The One Where It’s Druid Week

Another alt appreciation post: #DRUIDWEEK

Ah, Druids. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways… okay, there are too many ways to count. On with the post about druids. I love mine. Especially Elfi, of course. Elfindale is not only my main, she was the only level capped toon I ever had until about 2 weeks before MoP was released. So she’s always been my main, my one true love.

In fact, Elfi is the actual very first character I ever rolled. I was such a noob. I had never before played any MMO when my brother talked me into trying WoW, so even though he told me what server he was on, I didn’t know that meant I had to choose that server to create my toon on. I created Elfi on whatever random server Blizzard was defaulting to at the time and very slowly started leveling her up. After a few days of working on her my brother logged in and tried to whisper me. That’s when he realized I did the server thing wrong and explained it to me. /facepalm. I had no idea. Elfi was around level 17.. not very far along at all. But did I re-roll on my brother’s server? Hell no! I loved Elfi already so I paid $25 to transfer my only character to a new server at level 17. It really is ridiculous looking back at it. But as I stated, I was completely new to MMO’s and I went in with my heart on my sleeve. I really took my time identifying with Elfi.

Actually, when I finally let my brother talk me into playing and I created and paid for my account – it took me over a week to even launch the game and roll Elfi. Why? Because I had to decide on her name first. I had already researched the game enough to know I wanted to be a Night Elf because I like the whole hippy, earthy, dainty, magical elf thing. And I knew I wanted to be a druid because it combined magic and shape-shifting. These things seemed amazing to my little inexperienced brain. But what to name her… hmmm. It had to be something I could live with the rest of my life (I don’t know why I thought that these characters must be permanent. Lord knows I’ve deleted my fair share in the years since).

Every time I tried to think of a good name for an elf, the word Elfindale would instantly pop into my head. At the time, Elfindale Mansion was a place I drove by every day on the way to work and back home. It’s a locally famous historical landmark and not only did I see the mansion sign all the time, the immediate area around it is Elfindale Center and that huge sign is right next to the road. For days I tried to think of a cool elf name and for days Elfindale echoed inside my head. Finally I caved. I named her Elfindale. I named her after a shopping center, rolled her on the wrong server and paid $25 to move her when I could have just leveled a new toon to 17 in a matter of hours. Yep, I love that druid.

Here’s some young Elfi shots:

But this is alt appreciate week, not main appreciation week. So why am I blathering about Elfi? Geesh, sorry about that. Okay, so I mentioned above that I only had 1 level capped toon until right before MoP launched. Anyone care to guess what my second high level toon was? Yes, that’s right – a Worgen druid. Her name was Morena and although the Worgen sniffing could be a little distracting, I really enjoyed her while she was alive. I worked hard to get her from 70 – 85 in about 2 weeks so I could claim two max level toons. Once Mists was available, I spent 4 days getting Elfi to 90 and then immediately worked on Morena. I didn’t do her as fast, but she was 90 within 2 weeks.

I suppose if you get completely technical about it, she is still alive. I mean, I didn’t delete her. But when my temporary SWTOR career ended and several of my friends returned to WoW, there were a couple of them that were die-hard Hordies. In order to be able to spend some time in-game with them, I server transferred and faction changed Morena. Obviously she couldn’t be Worgen anymore, so she became a Troll druid. Additionally, the name Morena wasn’t available on the new server so I just completely changed it to my SWTOR name, Krisstalys (except with an extra “s” because Kristalys was also already taken. /shakes fist at high pop servers).

Yep, I love druids. I’ve actually got a few other lowbie druids sprinkled around just for fun. There’s just something about shapeshifting I really enjoy. Oh, and Flight Form. Yeah, Flight Form is the best thing ever. Oh, and back when I was actually a Resto healer I also loved Tree Form. Ah, memories. Makes me smile to remember the good old days.

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

Ah Achievements, How I’ve Missed Thee

Last night I spent a couple of hours on Elfi (original Elfi, not evil clone Elfi) just trying to slowly get back into the swing of doing some dailies and remembering what spell does what. After the daily fishing and cooking quests, I went to Hyjal and worked on dailies there. Man, I had not been there in so long. And I don’t mean because I’m playing Star Wars, I mean even months before that. It’s really starting to sink in with me just how much I had not been enjoying myself in Azeroth the last several months I was there. What I still can’t seem to figure out is why. It had nothing to do with my guild, it had nothing to do with me being a healer, I guess it was just burn out? I find that hard to believe since I’ve never been a raider so I wasn’t suffering from weekly wipes or anything like that. Like I said previously, I just felt lost. I don’t think it was with the game specifically, because in 2011 I really started to spend some time rolling new characters on random servers and leveling them all up to around 30 before wandering off to do it again with another new character. So I was still enjoying questing and being logged in. But then while I was on those servers I didn’t have any of my friends around, so I would begin to get bored. Does any of that make any sense?

And what the hell does any of that have to do with the title of this post? See how easily distracted I can get? So back to Hyjal. I’m questing away, beating on some Pyrelords in Sethria’s Roost, I saw a shadow on the ground of something huge and dragon-like flying above me. I looked up and sure enough, it was Andrazor. Since my Pyrelord had just died I shifted into flight form and chased the fiery bird down. Once I was over an area I knew I could land safely, I cast moonfire (it’s so great I can cast this in flight form) and dropped down to a ledge where Andrazor begin attacking me. I had been working on the Protectors of Hyjal quest, so I had my little gang of bad ass druids with me and we start wailing away. But not very far into the fight, he was spraying fire all over me and as I turned to move out of the path of said fire, I fell off the ledge. It was in an area where I could not climb back up to it and I couldn’t mount or shapeshift because I was still in combat. So I just stood there looking up and seeing bits of fire and a few random feet and elbows as the fight continued. Suddenly, I noticed Andrazor’s health was really going down at a pretty good clip. By now my little band of npc’s should have died or Andrazor should have came to find me. But instead, I was somehow still winning the fight. I decided it must be a bug, but I would gladly accept the kill regardless. A couple of minutes later and the fight is over. I fly up and loot the body and I’m celebrating secretly to myself about how the fight bugged out, when I suddenly notice Caligan had said “where are you Elfi?” in guild chat. I said I was in Hyjal doing dailies and he said something about being there too. I don’t remember how the conversation went exactly, but I asked him if he had happened to see my battle with the fire bird. He said something along the lines of “Yep, I was right there.” Then I see he has waved to me. Ah, he must be close. But where?

To make an already long story a little less longer… or something, Cal had been fighting the damn bird the whole time. He was standing right behind me on the ledge as I looted. I have no idea where he came into the fight, he obviously spotted me and came over to help and I had no idea. It was him on the ledge killing the elite that I was so proud of. Lol. When I got knocked off he didn’t know where I was. Since I thought I was there alone, I wasn’t updating anyone on what was going on. So I had a good laugh at my stupidity and the fact that I’m so unobservant. And he likely had a good eye-roll about the same things. But then he spotted Fah Jarakk standing right below us so he suggested we group up and kill that guy too. We requested the help of a guildie to come bear tank for us and we killed that dude dead. Can you guess what happened next? No, you’re wrong. What happened next was we looked up and Searris was standing just right over yonder. So we ran right over and killed that dude dead too. I finally got the achievement for The Fiery Lords of Sehria’s Roost. Woot. I don’t recall off the top of my head how long achievements have been in the game now, but I still love seeing those damn things pop up. I also still love my multishot add-on that automatically takes screenshots of achievements, because I forgot to.

And then? Then as we were headed back out of Sethria’s Roost, Cal spotted the fire dog, Kelbnar, which he still needed to get his achievement. We swooped down and beat that puppy worse than Michael … nevemind. It really was amazing to have them all spawned right there at the same time. In 15 minutes we had killed all 4 required for this achievement. It was a lot of fun and I appreciate the help I got from my guildies.

The One Where I Tell You Things. Important Things.

Do you know what I remember most about RIFT launching earlier this year? I remember how pissed off some people were that the WoW blogs they were following suddenly became inundated with posts about RIFT. While I’m not one who gets angry very often, I did understand (and mostly agree with) how annoying it was. Which is why I will be doing my Star Wars: The Old Republic blogging on a completely separate site. A site that will not be mentioned here, or linked to in any way. If you want to find me, you’re just going to have to stumble across me and hope you recognize my writing style. Hint: I will NOT be using “The One Where…” to start the majority of my posts, so don’t look for that. If you do find me, I may or may not confirm that you found me. Ha, this is fun already.

So why did I bring it up at all? Because I am not playing SWTOR in secret. I’m also not abandoning World of Warcraft or Elfi’s World because of it. But it is highly likely that between checking out a new game and the holiday season being upon us, things will slow down around here. I am not planning on cancelling my subscription to WoW (obviously i can’t promise that won’t change, but it will be a ways off if it does) and I know I’ll log in for some Winter Veil fun, so there will still be a few screenshots and observations going on here. I just wanted to give you a preemptive explanation about the cobwebs which you may soon notice gathering in the corners. Maybe I’ll play Star Wars for several weeks and decide it’s just not for me. Or maybe I’ll decide it’s all I ever wanted and I have lost interest in WoW. Hopefully, everything will go as I want it to and I will just be happy as hell with both games and split my time between the two. Whichever way it goes, I promise to make a statement about it here so that you all know what’s up. It always bothers me when a blog just stops abruptly and the loose ends aren’t tied up, makes me imagine bad things have happened.

Okay, we got that out of the way. Now onto other things. This just in – Elfindale, who has spent her entire life believing she was born to heal, is now officially a full-time laser chicken. It’s slightly disappointing, but necessary. There were a lot of factors involved. For one thing, I have been very unfocused while in-game for quite some time now (insert SWTOR here) and as a result I’m doing even more standing around Stormwind and simply chatting in guild chat than ever before. I have not been running dungeons so my gear is rapidly becoming outdated. My ability to heal is getting really rusty (insert recent story about wiping repeatedly and failing hard). And the most recent thing, the thing that actually caused me to have a meltdown Saturday morning and go off into a very rare rage (which lasted all of about 30 seconds)… I finally got all of the Darkmoon cards I needed to make a deck and get my Darkmoon Tsunami Card. Wait, why is that a bad thing? Maybe because when I combined them into a deck I got a Hurricane deck and not a Tsunami deck. INORITE? I COULDN’T BELIEVE IT EITHER. That’s probably the closest I’ve ever came to crying as a direct result of the game. Not counting that one time when my GM abandoned me like last week’s garbage.

So what do you do when after weeks of stress and frustration you end up with the wrong damn item? You take it as a sign. I suck at healing, my guild doesn’t need a healer, I don’t have a fucking Darkmoon Tsunami card trinket and at this point I hope to never lay eyes on one EVER. Ding! Switch to dps and enjoy a new laid back lifestyle. Luckily, our resident serious raider Boomkin was online at the time, so I asked her if the Darkmoon Hurricane trinket would be good for me to use for dps. She actually suggested the Volcano card instead. I immediately went to the AH, threw that damn Hurricane deck up for sale and purchased the Volcano trinket for about 7k. Done and done. I’m swearing off Darkmoon cards for good after this mess. But again, thanks to my guildie who put so much time and energy into crafting for me.

Let’s see, what else? I’ve gone another year without completing the Terokkar Turkey Time achievement during Pilgrim’s Bounty. How disappointing. I’m normally pretty OCD about completing holiday achievements, but just can’t seem to make myself complete this one. Maybe because a couple of years ago, when it was still a decent fight, I killed they guy but had forgotten to wear my stupid pilgrim hat and now I’m subconsciously avoiding the whole situation? Who knows. That’s just the way things seem to be going with me lately. If it ain’t one thing, it’s another. Good news is, as long as I have plenty of stupid stories about myself to tell you, I’ll just keep posting them here. Until then, may the force be with me.

Guest Post: D.E.R.P.

In honor of today marking my 1 year anniversary of being a WoW blogger, the following guest post was graciously written for me by my dear friend, Alas from Kiss My Alas. I appreciate her and her guest post soooo much, but honestly she still owes me cookies and this doesn’t make up for that.

Elfi asked me for a guest post for her one year blog anniversary and I figured I probably better humor her since

1. She’s written me a number of guest posts over the years and
2. She has my address.

I’m not going to lie; I had a hard time coming up with something that seemed like a good fit for this guest post. I’m having trouble writing anything in general for my own damn blog, so I hope Elfi reads this closely and realizes what a hardship this is for me. (I bet she won’t. I bet she’ll say something like: “It’s about time you got this to me. Where are my fucking cookies?”)

Anyhow. Elfi usually takes some time to point out variously my flaws or my virtues when she does something guesty for me. It was thinking about that which led me into my topic for her. See, I was fairly certain I had written a guest post here before and sang some praises, so I thought I might turn the tables on her and write a post telling you all how rotten and evil and mean she could be. But then it struck me that not only would that be phoning it in, I really don’t have any reason to make up vicious lies about Elfi.

So instead I’m here to tell you about a terrible disease that I am pretty sure Elfi has.

D.E.R.P.

Not to be confused with H.E.R.P. (Hunters Effing Raids Perpetually), D.E.R.P., or Dementedly Exhibiting Random Personalities is a serious disease that mostly affects Druids because they are the champions of being jacks of all trades. Think about it: No other class is capable of filling every possible type of role the way Druids can. Some other hybrid classes are susceptible to this horrible disease, but my Recent Scientific Studies show that there is a much higher percent rate of this crippling illness in Druids; more than twice of what the second most affected class, Paladins, has displayed.

Studies suggest that Druids are affected to the extent that they are precisely because of their propensity to be constantly changing forms. In many of the worst diagnosed cases, sufferers of D.E.R.P. will often wake up in forms they don’t remember shifting into.

Fortunately, Elfi so far seems to be a somewhat mild case, exhibiting only an inability to speak with consistency on any given topic (as is demonstrated by the way she either praises or abuses me) and in other erratic behavior, such as running into walls when she should be healing and then blaming the erratic behavior on outside causes, such as lag.

One cause for concern is that Elfi has also demonstrated an unhealthy addiction to the ability to shift into multiple forms. While she claims most often to be “Elfi,” there has also been a disturbing trend where she would insist that her name is Morena. Never mind that she still looks like a giant, deranged chicken.

Right now there is no known cure for D.E.R.P., and those afflicted with the disease have shown a disturbing tendency to only degrade over time, becoming more DERPy, if you will.

Because my friend is being slowly overtaken by this crippling disease, I plan on creating a foundation in her name. If you have any gold to spare, please consider donating to the Elfindale Stop the D.E.R.P. Foundation. Only you can help prevent more deranged and overgrown chickens.

How I Handle The Daily Hallow’s End Quests Involving Undercity

I know I am not the first person to have figured this out, but since I died like 5 times at the hands of an Undead Mage before I realized what I should do differently, I thought I’d go ahead and post it just in case someone else is having trouble. I am of course referring to the Alliance version of the daily quest from the Hallow’s End holiday event currently ongoing. The quest A Time To Lose is picked up right outside the gates of Stormwind and requires you to travel to the Ruins of Lordaeron (courtyard in front of Undercity) to douse the Horde’s Wickerman. The quickest flight path is to go from Stormwind to Androhal, Western Plaugelands and then fly over to Undercity from there. Of course, if you’re all about the hax, you can actually cheat on getting to Undercity by accepting and completing the Stink Bombs Away quest which instantly places you inside Undercity on the back of a broom dropping stink bombs. Once you’ve dropped all 25, instead of telling the broom to return you to Stormwind, just log out of the game real quick. When you log back in you will find yourself at the graveyard near the Scarlet Monestary just a hop, skip and jump away from where the wickerman is.

But I don’t want you to hop, skip and jump your way there. I want you to fly. The easiest way I’ve found for dousing the Wickerman is to fly up on the backside of him, look around to make sure no Horde are camping there on the top of the wall, and then actually land on the wickerman’s shoulder and quickly cast the dousing agent. If you’re a druid you can really get away with one here because with flight form it’s easier to land on his shoulder and then once you’ve got him doused you can immediately shadowmeld and then instant flight form up and away. Once you’re outside of the city just land and hearth and you’ve just completed 2 dailies with minimal effort.

Screenshot Saturday

Getting down to business.

The One Where I Redo All Of My Bars… UGH!

I don’t know how everyone else plays a druid, since I’ve only ever been me while playing a druid, but when I play a druid (that was almost confusing) I manage to use all of the forms at some point. While flight form, travel form, and aquatic form don’t affect your action bars at all, bear form, cat form, and Moonkin form all do. There is a point to all of this and I have two screenshots to share, but unfortunately, I have already exceeded the number of commas allowed in a post and I must end it here. Thank you and goodnight.

Okay, fuck grammar. This is the interwebz and it doesn’t care. Back to what I was saying. Basically my bars were all messed up. Every time I redid my talent tree, stuff on main spec bar got changed but stuff on the other bars did not. Then Blizzard screwed up my ENTIRE WORLD by taking away permanent tree form. I used to be able to walk around in my resto spec but in my natural night elf form and use my damage spells on my main action bar to do questing and protect myself. Once I shifted into tree mode to work as a healer, my action bar would shift with me and all my healing spells would magically appear. Magic is cool. Blizzard ate my magic. Let me go off on a small tangent here, one I’ve gone off on before, and say that I still don’t understand why they did this to me. They claim it’s because some mysterious people were complaining they never got to see their tier gear because they were always shape-shifted. Yet the tree was the only form they removed. Healers were the only ones affected. Seriously, the balance spec doesn’t need to look like laser chicken’s to do dps… other classes do dps without shifting. So if this really were about people seeing their gear more, they should have also taken away Moonkin form. Yes, I’m still QQ’ing even after all this time.

So not only did some of my bars have outdated crap on them, most of them had spells that were common to all forms in completely different locations. Every time I switched I was a tiny bit confused. Don’t misunderstand, it never rarely affected my dungeons and raid runs because I had the buttons mostly memorized on the forms I used the most. It was just a minor inconvenience if I had to go bear all of a sudden in an effort to get away from a mob without dying. Or when I switch to cat and prowl around things I would normally have to kill.

In addition to needing them to all make sense and match up well my whole bars area just needed to be resized and reconfigured. I use Dominos for my bar mod and I have had no problems with it, I just needed to redo it and make it look better. Line up my whole UI a bit more and make things a bit more even. So even though you won’t see how the bars look every time I change forms, I do have a before and after screenshot for you.

*click on the pictures for da big size

Here’s the before – not too terrible, but just not good and a bit too tiny.

And here’s the after – you may think at first the changes are too subtle, but they are huge in terms of making my life easier.