The countdown continues

With less than a week to go to E Day, my excitement is starting to get the better of me. 

Why you may ask?

1. Penguin mini pets
   
2. The culling of Stratholme instance: Strat has always been one of my favourite instances, I love the colours, the burning buildings, the sadness of the zone. All the little details hidden away, the burning orphanage, the plague rats swarm when you hit the gates and of course all the mini bosses, so Im really looking forward to being able to see the place before it was put to the torch.
   
3. New quests: Having leveled 4 alliance toons to 70 and mulitple low level alts up the high 50s, im really looking forward to some new quests and killing some new mobs.
   
4. Flying carpet mounts. If Im being honest its the only reason Im keeping tailoring on my priests.
   
5. Multi person mounts. My sense of direction sucks. I regularly get lost and have been ganked afk flying into mountains more than once, so the thought of a multi person mount that I can leap on and go afk makes my heartbeat happily. Its also making the Gnomeling positively gleeful, no more waiting around for me whilst I get lost or fall of follow when I get stuck on something.

6.  A new class. I have already deleted a bank alt so I can make my shiney new deathknight. Based on the changes to the racials, 2 percent avoidance and shadowmeld being usable in combat in particular, my deathknight is going to definately going to be an nelf. I already have a dark whelping mini pet for her and a bit of a back story (RP is beginning to interest me more and more). Also it turns out that Nelf deathknights can have that wonderful dark shade of pink hair that Morogrim has... to be honest, I was sold even before the racial changes.

Whilst I dont want to spoil anything for anyone, I would definately say even if you dont ever intend playing any other toon than your current main, take the couple of hours to run through the deathknight starter quests. Its well worth the time and the effort.

Mushrooms are NOT the devil

Or are they? !!!! 

Zangarmarsh is by far my favourite Outlands zone. I love the atmosphere, the fact that its mostly water and plays home to some of the more unique looking creatures such as the bog walkers. Wtb Marticar  as a tameable hunter's pet please. It speaks to my inner child with all its giant mushrooms (as a little girl I had a smurf play set complete with cute little mushroom cottages so when I saw the alliance base at Telredor, it was love at first sight) and its swampyness. Everytime I fly over the area, I think of Sylvia Plath and one of my favourite poems, "Mushrooms", 

"We are shelves, we are

Tables, we are meek,

We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers

In spite of ourselves.

Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning

Inherit the earth.

Our foot's in the door."

    Sylvia Plath

Maybe we are looking in the wrong direction for threats to our world order. Its not Arthas who threatens our existence but those sneaky mushrooms mutilplying in the darkness of Zangarmarsh's swamps. 

Weaken the Ramparts

Feeling over confident due to our success 2 manning normal instances we hit Heroic Ramparts last night. I know its not much, but the Lyloid has 6 days played full stop and isnt exactly well geared so we really werent sure if we would manage even the first trash pack. All in all it went far better than we expected with our very first 2 manned heroic badge under our belts. Yes, thats right we nailed the first boss all by ourselves. His anti healing debuff almost did for us thought since my greater heal was doing 700 before I noticed how big the stack was, but thanks to shadowmeld we managed to muddle through. Basically the Lyloid shadowmelded, the boss came onto me and i ran around a bit shielding myself. As soon as the debuff ran out, Lylia bandaged up and got aggro back and we killed him. Im so glad I resisted all those people who tried to make me reroll dwarf priest back in 2005/2006. In fact i cant express how much i love the new shadowmeld.

Murmuring is bad for you

Our 2 man target today was Shadow Lab. I was a tad nervous going in, after all I have bad memories of the 2nd boss.

"Time for fun", cue Mariposa spamming holy nova and burning through all my mana in 2 seconds flat. In fact, I cant help but question if thats why Blizzard gave us Holy Nova as baseline, to give them giggles when we oom ourselves fast on all bosses with mindcontrol abilities.

Note the awesome cower animations in the screenshot

However it turned out just fine, luckily a prot warrior and a holy priest cant kill each other fast at all. We did the first boss with Lylia as arms, but he secretly has this thing for being prot and hearthstoned to respec before the next room.

The 3rd boss proved slightly more challenging. I couldnt sustain enough mana to kill all the spawns and heal. So we had to go for the kite and nuke like mad strategy, which on try number 2 worked fine. Much to my surprise he dropped the hallowed shoulders (surprise because when doing him on my priest I normally get the plate chest my paladin desparately wanted). 

Murmur was afk easy by comparison.

Swarm

Ive become increasingly frustated by the overaggressive nature being shown by 90 percent of the server. Its like just because season 4 is over and pve is nerfed to the point of pointlessness, every sad little loser is out looking for people to grief. Now Ive no problem with world pvp or 70 versus 70, but Ive never been able to understand the mentality of people who hang around killing lowbies and then run for the hills like cowards the second some decent competition shows up.

I took my hunter to STV this afternoon to pick up a gorilla and within seconds of arriving, a lv 37 hunter was taking potshots at Lylia (lv 70 prot warrior). After collecting my new pet, I was heading back to the rebel camp when we were ambushed by 2 70s and a pack of low levels. Of course we didnt stand a chance (since my hunter is only lv 33), so whilst Lylia created a diversion I made my escape and fetched my priest. Now obviously this warlock and hunter wanted world pvp, why else would they be hanging around in STV? Oh wait. So we kill them a couple of times and off they run, in separate directions naturally because its rare that gankers ever stick together when things get tough.

Then there is Booty Bay, we have bank alts (both lv 33) parked there for easy access to the neutral auction house and the number of times that people randomly attack.... The guards need to be lv 80 already.

Its like the new talents and lack of focus have created this rage mentality in everyone. Must prove how great I am by ganking people on low health, afk, with multiple mobs on them or just chasing low levels around. Whilst leveling Lylia, only one ret paladin on the opposing side didnt attack, everyone else has been throwing themselves at him. I realise its happening on both sides, but its driving me mad. Im very objective focused, I log with a plan whether that plan is to level an alt, do an instance, some pvp or whatever and it drives me mad when I have to deviate from that plan to corpse camping some scrub who thinks griefing lowbies is a good way to spend the evening.

Its the fact that these people dont want pvp, they dont want to fight people of the same level, gear or quantity. If they did they would be happy for 2 v 2 or they would be in a battleground. They are just trying to upset and annoy people, obviously its working because Im angry right now, but its been every day for 3 weeks now. 

Take the guy who killed us when I was tanking the ring of blood for Lylia's weapon. It was late at night so we were 2 manning it on the last boss when this ret paladin attacks. We got him low even though we had the elite on us, but he had bubble so with help from the hardhitting mob he killed us. But then he came back questing as if nothing had happened, right next to us. Naturally we killed him 2 or 3 times and then he doesnt res for ages. We wait, kill him again and this time when he resses he bubbles and hearthstones. Its like these people dont understand actions have consequences, that killing people with mobs on them or people doing escort quests is going to make them dislike you. That you cant just waste their time, get them a repair bill and then expect to do whatever you want right next to them. As you might have guessed Im really looking forward to leveling to 80.

The end of an era

The expansion comes ever closer and I admit to a certain degree of apprehension intermingled with the excitement. I actually thought I had lost all my all old screenshots as ive deleted and reinstalled Wow a few too many times, but lurking deep within a random folder I discovered a mix of stuff from 2006. 

Above is my little priestie exploring the Troll Village between Darkshore and Moonglade. It took me a while and a fair bit of wallclimbing before I managed to get there, but from the first time I saw it, it fascinated me and I had to get there somehow so it was well worth the effort. Note the interesting mismatched gear, we never ever got tier 2 drops.

Below is a screenshot of my old guild just before our first Cthun kill on the 20th of July 2006, we practised like crazy before portaling SW, handing in Nef and Onyxia's heads and then heading Stranglethorn for Hakkar's head, then hearthstoned back. Naturally we wiped on the first try losing all the buffs, but killed him later in the evening and then nailed Ouro the same night.

The gnomeling is the hunter on the left hand side (no idea what he's wearing or why he's wearing it since hunter tier 2 dropped all the time and he definately has the full set in the bank) and im the glittery priest in the centre. That was the only guild Ive ever been in where 90 percent of the priests were all nelfs. If we needed fearward for anything we tended to have turn to the alts.

To the left is a rare shot of my little druid. Note the twiggy shoulders, that was taken in Aszhara just after her first MC run. For the first time I managed to sneak my alt into a guild speed run and picked up 5 pieces of tier 1. 

Clova

The majority of my characters have flower themed names and Clova my baby hunter is no exception. Her name represents both the flower, Clover and Glen Clova, one of the Scottish Glens. 

She loves the great outdoors, happiest when wandering alone through the forests, particularly when its raining. Her companion, Lyloid is a plainstrider who Clova found wandering injured in Darkshire pursued by an Orc. Slaughtering the orc, Clova nursed the plainstrider back to health and the two have been firm friends ever since. 

Whilst she prefers the wilder zones, her current goal is to make friends with those strange human types, so that she can buy one of their black stallions so she is doing some farmwork in Westfall.

Gnomeling no more

The gnomeling (who techinically is no longer a gnomeling) hit 70 on his warrior a few days ago. We are trying to grab him a few pieces of gear and as much gold as possible before the expansion rolls around. The first items on the list were the undead slaying set, easily 2 mannable and if running around winterspring first thing in the morning pretty much uncontested. 

From there we headed off to the Scarlet Monstary to see how easy the Headless Horseman was for 2 undergeared overconfident idiots. As it turns out, prayer of mending owns and the Headless Horseman is basically a loot pinata. I hardly needed to do any healing at all in the first 2 phases, phase 1 I mainly wanded, phase 2 I just stood close enough to Lylia to make sure the prayer of mending would jump everytime i got conflagated, phase 3 was slightly harder but we were looting before we realised it. From our runs, Lylia got both the horseman's blade (I wish priest's could use swords) and the melee ring. 

Inspired by our success here we moved on to the Shattered Halls, an instance I loathe with a passion, mainly because everytime I run it normally its with aoehappy mages and warlocks who start nuking stuff before the tank has even sneezed on it. This time however it was relaxing and frightening easy, yet again prayer of mending turned out greater than Warchief Kargath Bladefist. Also just goes to show how much they have nerfed everything, obviously the new talents helped but it was a completely different instance to the one we ran almost 2 years ago for the first time.

Our next port of call was Magister's Terrace, where we managed the first 2 bosses with ease. Selin Fireheart we just let him drain mana from the crystals and then used prayer of mending to keep us up (anyone seen a pattern here? :p) and used a similar tactic for Vexallus. Obviously all the instances were on normal, have to start somewhere after all and given our level of gear, easy stuff is good.

Ghosties, Ghoulies and Long-Legged Beasties

"From Ghosties and Ghoulies and Long-Legged Beasties and Things that Go Bump in the Night, the Good Lord deliver Us"

So how did you spend Hallow's End?

Briarrose, being a brave little kitten spent the night in search of ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night. She started with the grave of Arthas's horse, or more accurately the hole he in was buried in until recently. Nothing, just a hole. But on a slightly different note, how bad can Arthas be, if he reanimated his old horsie? Surely that shows a caring and sensitive, animal loving side. 

From there, she moved on the Wickerman festival. Surely those dodgy forsaken must be up to something interesting. Unfortunately not, they werent even handing out free booze.

Mariposa and Lylia took a more practical approach and went trick or treating at Stratholme. That mean Baron refused to give us his horsie even though we did all kinds of really cool tricks.

My little baby gnome rogue is still hiding under her bed, afraid that some evil zombie will come back and eat her.