Big Changes!

As you know, I'm a pet collector. With my two recent additions (Firefly and Ethereal Soul-Trader), I'm at 70 pets! With nothing but Imbued Netherweave Bags in my bank, that's almost 4 bags filled with pets! But, announced today, pets will no longer take bag slots (neither will mounts in that case).

Pets will now be learned as "spells" which you can then summon rather than having to carry around the item with you. While I'm pretty pleased with this change, I will miss carrying around my firefly cage or my worg carrier. But, summoning them will be much easier (truly random pets every time!) and I'll also get to have random mounts as well.

I shall be absent this weekend, but I have been tooling around in Azeroth more and more over the past week. Yesterday was the crocolisk fishing quest, but I was not rewarded with another pet. We shall keep up the good work.

An Update

((While I'm assuming readership of this blog, I figured I'd update it quickly. The move went off pretty well and I'm almost settled in. I'm figuring that once I finally get my computer set up in my room rather than it being in the spare room, I'll be playing more, but as it stands, I really haven't much time to play - it's been split between general household chores and fixing the house up.

In game, our Gold Team 25 man raids have been canceled permanently I believe as we had too many people saying they'd show up and then never make it. We also had a hacking issue which held us up and I'm not sure the group will get back together. From what I've heard we're going to go back to 10 mans and hopefully I'll be kept apprised of that move as I would love to be in a competent 10 man group once Wrath comes out.

From what I've been hearing, the good news is that when Wrath comes out, mages will return to their former glory days as the glass cannons, putting out the highest amount of damage on multiple targets (rogues supposedly can do the most damage to any single target foe).

On the pet front, I did not achieve my goal of getting the pet from Ahune. I was just too busy to have time to kill Ahune five times a day (I barely made it on more than a couple times over the past few weeks). New testing is now going on for the Hallow's Eve event and hopefully this year I can pick up my Siniter Squashling. Also, the pet from the World Wide Invitational in France is simply amazing - a pet Tyreal! Unfortunately, it's going for a bit too much on eBay. But now is my only chance if I want one. Murky and Gurky have passed me by...but how can I justify the cost??

Stay tuned, I'm hoping to get back into the game prior to Wrath, but it's just tough to find any reason to play. My gear cannot be upgraded outside of 25-mans, there are few recipes available to purchase on auction and only a couple pets I could grind and no faction rep to grind. Hopefully something will come along before Wrath to keep me interested. I've got thousands of gold and other than checking the daily fishing quest, there's just not much to do.))

Fire Festival!

Today the Midsummer Fire Festival began in Azeroth. There were some new quests to do involving torch tossing and brazier lighting. After doing those, I set out to gather Burning Blossoms. After trekking through the Outlands, Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, I managed to visit each and EVERY flame. That includes the flames in Undercity, Thunder Bluff, Orgrimmar, and Silvermoon. Total possible tickets for an Alliance member after day 1? 617 blossoms.

Immediately went and spent 350 of those blossoms on my latest pet, the Spirit of Summer! (I now sit at 67 pets, #34 on the top 50 single player collections). I attempted to get the new pet that Ahune, the Frost Lord drops, but we only attempted him on regular, not heroic, so I had no shot at the latest pet. He also refused to drop the new enchant I want.

On a side note, while finding flames in Desolace, I hooked up with the Super-Seller 680 to buy the Lean Wolf Flank Recipe. I also stopped in RFD while I was in horde territory and learned the recipe for Goldthorn Tea. That now lands me at 113/115 cooking recipes (98%). Just one more that is easily attainable, then the only epic cooking recipe available...

A Reversal

I previously stated that I couldn't find much to do in-game, that all has changed since I just realized the Midsummer Fire Festival returns tomorrow. With the festival, I have two pets I need to try and obtain. However, it appears that the Spirit of Summer quest line is no longer available. But I have heard rumors that he can still be purchased for 350 Burning Blossoms. So I've got some work to do. There's also a new pet this year - a Scorchling. It's probably a rare drop, but five people in your party can carry the quest into the instance, so hopefully it's a one in five drop rate - but if not, I'll be there farming this thing as much as possible!

So starting tomorrow I have some work to do. Should be fun to see how many blossoms I can collect. According to Wowhead, I may be able to get 350 in one year, otherwise I will try and get as many as possible and bank them until next year.

Play Time

Wow, it's been almost three weeks since a post. I have spent the majority of my time at the new house getting it ready for move-in and spent the past 6 days in Boston and New York, so I'm back, but it's tough to pick the game up again. It's that dead period you feel between major releases I think. I don't feel like PvP'ing all that much, but maybe I'll get 10 games in this weekend. Raids don't appeal to me outside our standard 25-man Gold Team raids, and really, what else is there to do?

Shall I start grinding cash again to buy 22 slot bags from Haris Pilton? I've just been saving up my gold recently to purchase recipes that I don't have off the auction house, but they are few and far between and going for even more outrageous prices any time I see them. I have no factions I can consistently grind - going out to Stromgarde is a royal pain in the butt gaining only 1 reputation point for each kill. I've been murdering centaurs in Desolace, but still only lose 3-5 reputation per kill, so the grind there is even more annoying.

But in the end, I see little reason to log on daily. What motivation do I have? Perhaps once I get moved into the new house and have less on my plate, the motivation to play again will return (there does look to be some fun stuff in 2.4.3), but in the meantime, I fear updates will be few and far between here.

OOC

((Probably no updates for a week or so as I just bought a house and I am currently in the process of cleaning it up - removing wallpaper, painting every room, installing new carpet, and then moving next weekend. Just an FYI. It certainly was weird to be walking around and thinking, "This is my house."))

A Promotion!

Last week, I had talked about the new outfit I put together for our guild meeting. I knew something was up when King Elros requested my presence, but I had no idea the magnitude of events.

First, we all arrived and were briefed on why we met in such a public place. Apparently, our dodgeball game in Stormwind where we played shirts vs. skins raised a few eyebrows and there were rumors floating around about out guild. We hoped that a "normal" guild meeting in a public place would quash those rumors.

After that was taken care of, Diastolic was called forward and given a well-deserved promotion to Crusader. I was next and could deduce what was going on, but really didn't expect it. I was promoted to Knight of DarkLight Resolution, an officer position, and I graciously accepted the promotion.

A couple pictures of the fine event can be seen here and here.

The New UI in a Raid

Last night, as we quickly took out Gruul and fought our way through SSC, I had the chance to play with my new UI. On a whole, it performed very well. I love my new "Fire Bomb" button (Trinket+Combustion+Icy Veins) and I didn't have too many problems finding the buttons I was looking for. Buffing is still taking some time getting used to as I'm using Grid for my raid status rather than individual raid bars via Pitbull. Here's the Grid I had going last night (taken before a few tweaks I made later in the raid):


The way I've basically set it up is in the lower left hand corner of each grid box is either a blue or reddish/pink square. Blue indicates that they have Arcane Brilliance. Red indicates Arcane Intellect. So as long as all those boxes are full, I'm doing my job as the only mage. Each party is in its own row, so the top row is Group/Party 1 and so on with the pets on the bottom line. So far, I'm using it just for buffs and to get a quick look to see if we have a bunch of dead people in the raid so I need to make a few quick tweaks - I'd like the box to be a bright red if someone is dead so a quick glance makes the dead stand out more. Also, Grid does a lot, and if I can scale it back a little, it might use less memory and be a bit more efficient.

Other than that, the only minor problem I ran into was I had forgotten to whip up my quick /stopcasting /cast counterspell macro, but I quickly made that and was ready for the next Gronn Priest to try and heal. The only major problem I ran into was with Cryolosis. It has some issues with sheeping. Every time a sheep was broken, even though I had turned off notification of sheep breakings, I received a lua error. So I spent a lot of time in SSC clicking lua errors away. At the end of the raid, I downloaded a new addon as suggested in chat, but was unable to test it before people started getting lazy and wiping us on the Lurker Below (more on that later).

Here's a screenshot from last night as we were clearing to Gruul. Compared to my previous "action" shots, this one is just so much cleaner and has all the information I need. I do need to tweak the Pitbull spacing a bit later tonight or this weekend, but in all, everything worked quite well. And people seemed to enjoy the random messages Cryolosis outputs when I teleport, portal, or conjure a mage table.