We usually start with Sethekk Halls. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it’s because it’s a port away from Magister’s Terrace. I like to think that we start there to build into a progression of sorts, like we’re starting from the easiest then moving on to the hardest. It’s not actually the case though. You’ll see.

Anyway, on to Sethekk. We can sneak past everything until we get to the first boss, who we learned we had to kill if we wanted to make our journey back convenient. Once he’s down, we then proceed to the second boss, which is actually the mount dropper. Cow will summon him, we kill him, hope he drops something, then move on to the last boss and kill him too. Once all of them are down a door on the right will open, leading to the a spot near the entrance. Note that it will only open if all bosses have been dealt with.

We then fly back to Shattrath and port to Magister’s Terrace. Again, sneaking our way is the key here. Once we get to the first boss, we clear the room first before we engage him. When he’s down, it’s a short trip to the second boss, which is again easily dispatched. A couple of sneaky steps later we’re on to Delrissa. For this fight we make sure that our cooldowns are available so we can AOE all of them. There’s a chance that they’ll let a Fear out, ruining the AOE and possibly causing aggro to the surrounding mobs so it’s better to be prepared. Then it’s on to Prince Kael’Thas himself, who usually drops nothing. Hey, he might drop the mini-pet or the mount so he’s slightly more rewarding than the other bosses.

We then pick up a flight to Silvermoon, head to the Mage trainer and take the port to Blasted Lands. From there, we run up to Karazhan. There, we switch to a raid group and clear all the mobs prior to Attumen. We found out recently that we don’t need a tank for him so we just two-man him and hope he drops something. Once that’s done, we head to ZG for the final stop of the run.

I’m at the point where I’m passive about getting a Lich King kill. I mean, sure if we have the group for it then I’ll give it a shot, but I’m not going to force circumstances just to get a raid going. Thankfully, the decision to do so isn’t up to me most of the time but that’s my stand on it. With that said, I run into a completely different problem.

I don’t have anything left to do.

So, time to find things to occupy my time with. Oh, I know I can always switch to an alt and do something with that, but the thought of gearing a toon from scratch the way I did it with Sin is daunting and time-consuming so I’m veering away from that with this post. The question here is this: what can I do with my main?

The answer came from a guildmate: mount runs. Now, I know there are other answers too, such as achievements, getting the Loremaster title or something similar, etc. I just prefer mount runs because they’re not anal with the details; run an instance that drops a mount, kill the boss, rinse and repeat. The best part? As a rogue, I can sneak my way past through most of the mobs.

My partner in crime is the above-mentioned guildmate: Cowtastrophy. She’s a druid, so her cat form stealth matches perfectly with my own. She gets detected more often than I do because of the sneak levels but she makes up for it by healing my sorry ass so it’s all good.

Now, we’ve gone through these runs often enough to have very, very low expectations of them. It’s like, got nothing better to do? Let’s do a mount run. The enthusiasm comes from the fact that it gives us something to do, not from the hope that a mount will actually drop. It beats standing around in Dalaran all day, watching everyone else’s gearscore progress while your own stagnates.

Okay, at this point I think it’s fair to say that we’re being bombarded with Cataclysm information. You’ll notice that I haven’t been writing about it. It’s by choice. I tend to ignore previews because of the fact that they’re temporary. I’m not sure if what I’m seeing is going to make it in the final product and I don’t want to spend the time and energy involved in keeping up with every little update. I also don’t want to deal with the eventual disappointment if something I’m looking forward to gets cut in the end. Just take a look at what they’re removing now and you’ll see what I mean.

Now, this is something I do for all games, not just WoW. I’ve been there before, folks. I’ve felt the anticipation, the excitement—then the game comes out and all you have a shell of what it was in the previews. So no, I don’t want to go through that. I’m going to get Cataclysm when it comes out whether it’s good or not. We probably all will.

I’ll tell you where it came from instead. I blame Arcanum. I’m a Fallout fanboy. Fallout 1 and 2 are two of my favorite games and I used to spend hours talking about them back in college with another friend of mine. Arcanum was created by the same guys so I saw every preview I could, bought every magazine that featured it. This was before Gametrailers, folks, so online preview videos were virtually unheard of. If you wanted information about a game, your best bet was to buy a magazine that covered it.

Then the game finally came out and it all went downhill. The real-time combat was too fast and awkward. The turn-based combat looked downright silly albeit more rewarding. The whole magic versus technology bit that they were trying to pull off came out half-assed. It was just a train wreck compared to Fallout. I hated it when it was released. I eventually played it after a few months when all my expectations were dead and it was only then that I appreciated it. I’ve been very wary of previews since.

So, going back to Cataclysm, if I find something interesting then I’ll write about it. For now, please don’t count on me covering previews and anything related to them.

I contacted Blizzard support via email and was asked three questions to verify my account. I was unable to answer all of them. One question involved providing my vanilla WoW serial number, something that I no longer thanks to Typhoon Ketsana. The rep told me to email Account Services directly and provide a government-issued ID plus a scanned printout of a document they provided in the link. I submitted what was required two days later. After nearly three days, I got a response that Blizz has removed my authenticator and I was able to login.

It was a long and arduous process. I still can’t get over the fact that the one thing that was protecting my account also prevented me from accessing it. Overall, I was unable to play the game for about a week.

Pardon the short update. Real life is getting in the way again. If you want to hear about the new talent previews, WoW.com has those covered. I was supposed to write a post about gear stagnation but this week’s heroic drops have managed to shut me up. Imagine that?

I broke my iPod last week. I was installing an update for an app. It prompted to reboot. When I did, it gave me the recovery screen, the one that told me that I should plug it to iTunes. I slept it off since it was late in the day. When I woke up, I plugged it in and got no change in the error. It was then that I knew that I was in trouble. My authenticator was in my iPod. If I didn’t get it to work, I wouldn’t be able to play WoW.

So I hauled my ass off to work, figuring that I’ll try to resolve the problem there. iTunes needed to download the recovery software needed to restore my iPod back to factory settings so that was the first thing that I tried. I then found out that our corporate firewall blocked iTunes from doing so so I had to try something else. How about a manual download of the recovery software, I thought. So I did, downloading the latest version for my iPod Touch. I went back to iTunes, tried to load it and it gave me another error. A little digging revealed that it was caused by a digital signature issue that Apple stopped using. Which meant I was stuck.

It time to think out of the box. What could I do to force my device to load the restore software? I already had it so I figured there must be some other app out there that would do it. I found two other things but they also failed miserably. I was a little tired at that point. If I gave up on the problem, I was looking at the possibility of bringing it to a service center then waiting at least a week before I could get it back. It wasn’t a prospect that I was looking forward to.

I don’t know what led me to it, but I eventually found out that my iPod Touch wasn’t a 3G model. It’s a 3rd gen device, sure, but it was only 2G. I had been using the wrong restore software all along. I then downloaded the correct one, went back to iTunes. This time, there was no digital signature error because Apple was still using it for this version of the software. After a few minutes, my iPod was restored. From the start of the repair process to the end of it, I spent 6 hours fixing it. It took forever, but you’re looking at someone who had zero knowledge when it comes to fixing iPods so I just took it for what it was.

When I got home that day I installed my apps and songs. It was then that I found out that my authenticator was out of sync so I still couldn’t log in. I informed the officers in my guild and filed a ticket with Blizzard to sort things out. I just found it incredibly ironic that the very thing that was securing my account was also preventing me from accessing it.