Fun Times With Friends

Last month I was thrilled to receive an email from a dear friend who I don’t get to talk to very often these days. It was an email addressed to a group of a us that had all ran together back in the day on various servers, in various guilds & even in other games. She was suggesting we pick a night to plan to hang out together and catch up with each other and just have fun. What an awesome idea. To make things simple, after everyone chipped in some suggestions, it was decided we would do some sort of level 1 gnome race through Azeroth because even those of us who had left WoW for good could roll a new toon for free and participate.

December 14th was chosen as the date and Mumble server information was shared. I was so excited and couldn’t wait for the 14th to get here. I missed hanging out with this group of people and the occasional tweets and random gtalk chats with a few of the members just wasn’t enough. Being able to spend a couple of hours in Mumble would be brilliant. Unfortunately, as the date approached, my company holiday party ended up being that same night. Holiday party starting at 7pm, naked gnome race at 8pm. So I had to split my time a bit between the two and I went to the holiday party from 6:30pm (yeah, first one in the door trying to get my time in) to approx. 08:15 pm and then arrived back home and logged into WoW and Mumble to join the gang at about 8:30ish pm.

I had told them beforehand not to wait on me, so when I finally joined they had gotten their gnomes over to Kalimdor and were racing to the Dire Maul meeting stone. Most of them were in Stonetalon Mountains when I arrived so I ended up rolling a Night Elf real quick to sorta catch up and I headed that way.

Yep, I was the last to arrive at the meeting stone but they didn’t have to wait on me more than 10 -15 minutes or so. There wasn’t a lot of screenshots because there were so many deaths and different routes being taken not a lot of us were grouped up together. Especially me, bringing up the rear. But just talking to these guys in Mumble and laughing together and making fun of each other … it was awesome. It did my heart some good. It was a brilliant idea & I am very grateful I got the chance to participate.

Here’s a screenshot of some of us at the meeting stone. It should be easy to spot the beloved brat who initiated the email and was our fearless leader. Just like the old days. She’s so amazing she just hovers above us all. Lol. Good times. Great friends. Loved it.

Then on Sunday evening I happened to be in the right place at the right time and was invited to join my guildies Supp and Ulla for a little time spent working on specific achievements through Heroic scenarios. They were trying to complete specific ones they were missing & needed a warm body to queue. I have done heroic scenarios maybe only a total of 15 times and most of those were on my Troll, so I just followed along and didn’t worry about trying to complete certain objectives. Of course, when you’ve barely done anything and then you’re in a group doing very specific thing, achievements will happen. Thanks again for the fun times, Supp and Ulla. I really appreciate it.

The One Where I Do Something Classy

I had mentioned at the beginning of the month that I’ve been working on leveling a Night Elf Monk to help my guild earn the Stay Classy achievement. Well last night I finally got to 85. It’s been a really fun project in terms of seeing some new people around helping and being able to run some low level stuff with guildies. But it’s also been personally rewarding for me in ways I’m not even sure I can explain. Truly, I cannot explain it. I keep wanting to say something about proving I can set a goal and stick with it until completion … but that’s not something I have trouble with irl and I already have 3 level 90’s in game. So I’m not sure why this character makes me feel proud of completion. Hmm. Anyway, it was rewarding and I’m very proud of it for many unknown and/or ridiculous reasons.

The monk and I have had quite a journey & I am going to be sad when she hits level 90 and just becomes a profession mule for me. She was way more fun than the DK and I feel like I play the monk better than the DK. Maybe I’ll try to fit in dungeons and scenarios with her once or twice a week. I’m not even through leveling her and I feel like I miss her already. Lol.

But now the achievement is … uh … achieved… as far as my participation is concerned and I won’t be spending the majority of my time on her. I must get back to working on improving Elfi in the hope she may one day be a viable Flex option. So I want to use this space to leave a condensed version of the fun we’ve had together.

I started out so innocently in the forests of Teldrassil:

But I immediately ventured out into the world to offer my assistance & I was a pretty quick learner:

Eventually I got to where I was kicking a lot of ass:

And I can’t even count how many beautiful things I saw along the way:

I made sacrifices when necessary & stayed where I was needed:

I elbowed my way through the masses to make sure I got my fair share:

I’m proud to say I did not merely survive, but learned and gained and improved and contributed:

And now I have stepped foot onto new ground & though I will be slowing down a bit in my adventures, I know there are many wonderful things ahead of me:

It’s been a lot of fun. I am glad Business Time allowed me the opportunity to contribute. Now maybe I will convince myself to start seriously working on the handful of alts I have created and never touched. A monster may have been created…

The One Where I’ve Been Monking Around

My guild recently realized we weren’t too terribly far away from earning the Stay Classy achievement and opening up a new bank tab. So the challenge went out to work on some alts if we were interested. Since I am not tied to a toon that has to stay valor capped & raid ready, I knew I should have plenty of time to help so I jumped right in. One of the combinations we needed was Night Elf Monk so I claimed that one as quick as I could. She’s my 4th Night Elf on this server and my first ever monk.

I chose the WindWalker DPS spec and I must say, even though I always claim to hate melee classes, I’m having a lot of fun with her. Am I good at playing her? Doubt it. Am I enjoying playing her? Absolutely. Way more than I expected. The list of what was needed to get the achievement was posted on 11/14, less than 3 weeks ago, and even with an extended 4 day Holiday weekend away from home and making sure I don’t completely ignore my main, I’ve managed to get my Monk up to level 63 (at time of writing). Of course, the 9th Anniversary xp buff could not have happened at a better time; all of us that are helping get these toons up have really benefited from that.

While the Monk herself has been fun, I think the best part of this whole thing has been getting to spend time with some of my favorite Twitter folks who decided to join the guild as social members for the purpose of helping. We’re all leveling pretty quickly and it’s fun to log in and see so many alts all around the same level. I’m lucky in that I’ve got the Monk buff for an hour a day and this is my home server so I have heirlooms – it amazes me that some of these awesome Twitter people are leveling so fast without having any money or heirloom items on this server at all. I’ve tried to offer my money to help them buy new gear, keep up with repairs, etc., but no one will take it. I suppose I should have expected that since you have to be a special kind of crackhead to agree to come to a new server and start a new toon when you have your own stuff you need to keep up with too.

Now that the Anniversary xp buff is gone I am starting to pressure myself to make sure I continue to level as quickly as possible. I’ve been hanging in there around the same level as most people so far, but I am not normally a fast leveler. I get too easily distracted and find myself standing idle quite a bit. But I certainly don’t want to be the person who we’re waiting on for 2 weeks to finish up the achievement. It’s no big deal if I’m the last to hit 85, someone always has to be the last. I just don’t want it to be a situation where I’m the last by a lengthy amount of time.

I will say, leveling up by just running dungeons as fast as the queue will let you has not been as boring as I expected it to be. Maybe that’s because I’m only running each dungeon twice before I’ve levelled away from it. Lol. Now that I’m in the mid 60’s things will likely slow down and I’ll start to get sick of the same ones over and over. I did run Hellfire Rampants 5 times last night & The Blood Furnace 3 times. I’m sure you could tell by the always recognizable weapon in my screenshot that I had been in the Rampants a few times though. The only thing I’ve not been able to do correctly is keep up with two professions. I’m doing skinning and leatherworking and I’ve been making myself stay up with skinning because there’s almost always something to skin in the dungeons. Leatherworking has fallen behind though as I’m not gathering enough of a certain type of leather before I start gathering the next level higher. I suppose if I’d break down and spend some money on some leather I could catch up pretty quickly, but if I’m going to have to do it with money then there’s no difference between doing it now or catching it up later.

Okay, I guess I should do less talking and more leveling. I will be sure to update you once I hit 85 (for the achievement) and 90.

My Blizzcon Experience: Part 1.5

Blizzcon is quickly becoming old news and I still haven’t written my post about all the wonderful people I met, so I apologize in advance for the delay. I hope to have that one published no later than Tuesday so I can move on to talking about other things. Speaking of talking, this post requires very little talking. This is simply where I’m tossing up my cell phone photos that I had taken to update my Facebook page and a few that went out on Twitter. Some of these you’ve not seen before, some of them are almost exact dupes of pics I took with my Nikon.

Inside Hilton lobby on Thursday night

Accidentally meeting Draynee while checking out her awesome costume

Navispammed irl

Darkmoon Rabbit cosplay

Deluxe fries from food truck

Inside Hilton lobby on Saturday night

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!

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 Get Navispammed & I Win A Contest (these events not related)

You guys, this year is going amazing for me so far and based on all the good fortune I’ve had this month, I’m excited to see what lies ahead. A lot of very cool things have happened to me recently and they just won’t all fit in one post, so I’m going to start off by telling you about two very squee worthy happenings involving our amazing WoW community. In chronological order, just to be fair.

First, I GOT NAVISPAMMED!! Woot! What a tremendous surprise. I have been reading of Navimie’s adventures in tracking down members of the community for quite a while now but I never once considered I’d be someone she’d be interested in meeting. I won’t go into great detail about the meeting because she’s already written up a brilliant post with all of the details and plenty of fun screenshots on her own fun blog. I will simply agree with her I was very surprised, I do believe her and I have very similar blogs (though she blows me away with the amount and detail of content) and we totally did jump on the bed in childish abandon. And I will also toss in a few of my own screenshots, although she totally had the screenshot thing covered.

Here we are jumping on the bed:

Here we are being stealthy with Shadowmeld:

And here I am showing off my newly named Teldrassil Sproutling

It was so much fun having Navi surprise me this way. We actually chatted for about an hour and while I taught her that Blingtron will give you pimp clothes, I will admit (with much embarrassment) she had to teach me how to kick my vendors off my mammoth so that she could hop on and get a ride. So it was fun AND a learning experience for us both. Thanks so much for looking me up, Navimie.

NOW ONTO WINNING A CONTEST – I totally did. I won the hell out of a contest and my prize was a brand-spanking new Swift Windsteed. The contest was held on Femtaur.com by Aune (@notanna) and began with this post to submit entries on a good name for the new, strange-looking mount being sold on the Blizzard Store. The winning entry would receive a code for the mount for free and amazingly, I somehow was chosen as the winner. Yay! What a good email to receive when you first wake up. You can read my entry in the post Aune wrote up to announce the winner. Thanks so much, Aune, for hosting this contest and providing such a great prize. Here’s a couple of pictures of me taking my new ride out for a spin.

And finally, I will close by saying that I have finally updated my blog’s background image and header image to reflect the new expansion instead of being stuck in Cataclysm. I realize most people read this from a feed reader so they never see my actual blog, but you should totally go check it out at least once. Although I will say I am not thrilled with my header because I couldn’t remember when I was taking screenshots what the dimensions needed to be and I ended up too close up. I will be redoing it slightly, but it’s basically going to be the same as it is.

The One Where I May Finally Be Getting The Hang Of Pet Battling

I never played Pokemon. Not because I was never interested, exactly, but because I turned 26 the year Pokemon came into existence. I did however have nephews who played all the Game Boy games and watched the cartoons and collected the cards, so I had a basic understanding of it. Now that I’ve dabbled in Pet Battles in WoW, I really wish I had played Pokemon back in the day because I’m beginning to really enjoy this type of little mini-game. Maybe I should pick up a game or two for my Nintendo DS. Yes, maybe I will.

Anyway, point is, it’s been a learning process more so for me than most of you young whippersnappers who grew up with the game. There’s a lot of strategy involved that I’m just now beginning to figure out. I have had many noob moments. Like back in December when I randomly chose to battle and my opponent was a rare I didn’t have. I immediately whipped out my Terrible Turnip because I knew from reading about it on Twitter that the turnip would only take the pet down to 1 health and then you can capture it. What I didn’t realize (because I never had really bothered to pay attention to attack types) is that only weakening blow will leave the pet at 1 health. I went in mashing buttons and killed that rare pretty quickly. Ugh.

Other moronic things I have done as I have slowly started gathering pets is start a battle with 1 or 2 of mine dead and the other at less than half health. That rarely works out, I gotta tell you. I’ve gotten excited about finding something with a slow spawn rate and immediately starting a battle before realizing my pets are level 8 and I’m battling a level 16. That NEVER works out. I’ve camped a slow spawning pet that was 2 levels higher than me and was thrilled the first one I saw was a rare quality and I managed to capture it … only to die on the second pet and not get to keep my captured pet. Which I didn’t realize until I frantically looked through my pet journal and couldn’t find it. Yep, I’ve done a lot of things wrong.

But I’m learning. I’m asking questions on Twitter and reading pet battle blog posts. I’m finally paying attention to what my pets attacks actually do. I’m starting to get the hang of it and the better I get at it, the more addicted I’m becoming. With all of this in mind, I do realize that choosing pets for my team based on how cute they are may not be the best idea. So I’m posting my team here for you guys to make suggestions on what I may want to do differently. Please feel free to look me up on the WoW armory as Elfindale, night elf druid on Moonrunner, and check out what pets I own and let me know your opinion on if i should change up my team or if it’s okay the way it is for now. I welcome all the advice I can get because I’m preparing to really start working on battling and leveling my team up.