h.i.e.p. karma

Mood: None? Shrug

Yesterday the big pre-Wrath patch for WoW came out, 3.0.2. It even had a name, "Echoes of Doom". Ooooh. (Sarcasm here).
There were lots of changes in the patch, so I logged in to check them out. It was the first time I had played WoW since I went on a WoW sabbatical in the beginning of August. That's over 2 months ago. For some reason it seems a lot longer. WoW was taking up too much of my time and I wanted to use more of that time to work out and get in shape, as well as get back into bedroom DJing.

I ended up playing for about 2 1/2 hours. I'm not sure how much more I'll play but I need to be careful not to let it cut into my other activities...

Mood: Pensive

I think I will be taking a break from playing WoW (yeah... can you believe it???). After this past weekend in Vegas, I feel like I should do things other than sitting in front of a computer pressing "3... 4... right-click" ad nauseum. Although admittedly that's been hella fun!

So what will I be doing? Well, prob playing Rock Band again (like 1-2 songs a night). Pick up bedroom DJing again - I really need to finish teaching myself beatmatching by ear. And finish watching So You Think You Can Dance!. Oh, and of course, hitting the gym again.

Ugh.. I just screwed myself... lol. I went to the Fox site to get the link for SYTYCD and well... found out who won it! Doh... So if you haven't watched the finale yet, don't go to the site

Mood: Sleeeeeepy.

More WoW-talk... ignore at will! So last Sunday I finally farmed enough honor points to purchase my first PvP epic-quality item: Merciless Gladiator's Pummeler. It took awhile as the cost was 18,000 honor points and 20 Eye of the Storm Marks. I was going to blog about it on that Sunday or Monday, but I've been too busy playing to do that.

I'm hoping to get the second Pummeler this weekend (I need two since my Shaman dual-wields weapons).


Here's two pics of my first Pummeler!

Mood: Delirious...

I just dinged level 70 on my Alliance shaman... w00t!

Time /played for level 69: 20 hours, 37 minutes.
(Note: I'd say prob several hours were spent doing battlegrounds, thereby not getting any xp at all. Oh, and 4 hours doing a Karazhan raid - although I got a measly 1.25 bars of xp from that...)

Total time /played: 14 days, 19 hours, 49 minutes. Sheesh...

It's a strange mixture of feelings... there's this "pump-your-fist-oh-yeah" mixed in with a strange elation, like a "phew-thank-goodness-that-race-is-over". I don't know why it felt like a race to 70, but it did...

Looking at my first post about WoW, it took me approximately 15 weeks to level up from 1 to 70... that's almost 4 months. I could probably shaved off 3-4 weeks from that time if I had just concentrated solely on the shaman and not played around with alts (but then I would probably get burned out too...)

Edit: Some pics!

Ding!



My flying mount over Nagrand... (ok so yeah every 70 has got one.. but still they're awesome)

Mood: Yay! (Is that a mood?)

Just dinged 69 on my Shaman. Time /played: 13 hours, 29 minutes. However! I was probaby afk for an hour of that - I got lazy and instead of logging off just stayed online & idled. One more level to go...

Edit/Update:
Tonight ended up being a big night of "firsts". In addition to dinging 69, I tried my first battlegrounds game - I entered an Eye of the Storm BG. And the Alliance won! So I got 3 EOTS marks and um... like 200 honor

After that, I ended going on a raid - Karazhan! At 69! I didn't do too bad... We didn't finish it, but got about to the middle, beating The Curator after an initial wipe there. The raid lasted about 4+ hours before we called it a night. So I guess I won't be dinging 70 this weekend (as originally planned)

Mood: w00t.

Got my shaman to level 68 tonight. This time I did remember to check time /played for this level: 11 hours, 50 minutes (almost 12 hours). A bit long, but I believe I had spent some time working up my fishing skill. Still, not too bad.

Total time played for the shaman (gulp): 13 days, 9 hours, 43 minutes...

Mood: Yay?

Just dinged 67 now (Yeah, it's late if you look at the timestamp. But hey, it's Friday and I'm sleeping in on Saturday).
This time I did remember to check my /played time for level 66 and interestingly it took me only 10 hours, 45 minutes to level from 66 to 67. Not bad...

Mood: Lackadaisical

Ding'd level 66 late last night. Got my Earth Elemental - it's quite useful for group quests.
I also died multiple times last night as I put in an attempt at world pvp - not a good idea. So far in pvp, I'd say I'm 0 - 15 (that's zero kills and 15+ deaths: my own).

Mood: Elated

A quick note: just reached level 65 now on my shaman. Things are going much faster now that I have 1) Water Shield and 2) am questing in Outland. Unfortunately I forgot (again) to check my /played time on this level just prior to dinging... *shrug* Oh well.

Mood: Giddy

Wow just dinged 63 in WoW. I have to say, Water Shield for a Shaman is flat-out incredible. I have practically no down-time whatsoever. I'd say I'm easily on-par with a druid in terms of how fast I can grind mobs now. It took me approximately 9-10 hours to level from 62 to 63, /played.

60 -> 61: Ultra-painful.
61 -> 62: Not so bad. Not sure what it was. But still hella slow. (Perhaps it was doing all those Desecrate the Flame quests - I wanted to get the Brazier of Dancing Flames. Which I did. w00t.)
62 -> 63: Relative breeze, compared to the past two painful levels.

Mood: Relief

Finally... just dinged 62. After almost a week of playing. Unfortunately I forgot to check my /played time right before I leveled to 62 so I don't know how many hours I spent at that level. My guess? 15+ hours...

Alrighties. From now on, I will be copying LiveJournal's "current mood" gimmick.

Mood: Sleepy


Ding ding ding! w00t. I hit level 60 on my shaman over the weekend. I think over the course of Saturday I dinged from 57 to 60 (I was 1 bar away from 58 when I started on Saturday). Getting my epic mount was very very nice. That's the good part.

Now the bad part. I spent most of Sunday and a good amount on Monday leveling from 60 to 61. It's soooo much slower. Ugh.
I looked at the /played time to level from 60 to 61 and it clocked at 9 1/2 hours! Usual leveling would probably be 3-5 hours. In addition the 9 1/2 hours was with accelerated xp (10% from Midsummer Fire Festival ribbon dance, daily torch tossing/catching quests, etc).

I can tell getting to 70 from here on out will be loads of fun...

Yesterday morning I awoke to find my MacBook Pro not working.

Turns out the display wasn't working. The screen remained black (off) no matter what I tried. Yet my laptop was still fully functional (thank goodness!) - I could hear it beep, I could increase/decrease the volume, etc. It's just the display never turned on - and the Apple logo on the back never lit up. So it's either a logic board issue or an issue with the actual display screen itself. Odds are it's the logic board, as connecting it to an external monitor did nothing.

I ended up being very lucky - I was still in warranty. Just barely. It expires in 2 weeks. I would have been *extremely* pissed if it had been just outside of the warranty period.

So last night I took my MBP to the local Apple Store and they're going to fix it. The rep was really nice, and I ended up getting a discount on the extended warranty from him to boot! (He said, "Don't tell anyone...". Haha). I told him I was interested in the extended warranty but Amazon was cheaper. He asked how much and I told him it was $50 cheaper. He talked to the manager and they matched the price. So now I'm $300 poorer but at least I can sleep at night for the next two years knowing my MBP will be taken cared of.

Now that I couldn't play WoW on my laptop, I ended up installing it on my server (old 2.6Ghz P4 with 1gb ram and a crappy ATI FireGL card). I was surprised as it runs WoW somewhat decently. It was actually playable at 1920x1080. I get occasional slowdowns but so far nothing too bad. The only crappy thing is I lost all my macros and I've had to rewrite some of them.

The current status of my chars:
Shaman - 55
Druid - 34
Hunter - 34
Paladin - 16
Rogue - 11
Mage - 13 (Yes, I started another alt!)
Warlock - 4

Update [6/24/08]:
Forgot to update this, but two days later (that Wednesday) they had it repaired and ready to pick up. They ended up replacing only the logic board. Price to me: $0. Woohoo!

So nerdy. There's quite a few web sites / services that will auto-generate an image signature for ya...

More nerdy blog stuff!!

This past Friday I started leveling my shaman intensely, with the intention of getting her to level 50 by the end of the weekend. I didn't make it. Haha... But I leveled her from 45 to 49 from Friday to the end of Saturday. Doing that though kinda burnt me out on the shammy. So on Sunday I leveled my druid from 11 to 19.

I'm finding the druid pretty fun too. The class seems very flexible, and I'm finding that classes that have the ability to heal the most enjoyable to play. So far the druid and shaman top my "fun" list.

Last night I leveled the druid again, since hitting level 20 you get cat form, which is waaaaay cooler than bear form. I guess because I was wanting to get to 20 so bad it felt like I hit a brick wall - leveling was soooo slow. It took me over 2 hours to get to 20! Ugh. I ended up getting to 21 later that night (and then finally logging off).

Once I hit twenty I also did the quests to acquire Cure Poison and Aquatic Form. Man... those quests were a magnificent pain in the rear to do! Honestly I'm glad I didn't have to do a quest to get cat form (although it seems to be an oversight/don't care issue with Blizzard).