warcraft { Life at 70

I've not posted much about Pernox in a while. He's been level 70 now for sometime. I still play him the most, despite the efforts of my guildmates to play alts. I love you guys, but Pernox is my toon. I've hit a bit of a slump. Since leaving <Ashes of Empires> to help found <Medieval Metaphysicals> I've lost my ability to find good lvl 70 groups. Which means my goals to finish my Assassination Set armor, get my Tier 4 armor, and finally achieve an epic flying mount have been delayed. I've spent a lot of time, in game coin, and effort to try and get the new guild off the ground and I find it a worthy endeavor. Sadly it too seems to be floundering and we are on the brink of dissolution. But I do miss doing level 70 groups, good ones. I've joined a few pick up groups lately, but they've been terrible, when they happened. Usually you sit in LFG state for 2 hours, can usually get 4 members but can never find that last healer or tank, and in the later instances, you need to have a varied party with some kind of healing and damage absorbing ability. The only one that has been decent was the one where I went with four members of AoE. I'm happy to see I still have a good relationship with most of the members and officers of the old guild. I've even filled in for them when they came up one short for Karazhan. That was a fun time.

But despite all this I have achieved a few things:

• Frostwolf Howler - I've wanted an epic riding wolf ever since I picked up 'Knockturne', my trusty Purple Skeletal Warhorse. I call him 'Ulysses'. It required a LOT of time in the Alterac Valley battleground which is no fun on the Horde-side for the lvl 61-70 bracket as most of the Horde raid (there can be 40 to a side) sit in the starting cave and just leech honor and AV marks. Supposedly this will be addressed in a future patch.


• Honored with the Sha'tar. This brings me one step closer to 'revered' status which will allow me to craft the Alchemists epic item, the Alchemist's Stone.


• I played around respeccing to see what the deep parts of the other talent trees for Rogues can provide and finally found a compromise spec of 7/41/13 that suits my play style and allows me to solo farm, which should make getting the mats I need for crafting (mainly primals) easier and let me achieve my epic flying mount skill faster. I miss the ability to step through shadows and ambush people, but the ability to rachet up the damage and hit more than one target at a time is quite useful. Yeah I know its not the most efficent in terms of energy and combo point generation, but it is a compromise, letting me be useful and maintain those elements I value highly (the ability to quickly and effectively sneak around). It actually does quite well against lvl 65-72 monsters and absolutely destroys things under lvl 64. I've been able to do something I've never been able to do previously, take on 4 mobs at once and kill them in the same time it would normally take to kill two, without dying.


• I'm one quests away from neutral status with the Netherwing faction, however this quest requires a five man group, which is actually hard to find/start than one for an instance. I'll hopefully knock this out so I'm one step closer to getting a Netherdrake mount.


• I've been doing the two daily quests I can to raise my Sha'tari Skyguard rep and get some gold. This puts me closer to getting a Nether Ray mount. (If you can't tell I like collecting mounts)


• Old Content - I've started going back and keying and seeing the older content, even if they are not full dungeon runs. I've also been filling in the gaps in the quests I've skipped on my journey.


• Sneaking the Alliance capital cities - Darnassus is done. I have some great screenshots of the two Night Elf leaders Tyrande and Staghelm as well as some of me fishing near the Night Elf character starting point. I also found I could get a quest from the Argent Dawn office to do a Blackfathom Deeps run. I couldn't finish the quest chain, as it was for Alliance only after the first part, but it gave me +350AD reputation! Up next Ironforge and Stormwind leaders.

If the guild thing fizzles I'll probably look for a raiding guild. I'd like to have at least one piece of epic armor and one epic weapon on Pernox.

I'm also fooling around with the idea of changing professions once I craft the Alchemists Stone, since its been hard to make money with herbalism/alchemy as opposed to someone who has skinning/mining.