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!

Great success!

So, yesterday, my good friend Bruzin fished up the Giant Sewer Rat pet, and I was insanely jealous.



Once I saw that the pet was the size of his toon, Underfoot, though, I was instantly over it, and just had to laugh. Too perfect!

Well, since RNG seemed to be in his favour, Bruzin, Lumpey and I went off to clear a couple of instances in hopes of obtaining mounts for one of us. We hit up Heroic: Sethekk Halls [twice!], but Anzu wasn't having that. Then we went to ZG.

Hakkar, the ugliest parrot-snake on Azeroth, made sure his brainwashed High Priests didn't deliver us any phat loot, either.



Tomorrow is another day right? And how! As it turns out, the RNG Old Gods are smiling upon me today! [Today being yesterday's tomorrow, of course.]

I was doing the fishing daily today, as I try to do every day, and chatting about the new Battle-Bots promotion Mountain Dew Game Fuel and Battle.net are doing, with my MT Wakizashi.

[Let us pause here to bask in the glory of the Battle-Bot. I chose blue fuel today, but I'll get some red fuel tomorrow for my Hordies!]



Anyway, I ALMOST hit escape on this freaking loot box as I was typing a long-winded message. I would have kicked myself in the butt all day if I did, so glad I didn't, because it had THIS in it!



Yay, rats all around!

So, I had no luck fishing up any more rats for my other toons, but I DID get not one, but TWO Strand Crawlers today in the Fishing Bags! Woot!! One for my mage, and one for my pally.



I also fished this up on my priest yesterday... Not a pet but still nifty.



Tonight, we hit up Ulduar once again. Hopefully we can down XT-002 Deconstructor! Crossing my fingers and toes!

FOOTNOTE: I've been asked how to procure the adorable Battle-Bot pet, and this is how you do it: First, go to the Mountain Dew Game Fuel site. Let the flash animation load. There will be a button that says "Claim now and fuel up!" with a little Battle-Bot on it. Click that and sign into your Battle.net account. DON'T WORRY, IT'S SAFE! It's the genuine Battle.net site. You MUST have merged your World of Warcraft account with a Battle.net account to be able to obtain the pet. When you get to the confirmation screen, you must log out of WoW ENTIRELY [not just to the character select screen], and then log back in. Voila! It should be in your mailbox in-game. =)
After you have your pet, you may subsequently log into the site once a day, using the same instructions here, to acquire fuel for your pet in the colour of your choosing [between either red or blue.] Fuel up your bot, find someone with one of the opposite colour, and BATTLE!

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. ;)

Children's Week continues

It's still Children's Week! I managed to get my "Matron" title on my warlock on the second day. My guildies are having some trouble with the "School of Hard Knocks" achievement I talked about in my previous post, so I guess maybe I got really lucky in getting mine finished. Alliance in my battlegroup are generally terrible with teamwork on a regular day, so... I can only imagine. I plan on not PVPing at all until this holiday is well over with, now that I've gotten my achievement out of the way... Well, actually, I guess it helps that Strand of the Ancients is my favourite battleground, and there's no part of the meta tied to it... Yet!

I'm still working on getting all of my alts their holiday pets. It's taking considerably longer than the Noblegarden bunnies took to procure, but I guess that's because it requires running around all over Azeroth and beyond, as opposed to running laps around a little starter town.

Tomorrow night I guess!

More Mage Mischief

So here is something that I just learned today, and man, am I glad I did!

I think the WoW bunny critters are waaaay too cute. From their little headscritching idling animation, to the scream they emit when you club them to death. I've got a few "set" non-combat pets for certain characters. For example, my Forsaken warrior is never without his piggy, Mr. Wiggles [because, come on, a big bad undead warrior with a pet piggy named MR. WIGGLES of all things? Hilarious.] And, more on topic, my Death Knight, Snooky, when doing dailies, is almost always accompanied by her Snowshoe Rabbit.

Now, I was happy enough to learn that the Noblegarden event pet was another rabbit with its own... ahem... "special" animation. But, while surfing WoW Ladies today, something else was brought to my attention!

During Noblegarden, mages could purchase a Tome of Polymorph: Rabbit for 100 Noblegarden Chocolates. WHAT. I had no idea! The reason being that the tome is not visible to non-mage classes on the vendor, and I didn't actually go to purchase anything from him on my mage. I was farming only for the pet, and I [luckily] got it as a drop from a Brightly Coloured Egg on her.

As soon as I found out, I logged onto my mage and zipped over to Azure Watch yet again for some egg farming. It took me probably 20 minutes to get all 100 running around, since most people are already done with their egg camping/farming.

I bought the tome and learned the spell.



Scamper, awwww.

I decided to test it out while I was getting a couple more achievements done, so here we are in Desolace as I was planting a rose with my Spring Robes.



Aww, what an adorable deadly scorpion.

Robots!

This morning, I finally got around to doing something I've wanted to do since 3.1 hit. I ventured into Gnomeregan on my gnome mage, whom also just so happens to be a Gnomish engineer... [I like gnomes... a lot. I blame Bruzin.]

My first order of business was securing the schematics for the Pet Bombling. This was the easiest one of the two, since the schematics to craft it are a 100% drop off of Mekgineer Thermaplugg, the "last" boss in the instance. I jumped down and took the short route to him with slow fall, and got the schematics, yay! Adorable robot pet number one off the list.



/dance break

Afterwards, I worked my way back up killing the trash mobs listed to drop the schematics for Lil' Smokey. No dice on the first go. I head out and reset.

The second time through, I just went around killing trash, and on my very last Arcane Nullifier X-21... The schematics dropped! YAY!



I am so happy! =D

EDIT: To add, I showed off my new pets to my husband as he was leaving for work this morning. He is an Engineer on his main. Immediately, he ran off to Gnomeregan to get himself some schematics. He got both on his first go through the instance, so that's pretty awesome [heading straight to Thermaplugg, of course.] And he wasn't even late for work! ;)

Of bunnies and Noblegarden

Noblegarden is in full swing on Azeroth, and like a lot of people, I am trying to get myself a Violet Proto-drake.

What that means is spending hours running around like a six-year-old on some horrible Speed/pixie stick bender, giggling: "I found one! I found one! F you this is my egg, BIATCH!"

Or you can be one of those stationary lumps of bunny camping eggs.

I found that I net more eggs per hour doing the running around bit than camping out spawn spots, even the really good ones like in Brill [H] and Azure Watch [A]. Mind you, I try my best not to egg hunt at peak hours.

I've gotten all 10 of my toons the adorable little Spring Rabbit pet this way, plus my warlock [whom I am trying for the mount on] her "the Noble" title.

Non-combat pets are my reason for doing anything in this game. [Here is my warcraftpets.com collection, if you're curious.] So, now that I've gotten the Noblegarden pet on all my toons, BRING ON CHILDREN'S WEEK.

[As a footnote though, if I always look this absolutely perfect degree of frightening and adorable, Noblegarden can stay.]

Demons and zombies

I initially rolled a warlock when I found out they could have pet demons. That was prettymuch the coolest thing ever, in my head.
On top of that, they were casters. I already loved playing casters from other RPGs [in Final Fantasy games, for example, my party leader was always a black mage. ALWAYS], so this basically seemed like the class for me. And I was right!

At first, I levelled as Demonology. This seemed like a good idea at the time, since I was so ecstatic over the idea of having PET DEMONS OMG. It was fun for awhile, but when I finally got my Felguard, I realized it was ... Well, pretty overrated.

So I respecced Affliction.

...and I fell in love with the class all over again.

My god, being able to kill something while you were running away from it [or if it was running away from you, hooray for chain-Fears!]... It was, for lack of a better word, EPIC.
I discovered battlegrounds soon after this, and the devious glee of killing that FREAKING rogue with wonderful DoTs after they killed you. SO. MUCH. FUN.

Fast-forward to Burning Crusade raiding, and you quickly realize, at least in 10-mans, there really is no room for an affliction warlock. My heart: broken! Really! I was presented with the ultimatum that I think far too many people were back then. I had to choose between being a part of my guild's progression, or having fun with my class. Yes, I know I know, I could have respecced at my whim, I'm being a bit melodramatic. But I digress.

I switched to the cookie-cutter Demonic Sacrifice/deep Destruction raiding build, and earned my spot in the tops of the DPS charts in favor of progression. [In the end, after all, it's the people I'm spending hours a day with that keep me renewing my subscription. It really is!]

I hated it. It was called "shadow mage" spec for a reason. Where were my beloved DoTs? There was almost no place for them anymore. I just bound all my keys to Shadowbolt and facerolled until the boss died. [OK, not really.] I didn't want to play a freaking mage. I was a WARLOCK, DAMMIT!

Fast-forward once again to Wrath. Affliction has gotten amazing upgrades, wow. Haunt? Yes please. AND they made my Felpuppy a significant PvE pet!! OMG! I love my puppy!
We're OWNING Naxx! I'm top DPS on Patchwerk! Look at all those DoTs! I'm having so much fun micromanaging, and yes it's tedious and yes I fail at the Heigan dance but omg it's so much FUN! THIS IS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE

you bet your ass it was! NERFBAT INC. QQ TO FOLLOW. You could fill up Sholazar Basin with my tears srsly.

Patch 3.1, my DPS dropped dramatically. Where I was averaging 2200-2500 in 10 mans, topping out at 3000ish dps, I'm down to 1900 maximum. Ouch. I respec Destruction, begrudgingly, once again, and look to the skies of Northrend for a sign!

And I am given one!

Oh yes, that's right. With the release of Wrath also came Death Knights. You know, all through my WoW days as a warlock, I've been asking myself, what could be better than having a pet demon?

The answer is: having a pet zombie.

THANK THE LICH KING!

I levelled my Death Knight as Unholy spec, and it made the game fun again. When people call DKs warlocks in plate, they really aren't too far off, at least not with Unholy spec. You're melee, not a caster, but you're still micromanaging your pet and all your DoTs [diseases]... I guess you can see why it was easy for me to like the class.

I hit 80, though, and remembered why I was levelling a DK in the first place... Because my guild was short on tanks! So, I respecced to Frost, as it seemed a bit more viable as far as negating damage went, and went to work gearing up [with much help from guildies, of course! Don't let my QQing throw you off, the reason I do this stuff is because they are so genuinely awesome.] It turned out to be a pretty good idea all-around, though. My guild got a shiny new tank to break in [lol THAT'S A PLUS I SWEAR], and I discovered that tanking was actually pretty damned fun... but... I still missed my perma-pet zombie. =(

AND THEN... Dual specs came out.

AND! They buffed Unholy DKs some.

Snooky was the very first toon of mine I dual-specced. I thought of dual-speccing Manatee [warlock] even, but didn't see the point in dropping 1000g on a "pure" class... Especially when, it seemed, Snooky was quickly becoming my "main."

So, TL;DR: 3.0 Affliction, you'll always be in my memories. /single tear

second only to pet zombies.