2008-02-01 Hillsbrad Foothills

We had a full five for last night's gathering of the Grunt Foundation. The lock, Kon, does not have his computer operating yet, but was able to borrow the family computer. We started with two level 23s, two level 24s, and Kon at level 22.

The new questing area is the Hillsbrad Foothills. The horde town in that area is Tarren Mill, and that's where we all assembled. Philly and Brae (who did the quest collecting this time as Arq is not familiar with the area) were the only two who had gotten the flight path for the town. We waited for the others at the Mill, and when Kon trotted into town we asked him to Summon the others. After doing the Summons, Kon mentioned that those were his first ever. I couldn't help but poke a little fun at Brae by mentioning that last sunday in WC he had given Philly her first opportunity to do a rez. These "firsts" continue to bring home that while we all have high level toons on other servers, the race/classes of the characters we are playing here are all new to us.

The early quests in Hillsbrad involve a lot of beast killing. Much of the area is open, grassy fields, blanketed with lions, bears, and . . . no, not tigers . . . spiders. We also tackled the Battle of Hillsbrad quest chain. This is part of the ongoing war here between the horde undead (Yay for undead!) and the humans who "infest" the area. The first quest takes the group to the human town of Hillsbrad (clever name - not) to kill farmers. Undead must really hate farmers, because over several quests droves of them will die and bloody their own fields. There are two named farmers, Ray and Getz, we must kill. After killing the necessary numbers of farmers, we took up residence in a barn we were sure is where at least one of the named farmers would spawn. After an endless wait and killing innumberable respawning unnamed farmers, we got bored and decided the best way to find the named farmers was through process of elimination. We killed everything and everyone, even the cows in the field (which could be skinned, but Philly did mention she was glad she wasn't Tauren).

The named farmers were soon discovered and dispatched. In the second battle it was peasants we had to dispatch. There are still five more quests in the series we have to do.

There are a number of quests involving invading the battlements of Durnholde, and we got one of those done as well.

We had east coasters who could only stay until 7:30pm server (10:30pm their time) last night, so we only got about five quests done. It was enough to level all of us up by one level, though. We will be going into SFK this sunday with two level 25s and 2 level 24s (although it's possible some of us may level up another notch before then). Kon (level 23) won't be able to make it, though, and we will have to find another stand in.

I took a look at the DPS data from the addon Recap after the run. Since we were just questing everyone was running around tagging mobs and killing things as quickly as possible. I think the mage enjoyed trying to overaggro mobs so the warrior had to chase them. Philly would just stand between them and blast away with her wand. Since everyone was helping with the killing I thought it interesting to compare the damage dealing.

By far the two highest DPS dealers were the mage - and the warrior. They accounted for perhaps 70% of all damage done. I was a little surprised the warrior could match the mage in damage, but he is specced fury and was for sure in full DPS mode. Also surprising was that the warlock's damage was no where near those numbers. He had his succubus out most of the night. I had recap set to include pet damage with the pet owner, and thought the damage would be higher. In fact, in terms of damage per second, Philly was actually slightly better than the lock, although the lock had slightly more total damage. Philly, doing nothing but wanding for damage, shouldn't be out DPSing a warlock. Will have to read up on locks and see if I can help him out a bit.

The data is based only on what Philly's recap recorded, so it's likely that not all damage dealt by the others got recorded if they got too far away for recap to pick it up. Recap is more to look at how well Philly is doing with damage and healing, not as much comparing her to others. But it's still interesting.

I haven't had much luck in convincing the others to use addons like recap, or, more importantly I think, something like Omen or KTH to monitor threat. Other than Philly and Huld (the warrior), none of the others are using anything like that. Well, at least Philly can monitor her threat compared to the tanks.