Vanity Pets

This is the first time Ive managed to get a toon to lv 36 without a pet. For some reason I just couldnt decide what suited my little Orcling the best. Im really not a Snake person so they were out (none of my characters have snakes, although I guess when the expansion comes out, Ill pick them up simply for collections sake). The Dragonhawk hatchlings seemed to exotic for her simple tastes. My Mage has one, but shes loud and its bright plumage suits her robes and her personality. The prairie dog is too small, plus it might get lost in Orgrimmar's bustle or Tamung could mistake it for a critter and use it for weaponskilling. As for the cockroach, well, after the Bahamas, Im just not fond of them, virtual or not.

Then it came to me, why not get a Parrot. So here we are, exploring the jungle in the rainy season together.

Its a Jungle out there

On a medium population server you might think that hitting STV at 4am would be relatively safe. You would be wrong, within 10 minutes we had been ganked by 2 completely different lv 70s.





The rain started just as we arrived. I suppose that should have been an omen. It went from light and airy in Booty Bay to wet, grey and dangerous in the jungle.

Which brings me to my current dilemma, we arent gankers at heart. I think its partly because there are 2 of us, which makes attacking solo questers who make up most of the opposing faction we encounter just seem wrong. Also, I think its a personality issue, maybe a touch of arrogance, why attack someone when you know you would beat them.. its no challenge. Which is why, I dont understand what 70s get out of killing people in their 30s.. ah well, only 32 levels to go before we can hunt them down and eat supper on their corpses. Anyway back to the dilemma, do we gank everything red on the principle that when the next scrub 70 comes riding past and one shots us, we will smirk to ourselves as we corpse run remembering all the misery we had already caused... or do we stay as we are, playing nice and then regretting it?

The arena rating theory is still holding true btw, both our little friends had rubbish ratings. This crocodile could probably have beaten them in a duel.

Perhaps even my parrot could have, well that might be pushing it.



On a more positive or at least more aggressive note, we got around 40 honor today from a lv 42 gnome warlock. He had this fascination with Grom'gol, lurking just outside the perimeter dotting up all the low levels venturing out. Which just plain nasty but for some reason he just didnt want to get the hint. We killed him around 7 times, the final time way out at sea. For some reason he thought escaping from a Shaman would be easier at sea.... water walking proved otherwise.

Whirlwinds

Ever since he hit lv 30, Tamung has been eyeing his Whirlwind Axe quest a bit like a puppy eyeing the biscuit tin. The other night we hit STV and collected all the Bloodscalp tusks (if you can see a troll has 2 tusks whilst alive, why oh why dont they all have 2 on their corpses..) and tonight we braved Arathi Highlands for charms. Now, we were lvs 33 (me, because I slack) and 34 (him) respectively and the mobs we needed are lvs 38 and 39. Actually it went a lot easier than I expected, in part I think due to windfury and the fact that I can heal.

That brought us to the hard part. How to kill a lv 40 elite when you struggle to hit lv 38 normal mobs. Obviously the easy thing would have been to ask one of the various 70s running around to help out, but that would have been too easy. Potted up with nature resist, totems down we summoned him. In the end, it was fairly touch and go, he hits hard and his knockback makes trying to tank him when you are 6 levels lower "interesting", but with around a 100 health to spare we killed him first time.

Tamung is a happy little Orc, running around with his shiny new toy. Shame plus 2 weapon damage doesnt have a glow, oh well, I really need to level enchanting.

Hex and all that Voodoo

There are two races Ive never managed to play to a decent level.

Dwarves, primarily because I dont fancy their animations, looks and voice/jokes

and

Trolls, mainly because of their feet "issue".

However out of curiousity I decided to give a Troll one more shot, and much to my surprise Im rather taken with my little priest. I like her casting animations, I like the way she sits so delicately and I love her accent.

So here she is, Sugarplum my latest alt. She is going to be shadow forever (yes yes I know ive said that before, but I mean it this time).

Stormwind Harbour

Now since I have a fondness for Night elfs Ive made that run of peril from Menethil to Ironforge so many times. In fact its probably the biggest killer of my low level toons, that and the Defias Pillagers so I received the news that come the expansion boats will go from Auberdine to Stormwind with a mixture of glee and sadness. Glee that no more will my low level toons have to gamble with their lives running from crocs, dino and spiders and sadness that the "rite of passage" will no longer exist. Add to the fact that they have already nerfed Defias Pillager's into the ground and where is the danger now? Hopefully Northrend will have some new evils lurking in the shadows, deadly like hogger and sneaky as a felreaver.

Here is my little Mage watching the construction with interest. She has heard all about the mysterious world beyond Elwynn and cant wait for the harbour to be finished so she can safely visit it all.

Sunset

Finished the last few quests in 1k needles tonight. It took longer than it should have simply because the scenary was so beautiful I had to keep stopping to take screenshots.

Things Im already excited about in WotLK

1. New zones to explore
2. The changes to healing/damage means there will be a healing flask
3. The changes to hunter's pets means that there will be more viable pets. Looking forward to having a pet that can disarm people as well as a cute fangly worg again
4. Furbolgs
5. Being able to buy enchants off the Auction house. Finally my enchanters will be able to make money without hanging out in cities and I'll be able to enchant my own alts without having to pay some random a small fortune
6. Not losing half my bag slots to mounts and mini-pets

Ganking Lowbies

Now dont get me wrong, I love pvp as much as the next person, but I really dont understand the mentality of people who just hang out at zones 50 levels lower than those they should be questing, killing greys. Today we visited Tarren Mill to discover a lv 70 hunter running around killing npcs and baby horde. Then we moved to STV to start doing Tamung's weapon quest and low and behold there is another 70, a warrior this time again killing lowbies.

Which leads me to the reason for this post. Someone posted whilst ranting on the official forums that people who gank lowbies all have sucky arena ratings and fail at fighting their own levels so take out their lack of epeen on lv 20s. Now I tend to take everything i read on said forums with a pinch of salt, after all people are usually too busy complaining, fighting or trying to protect their own bruised egos but that one comment got me thinking. Luckily I keep a stack of postit notes by the computer and I made a note of all their names and checked their amoury profiles... would you believe it... their average rating was 1300 in 2 v 2.

So Zamppa and Snappyah, this post is for you two pvp gods :D

On a slightly more bragging note, we had our first proper pvp today. Running around in 1000 needles finishing a couple of quests a lv 41 squid mage decided to be a hero and try and aoe two little orcs. He died and gave 3 honor points, my first 3 to be exact. Your first always needs to be immortalised in print so hello Sötsomsocker.

I have to admit the reason I dont lowbie gank is simply because you look so stupid when it all goes wrong. When your target/s fight back, kite you to guards, produce 70s out of the bushes or anything else sneaky. On the other hand, managing to be a lowbie who successfully kills a skull by clever use of terrain/tactics/pots is one great feeling.

Windfury and Wolves

The Orcs finally hit 30. Windfury, Astral recall and mounts, have to say im a happy orcling.

Hoping the horde version of the call of wind quest is more challenging and fun than the alliance version.

New Pets in WotLK

I have to admit being excited about the forthcoming expansion, searching for tibits of information all over the place. I keep telling myself its because i want to be able to make the best possible informed choices about spec/professions/leveling etc once it goes live.

But the sad truth is... its like christmas presents, I much prefer peaking inside when its forbidden to actually opening it on Christmas day. The speculation is far more fun, than actually getting your hands on it.

However, my little hunter is postively gleeful. Im very much a dog person but in the current game all my hunter's have cats simply because they are far better choices for all aspects of the game, but with the changes to pets (new talent trees etc) it looks like worgs will again be viable pets.

Plus to pile on more excitement they are adding new worg models. All that remains now is to level a hunter to 70 in preparation.

The Adventures of the Orclings

Last night we hit Razorfen Kraul to see if we could complete Tamung's warrior quest. Both lv 28 so we were a little nervous but as it turned out, our only issue was our inability to read quest text correctly. I was under the mistaken impression that Overlord Ramtusk was our target (pure coincidence that he drops the Corpsemaker... honestly). So after slaughtering him and getting my precious corpsemaker we had a look at Wowhead to discover our real target. All in all, it took us around an hour, would have been less had we known where we were going, got me a nice blue axe, around half a level of experience and of course the warrior chest we went in for.

Its not just anti-socialness, but I have to admit I do like soloing or rather two manning stuff. Its far more fun and challenging than doing it with a full 5 man party. It also gives flexiablitity, if we get too tired or grumpy we arent letting anyone else down.

Patch

I know its late but I've been busy doing other stuff. Have to say there are things I really like about this one.

New Mini-Pet: Always good, albeit a little small.

Mounts at lv 30. Considering Ive got multiple alts coming up to lv 30 its a great thing, running across Desolace and STV is painful. However its going to change the balance of PvP in those zones (makes it easier to escape corpsecamping), which is a shame. On the whole though, a postitive change as I hate running anywhere.

More Flavour Items. Again, always good. Havent yet managed to lure the gnome into Old Hillsbrad, but my shaman needs a pet ghostwolf.

Escort Quests.... grrrrrr

So me and my pet warrior are helping some bloodelf escape from Northwatch. We slaughter our way out of the main gate and then start sauntering off in the general direction of safety. I always thought that one of the key aspects of escaping captivity would involve running or at least hurrying... but oh no... not according to Blizzard. The best way to escape any heavily fortified area is to walk slowly and casually away from all the armed men. Whilst i accept it might work in practise, its annoying to say the least when you are trying to level.

To add insult to injury, this particular bloodelf kept saying "keep up the pace" as if we were the daudling ones. Grrrrrrrrr.

The Explorer's League, pt 2

I still cant believe it took them less than a day to figure out where this is. My guildmates must have too much time on their hands.

What raiding does to people.

I was doing my usual blog reading and I happened onto Unbearable HoT. The latest post there made me relive everything that led to me quiting my raiding guild and even the server that housed said guild.

Obviously I wasnt a tank, but I was both a founding member and an Officer for most of my time there (from raiding Karazhan to killing Illidan). Everything started out great, there werent many of us but we all enjoyed playing together, helping each other out and just chatting about stuff.

Then we progressed into 25 mans and the trouble started. Im sure anyone who has ever formed a guild will sympathise, but the weeding out of players, finding out who can avoid the fire and who is guarenteed to be dancing in it as their health ticks down was stressful. We lost good players who despite saying they understood what we were doing would only put up with so much as the 5th trial healer in row alt f4ed from a raid. Tempers on all sides got frayed, guildchat started to be full of people whining about stuff, complaining about our loot distribution and bitching about our lack of progress.

Just as everything seemed hopeless, that the naysayers on the forum were right and we were destinied to be just another Kara guild who disbanded after a few weeks, we suddently started to make progress and fast progress at that. Magtheridon died, quickly followed by most of tk and ssc and the negative stuff in guildchat died down. People started to bond, to have fun again.

Unfortunately that didnt last. We hit Lady Vashj and Kael at the same time as 2 other guilds from our server, and we hit a brick wall. People couldnt kite, people were pulling aggro on Capurnian... everything that could go wrong did and to make matters worse, our spies in the 2 other camps kept telling us how great everything was going for them. So naturally all the poisonous stuff we thought we had left behind resurfaced, people whispering plain old nasty stuff to those they felt were letting the side down, people whispering the officers every 2 seconds to complain about something.

Again stress levels rose and tempers frayed. I admit I almost lost it when one of our paladins needed me to explain in great detail what blessing of freedom was and where he could find it in his spell book. I mean, how can you get to lv 70 as a paladin on a pvp server and not know that.

Somehow, with much emoness, yelling and general hatefulness, telling ourselves it would all be ok on the flipside we struggled through those fights. We burnt out and/or kicked around 4 tanks in the process, lost the paladin who didnt know what freedom was and got ourselves some casters who could kite.

In officerchat, just after the Kael kill when all the glee had burnt itself out, we discussed how much better things were going to be now. After all, the first fights in the Black Temple and Mount Hjyal are easy right.

Our main problems were tanks, low activity from the best geared ones who had a tendancy to only show up for farm raids, not necessarily the stuff we needed them on. Our tanks were also one of the biggest causes of conflict in raidchat, they felt their status as tanks allowed them to freely critiscise the performance of everyone else and thus managed to create more drama than everyone else added together.

Then we had the lazy people, the ones who are friends with all the right people so kicking them was hard, but they consistently were late, unprepared and didnt have consumables/food buffs and in some cases repair money.

We also had some bad officers, who werent willing to lead raids, werent willing to enforce discipline and spend more time causing problems in Officerchat than they did fixing them, usually being more vocal about how we should change the loot system so it was balanced in the officers favour. Its amazing how you think you know someone, then they become an officer and it turns out you were so wrong about everything.

My other big issue was "not all guildmates are created equal". Ive always believed in fair play, if you introduce a dkp penalty for causing stupid wipes, than that penalty applies to everyone from the GM to the trials. Those penalties should also be in the guild rules, not just produced when the 14th wipe occurs and the guy responsible is someone who most of the officers find annoying. Our Gm's failure to see this, was always a bone of contention between us.

All this combined as we progressed through MH and BT. I felt i didnt want to log, i didnt want to raid because every single raid that didnt go perfectly turned into a rantfest. I still have nightmares about Teron, where 70 percent of the raid turned inward and almost ate each other. But on the other hand, whilst raids were made so unpleasant for me, and whilst i tried to make people stop fighting i wasnt backupped by the raidleader/guildleader who was often responsible for some of the worst incorrect blame apportioning, i was also given a guilt trip everytime i didnt log for raids. It wasnt that they couldnt kill boss X without me, it wasnt that we were short of healers, it just happened. Sure its great to be loved, but at the end of the day, this is meant to be fun, and listening to 24 people who individually I like for the most part, ripping each other up because of tiny mistakes in an online game

Raiding basically became an unpleasant, unpaid job, akin to teaching kindergarten to a bunch of hormonal teenagers.

The final straw for me basically came when the Sunwell came out. During the farm period before hand, i managed to distract myself with alts, only doing the odd raid when i was actually needed or i felt like it. But then came the patch and as one of only 2 resto shamans, i was "needed" 6 nights a week.I was actually looking forward to it, for me the best part of raiding is always the new content and to be honest i had managed to shove all the negative stuff out of my mind. Well that didnt last long, 30 minutes into the first raid in fact it all came flooding back as the namecalling resurfaced. The raidleader asking why hes "raiding and wasting his time with 24 complete and utter retards" when 1 person accidently pulled in an instance hes been in for a whole 30 minutes got us off to a good start. There was silence for a few seconds and then the angry rebuttals began, from that point onwards people were tense, spending more time whispering each other than paying attention.

I lasted a few days longer, but the writing was on the wall. I didnt enjoy it anymore, i felt i didnt know the people i had been playing with for months.I was on tenderhooks the whole time, waiting for the next row i might have to try and defuse. People told me to ignore it, play on your combat log they said, then you wont see the fact that half the guild hates the other half. But i didnt have to see it to know it, i had people whispering me to say that X was bullying them or that Y should be kicked because hes a moron.As an officer, i couldnt ignore it.

So I quit. It was hard at first, especially whilst we remained on the same server. The whispers were quite something, especially from the GM who it seemed i had personally let down, spat in the face of and other such things.

Maybe im just unlucky or i have too high a standard, but all my guild experiences have been interesting to say the least. In fact looking back, this was perhaps my most boring brush with being a raider.

A little bit more about my characters, pt 2

Amaryllis

My level 70 resto shaman, leveled partly out of necessity to cover the gap left when all our resto shamans decided to discover real life at the same time just before the Sunwell lauched.

Favourite Pet:

Most prized item: This is a hard one, I pretty much powerleveled to 70 alongside the boyfriend's gnome rogue so I dont have anything from Vanilla WoW. As soon as i hit 70 i specced resto and started doing Kara/TK/SSC alt runs with the guild before moving into BT/MH farm raids and thus everything was pretty much handed to me on a plate, for the greater good of the guild but even so.

She is primarily a chain heal spammer, if its not broke....

Thunderbluff

Ive always liked the Taurens, and somehow this screenshot looking up towards Thunderbluff captures the green and freshness of Mulgore.

Horde v Alliance

One thing I love about WoW is the environment and during questing on my little orc I've been looking around. The horde zones seem so much more full of life than their alliance counterparts.
Edit: Come to think of it, alive isnt the correct word. Full of personality is perhaps more accurate. Maybe its because I've always loved the gothic, the hint of something not quite nice lurking in the shadows, but Undercity is my spiritual home in WoW. I love exploring it, listening to the npcs plot, plan and gossip.

It makes Ironforge, Stormwind and Darnassus seem dead in comparison. Where are the npcs interacting with each other on the alliance side? Where are the plots, the fragments of conversions about murky goings on overheard in passing. Instead all we get is children talking about fishing and dismembering dollies.

The Rise of the Horde

So its summer, we are hardly raiding and this expansion is slowly drawing to end. To give something new to work on, we decided to roll a couple of horde toons to help pass the time.

The gnome decided on a warrior and to complement that, I picked a shaman.

However once the classes were decided, over dinner then the headache for me began. What race to pick.

I love the looks of tauren females, so cuddly and cute, but their racials offer little to shamans, either for pvp or pve. Ok, warstomp + heal can work, but we have other ways of keeping distance, instance ghostwolf, earthbind and frostshock for example. 10 Nature res isnt really enough to make it a vital component either.

Trolls are fun. Ive made a troll priest, troll mage and troll hunter before. But again, the only thing they bring as a shaman is beserking. Obviously haste is a good thing, for all 3 specs but its cooldown makes it a bit lacklustre.

Which brings me to Orcs. Axe specialisation should I go enhancement, expertise is always a good thing. Bloodfury, a mini trinket which suits all 3 specs and of course stun resist. Now even when im raiding most of the time, I like a bit of pvp and the thing I hate most of all in pvp is... not being in control of my character. 15 percent stun resist, especially when combined with base resists and the meta gem makes Orc the only choice really for a shaman in my opinion.

So we are currently level 20, 2 green, bald Orc females running around having fun.

Shark Attack

The waters of Azeroth are inhabited by a range of dangerous and predatory beasts, but it seems the sharpest teeth of all belong to......



the Druid. Thats right folks, be nice to your resident tree hugging shapeshifting friends, you never know when you will be swimming along side them.

The Explorer's League

I was reading over my post on the Fire Festival and it got me thinking. Ive been complaining about all the abandoned zones and my guild have been complaining about nothing to do... So now the "Where in the World is Amaryllis and her Alts" competition was born.

The rules are simple, I post a screenshot of one of my characters somewhere in the World of Warcraft and the first person to post a screenshot of themselves in the same location wins a prize.

So far its going down well. But now Ive actually come to looking for weird and wonderful locations that will keep them guessing, its got hard. Most zones have easily recognisable textures, meaning that even if they dont know exactly where something is, they have a fairly narrow ballpark in which to search. Even some of what i thought were harder ones have taken them a mere matter of hours, not the weeks i was hoping for.

However, its serving its purpose, my guildmates have something to do and im having great fun trying to come up with sneaky locations that will at least take a day or two to solve.

Titles

Much to my surprize, my priestie got an arena title this week.

So 10 games played on her in season 3 got me Challenger. The team played a grand total of 29 games last season, i played the other 19 on my shaman who naturally also got the title. Which according to Arena Junkies put us in the top 30 percent of our battlegroup. Now, i find that a little scary, if we were in the top 30 percent, that means the other 70 percent, 7000 active 2 v 2 teams give or take sit below 1650.

Which leads me on to titles in general. Having given the matter some thought whilst I really feel that Blizzard needs to tighten its title rules otherwise they are pointless. The only Arena ones should be Gladiator, handing a title out for 10 games in a whole season is just ridiculous.

Hand of A'dal should only be available to people who were able to complete the attunements before they were removed and the same is true of the Champion of Naaru.

Most people want something that distinguishes them from the crowd and when everyone has the same titles it makes them useless. You dont stand out, which surely was the whole point behind them being introduced in the first place.

All in all, across my characters which have a wide variety of titles available to them, the only one i like to wear is my little undead priest's General tag because that is the only one i really had to put effort into getting in the first place. I completed the attunements which lead to the PvE titles before they were introduced, killing those bosses for progress so i kind of got the titles as default. As ive already covered, the arena one took me 2 weeks of less than one hour in total so hardly counts. Rank 12 on the other hand took weeks and hours and hours of "farming" at the farm.

Then we have the "Of the Shattered Sun". Now in all the discussions of this ive seen recently, the most common argument defending it was "but its only fake money, it doesnt matter". But unless you buy gold, in which case WoW money equals RL money, ingame gold equals your time. Time you could be spending earning real life money so in the end it works out the same. Nothing in life is free and that includes titles in WoW it seems.

What titles do you wear with pride and why? Also more importantly, what kind of titles do you want Blizzard to introduce ingame?

Fishing

For the first time ever, I have taken fishing beyond 225. Thats right last night, my shaman, Amaryllis completed the fishing quest. Perhaps by the time the next expansion rolls out, I might even be at 375. Probably not though.

The dangers of the Real World

Just come back from a weekend away. In 3 days absence from my computer i have managed to burn my chest and arms, (my peely wally skin didnt take to well to the sunshine) and got a hole in my foot (a long story, but has something to do with the Gnome and a kitchen knife, once a rogue, always a rogue).

For my own safety the next time the Gnomeling thinks we need a break, im going to suggest we go to Winterspring.

Which got me thinking. Where in WoW would you choose to go on holiday and why?

A little bit more about my characters, pt 1

My ingame personality changes slightly depending on the character im currently playing so here is a brief introduction to them. In no particular order I currently play: Mariposa.

My precious priest, level 70, currently disc holy specced for pvp although shes holy at heart. My first ever character on a PvP server. She was my raiding toon pre-tbc, slaughtering Old Gods, dragons disguised as humans and fire elementals. Her bank holds the majority of my mini-pet collection as well as all my old raid gear.



Favourite Pet: Muckbreath. I love his cute eyes and the way he runs. Shame pets cant shadowmeld though as hes a bit of a give away in pvp.

Most prized item: My Benediction. I got the Eye of Divinity off our first MajorDomo kill and then spent the next 5 hours in Winterspring farming the Eye of Shadow. Our guild hadnt killed Kazzak at that point, so my hopes rested solely on that one drop. So there we were 3 holy priests, (2 of my closest friends ingame who now sadly have quit playing) and my boyfriend on his resto druid. Then just as we were about to give up, there it was, lying in the corpse of a Hederine slayer. Whilst it seems a bit sad now, i think that was one of the happiest moments of my life, certainly of my wowlife.

She is probably the sweetest of my characters. A true healer in that sense, always helpful, sometimes too helpful as she tends to end up being the agony aunt of the guild, listening to people pour out their problems both ingame and personal.

How not to recruit

So im minding my own business mining on my paladin when out of the blue i receive a whisper,
"Spec".
Out of curiousity I politely answer,
"Holy" and wait.
A few seconds later i get asked
"Plus Heal".
"2200"
"Man you would want a more progressed guild".

I cant say i have much faith in a guild that recruits by whoing unguilded randoms and asking them such polite and well thoughtout questions. Who knows though, maybe they will end up being our servers next Illidan slaughters.

Midsummer Madness

I know everyone is writing about the fire festival so i was going to resist temptation and not post on the topic. However having run multiple toons all over Azeroth and Outlands in search of blossoms, in the end the little flames whispering to me from the fires won out and i decided, lets just jump on the bandwagon.

The Fire Festival is one of the saddest festivals in my opinion. I know its the height of summer and the sun is shining but revisiting Azeroth and seeing all these zones so empty and forlown seemed more suited to some kind of midwinter or autumnal event. That sense of loss and trying to relive what went before was everywhere. Riding through Blackrock mountion and seeing the ghosts of all those raiders fighting pvpers for the right to raid BWL and MC. Still hearing the voices of raidleaders long since rerolled or quit yelling at the last man to arrive, now being ganked by a 20 man raid of rank farmers.

Riding through Feralas and finding Lethon let out to pasture, no longer hunted or fought over like some exotic prize.

Im writing this alttabbed from the game, my paladin was sitting afk at the Southshore flightpoint and when I tabbed back.. still alive. The Burning Crusade shrunk the world in a sense, apart from the odd leveler in my travels from fire to fire, Ive hardly seen a soul, yet Shattrah/outlands is crawling with life.

Sure change is everywhere and should be embraced. My problem is not that the game has moved on, but that there is so much beautiful and pretty much unused content just sat there. Most people leveling now are rerollers or alts, so they just power through it heading to Outlands as fast as possible and so it just sits there, untouched with just a whisper of what it used to be. Remember the patch notes which included "The Barrens now feels more alive", well, we need more of that.

So thats the reflective and emo part done, on to the positives of this years festival for me.

Farmed gold simply by traveling. Best idea in a long time Blizzard <3 Revisited lots of places I havent been to been to in a long time, especially Winterspring, Felwood (my old haunts on my priest, dreamfoil/plaguebloom and icecap farming) and Crossroads (scene of my first pvp experiences pre-battlegrounds on my warlock). Im also a collecter/hoarder so any ingame event which allows you to collect "junk" is great in my eyes. The only real disappointment for me has been the lack of pvp opportunities whilst flag collecting. Only one person tried to kill me, a warlock in orgrimmar who also failed to notice the gnome rogue riding ahead of me. Everyone else has been all festivally and party spirited, more into cross faction dancing and lots of hugging than violence. Im one of those hippy types who hates attacking first, so i need people to give me an excuse and this summer no one seems to. Oh and the dancing draenei flame thingie needs to be larger. Other than that, its been one of the best festivals so far but nothing can beat Hallows End, im a orange candy and pumpkin girl at heart.