Over the weekend, I finally found a guild to hang my hat: Fidelis. They are a friendly bunch and raid often—and there’s usually about ten people on at any given time. This is a little bit of a change for me.
Typically when I wind up guilded in a game, I am a big fish in a small pond or quickly become one through aggressive leveling and/or gearing. This time, I’m very much a minnow in a guild that’s been established for over a year. Checking my ‘score’ on WoW-heroes shows me ranking about 128th or so overall in the guild in relative terms of gear. I’m still not capable of doing Icecrown, but I should be able to handle lesser raids now—we’ll see as the weeks progress.
I simply had to find a way to get the old gearscore up. Even if I never wind up storming through a 25-man Ice Crown Citadel run, it still never hurts to be a little more efficient in providing DPS in dungeons. My three lowest pieces of gear would simply have to get upgraded: hat, necklace, and a trinket.
Ran a bunch of random heroics and got enough badges to replace the hat. I now have three pieces of Tier 9 equipment and am looking forward to eventually getting a set bonus for four pieces of it. It’ll bump up my critical percentages nicely when I do.
I did get a random little treat in the mail after doing something like 100 random pugs—the WoW development team sent an auto-mail congratulating me on apparently really liking pugs and rewarded me with a pet pug! It’s cute as hell and I don’t even like dogs. Good times!
The necklace was a bit of a problem. Seems as though there wasn’t any epic-level necklaces available for badges and the drops on the heroics for something useful was abysmal. I searched on wowhead for suitable gear replacements and came across a brilliant idea: get a PvP reward!
As you likely know, I don’t shy away from PvP fights and what I lack in skill I make up for with dogged enthusiasm. As usual, there was two pieces of gear available: one that was “pretty good” and one that was “wow” and each were priced accordingly. Setting my sights on “pretty good”, I began a blitz on random battlefields.
Random battlefields offer a number of advantages. First, win or lose, you are given bonus honor (read: points used for PvP rewards), although winning gives considerably more. Second, the time it takes to enter a battleground is ALWAYS under two minutes. Finally, it makes no difference how drunk you are while playing, since you’re going to die a LOT anyways and no one really cares if you screw something up. So, too intoxicated for dungeoning = just right for PvP.
To our credit, we won about half the time and over the course of Sunday, I earned a shiny new necklace and my gearscore is rapidly approaching “4500”. I won’t get into Icecrown with that, but I can consistently hit around 3k DPS when fighting and the random guys I fight with seem to be appreciative of my skills. Or at least, no one sneers at my score anymore. Good enough for now.
The last item on my list, the trinket, I still have no idea about. That may wind up being another PvP reward. We’ll see.
Finally, I continued my Eternal Quests for Achievements by fully exploring every zone in Northrend and starting the Eastern Kingdoms. There is a world to discover and I’m doing it a little at a time. Also raised enchanting to 200 and fished up to about half that. Fishing seems to be a nice little time killer while waiting for a dungeon group to form.
Now if I can just remember to switch my weapon back so I don’t charge into battle with a fishing pole in hand.
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