Well, with a little guild help, I managed to finish the Doomguard quest tonight. As ever I’m a total noob. I didn’t even know the Doomguard existed until I was trolling through some websites while in the 60’s. Obviously I knew about the Doomguard on the Curse of Doom, but I never knew that warlocks were able to summon a Doomguard! Typical day in my noob life.

I picked up the first two quests of the 3 quest chain to summon the Doomguard from Daio the Decrepit in the Blasted Lands. I read that he is surrounded by level 61 guards and I didn’t even bother to look at any of other peoples comments on Thottbot because well I was level 67 at the time and they were a bunch of levels lower, I could handle them right? Wrong! Oh so wrong! I died 5 times, 2 getting to the quest giver and 3 getting back out. On the way back out it was all about pride, how dare these level 61 (okay elites) cut me down as if they were level 71 elites? Well apparantly these guys used be the hardest guys in the game before Burning Crusade (BC) and I guess they were there to make it hard for little noob warlocks like myself to get the Doomguard goodness.

Quest 1: The Prison’s Bindings:

The first Quest The Prison’s Bindings requires a trip to Dire Maul. So if (and for the love of god I hope you are) smarter than me then do this at the same time as you do your Dreadsteed Quest - the final part of the Dreadsteed Quest that requires you to go to Dire Maul. The Prison’s Bindings is done in the East Wing, the same area that you go to to kill the imp Pusillin to get the Crescent Key to open the rest of the Dungeon to do your Dreadsteed quest - so it’s all on the way, unless you have a guildie friend with the key in which case you will be doing an area you wouldn’t have had to do otherwise.

If you are like me and you did your Dreadsteed Quest about 10 levels earlier, then I was reading on Thottbot that you can solo this area with a lot of hard work. It doesn’t require a key to get into the area and when you get in there talk to the imp again like you did with the Dreadsteed quest to get the key from him. When he runs away, follow him like you did last time and he will lead you to the Satyrs that you need to kill to get the drops.

I did the quest with myself at 70 Aff Lock, a 70 Hunter with nice gear, a 70 pally with okay-ish gear and a 63 Lock who needed to get this and the Dreadsteed too. We helped him get the Dreadsteed too. It was pretty easy with the four of us.

Quest 2: The Prison’s Casing

The other part of the quest requires you to go to Darkwhisper Gorge in Winterspring and kill everything for some drops of Tears or something like that. I tried to solo these but found it tough as an Aff Lock because it takes a few minutes to kill one with various fearing and kiting etc and the drops are a fairly low percentage drop. It took the 70 prot pally and I about 45 minutes to an hour to get 5 tears! This is also allowing for the time we stopped near an NPC who had nothing to say and investigated a locked instance in that area, which I imagine might be opened up in WotLK.

Returning the Quest and Picking up the Third

This was an adventure. After previous experience I got as many mates as possible together to accompany me in there (to hold my Undead Hand on the way to the nice Decrepit fellow). We had a 70 prot pally, 70 Hunter, 68 Druid (he was scouting and healing for us) and myself. We thought we’d try to sneak in. The party all bar the hunter with that darn Feign of Death move, wiped in the first 20 seconds. Felhunter looking dudes with Mana Burn - not nice, really not nice! On the second try we managed to sneak through without aggro and I picked up the third quest.

Quest 3: Suppression

This quest is all about turning a warlock into a Hunter! I have a Hunter alt so I know! You are given a gem in order to bind a Doomguard Commander into it. A gem that by the way looks like any other Soul Shard, in case you think you lost it. First we took on Mobs one at a time to get to the Doomguard. We managed to find one without any adds around and then we started. My part of the quest was required to click on the Doomguard and the gem straight after and keep holding there while pink light comes out of my fingers. The Doomguard has a nasty Hoof Stomp which cancels the spell so the plan was to have the Pally out in front tanking, the hunter out with a trap and the tree healing me and everyone until the quest was complete … simple plan right … er not quite.

The first time didn’t work quite right. We froze the Commander in a Hunter Frozen trap and then I went to work with the gem. After the gem finished it’s first channeled run the Commander then just disappeared - it was really strange. My quest wasn’t completed so then we attempted to pull another Commander nearby but he came with adds. The Pally tanked the Adds, I cast my gem on the commander and kept pressing it so that it wouldn’t run out (this seems to be the key) and the Druid Tree healed me and the Hunter did a shiteload of DPS somewhere - on the adds maybe, I kind of lost track in my fervor to complete the quest. The Doomguard Commander then complained about imprisonment and shrank into a tiny gem that I had to pick up off the ground.

So easy as that quest Done, Pally train back to the Quest giver and Hearth the heck out never to be seen again.

I now have the spell Ritual of Doom (which requires some reagents before casting like the inferno) and I have yet to wield my awesome power. Bwah ha ha ha ha

Maybe one day I will be able to add a video of my first summoning. But until then here’s a great video of the carnage that the Doomguard can bring … erm to the party that summons it!??!

And here is another video I found. Short, to the point, carnage and an interesting soundtrack.

Sooo have a hectic real life at the moment but you know the saying “There is no RL only AFK” and I have been a little AFK AWOL, still managed to dredge out some wow-craft time, still managed to read about The Life of Melvin(TM), even caught a bit of the “TO PVP” OR “TO NOT PVP” philosophy debate (which always makes for a good read, mind you, something about me must enjoy the paranoia of PVP servers cause I can’t seem to go back, not since my first server swap way way back in my wow-craft days), and I read about Pike’s habit of adopting young hunters… so yeah I’ve been ghosting around a bit… doing my quiet lurker thing… breathing heavy over online chat… you know - the usual drill.

Actually a warlock guildie of mine has also taken to mini-me adoption.

It’s that dreaded dread steed quest I reckon, a painful quest that requires the ability to fend for oneself. You know: matts and pugging independence or maybe some friendly guild style support, to get the job done. And you can see that a 60+ lock still chuffing along on his 60% land mount wants his big burning pony ever so badly – so she sells them some quest matts and they make puppy eyes and sell her a sad sad story, and their shriveled little undead hearts must hit the same wavelength for a second or something and portions of the guild end up in Dire Maul (oh wait that was me heh) and we slug our way through the quest for the lag-happy baby-lock, who doesn’t know where equipment gems come from or whatever the noobish topic of the day is, while she muses about beating his noobish head to death with her pet pally (seriously she is a warlock with a pet pally… who needs felguard when you have a pet pally?)

Pally to the head!

Anyhows this baby-lock was so pathetically grateful and love-love by the end of the quest that it was hard to get irritated at them, despite the constant lengthy lag-outs.

Was thinking we should rename a guild rank “Sel’s Children” and shove all the guildless noobish warlocks we find in it so they can mingle. It would be an interesting social experiment. I mean would they unite? Would they become more or less noobish? Would they all become tiny little Sel’s running across the great outlands on epic dreadsteeds? Maybe they would develop some kinda warlock hive mind … we could set them up with their own warlock chat channel O_o

Hmmm… or maybe I should just lay off the freddo-frog dinners and find some real food.

L’amico e gildano Utmar [aka Kheel] non aveva ancora la sua dreadsteed personale, e così ieri, in una rapida corsetta a Dire Maul, io e Hithlash l’abbiamo reso felice. [Dreadsteed of Xoroth]

[Il pianeta Xoroth è uno dei mondi governati dai Nathrezim (o Dreadlord), e ha dato i natali a Lord Hel'nurath che è assai rinomato nell'universo per la sua collezione di Dreadsteed - demoni simili a cavalli che fungono da cavalcature per i dreadlord. Ad ogni warlock di Azeroth di una certa potenza viene data la possibilità [dal 60° livello in poi] di domare le forze utili a soggiogare uno di questi demoni, e trattarlo come una cavalcatura da evocare nel momento del bisogno.
Comunque sia, aprire un portale per Xoroth e avvicinare un dreadsteed non è un’operazione semplice e può richiedere molti componenti esotici… …]

Sono molto contento di aver comprato i materiali tempo addietro, e di averli tenuti. Quando dovetti completare io quel percorso, tanto tempo fa, fu Apnea ad aiutarmi insieme ad altre persone.
Anche se i nostri aiuti non sempre ritornano direttamente, sono felice che l’aiuto di Apne sia passato da lei attraverso di me a qualcun’altro…
C’è un filo invisibile che lega tutti noi, warlock di Azeroth.

Complimenti Utmar.

Saturday night found us ready to go finish up Bungholio’s quest for his epic mount in Dire Maul West.

I suppose, technically, we already had a round in Dire Maul West, but a ten minute peek hardly counts. So we got the line up for the night together:

60 Warrior - Earlthecat
61 Warlock - Bungholio
61 Mage - Ula
61 Paladin - Vikund
61 Priest - Skronk

And, then, Blizzard got in the way.

There seems to be something going on every few weeks at 9pm Pacific time (midnight Eastern) on Saturday night. We have had a number of instance nights start off with us unable to log into the game. This night, Earl got dropped and could not get back on for a good 45 minutes.

The rest of us thought we might as well make a start at clearing our way into the zone while Earl waited to get connected.

Unfortunately, I do not tank much as Vikund, and when I do, I am not very good at it. Without a warrior’s taunts, it takes me a while to build up enough aggro so that the casters can let loose.

So we died a lot. Actually, by “we” I mean “the casters” and by “the casters” I mean, primarily, “The mage.”

Poor Ula.

Not that anybody was spared. We managed a full wipe at Tendris Warpwood.

Shortly after that, when annoyance with the inept Paladin was starting to get real, Earl finally managed to get logged on. Then we killed another couple of mobs and hit some undead.

Of course, undead, along with demons, are the mobs I can actually hold aggro with. So Earl showed up just in time to keep me from displaying any competence.

Ah, well, we were glad to have him. There was work to be done. We had to get down into the depths and slay Immol’thar.

Which gave us another opportunity to wipe.

We cleared all the mobs roaming around Immol’thar’s chamber, turned off the last two pylons that hold up the force field surrounding him, and ran in to the attack. Behold Immol’thar!

We even had help.

There are some NPCs in with Immol’thar that will assist you.

Unfortunately, Immol’thar spawns these green eyeballs (as if he does not have enough already) that are non-elite mobs, which fly off and attack the casters. We did not notice them until it was too late. Down we went. You can see the eyeballs, as well as the NPCs, here:

With that knowledge and a soul stone, we were able to slay him on the second try. Skronk was in charge of catching eye spawns that got away while I laid down a consecrate every so often to keep them focused on me. We won.

At that point we had to do a special ritual in Immol’thar’s chamber to summon the horse that Bung would eventually be able to ride. The ritual seemed awfully… well… pink to me. The mysteries of Warlocks I guess.

We managed to wipe on this as well, as wave after wave of imps and death guards, who try to interrupt the whole thing, eventually wore us down and overwhelmed us.

With no soul stone, we had to run back from the entrance. There were a few respawns by that point, but we were able to get back pretty quickly so we could try again.

Only we did not have to try again. We apparently finished the ritual, as everything was ready to summon the horse and rider. We did that, defeated them, and completed that stage of the quest.

And while we were down there, we needed to knock off Prince Tortheldrin for another quest. That meant heading down to the library, killing him, then running around a bit more to finish off the quest. Once done, we took a portal back to Ironforge and got to admire Bung’s new mount.

Now Vikund is the only one left without an epic mount. Another Scholomance run is in our future.

We got together on Saturday night and decided to do a short run into Dire Maul West in order to update Vikund’s Paladin mount quest, then head to Scholomance to finish that and update Bung’s Warlock mount quest. We headed out with the group all at level 60, just like last week. I think this might be the first time we have all gone a full week without any of us getting a level.

60 Warrior - Earlthecat
60 Warlock - Bungholio
60 Mage - Ula
60 Paladin - Vikund
60 Priest - Skronk

We all started heading generally in the direction of Feralas first. I was actually parked at Feathermoon Stonghold as I had been fishing, both trying to bring up my fishing skill and my cooking skill.

By the time we converged and found the summoning stone (off to the left of the path that leads in) four of us were already there, so there was only a single summon to do.

Our run into Dire Maul West was pretty quick. While we had no rogue and no Crescent key, we did have the “engineer’s lockpick,” (Vikund is an engineer) which is the powerful seaforium charge.

I had not used one before and was a bit disappointed. There was no loud bang or explosion effect. Instead, the door just opened. When I attach a powerful charge to a door, I like to see it at least come of the hinges!

Once in, we could see the area for the quest update. We had to clear out a series of single mob patrols that wander the courtyard, but once done with that, we managed to thread our was across the main courtyard to Tendris Warpwood.

We knocked him down pretty quick and were rewarded with a green “bind on pickup” staff worthy of any non-elite level 55 you care to mention. Bleh.

But we weren’t there for loot, but to feed the ancient equine spirit, Vikund’s once and future steed, if I read the quest correctly.

So we were in and out of Dire Maul in about 10 minutes. Not bad. We do have to go back to finish up Bung’s epic mount quest, which I understand is a bit more than a walk across the courtyard.

Following that, we headed back to Stormwind so I could update my quests and hand over some gems, then flew up to Scholomance.

We did better this time around, at least in the first big room. That was the scene of a couple wipes our first time around.

We managed very well indeed, only losing a mage now and again as we fought our way too then cleared our Rattlegore and his room.

Then came the time for the end of the paladin mount quest. While I skimmed a post about this segment of the quest and grasp the whole “use the right judgements” thing, I was not quite prepared for the battle that followed.

I was expecting a few small fights and then a big guy at the end. Instead we were in for wave after wave of elite mobs. We made it through the first two flavors and were on the second wave of the third when mana, health, potions, and what not began to give out. Skronk used the soul stone when he went down during the fight. Then things got really unstuck and we wiped.

And, it turns out, once you wipe on that battle, that area is no longer accessible unless you reset the instance. And since we were not up to the clearing job again, we decided to postpone that until another time while we went after the update for Bung’s quest.

We headed down to the Alchemy Lab, where Ras Frostwhisper resides, to get the update. We slew the patrols at the close end of the room, updated Bung’s quest, then killed Ras.

That cleaned up, we decided to wrap up one more quest, Krastinov’s Bag of Horrors, before we called it a night.

This meant finding our way to Jandice Barov, who hangs out downstairs. Getting to her was a bit of a challenge, at least until we figured out the way to handle it.

She is at one end of a room with lots of shelves forming corridors across your path. Mobs, some elite, some not, wander up and down these, so you have to clear them without getting too many on you.

It isn’t too tough, but we managed to bite off a few more undead than we should have, then one of us backed up too far and aggro’d another group, and soon we were all dead again.

A soul stone and some resses later, we refined our approach and cleared a path to Jandice rather easily.

The Jandice fight was a big of a surprise. She spawns a whole bunch of duplicates of herself throughout the fight. Finding the right one to target was a bit of a pain. However, the duplicates say they are minions of Jandice when selected, so simply hitting tab until you got the “live” one turned out to be the solution. (I will say here that I am glad that Blizzard adopted a standard UI practice and made shift-tab select mobs in reverse order, as I tabbed past Jandice twice. Instead of having to go “around the horn” to get back to her, I hit shift-tab and was set.)

Bringing her down, we took a victory shot in her little “Sting video” alcove, then headed out.

Since the quest turn-in is right outside the instance, we decided to try to blow past any respawns and run to the exit. And we nearly made it too. Another wipe.

So we ghosted to the instance, went in to revive, then zoned back out to turn in the quest.

The evenings work was enough to push Vikund to level 61. I did not try to get him ahead of the pack, but the run up work for the paladin mount quest actually put quite a bit of experience in his pocket.

So to finish up the mount quests for Bung and myself, we need another trip to Scholomance (which will also let us knock off the last major Scholo quest) and a full trip into Dire Maul west.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve made a post. Been going on vacation and then had to do actual work when I came back. I know, it’s weird. Anyway I just though I’d recap on what WoW things I’ve been doing.

When I came back from vacation, unfortunately my whole group was a bit higher than me. Now Sindral was level 50-51, Kathane and Keceltes were 49-50, and Skarra was 48 while I was just level 46. More or less those level ranges have been kept the same. I haven’t really found the time to play outside our regular meeting nights.

We did a couple of Sunken Temple runs, but they were pretty much done with it. Then we went over to do Blackrock Depths. We did several runs there and have pretty much have explored every bit of BRD. This past Tuesday we did a Dire Maul East run and that was relatively easy. I’m now at level 52 with our highest being Sindral at level 57.

According to WoWWiki, We should explore Lower Blackrock Spire and Dire Maul. At least until we’re in the level 58-60 range before we try out Stratholme or Scholomance. That should be a bit of fun.