The “Where Am I?” game

Here I am, just a nooby little warrior. Pressing buttons and slashing things. Doing quests and picking up my rewards. Equipping those rewards because they are upgrades.

And this is what I look like:

Aren’t I just beautiful? Even the pose is like “wtf..really?”

There is no attempt at matching. I’m not trying to NOT match. That’s just what I get and what I’ve put on. Nothing is mogged. There is truly no rhyme or reason to this mess.

There is kind of a purple theme going on with some of the pieces. The cloak is purple, too. Oh, it looks like I’m not wearing a cloak.

I am.

Bless your heart, Outland.

Even warlocks get the blues

The trouble with alts is when the special, once-a-year events come around it’s hard to find the motivation to work on them with all the toons. Now that achieves are pretty much account wide, that makes it much more difficult to care.

When Pilgrim’s Bounty rolls around, that is one that worries me. I’m glad that I did the rogue shooting one back when we had a central sanctuary that everyone gathered in. I’m glad I don’t have to waste a night trying to sit at enemy capital tables. I’m glad my achieves for that are done and I only have to care if Blizzard adds extra achieves in the future.

The part that nags at me is that it’s a good way to quickly level up a newb toon’s cooking. I don’t NEED to have every toon be a good cook. Some of them have lived for a long time on Hamburger Helper and ramen noodles and whatever cheese they scavenge off their enemies.

But I always think that I SHOULD do it and so I spent an afternoon working on cooking with my death knight. And I was sooo bored. I thought I would try to at least work on it with my goblin lock, but I just couldn’t.

Bocat will appreciate this next part: FUCK YOU CRZ! One more thing I’m glad for, is that I don’t have to try for that ridiculous achieve where you kill a chain of turkeys 40 times in a row. Because there were never turkeys around.

There were always some assholes around. I know they were assholes because all they did was run around and kill turkeys. They didn’t even loot them, they just killed them so that other people couldn’t. If I had been trying for the achieve I would have probably cried. As it was, it was still pretty annoying. I just wanted some damn turkeys so I could level up my cooking!

Instead of cooking, then, Zhari got to work on leveling. Can I say how much I love the 8th Anniversary buff? I did a handful of Outland quests, a few dungeons, and am now queueing up for Northrend instances.

It’s weird to bypass so much of Outland. Even though I’ve done it countless times now it was sad that it went by so quickly. I didn’t even do all of the Outland dungeons.

Of course I did the Caverns of Time one, where I went from adorable goblin to ugly human:

What is that? That is not cute. I just don’t get it.

I just got through taking the alliance DK through Northrend, so I don’t know how much questing I will want to do there with my lock. He may just do most of his leveling via dungeon finder.

I should probably spend some time working on getting another 90 or gearing up Khiaren to actually get into LFR, but I’m enjoying being little and evil.

Just no more ugly human mogs.

Little blue warlock

Zhari the little goblin warlock is cruising along; he got past level 50 this weekend, which means soon he will be ready for Outland. It seems weird because I just got my draenei DK on Winterhoof through Outland. I’ve pretty much been switching off between the two of them, taking turns leveling one while the other gets their rest XP.

I think it’s funny that these are the closing days of Cata and I’m finally getting my goblin leveled. I guess that means I won’t seriously work on any kind of panda until about 2014.

I actually have seen a lot of other goblins out there, which means there are other slacker people that also put off leveling a goblin. At least that’s what I’m telling myself.

One group had a goblin priest and I kept getting confused about which one was me, since we were both rocking the heirlooms and looked identical. Wait a minute…I don’t have Prayer of Mending…

I am grateful to the person who noted that you could transmog heirloom gear; which is such a nice option. If you have helm, cloak, shoulders, weapon and chest piece, you’ve basically got your entire look set from level 1 until you start phasing out the heirlooms. And that’s boring.

The problem was that I didn’t have a lot of pieces that I kept to transmog. The AH is pretty dead and what stuff there is in there is ridiculously overpriced. I started Zhari’s look based on the hat he won as a random greed roll. I liked the witch-looking hat with the goblin ears poking through.

Yes, it covers his mohawk, but it wasn’t as glorious as Zarigar’s so it’s ok.

And, yes, I know it’s a lot of blues of varying hues.

Blues hues.

Hee.

Even the staff was mogged to one with shades of blue on it.

The cape is one that I bought from the troll quartermaster. So even though I covered up his little baby mohawk it’s like he’s got a piece of Zarigar with him still.

He’s probably got about a week of playtime left on him. Once MoP hits the focus will need to be on getting the raiding toons to 90 and doing what I need to do for them. Then we’ll see what happens with the little blue warlock.

Moar waggle

I have abandoned pretty much all of my toons lately, but my poor Alliance ones definitely got the shaft. I logged onto Sarinde earlier this week to see where I had left her and it wasn’t good.

She had some random low level tailoring mats and some Simple Flour in her bags. Oops, oh yeah. I had gathered all that stuff up for her for last month’s Darkmoon Faire but got bored before I could actually go and do those quests. Even more sad is that Sarinde is still one point away from being maxed in tailoring.

Maybe next month.

My Horde toons are set pretty well for MoP. They are basically just sitting around waiting for the patch to break everything and send them into chaos. But I still had some things to take care of Alliance side.

The biggest gap I had with those toons is that none of them was a jewelcrafter. This wasn’t really a problem until Khiaren started doing some raiding over there and regularly needed gems. If I couldn’t find someone on at the time, I had to resort to the AH. And the gem market on Winterhoof was insane; I was hoping an Ahmule would show up and fix it.

I actually did make a JC but then I got bored with that toon and he became a bank alt. Then I got stuck because I didn’t really want to play him to level him up – and thus level up his JC – but I didn’t want to make another toon do JC because I already had one. (The logic, she is faulty but she is mine.)

I guess all it took was some pre-patch boredom to get things going. Because what do I like to do when I’m bored? Make another alt!

My wonky logic then told me that pandas can’t be DKs, so I could make one of those and not feel like I was cheating myself out of something I could do when MoP hit. Plus, of course, I could skip 50+ levels by going DK. The plan isn’t to be maxed by MoP, but just to get as much done as I can.

With my DK plan in place, I just needed to choose a race. To avoid repeating what I had I eliminated female human, female draenei, dwarfs, and female worgen.

I also said no to gnomes. (Sorry, gnome lovers, but I just can’t do it.)

My previous JC-turned-bank-alt was male draenei, so I knocked that out, too. I could not farm ore with that ridiculous habit they have of looking over their shoulder. Why so suspicious?

I was left with male human, night elf and male worgen.

I played around on the preview screen for each one and all of them were kind of meh. I kind of liked female night elf the best, even though several runs of Well of Eternity kind of made me hate their animations. But this was not a caster, so let’s try it out.

A few quests in and I was bored. I didn’t really like her and didn’t want to continue on. So I decided to break my duplicate rule (for the second time: see Sabryel & Notari) and go with a race I already liked.

Ok, I liked the waggle of the female draenei. And they come with a JC bonus. Fine, I won’t have duplicates of toons unless one is a DK. Does that work?

Since you get spit out of the DK starting zone at 58, the plan was to head to Outland, get to 60 and grab flying, then go back and work on farming ore and leveling up the professions. But then I hit 60, picked up flying…..and continued questing.

Playing melee in a group setting is still not my favorite thing, but I do enjoy bashing things in the face when I am soloing. I kind of forgot how fun it was to feel so OP as I go along doing my quests. (Yes, I know they basically defanged any elite not named Fel Reaver.) I couldn’t stop doing quests!

So I ended the weekend with my DK at level 63 and mining at level 1. Jewelcrafting would be at level 1, too, if it wasn’t for the racial.

>.<

Oops.

I have been spoiled

It began–as it usually does–by Sorak mocking me:

“WTF are you doing in LFR?”

Well, I had thrown my druid in there to get some VP. And if there was something she could pick up for herself, that would be cool, too, but I was looking to throw some VP boots and bracers at my lesser geared toons.

After that it was time for some heroics, but I couldn’t commit to any. I wanted Call to Arms bags, dammit, and I wasn’t going to queue until I got one. I don’t care if I only get Amberjewels or tanking flasks, I wanted my special snowflake reward for specialness.

And because I’m stupid and think I’m too cool for HoT instances, I queued for the lower level ones and of course get the troll instance. Every. Single. Time. When will I learn?

I don’t know which one it is. It’s the one I hate the most of the 2. They are at the boss that randomly kills people and the spirit guy rezzes you midfight. Do you know if you die enough times (YAY SHOCKWAVE BUFF!!!!) eventually the spirits run out and you get no more rezzes? Because I know that now.

Next!

And then the game started to be a little bitch to me and tell me CtA was up, but then when the queue popped up the bag would not be listed as a reward. What the hell kind of trick is this? It happened a few times and when I did a quick search online, apparently it is thought to be some kind of bug or just unfortunate timing.

Some people claimed they still got the bag at the end but I wasn’t going to risk it. Hell no. The worst times were when people would not accept the queue and the bag would be gone the next time it came up. Eff that. I declined every time.

I am now an entitled healer and I demand extra rewards for my time!!!!!!!!1111

So of course I did the next sensible thing and switched over to Zari. I’ll take the longer queue times for dps and Blizzard can keep their tease rewards and THEIR LIES!!!!

Pretty people really do get nice things

Omg I actually play my horde toons!

First I planned to take Notari the Now Beautiful Failmage through LFR. I went to take off her tabard, since there was no rep to gain and I wanted her to go in pretty. I noticed she had on the shirt that level 1 belfs come with and wondered what she would look like if it was taken off. So I took off her shirt (giggity) and saw that her robe now looked like this:

So apparently that shirt was covering up her exposed belly. Erm ok. The weird cut-off for her belly looked wrong. There was so much detailing in the neck and top part of the robe that having her stomach randomly showing seemed really distracting. Shirt back on, get into queue.

Right from the start it was a mess. It seemed like 10 seconds into the raid (the 2nd half) the entire floor was covered in purple fire and no one was taunting the dragons. Wipe #1. Mass exodus of people, including tanks, then off again. Same issue, wipe #2.

Well, I’m done here. I decided instead to take Notari out to Magister’s Terrace and see if she could get some pretty clothes. She got some shoulders that went into her void storage and, after killing Kael’thas Sunstrider, she was picking through his spoils and found herself with a new pet.

Ugh. Ok, well at least it wasn’t the mount.

I wasn’t done with masochism so I switched over to Tenderloyne the Forgotten Holy Pally and sent her into LFR next. It went much smoother for her; she ended up with a new belt and a head token.

I hadn’t realized that she had never done the 2nd half of LFR before so it was kind of embarassing when her achieve popped up. Whoops. I don’t even think I would have taken her in if I realized she had never been there.

That was only the first part of the embarassment, because once I turned in the head token and gemmed and enchanted that thing up, I put it on her and was stunned. Horrible. It was horrible.

I had to take a ghetto screenshot because I couldn’t get one from the loading screen. The thing is so huge that most of it goes off the screen. Maybe when she gets more matching pieces it won’t look so awful, but I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t even think I had the patience to try to mog around it at this time.

So I did the rare thing for a non-mohawked toon and turned off helm. Sigh. One day I will make you pretty, just not right now.

After that, I wanted to run Sabryel the Other Blood Elf Toon But This One is a DK through MT and see if she could find some mog stuffs. I raced through that place and was feeling leet when I got the achieve at the end and saw that I had ran through it on normal.

Oops. Switched it to heroic and went through again. She got a cool looking axe that would be cool to mog. She also picked up a dagger that I really liked, too bad DKs can’t use them.

Killed Kae’thas again, got the achieve for Heroic MT and was going through his loot when…are you effing kidding me?

Sabryel got the mount of her very first friggin’ try??!! Sonofawhore.

I send two rarely played alts into a heroic with the intent of them finding some dress-up clothes and they each come out with something nicer? I don’t have the pet or mount on Zarigar. I mean, sure I don’t farm that regularly on Zari or anything, but it’s annoying that they picked up that stuff with so little effort.

Sigh. The beautiful people get everything.

A little less fail

Or fayle, if you prefer.

Now that Notari was all pretty, she got the notion that she should step out of Orgrimmar and let the people gaze upon her gloriousness. So off into LFR she went.

It’s always pretty telling when the dragon trash at the beginning goes terrible with many deaths. The people who drop at that point are probably the smart ones. Well, no one ever accused me of being smart.

Ultra, then, is a disaster with one of the tanks not picking him up and it becomes death city. The amusing thing is one of the tanks says, “I’ve never been here and no one told me how the fight goes.” Well, that part is sad. The amusing part is that people still complain that it was the heals’ fault or that there was not enough dps. Really, guys, scroll up and read.

The second attempt is also pretty deathy, but he goes down and I am still alive. Yay, it’s wonderful being pretty and getting to live! His drops include 2 helm tokens and 1 chest token. Homina-homina-homina…give me! I’ve ragged on Notari’s spirit helm so long–she needs this upgrade! And there is only one other mage, good for me?

I won a roll! I won a roll! I got…the chest. Sigh. Oh well. It’s still very much an upgrade so it’s all right.

Lootship is a one-shot deal. I am terribad at getting out of the shockwave part–if I had a nickel for every time one of Rep’s pallies has to use Lay on Hands on me–but Blink makes it 50x easier.

On Spine I am dutifully spamming Arcane Blast when the trade window pops open and someone puts the helm token inside. Wha-? Is this a trade for the chestpiece? They can have it. Then the other person competes his part, so I complete the trade.

Then get a whisper: I got this by accident. Enjoy.

Zomg! I gets to haves 2 upgrades!?!?! I wonder if he truly didn’t need it or was just giving it to me because I’m so pretty now. People really do bend over backwards to give you things when you are good looking. (Giggity.)

It really did make up for the part on spine where the new tank was warned not to take a healthy amalgamation through the bloods and then proceeded to pick up 9 stacks immediately. It was deadly, though the pretty mage once again lived.

After that it was Deathwing. Another surprising one shot with an amusing 3 tentacle swords dropping at the end. Because I am not a whore, I pass on all the loot before I drop.

Time to turn in my tokens! With new loot, that means new gems and enchants. It also means I have to re-mog. I went back to the white robe, even though it looks like a priest outfit. Ah well, that’s the beauty of mogging, I can change my look whenever I want.

It’s good to be pretty.

Spring cleaning

Is it still technically spring? Summer starts when I have to turn on the A/C and that happened for me long ago.

As proof as my commitment to Mohawk Troll and reassure that there will continue to be nonsensical ramblings for some time to come, I have been trying to clean up and update some of my pages.

I thought updating my Who’s Who page who be quick and easy. Um, yeah apparently that thing hadn’t been updates since  2010. There were 5 toons on it and only a few were 85. (Or 80, whatever the max level was back then.)

Now there are quite a bit more than 5, most of them 85. It’s kind of scary to see them all listed out in one place. And it’s amusing to see how they pair up: Zarigar/Khiaren, Lorethos/Sarinde, Torvell/Notari…

I don’t seem to venture out beyond my comfort zone. Where are my hunters and rogues? Not every little alt is listed, such as Lorethos 2 on the alliance side and my little warrior side project. But at least I have a warrior!

The next part will be to go through my blogroll and that will be a lot more work. I’ve checked some of the links and a lot of them are dead. Some of them haven’t been updated in months and some of them don’t even lead to those sites anymore. Sad.

(And yet here I still am. In your face, bitchez!)

I’m debating waiting until MoP to take that project on, since I don’t know who might come back for it and what other blogs might pop up before then. Actually I’ll probably be adding stuff, at least. There are a lot more blogs I read now and I haven’t taken the time to add them like I should.

Even if I don’t comment a lot, just know that a little troll with a mohawk is probably lurking around. If you are the type of blog that lovingly mocks your guildies then I will be there with popcorn.

Slow toon

My druid is stuck.

Usually when I want to work on a toon, I can level them fairly quickly. When I decide on an alt, it becomes a fairly involved project. I think about how I want to level them and what they will do when they are max level and what kind of role I’m interested in for them.

Sure, my account is littered with 85s I had good intentions for but are not played regularly. Tenderloyne. Sabryel. Torvell. But even those toons had times during leveling when I was obsessed with them and had lots of greats plans for them.

But not my alliance druid.

Her name is Lupeh and she is a worgen. (Get it? Har har.) She was created because I wanted to see the worgen starting zone and because I wanted an alliance equivalent for Jendora. My troll druid is awesome and I wanted to recreate that experience on an alliance toon.

Design-wise, I absolutely love her. In addition to wanting to see the worgen beginning, I knew I wouldn’t like it if I made her a night elf. (Sorry Ana!) Too many runs through Well of Eternity have shown me how annoying night elf animation is. Constantly bouncing on their feet and that annoying way they rotate their wrists when they are casting. Ugh.

To be fair, I also found male worgen to be equally annoying. The way they wave their arms about like they are signalling a rescue plane for help. No, thanks. Female worgen animation isn’t perfect, either, but it was the least ridiculous-looking so that’s what I chose.

The problem came when I was done with the starter zone and ready to segue into “normal” WoW. I had started as balance because I thought a caster would be easiest and I would still be able to kill stuff outside of dungeons. Then I felt like I wasn’t doing very good with balance so I thought I would go back to resto.

The problem with resto as a druid is that how you heal when you first start out is different than how you heal at endgame. For me, anyway. Jendora with her purples and big, old mana pool can just throw out hots and AOE heals and green circles of love and not particularly worry about anything.

Lupeh has one hot and a couple of brute force heals. I sent her into an instance as heals and it was like I had never played before. My fingers went to Lifebloom by reflex and found that it didn’t exist. Neither did Wild Growth. When I used Swiftmend it didn’t make a pretty green circle and actually ate my Rejuv hot. I was stuck with crude versions of the spells I regularly used with Jendora and they didn’t make any sense to me anymore.

So maybe back to balance? This is where I’m stuck. It feels like my choices are learn balance or re-learn resto. (Don’t suggest feral; that is not an option.) I honestly can’t decided which one I want to do so I do nothing.

To buy myself some time, I even told myself I wouldn’t worry about it until I had picked up a few heirloom pieces. Sarinde and Khiaren have been slowly doing dungeons and spending their JP on leather caster gear and now Lupeh is pretty set. Still missing trinkets, but everything else is in place.

When I said before that I do nothing, that isn’t 100% true. I don’t leave the city, but most days I log on and make her do the cooking daily. That’s it. Since I’ve been stuck with indecision she’s gone up about 4 levels simply by doing that one daily. I could add the fishing daily to her to-do list but I’m still doing Arch on Zarigar and I don’t have time for more than 1 boring profession.

My awesome druid who was going to do awesome things now spends her days making spice bread.

Booted

You have been removed from group.

Um, what? I’m back in Stormwind? How did this happen? Let’s back up a few steps.

Torvell, the old grampa mage, needed to do one more instance to cap out his VP. He had been doing a mix of the HoT heroics and the old school ones. I’ve been trying to build up my JP among my 3 85s on Winterhoof so that they could buy heirloom stuff for the druid. (My priest got heroic HoO earlier in the week and that group did every single boss. Normally that would annoy me to hell but that time I was thrilled.)

So grampa mage queued for an older heroic and got ZA. One that was already in progress, even. Because I am lucky like that.

I started figuring out how long I would have to wait before pulling a Slice. Or I could just eat the deserter debuff and work on Children’s Week stuff. I saw that they were at the trash in front of the bear boss–and he’s pretty easy–so I would stick around and see what happened.

It took a while to get going since the hunter was apparently lost and couldn’t figure out how to get to us. Which is kind of understandable because when I loaded in, I was on the path up to the eagle boss, but everone else was at the last trash by the bear boss, with everything between them already dead.

We worked out a strategy to take the surges, then he dies and I win the crystal. Go me. Onward to the bird boss.

On the first trash the mob they mark for sheeping is immune to it, but he dies anyway and we go to the next group. This next group wipes us. Oh well. We come back in, sheep one of the remaining mobs and kill the rest.

(We do this 4 person because the hunter is lost again. Everyone released and got back in, but now he’s wandering somewhere near the front.)

We go to the next group. One mob is marked for sheeping. I sheep it–

–then I get a loading screen and I’m back in Stormwind. That’s it. We are back to where the story began.

So what happened? I don’t know. And since I will never know, I can only guess.

I can cross being mouthy off the list. I don’t think I said anything during that run; no one else did, either.

My dps & damage were right in line with everyone else’s. There was no wild variance where one person was carrying someone else.

Were they mad that I didn’t set a table? Nobody asked for one or for any food. I don’t make a table for every run, maybe that makes me a bad mage, but whatever. (I don’t think is the reason, I’m just listing all the ones I could think of.)

Was my PvP cloak offensive? Maybe. I had found it in Sarinde’s bag and sent it over to boost Torvell’s ilevel. Then I just ended up wearing it. If I’m going to cheat I might as well go all the way. It’s the only PvP piece I have, but it’s highly noticeable, so someone wouldn’t even need to do an inspect to see I’m wearing. So I can’t discount it.

My other guess is that is was by mistake. Well, that would be the least offensive reason. They “accidentally” picked Vote to Kick instead of Inspect and then they “accidentally” put in a reason and then they “accidentally” clicked OK. It could happen, right? Or I could say that they meant to kick the clueless hunter who was wandering around and got me instead. Yeah?

Something I forgot to mention was that every person from the group came from a different server, so it was unlikely that it was a group of people banding together to kick someone out “just because”. Or maybe it was. Whatever the reason was, at least 3 people had to agree on it.

The act of being kicked actually doesn’t bother me.  The anonymity of it is frustrating; I would like to know the reasoning behind it yet I would never want to get a message saying something like: “You have been removed from group because of…RETARD.” I will never know if I did something or they did something or it was a mistake or they were just being mean.

If I was the lost hunter and got kicked or was doing less damage than the tank or something obvious, then it would be understandable. Maybe the explanation is nothing more complex than “4 (or 3) people wanted to be jerks.” I queued up again and got Hour of Twilight. The group was much more geared and I was definitely the scrub doing the least dps. But I didn’t get kicked. Explain that, internets!