Back in the Saddle

My nephew is coming to visit this weekend, so I won’t be playing at all.  I logged in last night hoping to fill an alternate spot for the guild’s Kara run, but everyone showed up.  So, I was left wondering what to do.

You’ve probably sensed a bit of lethargy lately – and you’re not wrong.  Part of it is summer chores and fun.  But the other part was just going through a bit of ennui.  Honestly, I think all this Badge of Tenacity grinding and obsessing was getting me down.  So last night I officially gave it up.  If I see it on the AH for a decent price (1500G last night, still too expensive), I’ll grab it, otherwise – time to move on.

So what to do?

I read this article a while back on WoW Insider that made me feel pretty good about running Kara.  They list target stats for Bear and Cat and I was right on the money, even a bit above, on most stats (fyi – also lists recommended stats for Balance and Resto and other classes).  The only real trouble spot was a lower than recommended attack power rating for cat.  Then, I went to our guild website to register for the Kara run and they are requiring Defense of at least 492 for Bear tanks.  I haven’t talked to an officer yet to see how set in stone that is, but I did a little research on how to raise my defense.

I may write up a Defense-oriented post early next week, but based on the little poking around I did it seemed the quickest thing I could do right away was get back to working on my Scryer’s rep to get the +defense shoulder enchant.  Most of the good Scryer stuff starts at Revered.  Well, I’m still languishing back at Friendly, but I only needed around 1500 rep to make Honored.  So I started grinding away at Firewing Point in Terokkar. 

It actually wasn’t that bad, and having a purpose and a plan made it better.  Plus, with most of the mobs around level 64 or so, I was cutting through them like butter in cat form.  Seriously, some of the casters went down so fast that even taking time to loot them, my Prowl cooldown wasn’t up yet!  Got a couple greens, nothing crazy.  In about 90 minutes I had 50 or so signets and called it a night.  So one more quick grinding session and I’ll be at Honored.  Here’s the faction rep guide at wowhead in case you’re insterested.  There was just one other grinder, a hordie, in the area and two Adamantitie nodes in the area, so I got some ore out of it also (one node just to the right of the entrance gate, and the other node was on the NW side of camp).

So a quick little session that was a lot of fun.  I’m looking forward to playing again, but I guess I’ll have to wait until next week to get into Kara.

On another side note – I’m working on a completely new section of the blog.  Since I’ve been doing some research on how to raise stats in other ways besides gear, I figured that maybe others might be interested also.  So I’m trying to pull it all together in a coherent way, while letting you get at the data from different perspectives.  If I get some time to work on it over the next week, it might be ready to go by end of next week. 

I probably won’t be posting for a while given visiting family, then the holiday.  Have fun and play safe!