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Ding 43! What to Kill? What to Kill?

November 6, 2007 By Gitr 6 Comments

Paladr’s quest log was full, and I have very little time nowadays (as evidenced by my last post date) to just play around, so it was time to get organized. I decided to attack the quest log systematically. One night, Phil and I were in the pirate cove in Tanaris to complete 4 quests. Another night, I was in Badlands killing everything 4-6 at a time or chain killing in a non-stop 2 on 1 effort until I dinged. Last night, it was the Elder Mistvale Gorillas in STV, including the waves of attacks to get Mokk’s brain. Solo. I’ve never seen that done, so I decided to see if it could be done. Oh, yeah, I also downed Shy-Rotam with Huntr along with the help of Lance’s Drowurden 70 warrior.

Since I’m still short on time, here is a snapshot of my playing. Feel free to ask questions. How ’bout that for efficiency? Don’t tell unless someone gives a darn.

Name That Epic; I Must Be Pitiful

October 28, 2007 By Gitr 17 Comments

I crapped myself today. I was a tad embarrassed, but I got over it. Story time…

Thursday when I was done with all of my graphics stuff for the new theme, I started looking [read: drooling] over epics at or around level 40 that would go along with my being a tankadin.

I eventually found a nice shield that made up for the one Horde can’t get from an easy Badlands quest. I was quite pissed about that inequality, so I began drooling over an epic that appeared in the Armory upgrade search: The Green Tower. Anyone look at this one before? Wow! I can’t wait to get smacked by 7 things at once now. I still have yet to get ganged up since I got my plate gear, so I think it’s time to go after some spiders in Duskwallow Marsh.

Soooo… I was on the AH and confirmed that I still couldn’t craft what I wanted, buy what I wanted, or sell what I wanted. as far as armor goes. Moving on down to shields, up pops the Green Tower for 100g and a confirmed Auctioneer average of 119g on Velen. Um… hold on, Punitor, brb. Deadr has to buy me something. I can’t believe I was so happy about a little purple thing made up of ones and zeroes, but I was.

Have you ever had an epic weapon and shield pre-60 at the same time? Me neither.

Ding 40!

October 26, 2007 By Gitr 6 Comments

Paladr wears plate Paladr hit 40 just before 11:30 tonight. It was a pretty fast run from 60% at about 90 minutes. I knocked out quite a few STV quests in the process. Too many quests in the log make me go nuts and lose focus. I concentrated on staying in mostly high density areas to power grind and combined that with some drop quests like the crystals off the basilisks. It made for a pretty good combination and I flew to Grom’gol for the zeppelin to Undercity.

I hadn’t been to Silvermoon for about 20 levels, so I wasn’t even sure if there was a level 30 paladin quest, so I made sure to go there instead of using any old trainer. I didn’t see any quests from the usual suspects in SM City. Getting that over, I started going down the list of spells to train (actually, I started with wearing Plate Mail) and got to Summon Warhorse! Yes! Just what I’ve been waiting for. The next stop: Auction House.

I checked my bank and mailbox to make sure I didn’t have any plate armor sitting around that I’d forgotten about. My only disappointment of the night, armor-wise, is the lack of mats to craft some Truesilver Gauntlets. Too bad we don’t have a decent AH market on Velen. It’ll get there, but not fast enough for my gloves. I got all stacked up with various plate armor available to newbie 40s, which are insanely overpriced for the good armor because of everyone’s excitement to wear plate at level 40.

All in all I got Paladr’s armor up over 4k and his damage mitigation (yes, I can spell better than the crappy paladin guide up on the forums) rose to 51.48% the last time I looked. I didn’t get a chance to try out my new spells, but riding around the city on my new mount was fun enough for the evening.

New Theme in Place

October 26, 2007 By Gitr 9 Comments

I spent my time in the library at school using Photoshop and creating those cool custom images for the top posts and getting everything work correctly enough to go live on it for the evening. Evening turned to night, and I believe it is working good enough to leave up while the small improvements trickle in. Here are my favorite features:

A customized image on the home page for any post I want to display there.
The ability to display the most popular articles with custom graphics to draw the eye to them.
The speed of the code is phenomenal. My host has been running slowly and was down for some time on the East coast yesterday (bad GoDaddy!), so I’m looking into “fixing” that.
It has the backbone for multiple authors and is a really good framework for a magazine style site that showcases all of the different categories. I’m going to do some category cleanup as a result.
The text area is very wide, leaving plenty of room to work with text and images into a great-looking post. This will take a while to clean up articles taylored for a narrow format, but I’m not complaining.

This new theme will take a little time to get used to and some effort to convert some old content, but I really couldn’t be happier. Go check it out for yourself and drop Darren Hoyt a line in the comments if you like it.

Didn’t Make 40 Yet; New Theme

October 25, 2007 By Gitr 14 Comments

I didn’t get to play last night because of a massive amount of school work. I deferred working on school during our vacation last weekend (hey, you only get a first wedding anniversary once!) and had to play catch-up. The price I had to pay was writing a 2 page analysis on a sucky website in the library two hours before class. That was just Tuesday!

Last night, I still had to read 80 very dense pages of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to write my weekly 3/4-page critical analysis; for the 6th week without any feedback from the full-doctorate professor. Who knows how I’m doing?! The grades aren’t posted online, she hasn’t given us the papers or the grades, and she was only available to fix her mistake of leaving the papers at home last week during lunch hours Monday and Wednesday. Hello! Some of us have full-time jobs. That’s why we’re taking night classes!

I’m almost done working on a new theme that I found by a terrific web designer. I have every confidence that when it’s completely Gitr-ized, you will love the new feel and tell more of your friends. It is by far the most superior theme I’ve seen available to the public and should really get a foothold on the community. Stay tuned in the next couple of days.

UPDATE: Giving the theme a trial run until I get home from class. Please leave feedback.

Ding 39; Grinding away kill/drop quests

October 23, 2007 By Gitr 5 Comments

Paladr hit 39 last night and frantically tried to level out his Blacksmithing to 300 using the simplest and cheapest methods possible, only to fall short of the next recipe level at the trainer. I think Paladr is at 272 and must need 275 to get the next round in Booty Bay.

I started investigating the specializations and decided to go with Armorsmith and was moderately disappointed to learn that I have to hit level 40 for those recipe quests to become available. I have stored up most of the crafted items used to receive those Ornate Mithril Armor pieces, which I am obviously eager to don at level 40 anyway. I have some nice stuff crafted already, but I can’t wait to see what kind of beating Paladr will take with plate armor.