In June, when I last posted, I had been working on reputations and had just gotten all five Heroic keys, as well as making my Surestrike Goggles.  See my armory for what I've put on them. The funny thing about WoW, and really Blizzard overall, is there's always just one more thing to do.  All five Heroic keys?  Sure, that's an accomplishment.  Oh, by the way, here's a quest to hit some of those heroic instances, just when you get a chance.  There's always one more quest, one more piece of gear, one more attunement, one more profession point, one more schematic.  Always something to do.  Which is among the reasons I'm still playing essentially the same character I rolled in December of ought-four, I suppose.  I am their target demographic.  And the "one more things" I've been chasing since June have been quite enjoyable.

You Want How Much for a Primal Nether?
I finally completed Engineering, which was horrendous.  Engineering's been left out to dry in a big way since Burning Crusade came out.  The stuff pre-60 still works as well as it did, pre-60.  But afterwards?  Things aren't as effective against 60+ targets, many of our items don't work in arenas (arenas: the only reason to play the game for some people), and a lot of what we do have is outstripped by other professions.  It's kind of a mess.  Depending on your priorities, it's anywhere from amusing to appalling.  I've been an Engineer for almost three years, and they don't seem to be able to get the balance right with it.  On one end you have "Essential," and on the other end you have "Useless."  Engineering's spent much of the past three years sliding from one end of that scale to the other.  It gets to where everyone uses it, and it changes to where no one uses it, and back again.

I'll never quit it though.  For one thing, at the crassest level possible, I've spent entirely too much time and effort getting Engineering to 375, and I do not relish the idea of repeating anything similar to that process with another profession.  It may be a lemon, but it's the damn car I bought.  I can't sell it to someone else, and I won't pay to buy another.  Beyond just invested time and money, though, there's a personal interest.  I like Engineering.  I like being an Engineer.  The goggles, the goofy backfires, the weird yet effective devices, it's all fun to me.  And as I often say on the forums, a profession that I want to have, which has been left to rot on the vine, underdeveloped and forgotten, is more appealing than a profession I do not want to have.  Even if that latter profession is fully developed, well-designed, and has been treated with love and attention from the day of its inception.  For instance: I would rather wear goggles, even if they're the only thing worth making, than a tiara.  I'd rather throw a level 75 Arcanite Dragonling at something that kills it in one blow than throw a golden hare at the same thing.  It's just a matter of what I like doing.  And minotaurs with blunderbusses, wearing telescoping goggles, is the image that brought me to WoW.  Three years later, it's the character I play, and it still appeals to me.

Besides all that, I think we can all agree that the greatest motivation any MMO gamer feels is the drive to cause numbers associated with our characters to increase.  With that in mind, I have all five professions at 375, which means in many ways I win.  Oh, the very first time I renewed my membership card after 375?  I got Lil' Smoky.

No Autographs, Please, I'm Just a PC
As I mentioned in June, I have indeed pressed on with the Consortium guys.  An extensive series of farming trips (and several visits to my local key selller) later, I'm Exalted with them, and glad I did.  Consortium has no schematics for me past Revered, and the only things I got at Exalted were the tabard and the dagger.  I collect knives, I have about a dozen blue or purple daggers in the bank.  My "in town" outfit is strapping a Felsteel Eviscerator and Guile of Khoraazi.  It's not as effective as my Sonic Spear, but it's a little less cumbersome when negotiating narrow hallways.  Agile as I am, I'm a big fellow.  Having a ten foot long spear tied to my back doesn't help.

The fun part of getting up to Exalted with Consortium was the Ethereum Prison Keys.  In the course of freeing prisoners from Ethereum Prisons, you get the opportunity to visit the Stasis Chambers in Bash'ir Landing.  These are huge versions of the Ethereum Prisons, and house elites that you really need a group of five to kill.  Depending on your skill and your group, I'm sure people could take those things down with fewer, but I wasn't willing to risk it.  Those Stasis Chambers require five Ethereum Prison Keys to get the key to open them.  Once released, the critters inside can drop a Mark of the Nexus King, which item is required for a quest to make a key to the Stasis Chamber in Heroic Mana Tombs.  And that's the fun part.  Inside that is Yor, the bonus fourth boss of Heroic Mana Tombs.  Once you have the quest to open him, you can always repeat it, but you need a Mark of the Nexus King every time.  Right up until you're Exalted.  Once you're exalted, you can get a permanent key to that chamber and you don't have to grind Marks anymore.  That's where I stand now: LFG Heroic Mana Tombs.

As I mention often, most of my closest friends in game are hunters, so we run a lot of the same instances.  Between various guildmates' Kara key runs and farming for my and others' Beast Lord pieces from Kalithresh (he never did drop those pants for me), I was already getting pretty close to Exalted with Cenarion Expedition, so last weekend I pushed that through with a really nice Heroic Underbog run and a lot of Coilfang Armaments.  Even less productive than Consortium, the only thing I got from Cenarion at Exalted was a tabard.  Engineering's nice that way: since we only have two Outland rep schematics (Cenarion Expedition Friendly, Consortium Revered), we can afford to not give a damn where or when we get many reputations.  I'm not quite to 999/1000 with them yet but I'm within a Steam Vaults run of it, and I'm in no particular hurry.

I Have Had It With Karazhan
Karazhan has put big holes in my guild twice now.  We had a solid raiding group which unfortunately started raiding an hour after I logged off, pretty much at all times.  Once in a while they'd wake up early enough to do a run on my schedule, but not often.  Unfortunately, a good number of those guys rightly felt that our guild wasn't up to their speed, and left to form another guild.  I never mind when people leave the guild for reasons like that.  It's their money, they should do what they enjoy in company that they enjoy.  However, the problem that caused was that we felt like a raid guild but we were, for the time being, not.  Spending three hours trying to get to Attumen in time to fight him without adds is not what many consider to be a successful run, and after three weeks of runs like that, we lost a couple more high end players to a guild that could raid with them.  For my part, I've been in on three Attumen kills.  The first time I lost the Worgen Claw Necklace to a DPS paladin (who left the guild a week later).  The second time he dropped nothing I would roll on.  The third time I lost the Stalker's War Bands to an allied guild member.  That didn't bother me, at least she was a hunter.  And she needed those bracers more than I did.  I don't mind the low loot luck I've had with him.  It's the six times he dropped the crossbow when I wasn't there that really bugs me.

I'm concentrating on five mans, Heroics when I can.<span style="">  The time invested is much less, the chance of winning a reward is much greater, and the ability to actually start the run is greatly enhanced.  It's frustrating to log in at 11:00 for a noon raid, and see that, as has been the case for a week, only the raid leader and I are signed up for it.

"Are we doing this Karazhan run?"
"Yep, I'll be sending out invites in about twenty."
"Invites?  Plural?  I don't think you and I can two man it.  We'll need a healer."
"Oh we've got [four people] coming, they just don't have GEM and couldn't sign up.  Also, [two people] said they'd sign up last night but they never logged in, and we can find two more to go."
"What do we still need?"
"Healers."

So after having had a guild run posted for a week, in a guild where I've spent two months helping people get Karazhan keys, we had exactly two people signed up and, even counting non signed up "we're coming" people, we were lacking healers.  This is not a good start to a run, if you ask me.  And when we're still in LFG looking for our second healer at 1:30 for a noon run, you start to think exactly what you could have accomplished in the hour and a half prior to that moment.  This is why I was three bars from honored before I killed Moroes for the first time.  So I've had it with Karazhan.  If I can get into a raid guild's run I will, but my guild needs a stronger foundation.  We hit Karazhan earlier than we should have, and people got frustrated and left.  I'd rather wait until we're able to bring a guild group of ten people who have worked together before.  I don't care if we don't start hitting Karazhan reliably till Christmas.  We'll be running it as a guild, rather than a patchwork compilation of friends, friends' alts, and whoever happened to be LFG who wasn't saved. We'll be running heroics until we're geared and practiced, and I'm not going on another run to Karazhan until we can sign up and muster a full guild group.  I'm not seeing another of the four things I need from Attumen go to someone who isn't a hunter.  PUGging Karazhan is not the way to go.  And wiping your way to Honored is not as fun as it might sound.  I know, it doesn't sound fun at all.  It's still not that fun.

Ogri'lee, Ogri'la, Ogri'la ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Well, great.  Now I have that song stuck in my head.  And I do not know that song, which means what's stuck in my head is three Muppet pigs climbing a mountain singing that, over and over again until I die.  Super.

However, until then, I've been working on Ogri'la (and, unfortunately, Skyguard) reputation up in Blade's Edge.  It's a fun reputation to work on, though Palehoof dislikes the Skyguard, Rpwise.  They remind me a lot of the Argent Dawn, and I'm still smarting from the Argent Dawn's reputation grind.  "Hey, nice to meet you, thanks for the help.  We need you to go risk your life killing hundreds of ferocious horrible monsters and delving into dank dungeons crawling with the Scourge, and then maybe we'll think about selling you a nice biscuit."  I do like the way dailies work, though.  I'm up to six or seven I have access to, between Ogri'la and Skyguard, and that's a nice way to spend an hour and a half making 70-80 gold.  Not bad at all.  I really like the bombing runs, and I've gotten actually pretty good at staying on my wyvern while bombing.  Not much to say about the other quests, really.  A grind is a grind, however interesting the window dressing around it.  I do like that Exalted Ogri'la crossbow, maybe I'll get that before I get the crossbow from Attument or the rifle from the Big Bad Wolf.  I suppose I'll probably enjoy having the Skyguard cloak, too, though I already have a Parachute Cloak and now I am sulky about one of Engineering's signature items being replaced by a mere rep reward.  Stupid Skyguard.

More tomorrow.  I think five pages is enough for one day.  Maybe I can get myself back in the habit by holding back a little of what I was going to say today.  Tune in tomorrow for the next installment:

WTB 28 Slot TCG case, PST.

Till then, this is Palehoof Geargrinder, M.E.G.A. Master Roboticist and Toadwright, saying "I'm the czar of Kablamazhan."