Outside Azeroth

I’ve shared with several of you over the past 48 hours, but I haven’t seen everyone online to share. Yesterday, Minnesota officially became the 12th state to legally recognize same-sex marriages.

That means that Sona and I are getting married on August 1st of this year.   While we will not be having an in-game wedding (I’ve got things to plan outside Azeroth, and a mere 10 weeks to do it in); we will likely be having an in-game something to commemorate the event.  I’ll certainly keep you all posted.

 

We Are Mighty!

Last night while I was busily running an LFR that was quickly falling apart, my guildies were busy trying to get enough ghost iron and/or trillium to provide to the alchemists for Living Steel – specifically to get Yawondergirl a couple of crafted gear upgrades.

And in the process, they completed Mighty Miners.

In that LFR, however, Breige ended up saving the day against the Sha of Fear. At 1% (probably less) health, there were 5 raid members still alive. Breige and 4 healers. I popped Sionnach’s taunt on and went to town, blowing every  single unblown cooldown I had. I know I saw a couple of Smite/Holy shock type spells go off on the sha, and I did have to use Sionnach’s Heart of the Phoenix, but the Sha died, and we got our goody bags (for me, it turned out to be cash).  It was amazing fun.  I just need to figure out if there’s any way I can do a better job of getting Lei Shi while she’s hiding. As far as I can tell, as a hunter, it’s a crap shoot whether I put down my traps in the right place.

To Have or Not To Have

Some of my fellow bloggers have posted about the sha touched weapon (or weapons in general this expansion). In particular, hunters, and the utter lack of weapons available to us as upgrades from the blue 463 ilvl drops. I’ll admit I haven’t looked much into any other class than hunter, but I will say that across 5 LFRs, there are what feels like a dozen options to get a belt, but only two weapons, and an equally abysmal opportunity for rings and trinkets.  

Can we have a little balance here, Blizz?  I have but one waist. Yet two hands and two… ears? (I’m not sure what that empty slot image is supposed to represent.) Certainly, I have more need of options for trinkets and rings than I do for belts. Really now.

But anyway…

Breige got 5 belts running LFR over the last two resets (an average of nearly one per queue). And one trinket. No rings. To be fair, she did also get two tier pieces, and her sha touched weapon. I find it interesting that my first seven extra rolls all yielded cash. My 8th provided me with the weapon, and the 9th the trinket.  And I’ve gotten several other new pieces of gear, even when I was only rolling for slots that were seriously lacking.

I’m at ilvl 476 already, but still need to gem, enchant, and balanced all the gear (And figured out which darned belt I actually want to use, I have three to choose from) again. Raiding is expensive. Especially since I don’t like listening to guns, so even if I mog nothing else, I gotsta be carrying a bow.

I also find it interesting that I have a total of 7 of the 20 required sigils to move on in the legendary quest line. I’m not particularly worked up about that, though, as it means I’ll have to PvP, and potentially get good at it.  I’m sure the folks who PvP a whole lot aren’t all that excited about those raiders who are just after their legendary in the queues. Unless, of course, they’re on the opposing faction. Although, from what Navi says, winning a hair-raising battleground seems to be much more enjoyable than face-rolling the opponent. But again, I digress…

In a big way, I’m relieved that I got the weapon; but at the same time, I realize that I’m missing out on a certain amount of excitement that comes from finally getting something after weeks of attempting it without fruition. On the other hand, Attumen still owes me a pony, darn it.

And looking at my profile on the armory, I realize that the very first thing I’m going to do when I get home tonight is move my trinket to the other slot, so I can have myself not one but three achievements.

127 and Counting

I have been a mount collector since they took up bag slots. To be fair, at that point, I didn’t “collect” easily acquired mounts like the faction mounts. Instead, I would have one favorite that I would purchase to show the world I had done whatever it was that needed doing.  Then, thankfully, Blizzard gave us our mounts on a tab instead of in our bags. And I started collecting mounts in earnest. It didn’t matter to me how easy they were to acquire. They didn’t take up precious bag space, and so were worthwhile. The first mount that I ever pursued heavily was Rivendare’s deathcharger. It just felt right to have taken that mount as a trophy.  It wasn’t until Sona and Shoryl were pursuing Argent Dawn rep that I acquired it. Sometime late in Wrath, I believe.

When I first started writing this blog, I gave Shoryl a bit more backstory. She’s from a long line of paladins on her father’s side and priests on her mothers. Her parents both urged her to go into the priesthood after her sister’s strange disappearance (transferring to the Horde).  Her father has retired from his active role in the Argent Dawn and now runs a stable for both Paladins and teaching folks to ride. Shoryl keeps her vast selection of mounts in her father’s stable, allowing him to use them to amuse the children or teach others to ride flying mounts.

And she keeps adding to her collection.  When I completed the Tushui rep, I immediately bought the twelve turtles available. And realized I was starting to get within spitting distance of 150 mounts, which would make me the proud owner of a jade kite. I covet the kites, and sometimes regret that I’m currently splitting my primary time with two toons, instead of one in Pandaria. But while the tank is fun to play, and a paladin; my hunter has been a blast to play (finally), and ranged DPS is easier for me in the new movement significant combat style of Pandaria. Add to that, Phinkbunny collected everything I needed for the Geosynchronus World Spinner except the mysterious orbs, I was bit by the mount collecting bug again.

At 125 mounts, I started looking for easy ways to pump my numbers. Three obvious things came immediately to mind:

1. Purchasable mounts I haven’t picked up yet.
2. Crafted Mounts I haven’t crafted yet. Almost all of my professoions are at 600 (waiting on Tailoring and probably First Aid)
3. Argent Tournament.
4. Netherwing.

There’s a reason why I haven’t picked up most of the purchasable mounts I don’t have. They’re expensive. Yeah, I know, except the Grand Expedition Yak, none of them beat the 54k I dropped on the World Spinner. But that wasn’t just about being able to get it, that was also about a guildy doing something sweet for me. Living Steel and Spirits of Harmony aren’t “cheap”, either.

There’s a few crafted mounts I haven’t either made or acquired. The jeweled panthers will be the hardest, since my jewelcrafter is not yet 90, so cannot yet get cloud serpent rep to get those patterns. But I’ve missed two of the tailoring patterns and one engineering schematic.  Those should be easy to pull together, they don’t use Pandaria mats…  Yeah, ok. the list of raw materials is, um. Extensive. Though not impossible to acquire.  Then, of course, there’s also acquiring a raptor (Stupid RNG), an Ultramarine Qiraji Battle Tank, and Sandstone Drake from archaeology, and the Sea Turtle from fishing.

I’ve only got Shoryl up beyond the Valiant stage of the Argent Tournament, but I do have characters in four of the five races that I could pretty easily get up to split that work up some… and that’s 11 mounts (14, really, but I’ve already bought the Swift Grey Steed and Argent Hippogryph.)

And Kerridwen was already well into friendly with the Netherwing, making them ripe for the picking. Especially since she’s a dual gatherer, and so can save time by gathering both nethercite ore and nethercite dust while she’s out and about. I’ve learned that she generally has a full turn-in of one or the other by the time she’s done with the dailies.

So, let’s see… That’s 7 through professions that don’t require Mists materials; 12 from the Argent Tournament and 6 from the Netherwing. 25 mounts would, in fact, be enough!

Winter Veil Present!

Sometimes it’s so very humbling to receive a gift. Most often, for me, it’s because I never expected it.   This particular gift came from someone who has an enormous heart, but whom I have known for a scant handful of months. That he went out of the way to get it for me, even having forgotten the email I’d given him when we’d connected via real ID (so he had to check).  So, of course, I had to name the darling appropriately after one of his druids.  Don’t mind the backdrop. I was hunting dragons at the time.

Not the mount, silly, the hatchling!

I have only one thing to say: Thank you, JD.

Goodnight Terokk

I’ve spent the last couple of evenings somewhat brain-dead, for reasons related mostly to other people being on vacation.   My WoW time has, therefore, been limited to easy, grindy things. In particular, hunting Terokk and his minions.   I should have known that tonight was going to be serendipitous when I managed to pull off one of those annoying “do this weird thing really fast” achievements.

The trick is to find your next target while your bombs are on cooldown.

Thanks to CRZ (have I mentioned that “crazy” is an unfortunately fitting pronunciation of that acronym?) I didn’t have the area all to myself. In fact, at one point, I counted 6 different level 90 players all fighting for the same mobs. This meant that I didn’t even try for a Terokk spawn. I simply went about killing his enemies and his minions.  Thanks to the 8th anniversary buff, I estimate that I cut my grinding by a few hundred mobs over the past few days (give or take, due to quest turn ins).  8% may not seem like much, but when you need it, it’s very worthwhile.  Anyway, it became pretty apparent after about 20 minutes of the grind this evening that I was going to finish. That excited me a great deal, and sure enough, about an hour later, I was rewarded with not one, but two  achievements related to reputations:

No smack talk about my rep grinds.

With those in hand, I headed for the quartermaster to get rid of junk and buy the mounts and pet. No, I never did get around to doing this grind previously. I had other things to do, like getting talbuks.  along with my Nether Rays came another achievement…

I don’t suspect I can ride this instead, sir?

Real Life Fun and a pause in the Laid Back Dungeons

Yesterday, we closed on our condo.  While this is absolutely exciting news, it means that the next few weeks (in between holidays) are going to be very up in the air, and full of things not related to WoW.

Because of this, I’m putting a hold on my organized play time; so there won’t be any LBDs or Dwarven Dungeon Crawls until after the new year.

This doesn’t mean that I won’t be playing WoW, nor that I won’t be able to come and hang out with you lovely people – just that I need to have more flexibility than I currently have.

 

The Light, the Dark, and Lady Vashj

Laid Back

Laid Back Dungeons ended up being a laid back raid instead last week. I wasn’t in the mood for current content; and am looking for only a few more pieces for my sword set for Gurdrid. Since she’s carrying a sword right now, it seems to be a good one to work on.

So Tyledres and Gurdrid stormed Serpentshrine Cavern. Hydross went down with almost no sploosh.  The Lurker Below was dead fish pretty easily. Leotheras the Blind became Leotheras the dead.  And then there was Fathom-Lord Karathas. Who killed Gurdrid, but not Tyledres. Much like the last time I was in SSC, where the raid killed him, but the tank died.  After the Fathom-Lord, Morogrim Tidewalker was a walk in the pond. I don’t think we really needed to clear out his murloc minions first.

We were then at Lady Vashj, who has an annoying mechanic in phase two, where you have to pick things up off of mobs that have to be killed really fast.  But we were one-shotting mobs, shouldn’t be a problem, right? Until the fear-masters (Coilfang Striders) came along and feared us all over the place. We attempted twice, the second time trying to ignore one side of the room so that we could get to the tainted cores faster; to no avail. Lady Vashj may have won, but next time I’m bringing a shadow priest with me.

Site Update

I think the site update is pretty well completed. Widgets are in, and I’m pretty happy. I have a page to write for the guild; but otherwise, I’m pretty satisfied with my new look.  The blog name got shortened because of spacing issues. Now that little grey bar makes so much more sense. Also, the subtitle is more readable.

I’ll be trying to continue to work on my blogroll. I added both the Amateur and the Godmother to the page this evening.

I know I haven’t been the best at blogging recently; this is due in varying degrees to the site redesign; being at once too busy and not busy enough at work (it’s odd, I know); and an utter and complete adoration of Mists of Pandaria – so much so that I want to be playing, not writing. Also, there’s laziness and procrastination.

Short and Sweet

OMG Pandaria is PRETTY!!! 

Shoryl went out with Sona right out of the gate, and it says a great deal that we both played for the majority of Tuesday. We had anticipated we’d get started, Sona would want to get away from her computer, and I would move on to Gurdrid, who would then blow ahead.  Not so much. Sona wanted to play, so we played together. I’m very pleased.

When Sona was taking breif breaks, I hopped on Breige to check out pet battling. While I’d been interested in the pet capturing aspect of it, I wasn’t so keen on the battles prior to trying them. It’s so very 8-bit! (Just listen).  I love it!

Laid Back Dungeons will not be happening tonight. I have real life things to do that didn’t get done during the WoWathon yesterday.  We’ll be back at it soon, though, I promise!

Updates – WoW and computers

It’s been pretty hectic around here, mostly at home, but I can provide a few updates on the WoW front, non-the-less.

Sveala

Has dual-specced, and is now questing as well as dungeoning.  To be honest, it’s partially because I’m not getting the time to play at once, taking snippets of time to do one or two quests has been easier than grabbing time for a dungeon. Especially if I’m up and down from my computer.  She’s level 78 now, and if things go right; will make it to 85 in the approximately 6 weeks we have left before Mists.

Laid Back Dungeons

The LBDs have been going well. We’re still bullying our way through various Lich King dungeons, trying to get our red drakes. Hopefully, I’ll be able to run on Wednesday. You’ll read more about why when we get to the computers part of the post.

Mogolympics

My mog for the Hammer Throw hasn’t been posted here yet because of, well, that section down below. I promise to put it up just as soon as I am able.  Which will likely hopefully be tomorrow or Tuesday.

A Second Account

Among other things I’ve been up to, I took advantage of the insane sales on WoW to get a second account set up. You see, I’m a guild loyalist, and I feel guilty playing on toons that don’t belong to the guild. My solution is to use a second account. Besides, this way I get a recruit-a-friend mount for my main account.

The secondary account is going to primarily be used for levelling up toons for the various Classy achievements for the guild. I suspect I will rotate through several toons, and I’m even willing to delete some 85s 90s when the time comes that I’m out of room on that account.  All those toons will be dual gatherers, to help along the gathering achievements and make money for my main stable.  My hope is that I won’t get attached to any of those toons. We’ll see how well that works…

Computers

If I’m on your RealID, you’ve been seeing some cryptic messages for the past week or so. Well, it’s because last Monday, my desktop shut itself off in the middle of a Dwarven Dungeon Crawl.  I opened up the case, and we finished the run without further incident; but that led to some testing, cleaning off the heat sync and otherwise visiting a can of air upon the inside of the case…. to no avail.

The annoying part is that it seems to only happen when I play WoW. Now, to be fair, besides playing WoW, I’ve watched some Xenosaga stuff from Youtube (I’ll get you the link Soon); posted here; read other peoples’ blogs; and played some little flash-style games that don’t take a whole lot of horsepower.  You see how WoW might just be taxing the computer more than the other things, and therefore I’m not convinced that it’s specifically the playing WoW that’s a problem.

Anyway, so right now, I’ve got our laptop (which was purchased to be a music server) set up so I can play at least some. But I have most of the graphics set really low, and of course, none of my beloved addons are set up right. I don’t know that I’d even be able to play Gurdrid on this setup, and I’m pretty sure any kind of dungeon or raid just would not work.

The Desktop is headed in to the shop tomorrow; and Sona has said that if it’s not back by Wednesday, I can borrow her computer for the LBDs. If  I’m doing that, you’ll probably get to read me complaining about things missing from my bars. Lets just all hope that the best solution is not to buy a new computer. While I’d like a new one, I’d also like it to be on my terms, thanks.

Update on the computer front:

They’re keeping my PC for a week! Just to find out  what’s wrong with it. With that knowledge, Sona has graciously said she will let me use her PC for LBDs and LBRs.  Once we know what’s going on with my PC, we may well fix it ourselves (my problem is not fear of opening up the box, it’s not having the diagnostic tools any more). 

Guilty Secret

So, this past week, I finally got around to listening to a Twisted Nether Blogcast. I am ashamed to admit that I meant to when I heard about Tome of the Ancient‘s; and then I meant to when I heard about Navi‘s; and I was intrigued to hear what Kamalia had to say as well… but it was JD‘s that finally kicked me into getting them downloaded. I downloaded all four of those for starters; and listend to JD’s first.

To be fair to myself, I listened to JD’s first because I ended up with the opportunity to listen to the beginning of it live. Unfortunately, the ads popping up at inopportune times, causing me to be unable to hear some of the conversation; as well as my exhaustion since I hadn’t planned on being up that late originally; meant that I got cranky and didn’t listen to the full interview.   But, having heard part of it, I wanted to hear the rest.

I’ll hand it to Fimlys and Hydra, they do an excellent job of interviewing, even if some of the standard questions are pretty clearly being read from their notes/script/whatever it is. Once the conversation is sparked, they’re great to hear interacting with my favorite folks.

And you four guests were all terrific! I really enjoyed listening to what you had to say. For all four of you, I really got a solid sense of where your written voice comes from as well as how much of yourself you put into each of your posts.  I feel more connected with your blog now, thanks to those interviews. (And Navi, I’m totally going to learn to PvP from you someday! I need somebody out there protecting me from the meanies!)

But that’s not really my guilty secret. My guilty secret is that now that I’ve heard how relaxed you all were (even though some of you were very nervous), I want to be on the show. I think it just sounds like a blast.  But at the same time, I’d be scared stiff that no one would care that I was on…. I just have this little tiny blog to go with my little tiny guild, after all.