Tag Archives: Altoholism

OMG TWINSIES

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I’m starting to get frightened by the “great minds think alike” moments myself and Kaitz have ingame. And now…

SAME HAIR. TWINSIES!

Dan (aka Ryyu) has kindly been boosting us bit by bit for the past couple of nights on my Pally and Kait’s Hunter. When I was levelling my Rogue we discovered that you can enter Burning Crusade heroic instances below level 70 and my god they give decent experience! This screenie was taken in Blackrock Mountain shortly before a Molten Core and Blackwing Lair boost, but we also ran through heroic Ramparts, Blood Furnace, Slave Pens, Underbog, Auchenai Crypts, Sethekk Halls and Mana Tombs… Which not only got us levelled quite a bit but we also got some shinies and had some fun chatting on Mumble. Fun times!

Oh hai!

That Fluffling. Loves his photobombs.

Move Aside Apathy

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I promised one Miss Kaitz that I would blog on the Menagerie. Okay so that was a week ago and I was supposed to tell you about the adventures of Pinky but I thought it might be nice to talk a little about what I’m upto right now, because what I’m upto often seems to elude many.

Honourary picture of Pinky on the fish bike

I suppose I’d grown bored. Dailies had killed my spirit and all there was was raiding and the endless grind so I’d backed away a bit. Again. I’d even considered cancelling my payment until I wanted to play again but thankfully I didn’t and over Christmas I actually did a few dailies because I felt like it. When I got back home in January I was all ready to carry on watching through Supernatural and I figured why not farm Skyshards while I do that? So I did. I got one then decided to do dailies with that time instead. Then I had a brief addiction to the Walking Dead game.. I say brief because I played it until I reached the end (I still owe you guys a blog post on this game, it’s absolutely amazing). Then decided I really should level my Death Knight if she’s going to be doing transmog runs.

Levelling

Soupdragon had almost gotten to 86 before being pushed aside and abandoned for the apathy so it was only natural that I came to her first of my two 85′s. I ran through Jade Forest, Krasarang Wilds (which finally netted me Loremaster of Pandaria yay!), Valley of the Four Winds and finally, Dread Wastes where I died.. died.. and died again. I had to force myself but I got her to 90 and then decided I was happy and wanted to gear my Hunter.

Huntering

Kaitz runs a fair few transmog runs on her wolf-lady Death Knight and asked me one night if I’d like to come along for the Illidan bow so I did. It was a lot of fun! Kait met Snowflake and Baskilisk, we talked about politics and cookies, and discovered that I am in fact a glaive magnet. (Grats Kait on your glaive! Our mine, if Toman’s gtmod is to be believed xD) Yep, a glaive dropped! Woo!

Dan has the offhand, Kait has the mainhand, I was there for both. I am.. the Glaive Magnet

We did Naxx 10, and on the next reset did it all again along with Mogushan Vaults LFR where I got a hat. It’s mucho fun, but see.. Reliq wants a Mage for raids and I have a Mage.. I would have stuck with my Priest who is very well geared considering all that apathy (aside from her hat) but I believe another lovely guildy is wanting to reroll to her Shadow Priest and there are many Hunters everywhere as is *sad*.

Maging

So next up, I decided to speedy-level my Mage. You have no idea how glad I am to be rid of frickin’ Twylite the Blood Elf Mage who on entering random groups I had to inform them that I named her before I’d heard of the crappy sparkly vampires.. but that Jewelcrafting daily with the sparkles? Yeah, she was often glittering. Sigh. Anyway! Jaedia the Draenei Mage is much cooler. She was never abandoned, her professions are all levelled up and useful, she has some wicked transmog pieces and I really enjoyed levelling her the first time (hi Steve!). She has good memories.

I forget whether I started her in Jade Forest on Thursday or Friday.. Actually I think it was late on Thursday night, I didn’t do very much but I got started then Friday dinged 86, today she’ll ding 90. That might be the fastest I’ve levelled a character from 85-90 without going without sleep and other vital things! The Darkmoon Faire roundabout definitely helped.

“Time for bed,” said Zebedee

And Frost has somehow become an amazing spec! It’s as fun as Fire with all its crits and procs, and I get to play around with transmog again. I was way too happy with my Fire Mage transmog to change it. Dan and Rip helped me through Black Temple and Mount Hyjal for tier 6 a few days ago and I (*cough* jammy git) picked up all 5 pieces and my Draenei Mage looks wicked in it! Last night a few were doing ICC for transmog fun and.. well.. I know I should have been levelling but I can’t say no to ICC sooo I went along and picked up a few weapons including a mad looking wand which I think possibly scares Reliq going by his reaction, so I’ll definitely be using that if I have a wand.

Left to right: Ysaera, me, Rippur, Severiti and Splish

As for now, I’m hoping to give guild raiding another shot. I picked up a bunch of BoE stuff for my Mage when she gets to 90 and she had about 3500 Justice Points leftover from Cataclysm that I’m fairly sure I had been saving up, plus come tomorrow I’ll get in a Sha group pretty easily so I think she’s going to be geared. Note: If any Ghostlands folk notice the intellect Darkmoon Faire trinket for a decent price (less than 9k), please let me know! And can start joining back in with guild raids sooner rather than later. :)

The Joy of a New Alt

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I thought you guys might like to meet that smexy Space Goat staring provocatively from my header image. Okay, perhaps provocative isn’t the word, but she’s my cute little Wagglebum. That.. sounded less creepy in my head.

Those of you who’ve followed me for any length of time, either on Twitter or through this blog, will know that I’m a bit of an altoholic. Perhaps less so this expansion (would you believe that I’ve only managed to get 3 of my characters to 85 after my seven level 80s in Wrath?) but even so, I do like to mix up my World of Warcraft play time a little bit and trying different classes is a great way to go about that. I even post about them a lot, heck, they have their own category!

So for ages I’ve been missing the blue side of the fence. The red side is great, don’t get me wrong, I do love my Blood Elves and their great and terrifying city and my insane little Goblin folk and the cow people, but I’ve always been a little more blue than I am red. (Is this sounding like some kind of communist vs. capitalist thought chain to anybody else?) My characters on Terenas have pretty much been abandoned because I don’t feel like I have a place there any more. The server itself feels.. off and poor little Soupdragon is left on her own at level 82. So when I mentioned on Twitter that I felt like playing Alliance side one day and Rel popped up all, “Come play with me and Wabby!!” I was like.. well yeah why not? And as weird as I find their overpriced and max-level-epic-lacking auction house, Ghostlands seems like a pretty nice server as far as servers go.

I didn’t take too long to decide that it was time I levelled a Mage. I’ve always been kind of drawn to the class but it’s one of those that I get really into for a few levels then something shiny grabs my attention and it’s left for a while.. rinse and repeat, so this time, I’m going to do it and I’m loving it. She had to be a Draenei. Duh. *waggle* And she had to have my name. As I’m playing her a lot at the moment, she has her own part in the sidebar where you can see what she’s upto and she’s featured in the header because.. well Blood Elves eyes are closed in my version of WoW Model Viewer and that looked stupid so yeah.

I do already have a Mage at 67 on my main server but I.. I don’t like my main server. It’s a PvP server, which I can’t stand, it’s full of the type of people you really don’t enjoy grouping with.. basically, Vashj EU is that server. The one that when you get somebody from the realm in your random dungeon finder groups you can’t help but think, “Oh god, not somebody from that server.” You know the ones I’m sure. But myself and Dan have a bunch of our characters there so you know. Still, I don’t enjoy levelling there very much or playing there so it’s doubtful that Twylite (another reason I don’t really play her) will ever get much further than 67. So Jaedia the.. well I was going to say third but if you count other MMOs I suppose it’s more like Jaedia the 7th, was born.

So anyway, the first order of the day was of course to get the feck out of the Draenei starting zone which by now I hate with a bitter passion and then rustle up enough gold to get by on this new server. Rel had invited my Mage into his guild, Harvest Moon (of which I’m determined to get to level 25 FOR TEH LIONS :3 ..that and I’d love to help get a few more members for the 10 man team and maybe some friendly social folk), and a couple of his lovely friends offered me a little help. I didn’t really want to ask for gold because that’s easy enough but bag space I was struggling with so they sent me a few bags. <3 That was a massive help. And then I went off and sold the Moongraze Tenderloin recipe for 500g, a couple of moths, a few cats and a Moss Agate or two and hey presto I had 800g before I’d made it to level 30. I’m down to 400g now but that was the whole point of making the gold in the first place.

I had to question Twitter on what to spec because I’m now a bit clueless. It was always Frost before and I’ve been semi-absent from the game for so long I just wasn’t sure. The general consensus seems to be that Frost is great for solo play but Arcane is fun as hell especially in a group situation and considering I do use the random dungeon finder a lot while levelling, that’s what I went with. It is pretty damn fun, especially now that I’ve talked myself out of using Arcane Missiles unless very oom and am actually able to keep up on the meters a little now. And the grouping is.. unusual. I’ve had to deal with the very silent, the very bad, the very weird (see: picture of horny guy in Gnomer), and the rare group that’s actually been a little friendly. At 34, nearing 35, I’m getting to the sort of level where you bump into folk who would like to run a few dungeons with the same semi-competent group and I’ve had a couple of those now (even if one of the tanks was called “Battyboy” and the other turned out to be stoned according to his friend).

I’ve also had to look at actually levelling professions as I go. I tend to find it easier to do that than pick them up later on. And instead of taking the easy option of dual-gathering professions and sell the results, I picked up Tailoring and Enchanting. So considering my lack of heirlooms, that’s clearly led to a lot of focus on getting my Robe of Power. I probably didn’t need to, sure, but once I decided I was going for it, I was bloody determined even if it did mean buying a bunch of 20g stacks of Wool and Silk. I mentioned the scary Ghostlands auction house, right? Well I finally completed my robe last night and ran a couple of dungeons and she is totally badass. I’m really enjoying this Mage and her transmog set is going to be fab!

An early idea after playing with MogIt

NICEST Pug

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I’m bored of my Priest. I don’t want to reroll, I’ve done way too much with the character to just drop it. It isn’t the achievements so much, it’s the mounts and pets and all of the help I’ve had getting to the point she’s at. But I’m bored of her and I don’t enjoy healing enough. I’ve been pottering around with my alts – levelling the Hunter here and there doing instances with the other half on his Goblin and playing around a bit with Soupdragon, who is another character I’m quite attached to, my Night Elf Death Knight on another server – and it made me realise that I enjoy Death Knight dps a lot more than I do Shadow dps, which isn’t so much enjoyable any more as it is comfortable. The trouble with my Death Knight is that she is on a server on which I don’t really know anybody so I thought it might be an idea to level the Death Knight on my main server instead.

This Death Knight, who happens to be yet another Blood Elf, is actually older than Soup but at the time I decided I’d try out the Alliance side quests on a PvE server and play around a bit. Kalithe, the Blood Elf, has come close to being deleted a few times but I’m kinda glad I didn’t now. She still had some leather/mail gear equipped, her talents were blank, her glyphs were out of whack, needed to send over heirlooms from 4 different characters, train things and tidy up her bar set up a bit, but I didn’t have to do Outlands again!

I did a fair few instances when I got around to playing her yesterday, nothing that really stuck in memory at first. Bad tanks, average groups, the usual silence. And I’d been selecting instances I needed rather than letting it random me in Old Kingdom/Azjol Nerub over and over.. which it does. So when I got a Drak’tharon I was pretty happy, and when I saw the Orc Hunter wearing a pink dress, naturally, I took a screenshot. The group was very nice, and despite the Hunter deciding to tame a raptor that you can much easier get from Outland and parts of The Barrens, we let him tame a silly raptor and had a joke about the name and it was all very nice.

Then I got Drak’tharon again. I was running around with my Windrider Cub out because he’s adorable and the Enhancement Shaman whispered me asking where it’s from. I always find it quite nice when people notice something small like that and point it out or ask about it, just a moment of recognition from other players. So we kept on. The tank was good, the healer was good, the Warlock confused me with his big purple circles on the floor (I kept moving out of them), and the dps Shaman was fairly chatty. The instance was finished in no time. Painless and fun. So somebody asked if we wanted to do some more and well, why not.

This is the point in which I had to endure randoms, but it was experience and fun with a friendly group, which are pretty rare so I wasn’t going to complain when we got Azjol Nerub followed by Old Kingdom (what’d I tell ya?). I had only planned to do the one more after Drak’tharon but these runs were taking maybe 10 minutes and they were genuinely fun. The thing that got me thinking was when the Shaman said, “You know what gets me? After this, I’ll probably never run with you guys again.” Awww. It made me think, yet again, about the idea of some kind of cross-server preference list. I’m not sure how it’d work really. Similar to an ignore list, I suppose, except you could add people that you enjoyed playing with and if you were queuing at the same time, perhaps it could do its best to put you together in future. Bit of a weak idea, but we already have Real ID so I wouldn’t expect a cross-server friends list. Not only would it not happen, but even if it did somehow you’d have to pay for it of course. It is sad that I’ll never group with them again, but I’m also glad. After several terrible pugs that really put me in a bad mood over the weekend, it was like a breath of fresh air to group with a bunch of nice, competent, chatty and funny people. So okay, maybe it wasn’t the “nicest” pug I’ve ever had, but it was up there, and it was definitely the nicest pug I’ve had in the past couple of weeks since I came back.

So This Hunter Alt

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We’d been saving the name Fae since I transferred Fae the first off to Terenas, just incase I ever brought her back and I really love the name. Dan held on to the name for me because I didn’t have a space, but I did have a Rogue I wasn’t sure about. It’s quite nice having Fae the Hunter on Vashj again, even if it isn’t the real Fae. I decided to make her a red haired Blood Elf (who looks scarily like my Rogue, the one on Argent Dawn, in Hunter gear) instead of a Goblin, which was my original plan, purely because I knew I’d feel more comfortable with her. My Warrior and Shaman are both Goblins so no worries, eh?

The first thing I did was sort out her heirlooms. I had the sword and a dagger lying around, so she got those. They were enchanted with Crusader so I switched them both to +15 agi. I sent her the leather shoulders and chest to start with until I can get the mail stuff, which I figure is worth getting because I can then use it on my Shaman too. So far I’ve managed to get the chest but I still need about 2k points for the shoulders. I grabbed the helm and cloak from the guild vendor, and farmed a few points which got me the bow, which I can use on my Warrior afterwards, and chest so far. I threw on a few enchants (+15 agility on weapon, 8 agility and 8 dodge on cloak, +3stats on chest because I can’t do +4, +2 damage scope on bow) and got her a guild invite (we’re level 22). That’s a 45% experience increase, plus with the bow and all of the awesome stats, I’m basically one-shotting everything in my path. I have never levelled so fast.. I went from level 8 to level 18 in just a few hours. It’s nuts! So basically, my pet is there to look pretty and be awesome in instances. At the moment I’m mostly using a cat because the buff they do is nice.

I’d already known I wanted to get her the rare fox from Loch Modan, and Dan had mentioned the polar bear in Dun Morogh which we’d gone and got for Fae the first when she was a lowbie Hunter, and he offered to dragon me off to get it again. I checked Petopia for any other pets I might like and spotted an awesome rare cat from Darkshore, Shadowclaw, and asked if we could pop off to get that too. He threatened to drop me on a random mountain when I started RPing on his back (Fae the second really doesn’t like dragon turbulence), but you know, give a guy the evils and he wouldn’t dare. The polar bear is named Patrick after my beloved, giant cuddly polar bear that lives on the bed. The cat is named Shadow, just because it was originally called Shadowclaw so, why not. And the fox is called Sashi, as I realised I’m not using the name for a pet any more and it’s a lovely name.

So last night I decided to level a bit more, to catch up with Dan’s Goblin, and I got 21 to 27 (very close to 28) in a couple of hours. Started off by heading to Hillsbrad. There are some nice rewards there if you do a fair chunk of the zone, however, I also decided I might as well instance. The trouble with instancing is how much experience it gives, especially if you haven’t done the quests, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to skip past every questing zone I start. Each one is giving me one or two levels. I headed off anyway after getting my mining up to Tin level and some of it was nuts.

There was the SFK run that was just the last boss and we almost wiped on him but the dps was high enough, thing is, the Rogue (who at the beginning was spamming ‘go’ on every line while we waited for the Warrior to catch up) then started demanding a res… from a Warrior and a Hunter.

Next I got a Stockades. This one actually managed to confuse me a bit. The healer was called “Nksgfdhsfslksnksk” or something to that effect and was afk-ish. The Rogue felt the need to announce, “this is a random” okay, congratulations? I never did work out why they said that. The Mage started pulling and calling the afk, apparently gold farming, healer a fag. I made some comeback about him pulling without the tank, and he replied about the fag name Fae. Yeah, okay, I’m also a Blood Elf. At least I’m not called ‘Borntbwild’.. The Warrior whispered me telling me not to help him kill, he was trying to get him killed. It took us 5 minutes to get started and then the healer didn’t have water and went oom a lot, and I realised the Mage and Warrior were in the same guild. We’ll just brush that one under the carpet..

I specificked (ok, I know that’s not really a word, but how the hell would you spell it?) an SFK to do my class quest and the instance quests, picked up the bracers from the [4th?] boss, oh and one of the cow Paladins was called Chezus. He totally got plus points. Hope he knows I was thinking of Glee’s ‘grilled cheesus’ when I complimented his name. After that I got a BFD in a random that had me flailing about because the tank wouldn’t stop pissing moving and I was trying to Steady Shot my focus back ._. However, we got the place done pretty swiftly and I did the first couple of quests in Northern Stranglethorn and then decided to give it a rest for the night. One of these days I’ll level her Engineering and give her more bank space, honest.

Perhaps she’ll get upto more interesting antics soon, who knows ;)

*Small Wave*

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‘Ello :) So it’s been pretty quiet around the menagerie the past couple of months, eh? Those of you who still follow me on twitter and over at The Rant Page will probably know by now that I resubbed to WoW, but don’t worry, The Rant Page will still be my main blog. The main details of my unsubbing from Rift and subsequent resubbing to WoW are in my post here, if you’d like to know, but I’m not going to be repeating myself because the TLDR of it is that I wasn’t having enough fun and decided to see what was going on in WoW, and honestly, is it really that important?

I wasn’t sure whether I should pop back over here and say hello while I’m playing, or whether I should leave it be and just let my WoW blog lie, but I don’t see the harm. So for now, I’m cleaning off the cobwebs. I’ve updated the links in my sidebar blogroll, and I’ve been trying to sort out my out of date plugins, but for some reason I have to do it all manually so it’s proved to be a struggle and some I just can’t update because the automatic updates won’t work and a fair few have gone premium. So.. if plugins are missing, it’s because I’m too lazy to find new ones to replace them and tough!

As for what brought me back, not only do I get to play with Mr Ryyu, the boy shaped one, and some other friends (even the ones I just chat to on Real ID from time to time), but there is more than enough to do. The thing that really turned my head, if I’m being honest, is the WoW Hunter class. I adore Hunters, and I really enjoyed Ranger/Marksman in Rift, it felt comfortable, but nothing feels to me quite like the WoW Hunter, so as I don’t have £30 lying around for Fae’s transfer, a new Fae is born on Vashj for the purposes of fun. She was going to be a Goblin but at the last minute turned into a Blood Elf. Well.. what do you know? Yes I’m terrible, shutup, I’m not even particularly in love with Blood Elves I just didn’t want to be short or hairy. We all know that Draenei are the superior race, after all ;) *cough* But yes, I may blog a little about her antics. She’s already level 18 with a handful of rare pets.

Aside from Huntering, I’m also playing my Priest a fair bit. Though I say I missed the Hunter class, I’m not rerolling this time. Seithir is my main, and I doubt that will change. I have done and collected a heck of a lot on her and I will always be slightly attached. I’ve been gearing her up in heroics whilst farming Justice Points for my Hunter’s (and later on, Shaman’s) heirlooms. I don’t want to raid, and I don’t plan to or need to either. Zul’Gurub is awesome! Though not so fond of Zul’Aman.. that’s mostly because of bad memories of failed bear runs, scout-based wipes, and so on.. *shudder* I’ve been carrying on with my pet collection (which I have updated Warcraft Pets with, and I’m praying I find the money for a Cenarion Hatchling because I have wanted the baby hippogryph pet since I first saw it but no way I could afford a TCG card) and the odd auction, and last night finally got around to doing a chunk of Archaeology, I’m finally past 450! I also got the Vrykul Drinking Horn, which is .. interesting. I have been enjoying playing with friends, and Softthistle even came over, which is lovely!

I have been tidying my blogroll as well. I mentioned the sidebar blogroll, and I’ve gone through my main blogroll as well as my reader, removing blogs past, and updating urls. It’s nice to see so many of you are still going! (Yes, I still like exclamation marks and bracketed text). I am wondering though, as I’ve been away for 3 months and didn’t pay too close attention just before I’d quit the game, are there any new and/or awesome bloggers that you think I’ve missed? I don’t plan to add to the blogroll, but if they aren’t on there now, they aren’t in my reader, and I’d like them to be. Please leave links in the comments, or poke me on twitter, I will keep my eye on Akismet.

All in all, despite the immature and selfish behaviour you tend to find in this game, and I’m not sure how long for, I’m glad to be back. :)

By the Way, I Haven’t Quit

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A few people got the idea from my last post that I’ve quit WoW. I haven’t, I’m quite adamant ((aside: just noticed adamant = Adam Ant, ahaha..)) that I’d like to keep playing, I just really needed a break apparently. I’ve finally found a guild I’m happy in, it’s a social guild with a nice mix of people. Some raiders, PvPers, alters, achievement whores. Casual. I’m finally at a point in the game that I’ve always wanted to be in, and I’m not quite ready to give that up, so don’t worry, I’m still here. I’d like to do a few heroics, work on some achievements, raid a little, and play a few alts. So, as I said I probably would in the comments of my last post, I did reactivate my account on the day it ran out of game time.

I spent a week or two being completely bored out of my brains because I was struggling to find a quiet moment to just sit and read and enjoy it, but I didn’t feel like doing anything ingame, believe me, I tried. I’ve managed to carefully weave myself back into having fun ingame in the past few days.

Firstly, I did a few mid-40ish instances with the other half on Terenas with my healy Shaman. He has a few alts over there these days, it’s quite nice to have somewhere to play around on Alliance alts with a guild tag, heirlooms, and a gold supply, though it would be nice if we knew a few more people on the server. In all honesty, I could do with recruiting a few people to ‘Pining for the Fjords’ but I’m not quite sure how to go about it without recruiting the kind of people we don’t massively want to play with, and let’s face it, who wants an alt guild with no guild perks? Not many, I’d wager. Anyway, I had fun being a space goat again, I missed the *waggle* and Mr. Plods the Elekk is absolutely awesome. He sometimes changes colour. I don’t know either, I think he’s magic.

Logged her out in the Badlands ready to quest a little and was pulled away to my Priest to see if we could 2 man Onyxia (10 man). We were a Prot Paladin and a Shadow Priest, which isn’t a bad setup for this kind of thing. He has a lot of self heals, I can always pop out and throw a few heals about the place, we’re also pretty good at damaging stuff until it dies – it will be perfect when my AoE isn’t shite, the whelps stayed alive for a lot longer than I would have liked. It was a little touch and go, Dan had a couple of close encounters with the floor, luckily we saved it though, despite my nearing oomnicity after the AoEing, but we killed it and got 50g each for our troubles and a pat on the back. It was a bit of fun – we had to pay attention to what was going on and make good use of abilities, it was tough, but doable.

I finally poked him into helping me get the last 100 justice points for my heirloom axe (I know, I could have used Champion’s Seals, but I still want a few mounts from the Tournament and sod those dailies. I’m done with JP, so I’m using those), and off we went to do randoms with 2 pug DPS and a pug healer (guild were raiding). It first thrust us into a Blackrock Caverns with a silent Moonkin, a floor hugging Hunter, and a healer whose catchphrase was “W8″. We got the first boss down.. after a wipe.. then to the second boss where I had little doubt that yes, we were going to wipe again. Basically, the Hunter and Moonkin were too stupid to say “yes/no I have/n’t done this boss before” and we wiped pretty hard after I was feared out of my beam. Nngh. So we left, desperate to avoid a bad mood, and got a Deadmines. I only needed 50 points by this point and was pretty scared imagining Deadmines heroic with a pug, though, we did it. The Druid, again, wasn’t very talkative but the Death Knight and healer were pretty good company, and everybody did their job well enough, the healer even asked us what the tactics were – that never happens!! On the last rope swing back to Vanessa’s corpse, the server had a massive lag spike and I’m pretty sure everybody in the EU went offline at the same time. People were courteous enough to hold on with the loot, and then off I went to get my heirloom axe and cloak to enable my Warrior to kick some serious arse.

So after I’d blinged her up, I decided to play the Warrior a little bit yesterday, and man, what a difference 35% increased experience and the one-shotting-axe-of-doom really makes. I levelled her fairly swiftly from level 4 to level 12. I don’t really have a time frame because it was quite fragmented, but wow. Fast.

After a break and a realisation that I really can’t read through that much frigging noise, I figured I’d give dailies another crack. I have a few achievements to go for, still, and some rep to grind, guild rep especially – I’d like to make it to exalted with the guild. So we did those, and later on, raid time happened. I’d signed up. I figured, well, I don’t know if I want to raid unless I do it, and I got an invite. I won’t go into too much detail, but nomnom new bracers, and I believe I will try again next week after a little break if I can squeeze into the group. My confidence was pretty low by the end of the night, I’m pretty positive my performance wasn’t stellar, and I’m hoping that swings back around because I’ve always been quite good at damaging stuff til it dies whilst moving out of the fire. We got the first two bosses in Bastion of Twilight down. The first boss was easy, but I kept fucking up on the second boss. It wasn’t just me causing wipes, of course, but I think I’ll have to grin and bear game sounds in future, if I can get over the headaches.

After all of that? I don’t feel entirely like quitting. Maybe casual alting, and a little bit of raiding is the answer.

I do have a few goals, which I’d love to reach. I want to level every alt on Vashj to 85. Eventually perhaps on Terenas too. I’d like to get my achievements to over 9000, collect a few more mounts and pets, particularly the Ulduar drakes which I’ve been struggling to get a group for since the raid was released, finish levelling Archaeology and collecting the rare items I’m after, and when I feel comfortable with the game again, clear out my bank and restock with gold making schemes *plots*. I’m sitting on about 185k gold at the moment though, so I’d say I’m safe to hold off on that one for a while.

Confessions of a Secret Alt-aholic

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I was quite excited when I checked my emails last night and found my secret santa from Lodur, enjoy :)

For what has been many, many years now, people have known me as Lodur. The Shaman healer addicted to quite literally all things Shamanistic. While I love and adore my Shaman, and he will forever be my main, it is something of a little known fact that I am indeed an alt-aholic. Now, I don’t attend any meetings or anything like that, but there is just something gratifying in being able to change my identity sometimes and roll an alt.

I have well over 50 World of Warcraft characters, scattered across many, many servers. Only about 15 or them are Shaman though, the rest run the gambit of every available class, and every available race. That’s just really part of the fun in WoW. Just having options.

So when I’m not raiding or writing about the joys of Shamanism, I can be found on one of my many alts. The one above here is Zabonk, my Goblin Shaman. I’ve really enjoyed playing as a Goblin recently simply because I adore their casting animations, the story behind them, all of their emotes and everything in between. It’s such a large departure from Draenei and Dwarves for me that it is engrossing and fun. It’s also nice to see how the questing is different for Horde now. Back when WoW first started, I played a Horde character as my very first toon. Those were some very fun days, and fond memories, and as I’m playing again on Horde side with friends and family I’m starting to enjoy it all over again.

Back on Alliance side, on my home server of Zul’jin I have an army of alts as well. Chief among them is my formerly Night Elf, but newly made Worgen Hunter Abigail. She is the longest living of my surviving characters from the days of vanilla. Shortly after the game was released, my friends that I was playing with changed servers, and changed factions. They migrated to Zul’jin and rolled Alliance. Sad that I could not make a Tauren Shaman, I settled for a Night Elf Hunter. I raided and loved that toon all the way through to the Burning Crusade’s release, where I was able to roll my beloved Shaman class and still play with my friends. Personally I never really cared for Night Elves, and so when Cataclysm was released, I made it a point to race change her to a Worgen. I’ve been falling in love with the Hunter class all over again, and have been collecting pets fairly aggressively. Here’s a picture of Abi with her lovely fox, Guy Fawkes.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time on a Paladin alt, Tamisa, learning how to tank, and making my way up to level 85. She’s a Draenei, and I felt as though I needed to keep at least one active alt as a so called Blueberry. Here she is on her sparkle pony hanging out in Ironforge. She may or may not have a problem holding her Dwarven Ale!

But this is what I spend my downtime doing. I make alts. I play them, learn about their classes and really just have a great time doing it. I never really get bored of the leveling process, it’s almost like a guilty pleasure of mine. Whenever I’m bored, I roll an alt. Friends want to start playing and want a leveling buddy, I roll an alt. The options are near limitless. I have alts on PvP servers, alts on Role-Playing servers, and more than one of them is heroic and raid ready. Now, thanks to this blog, I have a renewed desire to try out my Priest alt. I started her a long while ago, but haven’t really had the gumption to really dive back in. Since Cataclysm’s release though, I think I feel the need to bring Mara Jade out of retirement and melt some faces.

So, if you’re a secret (or not so secret) alt-aholic, I salute you. If you ever find yourself in the area of Zul’jin and looking for someone to alt around with, I’ll be more than happy to roll one, or level one with you.

So I’m A Goblin Convert

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Meet Miyu.

Last night, I finally got around to levelling my Goblin a bit. I know I said I wasn’t so bothered about the new races, and I’ve always hated Goblins because they’re annoying and small and green, and they were stupid, but after playing with the character creation screen alone, I became a bit of a convert. The females actually don’t look half bad. I think they’ve made their way up to my second favourite Horde race – they haven’t quite taken over Blood Elves, but they are damn cool.

It wasn’t until I started levelling Miyu the Enhancement Shaman (which by the way is a name that I believe is now on its’ 3rd character, she has been a Rogue and a Warrior until now) that I decided exactly how awesome they are. You get a fecking vehicle mount! I wasn’t too big a fan of the Goblin mount, I’m still not, but man I want that vehicle mount it’s brilliant and it even has a radio setting. I had fun running over Goblins with it as well, hush.

I like that Blizzard gave you a group of friends, and I absolutely love Globber (the big guy in the middle) he’s brilliant. Though I’m really not that fond of the boyfriend. It’s nothing to do with “Well what if I’d prefer a girlfriend instead?” or anything like that, no, he’s just a bit of a tosser.

Click to embiggen!

After all the being scared shitless thinking you’re about to get “Stood in the Fire” on your Goblin alt, parties, running over pirates, and finding lesbians sat in Gallywix’s bed (I didn’t ask, each to their own), you get to be a true Goblin and set fire to things. With explosives.

Yes, I think I’m going to like this race. I’m officially a Goblin convert.