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Sunday 28 April 2013

How Little Lore I Know

Last night the boyf was watching Conspiracy Craft Ep2: Alliance Story and it made me realise how little I know about WoW lore.

But to start with what exactly is lore? Google informs me that the meaning of lore is:
A body of traditions and knowledge on a subject or held by a particular group, typically passed from person to person by word of mouth.
Personally I like this as a definition of real-life lore (think folk-lore) but how does that equate to a virtual world? Well I guess it's the same - it's simply made up traditions etc. and a little more of storyline rather than factual events.

You may also be wondering what this Conspiracy Craft is all about. It is a new show on Gamebreaker TV (which also hosts Legendary). Whilst Legendary is mostly all things WoW Conspiracy Craft focuses more on storyline and lore.

If I'm honest I wasn't paying 100% attention to Conspiracy Craft as I was running dungeons but the bits that I did see/hear mostly equated to gibberish in my brain. Simply because I know very little WoW-lore. I know there's the Alliance and the Horde, several continents, wars and general drama. But [atleast] half the leading characters are no-bodies to me.

There was talk of a troll named Vol'jin whom the boyf informs me is leader of the Darkspears and son of Sen'jin. A what now!?! Searching for Sen'jin in Wowhead does however bring this title up. So yes my knowledge of WoW-lore is crap - there's no other way of saying it. If we were talking Star Wars lore I'm fairly confident I'd be well above the average persons knowledge but were not.

Lorewalker Cho praying for someone/thing to help me!
What exactly can I do to resolve this situation?

Well, I'm going to continue watching Conspiracy Craft with the boyf although I suspect it may be a bit over my head for a while yet. WoW Insider has a column named Know Your Lore which I'm going to endeavour to read more of. Additionally, over at To All The Squirrels Leo and Tor (and new to the blog Nak) write lorelettes (snippets of lore in 200 words or less) and I find these really good as they keep my attention! Maybe one day I'll get around to reading some WoW books but being an extremely slow/bad reader I'm not sure if it will be worth the effort and (minor) suffering! Oh and I'm going to try and absorb more from the game in general - like actually reading the quest text!

I'd love to hear where other people get their lore knowledge from and how your knowledge of Azerothian lore stands?

Friday 26 April 2013

Naked Raiding!

You may have seen via twitter that I have been advertising (I think you'd call it that) an opportunity for WoW bloggers and twitterers to all meet up and cross-realm raid. The naked raid was organised by Mr and Mrs WoW and for those of you who are a bit unsure here are the rules.

 
Well, the raid (which was through Molten Core) took place on Wednesday evening so I thought I'd share the couple of screenshots I took and link to some other peoples screenies and an awesome video. I had a really good time and it's safe to say things went a lot smoother than I had envisioned. I'm not sure what I thought was going to happen but it certainly didn't. We did however encounter some problems such as mana regen for the healers and the core hound packs! Mr and Mrs WoW have written a great post-raid analysis which you can read here.

 
In addition, Thibaste has put up a gallery of screenies and Batinna has uploaded a video. One thing that I really noticed from watching Batinnas video is how bright and obvious my hunters pet Kitty is - keep an eye out for the green/orange cat prowling about.

Finally, I'd like to thank Mr and Mrs WoW for organising the event and of course everyone who turned up and made it a laugh! Hopefully there will be more in the future!!!

Naxx & ICC Guild Achievement Runs

Last night me and my guild did a few old raid runs. We stared off with Naxxramas which I've done a number of times whilst trying to get the pets for Raiding with Leashes. I saw the Stitched Pup drop for the first time but sadly I didn't win the roll.


We then moved on to doing an achievement run through Icecrown Citadel. We managed to scrape 8 people together and had a pretty good run. I wasn't sure if I'd been to ICC before but it turns out that I had and had a few of the achievements already - nonetheless I still got a fair few.



Tuesday 23 April 2013

Random achievements, new transmog, a must-have mount and a GIANT moonkin hatchling!

Hey!

I got back from my cousins wedding yesterday afternoon. I had a really nice time and it was a lot of fun - there was a whole table of sweets (giant strawberrys, fried eggs etc.) which was amazing!

Last night I logged into WoW and had a pretty laid back evening. As usual I logged my hunter, checked out the BMAH and queued for my daily random heroic and scenario. Following my scenario I got the achievement Got My Mind On My Money for looting 10,000 gold. I then went into my dungeon and got Mystically Superior.


 
I've gradually been getting new gear and my Dragonstalker transmog has slowly been getting less and less as I haven't been transmogging my new stuff to match. So, I decided it was about time I re-mogged my gear. I collected the Wind-Reaver gear (part of the Stormscale Set) from the quests in the Dread Wastes and decided to try it out as a transmog. I really like how it all looks together and to make things even better it looks great with my favourite bow - Black Bow of the Betrayer! I've hidden the helm and cloak because I don't like the helm and my current cloak doesn't match. I've also equiped the Tabard of the Wildhammer Clan as that matches it nicely.

 
I then logged onto my mage to do some pet battling. I'm taking a break from questing on her now that she's reached level 89 and am just poodling along pet battling. During one battle I saw a Player X has got [Turtles All the Way Down] message/alert pop up and once out of the battle I congratulated them. We had a good old chat about various things - from achievements to pet battles and they showed me their new Sea Turtle mount. It looks amazingly cute and even hides in it's shell. It really is a must have mount, in my opinion, but takes a lot of time, patience and luck to get. There is however a similar TCG loot model (Riding Turtle) which will set you back around $100!


My last bit of quirky news is that I got my Moonkin Hatchling to level 25 and the boyf asked if it would be bigger than me (on my mage) if I fed it Magical Pet Biscuits. The answer is Yes!

Friday 19 April 2013

I'm away again...

From this morning I'm going away (again). I'm travelling up north for my cousins wedding on tomorrow. (Saturday). I should be back online on Monday.

It doesn't feel like that long ago I was away for a whole week (when I was on holiday in Cornwall). Since returning from that holiday I haven't really got back into the swing of things - regularly blogging etc. I've been quite busy working at my temporary job which has now finished. So whilst I should have more time to play WoW, blog & things to blog about I'll also have no money - again meaning no going out spending it, more WoW.

I'll certainly miss playing WoW this weekend and keeping up to date reading blogs etc. (I find catching up can be quite time consuming). Have a good WoW filled weekend and I'll (virtually) see you next week!

P.S. To make up for my absence I've included a picture of my parents/the family dog - Skye.

Monday 15 April 2013

Perky Pug!

I've literally just got the Perky Pug pet which is a reward for the achievement Looking for Multitudes which you get for grouping with 100 random people in heroics. I'd totally forgotten about this pet and how you get it so it was a nice surprise when I got it through in the mail.


 
Also, in slightly related news I got the achievement Rookie Pet Crew at the weekend. I'm slowly progressing with my battle pet roster and now have 17 level 25s (towards Pro Pet Crew) and need to raise only a dragonkin to level 25 to get All Pets Allowed.

Saturday 13 April 2013

Jade Panther Mount

For a while now I've been working towards the Jade Panther mount and yesterday I finally made it. I love all of the new panther mounts but for me it had to be the green one first. I do intend to make the other three coloured ones and maybe one day the Jeweled Onyx Panther - with all of this being money dependent.

 
As you may be aware the panther mounts are made by jewelcrafters and they aren't cheap! Each requires an Orb of Mystery which will set you back 18k atleast! In addition each requires 4x Living Steel, 2x Serpent's Eye and 20x of a colour related gem - in this case Wild Jade.

So, I've been working aware on both my main (hunter) and my maggie to get enough Ghost Iron Ore to prospect for Alexandrite (reagent for Transmute: Wild Jade) and to make bars which I've been transmuting to Trilium Bars and then Living Steel.

 
Last night I finally got around to crafting my panther. As much as I was really excited about the prospect of flying around on it I made the decision to stick it on the AH for 12 hours - if it sold I'd make a good 4-5k profit and if not I'd still have the mount. Turns out that it didn't sell so I've spend much of my in-game time today flying about.

It also happens that I'm not the only person whose shown an interest in these mounts recently. Jim over at Power Word: Gold posted about the duplicating of the Jeweled Onyx Panther yesterday. It's a really interesting read and got me thinking about my servers AH. Whilst the four coloured panther mounts are available on my servers AH for a reasonable price (~25-27k each) the jeweled onyx is selling for a lot cheaper than the cost of materials (around 65k). I have no idea if this is due to duplicating or not but it's certainly cheaper than making your own - but should you purchase such bargain buys and risk it being a duplicate?

Wednesday 10 April 2013

Can I make it as WoWs Iron Lady?

A while ago I tweeted saying that I was considering taking part in the WoW Ironman Challenge. I had a few encouraging tweets back and a load of helpful hints and tips from various people. I finally decided to take the plunge. It just so happened that the UK's own iron lady Margaret Thatcher died earlier this week and hence inspired the title - impeccable timing Maggie!


What is the WoW Ironman Challenge?
I'm sure a lot of you will have heard of the WoW Ironman Challenge and some of you may even have taken part in it. It is a community run challenge that essentially see's the competitor attempt to level a character to max level without dying! There's a whole suite of rules that can be found on the website but I'd sum these up as being: only white or grey gear, no enhancements (gems, enchants, external buffs, flasks etc), no friends (i.e. guild, groups or things that involves groups - dungeons etc), no profs (except first aid) and no talent points/glyphs/class specialisations.

Why am I doing it?
I've been thinking about doing it for a while now. I think it's the idea of setting myself an in-game challenge that really will be a challenge for me. Too often I have found myself in the situation where I've ran into a mob, then thought and realised that I've pulled to many or just can't handle them all and have died. In short, I hope(d) that taking part in the challenge will help me curb my think later approach.

Monday 8 April 2013

My First LFR!

Some of you may have seen via twitter that last night I did my first ever Looking for Raid (LFR) and so I thought I'd talk about it and share some screenshots of dead baddies with you (which I believe is customary if you're at the forefront of raiding and getting world/server firsts... yes, I'm a little behind!).

Trash before the first boss.
I've always been a non-raider in a primarily raiding, yet very social, guild. As of late the guild has had some issues with the number of people available to raid etc. and so has shifted it's focus more to the social aspects of WoW. Our guild master, who was very raid orientated, also left the game for personal reasons and so my boyfriend took over. [On a side note the boyf is back blogging again here]. None of these changes really bothered me and in fact I guess it made things more benefical for me. Although, a lot of people I'd grown to know who were part of the raid team have subsequently left or become in-active.

Sunday 7 April 2013

Blog Azeroth: The One!

I'm a little late to the party with this one but Cymre asked the following question as Blog Azeroth's shared topic for 22-31 March:
What is your absolute favourite profession in WoW? Why do you love it above all others and what is one feature you would add to the profession if you could?
So, a quick recap on the available professions in-game (in-case like me you often forget what they all are). There's three sub-categories of professions which I refer to as: gathering [primary], crafting [primary] and secondaries. Each character may have up to two primary and up to all four secondaries at any one time (you can unlearn profs if you so desire). In most cases it can be beneficial to have complementary gathering and crafting professions (but, not all crafting profs have an associated gathering prof).

Gathering [primary]
Mining, Herbalism and Skinning.

Crafting [primary]
Jewelcrafting, Engineering, Blacksmithing, Alchemy, Inscription, Leatherworking, Tailoring and Enchanting.

Secondary
Fishing, Cooking, First Aid and Archaeology.

Now I'm somewhat an altoholic - I have a large collection of characters but rarely play most of them. Anyway, as a result I have all of the professions except two (Blacksmithing and First Aid) at varying levels. To date I've only maxed out a handful of the professions but I do know which I like and which I don't!

What's my One!?!
I've been thinking about my answer to this question for a couple of days now. I had narrowed it down to two and then I finally chose my One. The two are both secondary professions, namely cooking and fishing. In general I find the secondary professions to be more relaxed, more laid back and less of a 'I must hit max level' and as a result normally max them out early on.

Friday 5 April 2013

Auction Addiction!

Wednesday evening I visited the Black Market Auction House and noticed a Dun Morogh Cub for sale at 1,000G. I thought this was a bit of a bargain knowing that these pets (those purchased with Champion's Seals) used to sell for around 4k each. As I hadn't checked for some time I logged onto my banking-alt and found only one for sale at around 2,500G. So, I made a bid before logging off for the night.

Last night I logged in to find I'd been outbid. I made a second bid for the cub and went off to do some dailies. The auction had between 2 hours and 30 minutes left and so I knew I would need to keep a close eye on things.

I managed to find my second ever Onyx Egg and found myself just short of reaching exhalted with the Order of the Cloud Serpent. I did a quick daily and managed to reach exalted status and get my Jade Cloud Serpent. I also decided to buy the Azure Cloud Serpent and Golden Cloud Serpent.


Cool shot from the cinematic.

I headed back to the BMAH and found that the auction still had medium length but I knew that it wouldn't be long until it went below 30 minutes. I noticed a Bood-Soaked Invitation at the base price of 1,000G with a short duration and though 'what the heck' and made a bid. By this time the cub had also dropped to short duration.


I hung around the BMAH leveling some battle pets and keeping an eye on things. Someonne outbid me, I outbid them and a mini bidding war began. But I was determined to get the cub. Again they outbid me, I outbid them and then things settled down again. I won the Invitation and it was a case of waiting to see if I'd be outbid again. I wasn't and I got the cub for 2,169G.

With my new cub beside what appears to be a giant mailbox!
 

Wednesday 3 April 2013

10 Days of Pet Battles: Day 10

I've finally made it to the last component part of the 10 Days of Pet Battles challenge. It's been really fun and has got me thinking about all of my experiences pet battling. It also re-kindled my love for pet battles after I had a blip in my enthusiasm. Kudos to Navimie for thinking up the questions and promoting the challenge.

Day 10: Design a pet! What model would your pet have, where would it come from and what abilities would it have?

I think that todays question / task is in two parts really 1) designing the pet and 2) about the pet (abilities etc.). In yesterdays post, Day 9 of the challenge, I spoke in great depth about my favourite abilities and the 6 I would give to the ultimate balanced pet (based on personal opinion of course). Meaning that today my main objective is to address my pets model and origins.

Now there's a couple of different battle pet models that I'd love to see added to the game. A baby Orca would be pretty sweet but I'm not sure how it would work out size-wise... unless it was a pygmy.

A more realistic model would be based on the standard big cat cub but with a new skin to those currently availble. As much as I do like the cub models none of them have models that really stand out and grab my attention. I would like to see the addition of bolder colours and in particular a cub based on Winna's Kitten. If you've seen pictures of my hunter you'll no doubt have realised that my hunters main pet is this model. I absolutely love the green and orange and can't see myself replacing Kitty anytime soon(!) so a matching cub would be epic.


Not the best 'artists impression' that you'll ever see but this is what I managed to create using the wonder that is paint!
You may have noticed from yesterdays ability blog that I spoke about using the mechanical repair in conjunction with the mechincal passive failsafe and the advantages that can be gained if timed correctly. I guess I would like my pet to be mechanical to take full advantage of this and so we get Robo-Kitty-Cub!

Tuesday 2 April 2013

10 Days of Pet Battles: Day 9

Hey there! It's been a long time since I posted the other earlier components of the 10 Days of Pet Battles. I had this post atleast 75% complete before I went on holiday last week but I wanted the post to be 110% complete before posting. So here it [finally] is...

Day 9: What is your favourite pet ability? If you could have a pet with your favourite abilities, what would they be?

There's a few pet abilities in-game that I really like and so I've decided on the six that I would have built into my ultimate pet design (& tomorrow [hopefully] you will get to see said pet). I've tried to pick a well range of abilities with the aim of making the pet well rouded although that obviously would never happen. As a result I have six categories of ability - one for each of the six slots.

Self Heal
I really like the mechanical ability Repair as a self repair. At higher levels it can be really powerful in my opinion. It takes two rounds to hela yourself but there's a pretty neat way of using this to your advantage. Provided you time it correctly! In-game this ability is exclusive to mechanical pets which have the mechanical passive Failsafe. Now with perfect timing you can initiate Repair, die, come back to life (via Failsafe), complete Repair and stay alive with a fairly good amount of health. I have usd this little loophole and it works for me (when timed right).

Team Heal
Self repairs are brilliant for doing exactly that - a self repair. But there's times in game when you want to repair your whole team. For example, when an opposing pet has used an ability such as Arcane Explosion that causes damage to all of your team members before they've even entered the battle.
Renewing Mists is a pretty good heal over time (lasting three rounds) however it only heals the active pet (i.e. the one battling). An alternative is Bleat which heals all pets but has a 4-turn cooldown. Personally, I'd go with Bleat as I think it's slightly more useful. For instance, in my example above, if my super pet was active I'd use Bleat asap and hope to survive long enough to use Bleat again (as many times as possile) and hope to Bleat one last time before dying to heal the rest of the team. If my pet wasn't active I would way up the effectiveness of swapping the super pet in, Bleat, battle and again Bleat some more.

Bleat in action.
Damage
So, as is the nature of pet battles, there are a lot of damage dealing abilities. As a result I guess the ability I choose to put in this slot is really based on personal preference. Even so it's quite a tricky decision to make due to the vast number of damage dealing abilities. I've decided to talk about a number of damage dealing abilities that I like:
  • Slicing Wind is quite a cool ability to watch and it can be found in a number of the flying (and other) pet families.
  • Claw is another cool ability but this time found mostly in the beast family.
  • Whilst Leap is again pretty neat to watch, it also has an accompanying buff that increases speed by 100% for 1 round - a little extra bonus if you ask me.
Slicing Wind.

Claw.
Leap.
Damage over Time (DOT)
I've chosen to add a Damage-over-Time (DOT) to my pets skill set. I think DOTs are extremely useful both generally in-game and in pet battles. In case you're unaware DOTs are normally applied early on during a battle and slowly over time cause damage to be inflicted on the enemy.
Whirlpool is probably my favourite DOT pet ability. Since the first time I saw it I loved it. It's an awesome ability both in terms of the damage it deals, it's relatively short cooldown (3 turns) and how it looks. There are other DOTs, such as Apocalypse, but I don't like them anywhere as much as Whirlpool.

Whirlpool.
Speed Up / Reduction
As with most turn-based games speed can often be a brilliant advantage to have on your side. Despite this it isn't always possible to guarantee that your pet will have the edge. Abilities such as Powerball that increase your speed, in this case by 20% each turn, are really useful for giving your pet this particular advantage.
Alternatively, there are speed reducing moves such as Screech.

Damage Reduction
What can I really say other than that any ability to reduce the amount of damage taken either partially or completely is a useful one! Personally, I haven't leveled my Anubisath Idol (or any of the other four pets) that are lucky enough to posess the ability Deflection but my boyfriend has and I've read all about it. You may have heard all about the Idol's super ability 'Reflection' but that's now been replaced with Deflection. Even so, it's easy to see how and why Deflection, which "avoids enemy attacks..." is useful.

Monday 1 April 2013

BPTT: Easter / Nobelgarden Edition

Welcome to my latest Battle Pet Theme Team post all about Easter / Nobelgarden themed pets! It's been a while since I've done one of these post so I'll try to make it a good one. Nobelgarden is one of my favourite world events and Perculia's guide can be found here. Whilst I have completed all of the Nobelgarden events I will still be taking part in it this year - just for fun!


As usual, the pet images used below are taken from warcraftpets.com as is the information I use. The pet name will link to the pets detailed page at warcraftpets.com.

The Contenders
 
Spring and Easter are times of the year heavily associated with new life whether it's baby lambs or chicks. And so, this has influenced the contenders for this particular theme team.

Bunnies
There's a whole range of rabbits/bunnies and even hares in-game. They all share what is essentially the same model but with slightly differeent skins. In terms of their abilities I think they're all identical. Having said this there is only one real choice and that's the Spring Rabbit. The Spring Rabbit is a vendor-bought pet available during the holiday for 100 Nobelgarden Chocolate's.

Lambs
There are two lambs availabe in-game - the capturable Black Lamb and the Elwynn Lamb which costs 40 Champion's Seal. Again, same model, slightly different skins but the same set of abilities. I only have the Black Lamb in my collections and in all honesty I prefer it to the white Elwynn Lamb.

Chicks
In-game there's a variety of chickens available but I wanted a chick, not the adult. A quick search on warcraftpets.com brought up the Imperial Eagle Chick and the Jade Crane Chick. Not what I was thinking of. Then, I remembered about Egbert - your typical half-hatched baby chick. Egbert is available as a reward during Children's Week (which will take place at the end of this month).

Final Team
 
This final team of: Spring Rabbit, Black Lamb and Egbert is purely based on their appropriate-ness to the Nobelgarden (or Easter/Spring-time) theme. As a result all three happen to be from the Critter pet-family. Despite this they only share a few abilities and it's possible that they may actually form a team balanced just enough to work.