Gladiator, Are You Ready?

Now that my guild is regularly clearing Heroic Archimonde and I don't need to spend time in dodgy PuGs to get my kill for the week, I've finally made the move to a Gladiator's Sanctum, with the aim to get some PvP achievements - particularly in Ashran, which will likely be deserted as soon as the next expansion hits.

It's been awhile since I've PvPed properly and not only is my gear behind, but also my knowledge of any strategy to beating opponents 1v1. Luckily in Ashran that doesn't happen much, although I also have no clue what I'm doing in there besides following the mob and killing anything in the way.

I am, however, happy that I haven't completely lost my PvP cunning - I managed to get both the Darkmoon Faire and Gurubashi Arena heirlooms by biding my time and letting the frontrunners use all their cooldowns on each other before ganking them.

Not that I particularly care about heirlooms, considering the only PvP I do on my alts is in the world on a PvP server... but it's nice to have bragging rights to those!

Now all I have to do is figure out how to get all the Ashran and Gladiator's Sanctum achievements... ideally I'd want to get them done before the next expansion and then go back to using the Lunarfall Inn... I realise it will take me about 2 years (not an exaggeration!) to get *every* follower from there... but I can't help myself!

Drain Life

Duh.

Defending Alone-a

Anyone else spend a whole lot of time with Defender Illona dead?

This follower has got to be the most frustrating one to level up, particularly as she has the tendency to kill herself:

Yep, the Garrison Training Dummy killed her. Tough mobs, those training dummies.

Sure, I may have killed Arachnis a little close for splash damage, but when my pet gets into combat with it I can always call it back... I didn't even have time to *think* about the fact that you can't call Illona back before she died.

It's a good thing this is my last bodyguard not at max level... if I had tried levelling her with a lower ilvl she would have died a lot more!

T Minus 1 Day

This time tomorrow, NCP will have completed our first raid of WoD.

As with everyone else, I haven't had time to do a blog post because I've been too busy levelling and gearing up for it.

Luckily, even my relatively laid back approach to levelling hasn't been affected too much by the new guild's requirements; I finished levelling to 100 in just over 1 week and managed to pick up enough gear from heroics and one challenge mode dungeon to get a 634 ilvl.

I would have preferred an extra couple of weeks just so that I could do what I would normally do at the start of an expansion - max out my professions, finish every single quest (and associated achievements) and explore every single zone on the map - but I'm relatively comfortable with the timing, considering I haven't really played any more than what I usually would.

Things to note on my early expansion experience:

1. Using alts to access alternative buildings in the Garrison seems to almost be a necessity to be completely independent of the AH; I may need to level my alts a little earlier than I usually would.
2. The CM dungeon I did, Auchindoun, was about the same difficulty as the level 90 CM dungeons were, and only the last boss gave us a lot of trouble. I would imagine after working out how to maximise gearing and after Blizzard balances all the class abilities, it should be fine.
3. The Proving Grounds were no trouble at all - I hit these as soon as I dinged 100, knowing that I'd need to run at least Silver DPS to get into heroics. As it turned out, I did Gold DPS and Bronze Tank with only a few wipes and almost all Mythic level 90 SoO gear. Would be interesting to see how Silver Tank and Endless DPS run now that I've shed all the 90 gear, but I have other things higher on my priority list...
4. Run the level 100 MC with guildies and friends, preferably those who you raided with in Vanilla. It is an absolute SLOG to get through for not much reward (unless you collect pets and mounts), so nostalgia is the only thing that would make it more palatable. Luckily I got what I wanted out of the one run I did - I'm certainly not bothering to go back!
5. The Southshore vs Tarren Mill BG is quite fun, for a FFA Arena. Not interesting enough to keep as a permanent BG, but I wouldn't mind running it again in the future (if Blizzard decide to bring it back at subsequent anniversaries). I could see how it might be frustrating for melee, however.
6. I am a hunter. New pet skins/families are frickin' awesome. Carry on. :)