Gracie Status Update

2018 Blaugust wrap-up

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2018 Blaugust wrap-up

Today is the last day of Blaugust, and everyone is starting to reflect on the month and what we’ve accomplished. Before I get to that, though, I want to thank Belghast for setting everything up this year. There’s a bunch of time and stress associated with getting a community project like this off the ground. I’m so very grateful that he made the effort to revive Blaugust, give us some guidance and our Discord, and be our biggest cheerleader during this month of nonsense.

I managed to get 29 posts written here this year (counting this one). I would have had a perfect 31 but I decided to take last weekend off to avoid burn-out. Luckily I also have my other blog, where I have faithfully posted every single day. So in fact I will have a total of 60 posts up for the month. That’s so much blogging!

One thing that really set this year apart for me was the amount of interaction I’ve had with my fellow bloggers. I had more than double the views and almost ten times the comments compared to this time last year! I definitely attribute that to being more active in the comments here and on the blogs I’m reading. There are always so many awesome things to read over Blaugust, but I really made an effort to try to comment more this year too, which led to some really fantastic conversations. Most years I feel so exhausted and burnt-out after posting every day for a month that I end up taking a big break in September. This year I’m really motivated to stay active because I don’t want to miss out on chatting with the new friends I’ve made.

Thank you, fellow bloggers, for making this the best Blaugust ever!

BfA pet battling

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BfA pet battling

I’m not sure why I suddenly got back into pet battling, but I’m enjoying it. I didn’t finish many of the pet battle achievements in Legion, and now I’m considering going back. At least I should probably go and capture all the wild pets I’m missing.

I did catch every wild pet in BfA for this achievement. I really like some of the new pet models, especially the bees and butterflies. The most annoying one was the glutted bleeder. Not only is it super gross looking, but it has the “burst” ability. That makes it hard to catch, since it would rather explode and kill itself than let you capture it. I ran around in Nazmir for a while until I found one that had a different ability in that slot so I could actually catch it.

I’m not worrying about making sure all of my wild pets are rare for now. I have such a huge stable of pets that I only worry about specific ones if they have a useful or unique skill set. I do want to be able to beat all of the pet battle world quests so I can get enough currency to buy all the vendor pets and toys. There are a lot of things to spend pet charms on this expansion!

Ding 120!

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I actually hit 120 on Thursday evening. I didn’t use war mode for the xp buff, and I did take my time, read all the quest text, and watched all the cutscenes. There’s so much to do now I’m not even sure where I should start. I was so tired when I dinged that I didn’t do too much with it. Unlocking world quests was simple because even though I still haven’t finished the story quests in all three zones I am at least friendly reputation with their factions. I did a round of WQs so I didn’t miss out on the emissary for the day but then called it a night shortly after.

Ding 120!

I want to live here.

On Friday I worked a bit on the faction war campaign quests. I had already set up my bases in each of the Alliance zones, but now they were sending me back to start making excursions farther inland. I had the awesome surprise of getting to quest with one of my favorite characters, Lillian Voss. I’m not especially enthusiastic about faction nonsense, but it was nice to have the change of scenery and run around together as murdery bffs. The quest line ended without giving me any more breadcrumbs, so I’m not sure what I should be doing next to progress it. I wandered around to a couple places where there were flight points and found a few random bounty quests but not much else. There are plenty more horde flight paths to discover on my map so I know I’m not done. I suspect something else will open up when I increase my rep with the Horde war faction.

I’ve also run a few (normal) island scenarios. Supposedly they are a good source of azerite. I’m not really sure how I feel about them yet. I like the small (3-person) group size like scenarios in MoP. The islands do seem to be strangely freeform. I’ve seen groups stick together and roll through lots of enemies, and I’ve seen groups where everyone seems to wander off in a different direction. No group I’ve been in has ever done any of the quests that pop up, sadly. I’m sure soon an optimal strategy will evolve and everyone will start doing that. Overall they seemed reasonable to do, but I’m left wondering exactly what was the point. Maybe I’ll feel differently when I can do the more difficult versions with higher rewards. Side note: if you care about getting all your war campaign upgrades quickly, make sure to run a few islands sometime before reset. You have to finish five different ones to unlock one of the tiers of upgrades, and there are only 3 available each week.

I am sitting at the level cap but I still have most of the quests in Nazmir left to do. I plan on working on them slowly in between world quests and dungeons. I’m not in a huge hurry to gear up since I don’t have a raid group and will probably just be doing LFR, but I do want to get at least enough of an ilvl where questing isn’t too painful. As a fresh 120 disc priest the world quests aren’t horribly difficult, but it does take a long time for me to kill things.

I also want to start working on my crafting skills a bit now. I’ll need to find a good place for farming cloth, and send my druid through the intro quests so she can start picking herbs. I wish I had leveled with someone who had double gathering so I could have been selling raw materials all along, but my priest has alchemy and tailoring. They will be expensive to level right now, but should pay off nicely once I have a steady stream of bags and potions to put on the auction house.

Right now most of my friends are still leveling, so I’ll be focusing on getting my emissaries done every day and then branching out into whatever I feel like at the moment. It’s a good time to start working on alts for crafting and for seeing the alliance side of the story. I’m also looking forward to running some dungeons and/or islands with my friends this weekend, and hearing everyone’s reactions to the different zone stories.

 

Pug tales volume 4

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So I haven’t actually messed with my baby priest (who was level 48 at the start of this set of dungeons) since BfA launched. But the backlog of pug stories will continue to pad my Blaugust post count while I’m busy enjoying all the new stuff!

As a side note to the dungeon running, I really enjoyed the world level scaling. Since I’ve been getting most of my XP in dungeons, I’ve been able to cherry pick my questing zones and focus on the ones I enjoy. So far that’s been Ghostlands, Silverpine, and Hillsbrad. I really like being able to completely finish a zone without the quests turning gray on me.

Maraudon: The Wicked Grotto: This dungeon was relatively fun, even though things went to hell. You know you’re off to an ominous start when the pally tank zones in and immediately says something along the lines of “you’d better try to keep up.” Things were mostly fine until we got to the first boss. We had tried to skip a bunch of trash but someone who was lagging behind the group pulled. We ended up with the boss and about 3 packs worth of trash. The warlock died but everybody else made it through. Amazingly the tank even complimented my healing. Which of course wouldn’t have been necessary if he’d have kept an eye on the group. In however many years I’ve been healing, trying to skip trash has led to dungeons taking longer way more often than not. Anyway this tank ended up bailing after the satyr boss, but the rest of us kept going to kill Celebras. It was honestly easier without the tank, since we took our time and everyone looked out for each other.

Razorfen Kraul: It feels weird that this one is stuck in the middle of the three Maraudon dungeons. I obviously haven’t run this one in a long time, because there are changes that I do not remember at all. Where did the pig boss go? Anyway I had a pally tank and a solid group. They were mostly quiet but the tank pulled at what was probably the perfect pace for me. We kept moving, but they didn’t pull tons of packs at once. This was a breeze to heal.

Maraudon: Foulspore Cavern: I had another reasonable pally tank for this one. Healing is always more fun when the tank’s pace matches what I’m comfortable with. This dungeon is so short that there isn’t much to say about it. The only rough patch was the area where there’s some ambient damage on the group. It was a little tricky to deal with since I didn’t have all the tools I would like for aoe healing.

I finished off at level 52. At this point almost all of the vanilla dungeons are open to me, and there is no way I’m going to get through them all before I hit 60. I’m not even halfway through them yet! Sadly this is all I finished before BfA, and it will probably be a while before I get back to this alt.

The good news is that this mini-project definitely helped me get comfortable enough with disc healing to try maining it for BfA. It has ridiculous survivability in questing and has been pretty fun in dungeons so far too.