Over the weekend, I decided it was past time that I knocked out a few achievements, so Strev worked diligently at upping his First Aid and Cooking to Grandmaster status, earning a few rewards in the process. This was not without its challenges. Money had been running particularly tight since most of his gold got blown on a very nice set of pants earlier in the week and cloth was running at a particularly ruinous price in the AH, so I went forth to farm wool.
Wowhead noted a particularly nice place to farm wool is the Stormwind Stockades. This suited me just fine, since I was all of 30 seconds from it. After a couple of runs through I had more than enough to carry me past the ‘wool hurdle’ and into silk, which was pleasantly cheap. The rest of it all was pretty much a straightforward shop, craft, and train your way to victory.
Cooking’s greatest challenges come in the achievements: prepare a few dozen different recipes you can only buy with ‘Awards’ you receive from doing the daily Dalaran quest, buy a hat for 100 of the same awards, and so forth and so on. The thing is you can only earn two awards a day so it will take months to do them all. I also discovered a bug where in the latest patch you can’t get the achievement for earning your first cooking award. I opened a trouble ticket on it, but haven’t heard anything in a couple of days yet (not surprising with the weekend and other patch woes). I also discovered while trying for a cooking achievement that placing a feast (or mage table, or soulwell) in a BG will result in most people getting locked up and disconnected. Lovely.
As Strev was dangerously close to honor cap, I blew a couple thousand honor on a pvp-mount, a black mechanostrider. Stupidly overpriced, but pretty snazzy.
With the changes to the raid lockouts, Fidelis grouped up our brave 25-man band to storm the ICC with the understanding that the ‘leftover bosses’ would get mopped up by 10-man crews over the weekend. Everyone was fine with this and we once again bravely stormed the citadel. All I can say is ‘wow’. There’s a 30% damage boost in ICC presently for reasons I don’t question and we utterly steamrolled the first few bosses. Strev’s criticals were hitting for over 60k damage and recount says that overall I was hitting in the 12.3k+ DPS range. The guild’s raid pages brought these figures a little closer to earth, but I was inordinately pleased that my little glass cannon was firing well. Heck, Marrowgar never even got through the second “BONESTORM!” before he was exploded. It was going to be a good night.
We mobbed through the battles, frequently without losing a single person. I now –totally- understand the Festergut battle and he was brought down with a minute left on the enrage timer. Either he or his brother dropped some very nice pants…comparable with the ones I had just spent thousands on. Just one person rolled on it and got a ‘26’. For the rest of the evening I wondered if I had spent all of that gold for naught. Later to satiate my curiosity, I rolled just to see. I got a 21 and felt much better.
At long last, I faced my arch-nemesis: Professor Putricide. I had vowed my revenge weeks ago. We prepared, reviewed strategy, and attacked! The professor ran around, summoning his deadly oozes, and eventually started chucking vials of death as the floor became more and more impassable from a thick green glowing death soup. We got him down to about 3% then wiped from the sheer volume of crap on the floor. Undaunted, we identified where we went wrong and tried again. SUCCESS! The good Professor was no more and we all spammed the guild channel with news of our victory over ICC-Plagueworks (25-Man).
The following encounter was too new to too many of us and sadly, we were unable to vanquish The Blood Council. It looks fairly nifty with 3 “Princes” from the old heroics that take turns being damageable while horrible things happen all around. Good times!
Also spent a bit of time working on reputation. It started off innocently enough. I’d been running randoms with guildies as they tested their builds and one was looking to increase her Lower City faction for an achievement. She suggested a BC heroic: Arakkoa Halls (it’s filled with birdmen and flappy things), so I dutifully moseyed over and helped her summon the rest of the team. To my horror, it wouldn’t let me in the front door: I needed a key to enter the heroic version of the dungeon and the key could only be purchased at an ‘honored’ reputation or better. I had –just- gotten friendly with the Lower City, so I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Thankfully, the gang decided to run through the ‘regular’ version twice to help me with reputation and we ended with me halfway to the point.
Later I ran the dungeon solo once and finished up some quests in the area to reach the goal. With key purchased, I tried soloing the level 70 heroic. It was rough. Stupidly rough. In the end, I took two deaths from hard hitting guards, had to invisibility past one boss, but was able to take out the big bad at the end. Yay!
Finally, I reached Exalted with Stormwind by doing EVERY quest in Goldshire, most of the ones in Redridge, and a number of the ones in Stormwind itself. Next stop…Darnassus?
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