Yay Achievements!

     Seish has accomplished a lot this week! I need to get better at screenshotting achieves and things when I get them now that I've got a place to post them. Realized after the fact that there were a whole bunch of things I wish I'd screencapped.
     Thursday night he finally went in to the Brawler's Guild. He bought the ticket months and months ago when they went down to 1k gold on the Black Market Auction House, but he hadn't even gone in. Tai went in and brawled his way to rank 3 but Seish hadn't touched it. After Thursday night he's rank four and got a new pet! And might have gone further except then I realized it was 4 am!

     Last night he finally finished collecting the 3000 valor points that slave driver Wrathion wanted. (I was really late starting him on that quest so he's playing catch up big time.) Thanks so much for Syri (husband's mage) and Dust (friend's shaman) for running three heroic scenarios with me last night to finish that off! We also managed to achieve the bonus goal in one of those for the first time ever!
     Of course as soon as Wrathion found out Seish had finished that task, he had a couple more for him. I groaned: have to go kill some guy that would probably take more than Seish and Dust to accomplish and win two battlegrounds when I'm awful at pvp. I was ready to call it a night but Dust insisted that we should give High Marshall Twinbraid a try. After a single epic failure Seish managed to down him with some help from his goblin friend, even though he died a split second after the dwarf. Still it counted. Yay! one more task out of the way.
     But there remained the dreaded pvp. And Dust informed me all the good horde pvpers went to bed early. So I didn't hold out much hope for anything but we queued up anyhow. Silvershard Mines first. We won! I couldn't have been more surprised! But there was still the Temple of Kotmogu to go and surely my luck wouldn't hold. But it did! We got an amazing group and sailed to victory by a very large margin. Seish got not only the Temple of Kotmogu Victory achieve but also Temple of Kotmogu All-Star. And despite my dislike for pvp it was a lot of fun.
     So two more tasks out of the way and now it's off to Isle of Thunder to start on the dailies in earnest and run the Throne of Thunder a bunch more times for secrets. Still it's been a pretty satisfying week for Seish

I never thought I'd say this...

     But I miss Heroic Halls of Origination.

     I don't really miss any of the other heroic dungeons from Cataclysm and if I had to start queueing for them again as often as I did back then I'd probably get over missing Halls very quickly. But today I miss it. Not so much for running the instance because running it was very very long, even when you skipped all the optional bosses it still felt long.
     But because I remember queueing into it so many times with guildies and wiping occasionally over stupid things and laughing because Ret's* warrior alt would always die to the purple circles on Anraphet. It happened so often that it became an inside guild joke that the warrior in question just liked purple so much she couldn't not stand in it. As you can imagine Setesh wasn't really fun for her either.
     But it's things like that I miss, chatting with each other in guild chat as we ran the instances, laughing over really silly things. I had a lot more guildies that played back then, so I could usually get one or two any time Rim needed to go back to farming chaos orbs.
     On top of that Halls of Origination is a really neat dungeon. I've always had a thing for Ancient Egypt since I was a wee one, so one of the first things I did when I got to Uldum was fly around taking so many screenshots. And Halls of Origination has that amazing lost pyramid feel to it. The instance itself is gorgeous, even if it is really long and the optional bosses were neat to look at.
     One of the things Tai has been doing a lot of lately is running a friends' alts through instances to help them level. I actually really enjoy doing this because it gives me a chance to really look at the instances, take them in the way I couldn't if I were running them at level and needed to be more focused on doing my job. Well, there hasn't been an alt run through Halls yet, so today Rim went, just by himself to have a look around.

     Well, not entirely by himself because of course Speckles went. Where would a paladin be without his loyal cat?  The nice thing about wandering into instances solo is I can do things like go through the doorways I never got to go through when running the instance at level. Doorways that don't go anywhere... except when they lead into what looks like a service hallway down to a large Titan engine under the elevator!

     Wow, I never knew this was here! It doesn't do anything, there aren't any mobs or bosses or shiny loot. But you can wander on down here and just look around and finding out that it was here made me feel like I'd discovered something. Makes me want to go around and poke a bit more thoroughly into some of the older instances. And maybe sometime I will. In the meantime, though, Rim has had his little trip down memory lane and now he can go back to dealing with the more pressing problems in Pandaria. (Or just sitting around on his cozy farm in the Valley of Four Winds.)

Alt Appreciation Week: Druids

     Loved this idea: Alt Appreciation Week as soon as I saw it, so I knew if I made a blog when it was still going I'd have to post for it. Missed out on blogging for Death Knight Week, but I did pull Nyv out of his semi-retirement in Vashj'ir (Cursed Poseidus why won't you spawn for me?) and give him a bunch of pvp gear and get him the new boots from the 5.3 chain.
      This week it's druids. I love druids. I love the idea of them, love their shapeshift forms, especially the new stag travel forms. Unfortunately they're one of the classes I don't seem to be really good at. Or at least I haven't figured them out yet. These are my druid alts.

Tiuli

 Tiuli's lvl 86 at the moment. Her inscription is maxed and her herbalism is getting there. She's a resto/feral druid and I even gave a shot at healing on her a couple times during Cataclysm. I wasn't very good. I'm not very good at feral spec either. So she's sort of languishing for the moment.

Macangus

This handsome guy is my guardian druid. He's lvl 85. He leveled to about 83 with my husband's priest, but the priest moved on to 90 via pet battles and I wasn't really enjoying the way druid tanking worked, so Macangus is stuck at 85 for the moment. I love the tauren druid forms. Their flightform is definitely my favorite and I'm very partial to their catform. And well look at Macangus' bear form! What is not to love about this? (Except that I can't play it worth beans.)

Elynthaeia

This is Elynthaeia. She's level 30.  She's my alliance druid, I created her to help a friend start a guild. I thought maybe if I try leveling as Resto again I can figure out the changes and be a proper druid healer. One random run of Gnomeregan later... Elynthaeia is now a Balance druid. She gets to be pretty and spectral and surrounded by falling stars and not get yelled at if the tank line of sights her and people die. She hasn't seen much playtime, especially since Mists hit, but I enjoy Balance so far. And I think the Alliance stag form is the prettiest.

My goal for the druids this week is to try to do something with each of them. I'd like to get Tiuli's herbing a bit higher, maybe get her to the Valley of the Four Winds. Macangus just got the Spear of Xuen from Seish and I'd like to try and do enough questing in Pandaria to get to the vendor so he can buy himself some gear. For Elynthaeia, I think my goal will just be to refresh myself on her balance rotation and do a dungeon or two. Maybe pick out a transmog for her to encourage me to level her later. Nothing motivates like transmog goals. Monday I'll make a post about how I managed with these goals.

Introductions and things.

     I finally broke down and decided to make myself a WoW blog! I've been lurking around, reading other people's and thoroughly enjoying their adventures. But then I'd see interesting transmog challenges and think: Wow I'd kind of like to do something for one of those. And then there were screen shot challenges. Wanted to do those too. So the idea for making my own WoW blog started germinating in my head. After much toying with it and debating and angsting with myself over a name: Here it is.
     And here's a little about me and my gaming history: I started playing WoW pretty recently. A week or so before the Cataclysm hit. My friends had been trying to get me into it for well over a year and I finally gave in and let myself be talked into it. I figured I'd probably like it. And I did! I'd played EverQuest before. Not a lot really, or particularly well, but I played it.
     I had a Dark Elf Fighter (I can't remember if that's what the class was called any more but I think it's right.) His name was Drazzek Windblades and he reached the illustrious level of 29 largely by grinding mobs and by ever so slowly killing things until he was Kill on Sight in his home city and could wander around in the Wood Elf city, without getting more than strange looks from the guards. Because I could. I didn't do anything really epic on him, but I had lots of funny adventures that made me laugh and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
     So WoW wasn't my first MMO and at first there were a lot of things I really didn't like about it when comparing it to Everquest. The character customization was unimpressive. The male elves looked like bodybuilders, the graphics seemed kind of cartoon-ish. I've largely gotten over my quibbles with the graphics. I don't mind any more if my plate wearing paladin who totes around a gigantic sword looks like he's got the brawn to heft it. I do still wish the customization was better. I wish that my warlock could look skinny and bookish in comparison. It still bothers me that the females of most races are 10 times sexier than the males. And that gigantic chunks of some sets of armor just fall right off when a woman equips it. But I love the game.
     I love leveling professions. I love leveling alts. I love grinding up reps for achievements and mounts. Especially mounts. I never got a mount in EverQuest. In WoW I'm working my way ever so slowly toward that elusive 200 mount achieve. I love playing my characters. I play paladins a lot. I had a paladin in EverQuest too. I've played paladins in a LOT of D&D campaigns. So of course the first thing I wanted to make in WoW was an elf paladin. And as soon as a friend got me my own copy of BC I did.
     I love playing with friends. What finally made me give in and get WoW was the fact that most of my friends were playing. And when I got into the game I made a few new friends. A lot of the people I played with when I first started don't play any more, but I have so much fun with the few that do!
     I don't raid. I wish I did, though I am not sure I'd really be fast enough or good enough at mechanics to do it. I'd try if I knew a raiding guild that would take me. I like to think that I mostly manage to not stand in things and I hit the bosses like I'm supposed to hit them. But my guilds are small, casual, social guilds so the most we usually accomplish is the occasional tear through old content, group queue for LFR or a get-together to slaughter every Zandalari Warbringer we can find.
      I'm kind of terrible at PVP even though my first server was a PVP server and half of my mains still live there. Periodically I forget how bad I am and go into battlegrounds and die a whole lot. Sometimes there's swearing involved, but it's bound to keep happening as long as there are some honor point mounts I haven't bought yet. Sometimes I even try to fight back when somebody attacks me in world too. Usually this ends very shortly with me being dead and the person on the other end probably either wondering who the spaz on the other side of the keyboard is or feeling very good about themselves. As long as they don't camp me I don't begrudge them either.
     This will be my WoW blog. In it there will be squeeing over achievements, rants about things I don't like, stories about adventures with guildies, screenshots of mounts and pets and transmog sets. There probably won't be any cutting edge strategies for raids though, or amazingly insightful theory-crafting. Just the adventures of somebody who likes to play WoW and thought it would be fun to write about it. We'll see how this goes.