Thursday, December 29, 2011

The only way to get me to follow...

A bunch of random pics to share.

1. The only way to get me to follow:
I don't think I need to say much with this one except to share the chat and the pic Jess sent me:



Sigh. Jess probably wishes he had that leash on me when we were doing Nef.

2. The original Tebower
We ran some old raids last night for fun and transmog gear. I quite like the tier 6 druid set! I just need to get the chest and shoulders. Anyways we were in Black Temple and Jess pointed out that Illidan is Tebowing! Look!

3. Pushing my luck
With more game time with the holidays, I've been pushing my luck with pets and mount drops. I've been making my way back in Sethekk and Magister's Terrace lately, as well as trying to farm zone drop pets.

I think on one day over the weekend I decided to push my luck with several items in a row. I first went to try for the lump of coal pet. Then I farmed for whelpling pets in Wetlands for a while. Then I moved on to try in Winterspring for a bit. Next I went to Org to try to fish up Old Crafty. Then I went into Wailing Caverns to try for the Hatchling pet in there. My only success? Old Crafty after about 150 casts.

If I go back to equipping a main and off hand, I think it'd be hilarious it to transmog them into Dark Herring and either Old Crafty or Old Ironforge!



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Thursday, December 22, 2011

Happy Holidays!

I am definitely looking forward to flying home to Chapel Hill tomorrow for the holidays. I'll be back home for about 10 days, though I will definitely have to work next week. :( Anyways, a couple of holidays related notes I wanted to share:

1. A Lovecraft Christmas!

Awesome pics of a Cthulhu Christmas tree:


2. Star Wars Snowflakes!

Geez, I wonder how long its been since I've made paper snowflakes? I'm guessing somewhere around 3rd grade? Well for all of you playing SWTOR, these are pretty awesome Star Wars Snowflakes with a pattern you can download to make your own.



3. Santa?

I was randomly checking my statcounter stats and OMG I have evidence that Santa reads this blog:


Because Santa is reading this, let me just reiterate how good I've been all year and how I deserve a ton of presents. ;)

Wishing everyone a peaceful and relaxing holiday season!

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Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Cookies are distracting

O'hai there! Long time no see, or er blog! As predicted, work has been the pvp/bg equivalent of WoW. Pretty crazy with intense deadlines while assumptions and supporting data change by the minute. It really irritates me when I am too busy at work to blog. I mean seriously, when else am I supposed to blog?

Anyways, I have at least been able to raid. Just last week we had our first all guild run in what feels like forever. I want to say it was our first guild run since Cataclysm? So I made the boys line up and tuck in their shirts for a screenshot:



It was kind of an interesting raid for me last Thursday. Ten minutes before the raid start time I was contemplating whether the delicious cookies that the lovely Beru gave me that day were a sufficient dinner. I put it to a guild vote and it came back about 50/50.

So the raid starts with Morchok and during the spikes phase I ran to a side that I've run the two previous weeks. Except there weren't any spikes on that side this week to hide behind. D'oh. I promptly died. I might have been distracted by digging to the bottom of Beru's cookie container to see what variety of treats were at the bottom. So for the next 5 minutes or however long the fight lasted, the guild 9 manned Morchok while I ate cookies. Even better was the fact that one of the drops was for me. All in all it was a good raid strategy since I got cookies AND an upgrade.

I died quickly on Hagara as well as some spikes showed up to eat my face. But the guild got him down just fine again. I stand by the title of this post as my defense. Some folks on vent were saying that I needed to blog about dying so much. To which I responded to something of the effect of: "I only blog about stuff when you guys screw up. When I screw up, it didn't happen. This is why this is my blog". But look! I blogged about it! I still blame the cookies though (which btw were delicious Beru!).

Since I last posted I've also added Rades to my Real ID list. This way I have someone Horde side on my server and battlegroup to vent to when we're getting killed in BGs. I can also let him know when he's killing a poor little alt of mine and we don't have to resort to emotes when our toons cross paths. I thought I read somewhere that we would be able to do cross faction BGs? Is that coming soon? Did I make that up somehow? I think it'd be pretty hilarious to run around with his hunter or DK as his pocket healer. I think one thing Rades has learned about me from adding me to his Real ID list is that I'm in BGs a lot. :)

Despite the considerable amount of BGs I do, I have yet to cap out on conquest points. Getting 1650 conquest points when you're not doing arena or rated BGs is a lot. I think I'm averaging about 1000 conquest points a week. On the PvE end it feels weird to be capping out on weekly valor points. I rarely capped out on valor in the last couple of patches. But now the cap is down to 1000, our guild killing DS bosses a lot faster than we did FL bosses, and you can run through the new heroics so quickly compared to ZG/ZA.

I will vent about one thing (because really is it a real blog post from me if there is no angry venting?). The daily process of going to kill the Greench for the chance at the lump of coal pet irritates me greatly. First we have to go to IF, a city no one hangs out in anymore. Then we have to fly up to go kill the Greench. Then we have to go back to IF to turn it in. Grrr. I wish this was just like the other holiday bosses where we could just port to it quickly.


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Thursday, December 8, 2011

From archaeology to pvp

My job tends to be a job of extreme peaks and valleys. It's either incredibly crazy 80 hour work weeks or an absolutely dead 20 hour work week. In WoW terms it's like the two extremes of boring ass archaeology and sheer craziness of doing pvp. Anyways, this past work week was an archaeology week, but I got an email late in the afternoon yesterday that they are putting me into two BGs starting tomorrow. Sigh.

I figure I should get a post up since I expect work craziness for a while. The equivalent of 5 melee on this poor tree like white on rice. So a bunch of random updates.

We've started running alt Firelands runs on off nights for fun and gear, but also to finish building our legendary staff. Quick side note on this. I think the casters got kind of screwed with the FL legendary vs the rogues in DS. Even casual guilds are downing DS bosses much faster than FL bosses. Our resident lucky bastard Violent got his first epic dagger as part of the quest chain during the first week. I don't remember how long it took our mage Nkm to do that, but I know it was a lot longer than that.

Oh so in our last alt run... look what drops:

Yep... the first time the f'in Smoldering Censer of Purity drops, its when I'm on my lock. I love that this drop is noteworthy enough that it defaults to the top of the weekly guild news. Just to taunt me. So now Jess' shammy has my staff. We also saw our first ever warrior hunter shammy shoulder tokens drop off Staghelm... though Jess wasn't on his warrior. However Jess ended up getting the tier 13 shoulders that dropped off Hagara.

Sigh. At least the raid is clearly aware of the basic laws of nature. This is the last line of the macro that gives our new vent information:

This week has been the Darkmoon Faire stuff, though I'm already kind of sick of the games. However I know that the guild is grateful for the fact that the Grisly trophy drops are random and not based on killing blows, unlike the Valentines Day charm bracelet debacle. I hadn't read up on the Darkmoon Faire news so I didn't know how they dropped, but when I first got the quest I was ready to get pretty irritated... charm bracelet level irritated. But I immediately went to heal a bg and saw that I was still able to collect those trophies.

I've also gotten a good number of those Darkmoon faire blues in bgs as well. I've gotten a total of 6 or 7 of them, though I have to admit that I've been doing a lot of pvp. Just make sure you remove insignias, because that is the only way you get them.

Finally, I was looking at our logs from our first week of raiding and came across the craziest thing.

What in the?!?! Tranquility right after Rejuv? Any guesses on which of the first 4 bosses this was from?

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Friday, December 2, 2011

Left Claw and DS Tier 13

Last night was our first foray into Dragon Soul. I forgot to take any killshot screenshots. So here is one of my typical recreations:

Lets go around and explain. In the bottom left corner, there's warrior Jess. He's showed up as a good raid leader with raid notes! He's so cute when he goes, "hold on, I have notes". In the other hand he is reminding himself 2-2-2, which is apparently a hard number for high end mathematicians to remember. Continuing counter-clockwise we have Violent. Nothing has changed for our guild from Tier 12 to 13. The lucky bastard came out with 2 leatherworking patterns and two drops.

Next we have Nikolai who spent the better part of the raid thinking naughty thoughts about an old Czech tank friend of ours. Then we have Lorosia who has his new Holy Radiance spell but is confused with his less than half mana bar, something he has never seen before. Welcome to my world friend, welcome to my world. Next up is our friend Bubblehunter who is being all zen like and trying to meditate so he doesn't lose it on Zon'ozz like he did with his guild.

Then we have our two mages who are now both fire. The two of them got our first two Tier 13 pieces off Yor'sahj and Zon'ozz. Next is our friend Isaiah who healed for us as disc and holy. There he is with his full mana bar (disclaimer: I didn't actually check but am just assuming it was). Thus he has taken over dispelling duty from Lorosia. Then there is Chanti with his shiny new shield.

Finally there is me, back to wearing a pretty dress again. Yay! I am also holding a cookie. Why? Well, during our successful Zon'ozz kill at one point I had to blow tranquility before the group up phase. Here was the ensuing conversation:

K: I had to blow my cooldown to get us to this point.
Jess: Do you want a cookie?
K: I'm just saying, so the other two healers need to blow their cooldowns here!

So yes, there is me with my cookie, which is actually the same size as Chanti's new shield. That's one large cookie! Mmm reenactment killshot is not to scale.

Anyways, so overall thoughts? In 2.5 hours we killed 3 bosses. We went to see the fourth but ran out of time. I had read earlier in the week how quickly people were killing things, but I wasn't sure how that would translate to a guild like ours. As a casual 5 hour a week raiding guild who only ended up doing heroic Shannox in FL, I expect us to be 4/8 come Sunday night. Seriously? What the heck are we supposed to be doing the rest of the expansion?

In druidy news, I prepared myself for mana by taking 3 points in Furor and I went back to equip the spirit trinket from Tol Barad. I didn't find myself sucking as dry on mana as I expected. So perhaps I'll go back to another trinket. We'll see. Oh and I ended up getting the shiny necklace off Morchok (who my guildies decided is pronounced with a silent H).

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