Separate Lives

Over the past week or so, I’ve been mostly working on Anyth and Strev, each with their own decidedly separate goals.

Anyth has been trying to get Northrend-ready. Now at level 67, I’ve finally gotten a handle on the 4.0.x changes to the skill trees. Her ‘main’ spec is survival with a nice Ferocious pet, Buttons the wolf. This is my preferred spec for grouping as it allows for fairly high, consistent damage, even if it requires a LOT of button-mashing and situational reacting. I’ve been having fun with traps to a point that should probably be considered illegal. I can honestly say I don’t miss volley at all. Multi-shot, thrown explosive, multi-again… and suddenly I’ve stolen all of the aggro from the tank. Counting down the levels until I get misdirection.

Anyth’s offspec is much more solo friendly, but it comes with a terrible, terrible price: about half the DPS of the survival build while soloing. With her tenacious warp stalker “Goes” (Yes…”Anyth and Goes”—I’ll go the extra mile for a cheap pun.), she can mow through most things without having to stop and eat/bandage/repair which is a great perk over the “rest after every fight” she was getting with survival. Another nice thing is through glyphing, mend pet now gives a little happiness. As a result, I don’t think I’ve fed my pets more than once in the past week, particularly since you can overfeed them without penalty and the skill costs no focus and has an insanely fast cooldown.

I’m starting to warm up to the hunter changes, but she still has a long way to go before she sees her full potential. Strev, however, is on the top of his game.

Strev is (finally) at an illustrious 6k gearscore (average item level 264), which will be considered utter crap in a few weeks, but for now allows insane damage output. I’ve been fretting over haste/crit/mastery calculations trying to squeeze out every last point of DPS for the spec, but according to calculations over at elitist jerks, I guessed right. After hit cap, get haste to 20%. After haste, plow everything into mastery and ignore crit, which hath been deemed “really horrible” for arcane specs . Strev’s mastery pulls in another 20% damage at peak mana, so I think he’s where he needs to be until Cata comes out.

There’s been two main things that Strev has been up to lately: working towards the Loremaster achievement and throwing himself into the maw of Anub in the heroic 10-man ToGC.

I’d been lackadaisically pursuing Loremaster up until the end of the Halloween event, earning the Outlands achieve, then a bunch of quests in the Eastern Kingdoms, then I started working on reputations. I kind of liked the title “Strev of Gnomeregan”, so I started working towards it. Halfway through revered, I said to myself “Self—if you do other factions, you can get more gnome rep from bleedover!” and ported my butt to Darnassus. (Basically, if you’re exalted capped on an Alliance race and earn more of that reputation it coverts into a quarter of the reward for each of the other Alliance races.)

I hate the night elf lands. I hate them with a passion that goes to the very core of my soul. It’s all ugly, dismal, dark forest caught in perpetual twilight without sparkly vampires. In a fit of outright masochism, I completed all of the night elf starting quests, then moved into Darkshore, cleared out all of those and kept the rolling ball of questing going as long as I could. I knew if I stopped, I’d realize how godawful it all was and just give up and sit around Dalaran waiting for the world to end like so many others.

By the time I was halfway through…umm “Ashenvale”? (I really can’t remember those freakin’ zone names), I had reached Exalted with Darnassus and realized with horror that there might be drastic changes to Loremaster coming with Cataclysm. A few searches on the internet later, my fears were confirmed: people who had the achieve already was not going to lose it, but people who were halfway through would get screwed pretty hard. Quests that were being removed wold no longer count towards credit and I could expect to see my numbers completed plummet. Terrific. Between Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, I had about half of the needed 1400 quests done. On the bright side, the Cata changes will be along the lines of Outlands and Northrend in a “Complete 60 quests in Duskwood” sort of way. That’ll greatly improve tracking, but now I have to push to complete at least one continent before Cata comes.

Strev’s Kalimdor quest completes was about 150 behind Eastern Kingdoms, so I did the logical thing and wept. Strev put his Gnomer title quest on hold, dropped all of the Night Elf quests and teleported to Stormwind to start clearing out old quests. With only 280 or so to go and no good tracking method, this leaves a LOT of running around looking for exclamation marks. I’d previously “cleared” Elwynn Forest, Westwood, and Redridge. Starting up in Duskwood, I finished all I could find there and in Stranglethorn, finally closing out the last of the Booty Bay quests that didn’t involve trips to the western continent. Moved my base of operations to Nethergard keep, but it looked like I’d already done all of those as well, leaving me in the somewhat depressing Swamp of Sorrows, which was like a normal swamp, but greenlit.

Unfortunately, I was only been able to find a handful of quests here and there and none have led to large chains. I’m certain my destiny lies to the north, so next time, we’ll be revisiting Arathi and Hillsbrad!