[Local Time]

When I started out as a newspaper reporter, fresh out of college, my editor told me I'd need to write 8-10 stories a week. That was a daunting task; researching, interviewing, taking photos (it was a small paper :P), and editing 10 pieces a week was more work than I'd ever done. But really, it wasn't so bad. The paper ran five days a week (one of those rare small dailies), and each day my section had a different theme. Big feature Monday, economy Tuesday, Schools Wednesday, etc. So I'd write the story for my section. Then I'd write a column that gathered up all the small-town bits that weren't really big enough for their own story. Then I'd write a feature for the front page. And maybe I'd cover an event. My point is, by breaking down the overall task into smaller bits and focusing on those, the deadlines themselves weren't so daunting.

Enter [Local Time]

I'm trying to keep this blog active and this is one way I can do it. Each week (or so) I'll post a sort of roundup of the things I'm working on and that my guild is working on. I keep writing and I keep an idea of what kind of goals I was working toward and how close I am to finishing them.

This week I've pulled my trusty lock out of BC storage. She was my PvP character in the closing months before Wrath came out and so she sports a full set of epic PvP gear (this is back when the term "welfare epics" was coined). Now she worked her butt off to get these epics, don't get me wrong, but it's not nearly the work load we see in Arenas today. Mostly she was a battleground toon and I liked it that way.

Anyway, she was level 73 on Monday and she's level 77 today. Big jump! A full rested exp bar and all the heirloom items I can get my hands on sure does help :). Unfortunately, I dropped Affliction and picked up Destruction. I say unfortunately because I have a great love for Affliction. Or at least I used to. I leveled Affliction all the way to 70 and then kept it up through the months of battlegrounds PvP. But I didn't play her much at all during Wrath (about two levels over the course of the xpac, total), so I know this is news to no one but me, but I miss all the instant dots that differentiated that spec. It's become less about the instant casts and more about lining up Drain Soul and Drain Life. And that's not really the spec I want to play. Destruction feels much more like what I'm used to, where I cast one or two spells with a cast time and finish off the rest with instants that really do damage. I suppose dots don't tick as hard as they used to. Ah well.

Who would get rid of these if they had the choice?!

She's still wearing her Vengeful Gladiator's Felweave Cowl, though. For those of you who either didn't play during BC or have forgotten the awesome, that's the purple demon wings. Every so often they flare out, flap, and then disappear. It's a really random but exceptionally cool animation that I am reluctant to give up. I've seen upgrades, but right now it's still not worth it to give up the cool factor. Probably once I hit 80 I'll let it go.

On the guild front, we're making serious progress! 7/12 is, I think, our official progression. This week we downed Maloriak and the Twilight Ascendant Council and I'm really proud. We came into both fights knowing the encounters (we spent last week beating our heads against both), but without a whole lot of upgraded gear throughout the raid. Either we were totally on our A game or the stars aligned (or both :P), but we were able to make the interrupts stick on the potion guy and we got all four Twilight Ascendants to right around 25% before the third phase.

We took a look at Cho'gall and tried to figure him out a bit, but we didn't really get that far with only 30 minutes left in the raid. Hopefully we'll get him down next week.

We've been plagued by DCs and bad lag on Tuesdays the last two weeks. I wonder if that's a sign from Blizz?

Goals

This coming week I want to get my lock to 82. I figure it's doable and probably easier solo than duoing (and I think I want to blog about making quests harder to do in a group :\). Hopefully I won't run out of rested and I'll still have time left over for flask farming.

Sell those Darkmoon cards! I have a stash of several leftovers from making the pieces of my Tsunami deck. The Darkmoon Faire is coming in a week, which means prices will only go up. I'd like to make some cash on these while I have the chance since the prices on them will continue to go down each month as more and more people get their decks.

Kill Atramedes and Cho'gall! That may be a little far-fetched, but right now I'm still riding high on getting two new kills this week. At least one of them should be doable, I'm just not sure which :P. I suppose it'll depend on which bosses we kill first and what our raid leader decides to do on our progression night.

Until next week, good luck!