Happy New Year

With the new year creeping stealthly up on us, (I had this really scary book as a child in which Old Father Time could have passed as an undead), its time to make some resolutions. Now usually I manage to ignore or break all mine by breakfast on around the 4th of jan. This year however will be different (yes I say that every year too), but it really will, I promise. 

So in the short-term I want to:

1. Hit exalted with the gnomes. I always wanted a mechostrider and with the next patch it seems my dreams will finally come true. All in all I expect this to take a couple of hours as I still have all the start zone/Dun Morogh/Loch Modan quests untouched on my Priest.
2. Hit revered with the Oracles. Must start trying to hatch mini-pets as soon as possible. (3 days of doing all the dailies)
3. Hit exalted with the Tuskars. I need that fishing rod and well a pet penguin wouldn't go amiss either. (5 days of doing all the dailies)
   
4. Finish all the quests in the Storm Peaks. We are apart half way there at the moment, so a good days questing should clear that no problem.
   
5. Finish all the quests in Grizzly Hills.
   
6. Make my epic flying carpet, even though im unlikely to ever ride it anywhere. The surfing motion makes me feel seasick. Can't help wondering what the pillow/cushion thingie is held on with though and why can't i take passengers, there is plenty of room on the rug and its not like tailoring gives anything else worthwhile. A gnome panicking and peering over the edge as it clings on for dear life would be cute.
   

Mid-term aims (mostly for the next patch)

1. Exalted with Sporeggar, but Im going to wait until rep gives the same amount regardless of what level you are. That way repeatedly farming heroic Underbog should also produce enough Cenarion Expedition rep to tip Mariposa over into exalted and a hippogriph.
   
2. Exalted with the Timbermaw

Long-term aims

1. 100 000 hks. I recently hit 50 000 with the death of an annoying arcane mage in EotS so imagine this one will really be a long haul. Its annoying that achievements like this one arent account wide as I definately have killed over 100 000 players, just on different toons. Which brings to the really weird part, the other night I thought I would play around on an alt for a bit whilst Lylia finished some work but I just couldn't get into it. For the first time ever, I don't want to mess around doing stuff on other toons, I just want to make my little priest perfect. I feel distinctly odd.

In general I want to work my way through all the achievements. Planning on waiting for the next patch for doing most of the Outlands heroics though as since I hardly played my priest as anything but a pvp toy in the last expansion I'm missing most of those and most of the reps as well.

Earlier this evening we thought we would end the Old Year with a bang so we went and slaughered something from our past. Poor Onyxia looked so happy to see us, lying lonely in her lair, it seemed almost cruel to kill her, but 200g is a lot of money and she has well epics, even if they are outdated ones. (Will put in some screenshots when I sober up).

So on that note, HAPPY NEW YEAR everyone.

Upon a white horse

I've always loved horses so I finally bit the bullet and spent the morning grinding Mariposa the last 7k of Stormwind rep she needed. It turned out to be a lot easier than I expected as I had skipped most of elywnn whilst leveling. Thankfully the price of runecloth has dropped tremendously on my server as well, so instead of the 7 to 10g for 20 it was selling for when the achievement system was introduced, its now down to 2 to 5g so I picked up the last 600 rep that way.

Next goal is Gnomeregon rep, since A) its now the closest rep to being complete and B) the removal of race restrictions on the mechanostriders makes it just too tempting.

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.

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.

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. 

The squashlings are spreading

You can now get Sinister Squashlings from the treat bags, as well as a drop from the Headless Horseman, so even my lv 8 rogue has managed to lay her mitts on one. Whilst im glad they made them easier to obtain, I do think 2 squashlings and 2 hallowed helms in 2 hours seems a bit too easy.

So over all, Im now at 3 squashlings, 2 from treat bags and 1 from the Horseman.

Outland bound

The gnomeling hit the Outlands this morning, in record time for us. Looks like he will make the deadline of being 70 before the expansion hits, something we really werent sure of when we started. Here he can be seen in his true colours, a lepergnome with a pumpkin head. On a side note, the achievement for popping a pumpkin on the head of every race almost killed me this morning, Horde throwing things at you is scary. 

In other news, Mariposa finally got an epic flying mount. Thanks in part to all the people willing to pay crazy amounts of gold for runecloth. 9 gold for 20 makes it a very expensive way to rep farm.

I am a warrior

Well actually im not. But the gnomeling is, we are busy leveling yet another warrior for him. An alliance one this time.

We are repeatedly running the stockades at the moment, turning out to be good experience per hour. Ive finally found a use for my paladin, clearing the stockades in 3 pulls 5 times an hour.

I can understand why the prisoners rebelled though, its a pretty depressing place each cell complete with its instruments of torture, huge cobwebs decorating the hallways and no beds at all.

Overachievers and me

Spent this afternoon leveling fishing and cooking on Mariposa. Im now at 242 cooking and 225 fishing (need to complete the quest). I also managed to pick up 11 honourable kills, it turns out that STV is not a relaxing spot for doing a spot of fishing. 

So why am I, at this stage of the game leveling fishing and cooking on a character ive been playing for 3 years? Achievements, a system that Blizzard are implementing with this upcoming expansion. Basically you get points for a variety of things, collecting minipets, tabards, having professions maxed out and so on. 

But the main reason for the sudden interest in fishing is the simple fact that the expansion will bring the number of mini pets only obtainable through dipping a rod into the water to 6, 4 baby crocs, 1 crawdad and 1 gnome sized rat. I need a gnome sized rat, it will make my priest complete. Thus i need to be able to fish in Dalaran, so im working away on making sure ill be ready as soon as i can access the city.

Hocus Pocus

My first ever character on my own account was a little human warlock on a pve server. I played her for a few months and then we moved along with some friends to a pvp server, so she got abandoned. Abandoned until now in fact. The ability to move from pve to pvp became too tempting, so im now leveling her to 70 taking advantage of the fact that soloing is fun when no one can ganking you, with the intention of transfering once she hits the level cap.

The Pluses of this are

1. Shes a human, diplomacy is good, especially when like me you hate rep farming
2. lv 60 already
3. Has PvP rank, ok Knight Captain is nothing wonderful, but considering I only played her for a few weeks with the ranked pvp system
4. She is a herbalist and alchemist, which will allow me to drop alchemy on her and take up inscriptions

The negatives

1. Human and a particularly bovine one at that. Not sure what i was thinking when i made her. At least i can change her luridly golden hair to something less neon when the next patch comes out.
   
2. I leveled a gnome to lv 31, so im guessing the little gnomeling will become my new bank alt
3. Having to pay to transfer her, I resent giving Blizzard any more than i need to.
4. She doesnt have the epic riding skill

Sleeping Beauty awakens

When I first read that Blizzard were making transfers from PvE servers to PvP servers available, I was a tad annoyed. After all the Gnomeling had just leveled another warrior precisely because they had been adamant that they would never offer that service.

Then I thought about it and primarily about my other priest, little Dornröschen (which translates as Little Briarrose, the name given to Sleeping Beauty in the Grimm Brothers' version of the fairystory, a name that seemed so fitting for an undead) who was for all intents and purposes abandoned on a dead PvE server.

So fastforward a few days, and lo and behold, Dorn and the gnomeling's orginal warrior (Tabasco) are now safely rehoused on the same PvP server that our two Orclings call home.

Mounts, mounts and more mounts, part 2

The Orclings finally hit 60. Its taken a while and now Im relieving how painful Hellfire is for 2 melee classes. Its half tempting to respec to elemental but my gear just isnt up to it at the moment.
In other news I got a spirit of competition on this toon as well, although it was about as far from the spirit of the Olympics as you can possibly get... zerging 11 alliance with 40 horde. Ah well, it helped us get our matching Frostwolf Howlers.

Mounts, mounts and more mounts

Finally picked up my welfare horsie on my warlock.

Have to say I prefer the normal mount to the epic version. I like the fact that its a lot more wild looking, less domesticated than the 60 version which suits a demon steed.
The letter telling you to go and get a mount is a nice touch however. Its just a shame that they didnt send a warlock specific one, someone leveling a warlock as their first character might end up buying an ordinary mount when they dont need to.

Progress

Ive been working on my little list over the last few days and I think Im actually making headway.

The Orcling is lv 51 and counting, we managed to break through the Badlands into lusher and more interesting zones which really speeded up the leveling. The screenshot is the only good screenshot of the Badlands, me leaving it.

Got the Rune of the Guard Captain. A task made slightly harder than it should of been by the fact I was 5 levels lower than the mobs and Tamung was using a brand new weapon and so couldnt hit them. I wish the Alliance had a version of this trinket.

Hit Alterac Valley for the first time earlier today. It turns out that in the 51-60 bracket in Cyclone is really biased in favor of the Horde. Got 500 honor in 10 minutes along with 25k experience for completing a few of the quests. I also got to upgrade my main hand by getting the mace from the kill Vanndar quest. Its just a shame the queue times are horrible, but since the alliance get slaughtered 15 to 40, I suppose we can hardly blame them.

Gaming Aims

Im a list person. Without them I successfully manage to avoid doing all the things I dont enjoy. However since Blizzard have confirmed that they intend to release WotLK this year, its time to tidy up some loose ends.

The aims are fairly basic:

1. Rep grind
2. Farm gold
3. Pvp/battleground tokens
4. Level all toons to 70

So here is my to-do list by character (in no particular order).

Honeysuckle

1. Level. Which I admit currently seems impossible. Our next target is the Badlands, one of the few zones I absolutely loathe. Because going from 40 to 70 seems like far too big a task Im going to break it down into subsections, bite sized portions if you will. Honeysuckle's first task then is to hit 50 then 60 and so on.
2. Exalted with Silvermoon for a chicken. My Orc will look adorable on a pink and fluffy bird. The hard part will be persuading Tamung he wants a matching one.
3. Enchanting to 300
4. Fishing to 300
5. PvP trinket
6. Get the Rune of the Guard Captain

Amaryllis

1. Exalted with Winterspring Sabers
2. Exalted with all the Alliance factions
3. Revered and then Exalted with Skyguard
4. Exalted with the Aldor
5. Exalted with the Kurenai
6. Leatherworking to 375
7. Fishing to 300/375
8. Cooking to 375
9. Complete all quests in Blade's Edge, Netherstorm and Shadowmoon Valley
10. Exalted with the Shattered Sun

Mariposa

1. Exalted with the Cenarion Circle
2. Revered/exalted with the Skyguard
3. Revered/exalted with the Winterspring Saber Trainers. This has been a work in-progress since my priest hit 60 in the summer of 2005. However this time im serious about ticking it off.
4. Exalted with all the Alliance factions
5. Primal mooncloth bags in all slots
6. Complete all quests in Blade's Edge, Netherstorm and Shadowmoon Valley
7. Cooking to 375
8. Exalted with the Shattered Sun
9. Exalted with the Kurenai

Briarrose

1. Exalted with the Cenarion Circle
2. Exalted with the Skyguard
3. Exalted with the Kurenai
4. Exalted with the Consortium
5. Exalted with the Shattered Sun
6. Exalted with the Aldor
7. Farm the crusader weapon enchant
8. Exalted with all the Alliance factions

Calantha

1. Exalted with Orgi'la
2. Honored/Revered/Exalted with the Netherwing
3. Fishing to 375
4. Exalted with the Shattered Sun

Clova I

1. Level to 30
2. Get a mount
3. Tame a hyena, preferably the "Giggler" as I like his black and white spotty coat
4. Level to 40

Clova II

1. Level to 10
2. Tame the pink plainstrider

Nebel

1. Level to 20 for Blink

Sugarplum

1. Level to 20. My troll wants shadowguard

Snowdrop

1. Level to 40
2. Collect my welfare mount

As I complete each aim, Ill tick them off in a brief post and should I run out of aims for a specific character in a separate post Ill try and come up with some new ones. That however is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

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).

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.