(No estimated average queue time)

Let the fun begin.

It’s been a week or so since my last post, but you haven’t missed much for me not writing. There’s nothing all that exciting going on in my gaming world right now. Last week, I raided with my guild on Mushan, worked on some leveling/gearing things, farmed my farm, farmed food mats/leather, did Barrens on three toons, and so on. Just ho-hum stuff.

Ghilleadh

One of the things I’ve been working on over the past week or so is speed-gearing my second hunter, Ghilleadh. Sort of. This has slowed considerably, over time, since I started it nine or ten days ago, thanks to my own lack of patience with queue times and low tolerance for, well… more on that below.

Some good. Some not-so-good.

Ghilleadh reached 90 several months ago, but he’s been sitting in the mid-450s since then, since I already play a hunter and other alts, and since the main purpose for having him at 90 – having a hunter to farm leather with – doesn’t require extensive gearing. Last week, however, I outfitted him with the 496/522 crafted gear, the 522 neck, and some other pieces in order to get him eligible to run Raid Finder. The nice thing was that, in doing so, I was able to jump right into Heart of Fear and Terrace at that point, and got a few pieces to get him into Throne.

However, my experience in gearing him has been more complicated than it was with the druid, my most recent gearing project. Since he’s a damage dealer, there are some queues at certain times that aren’t bad, but there are others where I get the “you’ve been in queue for X minutes (but there is no estimated queue time)” crap.

Frankly, if I get that kind of message, I find it disheartening. It wasn’t as bad before I hit the Valor cap on him, because I could just work on other things while waiting. However, once I was capped, I found that I didn’t have the patience to wait some undetermined amount of time. I farmed turtle meat (and leather) in VotFW for parts of those times, but there’s only so much repetitive turtle slaughter one can do before becoming completely bored.

As such, I didn’t do as much Raid Finder as I had intended to. I ended up completing the T14 raids last week, as well as the first three ToT bosses and Ji-kun. There were other queues that I aborted for lack of interest / patience, ultimately. Hopefully, this week I can hit up ToT early and get it finished and out of the way before things go too sour.

Anyway, I ended up with no gear from ToT – unsurprising, given that I only killed four bosses. I did get a few pieces from HoF and Terrace, the crossbow from the Houndmaster in Scarlet Halls* (first try!), and a set of gloves from a heroic scenario. Ultimately, he didn’t get as much gear as I would have liked, but his level did go up 20 points in the last seven days alone, so I guess I can’t complain.

*Oh, fun times in Scarlet Halls last night, by the way. Doing Armsmaster Harlan, the tank ran in and jumped straight down to start the fight. I started shooting as I ran to my preferred position, then I typed “time warp” in /say. You’ll never guess what happened then… oh wait, you did guess? Yes, you were right, Time Warp never happened, at all, in the entire dungeon. And if there was ever a group that needed Time Warp on Harlan, this group was it.

So on the first Blades of Light, the tank and a DPS bite it. Harlan’s at about 40%, so while he’s finishing up his whirly-time, I put away Shad the Hyena and bring out Kurmokk the Gorilla (the only tank-specced pet I had on me). I had no illusions about it… there was a very high chance that we might wipe. But I did it anyway, kept pumping glyphed heals into him, and the boss eventually went down. It was great! I love doing stuff like that. Not that anyone in the group noticed…. :P

All in all, it was a good week for Ghilleadh, but I have to say that I have mixed feelings playing him. On one hand, it’s nice to jump into a raid or dungeon setting being completely familiar with the class and just doing things intuitively. However, it kind of stinks to play a less-powerful hunter when I’m accustomed to doing mad damage. Just kind of, though – I still prefer it to playing my mage, for instance, or other classes as DPS. The familiarity is nice.

The other thing I don’t like is playing as a worgen. The crit bonus is nice – not that I notice it. But I don’t like the way he moves, all herky-jerky and so on. Comparatively, I love how smooth it feels moving around on night elves. However, it is what it is. At this point, it’s unlikely that I will level another hunter in this expansion, due to Time and such. So I’ll get used to it.

It’s time to move on (from Mogu’shan Vaults LFR)

Anyway, last night I jumped into Mogu’shan (RF) for a chance at the weapon. The screenshot at the top of this page was the first real conversation in Instance chat, and it set the tone for the entire run. The Instance Leader was a resto druid on my server who apparently has a lot of fun talking trash and putting people down. By the time we got to Emperor, I had put him on ignore, which cut my chat window activity down by about 80%. I also noted his guild, and that it would not be one I would like to be a part of if it’s mostly comprised of the likes of him.

However, his initial statement was about as spot-on as it could be – not because of the boss encounters, but because it really was just a group of people flailing about on the screen for an hour and a half, with very few exceptions. We made it through – barely – but it was the opposite of fun. It’s likely that I will never do Mogu’shan Vaults part 2 (RF) again, on any toon, regardless of gear needs. Almost ten months after its release, it’s a virtual/digital dumpster fire at this point.

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Thanks for reading this post by Mushan at Mushan, Etc. Comments are welcome!

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