Friday, August 20, 2010

Back Home Again

We are back from the beach, and while it's good to be home, I miss it already. The drive home was a lot quieter than the drive down, with a lot of rain. It had started raining before we even left, actually, which messed up some of our plans for the last day there. Me, brother, and sister had wanted to go to the sound and swim before we left, but when we arrived, this is what greeted us.


Yea, didn't even try it. We just turned around and headed back.

It is wonderful to be back on my desktop. The laptop works all right for trips and stuff, but it's old, laggy, and has no sound whatsoever. Now I can get back to playing WoW and the other games I like without worries. And I can get on Ventrilo again! Oh Vent, how I've missed you.

Sis and I spent most of our vacation free time playing Allods instead of WoW, and while I miss my in-game friends, the break has been rather refreshing. And Allods is a ton of fun so far, I know I'll keep playing it alongside of WoW now. I may have to figure out a future post about the non-WoW games I've been tinkering in, there's quite a few of those now. I think I might even be able to make it interesting.

Today will be mostly getting things together so I can get back into Real Life. We've got grocery shopping to do, laundry to finish, all that "fun" stuff. Hopefully I'll find some playing time after it's done, then tomorrow one of my best friends is getting married, so I'm foreseeing that being a little hectic. After that it's back to the daily grind of work and stuff. Hmm, I think I'm ready for my next vacation already. >.>

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Vacation Day Four



Sunday morning was the first beach trip. The waves were a little rough, but we had fun the whole time we were there.


The only problem was... I got sunburned, despite the sunscreen I put on (have I mentioned yet that it's been ages since I was out in the sun?). It's not a bad sunburn, but it hurts, so I've been staying mostly indoors since.

The house we're all staying in is pretty nice, except for a minor*cough* ant problem. And we have a hot tub! Sis and I discovered we have a resident toad living here last night, but he was too shy for pictures. Maybe I'll get one next time if we see him again.

Today the older sis wants to go see this place called Roanoke Island (I think). It's supposed to be something like Colonial Williamsburg, so should be interesting. I'll try getting some pictures there, I keep forgetting about my camera until it's too late.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Driving to NC- Vacation Day One

I had to be up stupid-early for work, so I was a little worried about driving for 3+ hours right after. I forgot who was gonna be in the car with me. My brother and sister did a good job keeping me awake and alert (maybe a bit too good) and we arrived just fine.

So what good is a long drive without highlights? Here's some noteworthy happenings:

- Stopping at Chik-fil-a for food before hitting the road, and my sister dropped my straw underneath her seat. I had to stop the car so she could get out and find it.

-The surfer bar we drove past that sold "COLD BEEP". (Broken signs ftw)

-The bridge across the sound near here that has cobwebs decorating the siderails across the whole thing. Then I realized that most of the webs were occupied. By really BIG spiders. I developed a case of tunnel-vision after that. >.>

-The sheer number of ABC stores we passed once we crossed into North Carolina.

Can't remember much else. Tomorrow I believe we are hitting the beach first thing, so might have some pictures to post. Now I think I need to crash, it's been a really long day.

Friday, August 13, 2010

AFK for VACATION!!!!!

Yea, we're leaving tomorrow to head to the beach with the family. We will have internet, so I may put up a post or two if I find anything blog-worthy, but I kinda doubt we'll be doing much game-playing. Unless it's Allods or something- my brother's gotten me and sis hooked on it now.



Anyway, I'm almost done packing, then gotta go pick up a few things from the store. After that, I just have to get through work tomorrow, then we'll be on our way! Yay, vacation!

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Achievement Spaaaaam

We had another non-raid raid night last night, but at least I was able to talk a few folks into doing some dungeons (yes, I take all the credit! Muahaha). We wound up 4-manning Violet Hold when the PUG healer suddenly dropped the group, but my buddy did a great job elemental-healing on his shammy while we finished up. Go go shammies!

Then a couple other guildies decided to run heroic Occulus for the achievements they were missing. Since that's the last dungeon Barraccus needed for his CotFW title, I was very.... enthusiastic about going. The run went nice and smooth, until Eregos went down. Then Barraccus exploded everyone's chat windows with achievement spam.


7 achievements at once? Yes please. And he has his title now! I think he's only my second toon to get it, mostly because no one ever wants to kill Malygos anymore. Heck, they'll even do Naxx before him. :P

Krallormu approves of the achievement spam.

Not much else went on. I was having some issues at work today, however. I've had joint problems for years, now, and while it hasn't been worth mentioning before, today both my hips decided they did not want to work properly. It made for a painfully (literally) long day. But hey, I found that if I take enough of my painkiller stuff*, then everything kind of goes nicely numb. Doesn't help with the grinding sensations or the popping-out-of-place feeling, but at least the pain more or less stopped.


*(which I highly recommend for anyone that has pain problems, you can find it here)

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Getting the Gang Back Together

Today was "run Turron through ToC5", "Do random stuff on Barraccus & Rajast", and apparently "Go play alts I usually ignore" day. Turron has some decent gear now (3k GS woot!), Barraccus is 10 frost badges away from his t10 legs, and Rajast has 6 of his twenty ravasaur teeth, plus got to 63 from doing random dungeons. Then my sister mentioned she was on her hunter Treng, on Wyrmrest Accord. That got me thinking, sooo....

Gwynifar is now level 11, up from 9, and has all her buddies back. Khlar helped escort her to Elwynn to reclaim Haiden, she braved Howling Fjord on her own to get Arthoas back, and then she and Treng were off to Azuremyst for their moths. The trip was every bit as eventful as it was the first time, and in the end Gwyn had Authir back at her side.





*Warm fuzzies*

So that was about it for today. Might go back to writing tomorrow, if my brain can function normally (aka not so omygollytired). I'm also starting to think about leveling Quae a bit, or maybe Shaur.

Oh, and I had a screwup with my Runes of Magic account (it got suspended "by mistake" somehow) but it's all fixed now. Maybe I'll try leveling my warden there. Or my druid. Or my warrior/rogue.....

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Tales From the PUG (mild rant warning)

I've been in good PUGs and bad ones. Usually I don't say anything in my blogs about them, except for maybe a passing mention, but the ones from yesterday and today I felt were both worth a bit of blog space.

I've started running heroics with Turron for gear and badges. Haven't done that many yet, but I try to at least do one a day for the frosts. The randoms he gets are usually fairly easy ones, until yesterday. Yesterday, he got Old Kingdom.

I know OK can be a romp-fest if you overgear it like so many players do now, but that wasn't the case this time. He was in a group of fresh level 80s.

It was actually pretty fun. Since we didn't massively overgear the instance, we actually had to think about the pulls before we did them. We had to be careful of aggroing the patrols, manage everyone's aggro, and not simply run through willy-nilly. It was pretty awesome, felt like the old vanilla dungeons. People died, we even wiped once or twice, but everyone kept their cool and we went on.

Today's random put him in Halls of Lightning. For the record, I hate that place even when I do overgear it. But the group I was in decided to make it worse.

First off, Turron is still in mostly quest-reward greens/blues. He does maybe 1600 dps on a good day. And yes, I know that he's not that much help to most groups, but I do try to get stuff dead faster. It hasn't been helping that the RNG seems to be laughing at me- I haven't seen that much caster cloth stuff drop in ages. So gearing his dps set is being painful, as I'm spending the badges he does get on tanking gear.

So back to HoL. We are rolling along, the bear tank with an almost 6k gearscore is doing running pulls through the whole instance. I am running along behind him trying to whack stuff as best as I can, which resulted in my dps being abysmally low, but hey, no one's said a word yet. Then we get to the air elemental boss, whose name escapes me at the moment. Turron dies, but I brush it off, no big deal. Then the tank chimes in.

"Good, make him pay for getting a free ride."

. . . . . .

That is the moment that I realize that the tank and the other 2 dps are all from Burning Legion, probably a preformed group of friends. Only the healer (who was the nicest person in the whole group) and I were from different servers. So I came back with something along the lines of "Well, not everyone gets to level 80 with a 4k GS." Yea, I shouldn't be baiting them, probably should have ignored them, but eh. Elitist attitudes really bug the heck out of me. So then I get a spiel about how he farmed ToC 5-man until he had a 3.5k gearscore before he even set foot (paw?) in a heroic, and that's what I ought to be doing. He and the mage in the group actually went on about it for quite some time.

Me? I didn't say anything else, mostly because I just couldn't think of anything to say. Needless to say, I was rather peeved. And yes, that is what I probably should be doing, but that instance doesn't give badges, and that's what I'm in there for. I did wind up putting the tank and the mage on ignore, and the rest of the run was done in near-silence. We killed Loken with no deaths, and instance over.

He did at least drop a plate dps helm and the axe, so I finally got some upgrades. But yea, I think ToC will be getting a visit in the near future. A visit that will last as long as my guildies can tolerate, because I'm done with PUGs for the time being.

_________

On a brighter note, since we lacked the numbers for our usual ICC raid tonight we did ToC 10 instead, then went and paid Malygos a visit. Maly took some practice, but we got him down easily once everyone clicked. Now Barraccus just needs to finish heroic Occulus for his Champion of the Frozen Wastes title. (How he got as far as he is now without ever running H Occ is beyond me.)