The View Through The Branches

And how is it all going?

Elsen is looking mightily fine. I finally mogged her back to normal, after the serious drama of “oh my god, I’ve lose my gloves, I’ve lost my gloves” only to remember that ACTUALLY I’d been using off-set gloves to complete my mogging set. I have switched her weapon round though, and might fiddle with a few different staff mogging options. Gear wise, I finally started getting lucky in heroics and managed to boost my iLevel up to 463 ish. I also entered LFR for the first time and got a cloak from the first boss, before the group dissolved on boss number 2. Nice epic though.

I got the chance to dip my toe back in to Pet Battles again yesterday and once again am hooked. I grew a Terrible Turnip on my farm and powered him up a little. I definitely want him in my team, and my Darkmoon Cub (Thomas O Malley) but my 3rd spot just isn’t one I can settle on. I’ve stuck with my Gundrak Hatchling but I’m not feeling the love. I’m hoping that I’ll pick something up soon I can use instead – or I’ll just have to man up and power level something else. I should probably select a mechanical – I am tempted by either Squeaks McGee (my mechanical squirrel) or Speedwell (my De-weaponized Mechanical companion – metal rabbit). It’ll probably be Speedwell as he comes equipped with rare quality as well.

Farming is great. I’m slowly building up enough vegetables to max out all 6 ways at once, and will have completed another goal of maxing out a profession without spending a penny. So far I’ve now done that with First Aid, Alchemy, Engineering, Mining and Inscription. 7 of my alts have farms and are cranking out 20 veggies each every day – not a huge amount, but it doesn’t NEED to be a huge amount. The next thing I need to spend any real time on is fishing, to get the fish I need to max out all these banquets too, and then it’ll finally be the meat. Meat is the issue for me – I don’t like grinding animals out because I’m a) not very good at it and b) lazy. Mostly b).

Dailies aren’t bothering me all that much. They take a fair amount of time, but I get to do them alongside my boyfriend or my friends, and we have a good time. They get done – Golden Lotus, Tillers, Anglers, Cloud Serpent and then Klaxxi, most days. If I don’t get them done, I don’t get them done. Not the end of the world. I have been avoiding, however, the fishing dailies where you have to actually FISH – the drop rates are too low and there’s no maddening rush to reach the cap with that particular faction.

I’d got to nearly 90k gold and was comfortably on 89k, then I started enchanting and reforging and gemming. 900g for an uncut primal gem and the same again for leg spellthread. Although money wise I am still WAY up on what I started the expansion with (about 75k), it disappoints me I couldn’t be self sufficient in this scenario. What it has isolated for me is that I need to work on a couple of things – mining ore to prospect for gems in order to level my jewelcrafter, and levelling my priest high enough to get 10 motes of harmony, to make a spirit, to get myself to 600 in Tailoring. It shouldn’t really take THAT much grinding to get myself 10 motes. She says.

Drama is everywhere. People are always whinging about something. We had someone rage quit the guild last week because his question about the Justice Point vendor wasn’t answered quickly enough or taken seriously enough. Now, there’s a few issues I take with this.

1) We aren’t WoWhead.

2) It’s the beginning of an expansion – people are busy. When the conversation was happening, I personally was in the middle of an instance working on an achievement with 3 guildies and a PuG. There were 44 people online altogether, and I think maybe only 1 or 2 were idling in Stormwind, and they were AFK. People are busy – dailies, farming, grinding, reputation, instances, scenarios, battlegrounds, arena, questing. People don’t have time to stop and answer everyone’s questions, all of the time.

3) People have an expectation about leaving the game and returning that isn’t always valid. This particular person had left the game, come back, left again 4 months later, come back for a fortnight, left again, and then come back on Mists release. When they had stuck around for a “long” time, they were very vocal, noisy, chatty and ‘popular’ in that people tended to say hello, or respond to their comments in /g. However Jane Doe is a big guild, and we are a social guild. We accept new members, and whilst this person had been away, we’d had several new people join who had settled in and were enjoying everything the guild had to offer, including the excellent atmosphere in guild chat. I feel our rage quitter may have had his nose put out of joint when he appeared and wasn’t ‘responded’ to as he was previously. He didn’t like the fact he wasn’t a big fish in a small pond anymore.

However, friends are everywhere too. On Thursday, I had a really, really shit day at work. I came home, did my 7 farms and then decided I was going to farm Coren for the Pickled Egg, because I had had fucking *diabolical* luck with gear drops until this point. So, I farmed. 10 runs in, the pickled egg dropped. The druid tank, who hadn’t tanked the thing at all, there were adds everywhere and mobs everywhere and it was an absolute clusterfuck, needed on the egg and won it. I raged. I really, really raged. I was just absolutely livid. So I took a screenshot, made an alt on his realm, spoke to every. single. one of the members of his guild that were online until I finally got an officer. Showed the officer the screenshot and he was removed from the guild. Dealt with. I log back over to Elsen, carry on farming, after another 5 or so runs the egg drops again. A shadow priest needs it. And wins it. That was it. I was on voice chat with Lewis and Adam at this point, and I just cracked. Couldn’t deal with it. And then that’s when your friends come through for you. Adam, whose internet was bollocksed that night, kept Mumble on through his phone on 3G, got himself online with something ridiculous like 1.5k latency, Lewis came and backed me up through all of my dailies and then our tanking friend John turned up too, and we ran a load of heroics. Between us the four of us turned my miserable mood in to a good one. We stuck together and supported each other (nobody had had a great day at all to be honest) but together, we gelled, and we made it work, and we made each other happier. Damn good friendship.

It’s Adam’s birthday in a fortnight. I can’t wait. I’ve got him a few awesome gifts, although I am holding out waiting on some American delivery, really hoping some stuff comes through in time. A bit nervous it won’t but…well, I’ll have to wait and see! The majority of things should be here in time and if not, I’ll have to sort something out about making the extras Christmas presents instead! My birthday is also coming up, slowly slowly. 6 weeks or so away. I’m supposed to be spending my actual birthday night with a couple of friends having dinner. The week after that, however, I’m planning on having a little bit of a shindig. The three aforementioned lovely chaps are joining me on Friday night, and then on the Saturday the awesome Demeternoth and her partner, the awesome Brunty and a couple of other friends are supposed to be coming to mine for a Saturday evening of food and drink and video games and just general sort of “enjoyment”. I’m also planning on forking out some cash on some fireworks and setting them off and just generally having a nice time. I’m really looking forward to it, which is unusual for me. My birthdays in the past have normally been spent avoiding all celebrations of social interactions whatsoever in order to try and ignore the fact that I am essentially a bit of a social outcast, so I’m dipping my toes into scary water, actually trying to organise something with actual people.

So. Plans for the next three weeks. Spend as much time as I can with Adam, as per usual. Carry on losing weight – lost 5lbs (36lbs overall now) over the past 2 weeks so if that carries on, I might reach my 3rd stone before my birthday, which would be great. Get my tailoring to max level, get Elsen further raid ready, carry on with my dailies, max my fishing out and maybe ding at least one alt to 86. Get my 3 pet battle team all up to level 15. Raid for the first time! (25th). Run my first old content raid – the 21st. And most importantly – try and stay happy.

So, after the lovely comments on my blog and some hunting around on Twitter, last night I discovered the following:

- If you throw yourself off the side of the Skyfire and die, the ghost lady is on the Skyfire.

- Priests need something to stop them from dying after jumping from a great height. Oh yes, Levitate, I forgot about that

- You do not need to have cooking 525 to open up four plots on your farm

- The Skyfire is phased, Admiral Rodgers is not. She’s just in the air, floating.

- Getting your freshly dinged 90 best mate to ship you from the Skyfire to Halfhill is much quicker than walking/running/riding on foot.

- I now have 5 alts parked with their own farms, 2 priests, a paladin, a death knight and a hunter. They have all been allocated a vegetable each and will simply farm that one vegetable over and over.

- Tonight I’ll move my mage and my warlock, the two remaining alts.

- I’ll set my hearthstone to these places and then get a summon back to Stormwind (Stockades stone ftw) when it’s needed.

- I should have remembered to train my hunters professions before she left Stormwind, so I could actually DO some herbing and jewelcrafting whilst I’m there.

- I should have stocked up on old inks on my death knight so I could have carried on with my research whilst I was there too.

On the upside, I have a serious amount of vegetable production going on. Obviously these alts will move about and shift around as they get levelled, but hopefully this will give me a decent amount of time to actually farm up some veggies so I don’t have to worry about my buff food too much.

The plan for Mists of Pandaria self sufficiency continues!

I launched myself in to Mists of Pandaria at the worst possible time. I work at a university, so the middle-end of September is the start of the new year. One of my colleagues is leaving, so I’m trying to get to grips with his workload. My university degree started on the 19th of September too. However, fully excited buzzed about the whole caboodle I threw myself into levelling in a totally different way to last year. There was no power levelling this time (I actually spent launch night in Guild Wars 2) and I have levelled at what is, for me, an incredibly slow pace. I am currently about 10% in to level 89 and aiming to be 90 by the end of tomorrow night.

I know everyone has read these “what do you think of Pandaria” blog posts already but you know….oh well.

So.

Things I’ve Loved About Pandaria So Far:

- The Questing – collection quests. I’ve been questing with Adam (the boyfriend) and we’ve found that a lot of previously annoying quests that involved collecting things (6 snake heads, 12 murloc eyes, yadda yadda) have been changed so if something drops, it drops one for each of us.

- The Questing – AoE loot. This surely needs no describing. It’s freaking awesome.

- The Questing – The NPCS. I’ve met some fantastic characters, ranging from the amazing Chen, to the Texan Mudmug, to the Grummle, who tell me how I’m smelling every time I wander past. I also LOVE the Jinyu, and am so glad we got those and not the icky hozen! Any race, however, that use the word “ook” instead of “fuck” on a regular basis do get massive upvotes.

- The Farming – God. This is awesome. It really is. I love this. I have no idea if I’m in the minority or not but frankly I don’t give a damn. It’s just GREAT.

- The Scenery – it’s beautiful. It’s absolutely beautiful. I love the scenery, the different types of zones and the different things I’ve seen.

- The plethora of vanity items – in my bag, I have a turnip punching bag, racoon, puntable marmot, orange paint gun, constant beer keg, fan shaped off hands, incense and…good lord. Everything. I have no bloody bag space, void storage space or bank space so I’m really going to need to rethink my storage. I may actually need to get rid of some old gear because I just don’t have the space! Or my tabards. Serious question here chaps. Should I just bin all these tabards? I can rebuy em back right?

- The Gathering – my aim for this expansion was to be totally self sufficient. I no longer want to spend a fortune on mats and enchanting and gems and god knows what else. So I’m not going to. I had every profession at 525 last expansion, so I want them all at 600 this time – but for free. I want to spend NO money on professions. So far – I’m doing pretty well! I have maxed out Alchemy, Inscription and Engineering, as well as Mining, all for free. I’m hoping by the end of October to have maxed out Enchanting, Leatherworking, and Blacksmithing as well, and by the end of November, Tailoring and Jewelcrafting. I can coast of Adam’s jewelcrafting til then. By the end of Christmas, I want *all* of my 85 alts to have maxed all of their professions (quite a few of the later alts are dual gatherers).

- The World Bosses – we did the Sha of Anger, with 40 of us, and it was great fun! I also managed to get a set of tier gloves – which is awesome. I wonder – will they upgrade them each tier to higher health and new gear? I do hope so, it’s great fun.

- The Lore, the Vanity items, the rare mobs – oh my so AWESOME. There are so many wonderful things in this continent to find and to explore and to enjoy.

- The Instances – I’ve really enjoyed the cutscenes, stories and lore and the bosses, trash mobs and run throughs of the dungeons I’ve had. I can’t wait to do them at heroic and it’s really, really nice to be challenged. I’m enjoying it!

- The Pet Battles – so much FUN. So, so so so so much fun. I could wax lyrical about them and I will do in other posts, as well as my naming posts.

Things I Don’t Like (I tried to use hate but I don’t hate anything about it!) About Pandaria So Far:

- The Questing – speak to so-and-so quests - how is it possible that they improved collection quests (always the bane of group questers) but ruined “speak to so and so” quests? Now, both myself and Adam have to talk to an NPC, release an NPC – the non collection-ey ones that used to be shared are no longer. Most frustrating.

- Err. That’s mostly it. I…can’t find anything at all else I dislike about the expansion so far. The only problem I’m having is time! I have none of it! I need more time.

My Plan For The Next Few Months:

- Get Elsen to level 90, gear her up in heroics and get her raid ready.

- Get my shaman (Mining/Skinning) up to 500 mining (I already have a 600 miner but I fancy a 2nd one) and get her in to Pandaria so I can grind out the leather and ore I need to max out Leatherworking and Blacksmithing, and Jewelcrafting. In the process, get her to at least 86 (so she can access her farm) and then get her to 90.

- Get my worgen priest to level 90, finish maxing her herbalism, her mining is maxed already.

- Get my warlock to level 90, including her professions – she’s currently has no professions at all so I may make her an alchemist (so I can spec into a different transmute) and a herbalist, and farm up the herbs to get myself

- Max out the rest of my professions.

- Finish mogging my warlock.

I’d like four of my chars up to 90 before Christmas, which is goal point number 1.

This will leave, after Christmas, ideally before this time next year (pre-Hallows End so I have multiple chances to grind the mount, basically):

- My night elf priest, maxed to 90, mogged out (she has no mog right now)

- My hunter, maxed to 90, mogged out – she just needs a bow. Rest is kitted out.

- My paladin, maxed to 90, mogged out (I’ve chosen honor gear for her, so it’d take a lot of honor farming)

- My mage, maxed to 90 – she is fully mogged already.

- My DK, maxed to 90 – also already fully mogged.

- My 2nd druid, maxed to 90 (currently 72) – will need mogging (no idea about a look for her)

- The horde!

I have enough to do in World of Warcraft to last me at least 18 months, and that’s not even including PvP, old content, raiding, titles, achievement points, achievements to hunt, things to collect, pet battles…

I think maybe I’ll get to them some other day…