Mini Post: The Isle Was A Good Decision

Yesterday I posted that Blizzard themselves are suggesting fresh 90′s should begin questing on the Isle of Thunder to help get geared up and ready for the newly added content. I am not at all a fresh 90, but I was so worried about completing rep for the various factions that I hadn’t ventured over there yet. I was a bit concerned I might have trouble doing the quests because I don’t raid for gear and I assumed the quests would be slightly harder than the Klaxxi and ShadoPan dailies I had been doing.

But I went anyway. I did all of the necessary solo instances and unlocked the beginning of the dailies and I’m back again today doing them. I haven’t had any extra trouble killing mobs. In fact, I’m realizing I was doubting my abilities for no reason – something I also struggle with in real life. So I’m having fun again instead of feeling dread about doing those same old dailies I had been doing. Yes, I will be tired of these eventually but my hope is I won’t have to stay in this area long before I move on to the newer stuff.

Plus today I got the surprise bonus of an achievement. I spotted the gold chest and almost didn’t click on it because I thought “I don’t think I’ve picked up a key here”. Luckily, I’m very curious so I clicked on it anyway. Hooray for achievements!

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.

The One Where I Took The Plunge

Yesterday I wrote an unplanned post about how I just don’t seem to be too focused when I’m logged into WoW. It was prompted by hearing patch 5.2 will be dropping very soon and I just jotted it all down in about 5 minutes based off the emotions the patch news triggered with me. The post got a bit more attention than my posts normally do and I just wanted to take a quick moment to assure everyone, I do enjoy this game and I do have a hell of a lot of fun even when I’m not accomplishing anything. It wasn’t intended to be a complaint, just sort of a “lol, seriously where does the time go” realization. The problem is not that I don’t have fun or that I feel I must be somehow progressing to validate even bothering to play. The problem is I want to do all of the things. I have always been this way in all areas of my life. If you put any faith into astrology, you could chalk it up to the fact that I’m a Virgo.

I am 100% just like that (minus the whole working out thing… while I do have a storehouse of information about diet and health I haven’t quite gotten myself to use it on me). I am a perfectionist. I am a worrywart. I LIVE to serve. That doesn’t mean in the menial sense of fetching you drinks while you lounge on the couch (though I absolutely do tend to wait on people hand and foot to the point of annoying them) but more in a “whatever you may need, I will do my best to provide you with it” kind of way. I believe I can solve everyone’s problem by applying my logic to it and I want to solve problems for people. Except math problems. Get the fuck away from me with your math. Ugh.

The servitude thing is why I spend a lot of time picking shiny flowers to send to friends for flasks, or put in the guild bank for raid flasks even though I’m not on the raiding team. The perfectionist thing is why I jump from one activity to another one every 15 minutes, because I want to be good at pet battles, transmogs, gold-making, dps’ing, etc. all at once. When I am struggling a bit being good at something, like dps’ing, it really hurts my feelings and I tend to begin to worry about it. Yep, I’m a worrywart. Ask Alas, she can tell you. This worrying will build up and frustrate me and if I don’t feel like I’m resolving the issue then I will simply start to avoid it. Which is why I am so hesitant to actually run heroics and had avoided LFR while desperately wanting to jump in there all at the same time.

Luckily I have people in my life who know me well enough to understand I don’t act this way to be a pain in their ass, but because it’s who I am and no matter how badly I want to, I can’t control it. Which is exactly why after Kimber read yesterday’s post she was the first to leave a comment and tell me she was dragging my ass through LFR. And she totally did. We did Mogu’shan Vaults 1 & 2 and Heart of Fear 1 & 2. I would have loved to do Terrace of Endless Spring as well, but unfortunately I ran out of time and had to get ready for work. It was awesome. Kim hopped into Skype with me so she could give me some helpful hints or answer my questions without either of us bothering with push to talk. In our first group, the raid wiped once on Gara’jal the Spiritbinder but that was my only death the entire night. We one shot everyone else. It was bloody brilliant. I am assuming from all the bad things I hear about LFR groups that we just happened to get very lucky with some good runs. I’m glad we did, because my confidence needed it. I didn’t top the meters by any stretch of the imagination but I also didn’t come in at the bottom. Most importantly, not once did anyone call me a douchebag, or yell at me to do something different, or anything of the sort. I had sort of expected to witness general trolling and asshattery from everyone towards everyone, but really all 4 groups were very quiet and did their shit right. We did have 1 guy get kicked for needing on a blue trinket, but I didn’t vote to kick him so it was out of my control.

All in all it was a brilliant night. I had a lot more fun than I expected, the fights weren’t as hard as I expected, and douchebaggery wasn’t as evident as I expected. Plus I got to spend a few hours making as much fun of Kim as I could. I even got a few good drops and my ilvl is now at 180 so I am actually able to get into the new, upcoming LFR as soon as it’s enabled. BONUS! The drops I got last night were Spaulders of the Divided Mind, Fragment of Fear Made Flesh, and Light of the Cosmos.

All in all yesterday was excellent. Big thanks to my friend, Kim for helping me realize I actually can do LFR and big thanks to everyone who read yesterday’s post and left comments for me and retweeted it. You guys all rock!

The One Where I Finally Have My First Complete Transmog

In my continued tradition of remaining far behind the trend with things in-game, I have finally completed my first full transmog set. My beloved Elfi is, of course, the recipient as I would feel very guilty tricking out one of my alts before showing Elfi some tender loving care. Now, it’s not perfect; the professional transmoggers out there should probably not look too closely. The belt could probably be better and the red shirt I am wearing underneath is a bit too bright causing a slight color mismatch. Luckily, you can only see a slight glimpse of it right above the gloves so it doesn’t bother me at all. I did try just removing the shirt, but seeing a flash of skin there did bother me, so I put my shirt back on and have decided to leave it like it is. Honestly, I’m very happy with it. I’ve been wearing it for about 3 days now and every time I shift out of moonkin form and see my fancy red clothes, I always stop to proudly admire how awesome I look. Like I said, it’s not the most professional set but it was easy to obtain and didn’t cost a lot. I am completely thrilled with it.

Here are pictures of front, back and with tabard. Below the pictures you will find WoWhead links to the items.

List of items:
Head slot = Imposing Bandana
Shoulder slot = Wyrmhide Spaulders – DRUID ONLY
Back slot = Ancient Bloodmoon Cloak
Chest slot = Wyrmhide Robe – DRUID ONLY
Hand slot = Wyrmhide Gloves – DRUID ONLY
Waist slot = Prospector’s Sash
Leg slot = Wyrmhide Legguards
Feet slot = Bard’s Boots
Weapon slot = Key to the Planes
* I just realized while typing this up I didn’t do anything with my bracers, but I’m guessing they’re not visible because I’m not noticing an issue

The One Where I Join A New Guild & Rant About Tempest Keep

Gather ’round, everyone. I have an announcement to make. As you can see by the magical floating text being displayed above my head, I have joined a new guild. Some of you may recall I recently mentioned I was casually looking for a new guild to be … err, casual in … and I am happy to report I have found myself a new home. The wonderful people at Business Time graciously allowed me to spend a couple of weeks with them on an alt so we could get to know each other and I could gauge if there was more social activity during the main hours I am logged into the game than there was in my current guild. I am happy to report they didn’t immediately hate me and they are indeed more chatty and have more people online at once than I had been previously experiencing. On Saturday night they offered to let me make them my new, permanent home. I moved Elfindale over that night and have really enjoyed seeing all the good-natured guild chat and how they all pick on each other. So while I always get a little sad and totally feel bad when I leave a guild behind, I can’t help but be excited to have a more social experience now. Thank you, Business Time, for letting me hang with you guys.

In other news, I am frustrated. Can you tell? Even though my friend Grace can easily solo Tempest Keep (and in fact, last week she finally got the Ashes of Al’ar mount. YAY!) and has explained her method to me in vent I am still going in there and dying repeatedly after I burn all the weapons down and the 4 asshats that are Kael’thas sidekicks make their way back to me. At the start of the fight, I am running back to the entrance & downing those 4 in varying intervals between the entrance and Kael’s room, but as they all come back to life once the weapons are dead I just am unable to do anything else. Even with the staff equipped and being used, I stay stunned, disoriented, silenced with no chances to heal myself or throw more than one or two instant spells until finally I’m dead. I read on the forums that there seems to be a bug where the buff from the staff does not work and others have experienced the same problem I am having. But it’s odd that I would get that bug every time and Grace never saw it once. Stupid Undead Priests.

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.

My WoW Secret Santa Gift Has Arrived

Hooray for getting packages in the mail! Granted, I only check my mail about once a week so it’s very likely this package had arrived days earlier, but that’s neither here nor there. On Monday I got my WoW Secret Santa gift! I have no idea who it’s from AT ALL. Either it’s someone on Twitter I’ve not yet stumbled across or it’s someone who I do follow but clearly have no clue where they live because the return address didn’t ring a bell to me. In fact, the return address thoroughly confused me because it only listed a first name and an address and the first name was the exact same as mine. Even spelled the same, which is not the most common spelling. So I don’t know if my Secret Santa shares a first name with me, or just threw mine in there to stay a secret for a while longer. I didn’t spend too much time pondering about the address though, I jumped right in and started ripping it open.

Once unwrapped I quickly discovered I had NOT been sent a cake:

But the box was filled with goodies much better than a coffee cake:

Aside from the adorable, glittery mouse on the Christmas card, I got a handmade SpongeBob SquarePants ornament. Because he’s my fave cartoon ever. Here’s the front and the back:

And I got two AMAZING origami ornaments. I am so impressed with people who can do this. I love them so much. One is Alliance colors (awesome!), the other is my favorite color (even awesomer!) and I suppose Horde colors

And here’s the whole bundle of wonderful all together. Thank you Secret Santa! I love the gifts so much. I can’t wait to learn who they’re from.