WHAT TIME IS IT???

Sunday morning was meant to be the end of Daylight Savings on the eastern side of Australia. But, because of the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, "they" decided to postpone it for a week. Which is a fair enough decision - it would cause no end of confusion for all those visitors.

Unfortunately, no one told the majority of the windows machines in the world.

When I logged in on Sunday morning, I noticed two things. First, the server time had changed by an hour (I did have to double check that I wasn't missing out on an hour of sleep). The second was that the general chat channel was swamped with people crying out "what time is it where you are?" "what time is it in Sydney?"

Since I knew the answer, I decided to be helpful (since no one else was). I ended up getting into a conversation with someone who couldn't quite believe that both Blizzard and his computer would lie to him. So I pointed him towards the Bureau of Meteorology website and told him he could check there if he was still unsure. His reply is still making me laugh:

"Oh man, I have no idea what time I'm meant to go to school tomorrow!"

PvPing

Last night I jumped into the battle grounds for a bit. After waiting nearly 40mins, I went into Arathi Basin. I had enough time to run from the farm to the blacksmith, kill two or three Alliance goons, and then we won (with the Alliance having maybe 150 resources). The entire game took 8mins, and I was only there for about 5mins.

Next I signed up for Warsong Gultch. I discovered that being level 26 makes it a lot easier than being level 21 - I kicked arse. I also managed to score twice - I basically walked in, grabbed the flag and ran home. The second time I even took out the Alliance guy who'd nabbed our flag on the way. Final score was 3/0.

So that was a nice quick way to get some more honour kills. Yay!

Black Fathoms Deep

We ran through Black Fathoms Deep on Saturday afternoon. As Rana pointed out, we had pretty much the perfect party of 5 - a priest, a mage, a shaman, a warrior and a druid. The druid was specced for healing, and so bugged me a bit since I've become used to the solo healer role. More than once I wasted a big heal on someone because the Druid got his off just before me. Towards the end I got used to aborting my heals at the last second if they weren't needed any more - sure, it was wasted time, but at least I saved the mana. Obviously I should have just communicated better (read: at all) and arranged things. And he did save us a couple of times.

There was one almost fatal moment when we were facing the last big guy and Rana was getting wailed on pretty badly. I kept trying to cast my uber-heal, but my line of sight kept getting broken. While everyone was yelling at me to heal, I was thinking "I'm trying! I'm trying!". Fortunately I just managed to finish casting it in time, so I didn't look totally incompetent.

That is until we'd killed everything and were just swimming around picking up stuff. I had to drop something from one of my bags to pick up something else, and managed to run out of air while I made up my mind. Luck we had a shaman so I didn't have to walk back.

Bloodfury and Gold

Rana and I spent some time running the Stonetalon Mountains on Friday. Rana is currently 3 or 4 levels higher than me, so she was mostly just babysitting. I finished off a couple of lower-level quests, and then we both headed into the Charred Vale to kill some harpies.

First off, wow! So many rare minerals and herbs. If I'd had either profession, I would have been rolling in good stuff. I did pick up a fair bit of wool and silk, so I guess there was stuff for me. There were also lots of good drops - I picked up a good number of green items as well as some decent vender trash. Most exciting of all, we had a blue drop - the [Ranger Bow]!

We finished the killing harpies quests, and even managed to take out an elite Harpy along the way named Bloodfury Ripper. Of course, after we finished and handed in the quests we discovered that the next quest in the chain was to go and kill the elite...

I managed to pick up a group the next day and we went back in and killed Bloodfury again. Of course, the area was crawling with Alliance scum. I got ganked a fair few times - I'm going to have to remember how annoying it is to be chased down by someone 6 levels higher than you when you're already half dead.

By the end of the weekend I managed to get myself almost to level 24. I managed to get my Tailoring up to about 170 (yay! 10-slot bags!), my enchanting up to about 130 and all my skills. How did I manage all this? Well, I picked up almost 8g for the bow.

Wailing Caverns Runs

Seeing as we all had WAY too much free time over the weekend, the three of us (Rana the tauren shaman and Tuni, the troll mage) decided to hit the Wailing Caverns twice (although connection trouble meant Rana missed the second run).

Turns out this was actually the first time I'd played all the way through an instance. Previously the best I've done is getting to the final boss in the Dead Mines, only to have one of the party drop out leaving us unable to survive the final fight. So to go from never having finished one, to having done two in less than 24 hours is pretty awesome.

For the first run we teamed up with another shaman and a warrior. It was the first time I'd been the main healer for a party (other then a couple of times when Morcarli had teamed up with much higher level characters so it was the only thing I could effectively do), and it turns out it's quite a different game. I had to watch the other players much more than what was going on around me.

The other shaman decided to take on the role of secondary healer, which frustrated me a little (more than once I wasted a big heal on someone because he'd fired off a smaller one just before I finished casting), but it was really useful while I was finding my feet. We had more than one death, but with two shamans, I didn't get a chance to do a resurrection!

I was rolling amazingly well on most of the drops. Among the booty I scored not one by two blue items - the [Glowing Lizardscale Cloak] and the [Deep Fathom Ring]!

On Sunday, Tuni and I managed to pull together another group to do the run again. This time we had a tauren hunter, a tauren warrior and an ocrish warlock. We got off to a slow start, since we were down a couple of people at the begining. But once we picked up the warrior, we moved pretty well.

Being the only healer was fun. I was pretty pleased with myself that we didn't have one death. Well, unless you could the TPK that happened when we tried to take on Verdan the Everliving... To make up for it, I won both items that dropped off Mutanus the Devourer, including the [Mutant Scale Breastplate]!

So yeah, I picked up 3 of maybe 4 or 5 blue items. What to know the best bit? I disenchanted two of them...

What I'm Doing

I should probably do an update post, just to let anyone who's still reading this blog know where I'm up to.

I renewed my subscription with a clear plan. I was getting bored of Morcarli, which was part of why I decided to stop playing. So I created two new characters on Shadow Council - Alladela, a human mage, and Dunix, a dwarven hunter. The aim was to level them up together, trading stuff back and forth. Currently they're at level 12 and 13 respectively.

The other half of the plan was to team up with two of my friends, play on a PvP server, and level our characters together. So for that, I created troll priest named Jaitan on the Jubei'Thos server. He's turned out to be the most fun to play, and is currently around level 22.