Hellfire and Gronnlings

Enter the Ramparts

Some things changed between yesterdays post and last nights festivities.  Firstly I largely abandoned the notion of playing a Monk tank, because I got to thinking about what my actual “goal” was.  That goal being helping Grace get a foothold on my server of choice, and prepping her for eventual raid shenanigans.  My general theory was that still the fastest way to do that… would be to push hard on running the outland instances as a duo…  with me largely just wrecking thinks with thunderclap.  We however lacked the finesse to realize that it seems like the absolute best choice here is to hang out at Hellfire Ramparts until the person you are pulling is around level 65 and thus qualified to run all of the various Outland dungeon quests.  Without a doubt, after having done all of the lower level Outland dungeons….  Hellfire is the fastest and in theory you could run it fast enough to push up another character extremely quickly.  Sure it slowed down significantly after she reached sixty one, but I think the completion bonus would have been enough to keep pushing forward.  Granted we probably would have hit the instance lockout of I believe 10 instances per hour… and had to take a brief break here or there.  Still I firmly believe that had we actually stuck to this plan…  Grace would have been in Wrath of the Lich King already instead of just on the cusp of it.

All told for the evening we managed to push her from 57 to 67 before I simply lost steam.  With the recent illness, I have also largely weaned myself off of caffeine other than my morning coffee.  This also seems to mean that my ability to stay awake and keep doing the same thing without getting drowsy… has also been adversely effected.  I want to say we started up the dungeon train around 6pm and finished up around 8:30 so I guess 10 levels in that time is not that shabby.  Essentially we ran normal and heroic versions of Hellfire Ramparts, Blood Furnace, Slave Pens, Underbogs, Mana Tombs, Auchenai Crypts, Sethek Halls, and finally Shadow Labyrinth.  There was a period of time where we had to chain run Slave Pens for a bit…  which is pretty much the point we realize that we should have been doing that with Hellfire Ramparts instead.  Now we simply need to push a little harder to get out of Outland and into Northrend…  though if WoWHead is correct we might not be able to do Utgarde Keep until 69.  That is the big thing we are realizing through doing this is the strange quirks as to when you can zone into a specific dungeon.  They don’t seem to make much sense, and it feels like at some point they just decided to pick random numbers that don’t actually relate to the quests you are receiving.  Basically I am realizing that the older content has suffered greatly for all of the redistribution of crap that happened in Pandaria and Warlords.

Gronnback Riding

In other news I finally managed to get the Garrison mission that rewards the Coalfist Gronnling mount.  I am honestly just not sure what I think about it… I mean ANY mount is a positive because it increases the total number of mounts I have and moves me closer to all of those achievements…  but riding this thing…. it is ridiculously big.  Warlords of Draenor has been the expansion of humongous mounts… from the Corehound mount from the 40 man Molten Core, to the Grinch Yeti…  this is very much an expansion of irrational land yacht style mounts.  As cool as I might think this mount is… I just cannot foresee myself ever riding it.  When you ride around on it, the animation is in such a way as it feels like you are just about to fall off of the back… which strangely causes all sorts of anxiety in me.  Regardless I am happy to knock another mount off the long list of mounts that I do not have.  At some point I would love to get a group together and camp the various world mounts from Draenor, because as of right now I have ZERO of them.