down Leviathan for orbit-uary. I ended up having to bring in 3 of the tanks and quickly hop between them. I ran out of ammo on the second, but the DOT took him down before I could jump to the third. Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare OK, we had 3 peopl...

Dia's Nightmarish Leggings . Nov em ber has been a fun month for me. Let me start off this post with this. These peculiar stretch pants are available in both male and female sizes, horde and alliance. Yes, it looks like you have two skeletal gnomes in your pants, trying to climb out, or maybe they're simply groping your legs and got stuck in the bandages. This has to be extremely uncomfortable for your toon to wear, especially while sitting down. That permanent scowl on my orc's face? Yeah, now you know why.. Where you ask? Well, Elkagorasa was invited to a Normal HFC raid. This group raids regularly Sunday nights (local time) at a reasonable hour! You know that ideal 8PM - Midnight PST. See my oldest daughter plays rec. soccer. Her team had a scrimmage the other night with a similar aged boys team. One of the boys on the opposing team happened to be a boy she went to school with back in Kindergarten (9y ago). His dad still plays WoW. Overall, that first HFC...

Over the weekend, I only had a couple hours to play. Mostly the kids are adjusting to summer vacation hours, so they're not getting in bed until rather late at night. This left me only about 2-3 hours a few days to play. :-| I worked on my Draenor Pathfinder achievement prerequisites. Securing Draenor : As of Friday, I had 3 remaining bonus objectives to complete. I grabbed the the scouting missions from my QM and queued them all up. The hardest, IMHO, was Shattrath Harbor . This zone had a number of 101-102 elites that would dismount me when trying to run out of there. I wanted to run as I was also working on my Explore Talador and  treasures collection (64:100).  Draenor Loremaster : I made no progress with the  Arak storyline. ATM, I have only completed 3 of the storylines. I feel that when I complete these quests, the exploration will fall into place.  Reputation : I realized that I hadn't opened up tier-3 on my trading post . This tier increases you...

Last night, after I finished my dailies for the Netherwing, I decided to go run Ulduar for both the achievement mount and hopefully, Mimiron's head. 30 minutes of emptying bags, and turning in quest items, I finally show up at the entrance of Ulduar. I then spent the next 3 hours gathering achievements, until I had to give up for the day (2am local) and go get some sleep. Let's start here.This quick 6 minute long video is based on running with a level 100 toon. This is extremely helpful in seeing the fights from that perspective before hand.. Orbit-uary - This was easier than mention in the video. When your DPS is doing 1 million damage using the main (button 1) cannon, why use anything else.  Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare - I am at 8:25 dwarfs at the moment. It appears that the main technique is you have to do damage to the dwarf after the boss is pulled down. As a destro warlock, my technique was to splash a rain of fire over their mole machine. This would aggro them fo...

A month ago, I decided for glory and heck , just to try my luck, I solo'd ICC in attempts to get the mount. I decided to run this with my druid because it seemed to provide me the best dps and heals combination. As you can imagine, there was not a single issue soloing this content. In fact, on a couple bosses, I killed them too fast and didn't get the achievement the first time through (full house). That is OK, because Once Bitten requires at least two attempts at the boss to complete the achievement. Plus, if like me (i.e. boosted druid), you need to clear the raid once on Normal, and a second time on Heroic. UPDATED: As of last night, I have completed this and acquired my drake. Using the add-on ' RaidAchievement ' helped with the Lich King achievement, and I would highly suggest it, just need to make sure you download the ' legacy ' modules. Here's been my strategy for each of these achievements so far: Lord Marrowgar - Boned - burn him down quickl...

As I've stated before, I have guildies who are running legacy content for achievements, titles and mounts. Last August, I helped a guildie get her Sarth+3 drake mount. 2 days ago, she called in guild for a healer! *PLEASE* and I tried to bring in my disc priest. Sadly, she's never ran ICC 25-man, so she couldn't get into the raid for 25-heroic. Doing some research, I found that it's absolutely soloable. Sure Disc has really low DPS, but it is  possible to complete. Here's the first few bosses done by a level 90 shadow/disc priest. Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 This got me thinking... why my priest? That drake boss... Ok, so how do I heal the boss to full health in order to move on. Warlocks have 0 healing abilities, maybe I could pack along a big bag of bandages and 'heal' it up that way..  I could call in a healer, like Taur did.. On the other hand, my druid can heal and dps like a champ. Heck, maybe even heal enough in feral spec!? While I am at it...

Have you test drove the new proving grounds that came in patch 5.4? It's a really cool concept. You enter a solo scenario, pick the raid role you want to practice on, then FIGHT! Silver, fight 7 - get globule to hit Mystic so he doesn't cast heals. To get each achievement you need to complete a series of fights within the time period. They start off easy, 1 mob, and increase in number of mobs up to the final fight. You exceed the time-limit on a single fight in the series and it resets COMPLETELY back to the first fight of the round. So far, Elk has completed the Bronze level. There's a really great comments on Wowhead by Voxxell ( Bronze ,  Silver , Gold ) that details what you can expect at this level. I feel that I could have completed the Silver level, except I kept getting hardware issues. (think new video drivers I installed this week will fix it). The problem I see is that the implementation isn't much more than animated training dummies. Sure, in the ...

As of recently, my dungeon queue time wait activity has been fishing. I pop over to Twilight Highlands  and start fishing up the Deepsea Sagefish . These lovely fish are now appearing (since about January) in pools along the ocean front. In about 15 minutes time, I can tend to fish up about 20-30 fish. Benefits?  Food - Severed Sagefish Head (+90 Int) or  Delicious Sagefish Tail (+90 Spirit).  The raw fish are selling individually for about 5g. Free 100g for each stack of 20 fish. Guild Achieves. Yeah, OOT is a level 25 guild, but we still don't have either " That's a lot of bait " or " Time to open a restaurant ". Guild, Go Fish. We're currently 1100 recipes from the cooking achieve and 4000 fish caught in pools. I don't know about you, but the Seafood Magnifique has got to be the craziest raid food I've seen (so far). Why would I want to eat something from a basket with a crab in it (which BTW comes from a recipe that doesn't...

MMO Melting Pot has a great way to get yourself one of those nifty mounts. Cheeper than the pretty pony, and definitely not going to have hundreds of them showing up on day one. I'd personally love to get one for this lock , but not about to go spamming my friends.

I logged on earlier this afternoon to be greeted by one of OOT's resident altaholics, Taurohtar , finishing off the Winter Veil achievement A-Caroling We Will Go . This achievement has you fly around to each of your enemy's capitol cities and sing a little festive song . Intrigued, I joined her along on one instance of completeing this achievement. Funny enough on her warlock . Gratefully, Taur went through it one more time for me and sent along these instructions and screenies. So, here's Taurohtar un-edited. 1.       Take the portal to Dragonmaw port ( Equip your sweater! ) ( Don't leave it in the bank as I did ).  2.       Travel in an almost straight western direction 3.       Towards Ironforge 4.       When you pass through the wetlands, you’ll know you’re on the right track if you see these hills. 5. You’ll fly past the front of IF by way of the eastern side. 6. Hopefully you’ve been smar...

Reading through some of the release notes on Mists of Panderia , I think Blizzard is really pushing to involve the Casual players. The main evidence I see is their work on expanding the end-game content that is available to players. Scenarios: These scenarios are ranging from 3 people (i.e. close friends) to 25 people (nice pug size). Raid fail anyone? The timing fits nicely with new parents, 10 - 30 minutes, short enough in case the kids wake-up. The immediate-ness of them, i.e. defend Goldshire, makes them sound more 'important' than a simply group quest. I think this will have the advantage of not feeling like a 'daily', but still provide something for those that want the extra credit/points.  Note, I personally hate doing dailies. Challenge-dungeons: Now, this one has an interesting twist. Complete a dungeon in a certain way and be rewarded things like gear, pets, mounts and achievements.  Ok, but the cool twist is it will change in complexity as your avera...

If you have a lower level alt, now is the time to start running them around Azeroth. Find yourself a friendly guildie with a 2-man rocket and start flying around to all those Inns. Grab the flight paths and (based on last year) a nice bit of XP. It's a quest, so wear your BOA gear (and guild tabards) to get an extra bonus. This year, Blizzard ( reference ) has removed some of the randomness in getting the achievement , by making the Sinister pet a vendor item (instead of solely a random drop). I like, now if I could just BUY my warlock mount .. Still a little angry about that. Day 1: Tuesday 10-18-2011 - Got on at 1AM, Tricky Treats and a mask. Day 1.5: 10-18-2011 PM - Hallowed Helm (that I couldn't loot because I have one in the bank). Day 2: 10-19-2011: Sinister Squashling Day 3: 10-20-2011: Sinister Saber (now I can summon pumpkin men in BGs, reforge off the agility and it MIGHT be viable??). Day ?: I now have 5 Squash, thinking about making pies.

Elkagorasa want's to go camping. He wants the option to setup in some off the beaten path and visit there on a regular basis. There's a tent, a basic campfire and accessibility to some location uniquely his own. He want's to be able to simply invoke some command and go back to this location at will. Why? For one, Elk is only 1 batch of stormchops away from Chef Elk . This recipe only drops from the cooking daily out in Shattrath ; a portal and long flight into town. Shattrath were the cooking daily has you flying all over the continent. If he could simply plop down in front of Rokk , it would be lovely. Speaking of cooking dailies, I just recently found that there are cooking dailies, with related achievements in all of the various Horde cities, " Let's Do Lunch! ". Elk has completed the those in Orgrimmar, but now if he wants those achievements, will need to start regular trips to Thunder Bluff and Undercity. Ugh! (where are those portals??) Next, E...

My guild  has a really hard time completing the guild dungeon challenges each week. Typically we only get 1 or 2 of the seven completed. In fact, it took until last night for us to get the Challenging achievement for 50 guild challenges completed. (Not bad, considering we're already level 23 , that's a lot of questing). Thanks to Coren and Brewfest, we completed 7 guild dungeon runs last night in less than 1 hour (guild tank, heals and 1 DPS). So, if your guild is like mine, at least try to max out your potential with this event. Brewfest ends October 5th. You can potentially do this 3 more times (now until Monday night, next week & night of Tuesday 4th). That's 300k guild XP * 21 dungeons. To get to level 24, we need a total around ~ 53 million XP . That's basically a free 6 million guild XP while you grind for trinkets (and the occasional mount).

Over at Icy Vein's they've done an excellent job with a new 2011 Brewfest achievement guide, even down to a mini-map of the various vendors in both Horde and Alliance zones. I am happy to see that they put out a new 2011 edition of the mug . I'll probably be pugging Coren tonight until I see that dagger drop!

One of the easy achievements I still have to complete is " Drown your sorrows ". Basically you are to drink each of the various beverages introduced with Cataclysm. I wanted a quick break down of where I can get each of these items. This WowHead comment sums it up for Alliance, here's my Horde breakdown. Batamsi in the Troll District will vendor: Fresh Water Highland Spring Water and Sparkling Oasis Water From the Orgrimmar Cata recipe vendor ( Shazdar ) Starfire Espresso for 3 chef's awards. To make it also requires cocoa beans from this same vendor.  Highland Spirits is available for 3 chef's awards. (materials sold by Batamsi) South Island Iced Tea is available for 5 chef's awards. Lizzy Lemons sells the fruit, Batamsi sells (refreshing spring) water.  From cooking trainer,  Arugi : Darkbrew Lager is a trainable recipe. Required materials can be purchased from Sarah Brady in Dalaran's underbelly. Or the barmaids in Shattrath....