Valiant

So with the patch, other than Ulduar, I haven't really found that much that interests me other than the Argent Tournament. To start, there's a couple quick quests to do and then you can pick up three quests which reward Aspirant's Seals. Once you have 15 of them, you earn the Argent Valor achievement and can now become a Valiant for your faction. So after getting my 15 seals (5 per day for 3 days), I now can start working on collecting Valiant's Seals, needing 25 to then challenge the Argent Champion. Once I best the champion, I believe I will be an Exalted Champion of Gnomeregan, thus becoming Tiddlywinks of Gnomeregan.


I'm believe I can get 5 Valiant's Seals per day, so it might only be five days (yay Monday) until I become a Champion of Gnomeregan, however, it is yet to be seen whether all nine seals are available each day. Once I become an Exalted Champion, I believe I'll be able to pick which faction I want to champion next. At 5 days per faction, it should be relatively easy to earn the titles with each faction. Also, upon becoming an Exalted Champion of Gnomeregan, I can challenge the Black Knight and earn It's Just a Flesh Wound.


Basically though, I'll be an Exalted Argent Champion of the Alliance in 25 days. Five for Gnomeregan, and then 5 more days for Exodar, Stormwind, Darnassus, and Ironforge. So in just 25 days I'll be done with the Argent Tournament. Of course, after the 25 days, I'll have to do the dailies every day to earn Champion's Seals in order to purchase my 5 faction specific pets (200 + another 200 seals to earn those pets to trade to the horde in exchange for their pets), then 250 more for the Argent Hippogryph and 500 more for the faction specific mounts from each faction - the Great Azuremyst Elekk, Swift Ironforge Ram, Turbostrider, Swift Darnassian Mistsaber, and Swift Elwynn Steed.

So that's only 1150 Champion's Seals...minus 50 from becoming a champion of each faction (10x5), and I only have to earn 1100. At 5 per day...well...that's 220 days of dailies - but there should be more dailies opened up once the coliseum is built, but who knows. Obviously the pets come first, so that's just 70 days of dailies, still a few too many for me.

So, have fun at the Argent Tournament - a nice long grind once you complete championing your factions. Yay!

Random Thoughts

On 3.1:

In all, other than the time it took them to patch the servers (which didn't matter to me since I wasn't available to play until 9 server), I was impressed with the patch. Most of my addons worked, only a few gave errors, and when I clicked through the errors, they all worked as intended. I started in Dalaran, did the daily cooking quest, and picked up the new daily fishing quest. It took me to Sholazar which was nice since I got my Frenzyheart dailies done at the same time. I then returned to Dalaran, turned in the quest, and then flew up to Icecrown for the Argent Tourney.

On the Argent Tournament:

Pretty darn cool. I easily breezed through the intro quests, picked up the other dailies, and quickly earned 5 tokens. The quest to obtain 15 tokens will be done on Thursday, so it should be nice to see what opens up after that. Dueling on horseback is pretty sweet and the dailies take you all over Northrend. The only issue we had was after starting the Black Knight quest line and going to Westfall, when we tried to hearth back to Dalaran, the Northrend server was down and I had to call it a night.

On WoWMatrix:

Yesterday, news was released that WowMatrix had been blocked by both Curse and WowInterface. I completely understand the reasoning behind blocking WowMatrix, and, ultimately, it was the right decision to make for both sites, however, the way they handled it was completely wrong. They waited until patch day to block WowMatrix. They had been planning for weeks (if not months) on blocking the application, yet they didn't alert anyone to that fact. They gave no one a chance to prepare for the application breaking. The kept all the end-users in the dark and waited until the worst possible moment for everyone to break a vital application.

Like I said, I understand why they did it. Simple economics. WowMatrix made it so you didn't have to visit Curse or WowInterface to get your addons and they lose income because of that. There is no other reason other than simple $$$. However, again, like I said, the way they broke WowMatrix was despicable. They chose to break the application without providing any viable alternative. The Curse downloader obviously only works on Curse and is quite gimped and installs addons you didn't choose to install. As for WowInterface's updater, well...they don't have one. They'll gladly shut you out of their network, yet provide no alternative. Kudos to you guys.

So they shut down WowMatrix, which was a simple, efficient way to download addons without providing an alternative and they do so on the busiest day of the year. And what happens? Both sites crash or slow to a crawl. Gee, who would have seen that coming? Both Curse and WowInterface reported bandwidth drops of 30% and up, however, both were unable to stay up as people who used WowMatrix flooded their sites looking for updates, and, in most cases, not finding them due to poor search results, slow sites, and outdated addon listings.

On Achievements:

On Monday a few of our regular raiding team got together to do heroic achievements. Still working on that red drake and all...we decided to try the spider lairs, Azjol'Nerub and Ahn'kahet. After repeated wipes on Watch Him Die, we skipped it and proceeded to easily get Hadronox Denied and Gotta Go!. Not too bad. Over in Ahn'kahet, we easily got The Party's Over (Phosphorex had to sit that one out) and Volunteer Work. Respect Your Elders took us two tries, but only because we had a slight healing issue in the main room, but we got it done. Volazj's Quick Demise will have to wait as that is a very tough achievement. I think we'll have to all go in as DPS as I had troubles getting the healer down in the madness portion.

Of course, last night I earned Argent Aspiration and Dual Talent Specialization. I was a little disappointed to see no new achievements outside the Argent Tourney and Noblegarden. There are some smaller ones like for Dual Spec and for the new fishing dailies, but nothing fun like in the last patch. Oh wells, I think the Argent Tourney and upcoming holidays will keep me plenty busy.

On Paladins:

On Monday, I met a fellow blogger in the game after she saw my spam in trade chat. Please take a second and go say hi to Platezilla. She has some very cool updates to read and an awesome story about her death knight Velanora.

Thus ends my rants, tonight, more Argent Tourney fun, and maybe some tries at the Emerald Whelpling out in the Swamp of Sorrows. Oh, and perhaps some manual addon updating since WowMatrix doesn't work :(

Mounts!

So I just found this awesome site to track my mounts. I don't think I could remember all of the mounts I have as I thought I had 75, but here they are:

Tiddly's Mounts

Not quite sure how I'm going to get to 100.

It also looks as if the URL changes each time you tally your mounts, so the link above could go stale quickly. But a nice site nonetheless that allows you to easily see what mounts you need and how to get them.

Loremaster Murkimus

Last night, after seeing both Ryshat and Phosphorex log in, I convinced them to head over to the tournament realm so I could get a few last minute games in. I had been stuck at exactly 200 games played and I was worried that if they threw out a game where the other team had just given up or not shown up for battle that my game total would dip below 200 and I wouldn't get the wonderful Murkimus pet. So we quickly got in 4 games, I ended up with 204 games played at an almost 50/50 win/loss ratio and I'm eagerly awaiting my pet in the mail in a few weeks.

After we had those games done, I continued with my pursuit of the Loremaster title. Over the weekend, having finally regained positive relations with all the goblin clans, I figured there had to be some quests they would ask my assistance with. Unfortunately, prior to befriending the Bloodsails, I had already completed all the goblin quests I could find and they had nothing new for me. So I scoured every city I could find, eventually finding a couple of quests in the Stonetalon Mountains, one in Silithus I had left uncompleted, and a couple in Feralas. I was at a loss for quests and thought I would not find a way to earn my title.

Upon using a portal to travel to Darnassus, I came upon a quest I had forgotten about - cloth turn-ins. So after turning in wool, silk, mageweave, and runecloth, I was close, but not close enough. I took a portal to the Exodar and was able to only turn in runecloth. So there I was, 3 quests short of Loremaster when I remembered...those Infected Nightsaber Runts drop a Faintly Glowing Crystal that starts a quest! So on my first kill I had it, I turned it in, and lo-and-behold, there was a follow-up quest. Completed it, and I'm one away from Loremaster. And there it was, a big yellow exclamation point on my map - The Great Moongraze Hunt. I'm not quite sure why I never did it in the first place, and I'm also not sure why I never thought about coming back to Azuremyst Isle to look for quests - I just mistakenly assumed on my first pass through Azuremyst, I got all the quests, but apparently, one was left behind. I quickly completed it, and upon turning it in...

And, here I sit, Loremaster Tiddlywinks, a nice change from Salty Tiddlywinks for a bit. It would be interesting to see the rarest titles in the game (probably Twilight Vanquisher, or server first titles) - I would guess Chef, Salty, and Loremaster are pretty rare. Now, what is next?

Well, I have just one "quest" achievement left - Rapid Defense - so I'd like to clear that up and have 49/49 quest achievements complete. I also have one realistic "exploration" achievement left to do - Medium Rare - so I'd like to clear that one up as well. Then I think it's back to heroic 5-man achievements and, of course, I need to take down that pesky Kel'Thuzad in heroic Naxx. Unfortunately, I will be gone this Friday and won't have a shot at him this week (so he'll likely go down this week when I'm not there), but I'll get him sooner or later. But perhaps the week after, we'll have a brand new patch with tons of brand new achievements to ferret out. It certainly feels good to finally have Loremaster crossed off the list.

5 Mans

When some of our 10 man group didn't show up tonight (or were planning on not showing up), we had just 7 to go have fun with. So we decided we'd run 5 man heroics and rotate people out, but two people had other things to do, so the 5 of us that were left decided to go wreak some havoc thoughout Azeroth.

First up was Utgarde Keep where we quickly got On the Rocks (I had it, but others didn't). We hopped up to Utgarde Pinnacle and got The Incredible Hulk, My Girl Loves to Skadi All the Time, and Lodi Dodi We Loves the Skadi (I only needed the last one). After that, it was a quick port back to Dalaran, another port to the Caverns of Time and then the Culling of Stratholme for The Culling of Time (where I also won the drake! 74 mounts for me). COS was also the heroic daily, so a few more gold and badges for me there and I had also saved up the regular daily for a while, so I got that done as well. I have just one more dungeon to go for Timear Foresees.

After the Culling of Stratholme, we headed up towards Ulduar to do the Halls of Lightning where we got Shatter Resistant and Timely Death (in just 36 seconds). We then hopped over to the Halls of Stone and got Good Grief (also in 36 seconds) and Abuse the Ooze. Somehow Brann took damage and we missed out on his achievement.

So here I sit with 5600 achievement points. Yay!

More Cooking Dailies

Recently, I haven't been doing the cooking dailies that often. Every once in a while, as I stroll through Dalaran, I'll check in and do the daily to get a cooking award or two along with some spices as my raiding food always needs to be kept fully stocked. After getting the 100 Dalaran Cooking Awards achievement and Hail to the Chef, there's really been no point to the awards...until now. Behold - the Chef's HAT!


How sweet it will be to walk around with this awesome hat on and my Chef title. Of course, after the patch, with new recipes added, the Chef title won't be as rare. Just like the pet fawn, since there's going to be more pets added, 75 pets won't be as hard to obtain. Everything gets easier, so I guess they'll just throw us little awards like this cool hat (which I don't have room for in my bank anyways) to show that not only did we buy every recipe with our awards, we can also buy the hat and are true chefs.

(Plus, I just saw there's an achievement as well. Time to start doing those dailies!)

Salty Tiddlywinks

You know, I expected it to be a bit tougher. I had spent some time in the past working on One That Didn't Get Away, but I never really had the patience for it. Then, last week, when I won the fishing tourney, I knew I had to go back to that achievement. I did some research and found the best place to fish is in the starting areas of Elwynn or Mulgore, however, all you catch there are worthless fish. Why not fish in the Howling Fjord for the Dark Herring? All the other fish you catch there can be sold on the Auction House, so you can turn a nice profit while working on the achievement.

So I fished for a day there - about 3 hours - jumping from Fangtooth Herring school to Fangtooth Herring school (after all, only Fangtooth Herring can be turned into Dark Herrings). I didn't bother to have my cast land in the pool, but if it did, I fished it up, and if it didn't, I just hoped for a herring. When the pool was gone, I moved on. After no luck the first day, I sent the fish to my banker, ready for another day of fishing. Surprisingly, on my second day, there he was, the Dark Herring. I was only an hour or two into fishing (hint: turn down music and ambient sounds and turn sound effects way up - then you only hear the bobber) and I was quite happy to see him.


And there you have it...Salty Tiddlywinks. A couple more achievements done and a nice, shiny new title.

Faction Switch

I recently switched from the Oracles to the Frenzyheart after receiving all my pets from the eggs (still without the mount...). The switch was painless and I'm enjoying doing the Frenzyheart quests. At least it gives me some dailies with an incentive to finish other than the gold reward.

Total Oracle Eggs hatched: 15

#1: Yolk
#2: White Tickbird
#3: Yolk
#4: Tickbird
#5: Tickbird
#6: Cobra Hatchling!
#7: Yolk
#8: Cobra Hatchling
#9: Yolk
#10: Tickbird
#11: Proto Drake Whelp - FINALLY
#12: White Tickbird
#13: Proto Drake Whelp
#14: White Tickbird
#15: White Tickbird