Casual Huntering

My priest Aoirbank (yes, he was originally my bank alt, slowly becoming my main), has taken up holy healing and its not going half bad, even if I’m a noob of all noobs. I’m excited to actually get back into WoW, at a perfect time, when people are starting to care less so I can buy gear for cheap. yay!

I’ve been also playing on the auction house again, trying to fight them crazy AH junkies. I’m only up to around 125,000 gold, but we’re moving along.

Of course that was all good till I find that my computer won’t even boot. Sure the fans come on, but its like brain dead or something, nothing to the monitor, none of that reboot beeping, just laying there on life support with a DNR note on the paperwork. I kind of lost it last night with lots of swearing, and I think I broke a mouse. Yeah, I’m a lot of fun to be around. If anybody has any ideas, please through them my way.

Oh, and cats scaring off creepers? Holy crap! The only problem is that now my guild wants to reset our minecraft server, after I built a huge Japanese castle and a massive mob grinder (among other things). Its like the equivalent of starting back at level 1 on WoW. Oh well, I guess I’m not really into that much anyway.

My 4 year old daughter has been calling minecraft “my crap”, but not on purpose, she just can’t seem to remember to say the “ft” instead of the “p”. She’ll come up to me and say something like this:

“Dad, can I please play my crap on the puter?”

Sometimes it comes out mine crap. I love it, so I hesitate correcting it, even though as a speech language pathologist you’d think that I would.

My neighbor just renewed his WoW account so I’ll be playing shortly. We’re going to be level some alts, I’ll be  healing probably with one of my low level druids and  he wants to tank, he always wants to tank. So, he’s trying to decide between a warrior and a paladin. What do you guys think?

Anyway, I was a little bummed to find out that our guild completely reset our minecraft server and all the things that we built just evaporated up with cyberspace.  I had a pretty sweet mob grinder that took me a good week to build. I guess its best to remember that all of this video game stuff is temporary anyway. Oh, heck I guess pretty much everything in life is at temporary. At some point we all get to go to the happy hunting grounds after all. Anyway, I’m starting a joint effort with my brother and my nephew, a new house with some pretty cool terrain. I’m pretty impressed with Minecraft 1.0.0 so far.

Hello folks, just wanted to poke my head in here and blow out some of the cobwebs, maybe do some dusting and such.

What have I been doing lately? Well, more or less I’ve been playing minecraft, trying to build a great big asian temple on the side of my island. I’ll have to post pictures sometime if you’re into that.

I’ve been thinking about jumping back into wow to play with my neighbor, as it is, I haven’t played in over a month.

And, I’ve been attempting to write my second NaNoWriMo, I’m about 30,000 words in, trying to hit 50,000 before the end of the month.

There are loads of games I want to try out there, like Sykrim and SWTOR, but that all requires time and money. I guess minecraft is cheap, but it can require a lot as much time as you are willing to give it.

So, I haven’t been very big into writing these days. When would I find the time?

Most days of mine consist of me waking up sometime between 5am – 6am. I get on WoW, do my JC daily, cut some gems and mail them to my bank alt. Go do my cooldowns on my 3 transmute alchemists and post those on the AH and then either prospect or work on leveling transcription. Lately I’ve also thrown in a BG or two. I do that until I need to wake up the kid for school (usually later than I should have). Then off to work we go. During breaks here and there I update my profits excel file that I made to keep track of general AH junk, and post more gems or repost the enchants (that hardly ever sell before some jerk off comes around and undercuts me). I try to stay awake while at work, usually I get myself some caffeine at some point during the day. I get home and its dinner time/play with kids/try to clean (I’m not as good at that lately), or I’ll go shopping and then proceed with the night. By the time we get the kids fed its practically already time to start their bedtime, which has been quicker lately, good for mom and dad’s sanity levels. Kids are finally in bed and then they come out about 4 times asking for random stuff, (water, a toy, a hug, or some other thing made up on the spot to give them another excuse to come out of bed for the nth-teen time). By then its around 8:30-9:00ish and I’m beat. My wife is a much more productive pers0n than I am and attempts to get me to do something useful at this time (not all the time, just some of the time). I’m usually on the verge of zombification at this point in time and I may attempt to do what she had requested or I might just grunt on the couch in some unintelligible language. My wife will tell you that the later happens more often than not. Sometimes we watch our current show on netflix or try to catch up on the DVR (which is always on the verge of having no more memory left – threatening not to record our favorite shows). Then I crash, I don’t fall asleep, I crash. I hit the pillow like a ton of bricks, yet with less noise. No lying in bed contemplating my day, no tossing and turning, just sleep.

Then the next day, rinse and repeat pretty much. Is my life horribly exciting? No, not really, but I have cute kids than take about as much energy to take careful as they demonstrate running around yelling at the top of their lungs.  I do have to say our newest addition (little 3 month old boy), has complicated things in so much as he demands to be held all the time pretty much, making it difficult keeping the 3 year old boy out of stuff. Pretty much our house is now a zoo. Lots of fun.

So, in all of that (not to mention the girls dance rehearsals, church callings, family parties, outside projects, or other random projects), I don’t find much time to actually do much writing. I could (and should) write in the morning, but motivation isn’t there. As it is, I’m writing this at work when I should be working.

So, if you have kids and play WoW, how do you fit that in your schedule? Do you write a blog as well? Any other hobbies? Any hobbies fallen to the way side? I want to know. Calling for all WoW parents to unite!!

Oh, and I’m also too lazy to proofread this, so please let me know if there are any particularly embarrassing typos (like the time I wrote sh!t instead of shift, yeah stuff like that), so that I can fix them before too many people read this (not that my numbers have been very high seeing how I write but once a month).

Anyway, Ciao

Okay, I found this guide at WoW insider for parents of children playing world of warcraft. Its pretty comprehensive, give it gander if you will.

I’ve become a AH junkie for sure. I cleared about 40k this last week from Jewelcrafting, Alchemy, and Enchanting. I’ll have to post a little more about what I’m doing to make gold in the future. Good times right there.

Oh, and my little brother who quit playing WoW is coming back, but he didn’t want to have the game in his own home, he wasn’t sure if he could handle limiting his gaming time (that and he didn’t want to buy a new computer). So, he comes over and plays on my older brother’s computer (I won’t share their names since they are breaking the ToS, but we won’t get into that). I guess he’s paying my brother’s kids to level his character, he’s only paying them in candy though. He’s a Whopping level 15, woot! So, all of my brother are back into WoW, all 4 of us, craziness. Of course we don’t ever all get on at the same time. We do attempt to on Thursdays at least.

So, what is in your game these days?

As you can see by this lovely reformatted blog, I’ve been very busy blogging as of late.

Ha! No, I’ve been prospecting ore like a mad man, trying to eep a little more gold out of the obsidium shuffle before Patch 4.1 comes out. Tossing rare gems on the AH as if its going out of style.

And can I tell you, I’m frankly happy that its over. Prospecting is not the most entertaining thing in the world to do, and when you are prospecting literally hundreds and hundreds of stacks of ore, pretty soon you start wondering why you were playing this game to begin with. I like the prospecting method of making money – get on, do your prospect cool down, post on AH, get off.

But really, I worry about the gem and ore market, heck about the market all together. I don’t think its going to crash but I’m sure some jack @ss will come around and dump all of their extra gems that they forgot to cut into ore into meta gems, inferno rubies, and other stuff. I can see it now, red cut gems selling for 15 gold each (but of course the raw gem will sell for at least 30 gold, just to make sure you can’t profit off the cut gems). Bahh..

So, anyway. Here is my update. If you care to know what I’ve been doing these days.

The hunter is still sitting at level 82, why? He only levels with my wife’s mage, and we haven’t played in a long time due to things like the brand new baby we have at our house not letting us sit down for more than 3 minutes before crying (okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, he’s not so bad, but it depends on the day), netflix, the lack of the ability to play stealth now that we have our fancy Real IDs, and a lack of time to do much of anything. We have several characters that are linked to each other, they only get played if they’re together. My hunter is a little different in this respect, he only goes questing with the mage, but I’ve been working on professions with him, made him drop mining for alchemy. I couldn’t bring myself to drop engineering, too many toys there, even if it doesn’t make crap.

But my deathknight is 85 as well as my priest. They most chill in Stormwind hanging out between the bank and the Auction house. I’m leveling a druid (stuck in the Outlands grind, that place now drives me nuts!), and a warlock (Outland grind again, errr). I’ve been playing with my remote auction house on my ipodtouch a lot more, playing AH PvP (which can get pretty brutal if you ask me). And I’ve been making more gold than I ever knew was possible, but I find that its really easy to spend. I think I through down at least 25k just to get all the end level enchanting recipes. Why did I want those? I thought I could make money, but now that Power Torrent and Peerless Stats has been sitting on the AH for weeks, I’m starting to wonder if that was such a good idea.  Oh, and bought a few maelstrom crystals, thinking I would make some profit… not so much. Especially since we’re on the eve of patch 4.1 coming out.

However, I’ve been making a killing off of Jewelcrafting (we’ll see how far that goes before the market crashes with 4.1). I’ve made a goal. Once I hit 100k, then I’m going to splurge and buy myself the Vial of Sands. So far I’ve made about 30k gold this week, so maybe I’ll get there sooner than later.

Well, I have been very pleased with the rustic word press theme that I’ve been sporting. Yet, I’m not especially bright when it comes to HTML junk, and I honestly don’t know how to tweak the theme, it’s not very flexible. I’m thinking of switching to a theme that’s more friendly to noobs like me, something with the rustic hunter feel, but where I can more easily add things like, maybe a title image or something. Maybe I just need a word press/ widget tutorial or something.

Any suggestions?

I thought I understood how the auction house worked. I thought I knew how to make gold in WoW, but before the only maxed out professions that I had was engineering and mining. Gathering professions can make money, but it takes a log of time. Engineering is another matter. The only thing that’s good about engineering when it comes to making money is the fact that you can farm elementals while you are mining. But I don’t even know if that’s still an option in cataclysm. I should probably look into that.

Well, I got my deathknight to 85 and got her jewelcrafting and mining leveled up. Then I got alchemy and enchanting leveled on my Priest (well, I never quite finished leveling my enchanting, but I’m above 500 at least).

Now I’m attempting to make money using alchemy and jewelcrafting.

It’s actually working. I can actually buy a stack of obsidium ore, prospect take those gems and sell them for a profit. Some I cut and then sell to the vendor, others I send to my alchemist to have to have uncommon gems be transmuted into rare gems (only certain colors), then cut them and make a nice profit.

I’m not as good as some, but it’s an aspect of the game I had really given much time to before. The whole process is truly a minigame on it’s own, almost an elaborate version of lemonade stand. I’m kind of getting wrapped up in it.

Now I’m leveling a Druid with alchemy so I can have another daily transmute available. That and I wanted a toon in the 70s to play with my friend, it was either the Druid or the warlock. The thought of bringing a healer to go with his tank was appealing for dungeons.

I’m falling back into my alt problem. I guess “problem” is the wrong word for it.

So, I found a nifty WordPress iPhone app. So. I’m likely to actually write on here more often, but not necessarily with lots of visuals.

I recently leveled my second level 85, and again it’s not my hunter, he’s still sitting at 83 at the moment.

Don’t worry. I haven’t given up on the most awesome dps class in the game. After all, my worgen is also a hunter. The desire to experience other aspects of the game got me going. That and my love of playing alts has never left. Part of me wants to start working on my next alt already. And no, that’s not my hunter, I only level him when I play with my wife, and since we had a baby recently, we haven’t been able to play as often. Doesn’t help that our baby got RSV and is on oxygen, but he should be weened off soon.

Did I mention that we had a baby recently? Yeah, three weeks ago. He’s adorable. I’ll add a picture if I can figure our how to do it.


I think that did the trick.

So, started I started to level my Druid, I just got her flight form. That has to be the coolest thing in the game. Her gear is pathetic, mostly because she got leveled to 60 with recruit a friend. And I have no idea how to play a Druid class, so no dungeons anytime soon for me on that toon.