Woah! Shortly after finishing Part I of Building a UI, I began work on Part II and saved a rough copy as a draft. Since then I’ve had three more great topics I’d like to write about and have written rough drafts for each of them and saved them as drafts. Without realizing it, I’m sitting here on 4-5 almost complete drafts of posts, but there hasn’t been an update on the front page for over two weeks! So without further ado, let me catch you all up to where Qz is sitting right now.

Qz hit 70 a few days after the last post, with about 4600g sitting in the bank waiting to be spent. I’ve been saving every single gold since level 1, not allowing myself anywhere near the Auction House, and gearing myself purely on items that I’ve gotten as rewards through questing. I also avoided instances since there are only three reasons people go to instances; to get gear, to get experience, and to get reputation. I knew that any gear I got at low levels would be replaced soon (low levels go through gear so fast!), I knew I could get faster experience by questing alone than trying to get a group going and hoping it’s good, and reputation isn’t much of an issue then. I did a few loops around Terokkar for [item]Terocone[/item], [item]Felweed[/item], and [item]Dreaming Glory[/item], and made the last 400g within a matter of a few hours (thank god Terocone goes for 40g a stack on my server for some reason).

Flew to SMV, bought the riding skill needed, and got myself all excited over the possibility of having a swift flight form that night. I enrolled my brother to help me with the questline (I know that some of the lords can be a bit tricky, and he was nice enough to offer his help), and we ripped through all the quests without so much as batting an eye. But alas, I was but one quest away from my swift flight form, but it was Heroic Sethekk Halls, and the instance is not one that’s very popular. Not to mention I was a horribly undergeared (about +800 healing and 90mp5) Resto Druid who was going as an “off healer.” Miraculously (I credit the unique alignment of the planets), today’s daily on my server happened to be Sethekk, so finding a group wasn’t especially difficult. We completed the instance a short while later, and I get to zooooom around Outland in an armored brown crow.

The next day, the guild was shaken up a bit. One of our three Feral Druids (arguably the top one) decided to leave our guild for one that’s more progressed than we are (significantly more). His application was accepted, and he left without drama, and I salute and congratulate him on that accomplishment. However, we were now down one Feral tank. Additionally, our guild recruited a new Resto Druid, who has an amazing reputation (to quote a guild member, “easily in the top 5 on the server”), and was looking for a new guild after his last one fell apart. After speaking with the guild leader, it was agreed that I would fulfill that Feral spot (yeah, you heard me right, back to Feral!). Of course, this happened right after I spent my 25x[item]Badge of Justice[/item] (from the 20-badge Kara run I did at 68, and the 5 from heroic Sethekk) on the [item]Tears of Heaven[/item]. And I spent my honor and marks on [item]32451[/item]. Oh well, banked those in case I need to go back to Resto in the future. The Resto set in my bank is now at a lovely +1053 healing.

I’ve been working on gearing up Qz as swiftly as possible as to make him viable for raids, and he’s already progressed quite nicely. It is amazing how easy and cheap it is to gear up a Feral Druid. Tomorrow’s post will go into this concept in a little more depth, but this fact really did take me aback. As of last night, Qz has tanked through Karazhan, and got to tank in Gruul’s Lair as well (eating up hurtful strikes mostly, though the tank did drop the first time we tried Gruul, and I managed to tank him from growth 7 to growth 11, to the amazement of my guild). Qz has also tanked (and DPSed) on Astromancer Solarian in The Eye, and on Hydross (that resist gear is EXPENSIVE!), Lurker, and Leo. I’ll post all the items I’ve managed to accrue in a future post.

Meanwhile, I leveled SaladFork’s cooking to 375 so that I can make my own buff food for raids. There’s a special feeling you get when you’re entirely self-reliant when it comes to potions and food on raids, I like it. After reading BBB’s excellent post on consumables for Feral Druids, I decided upon [item]Elixir of Major Agility[/item] and [item]Elixir of Major Fortitude[/item] for Qz, with [item]Warp Burger[/item] as my buff food. My gear is heavily lacking in dodge (and agility) at the moment as I focus on keeping defense capped and increasing armor, and these buffs help out tremendously.

I’ve also picked up a few new addons. The first of which is one I love tremendously, as it not only makes my inventory look a lot spiffier, but also allows me to organize and find items remarkably faster, as well as quickly recognize the rarity of an item. Of course, I talk about no other than oGlow. This addon will add colored borders around items in your bags, bank, character screen, trades, etc., to allow you to easily recognize an item’s rarity. The glow was a bit too much for me, but a quick edit to glow.lua to change the opacity from 0.8 to 0.6 fixed that quickly. Another addon I’d like to mention is Routes. Routes is sort of the “successor” of Cartographer_Routes (which I mentioned in an earlier post). However, it improves on the Cartographer_ version in quite a few significant ways which have helped me tremendously, and I highly recommend those who use Cartographer_Routes switch to Routes. To quote the forum,

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What Routes does better than Cartographer_Routes:
- It is not dependent on Rock, Cartographer or any map addon.
- We got rid of the Tourist and Graph library dependencies.
- It no longer uses any Babble libraries because they are no longer necessary. We now rely on the addons supplying us the node and zone data directly.
- It supports creating routes using data from Cartographer_<Prof>, GatherMate and Gatherer
- It has been slightly redesigned to allow extension so that any addon can supply nodes data for creating routes with. This means in the future, it will be possible to make routes with questing data once the relevant plugin files are written for it.
- The configuration and route creation is a lot more robust, shows more information per route, and comes with a FAQ.

New Features
- Routes now has a Node Clustering feature which allows you to take a 567 node route and collapse it into a 196 node route by taking nodes that are near each other within a user-specified radius and turning it into a single travel point.

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Go check it out!