Flying IRL, flying not IRL, achievs, and race change

OK, it was a slow week for gaming, fast week for flying.

Almost done with another air medal (20 combat missions flown).

But in my off-time I had the chance to do a few cool things.  I was invited to help clear SoO on normal difficulty, which is one step harder than Flex.  We did great!  I was present for the first 7 bosses, and was ranked well in healing, usually near the top if absorbs are counted.  A big shout out to the folks at Genetically Superior for offering to give me a shot.

I got a 553 ilvl staff off Galakras, which is a level of loot I never even expected to have.  After 2 upgrades, that's a 561 weapon!  I have a few new good lessons learned about healing on this network, which is notorious for hopping routers without warning, therefore disconnecting all connectivity.  This almost always occurs in the middle of a boss fight.

A note about networks...

This is what you want to see if you're using a wireless adapter.  

This shows you how many routers I can pick up at one time, however.

The network we use here is configured, perhaps inadvertently, to swap your router to a "stronger" connection upon any background scan, which Windows insists on doing no matter how much I try to avoid it.  So, when that happens and my primary "good" router has a lapse, I get reconnected to a "lesser" router that effectively kills the internet.  Everybody has this problem here, and it's common for folks to complain about skype cutting out at interval or for facebook to simply stop loading.  That's because, in the background, their wifi connection is going to something like this:

My only solution so far is simply to initiate the background scan on my own and choose my primary router, forcing the connection to the good one.  How long it will stay on that router is anybody's guess...I would say I get about 15 minutes before it hops, if I'm lucky.  It's not unusual for me to literally reconnect to my router in the middle of a raid boss fight, so for a period of 10 seconds or even more, my guy is standing there uncommanded.  Fortunately, I'm usually so quick that the game doesn't even boot me off.  I have tried programs such as WLAN Optimizer to cancel the background check, but it seems to have no effect whatsoever.  That tells me that the mil routers themselves may be the culprits.  One way or another, we'll be at a different base in a few weeks, so perhaps their internet will be structured differently.

In other news, I transferred my pandaren toon over to blood elf, primarily for raiding and transmog reasons.  I like the pandaren character model in theory, but in reality it looks awkward on most mounts, terrible in most good transmog sets, and the area consumed by the player in the middle of the screen is less than ideal for healing.  My first 7 years, I played an undead character model when healing, and never had to deal with large character types crowding out my monitor before.

Oh, and I finally got the achievement in ICC10 I've been working on for 3 weeks.  Check out the new look of Smooge.  Notice the subtle glowing skeleton death dragon mount:

Still here in Afghanistan...transmogs and leveling

That about sums up how we feel about deployments!

OK, I'm really enjoying the transmog thing.

Running Flex raids with this set is just cool to watch.

Also, I have two new toons joining the fight at 90.  My first tank ever, and a hunter.  I am enjoying the druid tanking style, and even tanked my first level 90 raid successfully with no wipes!

The hunter seems to be a little lackluster in dps, but he's only 480-ish itemlevel.  The queues are considerably longer for dps than for tanks, of course.  My druid will pass my hunter with help from Timeless Isle and quick raid queues.  However, leveling a druid as guardian was a total pain in the rear.

Regaining the original tier 2...old school loot

I have decided that I am going to restore my priest to the original set that I had at the the end of vanilla WoW, all those years ago.
Some people may not know that the old tier sets, as well as the bosses that yield them, still exist.  On my original priest that was long since traded away or deleted or both, I had EVERY single piece of Transcendence gear, and I got that gear at a time when resilience did not yet exist and there were no higher instances in the game than Blackwing Lair.  I was literally the best geared priest on my original server, Smolderthorn, for quite some time.
Unfortunately, that character was deleted from WoW years ago, and my new priest, of the same name, has fine gear but not the legacy pieces that once stayed in my bank.

HOWEVER, you can still get this stuff!  I am now going through the process of clearing Blackwing Lair ALONE!  Despite many naysayers online, I successfully destroyed the first boss, Razorgore, using Discipline.

Details, in case anybody wants to try this: I MC him on the orb, start destroying eggs on the far side, and as the timer comes close, I bring him back to me, shield him, then use divine star to thin out the adds and build up aggro.  The shield heals and protects him, but you can only use an instant cast spell because casting breaks your hold on the orb.
I got about 60% of the eggs on the first MC, and he was still above 80% health.  It took 3 MCs total, and he had about 40% health left at the last egg.  He is, of course, simple to kill at that point.  The only trick is not getting him killed during the egg hatching, but the adds seemed to favor me, for whatever reason.

Good luck all you priests!  And stay tuned as I continue in BWL on my quest for the lost tier 2 gear.  Btw, nothing dropped from Razorgore, so I'll have to try him again next week.  Also btw, I had to get attuned to BWL, which was a simple process that involved soloing upper Blackrock Spire (UBRS), which was a lot of fun to see again as a level 90.  All in all, it took 5 attempts to learn his fight, but it took almost just as long to find the entrance to BWL.  When was the last time you entered Burning Steppes anyways?

On the road again, but managing to stay connected

I am on the road again, and although I am sad to be away from my wife, I'm trying to make the most of my travels.  I explored some new areas, worked in a military capacity, and had a few hours to play WoW and Hearthstone.

On the Hearthstone front, I can tell that it will continue to be a fun game to play, especially when the connection will not support higher level LFR groups in WoW.  There is only so much WoW daily quest grinding you can tolerate, after all.  Hearthstone is a great deal of fun, although it requires uninterrupted time to play each game.  It is also a game that will require you to lose a lot before you have a decent deck, from what I can tell.  I have probably opened 5 or 6 bonus packs of cards so far, using gold that I obtained from daily quests and victories.  I am becoming quite familiar with the feeling of losing to other players, and even the NPC practice opponents destroy me quite often.  Even with a deck that includes blue and purple cards, it seems to be a very luck-dependent game.  An addicting and fun luck-dependent game which will probably consume some of my actual income for new card packs.

On the WoW front, I reached ilvl 488 by completing the Golden Lotus revered grind and running quite a few LFR groups.  I finished Throne of Thunder today, concluding the list of available LFR instances, although I observed 75% of the Lei Shen fight as a corpse.  I still have no idea what killed me.  But I have put epic pieces in ever slot except trinkets...those simply elude me, and I anticipate more rep grinds to obtain those.  I do not expect to have a good enough connection to continue running LFR groups, so my priest will likely remain my best geared character for quite a while.  

I am bringing directional wifi antennae, and multiple wireless cards and connection points in hopes of developing a reasonable and reliable connection with which I can skype my wife and play an online game when I have time.  Remembering my last two deployments, I am bridling my optimism so that I am not sorely disappointed when the internet sucks.

So, I'm preparing to shift to alt leveling and rep/heroic gearing.  I have a goal to level some classes that I have not ever played so far, such as lock, pally, shammy, and monk.  And, I am completely unfamiliar with my DK, druid, and hunter, which are all sitting patiently at 85.  Smoogestab, my rogue, is now at 86.  Icy veins seems to be the new go-to place for leveling and gear questions, and I have adopted their combat rogue leveling strategy, paired with a good leveling addon.

As far as UI stuff goes, I have experimented with quite a few addons recently.  So far, I have settled on Dominos, Recount, Dugi, Atlas Loot, and a leveling addon.  I am still looking for a good unit frame and cooldown addon for both my priest and all of my alts.  I am tolerating Healbot and TellMeWhen, and I dislike the xPerl unit frames I currently have installed.