I didn't play all that much this weekend, but at the times where I played, I was quite successful in my endeavors.
I don't know how other people manage to save enough cash for an epic mount, I always spend my money for other things that I find more important. Raslebol just spent most of his money, 180 gold, on a recipe for Greater Nature Protection potions. I had tried to farm for that recipe myself, killed hundreds of nature elementals in a slime-infested cave in the plaguelands, and finally given up. Now I was happy enough to buy the recipe, I don't see it in the AH very often.
I think the problem is that the drop rate of 1% listed on Thottbot and Allakhazam is wrong: the data collection program they are using only counts drops *if* the mob drops something. If there is loot, there is a 1% chance of the loot being the recipe. But in over half of the cases there is no loot at all, pushing the chance of finding a recipe per kill to far below 1%. By the way, these databases are even more wrong if you look for drop rates of quest items. If 90 people kill the mob without having the quest, and 10 kill it with the quest, and the mob drops the quest item every time for people who have the quest, the database will show a drop rate of 10%. Which doesn't tell you anything about the real drop chance, as you don't know how many people had the quest at the time of killing the mob.
Anyway, now Raslebol has the "greater" versions of the potions that absorb nature, fire, arcane, and shadow damage. I'm just missing the frost potion, for which I will need help. It is dropped by level 59 to 60 elite giants in Wintersprings. I tried soloing them, but barely survived and spent far too many potions and bandages to beat just one of them. I need at least a second player to help if I want to farm them for the recipe.
Saturday I joined a guild raid group which was supposed to try to kill Onyxia. But only 20 people turned up, as not everybody who was interested had the key. At least I could enter Onyxia's lair, and use a potion of Dream Vision to sneak into her cave, have a look around, and do a screenshot. But then the raid group wisely decided to try AQ20 instead. Ahn'Qiraj was a success in that we were finally able to vanquish the first boss, Kurinnaxx. In previous tries my priest had tried to run around a lot to avoid sand traps, which turned out to be futile. Now I doffed a Greater Nature Protection potion and stood still, only running if I noticed a sand trap appearing next to me. Standing away from everybody else, behind Kurinnaxx, helped. Even that running didn't succeed all the time, but the potion kept me alive, and 15 seconds silence just served for mana regeneration. Another winning factor was that our tanks switched aggro much more often, basically after getting one or two debuffs. If you wait until the main tank has 4 debuffs before switching to the next tank, it often is already too late. No loot for me, but the satisfaction of having killed another raid boss. We then worked out a strategy to deal with the waves of mobs coming before the next boss. That worked well enough for the first two waves, but something went wrong on the third wave (are they getting harder?) and we wiped. As you then have to start over from wave one, we decided to try another day.
On Sunday I played Waldin, my shaman, and hit level 35. So I went on a voyage to different engineering trainers. I learned artisan engineering, raising my skill cap to 300, and gnome engineering. It is possible that goblin engineering might be more useful for leveling, by having better recipes for bombs and mines. But I was mainly interesting in the silly gnome gadgets. I already built some, like the Gnomish Battle Chicken, or the Gnomish Death Ray, but have yet to try them out. I'm aware that gnomish gadgets have a chance to backfire, and thus might not be the thing to use in a group, where you could hurt other people. But for soloing it might be fun, even if you end up hurting yourself. Now my only problem is getting to 300 skill, after using all my hoarded resources I only got up to 265. Many engineering items use a lot of different resources, thus are expensive to make, and as only other engineers can use them, they usually don't sell well. I leveled a lot making mithril bullets for guns, but ended up selling most of them to a NPC vendor, as all the high-level hunters use the better thorium bullets.
We held a guild meeting on Sunday, which helped to resolve some conflicts, but not all of them. I wasn't really surprised when that resulted in some people leaving the guild. There are so many different goals and play styles in World of Warcraft, it is impossible for one guild to make everybody happy.
After the guild meeting there were two events, a high-level raid, and a smaller 10-man raid to BRD to help some people get their attunement to the core quest finished. As BRD is going to change to be 5-man only in the next patch, we took the opportunity to get 6 people attuned in one run while it was still easy. And easy it was, I buffed everybody with a Prayer of Fortitude at the start, and that buff still had 6 minutes going when we reached the crystal for the attunement, thus only 54 minutes from start to end. We didn't lose time killing any unnecessary bosses, just the ambassador and the hall of seven, which you can't bypass. I played raid leader with Kyroc, we had one experienced warrior as main tank, and one hunter with lots of raid experience as main assist. So we basically pretended this was a serious raid, and taught the people in the group who hadn't done much raiding before how to wait until the MT gets some aggro, and then attack when the MA acquires a target. That wouldn't have been strictly necessary, but it served as good training, and we sliced through BRD like a hot knife through butter. I was rather pleased with that.
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