It's Mine all Mine...

...muhahaha! I am now the proud owner of a shiny new Earthwarden and I am a very happy kitty indeed... can you hear me purring?

One heroic Slave Pens, 3 clears of Steamvaults, 2,200g made from crafts on AH, 2,300g spent on Coilfang Armaments and a very welcome final few donations from guildies (big hugs and catnip to Jeym and Incazzato) and I made exalted in a week.

It did get me thinking, though. If I can do that, and my first char hit 70 back in February, then why aren't all of them geared out with epic crafteds and speeding around on their epic flying mounts? Now that I've got a stable connection and I'm raiding again, maybe it is time to finally get that Whitemend Hood for Ceara.

How does it play? Awesome that's how! I needed to farm a Primal Air for the enchant on my new cloak (later on that in this post).

Now normally, I would switch to my lock Kiira who does all my farming. Kiira is nowhere near raid spec, but send in the Felguard, Curse of Agony, Corruption, Immolate, Life Tap and Drain Life back to full and she can farm forever. I wanted to test out my new shinies though so I hopped on down to SMV with the kitty.

I lined up behind the first air monster, take a breath and... Tiger's Fury, Ravage, Mangle, Claw and... oh wait... he's dead. Thinking this must have been a lucky series of crits, I tried a few more. Seriously these guys were just disappearing and my Ferocious Bite was feeling very unloved.

The other thing that's nice about it is it's both a tanking and a dps stick. Up until now, I've been using Braxxis' Staff of Slumber for tanking and Fleshling Simulation Staff for dps. One less stick to chant and one more space in the bags, hooray!

I haven't tried tanking with it yet, but a couple of things are immediately obvious. The increased attack power and expertise should increase my threat per second noticeably. I mentioned in previous posts that my tank gear was OK for mitigation (around 23,000 armour, 12,500 health and 30% dodge) but was low on threat generation - I wasn't giving my dps a lot of room to play in. That should change.

The other thing is the increased defence on the Earthwarden. I'm now comfortably crit-proof at 425 and can afford to swap out some of those +defence gems for some agi and stam which should offset some of the armour loss.

New cloak

Flushed with happiness with my new stick, I decided to have another go at the Bring Me The Egg quest. On previous attempts at this I had died from the fall damage when I missed the nest and the run back from the GY (and the repair bills) were frustrating to say the least. Now, though, in my tank gear I could survive a fall so it was just a case of heal up and have another go.

Anyway, at the 7th attempt I managed to land in the nest, loot the egg and drop to the ground to wait for the birdie. Just as she's flying down, I get a /w from a hunter asking if we can party up. Thinking he wanted the quest as well, I invited him. So... birdie turns red, I grab aggro and off we go. Hmm... according to my Omen, hunter buddy doesn't seem to be creating much threat at all. Give him a bit, maybe he's making sure I have aggro locked down. Nope, he's really not doing much at all. So, I click on him to see what's up. He's attempting to tame the quest bird!

After a spell-struck moment of utter disbelief I get back to tanking the birdy through my tears of laughter. I had to pop a health potion but that was all, eminently soloable and I have a shiny new Nomad's Woven Cloak. It's only a minor upgrade but it was well worth it for the entertainment value.

As always... hugs to all.