Finally…

Ari’s on a mission…

… to get herself a chinese dragon.

She is well and truly teed off that Dax who has now been in a grand total of three BG’s ever has one

Ari got her tabard last night but Alliance was losing so not even a shot at the dragon. Decided to take Dax in to get a tabard, as she’s currently guildless and I really want to hide her clown gear, then did a second one as she’d picked up the pvp daily and lo there was a golden medallion in the post.

I gather we have two weeks (or however long the Olympics last) to get the pet. Normally I don’t obsess as much, after all there’s always next year.

Only it’ll be four years before the Olympics are on and the pet will be something different, maybe a bulldog or a lion? Though as it’s in London a pigeon might be chosen.

There are also rumors of a azure skin but I’m not even going to look that up obsessing about the normal one is more than enough for one weekend.

Dax goes to AV

I ended up not playing a lot this weekend, just had other things to do, but I did play Dax.

We discovered Alterac Valley. I stood around in the cave waiting for the off, and realised

a) I didn’t have any raid addons so it was just the Blizz party UI

b) I didn’t have to buff anyone or heal anyone so it didn’t matter.

Then it was off with the usual mad charge south. Stopped off at IB and discovered killing  NPC’s in AV gives you XP. (Ari would have been at level cap when she first went there & she didn’t go back before 70)

Had a moment of WTF! when Cinder turned on Dax and starting biting, swiftly followed by realising it was some hordies red lynx and that Cinder was still Dax’s best friend.

I’m pretty sure Cinder is the main reason Dax has made it as far as she has. I just love that skin.  Yes I know it’s a recoloured  NE druid cat form more or less, but the lynxes are the only cat skin with ‘proper’ catseyes. The nightstalker  skin  in all its recolours have slits for eyes & it annoys me.

I’ve been following  the hunter changes in WotLK especially the extra  stable stalls, and the  5 level gap (as opposed to having to level your pet up from some silly low level) which is great because I have a plan that my  hunter will collect versions of druid forms and with only 3 slots and having to level a bear up from the mid fifties it wasn’t looking like it was going to happen.

Now I can pick up the Dire Raven from Blades’ Edge and have a look at the bear family again though I’m waiting to see if the Fjord Hawk becomes tameable.

Haven’t decided which bear yet there isn’t one that uses the druid bearskin so I may just keep my eyes open & pick whichever skin is least common. I’m assuming the NPC bears in Ashenvale aren’t tameable or someone would have done it by now.

And I’ll still have two slots left for pets with purpose. Yes I know Ravager is *the* PvP pet and Wolves *the* raid pet for that howl thing they do, but as Dax isn’t aiming to do either of those seriously my “druid” pets have higher priority

Dax also found time to go looking for random RP, not a great success. One worries for the realmwhen a row between two player run restaurants drops out of IC in /say to claim one of them “RP’s like a 5 year old”. No wonder both of them lack customers. Still Darkmoon Faire is in Shattrach this week and there’s usually RP to be found near there. If only the barker would stop spamming.

Friday Focus (1st Aug)

I have one goal this weekend and one goal only

• Play Daxtari

I was mildly stunned when I did that PvP daily on her earlier this week to realise shes’ never been in a BG. She’s also never done a dungeon. That it co-incided with this post on BBB’s blog about the “game starts at 70″ mindset got me thinking. It took me 30 days played to get Ari to 60. Not that I even knew the “/played” command existed back then.

I’d log on for an evening and spend it roleplaying in Ashenvale or doing some battlegrounds to keep my rank at sergeant. (In them thar days you got a 10% sergeants discount from vendors and I needed it to fund my drinking supply.)

If I was questing somewhere it was as much to follow the storylines as to worry about XP, and if the horde attacked Astranaar or Darnassus I dropped what I was doing and went to defend my homelands.

If I had a goal it was to enjoy the game while I was playing it, not reach 60. Not look to the next patch or expansion and plan what I was doing. Long gone are those innocent days of being such a noob I hadn’t even heard the word. Should I admit that as a hard core roleplayer in a Kaldorei only guild who didn’t care much for the younger races and certainly not those smelly magic users, mages & warlocks, I didn’t even know you could get a mage to conjure you water or create a portal to Capitals.

Somewhere after Ari hit 60 & I started raiding I got a lot more goal focussed, started reading the forums learning all the gamer terms downloading addons to monitor or improve my performance.

I don’t think one way of playing is better than the other, I enjoyed the game then and I enjoy it now in a different way, but in rushing to 70 I’ve deprived Dax, and myself, of some of the depth WoW can offer a player. One weekend of doing BG’s, (without trying to accumulate tokens & HP for a specific bit of gear) exploring old content, hanging out in Stormwind looking for random RP and just going with the flow won’t bring back the innocence of the old days, but taking ten days to get to 70 instead of nine won’t make me a worse player either.

Tasks undone

Not really sure if these are best done in a new post or whether I should just update and ‘republish’ the Friday one, for now it’s a new post

1. Get Machica to 25, she should have plenty of rested XP by now I’ve been ignoring her a bit recently
2. Farm Basiliks on Dax for some money
3. Read up around the web on all the ‘how to make Gold’ tips and tricks. Well the free ones. Not spending real money to find out how to make fake money
4. Almost forgot, attend the Redemption of Eranikus.

Out of four tasks I managed to complete one, not a very focussed weekend.

1. I struggled with Machica in Ashenvale, which is odd I know those quests well. So I popped across to Wetlands do do some of the early quests there to help give her a boost.

2. Didn’t even get onto Dax this weekend, kept playing hooky either leveling Briar or shock horror watching TV. I have discovered “TV Choice on Demand”, so all those programmes I missed because I was raiding when they were aired I can now watch. Well thats the theory the limited choice makes it unlikely that anything I want is actually available.

3. /point at TV “it’s their fault mum”. No I did do some surfing on this, of course most of the sites want you to buy their secrets, I did find James gold making guide but can’t connect to it from work so will edit this later (Later: check the Resources Page I’m putting anything I find under the heading Gold Digging)

4. Yay!  This one I completed. Eranikus is part of the quest chain to open the Gates of AQ. There was a massive effort to get them opened back when the instances were patched in, but because there’s a complicated quest chain before you can do this event most people haven’t bothered since the gates opened on their server.

Well anyway someone on our server got it into their head they’d like to follow it through so on Saturday there was an open event to redeem Eranikus.

The first attempt went a little awry when it descended into horde v alliance PvP. Both sides decided the other was to blame. (The bickering on the forums about who started it went on longer then the aborted attempt, so nothing new there) Not sure where the horde went but alliance regrouped. I watched Remulos kill a few pvp flagged ally members. Don’t know why he did that but they probably bought it on themselves, Remulos can do no wrong he’s mah demi-god.

Then back for the 2nd attempt which went off without a hitch. It was complete chaos though, I had to go watch a video of the orginal kill to get an idea of what was going on

I certainly didn’t see Tyrandes but she must have been there. The video is from 2006 when Vir Mortalis & Honorbound got together to take Eranikus down. As there were reports that this event was crashing servers, and because Eranikus generates a shade for every soul in Moonglade the two guilds kept it quiet about timing (they opened the gates unannounced at 6am server time to avoid crowds too). I was there though, had teleported to Moonglade for some reason, and saw the message in General about could we all please leave. No way. I’m a druid I wasn’t leaving my ‘capital’ but I did stay up by the teleport & stealthed so as not to be in the way. Thanks to poor graphics and the annoying green light of Moonglade I didn’t see much that time either.