Summer Doldrums

I've been a little quiet lately - and with reason. There hasn't really been much going on. People in my guild have been on vacation or just haven't been logging on because, what's the point? We're going to have a gear reset in 3 months anyway. I liken it to inflation in that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people believe there will be inflation in the future, they will buy things now. An increase in demand without an increase in supply will drive prices up. Tada!!! Inflation!!! Same thing here. If people don't feel like there will be people signing on, they won't sign on. Which, in turn, leads to other people not signing on and the next thing you know, no one is signing on.

So more often than not lately, I'm the only person in the guild who is logged on. It will be like that for hours. Maybe someone who doesn't generally do instances will log on to play a couple of rounds of Alterac Valley or something but, for the most part, no one. We didn't even have anyone on for Arena night (which I was disappointed about because I just need 50 more points on Kaylee to get that last pice of season 3 gear and she never has to do arenas again).

I haven't felt like doing an instance with other people much lately. The ones I'm interested in require a lot of communication (Karazhan and heroics, for the most part) and... I haven't felt particularly social. I did a couple of Black Morass runs last week to grind some Keepers of Time rep so I can get the teleport on my mage (I gots to be mobile). I did a Karazhan run on my paladin a couple of weeks ago and we cleared everything but Nightbane because nobody could summon him. I brought Hiahotah in because he has the urn. We wiped a couple of times and decided to take a dinner break. A bunch of people didn't come back, so we ended up filling out with three people from my guild who'd never seen Nightbane before. The warrior who was leading the raid had tanked everything else so I let him tank Nightbane. The other three people from my guild died pretty early. I battle rezzed the priest (Pater) so we had 8 people up - 3 healers, 4 DPS (one of them being Hiahotah in his tanking gear... just in case) and a tank. The tank went down just after the last flying phase and took out two more DPSers before I could pick him up. We did the last 24% with two holy priest, a holy paladin, a hunter and a druid tank. The whole thing took 17 minutes. It did, however, demonstrate how incredible a tank Hiahotah is. The healers couldn't keep the warrior up but their mana was actually going up after Hiahotah took over.

But other than that and some 2 manning of Mana Tombs for the +12 stamina to boots enchant... I've been playing solo. But I'm also feeling the malaise that's affecting the rest of the guild. I mean... What's the point of collecting hundreds of badges of justice when I'm going to be replacing all that gear in a few levels anyway. Plus... The rumor is that the gear reset won't be as steep so I may be wearing some of my current gear well into the late 70's - possibly even 80. Well that's no fun. A lot of the thrill of leveling and questing is getting new gear. Gifteye had a lot of that with his tier two gear but still replaced everything by 66. So I'm not overly excited about gearing up for the next few months.

So what does that leave? I mean... There hasn't been a day in the last two and a half years that I haven't found a few minutes to log in - even if it was only to check my mail or the AH. Here are some things I've been working on and some other possible ways to burn three months:

1) I've decided that I want to use the name of one of my bank alts (Zoealleyne) as my Death Knight. So I started liquidating her inventory. It turns out that most of what she was holding was enchanting mats... Mats that were going to have no value in three months so... Why hold them? The first round of auctions netted me 2200 gold... And I don't _need_ gold.

So I decided to give the warlock I've been leveling some better gear. She'd been rocking about 34 spell damage and while I could kill things, it seemed like it should be easier. So I bought her a Staff of Jordan (apparently the official weapon of warlock twinks everywhere) and... Oh!! It's level 35 and I've got some shards lying around. So I put a +40 spell damage enchant on it. Once you start down that path and you still have 1700 bonus gold lying around... Well... I decided to twink her and do some battlegrounds. I still haven't enchanted most of her gear but... Yow. She's fun. She's sitting at 178 shadow damage and consistently tops the damage and healing done meters. Plus, having a single twink can really shift the tide of a fight... Particularly one who can DPS 5 people while she's dead.

2) I'm leveling a shadow priest. The original intent was to level the warlock to catch up to a fried who is at 49 so we can quest together, but the twinking process put a stop to that. So I'm working on my priest. He'd been at level 13 for a while. Last night he got to 30 which means he gets Vampiric Embrace and a mount.

3) Get a Justicar or Conqueror title. This is really tough without being able to turn in marks for rep any more. Gifteye (who already has a rank 10 title) is already exalted with AV and WSG (the tough one by all accounts) so he'd just have to do Arathi Basin... But he's only 1700/12000 to revered with them, so I'd have to grind out over 31k rep on a character I don't play much any more. The alternative would be Hiahotah who is over half way to revered with AB but only 3k/12 to revered with WSG. That would be a lot of WSG. Plus...

4) Hiahotah is very close to the Champion of the Naaru title. He just needs to get into a Magtheridon's Lair raid and he'd be pretty much done - just a quick trip into heroic Slave Pens to turn in another quest and he'd be finished.

So... That's how I'll spend a lot of _my_ time over the next couple of months. Maybe people will start logging on again after school starts up again.