Team Update: 6/4

It's been a fairly slow week for us, so nothing major to report. I think Sol's 25-man team only made it as far as Thorim attempts last week, so no progress there. This week's already behind since Tuesday's raid got canceled - bad combination of people with other commitments and some raider turnover. It's unfortunate, but you get periods like this in raiding guilds.

For me, it's been mostly tournament dailies. I did try to get into the Ulduar run this week before they called it, but apparently when they say to the contractors like us to send our mains for the job, there's fine print that says "everyone but Ragar". Bah, like I need their repair bills anyway.

Our new bear tank Grunzford has had a fair bit of action this last week. No raids, but a fair number of heroic runs. Only one piece dropped from any of the runs that he cared for, but it's still Emblems of Heroism towards other gear. It also gave him a bit more practice at tanking, so he'll be a bit better prepared for when I line him up with a Naxxramas job at some point.

Speaking of Naxxramas, our resident shadow priest, Matheion, paid that place a visit this past weekend. Some friends of mine from the guild were going with a pick-up group and said they needed a shadow priest, so I sent him along for the practice. To hear him describe it, it wasn't the worst PuG in the world, but they certainly tried for the title. Sounded like your typical PuG screw-ups to me: assigning people to kite on Gluth who aren't built for it and not giving them enough healing, half the raid dying to the dance on Heigan, only one person cleansing curses on Noth, etc. They ended up not finishing the run, but if nothing else he got some Emblems of Valor and a new pair of pants out of the run.

Most of the last week though has been dedicated to our team's mage. Right now he's 43 and slowly making his way towards Outland. Our team's hunter, Lokaja, asked if he could be next, but after buying epic flight training for the priest and the druid within a few weeks of each other, the team bank needs a breather and that means it's the lowbie's time to shine. Besides, I saw him trying to quest a little the other day and I think he and that wolf of his need a bit more training dummy time before they start questing again. I don't know hunter rotations all that well, but I'm pretty sure he's doing it wrong.

Crusader Solannis, the team's newest 80, and some news

Some quick updates since the last couple of days were eventful and we actually remembered to take pictures for once.

First off, Solannis finally finished championing the last of the cities for the Argent Tournament and has earned his Crusader title.

Of course he couldn't resist being a smartass and timing everything out. Not that I'd be any better, but it's still a little silly. It'll be a while before I get those titles though - back when I was questing, they were a little stingier with the reputation.

Next up is our resident priest, Matheion. He finally hit 80 last night, so we celebrated by going to crafting him some gear, spending some Emblems of Valor on bracers, and hitting the auction house for bargains. He still has no idea how to heal though, so for the moment he's focusing on Shadow.

Math did say to pass along a message to anyone currently leveling: if you're 77 or higher and you're not doing the Argent Tournament dailies, drop whatever you're doing and go. Aside from the whole "collecting Champion's Seals" thing, each quest is apparently worth about 24,000 experience each, so it's as close to free experience as you're going to get.

On the raiding front, Sol says they downed Kologarn, Assembly of Iron, Auriaya, and Freya for the first time this week in the 25-man run. Not a bad week's work.

There was one other bit of news. Now what was it?... Oh yeah!
I managed to get some tickets for me and two friends to go to BlizzCon this year. I've been once before, but not as a blogger, so this time I'll have some gadgets to post anything interesting we may find. Of course, this means I'm gonna have to find another human costume for the show since it's apparently in Alliance territory. For some reason, they get all worked up when a Tauren shows up on their doorstep.

Team Update: 3/7

Not a whole lot to report for myself the last few weeks: cooking dailies, farming ore, the usual. Mordigg spent most of the last few weeks gathering herbs to mill as he tries to make his Darkmoon Card: Greatness trinket; right now we've got the Prisms Deck made so Daikaja can get the Darkmoon Card: Illusion as a healing trinket, but the other decks are all sitting at five or six out of eight cards. He's also run a few more heroics for emblems towards his tier pieces, but really I just need to get him assigned to a 10-man Naxx run again.

Solannis finally got to take down Malygos (well, the 10-man version at least), so now he's got that new tanking neck he'd been looking for. Guild's still working on the bigger version of the fight, but it's something. Funny thing was, he got the achievement, but didn't get the Champion of the Frozen Wastes title. I took a look at his achievements and found the problem. Apparently he's never gone to Oculus; I suppose I'll have to fix that at some point and schedule him for a run one of these days. Since Sol's become our main field agent for raiding these days, he needs a title and until he gets to work and gets Chef, he'll have to settle for Champion of the Frozen Wastes. That or I could make him get Challenger again, but I'm guessing that suggestion won't go over well.

Most of the team's effort the last few weeks though has gone into two of our cloth-wearing members. Our senior engineer, Medeleth, has been making fairly good progress into Northrend. Granted, getting him to step out of the lab was a pain, but once I got it into his head that he wouldn't be able to upgrade his goggles or learn the secrets of the motorcycle without some legwork, he started burning through those quests in Borean Tundra. Earlier today he hit 74, so it shouldn't be too much longer before he catches up to the rest of us and we can start working on some gear for him.

The other clothie who's made some great progress would be our resident priest, Matheion. Up till now, we've never had a priest pass the 20 mark. They'd always end up running for the hills or vanishing from the face of Azeroth or something like that. Regardless, we've finally got a priest that's made it past the Barrens and through the proper application of heirloom items, craftable pieces from other members of the team, and the occasional threat, he'll make it to Northrend or die trying.