Tag Archives: screenshots

screenshots, stories

Took a Ride Into the Danger Zone

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So I healed an Underbog on my druid today, since I’ve been trying to do one instance or so a week with her, just for kicks. There was a level 64ish hunter in the group.

…I bet you all think you know where this is going, right? Some sort of disaster story about this hunter?

Well you would be quite wrong! For this hunter had a very solid spec and shot rotation. Pet on passive with growl off. Eager to trap if necessary (though it wasn’t). I told him it was really nice to see a PuG’d hunter who knew what he was doing. He informed me that he also had a level 70 horde hunter and that he loved the class.

A. Kindred. Spirit!

So we basically spent the entire instance talking about hunters. It didn’t help that two of the other people in the group also had level 70 hunter characters and seemed to have a decent grasp of them as well. I never woulda expected a hunter theorycrafting discussion in Normal Underbog, but there you go. It was really refreshing and honestly I think that the odds that it are gonna happen again are pretty low, so it was fun while it lasted.

We wound up running Slave Pens after Underbog and I got a level on the tree, but honestly the discussion reeeally had me itching to play my hunter. So that’s what I spent the rest of the day doing. Ended up with this fabulous prize:

Yes, that’s right, Tawyn is 77 and the flyer is back! I have to admit though, unlike 99% of the WoW population, I wasn’t really dying to get flying back. There was something really charming and fun to me about hoofing it old-school-style. But in the end the flyer was an obvious upgrade choice. Firstly, the last zones are much more geared towards you having it. Secondly, having your own flying mount saves you a bunch of money that would otherwise go to flight paths. And thirdly, when everybody else has a flyer and you don’t… things are tough. It really sucks to be heading towards that Wolvar Pup and have somebody drop out of the sky and grab it and fly off again*. So in the end I am glad have my wings back.

* The day I hit exalted with the Kalu’ak and can get my pengiun pet is the day I do that quest for the last time and never do it again. Ever. And yes, I need the penguin pet. Linux geek, remember?

screenshots

Ding Dong

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Hit 74 last night. Loving Dragonblight. Loving the Tuskarr. Loving the Red Dragonflight (honestly I have been a big fan of theirs since the War of the Ancients novel trilogy, but the expansion has rekindled the love and I am soooo going to have a Red Drake mount. I don’t care if everyone else gets one too.) Loving Dalaran– it’s like a mall only all the shops are toy shops and instead of a bunch of zombies taking over there are a bunch of gnomes taking over. Much <3. Loving Aspect of the Dragonhawk if mostly for the fact that now I can consolidate two buttons on my actionbar down to one. (...what? Don't give me that look!) Loving the fact that in one more level I'll be plunking my 51st talent point into Beast Mastery (cause I opted to go for some Marks stuff first) and I'll be able to have a pet talent point field day. Well, that'll do it for today. I have a couple of informative-guide-type posts in the works, I swear. =P I leave you with the following screenshot:

“So then after that Sephiroth jerk ganked me, my whole party just left without rezzing me! The nerve! I had to make the corpse run back but they were all gone by then… harumph.”

pets, screenshots

Don't Stop It Now

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Seeing as I spent most of Thursday goofing around on my Death Knight, and the first half of Friday joining billions of Ramparts groups on my treedruid, and didn’t even really get around to starting Tawyn’s leveling journey until the second half of yesterday… I’d say this isn’t too bad. I’ve got the leveling fever now though, and I want really badly to get to 71 today. Will it happen without all that rested XP that I had yesterday? Only time will tell!

I’ve been experimenting with using different pets while questing, and thus far I seem to be having the best luck with my good ol’ kitty Locke, the Ferocity Pet. The bear isn’t bad but in all honesty both he– er, she— and Locke seem to be pumping out the same amount of threat, so in the end you’re basically choosing if you’d rather have the bear’s armor and general tankyness, or the cat’s DPS for quicker questing. I prefer the DPS myself for general leveling, and saving the bear for solo’ing harder quests.

I have also experimented with both my Cunning pets, Tux the Owl and Eltanin the Windserpent, and they don’t seem to be quite as effective but they do work well enough. Tux’s Snatch can be handy sometimes.

I will most certainly be continuing to rotate through my pets as I level, and reviewing them as I go– do keep in mind that at this point I do not have the exotic pet talent and the four extra points (I’ve slated myself to get it in five more levels)– so your mileage may vary!

Well, off to do my morning routine and then head over to– probably the Borean Tundra (I’ve been alternating between both the Tundra and the Fjord but I actually find the Tundra to be a tad more interesting. And the baby mammoths must be saved.)

In closing, here is Tawyn surrounded by fanboys!

Hawtstuff!

screenshots

Unexpected

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So, yesterday was full of surprises. Let’s see here, we’ve got…

…Death Knights which wound up being about ten times more fun than I was expecting. The whole opening quest line thingy was superbly done and perhaps more importantly, I am absolutely in love with my character ideas for my Death Knight. And as you long-time readers know, even though I am not a particularly active roleplayer, I looooove making characters and stories for them and more often than not, it is backstory more than any other factor that determines which characters I wind up actively playing… this is especially true for non-hunters cause it’s so hard for me to get into them otherwise.

Why yes, I did make a gnome. I like gnomes. And c’mon…

…stealing a pony is adorable.

Next up: Queue Times.

Queue Times are a strange phenomena that I have not had to deal with before. But it appears that with the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, old-time players are returning to the game in droves. It seems to be especially affecting older servers and, well, Silver Hand is a launch-date server (one of only two RP servers on launch day, according to WoWWiki!) I myself got lucky and never had to wait in line more than a few minutes, but there were reports in Trade Chat and among some of my friends and guildmates that the line was as high as 400 people and an hour’s wait at some points.

Fortunately for me, there is always The Venture Co. where all my hordies are at, if the wait gets too unbearable– VeCo is a low-pop server so it’s nice to see it actually bumped up to Medium now =P

As for my hunters, well, Tawyn trained all of the next levels of her professions (byebye gold!) and did some questing in Howling Fjord but by this time the place was swamped and I got sleepy really early (I blame the previous night’s Midnight Release), so I just called it an early night. I do plan on doing a lot more stuff with her and hopefully Lunapike today. Really, I am in no rush to hit 80. I know a lot of people are runnin’ their way to Naxx and I can definitely understand that, but I am content with going a little slower, seeing all the sights and messing around with multiple characters and not just one.

Plus, come on. Hellfire Peninsula is a “WTB Healer” fest right now, and I have a level 57 resto druid. You don’t expect me to ignore that clarion call completely, do ya? =P

screenshots

Another Mission Accomplished

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All it took was one run of the Sporeggar’s “Now That We’re Still Friends” quest to want to repeatedly bang my head into the wall. Grinding on Naga bugs me more than grinding on Ogres does, for some reason (maybe all the slave adds they bring?), and on top of that, you get to deal with approximately 42 other 70s there all camping the spot. Just say no.

But I really wanted Sporeggar rep for my Tiny Sporebat. I was already sitting pretty at Revered because that’s what I had to get to nab the Primal Earth to Primal Water Transmute (aka the Moneybags Transmute), so I just had to get to exalted. Preferably without that naga quest.

But hey, Sporeggar just loves those flowers that you can get in Underbog…

The question then became, “Can I solo enough of Underbog to effectively farm the flowers?”

…apparently, up to the first boss, I can!

Now that two-pull pre-boss is where things fizzle out, because those mobs are un-trappable and they just love to squish hunter pets. But still, I was quite pleased to have gotten that far. It was a crazy ride, I had to trap and kite and maneuver my way out of a myriad of large and hard-hitting pulls, and there were a couple times where I was lucky to escape with a mere 400 HP, but I never once did die, and in the end I wound up with not only 14 flowers but also the realization that I had fallen in love with Huntering all over again, for, oh, the 736th time or so.

Now I could have just farmed that first third of Underbog over and over but at this point the Boyfriend and the Pallyfriend wanted to get in on the action so we stomped through the place a time or two and whaddaya know:

Annoying naga quest? Pfft. Who needs it when you’ve got a bear? =P

(And yes, Bear is now 70, and still nameless. Why am I so horrible at coming up with names lately? /sob)

screenshots

Minipet Mania

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I figured since my last few posts were so focused on minipets– the bat minipet in particular– I should at least discuss my thoughts on them a little.

So, minipets. I’ve really liked them ever since I started playing WoW. I say “really like” instead of “love” here because I never really considered myself to be a diehard collector. I just liked having some fun minipets. My first ever minipet was the Westfall Chicken, when I was about level 8 or so. My sister showed me how to get it and helped me set up a /chicken macro to spam. I still have that macro in Tawyn’s macro list. The Westfall Chicken followed me everywhere until one day I found an adorable Mechanical Squirrel on the Auction House for a whopping 40 silver. I spent all my cash on it. I was broke but happy. My boyfriend thought I was nuts for spending that kinda money on a pet.

Then came the Children’s Week Quests and you had the option of getting one of three minipets, or five gold. Five gold! I would be rich!

…yeah, forget that. I wanted Speedy. So off I went to all sorts of crazy far off locations at the tender level of 16 and got my turtle.

As I progressed through the game I found myself casually collecting the occasional minipet, mostly the ones that I really liked. I willfully passed up on several minipets because I wanted the ones I owned to be special. It’s sort of like that inspirational story you’ll hear sometimes, about the kid who only owned two Hot Wheels cars but didn’t want any more because he couldn’t spread the love around that much. That was sort of like me– I carefully picked the minipets I owned. Of course, there were many minipets out there that I considered to be special, so it wasn’t long before I had a whole bag dedicated to minipets anyway (now consider my quiver and my bag dedicated to random holiday junk and “toys”, and you will know where my constant bagspace issues came from.)

At level 70 I sort of gained a reputation among my instancing/raiding circle as being That-Hunter-With-The-Minipets. Other people would have one or two minipets that they could bring out to show, me, I had a Random Minipet button on my action bars that I would hit every five minutes so I would cycle through several different ones throughout the course of your average Heroic. More than one person asked me “How many of those do you have anyway?” or /boggled at the fact that everytime they looked at me, I had a different minipet out. I was different that way, and unique, because I was that willing to give up my bagspace for them. But I was never a collector so much as just a fan.

And then Patch 3.0 and Achievements came out. Minipets became summonable, and fashionable. Even though it sort of bugged me on a minor level that now everybody could and likely would become a minipet junkie, on the other hand the idea of actually having bag space again made me so ecstatic that any potential sadness caused by a loss-of-uniqueness was nullified. It was also about that time that I realized “Hey… I’d might as well go pick up all those minipets that I passed up on before.”

So off I went, gathering up all the faction-specific minipets that I didn’t have and any of the other easily-obtainable ones, and after getting the Batling I took a look at my collection and realized hey– I have 40 minipets. Without even really trying.

Then I realized that when you get 50 minipets, they not only send you an adorable skunk in the mail, but you also get an achievement that includes wording which is suspiciously similar to my current place of employment. The irony, I could taste it. That achievement? Tawyn needs it.

So she spent the last three days living in Wetlands. It was worth it for #41 here:

Three more dragon whelplings and days of endless farming to go! Hey, it’s the week before the expansion, what else do ya expect me to do? =P

Do you guys have any thoughts or stories on minipets? Or other comments or questions? Share the comment love!