I submitted my resignation from the Azeroth Inc. raid team earlier this morning. "It's not you, it's me." has never been more true. Arcane is simply not in a good spot right now and we're up against a tough DPS check. Flawless mechanical execution isn't enough: you also have to be tall enough to ride that ride. Even with really nice gear, I'm falling flat. No one had said anything directly, but we all can see logs. I'd much rather bow out gracefully and do something I enjoy than be a millstone. For the record, I did try out Fire for a few hours, but trying to retrain myself after (literally) thousands of hours as arcane-- that's just not happening. Net result: weekends now free.
Back on Bloodsail, Magrom continues puttering around. After long and careful thought, I dropped my money making professions and replaced them with mining and engineering. (Engineering gives me bullets, bombs, and better guns). I will probably live to regret this decision, but I've made it this far in life making consistently bad calls and I see no reason to stop.
Hunting for copper ore put me on the east side of Elwynn Forest when I hit level 10 and I had to choose between going to learn pet stuff or finish a few quests in the area. Given it was a long ass walk back to Stormwind, I opted to stay in the area, recovering insignias from dead guards, clearing a murloc infestation, and depopulating the woods of prowlers and bears. By the end of it I was about 10.7 and I decided to push eastward into Redridge Mountains for the flight point at Lakeshire. There's no FPs at all in Elwynn Forest proper. There's generally one point per zone and the Elwynn Forest one is in Stormwind itself. If nothing else, it would save me 20 minutes of jogging later running all the way there and then back.
Once in Redridge, I find a copper node and happily set to it. There's a few spider corpses nearby, so a few murder hobos are probably in the area. Then I notice the corpses are level 16 and were vanishing in preparation to respawn. Oh dear. Fortunately, I was able to hi-ho myself out of there in the nick of time and I was able to pick up the flight point unmolested. I was hoping to be able to score huge experience from a couple of easy quests in the area, but I wasn't quite buff enough to be trusted by a little girl to retrieve a necklace from the bottom on the lake. Such is life.
With a fast path back to the east secured, I returned to Stormwind to train my level 10 skills-- and find I need to go back to the Dwarven homelands to learn to tame animals. Ok! One tram ride later and a brisk jog to Kharanos later, I'm tasked with training a variety of pets to see how they feel. This provided an unexpected challenge. The roving packs of murder hobos weren't leaving ice bears, snow leopards, and wolves to some random hunter to stumble across-- just acre after acre of dead animals I could no longer skin. *facepalm*
Eventually I was able to run through the entire series and dinged level 11 in the process, before settling on a snow leopard I named "ScratchFever" in honor of "You Awaken in Razor Hill". The cat gets random cheers and applause wherever I go. It is also, however, clearing out all of the meat I'm able to stuff into my bags. I picked "cat" because it comes with a healthy DPS buff (10%) and doesn't sacrifice too much health as a trade-off, but it eats like nobody's business. There's 6 levels of "loyalty" and pets gain xp, levels, and skill points independently of the hunter. The lower the loyalty level, the faster they get hungry. Freshly tamed pets are at "teenage boy" levels, so I watched my "I'll use these when I learn cooking!" stockpile diminish steadily as I adventured.
I returned to Elwynn, but this time I headed in the opposite direction to Westfall. I poked around and progressed on a couple of random quests. There's some challenges here. ScratchFever is keeping the heat off me initially, but he's dropping like a sick beat in half of one. That means additional recovery time for re-summoning and re-feeding, since pets generally become unhappy at dying to Harvest Golems, vultures, coyotes, and everything else. The fact Scratch is also woefully underleveled (just dinged 9!) isn't helping a bit. Then there's the inventory factor. I have a grand total of 28 inventory slots (not counting the ammo pouch) and westfall is bad about everything being used in quests. Space is already tight between bombs, crafting mats, food for me and the bottomless cat, emergency healing potions, and such. I can realistically get another 6 slots by picking up a cheap(ish) linen bag now that I can afford it and I'll need to prioritize that.
Tonight is my eldest daughter's 18th birthday, but afterwards I shall dine on Westfall stew!
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