Life in 2.4

The past month and a half or so has been a fairly busy time for me. I'm happy to say I've had a lot of success with changing my main character and I don't regret it in the least. Some people are annoying about it because it is "EZ Mode" but that doesn't really matter to me. I've been having a blast and I'm so thankful for it.

As soon as 2.4 hit I hopped into the 25 man scene with my shaman. On my first trip to Hyjal, the same night of the patch, I scored a Claw of Molten Fury. It may have even been a server first! What luck I had there. I was dual wielding Fool's Banes at the time. On my first trip to Black Temple I got myself a Rising Tide which I offhanded for a few weeks until a Syphon of the Nathrezim showed up. I'm still using this combo and it works great, though my long term goal is to get a 2nd Syphon and dual wield them. It's not a huge loss if I never get a 2nd as Yo's Sim says my current combo is fairly similar in terms of DPS output, but I can dream, can't I? ;)

I've had great luck with loot; more so than I deserve. I'm going for all non tier 6 gear since piece meal rogue gear is superior for Enhancement at this point in the game. Most of what is the best for me is stuff other classes want to throw to the DE pile, so in that respect things are often in my favor. I get great upgrades without stealing what other people want (most of the time) and I save stuff nobody else wants from being Disenchanted. The only item that severely eluded me was Bow-stitched Leggings, which we never saw after a hojillion trips to Hyjal, but we finally got them just this week, on the same night I hit exalted with Scale of the Sands. (Take note, my previous raiding character was just a little bit from exalted and we never saw them drop when I was raiding as her.)

Enough about gear! I spent a lot of time doing the Shattered Sun dailies. What a fantastic way to get gold. Right now I'm completely burnt out on said dailies, but I'm grateful for the gold I got from them. I think I will really need it when Wrath of the Lich King comes out. I am terrified to know how much it will cost to 'activate' epic mounts in Northrend. My current guess is 10,000 gold, but it could end up being more.

Jewelcrafting has been a boon since 2.4. Everyone is getting new gear and the price of gems skyrocketed. The cost of superior quality patterns, however, has stayed about the same. Most are 300-500 gold while certain ones (such as Teardrop Living Ruby) are close to 1,000 gold. Since I made so much gold doing dailies, I decided to invest in a lot of blue patterns. I have all the Living Ruby patterns except Teardrop now, and of course I have all the Hyjal and Rep patterns. Being able to get patterns from Hyjal rather than Shattered Sun also saved me a lot of gold. There are people asking for Jewelcrafters in trade channel pretty much non-stop, and I've gotten as much as 15g for cutting one blue gem in terms of tips, so I feel the patterns I've purchased were worth the money. Since we just got the epic gem vendor recently, I'll have to keep an eye out on how the price of blue gems fluctuates and whether or not I can make a significant amount of gold cutting epic gems over blues. Time will tell!

Also on the subject of Jewelcrafting, the price of green gems has gone up quite a bit as well. At first I used the Brilliant Glass recipe until I ran out of green gems to use. Of course, after getting a few talasites, which sell for about 9 gold now, I stopped using the transmute. While you can't do much with Deep Peridots, you can pretty much guarantee a good 4 or 5 gold for some of the Blood Garnet cuts. Since Brilliant Glass takes 3 of each green gem, getting a talasite is an enormous loss. As it stands I can get more money for 3 cut Blood Garnets alone; not even counting the other 15 green gems it takes to make! Sure there is the chance to get an epic gem now, but it's probably a very small one, and not worth it if you have a surplus of Badges of Justice, anyways.

On the raiding front, we're currently working on Illidari Council. It wasn't too terribly long ago (after 2.4) that we downed Reliquary of Souls and Mother Shahraz for the first time. For us, Reliquary proved to be quite a pushover. We were so stoked over our success. This happened after we lost some folks, had some mains changed and things changing around, so there was a lot of tension in the atmosphere about our progression. Since then, I think that things have smoothed out some, though we seem to constantly have people leaving now for real life issues. The answer seems to simply be to recruit more people for back up, so we have a lot of new people coming in lately. I think this will help to stabilize our progression for sure, but we have to teach a lot of new people the ropes, and of course get them geared up with Shadow Resist for when they get to go to Mother Shahraz with us. I think the thing I admire about my guild is their determination and persistence. I'm the type of person who, alone, could be crushed under stress fairly easily. I'm not a leader type but I do quite well at following directions from those who are. I sincerely want to do my best for myself and for my guild, so I will always strive to improve how I play and to help my guildmates to do the same. If I make a mistake, I generally know about it and I feel horrible, but I do my damnedest not to ever make the same mistake again. I consider myself a 'competent' player although I sometimes wonder if other people think otherwise. I believe that's mostly just me being paranoid. I want people to feel that I'm reliable. I try very hard to be!