Friday night I settled in with random dungeons and a burning desire to reach ‘the next game’. By the end of the night, I hit 79 and each quest took me another sliver towards the shiny light at the end of the tunnel. Over the course of the night, I had finished a most incredible quest arc that was heavily based on Norse mythology and unwittingly handed over Thorim (the “Thor” equivalent) to the Lokem (the likely misspelled “Loki” equivalent). This understandably upset a lot of giants I had just gotten to kiss and make up with Thorim and they charged me with a quest to visit the Halls of Lightning and cut Lokem’s lying tongue from his head.
Terrific.
Saturday morning was much of the same as I met, loved, and hated various people in pugs. Explored a few zones between dungeons and knocked out a couple of the accomplishments for doing so. Ventured into new dungeons and had a blast with many of them—a few stand out as ‘notable’.
The Oculus: I have nothing but hate for this dungeon: seething, blind hatred. A solid portion of this hellfest is a three-dimensional dungeon riding the back of a dragon whose powers replace your own. A considerable amount of coordination is required to pull off the end boss fight, even on ‘normal’ difficulty—all total, I think I took 6-7 deaths on that run. I dreaded to see what the “heroic” (read: more difficult, but more rewarding) version of the hellfest would be like. Using vent or another chat program is the only thing that could make this workable.
The Halls of Lightning: A fun giant-filled romp, notably marked by getting to beat the living crap out of Lokem for being such a jerk.
The Culling of Stratholme: I’m always a sucker for time travel timey-wimey stuff and this… was excellent. The basic plot is something is screwing with time, so effectively you have to save Hitler from getting shot. Close though. The party and I travelled back to Warcraft III (not kidding) to play out the mission where Arthas, the Soon-to-be-Lich comes to Stratholme to find plague is beginning to take hold and all of the innocents must be slain as they begin turning undead. Escort Arthas through town and kill everybody. Intense fun and it culminated with a battle against the demon Mul’Ganis. I swear I need to find those Warcraft III disks again.
I had run around with Brian and Jacob individually off and on and ending alone after a successful dungeon run, I found myself with 4% to level 80. Hmmm…I flew around lazily debating on grabbing another group to knock it out, when I decided to check my quest log for anything ‘stupid’ I could do….and I found it. I had forgotten to turn in my quest after cutting out Lokem’s tongue. That and another quest from the Halls of Lightning gave me what I needed and I dinged 80 at 241 hours played!
At that point, my game changed considerably. I might have been 80, but I was a baby 80 with equipment that reflected it. My “gear score” (forever after notated here as GS:) was about 2300 and to put that in relative terms—I was doing maybe a third of the damage I could be doing had I “epic lewts”—maybe less. I upgraded a couple of tiny things, then Jacob and Brian introduced me to heroics.
Wow.
Heroic dungeons lived up to the name with bosses several times harder than the regular iterations, with a lot less room for error. As I ran through the first few, my equipment took a serious leap in power and I started rapidly closing in on 3k gearscore.
To digress, I believe in my heart I’m a fairly competent player (if not speller) when I know what to expect—a few of the dungeons I had never seen and hilarity sometimes ensued. (Don’t get me wrong, I always warn the groups I’m with if it’s a new experience—and –usually- someone gives me pointers, but not always.) The best example was getting locked out of a boss fight due to not knowing a wall would suddenly appear. Insert team wipe here. Most instances with friends worked extremely well—Brian makes a damn fine tank and I’d sucker him into a five-man any day of the week.
The worst experience? Heroic Oculus. I got to see the horror that is this dungeon and we foolishly didn’t abandon it altogether. Despite having a fairly solid grasp on how the encounter works, we still suffered multiple team wipes and in the end gave up altogether.
Registered in the Argent Tournament—a martial tournament (with jousting!) reserved for level 80s. Not really sure how it all works, but I have to do several days worth of daily quests before I can compete in the arena. An aspirant is me.
I finished the weekend by shopping for a couple of new epic-level pieces of gear: a ring reward in return for hard earned emblems and a pair of bracers which drained most of the rest of my cash reserves. GS now 3234 and starting to feel a little less like a newb.
With some luck, I’ll get a few more pieces over the coming days.
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