The One Where I’m Getting My Groove Back

Back when MoP was new and everyone was busy farming their asses off and raising lots of vegetables and cooking lots of things … I was concentrating on making money. I farmed vegetables and immediately sold them on the AH instead of stockpiling them or leveling my cooking. As soon as I unlocked the Songbell seeds, I began planting them for Motes of Harmony and quit vegetables all together. The reason being I could use the motes to make extra Living Steels. Which I then sold for money. I like money. I always want more of it. Strangely, I never really have a lot of in-game money due to not actually playing on a serious daily basis and not having enough high level alts to help support my own crafting. Which means I never really made a huge amount of money off of Living Steel because I had to buy Ghost Iron Bars to make Trillium to then make the Living Steel. While there was a profit margin there, it wasn’t a very large one. Especially considering I only used my daily Living Steel transmute an average of 4 days a week. Or some weeks not at all. But I digress; I never stockpiled vegetables or leveled my cooking. That’s the main point here.

Guess what happened when I decided last week I wanted to become Master of all the Ways? I totally had to buy ridiculous amounts of vegetables and meats. I also had to spend lots of hours fishing so I could bundle them into groceries and trade them in for IronPaw Tokens to buy Soy Sauce and all the veggies and meats that were not available on the AH. I was able to grab some stacks of ingredients from the guild bank and I’m very grateful for that and hopefully payed generously enough to compensate for them, but I still had to come up with a lot of the ingredients myself. My in-game money averages around 15,000 gold (seriously, i have GOT to be better at doing dailies and running dungeons) and while I did accomplish what I wanted to accomplish by the time Saturday afternoon had rolled around, my 15k had dwindled down to around 6k. I feel so broke. But it was worth it to get those achievements and finally have that all finished up.

Now I just need to learn to be more dedicated to spending my time in game wisely. I get so easily distracted. I do seem to be heading the right direction though as I made myself buckle down and finish up my Klaxxi reputation by doing those dailies very regularly over the past week.

Maybe the fact that I’m really, REALLY, loving my Death Knight and now have her at level 86 and questing in the Valley of the Four Winds will inspire me to do dailies more consistently. She kicks some serious ass even though I’m merely facerolling my keyboard. I think dailies with her will go much quicker. Plus, she’s now mining ghost iron ore so she can help Elfi transmute living steel without having to pay for mats. It’s actually a little concerning to me that I seem to take down mobs in the Valley faster with my lvl 86 DK than I do with Elfi who has an ilvl of 480. I guess the real test will be if I ever brave up enough to take Morrissa into dungeons. Because I’m playing her by facerolling my keyboard, I’ve been hesitant to do any grouping. I’m such a sensitive little thing sometimes. I don’t want any big, bad internet strangers mocking me. But aside from all that, she seriously kicks ass.

Let The Boring Blog Posts Begin Again

Heads up, suckers! I have found my way back online. My grandfather has improved enough to be moved to a nursing facility near his house for therapy. That means my mother no longer has to stay with me and since he’s back to being 2 hours away and out of danger, I don’t have to spend my days sitting at the hospital. My free time has returned and as a direct result so has my derping around. I’ll admit, the first night I was able to login I did not stay online long. Even though it had only been roughly 5 weeks I had been gone, I had been so focused on other things and so stressed out that I let WoW leave my mind completely. Which resulted in me logging in to Elfindale, gathering my crops and planting new ones, and then standing there in the middle of my farm staring at my bags trying to figure out why I had all that shit and what the hell was it all even for. After about 15 minutes of this brainless staring at inventory, I gave up and logged out.

The next night I logged back in to find my brain had mostly returned to normal and I was able to do dailies, run a scenario and switch over to my DK for some leveling. Ah, it feels so good to be back. I’m behind in that I’ve not done any Thunder Island stuff, so I need to hop over there. However, I think before I get sucked into the island hub, I’m going to finish up some things on Elfi I never got around to, such as finishing off my cooking by completing all of the Ways and getting a few more reputations up to exalted. I will simultaneously work on taking my DK from 86 to 90 so she can fly while gathering ore for me.

In almost related news, screenshots:

The One Where A Gamble Paid Off

When I first started playing WoW, The Burning Crusades was already live so my first experience with an expansion launching was Wrath of the Lich King. By the time Wrath was ready to be launched, I had already fallen in love with the game and recognized that a new expansion was a big deal. I took the night off work and stood in line at a local Game Stop to purchase a copy of Wrath at midnight. Because I was one of the first 100 through the door (number 12, to be exact) I got a free poster of Arthas. Regrettably, I did not purchase the Collector’s Edition because I had not reserved one 8 months in advance and they had no extra copies available at that store at midnight. I blame this on my noobness. As soon as I realized how cool the Collector’s Editions are, how much this game means to me and how (at least it seemed at the time) uncommon the CE’s are, I vowed to never make that mistake again. I have the Collector’s Editions of both Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria because I was smart enough to put my name on a list well in advance for both of those launches, though it does seem now they are easier to come by.

Over the years, I have always stared longingly at Amazon and Ebay as Collector’s Editions of World of Warcraft (vanilla), The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King were listed for hundreds and hundreds of dollars each. Even though I could technically afford them, I just couldn’t allow myself to pay such large amounts of money for a game. Especially a copy of a game I already own a version of. I’ve pretty much resigned myself to never getting a chance to own the original game (vanilla) Collector’s Edition because of it’s extreme rarity, but I did decide to do a quick search for TBC and Wrath every few months just in case I found someone who didn’t realize what they had. Over the past year I had even allowed myself to consider buying a used copy with an already used game code as long as the box contained all of the other items that were originally included. But those would have to cost even less to justify purchasing them.

Cut to two weeks ago when I happened to think about doing a quick eBay search at work and found a deal that seemed too good to be true. A mint, unopened, factory sealed version of The Burning Crusade Collector’s Edition for a buy it now price of $165 and free shipping. Oh the agony. It’s a bit much to spend but it was an amazing price for that product IF the product was actually as described. To make matters even scarier, the seller had only 2 reviews… he was basically a noob seller, an unknown. Both of his reviews were positive, but still that’s a big risk. After a quick question posed to Twitter and a few hours of agonizing over it, I decided to take the risk. It’s tax return season so I had more extra money than usual and I knew PayPal offered a buyer’s protection for purchases that weren’t shipped or advertised correctly. I clicked the button and bought it.

I didn’t receive any type of confirmation from the seller himself, just the email from eBay letting me know my purchase was successful. It was several stressful days before I got an update the item had shipped and then a week of waiting for it to arrive. But finally, last Friday, The Burning Crusades Collector’s Edition was in my hands. Unfortunately, I was rushing out of town for 3 days and while I could have taken it with me, I decided to wait until I was back home to break it open and see if it was truly an unused game code.

I’m happy to report it was exactly as advertised. I am now the very proud owner of all the items included in the box (all still completely wrapped and unopened, as was the box itself) and I have a new Netherwhelp pet in my collection. I still don’t know that I’ll ever get this lucky with a copy of the vanilla CE, but after a few months have passed I will start watching again for a copy of Wrath. I just hope I get as lucky as I did this time around.

After attaching the code to my account last night, I knew that as soon as I opened the pet in the mail I would get the achievement. I positioned myself to capture the perfect screenshot but as you can see, at the moment I grabbed the pet from the mail, Elfi turned around and put her back to the camera. Grrr. Oh well, it’s not like I can get a redo, so it is what it is. I’m still super excited. And yes, the seller got excellent feedback from me.

Lunar Festival Madness: Why Am I Doing This Again?

In-game holidays are fun, right? (Sidenote: how the hell is that dude riding his wind serpent upside down? [not an innuendo])

When the achievement “What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been” went live in September 2009 I immediately began doing all the things. I actually got the achievement pretty quick, though if I remember right I had to wait for the second Love Is In The Air to roll around because I missed one of the elements the first time. I was actually trying to verify the dates a few minutes ago by viewing my achievements, but I don’t believe they’re displaying correctly. If they are, then I actually completed this the first time through each event.

EITHER WAY, the point is I haven’t done the Lunar Festival in it’s entirety since then. I mean, if I happen across an Elder I will stop and get free xp or gold depending on my character, but I haven’t bothered to fly all the places and track them all down in years. However this year the Lunar Festival happens to coincide with me making a big effort to level up my DK. She’s around the lvl 64, 65 mark so when the event began I thought to myself “self, you should fly around the lands and get that free xp. It will be easier than leveling and will fit right in to your lazy lifestyle.” Of course, I still have other toons to take care of, so I’m not devoting all of my time to it but I’ve been chasing down Elders for a few hours a day the past 3 days and I’m really starting to question if it’s worth it. I mean, I’m not max level so in enemy territory the NPCs are kicking my ass. In the higher level Northrend and Cataclysm zones, any old regular mob I get too close to is kicking my ass. As a DK I basically went from Eastern Plaguelands to Hellfire Peninsula so even though we start off with a lot of flight paths already known to us, most of my maps aren’t opened up to show location names. This means I’m spending a lot of time tabbed out to look up coordinates for the majority of the elders. So between the repair bills and all the wasted time running back to my body, flying across the land and tabbing out every 3 minutes I’m beginning to wonder why I’m doing this. I am pretty sure if I had stayed in Nagrand and continued questing this entire time, I’d be leveling much faster. Although I will say I am enjoying grabbing all of the mining nodes I come across.

Oh that’s right. I’m doing it for the Lunar Lantern. Never mind the rant, totally worth it.

image credit goes to WarcraftPets.com http://www.warcraftpets.com/wow-pets/magic/lanterns-and-lamps/lunar-lantern/

Also, I am now realizing I should do this on one of my Horde toons to get that pet as well. But I can guarantee I will use the level 90 for that adventure.

Hooray For New Mounts

My tiny little Horde guild managed to luck into 5 of us online last Friday evening and we stormed through Ulduar 10 man to collect our Rusted Proto Drakes. Achievements and mounts for everyone! Next on the agenda, finish the 25 man run we have mostly completed to get the Ironbound Proto Drakes for those of us who still don’t have them.

Sidenote: It is hard to get a good picture of 5 flapping drakes. Sorry my dragon is rudely covering your face, Morgrull.

The One Where I’m Making Some Progress

At the first of the year I wrote a post about how I was finally ready to make my time in WoW all about me instead of following a crowd or doing things because I felt they were the expected order of things. I mentioned I was going to work on setting some specific goals for myself concerning what my top 3 or 4 main focuses would be. I haven’t actually decided on any specific goals yet, but I certainly have made sure I’ve done more than login just to sit idly and hope some sort of opportunity walks up and smacks me in the back of the head. I’ve been spending more time on alts and just doing whatever random things I have felt like doing. It’s been a lot of fun. I have a total of 11 characters across 4 servers now and between those 11 characters I am in 2 different Horde guilds on a permanent basis, 2 different Alliance guilds (1 as a trial member on a Shaman I’m leveling just to check the guild out) and 2 characters who are guildless just because I like them that way at the moment. I’m feeling pretty good with the state of things and I can tell I’ve actually managed to let go of a lot of the pressure I was putting on myself for no reason. I’m like a free spirit in-game currently. Logging in to whatever faction, guild, character I feel like without worrying about needing to put face time in anywhere with anyone. Well, except for my besties in Cat Ate It on Proudmoore. When they are online I come running cause they’re awesome.

Point is, as a result of this recent free spirit attitude of mine I’ve actually been accomplishing things. This will be completely boring to anyone besides me, but thanks to the wonderful add-on Multishot, I can actually easily see that over the past 2 weeks I have achieved a lot. There are a few that appear to be duplicates, but they were done on separate characters so they count as a new one in my book. And I apologize in advance for the crappy, inconsistent sizes and resolutions of these screenshots. I was lazy and did this at work where I don’t have my fancy photo editing software.

The One Where I Kill A Big Thing

Yesterday morning one of my guildies gave me a heads-up and an invite for a Galleon group. Yes, plz! I’ve only spotted him up twice since the expansion launched and hadn’t ever been around to notice a group forming. I had no idea if I’d get any loot, but I totally wanted the Extinction Event achievement. So it was a great surprise to actually get a pair of 496 boots [Stompdodger Boots] and the additional achievement It’s Over Nine Thousand.

We won’t talk about where I came in on Recount. In my defense I was taking lots of screenshots. >.<

Finally, No More Dark Soil For Me

As I mentioned in my last post, I have spent the past several weeks absolutely obsessed with farming dark soil. But I am happy to report that is no longer going to be a massive time suck for me as I am now best friends with the 10 Tiller farmers who I’ve been spending all my time sucking up to. I had been worried about whether or not I would be able to break my dark soil habit once I no longer needed it, but was relieved to discover that while I can still see the random piles of dirt, they are no longer lootable for me. Thank. The. Gods. Now I will have more time to queue for heroics and work on some of the more important reputation grinds which will actually give me gear and other useful things. Not that I’m mouthing the Tiller reputation, because farming is fun and I love my animals and other things I received. But those things aren’t going to advance my game and that is my main goal for this expansion. Which reminds me, I still need to write a bucket list post for what I want to accomplish in Mists.

Anywho, hooray for best friends!