Win if you can, lose if you must, but always always cheat. . .

My dad has a lot of little nuggets of wisdom, that one is one of my favorites: "Win if you can, lose if you must, but always always cheat". I was tired of losing in the stupid joisting, and people telling me its easy, so I just found a way to cheat, many thanks to Darraxus for providing the method. I mounted up and had one of our guild tanks come with me. When the champion would go into attack mode, he would just taunt the champion off me. I pretty much shield broke and charged him to death with ease. Now I am an Argent Champion and have access to more dailies and a pretty slick looking two handed sword (and I've been debating buying the belt).

I still really don't like joisting and have yet to do the dailies which involve it. I made valiant purely by killing Icecrown scourge (as a side note, the Vrykul you have to kill and plant banners on for the Ebon Blade dailies count as scourge, so it's 2 for 1, and if you're a champion already and re-doing the valiant quests, it's 3 for 1). I may have to get on the jousting dailies (the killing the scourge ones, not grand melee) because I need 25 more marks for the gear I want(the 2h sword and plate DPS belt, my ret set belt is a quest green), then maybe another 60 if the BoA chest goes live.

I had another strange thing happen to me last night. Normally when I run an instance, if there is something I want, it will never drop. I ran hellfire ramparts easily a dozen times on my warrior, no hellreaver, it dropped for every single one of my other characters. I havent seen the Suneater, Skadi's belt, or the Red Sword, despite multiple runs through those instances. Last night, almost made up for that. We had a guild run through Heroic Violet Hold. Our druid was tanking (I believe he's the only 80 druid in the guild, a situation I'm trying to remedy), he asked me if I wanted to, but I am uncomfortable with the boss that needs to be kited around the room, so I DPS'd. Long story short, we ended up plowing through it (did wipe on the boss who needed the kiting, go figure), and besides the first boss, I got every single drop (mostly because I was the only one in the group who could use them). I got the tanking pants, some plate gloves, and a DPS necklace, all upgrades. The pants especially are a big boost because they have more defense and more stamina than the standard issue legplates I was wearing (blue vs purple, go figure lol). The 20 extra points of defense will let me re-gem for more stam. While I don't really want to raid tank, I am starting to have a pretty decent tanking set for heroics.

My druid is coming along quite well, minus a complete douchebag move from a pug group on tuesday night. I was in LFG for underbog. My druid is level 65, I wanted the pants that drop off the last boss. I got a whisper asking if I could tank. I said sure, group ended up being a druid healer, me and 3 ret pallies. I got to the instance, switched to bear form, went about trying to mark and realized I wasn't lead. Asked the druid, who was lead to make me leader so I could mark. He refused to make me lead so I switched into cat form and let the 3 ret pallies fight each other for aggro. He promptly booted me from the group mid instance, I re-iterate, what a douchebag. Well, I am mid level 65, and if I don't ever get the pants, it's no big deal, there are a few others that are passable, I'm considering the heavy clefthoof.

My personal philosophy on leveling gear is that socketable Outlands gear will normally last till at least mid 70's. I believe the reason for this is that Outlands gear was designed with Outlands gems in mind, which generally give relatively small benefit. When you take something like the cheat that drops in Blood Furnace, and socket it with 3 blue-quality Northrend gems, you get a considerable benefit (I am using two of the opals with AGI and Stam, and I believe a perfect jagged dark jade, so 16 agi, 7 crit rating, 35 stam, thats on top of what the chest has). It is further magnified in the higher level items: Necklace of the deep, for very modest mats, when socketed with the above listed opals ends up around +30 agi, +40 stam. That is considerable and should last close to 10 levels or more depending on instance drops. Hence, my gearing strategy is normally to find the socketable outlands gear, and get as much of it as possible.

Hope everyone has a lot of goodness, and in honor of one of my favorite infrequently updated blogs, I'm WTFOUT!