Bastion of Twilight, Betas and Transmog!

I've had a very full week.  I do know that it's Friday but when you consider that most of my playing these days seems to takes place on Saturday night and Sunday, that's pretty impressive.

I have already talked about my transmogging for Round 2 of Mog Madness so I'll not touch on that again.  That took up Sunday before raid and Monday after work.  Then on Tuesday, I tried to do some levels on my warrior but I think I ended up sitting around reading blogs.  I don't think I actually did anything but I know I felt like I was busy.

However, Wednesday was AWESOME!  I went on a heroic Bastion of Twilight run with my husband and a ton of people from Twitter.  It was spearheaded by Oestrus at The Stories of O, whom I've always liked due to her blog name.  I didn't say that.  Shh.  We got heroic Halfus Wrymbreaker down and then did a few tries on the Twins but ended up switching to normal and powering through so we could get down Heroic Cho'gal.  We spent some time pounding away at him and while we didn't manage to down him (THIS WEEK) we'll be heading back in next week to beat at him some more and then ... Sinestra!

Thanks Oestrus and all the Twitter peeps that went!!  Which are the following: @notfurioso @Hempia @Suzushiiro @Gastothetroph @BigPappa707 @gotowell & @tyben.  And my husband, who sucks and isn't on Twitter.

Then, last night a new round of beta invites were sent out and I managed to score one.  I started a download when I got home, but our connection is really bad right now due to the weather.  (We're in flood stage here again.  The area got 4+ inches of rain in 24 hours and it won't stop raining until Monday.)  I managed to finish the download today, got my druid copied over and then stared at the Panda creation screen until I had to leave for work.

I like the way they have changed the creation screen!  That looks awesome.  And that's my first impression of the beta.

As far as more transmog, I made my blood elf warrior a future transmog set.  It's pretty awesome.  I'll not post it, she has to go gather it first!!

Now, time to work in a office that has termites everywhere, a flooded parking lot, a waterfall outside my door and a toilet that's backed up.  Stupid slum-lord landlord!!

Mog Madness - Hunters and Druids - Round 2

As I mentioned earlier, I have made it to the 2nd round, the hunter and druid round.  We have to use either Glaive of the Pit or Marrowstrike.  I was able to pick up the Glaive off Mags my first shot, so yay there!

So, here's a pretty picture of Karegina, my main, dressed up pretty!  I chose to go with the Glaive of the Pit instead of Marrowstrike because of the fire-y effect on the weapon.  I also took the gold on the polearm and used that to put together the accents on the below outfit.  I also used the blue on the polearm as a base color for the general overall outfit.  And I loved the druid-ish markings on the kilt and gloves, so this just fell together.

My items that I'm using are the following:

Head - Ragefury Eyepatch - It's off Hurley Blackbreath in Blackrock Depths.  I picked this up eons ago.  So it was already in my bank!

Shoulders - Splinthide Shoulders - This is off Eviscerator in Blackrock Depths as well.  However, he's one of the bosses in the Ring of Law, which means he has a CHANCE to spawn and then a CHANCE to drop the loot, suck.

Back - Spore-Soaked Vaneer - I got this off Quagmirran in Slave Pens (normal).  That took me like 5 or 6 tries I think.

Chest - Tunic of the Nightwatcher - This comes from Swamplord Musel'ek in The Underbog (normal).

Bracers - Not shown so N/A

Hands - Starlight Gauntlets - Luckily, this came from Hungarfen who is also in The Underbog (normal).

Belt - Belt of the Deep - This is a quest from Zul'farrak, "A Fool's Errand".

Legs - Kilt of the Night Strider - And this comes from Broggok in The Blood Furnace (normal). 

Here are a couple more pictures for full around views:

Round 1 Passed and Various other sundries

I have determined my new favorite way of logging in.  Logging into my guild and seeing "Congrats on making it to round 2 Kare!" from JD of the Amateur Azerothian.  He happens to be in my guild and is an awesome guy (and I'm not just saying that because he's a judge!).  So I ran over to his round 1 finalists post and yup!  There I am!  I was number 12.  Yay!

So, I dug around yesterday morning and came up with an outfit for round 2 which I'm now farming.  (I actually have all pieces but 1, the shoulders.  Those are going to be a PAIN.)  I even got the weapon we're basing it off 1st try.  Woot woot!  I do know I can use a mogging program to do this but I'm going to try to get the outfits together instead.  More fun for me that way :D

This weekend, we took a couple swings at H Ultraxion.  Not nearly as annoying as H Warlord Z.  That makes me want to curl up in a fetal position and cry.  I felt bad because my head wasn't in the game.  I kept trying to focus but my attention was immediately drawn to something else.  And I kept having a hard time with in game depth perception.  When we were doing the Hour of Twilight heroics I was really screwing up left and right.  When I was mage-ing it up, my DPS was really awful.  When I was healing, I just kept spamming heals because I couldn't handle the way things were moving.

It got worse when we went to do Firelands on Sunday.  Drives me crazy when I can't tell where things are.  Go go, standing in the fire!  I spent all day Sunday working on either my warrior's blacksmithing or farming for my round 2 transmog set.  (Because I'm on a new server and ZOMG I NEED CRAFTERS.  Or something OCD like that.)  My warrior's blacksmithing is at 200 right now, so yay.  I can go back out and start leveling again.  She's level 50 now.  I don't know where she was when I left her.  (EDIT: Apparently 48.)

Anyway.  I realized I didn't cap my guild exp last week so now I'm behind the husband.  :( Booooo.  I did get capped last night so yay there.  Halfway to exalted (I think).

And now, I must get to work.  It's been quiet the last few days.  Which is very nice but I think it's going to pick up now.  So, I will leave you with a picture of my office cat.  Who was asleep but the second I started moving around did this:

Happy Monday!

Mog Madness - The Cloth Round! aka Round 1, FIGHT!

In case you haven't heard, there's a little Mogging contest going on.  The first round ends the 23rd (so tomorrow) and I'm finally getting my shit together for a submission.  To find out more, you can check out:

http://arcanewordsmith.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/mog-madness-is-here/
http://tomeoftheancient.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/let-the-mog-madness-begin/
http://effysrponwyrmrestaccord.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/introducing-mog-madness/

For the judge's consideration, I have put together a little outfit I call 'Flames'.

My mage, Annanda, is a fire mage.  I am not a very GOOD fire mage, but goddamnit, she's a fire mage.  When she was undead, she was a frost mage, but now that she's a goblin, it's fire all the way baby.

I have a couple different screenshots, but they are all of the same outfit.  I wanted to take a set of screenshots of her in a fire-y environment and then another of her somewhere we can make out the details of her outfit.

Here, we have Annanda modeling for us in the magma fields of the Sulfurion Spire in Mt Hyjal.  She wears stately red, as this is the color of her preferred element.  (If she could tame Rag and lead him around, she probably would!!)

The set is as follows:

Head: Circle of Flame   Epic that drops off Ambassador Flamelash in Blackrock Depths.
Shoulders: Mantle of Tirisfal   Tier that drops off Void Reaver in Tempest Keep (I got these, and my alternate shoulders to both drop today. Wow!)
Back: Cape of the Fire Salamander  Also drops off Ambassador Flamelash in Blackrock Depths (I got 4 of these while farming for my hat!)
Chest: Robe of Evocation  Drops off Jergosh the Invoker in Ragefire Chasm (so easy to farm as Horde, Sorry Alliance!!)
Wrist: Bindings of Raging Fire  Drops off Selin Fireheart in normal Magister's Terrace, I was farming the belt (see below) and I got like 3 of these, didn't realize they were the same design/color as the other ones I wanted, was very nice to have 'appear'.
Hands: Cindercloth Gloves  As I don't have my tailor on my new server, I got one of my guildies (Hi Goro!) to make this for me!  It's a tailoring pattern!
Belt: Cord of Reconstruction  Drop off Kael'thas in normal Magister's Terrace. I finally got this to drop today!
Legs (which you can't see): Trousers of the Astromancer  Drops off High Astromancer Solarian in Tempist Keep
Feet: Coldwraith Boots  This is a BOE green you can get off the AH.
Weapon: Anything with Power Infusion because it glows red sometimes.  (Seriously)
Offhand: Frostbridge Orb BOE that drops Heroic Occulus.  I got like 2 in 3 runs I did in there!!

Pet: Phoenix Hatching from Magister's Terrace.  She was drawn to me because I like fire!!  (Her name is Ember!)

And here are some normal pictures, without fire in the background.

This is something I was going to post anyway, so I'm excited that I can put it towards this!!  Also, I totally got 3 pieces of this all finished up tonight, just in time!!!

Shared Topic March 19th-25th: Killing Knowledge

The last couple of years in WoW have changed the game quite a bit. While it is very easy to jump into the "elite" vs "casual" vs "noob" bandwagon type of discussion, what is causing it I think is a more interesting topic.
Do you guys think that the LFR and LFD kill the sense of community, but taking it one step further; does it also kill the passing down of knowledge?
I know I did learn a lot from reading the web, but even now I get tons of information from my guild. If I have a doubt, I ask the question and most of the time someone knows off the top of their head where an enchant is, or what the best glyph is, etc. I don't take that community for granted, but it was built before there was a LFD. We are together because we did have to take the trek to the meeting stone. Now we have a button that 1 person uses and BAM we are all there. We know why that is cool, but many of the new players really don't know what that really means.
So are the new tools for grouping killing the knowledge sharing?

I sit here, with a root beer next to me, my cellphone open to Twitter next to me and I think about this shared topic.  Do I think that LFD and LFR have killed the community and knowledge sharing that is out there?  In a short answer, No.  In a long answer, Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.  (Okay, bad joke that I heard from an old rogue friend of mine.)

When I started playing, back in Vanilla, I sucked ass.  I did.  There is no doubt about that.  I looked up to other people, but they were also not the 'elite'.  They played because it was fun to just poke around the world.  The knowledge that was shared to me at that time was simple things like "To use party chat, type /p" and shit like that.

Then, during Burning Crusade, I started raiding and thus became aware of other things.  Like WoW blogs and Thottbot (remember them??) and Allakhazam (remember THEM?).  I fucking thottbot-ed EVERYTHING.  I moved to other guilds and started playing new characters.  In my new guilds, no one played the spec that I wanted so I had to learn on my own.  (Apparently incorrectly, but that's a story I've already told.)  I didn't have that community of people that knew things.

I found Resto4Life.com and fell in love.  I wanted to have Phaelia's little baby druids and I worshiped everything she said.  When she stopped blogging due to her expanding family, I truly mourned but I looked around for other resto druid blogs.  I found elitistjerks during the beginning of Wrath and followed their advice for a while, but eventually carved out my own 'niche' in healing in my guild.

In Wrath, we were a 25 man raiding guild and I believe only had 2, maybe 3, healers when it started.  Between me and my co-healer, my best friend and our resto shaman, we could answer almost every question.  My best friend had a disc priest, the only thing we didn't have was holy pally and we ended up with one of those by the time ICC came about.

However, I was the one people came to with resto druid questions.  If they had healing questions, they would go to either myself or my best friend.  Even people who weren't in our guild would come to us.  It was really weird!!

I never felt that there was a in game 'community' for me to rely on for my questions.  No one played a resto druid when I was starting out or forming my opinions.  I had to search outside the game to get my community.  And oh boy did I find it.

When I made my own blog, BlogAzeroth welcomed me with open arms.  They supported me and let me feel like I was writing TO someone instead of just throwing my thoughts into the nether.  When I decided to become more active in Twitter, I was also welcomed.  I'm very shy (still) but people still respond to me and I have conversations with people all over.  I feel a PART of something.

I'm in a new guild now, one where (for the first time ever) I am healing with another resto druid on a consistent basis.  This was something I never wanted to do.  However, I'm doing it.  I think we have our own healing and gearing ideas but that's okay.  At this point in my healing career, I'm willing to say "Look, I don't heal like you but I'm a goddamn good healer who can keep my shit alive".

I joined the new guild after LFR and LFD were put in.  I still feel a sense of community with them.  They are great people and we fit well together during raids.  I love running randoms with them to meet our weekly guild challenges because they're silly people and fun!

I don't think that advent of LFR and LFD caused a lack of community.  I think the only way it does that is if people only run them alone.  I know my old guild makes a group to go run LFR on Wednesday nights.  I know that my current guild will get 2-6 people together to go run it randomly through out the week.  I love that if we have 4 guildies together, we can pug a 5th from LFD really easily!

Also, in my new guild, we don't have that 1 button that will summon everyone.  We still have 9 levels until we get that, so probably about the time they take that out of the game!!

Many things, left side, handle it!

I have so many things that I've been doing these last few weeks.  My last post was 2 Mondays ago and life has been rather hectic since then.  The only reason I have time at the moment is that I broke the copy machine at the office and can't do my projects without it!

I am still working on my 2012 in 2012.  I feel a little bit screwed out of time by my husband however.  He keeps sending me stacks and stacks of ore to 1. prospect and 2. use the green quality gems to make jewelry to then disenchant.  (This morning, I had a whole page of mails to do this with.)

However, over the last few nights I've been able to get my baby undead hunter to level 35 and my blood elf warrior to 48.  I also started a new blood elf rogue who is currently level 8 and I had to delete my level 6 orc mage on Blade's Edge because I transferred my 85 to the server.  So what that means is that I'm currently at 1907 levels of my 2012.  I'm 94.78% done.  But I had a huge head start.  Sorry guys!  I think I might be playing the longest of all of you so it's probably only fair that I have that many more levels!!

On my other leveling goal, I have 4 more alts to get to 85.  And I really don't want to reroll a DK on my new server since I'm 1 level away on my old one.  But I'm not sure how I'm gonna get that last level.  It's rather frustrating.  I suppose one night I should just man up, grab the husband and go level.  And then DING and then done.

In other news, in Deathwing's Jaw last week, we found a baby drake.  The Reins of the Blazing Drake dropped and everyone went OMGWTFBBQ.  (Also a Maw dropped!! YAY!  Towa, the other healing druid got it!)  Anyway, our little goblin rogue won the drake and then I took some screenshots of him in Org later.  I'll post them when I have a chance.  Maybe tonight.

And in Heroics, we are down two 3 heroics in Firelands, Baleroc, Alysrazor and of course, Rags.  And for our achievement drakes, we're down to 3 achievements, the Alysrazor one, the Shannox one and the one for kneeling.  (I don't even try for that one. I just stand back.)  So yeah.  I leave tomorrow morning for the weekend and I won't be back until Sunday just before raid so I won't get any of the fun of those this week!

So, yay. Thursday updates!  Woo!

Saturday is Fun Night! Sunday is pretty cool too!

Tonight was raid (as usual) and we all joined together at the appointed time.  We started in Dragon Soul, and got Heroic Morchok.  That was fun.  We almost had him once but he kept throwing his red crystal towards the back of the raid, so we ended up pulling some trash towards the beginning (waaaaay off to the side) and wiped.  However, we got him down the next time and it was awesome and fun.  I got my first heroic piece (the neck) which made me really happy because I'm a huge dork.

We spent sometime working on Heroic Warlord.  Dear lord, that was rough.  I need to do some research on that.  This will be homework.

We also got Minutes to Midnight (achievement on Ultraxion) and Ping Pong Champion (achievement on Warlord).  I think half the guild got the Taste the Rainbow on Yor'sahj that night as well.

Anyway, we cleared through Warmaster, and then had some lag issues for one tank and healer so we called the raid and went to 25 man Naxx for KZ and Saph.  Before that, however, somehow, my guild leader, one of our officers and  our DK spent like 5 minutes chasing me around the deck of the ship.  I laughed so hard that I cried.  The GM and officer both play orcs and they were chasing me with no pants on.  Then our rogue (who is a goblin) was also nude and running around.

I ran them around and around and around the ship, up to the top, then all the way to the back.  It was so fun. Really silly but fun.  I have pictures that the husband took while I was afk.  Apparently they tried to snuggle me.  Or something.  Honestly, I think the pictures look worse then they are.

Anyway, we went and killed KZ and Saph on 25 (me as my mage), then went to OS 10 for the drake (me as my mage) and then did Ruby Sanctum 10 Heroic (me as my druid).  And then, we went and killed Maly 10 man (me on my druid).  So yeah, good times.

On Sunday, we gathered up, finished up Dragon Soul and headed into Firelands.  (I healed Spine but dpsed Madness, then continued to dps through Firelands, until we got to Domo and Rag.)  We got the achievement for Beth'tilac which was a freaking nightmare since our mage kept disconnecting.  So it was me and a shaman on the bottom to kill the spiderlings and I was OOM in like 5 seconds I swear.  Rawr!

So we moved along through Firelands and people picked up transmog gear and other gear.  And I got my heroic shoulders off Domo.  So I have heroic boomkin shoulders!  Woo!

By the time we finished raid, we were all really tired.  So 3 of us finished up the guild dungeon challenges for the week and got us to level 11.  Tonight, I'm going to play my warrior.  Who I've neglected horribly for the past few weeks.  This weekend was another weekend of 'only being around for raids' since I had errands to run all day on Saturday and then on Sunday the husband and I drove to my mom's new house and helped paint the kitchen and living room.  (Which is like half the freaking house.)  At this point, my hands hurt so bad from holding the paint brush I'm amazed I can type and hold a mouse!

And I'd like to take this opportunity to tell my one of my best friend's congratulations on his normal Madness kill!  Yay!!!! :D