A Midsummer Pet Collector's Dream

Happy Canada Day, fellow Canuckistanian WoW nerds!

I told you I've been busy!

Well, the Midsummer festival is winding down on Azeroth, and that's okay with me. I have, in the past week-ish, gotten:

-A Scorchling pet for my warlock
-A Captured Flame for ALL my toons
-The "Flame Warden" title on my warlock and mage [the warlock being the toon I am working on the "What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been" meta-achievement with]

But wait, there's more!

I also:

-Fished up Mr. Pinchy, FINALLY! On my hunter. Got the Magical Crawdad on my second wish! =)
-Completed the "Lil' Game Hunter" achievement [75 mini-pets on one toon] and earned myself a fawn pet
-FINALLY got the Green Proto-Drake Mount!!! After getting the mount, I promptly switched Snooky from Oracles to Frenzyheart. I love those Wolvar. I really do.

While that doesn't sound like so much in text, it's a lot of work running 10 toons around honoring/extinguishing fires all over Azeroth and Outland! But it was well worth it. The quest experience leveled a whole bunch of my toons, and I had a great Indiana Jones-esque escape from Orgimmar on my mage that I will remember for a long time. haha.

My guild has started alt-night Naxx runs for the time being [til 3.2, I'd surmise] and I opted out this week so my husband could join in. We haven't had the healers for Ulduar lately, but we'll get back in there soon. My friend Lieke - the girl I mentioned in a previous entry, recruit from wow_ladies - has been working very hard to gear her paladin for healing, and she cleaned house for upgrades on the last Naxx run I was in with her, so she'll be Ulduar-ready in no time.
Also, the pally Lieke was supposed to "replace" so-to-speak recently returned to the game, so that's great too. It gives a couple of people who rolled healers for the sake of the guild when they had other "mains" initially a chance to return to a class they actually enjoy playing. =)

Patch 3.2, OMG

So, after reading WoW.com's post about the 3.2 Patch Notes, I think I am even more excited for this patch than I was for the last one. I'll highlight some things that made me squee.

Isle of Conquest - New battleground omg! It looks like it's going to be a mix of Arathi Basin and Alterac Valley kind of? Grabbing nodes and storming the Keep to kill the General. Sounds pretty cool. I do like to take a break from alt-grinding to PVP so I am excited to try this out.
While on the subject of PVP: They are adding experience gains into battlegrounds. Awesome. And to keep twinks from QQing, they are allowing them to opt out of exp gains - but they will only be able to fight against other twinks if they do. HA. Being that my lowest toon is 50 now it's kind of too late for me to really, really enjoy this, but all the same - it's about time.

Better accessability - As a player of both factions [though I do spend more time Alliance side], I was pleased to see the Horde were getting a long-needed zeppelin to Thunder Bluff. Alliance have their Deeprun Tram to tie things together, but Horde still had to run across Mulgore and through the Barrens if they wanted to get from TB to Orgrimmar/vice-versa. Also, they're adding portals to the Dark Portal in SW/Org, I think it was, so that's awesome too. And mailboxes galore! No more having to deal with idiots parking their mammoths/elekks/kodos on the mailboxes outside the bank. =P I used to envy the amount of mailboxes smattered around Silvermoon City while I was playing the auction house.

Emblem changes - They are adding yet another tier of Emblems for the "hardcore" raiders, and my first thought before reading on was that it was getting a bit out of hand. Then I read that Emblems of Conquest would be rewarded through instances like 10-man Naxxramas and even... HEROICS? What! That's awesome! I forsee an instance zerg in the future for my guild. Gearing people up even moreso will really help us push forward in Ulduar. I just want to *see* Yogg-Saron - I don't want it to be like in Burning Crusade where Wrath was being launched and I hadn't even seen the Illidan encounter, QQ. I am very happy with how Blizzard is doing things this time around. Yes, hardcores will QQ, but the game was meant to be played by everyone, not just them. Whose needs are more important and why? The answer is no one's. Everyone pays the same $15 / month. And Blizzard wants to keep the huge player base rolling in the dough. Sorry, dudes.

VANITY ITEMS - OK, so, I am a complete pet collector. [Mounts to a lesser extent. Much lesser. But I digress.] There are SO MANY new vanity items coming in the next patch! 8 new non-combat pets, NOT INCLUDING Argent Tournament pets, zomg! Children's Week will also be coming to Northrend - at least I hope it makes it to live realms, past the PTR - I REALLY want a baby wolvar pet, and a baby gorloc too.
Aside from pets, they are making the Silver Covenant and Sunreaver flying mounts purchaseable with Champion Seals, AND a new paladin-only Argent Crusade Charger. More incentive to level my Paladin, basically. ;)
Horde will also be getting the long-anticipated Ravasaur mount, which is their version of the Wintersaber from Winterspring.
Along with that, new tabard and banners, and an upgraded Argent Squire who can actually run errands for you... System overload here srsly.

I need a break! Phew! More later!

Pally power

My husband recently got his paladin her Charger, so I met him out in Nagrand with my own pally and took some screenshots. :)






I'm the pretty one. Uh... The pretty, feminine one. The girly one. I'm the Blood Elf.

Anzu

Yes, my little druid is seated there in her epic flight form, which means the raven god, Anzu, has been vanquished! ...For now.

Admittedly, I spent the extra 17g and picked up epic flight form from the trainer after I had bought my druid her epic flying skill, but I wanted to do the quest chain anyway. It was actually pretty fun, and I got a nice Idol out of it, as well. [You also get a trinket for your flight form, which has since been nerfed in the doing-away-with of riding crops and etc. It used to increase your speed in flight form/swift flight form by 10%. Now, it does this.]

Anyway, two of my guildies - Maara [prot warrior] and Bruzin [ret pally] - and myself [resto druid] went into Heroic: Sethekk Halls to finish off my quest. It was actually a pretty fun fight, but I can see how it would have been quite hectic at level 70. [My druid is only level 73, but my friends were on their 80s.]

Hopefully we can farm H: Sethekk just about every day now, and try to get someone the land mount. I think it's one of the prettiest in the game - but I feel the same about the swift flight form, so I'm happy either way. ;)

Charge!

I did it, I did it! I got my little Blood Elf Paladin, Cadmus, to level 60, AND got him his Thalassian Charger.

But let me tell you, this was no small task.

The Horde version of the Paladin epic mount quest is a lot easier than the Alliance version, or at least less time-consuming. You pay some gold, buy some things from a vendor/AH, kill some Scourge, steal some holy water, and then it's one quick trip to Stratholme, and you're done.

At least, in theory.

I did the goldsink part of the quest no problem, as well as the Scourge slaughtering. Once I got to the next part though, something silly happened.

The object of this step of the chain was to head into Tyr's Hand and procure a sample of the Scarlet Crusade's holy water from their abbey. I had no one to help me [at first], but it was still straightforward enough to me. What I planned to do was run into the abbey, die where my quest item was, corpse run back, ressurect, pop my bubble, loot the item, run out to a safe spot, die AGAIN, run back, res, and then hearth out of there. A bit long-winded, but a very straightforward plan. No real kinks to work out, right? WRONG.

It all went well up to the part where I died and released my spirit. Where I was transported to looked all too familiar, but not exactly because I had been there moments ago...

You see, I was transported to the Death Knights' phased version of Tyr's Hand / the Scarlet Enclave.



Let me re-iterate: I was on my PALADIN.

I res'd at the spirit healer and tried to hearth out. I recieved a warning message saying "You can't leave here until you've escaped the Lich King's grasp!" Uhh... Okay. So, I sent in a ticket, and waited.




In the meantime, I headed up to Acherus to socialize.

| |

I even managed to find my name in the Death Knight roster. Wow, I hadn't realized Arthas had planned so far ahead. Was he keeping names of every paladin around in there, just in case he might run into them and Scourge them up?



Eventually, I got in touch with a GM, and they were kind of unhelpful. He ported me back to UC. I said thanks, but, wasn't this just going to happen again if I went back to Tyr's Hand and died a second time? He said "yes," and his advice to me was: "You know, you can buy the mount off the paladin trainer at 61 now. You don't need to do the quest."

Umm, thanks? I know that. Some of us like to do things the fun way, or the hard way, depending on which way you look at it. I'm also planning on doing the epic flight form quest for my druid...

But I digress.

My husband ended up helping me with his Alliance hunter to clear me a path to my quest item, as well as a level 80 BE Pally who happened to be there when I returned.

Then I just waited until I got a hold of a friend of mine, and he took me to Stratholme where we kicked the crap out of some Silver Hand after I burned down their church.



[OK, so this is what the instance was really mostly like... He killed most of the things and I just sat there and drank mana juice, QQ.]

All the stress ended up being worth it. I got a shiny new tabard:



AND, of course, most IMPORTANTLYYYY, my Charger!!



YAY!

zomg!

We squeezed a Heroic: Culling of Stratholme instance in before Naxx tonight [CoS is my FAVOURITE instance, by the way!] and we made it JUST - and I mean JUST under the wire for the optional boss.

So the [Reins of the Bronze Drake] dropped, my GM and I greed rolled and... I won! YAY!

Apologies to Maara for my squee. But, now she has absolutely no competition for the drake. =) Going to run it again tomorrow for her!!