Saturday, January 31, 2009

Lunar Fest

I'm throwing a Lunar Festival party. Big cross-faction thing in the World's End Tavern in Shatt. Starts in five hours.

I have no idea wtf I'm doing and it's going to bomb.

EDIT: It didn't bomb. It actually went pretty well. Yeah, I'm surprised too. :-D

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Loque Watch '09 update

I haven't seen hide nor hair of Loque since the time he killed me. I'm not giving up, but I miss Cinnamon. Gorilla was fun for a while, but now I'm like, "Okay, Gorilla, let's finish these quests so I can send you home! Buh-bye now!"

So I think I will finish up the Basin — I have a handful of quests to go — and then move on to Icecrown. If I find Loque before then, awesome, I will be ecstatic. If I do not, I will wait until I have my epic flyer (mining while Loque hunting has gotten me halfway to the training) and then put in a couple of days here and there, because aside from working on the Elder title with Ahami, I've done nothing but look for Loque for over a week.

I'm going to trust that someday, I will be in the right place at the right time again, and next time I won't screw it up. In the meantime, I want to continue to do the other stuff I love in the game, like PVP, the holidays, and maybe playing other toons sometimes.

Monday, January 26, 2009

Diving in to UIs

I've been using the standard UI for WoW since I started playing, and while I didn't have any problems with it as a hunter, I'm really starting to get annoyed when healing, because:

- Everything is too far away from everything else. While all of my spells are keybound, I do click to select people. (Yes, I click sometimes. Sorry.) I want to be able to see everyone in my group or full raid in one spot, see who needs healing, click the name and hit the appropriate button. Without using Healbot, though, 'cause I hate that p.o.s. add-on. It's not too bad when I'm just with a small party because everyone's portrait is on the left, but in the battlegrounds or WG it gets really, really frustrating and slows me way down. And as I've established here, I like things to go veryvery fast.

I'd also really, really like to be able to heal someone without switching who I have selected. For example, if I am healing a five-man, I usually have the tank selected as my default heal target, so I can monitor Earth Shield, keep her health topped, etc. I want to be able to heal one of the DPS without having to switch to them, heal, and switch back. Mostly so that I can just throw a Lesser Healing Wave or Chain Heal at the ranged folks without losing my attention on keeping the tank and melee peeps alive. Or so, when I'm in a battleground, I can throw heals to the folks who need one while my pocket DPSer isn't taking damage, but not have to search and find them again. I know it can be done, but how?

- I have a lot of action bars. I hate going to my spellbook, so I use all five action bars, and most of the things on those action bars are keybound. I rarely use everything, but I want to know that Fire Resistance Totem is there should I ever need it. I need more action bars. (I'm dead serious, I need at least one more visible for both Ahami and Ideale.) Bad thing? They eat a good quarter of my screen on the bottom and the right. I want to make them smaller, stick them all in one spot, and perhaps add more actiony goodness, if that's even possible.

- I am really starting to hate the portraits/health bars/etc. I do not like fancy things (aside from fancy party clothes), and they are just too ornate for me. I want them to be plain. And maybe not round, because it looks messy on a cluttered, rectangular screen.

So what do I do? I've been looking on the official forum and at what various other people are using, but I'm still at a complete loss as far as what mods to download and how to configure things. Is there a how-to guide out there? Because I'm not finding one, and I'm hesitant to grab add-ons or mods from any site but Curse, given the rash of hacked accounts lately.

Help, please?

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Dear Beast Masters

Please keep respeccing as Marksmanship or Survival. While your DPS will trump mine (not that, given my level, gear and general disinterest in PVE, it wouldn't have already), I will have less competition for Loque'nahak's LOVE.

<3 Loque.

Now if only I could convince folks on VeCo to not kill him ... or bribe them into telling me where he is and letting me tame him. No takers so far, sadly.

P.S. In all seriousness, I'm really glad to see other hunter specs getting attention. BM hunters had it good for a long time (the entire time I've been playing the game, in fact), so it's about time hunters who just don't care for BM got some time in the sun.

In fact, when/if dual speccing even gets implemented, I fully intend to go with one of the other specs for PVP and just keep BM for wandering about Azeroth, farming ore and hopefully taking Loque for walks in. I certainly want to test out survival at a higher level; it was/has been fun in the low levels. And I'd like to give MM a whirl too, just because I love burst damage.

But since I don't have to think about what's best for a raid group or arena team, I think I will stick with what I love for now.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Lunar Festival coolness

Did anyone notice that the new elder in Thunder Bluff is named Ezra Wheathoof? Things like this make me really love Blizz.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Who am I kidding?

This is LOQUE BLOG now.

I found him. I found him! I was going to finish up a quest and then do one more round, and I happened to be in the spawn west of Nesingwary's camp, and he just appeared right in front of me!

So I quickly feigned death and abandoned my Gorilla (way better than Rhino, I may tame one for real someday), then ran over, laid a frost trap, and started the tame.

And then a longneck grazer wandered into my trap, and Loque pounced me. And since FD was on cooldown ... I panicked, broke the tame and died.

I ran back as fast as I could, praying that no one had seen him. I was literally shaking. And then I got back, and there he was! And I started to bandage — and he pounced right into another hunter's freezing trap.

I thought I would be more upset, but after three days of hunting, I'm just glad I finally saw him! Alive, and with my own eyes, not via a guildie. I was beginning to think I never would. And with two close calls in three days, I'm hoping this means that I will get him for myself eventually.

And this hunter and I had been patrolling his spawns all morning and we kept running into each other and chatted, so I knew he had stumbled on him as he was being tamed four times, and seen his corpse twice. So I was really excited for him to finally have nabbed him! If he could get him after weeks of searching and so many close calls, I can hope for my own Loque someday soon. I cheered him, saluted him, then headed back to Nesingwary to log and take my real cat for a walk.

Maybe tomorrow will be the day.

Day Two

No Loque, but 450 mining makes me v. happy.

Definitely the prettiest hunter in the zone.

(I don't imagine anyone hasn't read the Very Secret Diaries, but if you are among those few, clicky click.)

Anyway, no, I do not plan to do this every day (post updates). In fact, I hadn't planned to do one today, except that right after the server came up, I logged in and about 15 minutes later was chatting with the other BM hunter in the guild about Loque, when a pally guildie was all, "Is he a glowing blue cat? 'Cause I saw him a minute ago."

Me: "omg where? OMG WHERE?"

Sadly, we flew out to the spot and he was vanished — no corpse or anything. F. had seen an Alliance hunter in the area, so she probably got to him first, darnit.

But I am posting this because I want to share the spawn point: It was on the west side of the Lifeblood Pillar. This is not on the wowhead map, and is in fact only on one other map I've seen. So I can confirm that this seems to be a spawn point, since he appeared there immediately after server start-up. (Server was up 5-10 minutes.)

So anyone who is desperately hunting for their spirit kitty like myself, be sure to check that spot as well!

So maybe I'm being a little oversensitive

But the switching r's and l's thing is suddenly en vogue on VeCo — like, literally, I've turned off every chat channel I used to follow except the Defense channels, and I see it there sometimes too — and it makes me want to choke people.

Am I missing something here? Something WoW or lore related, perhaps? Or is it the standard "mock Asian accents" bullshit? 'Cause if it's the former, I'll rein it in, but if it's the latter, I can make no promises NOT to choke people. Mostly because I thought that stopped being funny in like 1870.

I play an MMO to get away from this crap.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Death knights on any realm

I saw that in the general chat. This makes me happy, because I really want to redo the death knight starting zone, but do not want to reroll my current death knight.

Of course, this means that I will add a swath of incomplete DK alts across nine servers (one for each race!) to my pile of level 25 Alliance alts.

Other changes:

Mania has the list of hunter changes, so I won't bother with those. My Arcane Shot costs less now, so that makes me happy. I've always used it in my "shot rotation" when soloing because I use it a lot in PVP and don't do instances on my hunter, so I never really worried about mana conservation or the proper ways of doing things. But now it costs less mana! So I can kite paladins longer in PVP — which is good, because those bastards never die.

Arcane Torrent has diminishing returns now. :-( Not that I am close enough to melee people to use it in PVP much, but still.

Important for world PVP — 60 graveyards have been added to old Azeroth. Please, WoW gods, have added one closer to Stormwind. That is the worst corpse run in the game, no contest.

Wisp got a buff!

I'm a bit miffed that they nerfed the quest requirement for Loremaster of Kalimdor. I realize that 700 quests is a lot, but really, why make this achievement easy? It should be time-consuming. I swear, if they nerf it again and there are 8 billion Loremaster Irhealzorz running around, I will ... complain about it and otherwise do nothing. (Let's be realistic here.)

Same with the aquatic form quest. I really liked that quest on Onashne. In fact, I really like all of the ability-granting quests, and kind of wished there were more — it is more immersive and feels like you are really earning the abilities. (For example, I LIKED training pet abilities by learning them from animals in the wild. It would have been nice if you could learn them with a temp tame stick like with the level 10 quest, or by fighting the animal, so you didn't have to have a stable slot free, but I LIKED it. I feel bad for new players who will never get to experience this stuff. I also LOVED the totem quests on my shaman.)

I get a free shaman respec! So long, PVE healing build. Hello, shorter stun durations and fewer pushbacks! And they fixed Fire Nova Totem. Which means I can actually use it for something other than making pretty flame poofs while waiting for people to hit the flag room in WSG.

Hooray for trading inks! I need Snowfall Ink badly. I have a bag full of Ink of the Sea (I am dead serious, I have the worst luck milling Icy Pigment).

Double hooray for mining not sucking so bad anymore! One hit gets you everything in the node. While I liked mining fine the slow way on PVE realms, one member of our rival guild seemed to always be mining at the same time as me and constantly ganked me all through Outland (since he was a mage and in top arena gear, it wasn't hard), and mining is a terrifying prospect (hehe) for me now. With every tap of a node, I get more and more convinced I am about to die. It will be much less stressful now!

And on an unrelated note, pro-tip to the night elf non-hunters out there: If I have Hunter's Mark on you, Shadowmeld will not help you, even with the new changes.

New zone, new pet

I love Sholazar Basin. Ideale, however, has only done one quest there, despite having the achievement for exploring the whole thing, plus about six hours of /played.

I've been hunting Loque'nahak. I did a few rounds yesterday on talbuk, and then dinged 77 and finished Dragonblight today and started Loque hunting in earnest. While I saw Loque twice (dead both times) on Ahami while she leveled from 77 to 80 in Sholazar, he was quite good at hiding today.

However, terrified that I would lose Cinnamon, I stabled him and tamed a rhino as a temp pet. It turned out to be a good choice; Ideale hates how Rhino blocks her when she's mining, and Rhino hates how the only food Ideale has are some dried out Telaari Grapes that might have been gummed by a lightning bug at some point. And also how she named him Rhino. I don't think I will have a bit of trouble when it comes time to set him free and tame Loque — should that time ever come.

I've always had luck with rares, so I'm betting that this time, when I actually care, it will vanish on me and I will never find him. But hey, if it was easy, what would be the point?

I figure I'll search intensely for a few days, but after that, it's not going to interrupt my life, either out of game or in game. It'll happen or it won't.

Monday, January 19, 2009

Because it's still getting replies

In the spirit of Yar Yar Hump Hump, a couple of folks on VeCo stumbled upon some "roleplaying" in Silvermoon City and decided to join in: Don't Cyber in Smoons: A Cautionary Tale.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Project Infiltration: I suck

I am working on the blog layout thing and adding a list of "helpful" (in my mind, anyway) posts I've written, and realized that while I wrote all of the Project Infiltration posts, I never posted them all.

For those who don't feel like mucking through my archives, Project Infiltration was where I rolled a Horde hunter and an Alliance hunter, leveled them to 10, and then went to each starting zone of the other faction to tame pets you can't get elsewhere, or can't get until the high levels.

The ones I did post:

Project Infiltration: Dun Morogh
Project Infiltration: Teldrassil
Project Infiltration: Tirisfal Glades
Project Infiltration: Eversong Woods
Project Infiltration: Elwynn Forest

So I will be editing the rest, adding screen shots and posting them sometime in the next week. And maybe, maybe even add the long-promised screen shots to the already finished ones! Since they were the whole reason I even created this blog and all.

So much win

When a healer suspects her tank is cheating on her ...

Friday, January 16, 2009

Housecleaning

- Removed some inactive/vanished stuff from the blogroll and added a few new ones. (Including some VeCo people! Hi, VeCo people!)
- Cleaned up Armory links to get rid of my latest failed Alliance attempts.

That's about it. Still haven't created a decent blog layout, because I have WoW ADD and am now working on a "poster" for an event I'm co-planning in between working.

To Do:
- Stop stalling and take decent screenshots to use for blog layout.
- Get Ideale to 76 and Sholazar Basin to tame the spirit cat.
- Get Kamai and Malisya to 30 and mounted, so I get an idea of who I want to level next. Alternatively, find out of there are drugs that cure altitis.
- Stop dropping Ahami's fire elemental every single time I PVP and the cooldown's up. Seriously, overkill is fun, but one of these days I'm gonna need it and have blown it.
- And get the Stormhide belt made, since I've had the mats for it in my bags for, like, three weeks and I could use the space.
- And do more Wyrmrest and battleground dailies.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Finding fun in dailies

I am not a dailies kind of person. I don't care for them much — oh, I do them, but I don't really like them. Not because dailies are generally gank-fests, but because they eat valuable time I could be spending PVPing or exploring or mining or something. And face it, once you've seen them once, they're pointless.

So here are a few of the things I do to make dailies less of a chore:

1. I only do 3-5 a day. That's still a good 50 gold or so, plus the rep, and takes anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, depending on which ones I do and how much travel I put in. Honestly, I'm not in a huge hurry to get exalted with everything NOW. The next expansion will be another 2-3 years down the road and I don't do much PVE, so I have plenty of time.

2. I focus on one rep-grind at a time (well, two; one PVE and one PVP). If you're only doing a handful of dailies each day, it's nice to see one faction gaining rep in chunks rather than a trickle in three or four. It makes it feel like something is being accomplished. For example, I worked on Ahami's Kalu'ak rep, then took a PVP-only break for a few weeks. Now I am working on her Wyrmrest rep or working on Arathi Basin when I log in on her. Of course, if you're doing the heroic tabard thing, you're going to gain rep much faster plus get emblems and stuff from the heroic daily.

3. Pick one daily that I really like and do it every day. Right now, it's the cooking one (and I think the jewelcrafting one will be up there, too!). For the Kalu'ak, I liked the wolvar pups quest. I did my third Aces High! today and am really having a blast with that one (plus, when I do lose my drake, I have time to read blogs while I parachute to the ground for 15 minutes).

4. When I reach a goal (a certain amount of gold, a gain in rep from Friendly to Honored, etc.), I reward myself. For Ahami, it's harder because she's a scribe, and the recipes aren't purchasable. I've been grabbing cooking recipes or minipets for her, but I'm going to be running out of stuff soon. For Ideale, I'll splurge on an expensive jewelcrafting recipe (or go to the Isle and grab one of the few I haven't learned yet).

5. When I've reached a major goal (Exalted with a faction, or if I ever manage to save 1,000 gold), I take a break for a week and only do what I feel like doing, whether that's leveling an alt, playing around in the battlegrounds, flying around pointlessly, or whatever.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Just three questions, not 20

Questions for everyone, because I am bored but don't feel like writing/finishing a substantial post today. My answers are below.

1. Do you have a preferred faction?

Horde, all the way. Maybe it's because my initial experiences playing Alliance were on Laughing Skull, the Worst Server in WoW. Maybe it's the 20-30 zones and their boring, boring quests. (Okay, Ashenvale was okay.) Maybe it's the that only realm I have liked enough to keep playing there was Venture Co., and since I have Horde there, Alliance is out. I don't know. I do know that the only Alliance character I've ever gotten past 30 stalled out at 38, and she only got that far at all because my BFF and her fiance power-leveled me in four sessions through instances.

Part of it is that I love the storylines for the Horde so much better. They have an edge that the Alliance just doesn't, and I love it.

2. What is your favorite race in the game?

Draenei. Coming off my last question, maybe that's weird, but if draenei were Horde, I'd never play anything else, except maybe my second-favorite race, trolls. For both, I love their stories, I love their cultures, and the Exodar is absolutely the most gorgeous city in the entire game.

3. What is your favorite class?

I think resto shaman is the most natural class for me to play. I just "get" it on a level I don't with any other class in the game — or maybe that's healing. (EDIT: Which is not to say I'm good at it yet. I've got a lot of work to do.) Either way, shaman is definitely my favorite class for PVP so far (though some other classes are seriously fun, and I've really never gone beyond the 29 bracket for most classes yet anyway).

That said, I think that hunters are still my favorite, partly because I spend a lot of time soloing due to my working hours. Other reasons: Cats, of course. There's just something completely relaxing about sitting at range and destroying a mob while your pet plays with them. And really, they're just fun. They're the only ranged class in the game that is not a caster, and that's kind of cool. They're like rogues at a distance (even if we never got our camouflage).

I'm also, in my latest round of testing the waters of other classes, really liking my mage, warlock and DK, and I really want to give my druid another shot — I think I'd love druid healing. Still not big on the other melee classes or priests, though.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Impatience

Ideale sat at the end of the dock at Moa'ki Harbor, idly scratching Cinnamon behind his ears as he purred. So much had happened in the war against the Scourge the past few months, but a broken arm had taken her out of commission for weeks just days after she arrived in Northrend. Now she was stuck cleaning up little messes while others spent their time on the front lines.

"What's wrong, hunter?" One of the Kalu'ak guards took a seat next to her.

"I don't feel particularly useful. I came here to fight the Scourge, but it seems like all I've done is break mammoth traps, retrieve crab traps, play matchmaker to sea cows, pick flowers. Not that those things aren't important," she said hastily, "except maybe the flower thing, but they aren't what I came here to do."

"You came to cover yourself with glory? Be a hero?" he asked with a slight smile. Or she thought it was a smile, anyway. Hard to tell with those tusks.

"No. But ..."

"Ah. Revenge." Ideale nodded, then shrugged. "Vengeance isn't a path one takes lightly, shaloshka."

"I know," she said. "But it's the path I chose, and this waiting is driving me mad."

"If that's really what you seek, then I suggest you ask the goblin for passage to Venomspite. But there's value in what you are doing here as well. The Kalu'ak are grateful for all of the help the Horde has given us."

Ideale stood, her cat following suit. "You're welcome." She hesitated for a moment, then forced a smile. "And thank you for the shelter for these past few days, and the advice." Moments later, she was flying over the guard, waving as she left the village.

Finally, she would get to fight the Scourge. Finally, she would get to do what she came here to do. And maybe she'd find some sign of her family. Ideale pushed the last thought away; it wouldn't do to get her hopes up.

Below, the guard shook his head. "That one's going to get herself into trouble. What's wrong with trapping crabs?"

Monday, January 12, 2009

Haven't played

Too tired. Not sure why.

Going to log into the hunter now, but don't know how long I will last.

Alliance characters are on hold (or maybe retired?) due to BFF's new schedule not meshing with my old/current one. Not renewing Recruit-A-Second-Account until we figure out what we're doing. Poor Tshaya. Three servers and I still never play her.

I did, however, play lots of Arathi Basin on Saturday. Healed until I hit that point where I couldn't actually react anymore and had fun the whole time.

Next goal: Ideale to 77 so I can get Cold Weather Flying and tame a Spirit Kitty. And then hunter PVP. Oh, I've missed you, hunter PVP. Healer PVP is fun, but sometimes I want to kill people, and taking the lowbies for a whirl is just not as fun.

The end.

EPILOGUE: I really wish my guild were way less awesome sometimes. Because they are way too cool for me to even entertain the thought of transferring my mains to an Oceanic server, thus dashing all of my hopes of doing anything fun in the game. Like get an ugly, ugly warbear.

REVISED SEQUEL OF EPILOGUE: So now I'm organizing stuff for my nights off. And it scares me! More on this later.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

My new favorite

I should make this an ongoing thing, because I have a "new favorite" in this game like every week.

Anyway, this one brings me back to when I first hopped into Arathi Basin on Ahami: I like to get a melee class on me, then just heal myself while my pocket rogue or DK destroys them as they focus all their fire on me. I'm not sure if it's because I switched out a couple of instance drops for pieces with resilience or if I'm just getting the hang of endgame PVP again, but I sat and healed myself through two warriors and a ret pally in AV last night — a RET PALLY — while the rogue I'd been focusing all my heals on wiped them out. Granted, the pally at least could not have been well-geared because I get two-shotted by the geared ones, but still.

Melee classes get tunnel vision too! And I love it. <3

I missed you, battlegrounds. I'll never leave you for PVE again!

Battleground rep by the numbers

So you're eyeing that shiny Conqueror or Justicar title for the battlegrounds, and you need rep. Chances are if you PVP at all, you're already Exalted or close with Frostwolf or Stormpike, and heck, that was easy, so gaining exalted with your respective Warsong Gulch or Arathi Basin faction should be cake, right?

Yeah, not so much.

Because you get a little reputation for every enemy NPC killed in Alterac Valley, or a lot if you take out Balinda and Vann or Galv and Drek, and there are so many quests in AV, it's pretty easy to get Exalted before you can even complete some of the other achievements (in fact, while I'm not sure due to my head start on both my mains, I believe that if you do all the quests and kill at least Balinda or Galv every match, you could probably hit Exalted before you even get the Alterac Valley Veteran achievement).

Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch, however, have no NPCs, so you have to be at least partly successful to gain any reputation.

So here's an expanded version of the little guide I wrote for myself, since I am shooting for Conqueror on Ideale and maybe Ahami as well. At least it'll get me out of Alterac Valley for a bit!

Arathi Basin
Arathi Basin has one bonus that Warsong Gulch does not: quests. Completing and turning in the quests grants 500 reputation each. In addition, you gain 10 rep for every 200 resources gathered (or 10 for every 150 on battleground weekends). That's 100-130 rep per win, and the battles go much more quickly so even if you lose, you're not spending too much time futilely. If you do the available quests, you'll need to win 312-405 battles to hit Exalted. If you lose but still put in a good show in most of the battles, that's about 500-600 games played.

Ideale needs 367 wins at 100 rep per win, plus one quest.
Ahami needs 397 wins at 100 rep per win, plus all quests.

Game Plan: Run two matches per day, every day, on at least one toon.

Warsong Gulch
Warsong Gulch is definitely the harder of the two. WSG matches can go on for a fair amount of time, and even if you win, you only gain 105 rep per game (or 135 on WSG weekends). This means that if you only play on WSG weekends, you need 934 flag captures to reach Exalted; if you miss the weekends, you need 1200. Ouch. That's 312-405 games if you win every game.

Ideale needs 1144 flag captures.
Ahami needs 1181 flag captures.

Game Plan: Cry. Just kidding. Try and shoehorn in a win a day so I don't get stuck at Friendly or something horrible when I finish up AB.

Can you tell I sort of hate Warsong Gulch?

That's a lot of time in both battlegrounds, but I think I can do it. I really want the title for Ideale, which means my best bet may be doing as many of the two battlegrounds before she hits 80 as possible. Horde in the pre-level cap brackets in Nightfall tend to be those who actually enjoy PVP, thus we work together better and have a higher success rate. End-game drops down to a 50-50 proposition. I don't intend to stop questing or anything, but I could spend half an hour in the battlegrounds before heading off to quest easily.

Ahami is already 80 and since PVE healing kind of bores me, I've pretty much just been doing dailies. So I will ditch a couple dailies and hit the battlegrounds with her more often (she's just barely Revered in AV, too, so I can keep running that; Ideale is already Exalted with Frostwolf).

Ideas to Keep It From Sucking
- Take advantage of the battleground weekends. If it's AB or WSG weekend, ignore the other battlegrounds (even the daily, if your time is limited!) and cram as many games as you can in.

- Find friends to run with. Chances are there are others on your server going for the title (and other achievements) as well, and if nothing else you can commiserate between matches. Team up with them as much as possible if you work well together, and this has the added bonus of improving your success rate. I watched a five-man premade in Alterac Valley defend and recap all four towers against the 15 or so Alliance who slipped past our front lines today. A few folks got their Frostwolf Perfection achievement that match. Ran into a priest and mage in AB who defended the Lumber Mill alone the entire game without losing it once, despite groups of 5 or so Alliance heading up there every few minutes.

- Get guildmates involved. One of VeCo's Alliance PVPers got the Battlemaster title (world fifth, world first paladin) with the help of his two guilds and in-game friends. Many of them got a bunch of the PVP achievements in the course of helping him out, and they all said it was a lot more fun that way.

- Even if you don't find friends from your own realm, work as a team with whoever you end up with. If nothing else, the exercise in strategy will give you something to do. And if you get a cooperative group (you know, the kind who doesn't type insults and cursing in all-caps while trying to singlehandedly cap the stables), you might be able to work on some of the more difficult defense achievements. In fact, if you're on around the same time every day, you might start running into familiar faces; when Ahami was 59, I spent a couple of weeks in Alterac Valley with her before leveling for some reason (I forget why). Because I usually queue up between 1:30-4 a.m., I was running into the same group every day, from several different realms in the battlegroup, and we won about 95 percent of our matches because we had a strategy and just trusted each other to listen and respond when someone said, "We could use some more defense at Galv" or "We're short healers on offense."

- Work on the other achievements. Ignore the rep at first, and work on stuff like Disgracin' the Basin and Supreme Defender and, of course, the Veteran achievements you get for 100 wins. By the time you've exhausted those, you'll be much closer to your goal (hopefully, anyway!).

- Spend your Marks of Honor. I have no idea if they stack past 100 now, because every time I get close, I go shopping. Ideale has several tabards. Ahami just got herself the Frostwolf Howler (and another achievement!). You can get six mounts via Marks of Honor, the five faction mounts and your respective AV mount; work toward the Albino Drake. I'm going to turn in Marks for honor on both of them as well until they both have the blue PVP set and the off-set pieces, which could take a while since each piece is 50k-60k honor. These are goals that can be worked on a bit here and there, so (like with the achievements) you feel like you're accomplishing something.

- Don't push it. If you keep working toward it, it'll happen, but don't burn yourself out. Take time out for exploring, professions, RP, world PVP/Wintergrasp, heroics/raiding, arenas, or whatever else floats your boat. What's the point of having a fancy title if you burn yourself out on PVP or even the game getting it?

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Northrend in pictures

Ahami got all dressed up and made some new friends. She wants one of those icicled helms for herself, by the way.



Ideale's favorite part of the new Aspect of the Hawk: the ability to fly.



Ideale to the mammoth calf: "You're cute and all, but I'm more of a cat elf. Now shoo. Oh no, don't look at me like that."

Now what?

So a few minutes ago, a level 18 warrior whispers me and asks for 10g. Being a generous troll, I stole BRK's trick and said I'd give him 40g if he farmed me 99 Light Feathers.

"Great," he says, "I have over 100." And I get a group invite.

So I gave him his 40g, and now I have 100 Light Feathers and no idea what to do with them.

EDIT: Also, I was meant to be flying to Dalaran from K3 while writing this post, but forgot to actually do it, so now I have nothing to do for 30 seconds and that is way longer than my attention span.

Secret identities

So we have a new software system at work that we've been training on, and this guy from Training Co LTD (I have no idea what the software company's called, but he works for it) has been coming in to go over all the features and whatever other random crap that he feels we need to know. He's been training us in groups, and my group went yesterday.

So we're putting pages here, and moving PostScript files there, and trying to figure out why this is working on one page and not another, and my coworker, who's on his laptop, accidentally closes the whole system, meaning that those of us sitting at the slaved monitors get to sit and look at his desktop for a few minutes while he opens it back up.

And he plays WoW.

I desperately wanted to ask what server/faction he plays, but I think that's kind of weird to ask some guy you don't even know the name of. Plus I had asked a whole ton of questions about servers and crap and felt like enough of a geek. (After we got back to the bat cave, I was all, "See!? It's totally normal!" and my boss was like, "Okay, so two whole people play that game." Thanks, boss, thanks.)

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Personality in perspective

I didn't really intend to roll Kamai, my troll mage. I was playing around with the character creation screen and really liked her hair (you have no idea how much gold I've blown in the barber shops of Azeroth, people). And then she was level 14.

So unlike Ahami and Silang, she didn't have a rudimentary backstory in place when I started playing her. And unlike Ideale, she did not even have a personality.

But now that I'm actually leveling her, I found I was having some trouble distinguishing her personality from Ahami's and it was really making playing her a bit odd. The backstory and personalities of my characters has always driven my enjoyment of the game. I have an eidetic memory, so once I've been through a zone, I remember all of the quests I completed down to the text (not word for word, but close enough for horseshoes and handgrenades), and if I'm not figuring out how a character would react to the lore and the quests, I get bored superfast.

The first thing I did was get her to another zone. Ahami leveled almost entirely in troll, orc and shaman zones — she did perhaps a handful of quests in the Ghostlands, and I think two in the Plaguelands. As a shaman, it made sense; as a burgeoning member of the Earthen Ring, of course she would be questing in areas where elementals were particularly active, and as a healer, of course she would be working in areas where there were other shamans and even druids who worked with nature rather than the Light to heal.

Kamai, as a mage, was particularly suited to go to the Forsaken and blood elf zones, to "learn more about magecraft," so off she went. That way, while I got to know her, at least she would be doing something different.

Nonetheless, there are similarities between the two, and knowing that Ahami had siblings, it only seems natural that Kamai would be her younger sister. Both are a bit eccentric in their intellectual pursuits for trolls; Ahami is a big reader, particularly of texts that describe healing and cleansing techniques and histories, and Kamai is an engineer and always poring over schematics. Both seem to have a deep-seated loyalty to the Horde. But that made developing a separate personality for Kamai a bit more of a challenge; I keep wanting to play her as I did Ahami.

So I sat down with some of the RP Friday Five questions from Too Many Annas. Really, for developing a character, they're fantastic. Answering some of them for Ide really helped me to get brave enough to actually roleplay with her! So if you're struggling, they're a wonderful resource.

Here's what I learned (well, Ahami I already know fairly well, but I am writing some out for comparison purposes):

AHAMI
Ahami is the more practical and grounded of the two, because she is the older, because she works with Earth and Water, or because of the nature of practicing the healing arts, or maybe some combination of all three. Because she's a healer, she tends to be patient and think logically; while she regrets every life she cannot save, as a soldier she does have to weigh who is most necessary to the fight and where to best spend her energies. She also has to think of herself, because if she burns out or uses her mana impetuously, then she's of no use to anyone.

This practicality extends to how she works with other classes; while she doesn't care much for those classes who work against nature instead of going with the flow, and particularly has a distaste for warlocks and death knights, she recognizes that they are another tool against the Horde's enemies, so she works with them. (On a side note, she realizes that death is a part of life. She also sees banning cannibalism as wasteful — people ARE made out of meat, after all, and if they're already dead ... — and often finds herself exchanging recipes for gnome with her Forsaken guildmates.)

She dreams, but they tend to be abstract and deeply rooted in the natural world around her. Sholazar Basin was a welcome relief after the snows of Howling Fjord and Dragonblight, for the dreams of waterfalls and trees alone. She likes to explore the world, but not necessarily for the sake of tourism so much as because she feels very connected to Azeroth and wants to know every nook and cranny of it. Sometimes she dreams of storms or earthquakes in completely other parts of the world.

She doesn't "get" fashion, and she hates most cities for the way that they destroy the natural world rather than working around it (though she likes Thunder Bluff and would love Darnassus if it weren't full of pesky night elves). She mostly travels, staying wherever she ends up for the night, whether in Orgrimmar or camped out in Un'Goro Crater.

Ahami's favorite holidays are the Midsummer Fire Festival and, to a lesser extent, the Lunar Festival.

She's fiercely independent — while she likes to feel as if she is useful and contributing to any group with similar goals, she has her own goals and she's not going to abridge them for anyone else, and she is quite happy spending weeks without human contact out in the wilderness.

Her philosophy? Go with the flow, work to keep balance, and stay away from da voodoo, and you'll be fine.

KAMAI
Kamai is the younger of the two, and much more of a social creature. She loves cities and can sit and talk shop with her colleagues for hours, something that would drive Ahami crazy. She's impetuous and, because of this, often gets into trouble over her head. Like her sister, she's fiercely loyal to her friends.

She's not a big reader — she learned how, because she's a mage after all, but she sees books as an annoyance that stand between her and what she needs to know. She prefers tailoring patterns and engineering schematics, because she can use them to get immediate results (by making them).

I don't think she'll ever be much of an arcane mage, since she seems to be pretty drawn to frost and fire. Arcane magic would probably require too much stuffy studying in libraries and not enough pyromania and shooting shards of frost at things. Plus, frost and fire remind her a bit of shamanism, and while she's studying magery on a whole other continent, she's still a troll and it reminds her of home.

She's far more energetic than her sister. Ahami is content to let things happen and react here, give a nudge there, until they're going the right way, then she goes with them, and what's past is past and cannot be changed. Kamai is much more hands-on, and always has to be doing something. She gets very upset in situations where she's helpless to change things, and has a tendency to obsess over them later.

One thing she does love about Silvermoon City is all of the parties. Kamai loves parties, and people, and while she recognizes that it's frivolous, she is a bit of a clotheshorse. (She has more dresses than Ideale.)

She's an inventor — while she's much less practical than her older sister, she's more cunning. She runs off of instinct, but somehow it all ends up working out, even if half of the stuff she dreams up shouldn't work. Unfortunately, Kamai also has her head in the clouds a lot, and sometimes she fails to account for reality in her schemes, with disastrous results.

She dreams, but mostly her dreams simply reflect her actual life, or she dreams of home. She's a bit of a follower, and while she recognizes that what she's doing will soon be important, she still misses her home (her childhood home, not the apartment she keeps in Silvermoon City). Trips home can be somewhat uncomfortable, though; she doesn't feel she's at all lived up to the expectation of what a Darkspear woman is supposed to be.

Her favorite holidays are Winter Veil and Children's Week — she might be an adult now herself, but she loves children.

And if she empties her pockets, there would be thread and a cloth stuck with needles (no thimble, though, because who needs them?) in one, and a handful of assorted bolts and springs in the other. She always has something in her pockets to keep her hands busy.

THEIR RELATIONSHIP
If they are sisters, they have to have some sort of relationship. My thoughts are that, as children, they were closer to each other than their other siblings because both had a deep love of learning. However, they grew apart as they grew older, since Ahami was drawn to the healing arts and shamanism, while Kamai found herself chasing more arcane pursuits. However, as Kamai follows in her sister's footsteps in serving the Horde, they are starting to regrow that connection and find common ground again.

Even so, I think Ahami is probably often exasperated with Kamai's head in the clouds personality, while Kamai probably loves to annoy her practical older sister with frivolous things. (That's what younger sisters do, right?)

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Stupid PVP tricks

I cannot help it. Every single time I see someone blow their trinket in PVP when I'm on Ahami, I Hex them. Even if they are one good shot from death. The only time I can resist is if my chosen target for heals is taking large amounts of damage.

Second to this is the Fire Elemental. I will wait until we are at the Stormpike Graveyard, usually, but oh, I love dropping him and then watching everyone run around trying to figure out what shaman did it or fighting him. If you can't kill the shaman, kill the totem, dummies.

It's like Disengage on Ideale. Do I need to use it? Most of the time, no. Do I use it anyway? Hell yes, it makes me fly through the air! I mean, I don't use it in situations where it's completely pointless or I might need it in a few seconds — I'll wait until after a warrior Intercepts or a death knight Death Grips, and I always am in a melee situation and need to get out when I hit Shift + D, but ... flying through the air!

Silang's Death Grip is getting there. Someone going after the flag runner? Death Grip! Someone on the flag at the Blacksmith? Death Grip! See that player over there, running innocently through the Field of Strife? Wave. Then Death Grip!

I really hope I'm not the only person who has skills or spells that are just so much fun that I use them every time I can make a case for it/every time the CD's up, squealing with glee the whole time.

Friday, January 2, 2009

Titles

I have to admit, I'm kind of addicted to titles. I wasn't for a long time, but with the achievements system offering a bunch of new ones, I'm kind of hooked, especially given the wide variety. I already know certain ones I want.

For example, one of Ideale's faults is that she tries way too hard to do everything for everyone. She was short of Exalted with the Darkspear Trolls by only 300 rep when the Achievements system hit, and already Exalted with the other four Horde factions, so she's Ambassador Ideale now.

Ahami is naturally going to go for both the "Elder" and "Flame Keeper" holiday titles (Lunar Festival and Midsummer, respectively).

Silang is a bit harder, but I could aim for "Argent Champion" for now, and next year for "the Hallowed."

Kamai, my mage, who I've pretty much decided will be the next toon I level to 80 after Ideale*, will be Kamai the Loremaster and maybe Kamai the Seeker as well. That just seems appropriate for a mage.

I want to get the "Explorer" title on all of my toons who can get it, too — the twinks are probably out, though I've heard of one very determined level 21 on another server who has the title, so who knows? I might go for some of the holiday titles for them, though. I'd also like to have Conqueror Ideale and Ahami of the Horde eventually, but that will take a very long time, if I can do it at all.

Any other title junkies out there?

* I'm not going to put any serious effort into leveling Kamai until Ideale dings 80 and Ahami is exalted at least with the Wyrmrest Accord for my fancy gloves and head enchant. And probably with the Knights of the Ebon Blade, too, for the pants or kilt or whatever it is. While I've pretty much decided the PVE thing is still not for me, I would like to have a passable PVE set just in case I ever need it.