bad posts

Looks like the last couple of posts that I sent via email got formated
horribly. It looks like the email was sent in html format and
blogger.com parsed it as if it was plain test. My apologies for your
eyes if you read (or end up reading) one of those posts. I'll try and
clean them up when/if I get a chance.

Productive Weekend

So I've decided that my warlock is just not quite ready for Kara. In part it's me that's not ready. I know there's quite a bit of info out there on all the boss fights in Kara and the last thing I want to do is get to the boss and have the "Everyone know how to do this?" question posed and me the first or only one to raise their virtual hand. So with that said I didn't even attempt a Kara PUG.
In general I don't have a lot of time during the week to get much done in WoW. However, on a somewhat regular basis I get a Friday or Saturday night where I can spend a few more hours online thanks to not having to get up for work the next day. This weekend was one of those.

According to what I've been reading a minimum of +600 spell damage is recommended for entering Kara so I've been working hard at getting what is needed. I've specialized in Shadowcloth because there are three "Epic" items that I can craft that all add to shadow damage. I've got the shoulders and I'm very close to having the matts for the boots. On top of that I picked up enough badges finally to get a cloak that was a big upgrade. So after one daily heroic run to get the badges and a trinket I got from the run I was able to boost my +spell damage by somewhere between 50 and 60- points. Not a bad night.

Unfortunately, the run didn't start a success. I had asked if a guildie wanted to come. He did. Then when it came time I managed to get another guildie to come with. Here's where the problem started. The two guild mates were both setup for tanking. In a 5-man heroic I discovered this is a disaster in the making. We were so shy on DPS and our tanks were taking too much damage for our poor healer to keep up with that we wiped twice on the first mob. At this point I'm faced with the choice of keep banging my head against the dungeon wall and try to get through the instance (probably not going to happen) or figure out how to nicely ask one of the guildies to leave. Since our guild is small and both of these guys have been pretty helpful in the past, the last thing I wanted to do was to ask them to leave. On the other hand I'm looking at the 5 badges that I need to get my new cloak. So I stuck it out until our main tank decided that it wasn't working. To make this story a bit shorter, the other guild mate also ended up leaving and once we rebuilt our group we had one of the best PUGs I've seen in weeks.

So the question is, if I can manage getting to +600 spell damage by the next time I have a Friday or Saturday night to kill, do I try and get in a Kara PUG or not?

This weekend

Well this weekend actually turned out to be a pretty good WoW weekend
for me. I managed to take my 70 dest lock through 3/4 of Heroic
Botanica (more later in the post) and then we ran a guildie through
ramparts. In addition I somehow managed two night of play and got both
my new alt hunter to 10 and my alt mage to 24.

The 70 heroic Botanica was an interesting ride. We started out with
everyone we needed, but a CC class. Then we got the CC class, but lost
our tank before we even got started. Then we got a epic geared tank who
DC'd after our second wipe. Then we managed to get another tank who was
mostly blue, but did as good or better. Unfortunately we got about 20
minutes from the end and our new tank had to go. The odd thing was that
in a normal PUG, we would have had to quit after the first tank left,
but managed to somehow keep everyone else.

Sunday night I was playing my mage in Duskwood. She's 24 and one of my
guildmates was nice enough to play one of his alts and help out. Along
the way we picked up a 3rd random party member and rocked through a
handful of quests in short time. During this time my CC ability was
pretty much negated since we were facing mostly undead. The one thing
that struck me was why can't I polymorph an undead? It's not like I'm
changing a tree into a sheep.

First Attempt at Kara PUG tonight

After taking a look at some character eval site and thinking long and
hard I've decided to attempt to try a Kara PUG tonight. Since I play a
lock and she's not extremely well gear I don't really have high
expectations. Considering how tough it is to even find a PUG for a
heroic (any heroic) I'm not counting on even finding a PUG let alone one
that's willing to take on a lock who's gear is somewhere near the
minimum to even start playing Kara.

wish me luck and if you're on the Scarlet Crusade realm around 8:00pm
server time and see a lock looking for a Kara PUG have a little mercy
and send an invite

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Have to start somewhere

With any blog you have to start somewhere. Here's a bit of a summary of where I'm at.

Home: I'm married and have 2 kids (more if you include the pets).
Work: I work as a software developer more then 30 miles from home
WoW: My main is a level 70 Warlock on the Scarlet Crusade Realm

As with many people that have kids and work full time my WoW time is pretty limited. I'm lucky if I can get in more then two sessions lasting anywhere from 1 1/2 hours to 2 hours. Raiding is pretty much out of the question although my lock is pretty close to being geared enough to at least start Kara (finally).

My lock is part of a now relatively small guild. A short time ago we had an event that saw a good portion of regular members run off to other guilds. I'll get into my guild status in future posts. At this point the only thing I'll add is that it makes me a bit sad when I'm the only person logged on from the guild.

more to come...