Ding! 80

That's right. Yrovi is officially at the level cap! Just hit 80 today and had a great time training up those last skills and buying new gear to attempt to come at least a little closer to the defense cap of 540 (535 for heroics). I purchased some gear with the gold I had saved up for my epic mount. I figured that getting to the defense cap is more important than running heroics/increasing rep with various groups in order to begin raiding. It was emotionally difficult until I actually got my new shield out of the bank. That thing is beautiful... all glowy and shiny. :D It's worth it, as my defense is now at 500-plus and on it's way higher.

As soon as I hit 80, I went back to Zul'Drak to take on Ragemane again. That dumb seal had killed me before when I attempted to solo it, but at 80 all it took was a health pot and burning my enraged regeneration and bickity-bam, he was dead, and I was able to pick out this very nice axe to slice and dice mobs with. I did have to work on my axe skill for just a little while, but everything worked out okay. I hearthed back to Dalaran and finally took the Orc that's been standing in Krasus Landing for ages up on his offer of heading to Icecrown and did some quests there for the Argent Crusade. They're decent enough folks, I guess.

Finally, I did a quick run through regular Halls of Lightning with Tyra (damn, you're such a good healer) and three other players in a PuG. I died on Ionar thanks to a freak crit and then the stupid shocking debuff, but our DPS druid shifted to bear and took him down. Most excellent playing, thanks for being a good PuG group. Unfortunately, neither one of the tanking items dropped. I guess I'll just have to keep trying. Now that I've been inside once, I feel more comfortable PuGging it and not feeling like an idiot, so I may run it more often now when I have the time. As a tank I should be able to get groups often. Oh, and I was wearing my Wyrmrest Accord Tabard, so I earned a bit of rep with them for the run. That was groovy. :) I have shamelessly stolen a very good gear wishlist that I'm following thanks to Kadomi's blog, and I'm working my way towards getting each slot filled with something on that list.

Oh, and from what I hear, we're in talks with another guild leader to eventually get together to raid. Sounds cool. Hopefully that all works out, because Naxx is calling, and I wants it, precious. I wants it all.

IRL: X-Men and PvPOnline, plus Database

Yeah, so, I haven't actually played WoW for the past two days. I came home on Wednesday after listening to the newest Instance podcast with the PvPOnline creator and decided to read the comic. Like, all of it. The whole thing. I didn't stop till bedtime, and I still hadn't completely finished. Regardless, it took up all my WoW time. Last night I came home, helped with dinner, and then watched X-Men and X2 one after the other. Wasn't really in the mood for WoW after that, either.

So. I guess I'll get on tonight and this weekend. I really should get to level 80. I'm so freaking close at this point that it's stupid that I've taken this long (50% through 79). And I know that the guild wants to start raiding and I want to raid with them. And 80 is mandatory for that business. So. I guess I'll get on tonight. And this weekend.

On a side note, I'm going to take at least part of this weekend to fix my media storage situation. I have well over 200 DVDs in my collection, maybe closer to 250, and it is sadly unorganized. I have no idea where some of my movies are. And when I get in the mood for a film, but then can't find it, I go nuts. For example, I know for a fact that I own the Bourne Ultimatum. But I can't find it ANYWHERE. I've looked. So I broke down and just rented it from Blockbuster. By the way, Blockbuster used to be cool. Really cool. 99 cents for an old film for 5 days and no late fees. Yeah, they don't do that anymore. They're back to their old, craptacular ways. Damn that they are the only rental place near my house. One more reason to reorganize my DVD collection. I'm going to use my database software, Delicious Library, to get it all settled and happy. Plus, I just bought something like 5 dvds recently that I need to put in there...

TL;DR: Haven't played; will play tonight and weekend in between organizing my DVD collection. Yeah.

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.