Well that was great!

My friend Mike got his Sinister pet from the WoW Halloween event last night! Considering that we have been doing the event together for more than a week, its about bloody high time!

It allowed him to complete the event's meta achievement and get a title "The Hallowed". Too bad he never got the mount. /grins

I'm not sure if I will do more Headless Horseman runs. All my level 80 characters got the rings they needed for upgrades, my Death Knight got the DPS plate helm and the Paladin got the sword and mount. Druid and Shaman both got the pets. So I am content (compared to last year were my Warrior just did not win the DPS plate helm).

My Shaman run the regular ToC twice and got 4 upgrades, 2 to the heal set and 2 DPS upgrades.

My Hunter joined an AV game just to see how she would do, and we actually won the game (I was shocked). My usual tactic with the hunter is to play Defense, and it looked like it worked again. Nothing stalls a Horde charge better than dead healers. :D

Weekend plans: Some more ToC runs and heroics for my Shammie, some AV and questing on the Hunter, and helping out with whatever is needed in the guild (example I did the Anguish quest in Zuldrak for 3 level 77s last night for their weapon upgrades).

Ding 80 #6 - Shaman

Shammie made it to 80. Unable to sleep due to work and sick young child, let the ding happen at 4am in the morning.

Now to figure out final talent specs, gear upgrade paths, and who to level next?

Little time

Once I arrived home last night and booted up the gaming rig, I immediately used Blizzard's new service and changed my Paladin's race from Dwarf to Human. No more ugly!
/cheer

Thank you Blizzard for allowing me to correct that 5 year-old mistake!

Other than that, I just dabbled a bit with my AH business, and did the Hodir dailies with my Shammie. later we did a quick Headless Horseman run, and my Shaman now has all 3 the rings from him - both caster and 1 melee DPS, for when she reached level 80.

I also studied a couple of level 80 talent builds to see where I went wrong in her Enhance and Resto specs. Will have to respec her when she hits 80. Then the tough choice... Level the Hunter or Warrior 1st? I'm leaning towards the Hunter.

No more Dwarf!

At last! My Dwarven mistake will haunt me no more! Human Paladin! /cheer

Creeping closer

As a result of a busy work schedule, my Shaman have been receiving little attention, other than quick 20-30 minutes breaks. But she is creeping closer to 80.

My aim is to have all my characters at max level by the time Cataclysm hits. So on the to do list: Hunter - 70, Warrior - 70, and Mage - 51.

The heirloom items are amazing for people like me that love to play alts. +20% XP allows you to breeze through the levels. In a good gaming session of 2-3 hours you can easily knock out 1 level (with restedbonus XP).

My AH "game-within-a-game" is keeping the gold flowing on a steady basis. My buy-cheap gear, disenchant and sell enchanting materials, nets me 100+g per day for 5-10minutes of effort. Its enough to pay the cost of leveling and buying gear for future use/end-game, as well as the mounts/riding skills.

Weekend WoW Wrapup

Win7 was stable all weekend long. Only complaint was the network did not reactivate after computer returning from sleep mode. Recommendations are to replace the device driver. I plan to give that a try tonight.

Weekend gaming:
It was a little bit of everything. almost all of my top level characters saw some time in Scarlet Monestry - chasing the Headless Horseman. After my paladin's lucky break last week, I was not planning on getting anything.

But in the one group I ran with, we saw 4 Sinister pets drop! (I passed, since I have no love for pets), but lo and behold! After that run, I switched to my Shaman, did the Trick or Treat with the innkeeper... and got the Sinister pet.. Well well.

My Shaman also reached level 78 and was asked to heal a regular ToC instance. Took us 3 tries to get the Black Knight down, and I walked away with 2 level 80 healer items. I also joined regular Utgarde Pinacle run as DPS, and got 2 gear upgrades from the quest rewards.

She also did a couple of Alterac Valley runs for experience, but most of the runs were just a mess. However, when you find a good team that knocks over Drek in 12 minutes or less - its tough to go to bed.

In conclusion - PUGing is a win and a miss scenario. You NEVER know what you are going to get.

Halloween Fever in WoW

Every year since Blizzard introduced the Halloween event my characters have participated in the event.

And last night, after 3 years and I cannot count how many Headless Horseman kills, one of mine, finally got the Headless Horseman's mount!

My paladin is the lucky character.

Considering last year, when I tried to get the Plate DPS helm for my Warrior, where my warrior participated in 86 kills of the Headless Horseman - without ever winning the roll for the helm! (Of course this year, my Death Knight got it... go figure...).

Windows 7:

I continue to play around with tweaking some settings, but its been very stable. Only irritation I noticed was that it took a long time to re-establish the network connect when it wakes from sleep mode.

I remain very impressed with how stable and bug-free the install has been for me.

Getting started on Windows 7

My copy of Windows 7 arrived a day early.

Never one to say "No thank you" to Lady Luck, I rolled the dice and start up my re-format, install and patching process last night.

I was shocked when I completed the new install in less than 1 hour. Patching is was less than 12mb and my machine only had 3 device drivers than did not came on the DVD...

I was able to start playing WoW after spending 15 or so minutes twiddling some settings.

Microsoft.. color me impressed. Been using every OS you created since Windows 3.1, and this was the easiest install ever.

Of course later in the evening I "broke" something and lost my visible mouse cursor and had to reformat, reinstall when a repair did not fix it. But once again the entire process took less than 45 minutes.

Time to buy that 2nd copy and install in on my wive's computer.