Your target is Dead

Yesterday two guildmembers level 68 wanted to do this quest. As it turned out, it’s more of an event. Never done it before, weird enough, but it turned out to be a lot of fun. Our group makeup with shaman, pally, mage, rogue and mage was a bit odd, but we made it work with some help from a few folks who were also doing this event.

Basically you have to defeat five bosses in a row, especially the last one hits hard and once you think you’re done, he revives himself ;). And the rewards are great. As a non-70 you get a lot of xp and pots and bandages, plus a nice weapon at the end. As I did this with my 70 hunter, I got over 22g per quest, so the epic flyer got just a little bit closer.

More info can be found on the wowwiki and wowhead:

http://www.wowwiki.com/Ring_of_blood

Chain starts with Brokentoe.

There is a very nice article on wow-insider on Hunter DPS.

A lot of people will tell you that a Hunter is an overly easy class: sic your pet, turn on Auto Shot, and you’re done. While having a built-in tank that you can even heal a bit gives you a pretty strong advantage when going it alone, I’d have to say they oversimplify things a bit.

http://www.wowinsider.com/

I have to agree with this. Especially instance runs were a challenge at 1st with managing your pet, keep threat low and setting traps. I’ve gotten a bit better at it now, but it takes some practise ;).

After a successful Manatombs run friday night, I only had a few 10k of xp to go, so I decided to head to Netherstorm and do a few quests to get to 70 ! And while killing one of those weird creatures outside area 52, I dinged to 70 ;). Ofcourse I received a lot of GRATZ !!!! from the guild.

Got some pretty nice gear from the instance runs and some blue quest rewards. I got the pvp S1 leggings and will get the gloves as well when I have 20 AV marks. My current spec is 18/43/0, which works very nicely along with Spikee, the revenger. When i get a crit, the Go-for-the-throat talent gives him rage, which he then uses for his Gore ability which can do quite a bit of dmg. Only thing I am not too thrilled about is the improves concussion shot, but it’s ok, it can help out every now and then. Morphea will mainly be doing PVE, we’ve been having a lot of fun doing instance runs lately, so I hope to upgrade my gear a bit by doing the 5 man instances and maybe when we have all geared up a bit, Heroics.

So after almost three years, Morphea my hunter ‘alt’ reached max level ;). I mainly started playing her late last year. It went by pretty fast even the outland parts 60-70. The instance runs helped a lot. Got most of Netherstorm, all of Blade Edge Mountains and Shadowmoon left to do for gold.

We did quite a few instance runs this weekend, the Black Morass and Steamvaults were the toughest ones, but in the end we managed to finish them all :).

Especially the Black Morass is excellent. It’s a constant fight and you have to keep on your toes the whole time. But once you get into a sort of rhythm, it’s not too hard. Morphea was on addon duty with a little help from a mage (beano or pangloss). Excellent tankage was provided by Donahue and healing by Timps ;). Blizz should definately take this direction in WOTLK, I think this instance also won the best instance poll on the wow forum.

Some nice new loot included a new gun and a new head piece ! The gun looks awesome :).

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Ok it’s been a bit longer than a week, but the title sounded cool ;). Morphea has finally left Terrokar Forrest behind her. We did the group quests with the guild, which was a lot of fun, but the environment was getting on my nerves by now, so I left a few quests undone and finally moved to Nagrand. I’m so glad I got an epic mount, because it’s rather big and there is quite a bit of running around between the various quest hubs and mobs.

The first quest chains I did were ofcourse the hunting quests for the Nesingwary Epidition. Kill 60 goats, owls and clefthoofs. And then the elites. A friendly guild druid helped out with those. The big elephant like creature at the end of the chains ‘Tusker’ was pretty tough, but we made it and I got me a new gun to replace the epic pvp bow. I also collected the beads killing ogres and some quests for the Consortium.

Also ran various instances with the guild the past week, with the help of one or two non-guildies here and there. Slave Penns was easy, we were a bit higher lvl than the instance is rated, and cleaned it out without problems. Sethekk Halls was more troublesome. I think we bit off a bit more than we could chew, and wiped quite a few times, especially at the End Boss, some of us even had to go back to the caravan camp and repair. But it was so cool when we finally did it. The quest reward for the instance is a very nice polearm with lots of agility and stamina on it that actually looks great.

Mana Tombs seemed to be better suited. Only had a little mishap, we even beat the Prince without any troubles. But out of all these, the most fun was Old Hillsbrad in the Caverns of Time. It was pretty tough, but we made it, only wiping twice. The mobs have fear, and some of the groups are pretty close together so you can figure out what happened those two times ;). Also cruised around old Southshore and Hillsbrad for a little while after we were done. It’s very nicely done. So nice to see Hillsbrad in it’s original state ! All in all Morphea is now lvl 68 1/2 or so, and still plenty to do in Nagrand.

Almost exclusively played Morphea, with Morpheus doing the daily pvp almost every day, and one Arena Night. We did well this week going 7-3, now with a priest / mage / boomkin combo, instead of hunter / mage / boomkin. Ruryk has dusted off his retired priest and at least the fights do last a lot longer now ;).

Patch 2.4 is around the corner, I think it’s already been downloaded in the background, looking forward to the new dailies !

Yesterday Morphea and 4 guildies cleared the Underbog. No help from lvl 70s this time ! We had 2 mages, lvl 64 and 62, a druid tank and a holy paladin as healer (both 64). And we did very well. The only wipe occurred right before the first boss where we somehow pulled 2 Bog Lords (and the boss ? wasn’t quite clear to me what happened exactly). We got 1 down, but then people started dieing and with just me and the pally left, we got the other bog lord to 20% or so and I couldn’t shake him off anymore, (my pet was a goner by this time) to shoot him and we died as well.

The third boss was a fun fight. His pet is a captured druid in bear fun. When he get to about 20% health, he becomes friendly. When you speak to him afterwards, he thanks you for freeing him, and that it was an embarrasing experience, being a hunter’s pet :).

Then in the passage before the last boss, I accidentally sent my pet to the next group. My heart skipped a beat when I saw him rushing off. I was too late pulling him back, and he brought three extra mobs to the already tough group we were fighting. But miraculously, we managed to kill em all :). With barely any health and mana left !

Everything went smoothly until we got to the last Boss. He is pretty tough. Luckily when we screwed up, he somehow reset and got back to his place, leaving only some of us dead on the ground. On the first try the clothies died, and somehow the Stalker evaded. On the second try the pally got killed  (he got allevated and plummeted to the ground) and we ran out of the room. The third try though was very smooth, and the boss went down pretty fast.

As you can see, not the whole group grasps the concept of the victory end screenshot :). There is another one over here.

No interesting Hunter drops, just some cloth and +spell dmg stuff. From what I saw on wow-loot.com, the Slave Pens has some more interesting possible hunter drops. Hope to do that instance soon as well.

Completed four quests in the Underbog and thanks to rested XP I went from 350k xp needed to 180k or so. Gained between 1000 - 1200+ xp per mob kill, which was very nice. The 65 - 66 grind seems to take a bit long. The Terrokar Forest quests are a bit grindy (wolfpelts anyone ?), and are starting to bore me. I am actually thinking of skipping a bunch and heading straight to Nagrant, which is a much nicer environment. Sure it has it’s grind quests as well but all in all a more enjoyable experience than TF, atl east from what I can remember when I did all that with morpheus.

On Saturday we had a very nice guild run in the Blood Furnace. No deaths or wipes or quarrel over Loot ! Certainly beats pugs :).

Besides Beano who was lvl 61 we were a little higher than the instance is rated, but we had the quest from Thrallmar to do there anyway, which gave me a new cape, a very nice reward. Some nice loot dropped (a mace for our pally, and some cloth piece from the last boss, nothing for me this time). I did get nice xp though, almost 1000 per mob, as I was rested again. Dinged to lvl 65 at the same moment my ravager leveled to 64. The odds of that ever happening again are very small !

Not the best victory shot here as two of us had already stoned back to Shatt :).

The new leveling system of 2.3 is all fine and dandy, but the leveling of certain skills has not been adjusted to the new leveling speed. For example my polearm skill is still at 256, my 2h sword at something similar, and mining got stuck at 215 when I entered outland. As there is no Mythrill or Thorium in Outlands, I had to go back to the Old World to leveling these skills.

This mining guide at noobschool.com helped a lot. I figured sunday morning would be a good time frame to do this without too much competition, so I made a few rounds around Tanaris and ventured into Un’Goro a bit as well. This left me with a truckload of Mythrill and Solid stone which will be nice to level my engineering. Mining is now at 241, engineering at 250, I’ll have my enchanter / tailor alt make me a mining glove with +5 mining so I can do Thorium on my next round !

Luckily since last night I have an epic mount, which made the process a lot of faster than when I first tried this a week or so ago.

Morphea got to level 64 tonight while questing in Zangarmarsh :). It’s such a nice area, I really like the weird atmosphere there. And it’s somewhat more relaxed than Hellfire Peninsula, as there aren’t mobs (with adds) everywhere you go. And there are plenty of Ogres that drop cloth and nice green items + silver, and who doesn’t like to kill Ogres ?

Only had an unfortunate incident (dieing twice) while getting Spore Sacs in the western part of the zone. I got mobbed by 2 Bog Lords. Usually not something I can’t handle, but they got a weird DOT (strangle something) and then out of nowhere 2 more popped up :(. Unfortunetaly I didn’t die in a comfortable place and got killed again (feign death didnt do much this time) when I get back (quite a walk too).

Ah well that’s all in a day’s questing ;). I am still not finished here in the area and already am 64 now, at this rate I’ll have netherstorm and silvermoon left when I get to 70, which should get me some nice income. I almost have enough for the epic riding skill and banked 50 AV tokens to get the AV mount. Ofcourse I could send over the rest of the gold I need from Morpheus, but this feels more like an accomplishment when I get Morphea to handle her own finances ;).

Yesterday Nazgrel send Morphea on a quest to look for an assassin. Unfortunetely for the assassin, I found his corps in mountain, west of Thrallmar. After delivering the axe that killed him to Nazgrel, he send me to a Far Seer in Thrallmar. She gave a spirit wolf to aid the reconnaisance mission near the assassin’s body. And then a spirit wolf appeared and led me to a hidden village of the people of Mag’har. They’re brown colored orcs, family of Thrall.

Their leader then asked me to deliver a letter to Nazgrel, who send me to Thrall himself ! Always exciting to visit him, he seemed quite upset / surprised about the message the Mag’har were still alive ! He then send me back to them, to aid his people.

You can find more on the mag’har at wowwiki.com.