Catching Up.

It's been awhile since I've placed anything up here. Time to catch up.

I hit 70 long before my goal of January 1st. I did not hit 80 before I returned home from vacation, but I was rather close. A few weeks later, I'm sitting almost completely in 'purpz' and have started the transition to being guilded.

Not that I've minded being unguilded. My husband and I have discussed creating a guild just for us in order to keep the charter-signing and unsolicited invites away. This may still be something that we pursue in the future. However, it seems I have found an actual progression guild for Laurewen, so I now am working on that route.

I suppose that I don't really have much reason to be 'proud' of myself. Many individuals have gone from fresh-to-80 to full epic gear in the same amount of time I have, I'm sure. But I wonder how many of those were alts, rather than mains. Then again, much of the theorycraft has already been done for me, so I suppose I have a leg up on the 'competition'.

I still can't quite understand the change that has happened within WoW regarding PuGs. I've been utilizing the Looking for Dungeon tool for over a week now, and overall things have gone smoothly. Today was the first I had placed someone on my ignore list, and I'm glad I did because the 'someone has declined the invite' message appeared automagically without ever popping up a box; my guess is the duo we had just voted out was attempting to be readded by the grouping algorithim. I can handle stupidity, but racist remarks and intentionally wiping a group are too much.

I will be a slave to the Looking for Dungeon tool for awhile longer, it seems. Though the official invite has not yet been submitted, it looks like I'm being conditionally accepted to a progression-style raiding guild. So far, my experience just speaking with one of their officers has been excellent and the overall attitude of the members suits me and their raid times fit my schedule. The condition, however, is that I need to complete my aims of gearing up.

It took me about ten minutes of grumbling at WoWWiki to finally find exactly who and where I could obtain my first piece of Tier 9 gear. As I'm not yet haste-capped, I'm not as impressed with some of the crit-only portions of the restoration-focused set. However, the 4-piece bonus makes that crit a little more useful, at least, since I generally don't use single-target heals. My new shoulders are a bit bulky but I feel a bit of pride in having my first tier gear.

I was unaware that there was more than one metric for computing 'gear score'. I'd been working so hard to obtain over 2300 gear score in order to apply to another guild who listed it as a base requirement. I finally hit the value and was thrilled and applied. Just last night, I discovered that the 'gear score' that is generally referred is one give by the add-on of the same name and is an entirely different metric from the score I'd been referencing through http://www.wow-heroes.com . Per WoWWiki's general conversion list, it seems my add-on version gearscore is actually over 4000.

Today was the first day I had done any questing in over a week. I've since gained a significant amount of gear and the difference was amazing. 1xStarfire,2xWrath will kill just about anything; I almost one-shot one creature when my Starfire crit. It's actually rather sick to think about it. I still need to complete the Icecrown quests and then, aside from group quests and dungeons I haven't complete yet, I'll be done with questing on Laurewen. Perhaps I'll work on the Argent Tournament quests in between waiting for my Looking for Dungeon queue to pop.