Garona and Jeeves

I'd been so content having Walter that I didn't really give the actual repairbots any thought.

When I bit the bullet and dropped herbalism for engineering I went around and collected plans but never really did anything with them.

Yesterday I finally handed in one of the last parts of the legendary questline after wandering around with Blackhands severed arm for about a week. I went off to find Kadgar and Garona hanging around outside the Horde camp. Kadgar was as casual as usual, standing there, not caring if he was spotted. Garona was hunkered down, waiting to go on a killing spree.
Picking up this quest I already knew it was going to be a headfuck. No real skill from you. All you had to be concerned about was if your computer could handle enough graphics to clearly show what way the mobs were facing. I'll give you one guess about the state of graphics on mine...

Heading up with Garona, I could get to the pit with the Horde having some kind of rally but my computer decided that if a mob walked away too far from my char then it would fade into the distance so I never knew when it was walking back. Coupled with the other mobs that were roaming around the was a tiny split second to send Garona in and hope for the best.
Needless to say, it didn't go well.






After repeating this over and over and at one point watching a guide for so long that the mobs reappeared behind me. I cheated. I joined a random group and got into the first tower that way.
I then joined a second group to get up to where I was supposed to hide behind some barrels.
I got up there and had no idea where I was supposed to be hiding. So, I left the group and let them all come at me. Garona and I were dutifully 'rescued'.
I went off again, this time trying to sneak around the back, Garona followed me around, enjoying looking at the Horde architecture. Knowing really that there wasn't going to be a back door I crept back round to the front. There were no mobs.
I inched up to where I needed to go. Half expecting my computer to suddenly kick into gear and all the mobs appear instantly. I nestled myself into a corner and waited. Still no mobs.
I reloaded.
They all appeared.
Garona had vanished.
I could see the little shit down by Kadgar as I poked my head over a wall.

So all that was left was to pick them off one by one Hunter style.
As I inched along the wall of the upper section, coming from the tower opposite the path you're supposed to take, I shot the mobs one by one. Pulling them over and silencing them before dispatching them quietly away from prying eyes. I had to kill four this way before I got to the crates and could see the cut scene of Deadeye turning into a weird dead looking Horde with spikes.
After the cut scene I was transported back down to Kadgar and Garona. Turning on the quests they disappeared and I was left looking at Hordies.
Thanks for that!

After completing that nightmare I was at a loose end. I'd got a couple of raid achievements that I needed a hand with but started looking at my professions.
I'd looked at making all the research I could to get all the glyphs and then thought about making all the Hunter glyphs but it was a headache having to flick between the inks tab, glyph tab and then the auction house and by that time I'd forgotten the seven herbs I could use to make the ink.
As mentioned before, my computer isn't the quickest thing in the world so I can't run wowhead and wow for long before my fps drops into single figures. It has meant I've turned to fashioning myself a paper form of my most used Wowhead pages using flashcards.


After writing out all the inks I decided to take a look through my engineering. And my engineering button was right next to my inspiration on what to research making.
Walter was sat there with his little '2' icon. It made me think about when I was last in a raid and the Horde were being very unfriendly and wouldn't let us put a mount up. We had to coordinate repairbots so we wouldn't have to go outside.
Scrolling down to Jeeves, I'd collected all the plans for the components to make it but never got any further.
I wrote everything down on a piece of scrap paper and then checked the auction house for bits.
Two hours later, which involved lots of calculations, smelting, farming and nearly being stuck in a Wintergrasp battle. I'd nearly got everything and I was 4k lighter in the gold department.
The last little bit I needed was King's Amber.
Turns out there were npc's who sold it for justice points or honor. Not anymore though.
Looking at my scribbled notes on the possibilities my options were; prospecting it from ore, farming Onyxia for her gem bag, getting a jewelcrafter to create an icy prism or finding an alchemist who can transmute it.
The idea of farming ore again was not something that made me jump for joy. However I'd have to go down that route for three options anyway. So I went to Onyxia. The gem bag dropped. Twice on two chars (it was late and I couldn't be arsed taking the others over there) but both bags contained one solitary Dreadstone.
Now locked, I had to look up the other options. I had previously sold all of my gems so had nothing at all on me. For the prospecting and icy prism I'd need to farm a lot or spend a lot of gold. Transmuting seemed the only viable option. There was a snag though...


So I would need to find at least one alchemist who was able to do it, if I was able to do it on my DK. Otherwise, I'd need to find two.
I went to the ah to find the lesser gems, Autumn's Glow. Annoyingly there was King's Amber for sale at 300g per gem. I'd spent far too much already so really wanted to reel in the throwing gold at the auction house. Glow was up for 9g each, bargain. Now all I needed was the Eternal Life to finish up the mats list.

When I was creating the Titansteel I had bought the mats I could (before I started wincing at the cost) and farmed the rest. I had a bunch of Eternal Earth, and I was hoping that I had found the recipe to transmute it to an Eternal Life. No such luck.
The recipe was available on the ah. For over 5k. No. No. No. No.
So I bought the Eternal Life and hopped onto my DK to double check if she had the transmute recipe and if she didn't, then get it.
I went off to Dalaran. Going straight to the 'retail zone' looking for the Alchemy place. I ran around but just couldn't see it. I had to ask a guard. "It's the one with the doorway shaped like a giant flask, you can't miss it!"
Well I did, so I can.
When I did find it, the bright blue bubbling doorway, I ran in to find who I was looking for and the conversation kinda went like this...
Alchemist: "I have a job you can do for me"
Me: "Oh yeah? What's that?"
Alchemist: "Transmute me five amazing gems from some shitty ones and I'll teach you how to make another one"
Me: "Errr. I don't actually want to know how to make that gem so I'll pass. So, do you sell anything?"
Alchemist: "Err no. Clearly I'm too intelligent to just 'sell things'. Ask that wench behind the counter..."

So I asked her. And she must work in the most epically rubbish store in Dalaran as all she sold were empty bottles.
I did what any disgruntled shopper does, I just walked away.
I ran to the anvil to do my living steel cooldown and then had a flick through my other recipes.
Holy shit. I already knew how to make the gem.
But...
But it said cooldown resets daily...
It's a shared cooldown with crappy living steel.
Enough fucking around. I walked into the auction house and bought the damn things. 440g although this time it was from the DK's money pot so I didn't feel too disheartened.
Mailing them over, and logging onto Zionxi, I finally made Jeeves. Being impatient lead to it costing me nearly 5k!
Best run a lot of old raids to get my bank balance back up to a level where I'm not having a mild panic attack every time I look at it.

Hello London!

There's something rather exciting about meeting your guild mates. These people that you spend hours talking to over teamspeak, you've messaged each other, you know what you look like.
Then you decide to name a date to go somewhere and hang out.

This date was today, the 11th of April. The date of the grand national and the boat race. Our mission however was to have some fun in London. Even though Francis was wondering if we would be able to see the grand national while we were here!
We didn't have any plan of what to do, just see where we ended up.
We met at King's Cross. Francis/Yjelza arrived first, announcing that he was outside the station. This prompted the question of where? There were three places he could be near. The giant bird cage, the taxi rank or by the holy grail of Costa. It was the bird cage. As my train pulled into Kings, he mentioned the bird cage had a swing. Jokingly I said to get on it, as I walked around (past Costa and the taxi rank) I could see someone on their phone, swinging merrily.
"Are you on the swing?" I asked. "Yep" "I see you!" First person found!
All I could say while grinning like a Cheshire Cat was "You're an idiot" as he tried to get off the swing but got his headphones tangled up in the chains. A quick phone call later and we discovered Blunnerz was here as well but was getting food. The quest to find him was on. Propping up the counter at Wasabi, we waited until his posh 'Super Noodles' were ready and headed back outside to wait for Rawls to show.


There was a slight groan when we thought we needed to head to Euston to collect him. As we crossed the road we dipped into Costa to get a pilgrimage coffee and it was while we were in there we learned that he was going to get to King's Cross. That coffee need saved us a wasted trek!
We sat back down at our bird cage bench while Blunnerz ate his posh super noodles. He picked out a lemon slice with his chop sticks. "Should I eat this?" He asked. Almost instantly the reply was "yes." He did indeed eat it and then discovered the woes of #lemonburps. Francis decided to go for a loo break while we were waiting. Going in one door, he seemed to take forever to come back again. "Do you think he's lost?" Blunnerz asked. "yep" I said, nodding. Francis chose that moment to reappear from a completely different direction. "I got lost!" he yelled as he came towards us, I can only assume we both looked completely confused as to how he got lost in what is essentially a very wide corridor.
I finished my coffee and went to recycle my cup and when I turned around to walk back, Chris/Rawls had sat down in my place. "You're in my seat!" I joked as I came up. We were all here and we were ready to rock and roll.

As we didn't know really what we wanted to do I suggested the river. The river as in The Thames. It was a 45 minute walk but also a nice scenic one. And in good company wouldn't seem like any time at all. Walking down there with myself as the 'tour guide' we headed off. I'd walked this route many many times, Francis however decided to ask halfway down 'are we nearly there yet?' "No".

While walking we went down a side road to take us onto Fleet Street. With Francis pointing to something vaguely as we were walking down, saying 'what is that?' we weren't sure what exactly he was pointing at. "A building?" Blunnerz said. "No shit sherlock" He replied with a swift "what???" to my reply of "a cloud?" (I had no idea what he was pointing at!) Arriving at St. Paul's we stopped for a moment to take in the sun and read the flurry of messages that had come through.


Francis was rather excited over a Shaun the Sheep that was outside. He asked if we had seen the film. It was a unanimous 'no' to which Francis said that it was really good. Uh hu...!

Walking onwards a truck went past us electronically muttering something. "Did that truck say it was reversing?" Blunnerz asked what we were all thinking. "It's a very confused truck" He then spotted a bridge. "That looks like an important bridge..."
"That's the Millennium Bridge"
Francis started wandering off. "Guys,  we going to cross?"
At that moment the traffic light God's were with us and we could cross the road over to it straight away. The wind was quite strong and the sun was constantly going behind the clouds, Francis decided to walk in the sun. Gloating for all of five seconds as the clouds came up and plunged his nice 'warm side' into shadows. Going over the bridge there was a people traffic jam, a person cooking something in caramel that smelled delicious and also a pigeon that 'attacked' Francis. I spotted something in the river. "Is that a syringe?" I asked, squinting in the water below. "Oh, no, its a bottle". Rawls laughed, "that would have to be some syringe!" "One for an elephant?" I quipped, miming using a syringe the size of a tree trunk.

We were at the pub!


Going in we headed to the bar and ordered drinks, we chose to sit outside as even though it was fairly windy, it was a sweat box inside. Heading out we picked our bench and procceded to wipe off the rain from the seats. Rawls somehow managed to wipe his dry and then spill beer on it. I went to the loo and brough back tissue to dry my spot. We were chatting about all sorts, Francis tried to mouth something to Rawls who had to give up after many attempts and announce that he cant lip read. Blunnerz told us about the time he unexpetedly opened up a blood orange and went to laugh about it with Rawls, even though Rawls would not know why it was so funny as all he would see was a green fruit. It was at that moment when we were all very much 'not prepared' that a huge gust of wind sprang up. My pint glass fell over and smashed against the ashtray, emptying is contents all over Francis and his bag. Rawls managed to catch Blunnerz' bottle (which was pretty much empty) and forgot his own which sprayed him in beer. All we could do was laugh. There was glass everywhere. Rawls realised that it wasn't just his hoodie that soaked up most of it. He looked like he had wet himself after the bottle just poured out into his lap for a split second before being stood up again. It turned out to be the most expensive pint I've had after only managing to drink a quarter of it before inadvertently throwing it all over a guild mate.




The conversation turned to physics. Blunnerz and I looked at each other and shrugged. I then started watching some geese by the river. "Oh we've lost Ella" Rawls laughed. "I was just watching the duck/geese things down on the rock" I replied. "Where?" Rawls asked. "Down there on the rocks" Blunnerz pointed out for him. "I can only see one, they're very well camouflaged" "they are, the whole river is covered by them" We joked.
We then had to decide what to do next. We were discussing going to a museum but the ones we wanted were in Kensington. I was checking Google maps to see how long it would take to get to them when Francis had an amazing idea. "Let's go to London Bridge! It's only over there"
"It would take us 1 hour 45 minutes to walk" I announced.
"How slow do you think we are?"
"What?"
"Were only going to the bridge!"
"Ohhhh. Well then, not that long..."
We headed off. Francis was obsessed with going up stairs and had to be called back down. Asking the way we found a little fountain comprised of small jets of water coming out of the floor.
It was too tempting as we stood around it. I flicked Francis with it. I had promised him he was going to get dunked so this was as close as I could get. This lead to a mini water fight. I scooped up a handful and flicked it his way. He did the same but as I skipped out of the way he only managed to hit an unsuspecting family with it. Apologising profusely as we briskly made our escape he caught up with us. Blunnerz and Rawls having made a quicker exit when they could see how this was going to end.

I didn't take this photo but where the woman in red is sat, that's where the unsuspecting family were that got a face full of water...

We got to London Bridge eventually. There has never been seen so much disappointment and confusion over a bridge before.
"Why are we here?" Francis asked.
"This is London Bridge" Rawls replied.
"What? What's that then?" Francis blurted pointing at the well known London landmark.
"That's Tower Bridge" Came the chorus of replies.
"What the fuck. Why would this be London Bridge? I wouldn't care if this one fell down! It's just a bridge!"
"Do you want to go to Tower Bridge...?" Rawls added.
"Yes"
We walked back down again. Passing sone sort of performance/meeting going on outside of city hall. We stopped for a while listening and enjoying the sun.
Moving on we were closer to Tower Bridge and Blunnerz spotted something.
"That bridge has a giant penis on it!"
We all looked.
"Where?" Rawls asked.
"In the middle. It looks like a glowing penis..."


As we walked up to it, the lure of stairs again meant that people started to go up. I was busy reading a sign telling us we were going into 'the exhibition' and was not paying any attention to where I was walking. I walked straight into a bollard. Grabbing hold of someone's shoulder to stop myself falling over we negotiated our way through the crowd and walked up the steps to the actual bridge. Crossing over it. It didn't seem as big as I'd imagined. Francis though was happy!
It was getting on to a very late lunch time so the McDonald's app came out and we made a pit stop. The next port of call was Covent Garden, which Francis assured us was 'over there and to the left' setting him up as group leader we followed him off down the street.
We had in fact gone round in a big circle, coming back to the road we went down to get to Fleet Street. As we pressed onwards, Francis told us to cross the road and carry on. Unfortunately his maps hadn't quite caught up to where we were and this was the wrong direction.
"It's over here!" He called from his position at the front. I crossed my fingers and held them up so Blunnerz could see and the laughing from the back caused both Francis and Rawls to turn around.
"What?"
"Nothing!"
We passed a building clad in orange and green plastic.
"That building is very..." Blunnerz started to say.
"Orange?" I added.
"OMG, Rawls! What colour is that building?!" He asked.
"Green?" Rawls replied, as that was the only colour he could see but knowing it was likely to be wrong.
"You're half right, that big bit is orange."

Taking the right street this time we realised we were right next to Forbidden Planet. A unanimous vote to go inside and have a look round, it was big. Upon going in we almost immediately were questioning where each other had disappeared to.
Blunnerz found Jesus.
Jesus was kinda cute.


Francis had disappeared into the black hole of the Star Trek section and many questionable noises were heard as he was picking up boxes and other trinkets.
We headed downstairs into the comics/books section, wandering around looking at all the weird and wonderful titles. We Found a book on shit taxidermy, highly amusing and very very wrong on equal levels. Then stumbling on a World of Warcraft poster book Francis almost had a mealtdown as the 'do I - don't I' demons set in. There were a few other WoW books on the lower shelf and a I ducked down to check them out Francis lowered the poster book and inadvertently hit me on the head. Not realising what he had hit he lifted the book up to see. Realising it was me, he then boofed me on the head with it again for good measure. I decided to just waggle my foot at anything on lower shelves after that!

Coffee was calling by this time. It was heading on to 5pm and we needed a second wind. Heading into Covent Garden market we found another Costa and sat down to relax for a bit. The phone chargers came out and we spent the time looking through the 1000 images we had all sent and received in our little chat group.
My magical artwork of how to kill Garrosh and the MS Paint tactics for some of the Highmaul bosses where we played a little game of 'guess what boss this is describing'.
Rawls had a train at 6pm. At 5:23 I checked how long it would take to get there from where we were.
"It takes 35 minutes to get back to King's from here..." I announced.
"So I better leave now then?" Rawls questioned.

Blunnerz whipped out his phone and put us on target.
"It's going to be five past six by the time we get there according to this" He said.
We walked down shady back streets. We were on our epic ground mounts as Blunnerz was informing us that we were ahead of schedule by a minute.
"Not quite enough!" Rawls said. "I'm probably one of the only ones who want their train to be cancelled so I can get a later one"

We came to a dead end in the road.
"Where do we go?"
Blunnerz checked the map.
"Through the pink building apparently"
"Let's go thorough the pink hole!"
(There's always one! And this time it wasn't me!)

We could see the train station. It was so so close but we could also see the clock and that said six as we were waiting to cross the road.
"Hopefully we can get across both sides in one go" Blunnerz said.
"We need all this bullshit to go away first" I replied, gesturing at all the traffic going past us. I turned round to check how Rawls was holding up. I didn't actually have to ask. The nervous laughter said it all. However all was not lost. Checking his train times, it left at 6:08. Francis was checking his phone as we walked up the street and managed to walk into a lamp post, right next to a bus full of commuters. As we got into the station Rawls ran off to check the departure boards. Running back we got time for a swift goodbye before he had to chase after his train.

The rest of us had a while. Francis had to wait for an hour and Blunnerz and I had open returns (clever people!) We decided to find a pub. There was a sign for happy hour. We needed no more temptation.



We sat there, cocktails in front of us and contemplated our WoW experience so far, as fought the wind and a wobbly table. Four cocktails later, Francis realised he still had to get back across London to make his train. Time to go!

Cata dungeons

The easter break means raids have been put on hold for two weeks. The first week was a little 'confusing' for the few of us who were logging in. Not enough to raid and not wanting to Pug some angry teenagers, we inevitably just hung around in our Garrisons until boredom overcame us.

This week I've been a bit more proactive. I competed lfr in one go and then did something I haven't done in a while. I opened up my achievements tab.
I was suprised to see I had over 11,000 points. Not bad for someone who discovered dungeons for the first time at the tail end of Cata. Now Dungeons and Raids is my 'go to' section for things to do during downtime.

Having a flick through I settled on the Cata dungeons to have a crack at. There was a lot I hadn't done. Zul'gruub and Zul'aman being two I hadn't done at all. I knew where Zul'gruub was so I headed off there.
The last time I went in here on my own I failed miserably. The boss on the altar with the two swirly green lines had hexed me or done something to me where I couldn't kill it. After ressing I just left not giving it a second thought. This time (and with me being slightly over geared for it) it should be a walk in the park/jungle.
It was to an extent. I got lost. I had to keep checking my mini map to try and work out where mobs were. On the final encounter I had to check Wowhead to see what to do with the chains. The time spent meant that I had a zillion ghosts pummeling me and was in the 30% health region. After completing it I did discover a while host of achievements that I'd glossed over. Some I had got just by being able to one shot bosses. I'd missed the kitty one and also due to being a bit soft and feeling that I should let him get on with his work, I'd not killed the master chef either.

Briefly looking through I paid a visit to Uldum as there were three dungeons there that I needed things in.
Heading into the Lost City first I knew I needed a lot of angry crocodiles and also to get electrocuted a whole bunch. Both of which were easy to come by. I'd also killed everything in there and when I got out, mounted up and headed into the sky just in case the reason that there were lots of skeletons around was still about. I checked my list again and realised that I'd missed one. I'd have to wait to come back for that solitary achievement.

I then made a list. On actual paper. Of The dungeons and what achievements I had left in them. I didn't particularly want to have to keep going back to shrine and then to Stormwind every time because after I'd killed things I'd realised I'd missed something. I was wearing the portals out as it was and I'd run past the same character afk'ing at the Mage Tower at least five times.

Onwards to Vortex Pinnacle. Which I really think is quite a beautiful dungeon. When it isn't covered in skeletons.
I had 'kill Asad quick' and 'gather 5 Orbs'. I had the crazy notion that the Orbs were the light pillars of which there were two at the start. I wandered over to it and just sort of walked off the edge thinking I would land on it and jobs a good'un. The answer was 'no.' and I fell off the edge like a fool. I had to admit I had no idea what the Orbs liked like so had to have a quick Google of what I was looking out for. Turns out they were pretty large and I really shouldn't of been able to miss them but after taking three chars through this dungeon on HC I could honestly say I had never ever seen them before. Observation skills 0 - treating all chars like a Hunter and going 'afk' 10.
I got two really easily, another two were with the Drake boss (which coincidently handed me the reins to the Drake of the North Wind again) the fifth one nearly lead me to punching my laptop.
'Jump off and click furiously!' Claimed nearly every single wowhead user. That's all very well and good but I have a track pad and having to use the up key and then the space bar to jump up and out, and then to position my cursor over the orb to then be able to click furiously was easier said than done. After six attempts at one orb I was just left furious.
I went off to clear the rest of the dungeon. Orbs were quite literally everywhere and all just out of furious clicking reach. I ignored them for a while and just went back to kill Asad, fed up of being ported back to the start for every failed attempt. I know you can use the wind tunnels to get you back to certain points but after 20 minutes of trying on different ones, any run at all is too far away.
With Asad dead I took the wind tunnel back to the start and flexed out, ready for another go at the ones near the start. I tried zoomed in, top down, far out... All these helpful tips seemed like the most unhelpful things ever written. I just went back to a normal camera and started throwing myself off the ledge, hoping for the best and pummelling my track pad.
The achievement popped up! AwwwwwwYiiiiiissss! I could finally leave this shitting cloudy hell hole (it had lost its allure after all that time spent spinning around mid air)

I did Halls, Deadmines and Shadowfang before heading to Throne of the Tides. I used feign death more times in here than I've used in a whole raid night. Old Faithful took some working out as I thought that you needed to kill the three adds to get her out of the phase where she is shielded. This resulted in what can only be described as a Benny Hill sketch with me running around trying to avoid her hoping that more adds would spawn. Three attempts later she had blown to bits one of her Naga witches and I was off for the last boss.
This one really showed how little I had paid attention to it. Keeping behemoth alive until you get the buff. I just killed everything and then was left twiddling my thumbs when no others came out. I got the buff but had to let the dude in the middle with the water ocd die to reset it. I then let the add live but it killed ocd dude. Once again I was perusing wowhead to see how to do it. Bandages was one option. Going BM for sprit mend was another. I had Raidwiper 1.0 with me so a quick respec and I was away. It was a face roll when you actually knew what you were doing. Sprit mend kept ocd dude up and I picked off the other adds around him. I got the buff and 'boom' everything dead. Ocd dude was happy again and I got my achievement.

I did also go to Stonecore. A tedious dungeon. All I needed in there was the 60 disciples to be killed in 10 seconds while the encounter is active. I'm not going to lie, I'd been here before and killed all the ones in front before I'd pulled the boss and lost it. So this time I pulled and then waited. As I was trying not to get sucked into the gravity wells I somehow lost my mind and didn't kill anything. A few died to the wells which meant the timer was started and I just kept kiting what was left. Once the floor was completely covered in shit and I realised the error of my ways I was so annoyed that I just killed her and hearthstoned out in true stroppy teenager style.

Sulking on a roof in Stormwind I had a look through what was left in my achievements. There wasn't much. I did still have a few loose ends to get through and the whole of Zul'aman to do but the list was a damn sight shorter than when I started! (Even if my stress levels were higher)