79, Helmet, Helicopter, and Fish

Busy weekend for Yrovi: I hit level 79, upgraded some gear, and decided to work on… fishing. Gah! It’s like watching paint dry, I swear. If only it didn’t make leveling cooking that much faster…

So, I was diligently working on dailies in Sholozar Basin (I should even get the Simple Request achievement this evening), and decided to finish up the questline featuring the Avatar of Freya while I was hanging out with the puppy-men. Figuring out the second fight took the longest (funny, you should walk away from Urgreth when he’s casting shadow barrage to get out of range… why on earth didn’t that occur to me right at the beginning!) and after taking him down, Hailscorn was really easy with just blasting away the adds. Regardless, I finished the quest and got myself a Greathelm of the Titan Protectorate. As much as I didn’t want to replace my Tankatronic Goggles (with my nice meta gem), these were far too great an upgrade to ignore. Bye-bye engineering goggles! I hardly knew you.

Because my engineering goggles were gone, I needed to craft some way to see track gas clouds on my map. Practically free gold ftw! So, that meant either crafting goggles that I would switch out whenever I was flying around, or a belt tinker. A wonderful frost mage in my guild pointed out a plate belt that he had placed in there a week ago. It was a decent upgrade over my old one, so I grabbed it from the guild bank, put in some gold (I’m trying to put gold in each month), and tinkered it right away. Great, I can see far distances again and I can still see those gas clouds. Two upgrades and everything is still working. Check and check. (Speaking of engineering, I finally managed to snag some Elemental Seaforium off of the AH so I was able to craft my Flying Machine! Yay! YAY! I'm really excited. :D I love this thing.)

I ran Halls of Stone this weekend as well, which was fun. It was a guild run with some PuG mixed in, so it wasn’t as perfect as I would have liked, but it went pretty well nevertheless. Our guild’s holy Pally extraordinaire, Tyra, healed as I tanked and DPS was rounded out with the aforementioned plate-belt-depositing frost mage, Car, a Shammy and a Retadin. It was going well, although I really wish that I had had more time to read up on the instance before going in, as I had never seen it before or researched the boss fights. The Shammy and Tyra were very helpful, explaining the fights, although the Retadin wanted to speed things up as we were moving too slow for his tastes. Poor Car bit the dust right after the Retadin suggested we go faster thanks to a poor pull on my part. Sorry Car! Also, I was using a new mouse-over macro for Devastate during this run, and I think I’m still having to get used to the mechanics. I occasionally still use my mouse to click on more situational abilities, which means it isn’t moused-over a target… *sigh* Something tells me I may need to rearrange my UI.

I also loved the buff food that Tyra had on her during the run, so I decided I should really work on leveling up my cooking. And the best way to level up cooking is to level up fishing. So I’m fishing, and using El’s Guide to do so. I’ve just gotten the quest from Nat Pagle himself to find those four very rare fish, so I’m off to explore the far reaches of old-world Azeroth and get those fish. In the meantime, I’ll gather up the supplies I’ll need for the cooking quest, as I’m ready for that as well. I have the cheese and the clam meat (thanks to that quick quest in the Raventusk village in the Hinterlands, which also netted me a better fishing pole), and when I log in tonight I’ll run up the hill into the Hinterlands proper to take down some Owlbeasts for the giant eggs. All-in-all I’m doing well. I think I’ll even hit 80 by the end of the week.

Level 79, a new Helm and belt, a fancy-pants helicopter that I adore, and lots (and lots) of fish. Busy weekend for Yrovi. Lets hope the week is just as busy.