Category Archives: screenshots

pets, poll, screenshots, wash

Pick a pet, any pet!

26 Comments

So I’m sure you long-time readers know about Tux and Locke, but who’s the third pet in my stable?

Well, currently, it’s a level 68 Bloodmaul Dire Wolf from Blade’s Edge, named Amarok. Amarok being the name of a giant, fearsome wolf in Inuit mythology, and also the name of an amazing piece of Open Source software. I originally got him partially because I was inspired by my desktop wallpaper and partially because I wanted a pet that still did some damage but also had a little more armor than my other two pets, for grinding and the like. But for some reason I haven’t really gotten attached to him the same way that I have to Tux and Locke. Oh, he’s a neat little pet, but… I dunno. I’m sorta feeling like something different.

So here is where I turn to you, readers, for help and advice.

Should I stick with the wolf, or try something different?

Oh, and here are the current candidates for “Try Something Different”:

Raptor:

Tux was the first pet I ever tamed, and the second was Wash, a Mottled Raptor from Wetlands. I’d had my eye on a raptor pet almost as long as I’d been playing the game, and I went out and tamed Wash the second I was a high enough level. (Oh, and for those of you who do not “get” the name… click here, please.)

For a while, Tux sat in the stable while Wash followed me everywhere. Then I started to feel bad for Tux so I pulled him out again. Then I tried alternating between Tux and Wash for a while but it soon got to the point where I simply could not keep them both up to me in level. Finally while questing in Stranglethorn Vale I realized that level-36-Wash just could not hold aggro on some of the level 40 mobs I was trying to attack, and I was forced to choose between Tux and Wash… and, well, I picked Tux and Wash went to the stable for good.

There he stayed until I was level 69 when I realized that I needed that third stable slot (the other two taken by Tux and Locke) to be able to learn the highest level skills for my kitty and birdy. It was actually something that I’d known I’d have to do for a while, but I’d been putting it off because I’d gotten rather attached to Wash in the short time that he’d quested with me. So finally one day I took a deep breath, pulled him out, took him to the prettiest spot in Nagrand, and released him.

…I cried. Real hunters cry.

(Warning: if you are anything like me, then do not look at these pictures while listening to “When Somebody Loved Me” from Toy Story 2 unless you want to risk bursting into tears.)

*pulls self together*

Anyways, the point is that I still have this little longing in my heart to have a raptor waddling after me again. The downside is that they do fill basically the same role as a cat so it might be sort of redundant to have both. But hey, who said having hunter pets had to be logical, right?

“A feeling is not much to go on.”
“Sometimes a feeling, Mister Spock, is all we humans have to go on.”

Ravager:

I’ve never had one. Supposedly they are the highest-DPS-pet in the game and that aspect sort of intrigues me. I’d like to try something else in my raids and heroics; I love Locke but he’s gotta get some time off sometimes ya know?

Unlike many people, I find ravagers to be cute in an Aliens/hydralisk sort of way. “Pike, you’re nuts for using the words “cute”, “Aliens”, and “hydralisk” in the same sentence.” Yes, yes I know. (Hey, Starcraft is cute.)

I do rather like the idea of trying out a type of pet that I have never tried before… it’d be exciting I think.

Windserpent:

My character Lunapike has a Windserpent as one of her two pets (the ever so cute bright red Springpaw Lynx is the other) and I’ve really enjoyed having him as a pet. Lightning Breath is great and scales with hunter AP, so as your attack power goes up it will make a difference in your noodly Windserpent buddy as well.

I’ll admit I’m also inspired by the fact that a hunter friend of mine who I have ridiculous amounts of respect for (and who consistently beats me in PvP although I outgear the heck out of him) runs with a Windserpent. Clearly he knows something that I don’t. (Actually I think he knows a lot of things that I don’t.) And I think the Windserpent might be a part of that secret. MUST. FIND. OUT.

Boar:

If I want to stick with my original plan of having a grinding pet, then the ever-fashionable boar might be a good choice. The downsides are that it’d be quite a level grind to bring one up to level 70, and also, the recent boar nerfs make this somewhat less of a must-have-pet than it used to be. Still, it’s a solid choice with lotsa armor.

And there you have it. What’s a hunter to do for her third stable slot? The nostalgia and overall coolness-factor of the raptor? The damage, unique-ness, and new-ness of a ravager? The fun Lightning-Breath-goodness of the windserpent? The armor of the ol’ boar standby? Or should I just stick with my wolf?

…I’m torn.

What do you think?

I’ve put a poll up on the sidebar so you can cast your vote. And please feel free to leave your comments on pet-picking!

gear, karazhan, screenshots

This Is My Rifle

8 Comments

“This is my rifle. There are many like it but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I master my life. My rifle, without me is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than any enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will….

My rifle and myself know that what counts in this war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of our burst, nor the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. We will hit…

My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weakness, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will…”

– Rifleman’s Creed

So yeah, cookie for the first person to guess what exactly about this picture is making me grin like a lunatic!

/continues grinning like a lunatic

amusing anecdotes, karazhan, screenshots

You broke my Karazhan!

7 Comments

That’s me. In a raid group with one other person so I could run into Karazhan for two minutes.

And that’s… that’s another raid group in the same instance with me.

After a lot of confusion and pondering over whether we actually could 11-man Karazhan, the one final member of the other raid group realized he couldn’t get into the instance because the “raid was full”. Ah, so that was it. Ten people with the same Raid ID can all get into the same copy of Kara, regardless of groups. That’s how it seems, anyway, because I’d earlier been called in to help on Curator with two of these people a couple days ago… so I was, in fact, sharing a Raid ID.

Still, I can tell you right now, after months of playing this game, it is downright surreal to be in an instance all by yourself and suddenly run into a bunch of other players.

druid, screenshots

Top Secret Project #314159: A Confession

13 Comments

That’s me.

Tamaryn, kittycat, druid.

Yes, I can hear you, screaming at your computer monitor, “Whoa whoa whoa, wait a minute!”

“Didn’t you roll a horde druid that you got to level ten?”

Yes, yes I did. Then I decided to reroll as an Alliance druid because I wanted to play with my guild.

“You actually got a non-hunter character to level 20?”

Hey, this is my second non-hunter to get to level 20, thankyouverymuch. I have a 21 mage.

“So you decided to make a feral druid?”

Actually no, all my talent points thus far have gone into the Balance tree. The picture shows me in Cat Form cause I just got it and thought it looked fun.

“So you’re gonna level Moonkin?”

Yup, I figured it was the best bet if I wanted to be able to solo decently efficiently while still having a strong mana pool for times when I’d want to jump into a healing role. Endgame I think I’m gonna either stay moonkin, or more likely, switch to tree, because I really want to give healing a serious try.

“Wait… did you just say… endgame…?”

Yes. Yes I did. I’m being serious when I say I’m leveling this character. And thus far this is the only non-hunter class that has been able to hold my interest for a decent amount of time.

Here’s the deal, basically I decided that I wanted to try playing a “hybrid” class that would allow me to heal, or, with the proper reshuffling of gear and talent points– tank, for my guild. That gave me two options: paladin and druid. In the end it came down to whether I wanted a reliable rez or whether I wanted to be able to turn into stuff, and being able to turn into stuff won out. (Not to mention I have a horribly hard time trying to get into paladins. I just can’t do it… I don’t know why!)

How am I liking the class so far? To be honest I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. It’s fun to be able to cast at stuff and then when you’re running low on mana, switch to bear or cat and start swiping at things. It’s fun to be able to run around and give people buffs (hunter pets are always buffed. Always.) Perhaps one of my favorite things is that it’s an all new challenge for me. Running into quests that are orange or red to me with one of my hunters is challenging and it’s fun to take on that challenge; but trying to do the same with my druid is even more challenging, partially because I’m still learning about the class. I felt so proud of myself today trying to complete some collect-the-mushrooms quest in a cave in Darkshore. There was one last mushroom that I had to get that was surrounded by three guys all at my level, one of which healed. I popped an armor elixir, cast Regrowth on myself, hopped into Bear Form and ran into the fray. A healing potion, a couple healing spells, and a whole lotta Mauling and Swiping later, I’d finished the quest and was /dancing all over the cave.

That’s really the beauty of the class so far– you can change your style of play based on what you feel like doing. Feel like casting? You can. Feel like tanking? You can. Feel like being a rogue? You can. Feel like healing? Yep, you can do that too. Granted, this does leave out “feel like being a hunter?”, which is my favorite type of character, but hey… nobody’s perfect. And running around in Cat Form sorta feels like a perpetual Eyes of the Beast.

I have no idea how much longer I’ll be able to feel like a true hybrid before I realize that my feral skills are falling farther and farther behind because I’m spec’ing and gearing myself up like a mage, but in the meantime, it’s fun. There is a “MoonkinForLife” in my guild who told me he leveled up to 30 with no problems using Cat Form, even as Balance, so that’s encouraging.

Oh and for the record, I still like hunters the best and this is always gonna be a hunter blog. =P My hunterness, I feel, extends beyond the game whereas donning the druid costume for a couple hours does not.

That said, I’m having Writer’s Block lately. Ask me hunter questions so I can answer them. Dooooo iiiiiiit!

endgame, screenshots

Easing into Endgame

8 Comments

World of Warcraft is an interesting creature.

It is, of course, an MMORPG– “Massively Multiplayer” being the first two words in that acronym. And yet if you want, you can go through much of the game without really dealing with too many people. That’s what I did. Oh sure, there’s other people you can interact with and there’s a living breathing economy, much like on Neopets which is what I played pre-WoW. But you can level to 70 basically without any outside help.

When I was level 19 or 20 or so, I did Deadmines because somebody told me I should. It was my first ever instance, people were impatient with me (to be fair I was the worst hunter of all time at this point– pet on aggressive and immolation trap for the win) and the whole experience really left a negative impression on me and after that, with the exception of a few run-throughs by higher-level friends, I hardly did any instancing at all until I hit Outlands.

And this is where it started to get interesting, because this is where our guild really started to grow and we started to do stuff together. Our little Karazhan group that we have now has been running stuff together since Hellfire Ramparts– heck, a few of us have been running together since Zul’Farrak. But for the most part, we went through Outlands together, running instances as we encountered them and sort of learning together. This has culminated in what I think is a very solid group of people who know how to work efficiently as a team.

So you’d think the level 70 endgame would be a breeze right?

Well, it takes a lot of work that really hadn’t occurred to me beforehand, simply because I’ve never played an MMO with situations like this before. Karazhan is a ten-man raid that takes quite some time to do if you’re still learning it. So it’s a pretty big time commitment. And it’s really hard to sync up the schedules of so many different people, most of whom have school or work or even the military going on in their real lives. And it just so happens that as a guild officer, I am now in charge of trying to plan this and get it together, and keep everybody happy.

It’s a little bit stressful and it pushes me out of my comfort zone, and I have to admit it had me worried for a while. Had WoW finally turned into a job? Was I breaking my own “it’s a game” rule by continuing to play?

But I’ve been thinking about it and I’ve decided– WoW isn’t just any ol’ game. It is an MMORPG as I said at the beginning of my post. It has plenty of solo content, but if you want to really, truly unlock the “massively multiplayer” portion of it, it’s going to take some work because other people are involved, not just you. But that, I think, is part of what makes endgame so rewarding.

It’s not everybody’s thing, and that’s quite okay. In fact, as I even told my boyfriend the other day… “Sometimes I catch myself wishing that I could just go back to when all I had to worry about was how many kobolds I had left to kill.” But in the end, as much as I do truly love the solo content of the game and the leveling (hence all the alts), I also love running instances and raids with my friends. And to experience that, you’ve got to be willing to put in a little effort… more than you might initially expect.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I’ve been a little scarce these past couple of weeks. Because I had to take a little break to sort of define the game in my head and decide if the sudden new “work” aspect of the game that jumped on me without warning was justified. I’ve decided it is.

As is running into Orgrimmar with a couple buddies when you’re bored, just to see if you can actually hit Thrall once before dying:

I think I got in a single Arcane Shot. It was epic.

linux, screenshots

World of Warcraft on Kubuntu Linux

15 Comments

I was looking at my site referrals and I’ve noticed that my biggest referrers (aside from Google) seem to be screenshots that I took of myself playing on Linux. Well… those screenshots are quite outdated and there were only two of them. So I figured I’d take some more, hopefully demonstrating a little bit more than just “Look I can boot it up”!

I’d like to note that I normally play in the fullscreened version of Windowed Mode, but I decided to take my screenshots using a much smaller window size so you can see a little more of the Linux environment.

The screenshots have also been resized to 1024×768 (my normal size is 1280×1024) so I apologize if some of the text is hard to see!


It’s true– I never logged into Tawyn on Windows until after she hit 70.


Latency and framerate in Stormwind on a fairly busy day. 27fps is more than playable. Also I would like to note that I don’t quite understand why, but I experience more latency natively on Windows than via Wine in Linux.

The program in the background there is Amarok, which is definitely my favorite music-playing software (and is currently only available for Linux/Unix, although I hear a Windows version is in the works). I wanted to demonstrate that I can listen to music and play WoW (with sound effects intact) at the same time. Note: If you are using Linux and wish to do this too, you have to go into winecfg and make sure you are using ALSA and not OSS. Some people have issues with ALSA though, so be warned!


Framerate while flying in Netherstorm; it’s gone up to 51fps. It was actually up to about 60 but the screenshot program slowed it down just a bit.



Linux, meet massive quantities of sustained ranged DPS! While listening to Scatman, of course. (It actually randomly happened to start playing here because my playlist is always on randomize. Good timing, I thought.)

So there you have it– not only can you play World of Warcraft on Linux, but you can listen to music while you’re doing it, and, judging by what I’ve got minimized, you can also chat on IRC, Instant Messenger, and browse the web, so is great how Classic WoW turned out. Gold4Vanilla offers classic wow gold for all players across the world as well. All at the same time. Really the only thing I’ve yet to do on Linux is chat on Ventrilo. =( Someday, though. Someday!

For more information you can check out my previous posts on WoW/Linux:

The Linux & WoW Q&A
Answering Questions (Mostly of the Linux Persuasion)

As well as The Official Ubuntu WoW Guide (Very helpful!)

And remember, no matter what Blizzard says, there is indeed a Cow Level:

alts, screenshots, the old switcheroo

The Ol' Switcheroo

8 Comments

So you all know that I have a level 70 hunter. Ja?

Well, my boyfriend has a level 70 warlock. So now you know that, too, if you hadn’t already!

Anyways. Today we were talking and at the time he was doing schoolwork and I was on my blood-elf-guy who I adore playing, and I was talking about how I, at level 13, had succeeded at taking on and killing three level 14 mobs at the same time by DPS’ing one down quick and then having my pet tank one (and with a Serpent Sting planted on him) while I kited the third. And we began talking about how really my success there had largely been dependent on the fact that I already know how to play a hunter. And then we began talking about what it would be like if maybe he rolled a lowbie warlock and if it would be the same experience for him, or if it was more of a hunter thing.

And then… I don’t even remember which one of us came up with the idea… but one of us said “You know… we should level each other’s class”. I.e., I would level a warlock and he would level a hunter. And the other one of us very quickly agreed that this was a fantastic idea, and we both went immediately over to yet another new RP server (Sisters of Elune) and pretty soon we had our level one characters ready. We ran them to Durotar where there are both warlock and hunter trainers, and we’ve agreed that we will only play these characters with each other.

They got to level four tonight.


That’s my boyfriend, the tauren hunter, and yours truly, the undead warlock.

Now we’ve both tried to level each other’s class before. He has a level four-ish night elf hunter and I’ve got a level four-ish gnome warlock, but we both made the characters strictly for RP purposes and then sort of tried to level them on our own, and basically we decided that we didn’t like the other’s class. But this time it’s different. This time we’re doing it together and we’ve got the other right there for advice and help. I trust his warlockeryness, and he trusts my hunteryness, and right off the bat we’re giving each other all sorts of handy advice. I have no idea how far we’re going to get these characters but I’m very excited for this little project already.

He’s doing pretty good, even if I often catch him popping into melee mode when the mob runs up, because he’s not the best kiter yet. But I’m a forgiving teacher/girlfriend! =P

P.S.

See the guy on the left? Tux and I got him down to 85%-ish percent. That’s not bad, right? Well on our way to being able to solo Molten Core, right? ;P

i love hunters, screenshots

Hunter The Thirteenth

8 Comments

So after waxing poetic about all my hunters in my previous post, what did I do? I went and made another one, obviously.

Althalor the Level 7 Blood Elf Hunter.

Male Blood Elf Hunter.

Now some 95% of my characters are female, because I am female too, and I feel most comfortable “getting into” my characters when we are the same gender. After a while I started branching out and playing male gnomes, and now I’ve got me a male belf.

And I am enjoying playing him faaaaaaar more than I thought I would, especially since I’ve never been a huge blood elf fan.

But. I love his animations. I love his voice. I love the way he looks in the [Festive Teal Pant Suit]. And I absolutely adore the way his ears go all boingy-boingy when he runs. Actually I have a confession to make here. Not too long ago it occurred to me that I seem to have some sort of long ear fetish. Growing up (and still today) I have always been drawn to animals with long ears– rabbits, bilbies, and of course hares, my “mascot” animal. I grew up watching Star Trek and I loved Spock and the Vulcans. I collect Pikachu toys. In D&D I usually wanted to play elves or half-elves and now that I look back on it I think that it’s not because they’re graceful and athletic and all that– but because they had those freakish ears. My main character in WoW is Tawyn, a Night Elf, and I am so jealous of her ears. I wish I had long ears like that. It would be so awesome. I want to be her for Halloween just so I have an excuse to put on some fake elf ears.

/cough

So yeah, sorry about that tangent. Now that I’ve scared away half of my readership I’ll continue where I left off:

Above all though, I love my new character’s personality and backstory. You will notice from the picture that he is in Mulgore. He has a very good reason for that. I cannot wait to develop this further.

I love inventing new characters. I think it might be my favorite part of the game.

…but then again, these days anytime I make a blog post, I say something like “[Some completely random aspect of WoW] is my favorite part of the game!” So maybe I should make a song:

Running heroics and downing the last boss
Roleplaying and using up all my toon slots
Big Steady Shot crits and winning AV
These are a few of my favorite things

When the raid wipes
When my traps break
When I’m feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don’t feeeeel so bad!

The downside to having so many character ideas, of course, is that I give myself far too many characters to play, so many of them wind up getting neglected, even if I didn’t intend them to at all. I almost need to make some sort of playing schedule for myself. Hmm, that’s not a bad plan, really…

In closing, I leave you all with my new favorite YouTube movie. No, it most certainly did not put tears in my eyes. /scoffs at the notion

…

/sniff

karazhan, screenshots, stories

And so it begins…

11 Comments

Finally got around to doing Black Morass and nabbing the vaunted key to Karazhan. We sort of waited around until we had a good-sized group of us in the guild who needed it, and today was one of the rare days lately where schedules didn’t clash and we had four of us who needed the key, so we grabbed a fifth person and off we went to what was overall a very smooth run of BM, free of any deaths or major problems. I was on “adds duty” and I got a lot of praise for my job as such, so I must’ve done better than I thought I would, which is always a plus!

Afterwards we all rushed off to Shattrath and then all the way back to Azeroth and Deadwind Pass to finally nab ourselves [The Master’s Key].

Now, you gotta understand something here. Of the five of us, three of us, myself included, had never once set foot inside Karazhan. The fourth had only been inside once and only for one boss, and the fifth had been inside multiple times but never before on this character or even character type (his two other characters are a warlock and a mage; this character is a holy pally.)

So what did we do?

We converted the group to a raid and went inside, of course.

(Insert screenshot here that I should have taken but completely forgot to! =P)

There were some level 71 elite horses that we decided to have some fun with because we were feeling a bit giddy. So that’s exactly what we did. Pulled some horses and disposed of them. I even chain-trapped one, which normally isn’t a big deal because I do that all the time but this is Kara, after all.

After a couple pulls we were sort of discussing it and came to the conclusion that the mobs so far seemed to be of a comparable difficulty level to the mobs in a Heroic. And as a guild, we’ve got a few Heroics under our collective belt.

So that’s when somebody said “Hey, let’s see if we can grab five other people and take the first boss.”

So there we were, with that carrot dangling in our faces, and it was as four of the five of us were drooling over the carrot when my boyfriend, who also happens to be the guild leader, spoke up. He said that he had made this guild and leveled up with this guild and become good friends with the people in this guild and he wanted his first Karazhan run to be a guild/good-friends-of-the-guild run. And at the time we certainly did not have enough people in the guild who would be ready to jump into Kara with us.

And we all sort of agreed and reluctantly pushed that tasty carrot aside and left Karazhan. For now.

See, lemme talk about my guild for a bit. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before in the past, but I’m gonna say it again. We have a pretty large guild, 120-something characters and 70+ accounts, and we are largely comprised of people who are newer to the game or who are at least new to getting a character to 70. These are people I leveled with. People who learned the game with me. People who have never done this end-game stuff before… just like me. We’re all in this together.

I know of a lot of people who are in some big huge guild and they get ushered through Karazhan by the big boys the day after they hit 70 and come out of the other end all shiny and geared. I’m not trying to say that’s a bad way to do it, but that’s not how I would want to do it. I like the fact that my guild and I are doing it the old fashioned way. A year behind, yes. But that’s not the point. We worked our way through the 50s and 60s doing instances together. We learned how to work together as a very unified team. We started doing some heroics and we have done very well on them, if I might say so myself, largely because we have that unity and experience with each other.

Most of us have never been in Karazhan before (except for today’s little tour of the entryway). We haven’t done end-game before. We don’t know what we’re doing. This is a big first for us. And it’s going to be hard and we’re going to get dirty and there is a lot of work ahead of us. And we are going to learn so much. And I can’t wait.

We have a lot of people in the guild who are in their 50s or 60s or who are 70 and still need to get geared/keyed. And we agreed that we are going to start concentrating on helping those people get ready. It might take a few weeks. It might take more than that. But we will do it, and then we will have more than enough people for a ten-man raid and we’ll trust each other and be able to work as a team because that’s how we’ve been doing it all along.

It sometimes amazes me how much of a role WoW has had in teaching me how to be a team player. We’re allowed to say this in job interviews, right? You know, when they ask you the inevitable “Tell me a story of when you had to work as a group” question. I can talk about WoW, right? I might get some funny looks, but hey…