Hello.  My name is PTD, and I’m an anti Fish-ite.  What the heck does that mean?  Well, it means I hate fishing!  Not that I dislike the people that fish, per se, but just that I couldn’t ever see myself leveling fishing.  I thought it was a HUGE waste of time.

Now, before you go off and judge me, I will say that I did TRY to like fishing on a few occasions.  I started many alts with the intention of working on all THREE secondary professions as I leveled.  It just never worked out that way.  I cooked.  I made bandages.  I didn’t fish.  You see, for me, it was always easy to fit in cooking or first aid while I did other things.  I could always find time to make bandages while waiting for groups to form, and cooking was always a quick stop in any capital city (usually IF for me) after hitting up the AH.  Fishing, though, always seemed like a waste of time.

Cast.  Stare at the screen, waiting for the stupid bobber to move.  Don’t DARE look away from the screen, otherwise you’ll wonder if the bobber moved while you looked elsewhere!  Right click the bobber once it moves, and hope the fish doesn’t get away.  Ugh.  With cooking, or first aid, or any other tradeskill, you can set it and forget it, at least a little.  I can make all the roasted clefthoof I have the mats for with one click.  I can make exactly 17 heavy netherweave bandages with just a few clicks.

Fishing?  Forget about it.  You better be ready to focus, son.

So I think the highest I ever got with fishing was in the mid 40s.  And that was with my old, forgotten alchemist, when I wanted to be able to fish up oily blackmouths.

That was the highest, until yesterday.

I finally faced my fears, and made an effort to level fishing a bit with my priest.  My priest is 62 now, and he had been shelved for a long time when I got him to about level 26.  Leveling had slowed to a crawl with him, and I couldn’t take it.  So at some point he became a tradeskill alt, leveling Tailoring and Enchanting.    That was all good and fine until he capped out his skill due to level.

Anyhow, that’s unimportant to this post. I picked him back up, got shadowform, blah blah blah.  Now he is my “main” alt, and the alt most likely to next hit 70.  He has his Tailoring at 360 and Enchanting at 300.  I am VERY thankful that I did pick him back up, as those two skills are very useful.

“So, PTD, what the heck does this have to do with fishing?”

Well, the other day I found myself in IF with the priest.  I realized that since I had parked him as a tradeskill alt for a long time, I never picked up a secondary tradeskill.  Not a one.  No cooking, no first aid, and yes, no fishing.  In interest of leveling cooking quickly and cheaply, I had read on Lootables.com (where I go for ALL my tradeskill leveling info) that the best way to do that was to fish.

Fine.  I’ll fish.

And they were right.  In no time at all, I had both fishing and cooking up to 150.  Along with that, it was the perfect opportunity for me to level my Enchanting skill a bit to boot.  I’m finally at the point where some people might actually WANT some of the enchants I can do, so I offered up the orange ones that I had mats for in trade for decent prices.  So not only did I get my fishing and cooking up, but I also got up to 311 in enchanting, and MADE MONEY DOING IT!

Woot!

Everything is better if you can make money!

And it helped me realize another miracle, you can actually MAKE MONEY from some professions.  (Poor, ill-informed sod that I am, my two 70s have probably the 2 least profitable tradeskills…Leatherworking and Engineering.  I rarely make much off of either, other than primals occasionally with the Engineer.)  Wonder of wonders, I think I found a new way to pass the time.  Fish in Stormwind while hocking enchants.  Yay for multi-tasking!

So now, dear fish lovers out there, I understand you.  I am ready to admit that I had an irrational hatred of the profession, and I’m here to come clean and ask that you allow me in your ranks.  Heck, if this continues, I may even soften my position on Murlocs.

It’s been a little quiet around here lately, sorry about that.  I’m a key player in a HUUUUGE project at work, and our launch is this weekend.  It’s been one of those weeks.  I’m sur a lot of you out there can sympathize.  Anyhow, here’s a little bit about the latest goings on with PTD.

The Shammy Ditches the Elekk

As a lot of you know, I’ve been working my Stormwind rep so I can dump the hated Elekk with my Shammy.  I’m so sick of getting STUCK everywhere, I can’t take it anymore.  Well, the deed is done.  I conveniently saved the last couple of turnins that would push me to exalted for the mini quest hub in Elwynn where horses are sold.  The first thing I did was destroy that stupid Elekk mount.  Poor guy, don’t tell PETA.

Do I want to delete? HELL YEAH! I hopped on the cheapest horse on the lot, a beat up Pinto.

Wow, I sure look big on that thing.  I actually feel kinda sorry for that horse.  I hope he has a warranty!

So there it is.  Exalted Stormwind rep with my Shammy.  As an added bonus, I know where I’ll be vendoring and repairing from here on out!

Hunter Gears Up in Karazhan

I also put together a Kara run last night.  It seemed like it might not go off, and I actually half-cancelled it, when suddenly two of our best tanks threw their hats in the ring.  We had 2 priests, a Warrior and Pally for tanks, and a mix of DPS that included my Hunter, 2 Mages, an Enhance Shammy, Kitty Druid and a Fury Warrior.  Interesting mix, to be sure.  Luckily we had the Shammy along who made the melee DPS very strong.

We blasted through pretty much everything.  We had one wipe after the ramp leading to opera, where we accidentally pulled the whole room.  Other than that, we one shot everything, skipping only Illhoof and Netherspite.  We would have gone back, but a couple people had to bail so we called it a night.

Loot-wise, it was both good and bad for me.  I actually got one of the best cloaks a Hunter can have in the Drape of the Dark Reavers.  Nice. I also happened to pick up TWO pairs of gaunts. I got the Gloves of Quickening from Maiden and my T4 gloves, the Demon Stalker Gauntlets from Curator. I already have the Crystalhide Handwraps, so I have some thinking to do there. Anyone have any thoughts on those three? None have enchants as of yet, the Crystalhide are gemmed but with easily replaceable stuff, no epics.

Anyhow, what I REALLY wanted though was a new ranged weapon.  No dice.  No Crossbow from Attumen, no Gun from the BBW (which I REALLY want…I am a dwarf!) and no bow from the Prince.  Bah, humbug.  Someday I will upgrade from my old, blue Valanos’.  I just don’t know when.

Well, that’s about all for now.  I do have some more in depth posts brewing, I just haven’t had the time.  Next week things should start to clear up, right about the time all the adulation and cash starts rolling in at work for the great job I did on the site.  We’ll see.  Thanks for reading!

AH Insanity is killing me.  Honestly.  I had fun leveling my warrior for awhile, got him to 40, and said “yay, time for plate!”  Then I saw the AH.

You have GOT to be kidding me.  10g for a pair of level 40 plate bracers of the Wolf?  25g and up for anything of the Bear or Tiger?  SERIOUSLY??

I mean, aren’t I going to be using this for, like, 5 levels or so?  Which at the present rate of progression amounts to about a week of playing?  /scoff  I guess I’ll be rocking the mail for awhile longer, until I can get some good quest rewards or something.

What I’ve found is that the insanity is all over the place.  Yes, I realize Blizz dumped a crap load of cash into the economy with the SSO dailies, but this is getting ridiculous.  My shammy, now level 45, is still wearing bracers and gloves from level 30.   I refuse to bow to ridiculous prices, and farm with my 70 to outfit an alt.

Now, in some ways I understand the ridiculous prices for, say, level 29 BOE blues.  I know the twinkers fall all over themselves for those.  But this craziness about other sub 70 stuff must end.  How long do we spend in those midlevels anyway?

Now, people -  the only way this will change is if YOU change it!  You must agree to not bow to ridiculously priced green stuff on the AH!  If we work together, we can move mountains, you and I.  We shall overcome!

I’m the Part Time Druid, and I approve this message.

And how sweet it is.  I dinged 60 with my shadow priest over the weekend, and I had forgotten just how much better the itemization gets when you hit the outlands.  Not just in terms of the various green drops I could find on the AH to wear, but also in the quest rewards.

After a few of the starting quests in Honor Hold, I made some huge upgrades by way of quest rewards.  I got the [Shadowbrim Travel Hat], which is both dapper and has some great stats.  Then I picked up a new pair of pants, the [Wanderer's Stitched Trousers] along with a very nice and fancy-looking, animated weapon in [The Staff of the Twin Worlds].  The capper though, was the [Goldweave Tunic], which will probably last me into the mid 60’s.  Wow, just wow.  It’s amazing how quickly you can acquire great upgrades in the Outlands.

To celebrate my newfound power, I decided it was time to give my first Outlands instance a try.  So I went about putting together a group for Hellfire Ramparts.  Awlbiste of Awlbiste’s Thicket offered to come out with her freshly 60 Druid to heal, and bring along her freshly 60 Hunter better half.  We picked up a guild tank, and put out the clarion call for a fifth, which was answered by the guild leader in the form of his 66 holy pally.  So, healer heavy isn’t the first thing you want to hear, but that’s what we were.  Also, the warrior we brought along was very new to the game, the warrior being his first character, and didn’t have much experience tanking.

So we had a group, and it was an interesting one.  Gahrie, the tank, had to use a two hander as his one handed weapon skills were quite low, since he had mostly soloed his way to 63.  He was also unable to fill the role the tank often takes, of marking targets and generally leading.  So, I asked if anyone felt up to taking that task, and noone spoke up.  So I found myself marking and leading the run.

Weird.  I never, and I mean NEVER have to mark targets or lead a run.  My main is a healer, and they hang back and do the same thing no matter what:  keep the party alive.  There was a time, long long ago, when I was feral spec’d.  Even then, though, I think I tanked a grand total of 2 Outlands instances.  So though I HAD marked before, it was only a couple times.  This should be interesting.

As I mentioned before, our tank Gahrie is a very green player, and doesn’t have much tanking experience.  As the leader I had to kind of give him advice and walk him through some basics, though my tanking knowledge is limited.  Gahrie was VERY open to my suggestions, and was eager to learn.  That’s a huge plus in my book, and it made the run easier than it could have been.

Anyhow, it becomes obvious to me fairly early on that Gahrie isn’t great at generating threats on multiple targets.  Of course it doesn’t help that he has to tank with a slow 2 hander, either.  My remedy was to use as much CC as we could, whenever we could.  So I often set up trap targets for the hunter where I often might skip them, and also spent a lot of the instance doing some CC myself — Mind Control.

Ok, though I’ve messed with MC a bit through my leveling process, I rarely used it.  But in Ramparts I had a HELL of a lot of fun MCing targets at any opportunity.  It was great for us because it both took one mob out of play and used said mob to bash on the others.  Of course this killed my DPS numbers on the meters, but frankly I didn’t care.  It was just too damn much fun to MC guys left and right.

Sometimes I threw MC on a caster, and blasted away at his buddies, or I MC’d an archer and launch some arrows.  By far my favorite target, though, was the Bonechewer Destroyer.

They hit quite hard for this mostly level appropriate group, so that was a good mob to choose.  They also had a couple nice abilities for me to use, and, to top it all off, they look badass.  Nothing like using the enemy’s best weapon against them, eh?

Now, the only real problem with using MC is the aggro when it breaks.  I very nearly died quite a few times, as it was very difficult to get a mob off me that I had MC’d.  Still, it was a ton of fun.

So in general the run went alright.  It was a little slow, it was a little messy, but we managed fine with that makeup all the way to the last boss, the Dragon and Rider.  After a couple of wipes, the GL hopped on his 70 hunter just so we could get it done and get out of there.  Without the GL on that run, we would not have fared as well.  He was multi-tasking like crazy as his Pally for most of the instance, and then saved our butts with his hunter in the end.

All in all it was a lot of fun for me, we made it all the way through, and I grabbed the [Witching Band] at the end. Nice, very nice. Our tank learned a lot of the basics of tanking, like pulling with a ranged weapon, and trying to LOS pull casters. The hunter got to practice trapping, a LOT. I got to play around with MC, and the GL, surely, got to laugh a little. It was great to group with a fellow blogger for the first time, and I was glad that we were successful. Then, to end my night on another nice loot note, I also picked up the [Mantle of Magical Might] from the Ramparts main quest.

Needless to say, I’m quite happy to be back in the Outlands, and I’m also VERY happy with the shadow priest at this point. It really is a VERY different playstyle from both my Druid and my Hunter, and a lot of fun. Now to tackle the Blood Furnace! Thanks for reading!

With recent developments, and a lack of opportunities for my main, I’ve been working on leveling my Shadow Priest.  (Whether I will stay shadow or go holy at some point is still up in the air…it might be interesting to see healing from another perspective, but I already HAVE a healer.)  I hadn’t really played him that much in a bit, and he was level 52 when I started off in earnest again.

Now, when it comes to content, I have oodles of experience with levels 1-40.  I’ve taken every path imaginable to get a character to 40, so I’m well familiar with all the different zones, and what my options are at each progression level.  I also have plenty of experience with the BC 60+ content, I’ve run it with two different characters, and due to the way the Outlands are set up, there isn’t a WHOLE lot of variation to be had.

When it comes to content from about 40 to 60, though, I’m a bit hazy.  I went through it all with my Hunter, as he hit 60 LONG before BC, but with my druid I pretty much blew through it as quickly as possible and hit the Outlands at 58, never looking back.

Now I find myself at 52, and exploring this old content that at this point still seems quite new.  I spent some time in Un’Goro Crater, which is a pretty nice zone, though a little too spread out, and that dang elite Dino is still a pain in my arse.  Why didn’t Blizzard un-elite him?

Next I headed out to the Western Plaguelands.  I did all the quests in Chillwind, got an epic drop from a ghoul ([Wall of the Dead]) and headed on to the Eastern Plaguelands.

I quickly realized something.  I had never really been there before.  Sure, I had grabbed the FP in Light’s Hope with my hunter back in the day, but that’s about it.  Looking back I realized that I dinged 60 in Western Plaguelands, and after that went right to nothing but instance runs and MC.

How exciting was this?  The lay of the land was new to me, the music was new to me, I hadn’t ever done any of the quests.  Wahoo!

So I wandered around, being a bit more of an explorer than usual, found a nice little quest for a ghostly girl which I knocked out pretty quickly.  (I really like all the haunted and monster ridden towns in this area, and how basically everything is not quite right.  I’ve always been a fan of horror movies (the classics) and this was right up my alley.)  I got myself to LHC, and basically found out that everything else was too tough for my level 55 behind, and there wasn’t anything to do.  Bummer.

This, I realize, is where the old world content fails.  The progression curve is not NEARLY as well defined as in the BC content.  In BC you can pretty logically go to the next adjoining zone when you’ve exhausted the quests in the present zone, and you’ll then quickly find a bevvy of new quests for your enjoyment.

Now, however, in order to progress I had to think about things.  So, I took a look at the other zones that should be good for me.  Winterspring sounded good, as I had a couple continuations from Un’Goro that led there, but then I’d have to get my butt all the way to the other continent, work my way through Felwood, and then have to get my Timbermaw reputation sorted to get through the cave.  I could also head to Silithus, but I never really liked that zone.  Too desert-y, and also on the other side of the world.

No fun.  None at all.

And that is the other failing I found - stuff is just too darned spread out.  It’s nice to have “options” as far as different zones to level in, but it’s irritating that they are so far afield.  The added irritation is that I soon found out that I didn’t even have the Astranaar flight path, so I had to hoof it all the way from darkshore, through Astranaar, and then up to Felwood.

Oh, bother.

It makes me wish Blizz had revamped more of the old world content than for the 35-45 range, but oh well.  It goes to show how much Blizzard learned about what worked and what didn’t.  In the Outlands you still have options, you just don’t have to go out of your way to take them.  While I WAS planning to squeeze as much out of the old world as possible, now I’m not so sure.  It might be hit 58 and hit the portal again for me.  We’ll see.

As it is, I’m at least enjoying myself.  it’s interesting to honestly be on the trek to 70 again, as once you hit your mid-50s I figure you’re fairly dedicated to hit the max level again.  I have a number of low 40s that I grew tired of, but if I get this far, chances are I’m going all the way.  Now I just have to think about what to do when I get there…melt faces, or heal the masses?