Casual Huntering

Posts Tagged ‘Holidays’

Yup, I’m on spring break, as a result I’m writing on my blog less. Does that make any sense at all? Ha! I think not. But it seems when we have more time free we get less done at least that’s been the case for me. Maybe its because there’s freakin’ snow on the ground right now, a good foot of it or so. What gives? Come on its suppose to be spring break, not winter break.

So, I spent a good chunk of yesterday running around looking for eggs as part of the Noblegarden holiday. I ran around Goldshire for a long time and wow its crowded there. I played in the morning before 8am and there quite a few people there. When I came back in the afternoon around 1:30pm, oh my gosh, it was wall to wall pink bunnies. And half of them were camping spots. I was sick of it, so I took myself to Dolanaar (for you hordies who don’t know where this place is, its the night elf beginning area). Much better, but the eggs are more widely spread out. Still that’s where I’ve left my character so I can hopefully finish the thing tomorrow. Its probably one of the easiest holiday meta achievements to get out there. But my goodness, hunting eggs can be a little much after a little while. When ever I do something for a long time that’s very repetitive I dream about right away when I go to bed. Without fail I started running around looking for eggs in my dreams. Priceless I know.

Oh, my brother-in-law finally got back to playing WoW again now that he’s finally done with all of his console games that he got from Santa for Christmas. He writes The Daily Warlock, which is kind of funny, because he hadn’t updated for 8 or 9 months during his WoW hiatus. Hopefully we’ll see a little more out of him in the future. My warlock is still just level 10, has a clerk/banker job, hanging out in Ironforge. And I don’t have any plans to change that anytime soon.

So, I’ve been focusing on leveling a druid and a priest. I’ve been playing which ever character has the most rest XP at the time. Lately the priest has been getting the attention because I pretty much had no rest XP on the druid. I’m leveling the priest partly just because I want a high level enchanter and a high level inscriptionist. It’s also nice to have another healer bouncing around. The druid is an herbalist and alchemist. I particularly want to level alchemy, but I also love being a cat, sneaking about. Way too much fun.

Anyway, I don’t know how much more writing I’ll do for spring break. Of course I’ll write today. I have nothing better to do with my morning, but I can’t guarantee you’ll get anything else the rest of the week. If they had a second maintenance time during the week I’d probably write more, but they don’t.

Friday Fiction is back (yes I found my flash drive). And this is a good one too!

Before we get to that I gotta jabber about what I’m doing in game. My wife and I finally got our “Elder” title, took us long enough. We’d been having difficulties getting guildies together to run the 5 mans. It seems whenever we were able to get on they were raiding (we aren’t geared enough to be on the progressive raids at this point). I guess we could have puged it, but we really didn’t want to wait through the queues; it takes a while for us dpsers.

So, why we were waiting for our gear to get done with 25 man ICC we worked on leveling my wife’s death knight. She’s almost to level 64. We’d really like to catch her up to my brother and sister-in-law if we could help it (they’re both level 68 I believe).

Sadly, I still don’t have the “elder” title on my death knight. Our guildie tank specifically said that he didn’t want to swap people out. A little annoying if you ask me, but it took a lot bending arms backwards just to get that done. Us beggers should be choosy I guess. So, I get to pester guildies next week. They’ll find out just how annoying I can be (evil laugh).

I’ll be very happy to have this holiday done so I can get back to work. It’s so funny that I look forward to holidays to mix things up then look forward to finishing them so I can get back to the same old same old. I’ve been neglecting all of my many alts who are all sitting on full rest xp in random inns all over the place.

Anyway, its Friday, so lets get on with the Friday fiction.

Remember Prax’s dream about that strange girl? Well, read on, things start to get interesting (as usual, I only wrote Praxton’s part, Loreli wrote the mystery girl, and Moordeth wrote Voljub).

There was something going on in the Trade District. A crowd was forming and unfriendly shouts could be heard.

Prax heard all of this commotion. He followed the commotion, partly out of morbid curiosity.

There was a slight break in the crowd. Just enough for Prax to see through. Four city guards were escorting a hissing, spitting angry woman. She was fighting them, trying to break free. She was dressed in dark ritual robes and the crowd was shouting obscenities at her. One good look at her face revealed the girl from Prax’s dream.

Prax’s jaw dropped. He instantly recognized the woman that was flaying about at the arms of the Stormwind guard. He attempted to navigate through the crowd to get a closer look. He boots managed to find some loose cobblestone and he fell to the ground. Praxton managed to get himself up enough not to get stepped on with the growing crowd. He tried again to weave his way through to the front.

Praxton finally got to the front of the crowd to see the scene unfold.

The girl thrashed wildly, her sable locks whipping around her face. She managed to break the guards grip and whirled, hitting him with a blast of shadowy energy. Murmurs of Cult of the Damned made its way through the crowd. The captive turned to flee, but found herself blocked by a few of the braver souls in the on-looking crowd. The guards took hold of her again and someone managed a binding or silencing spell on her. They dragged her through the Trade District, obviously headed for the stockades.

Praxton was filled with strange emotions. He should have felt disgust for this woman, obviously a member of the cult of the damned. It had to be a coincidence that she had been in his dreams, but it looked just like her with his father’s eyes. Praxton followed the crowds, with growing interest and concern. He needed to help her somehow. “Pst, Voljub, what do you make of that?” Prax whispered.

Voljub spoke softly “Voljub has seen people of this kind before in Northrend with Master Volrac. Some of them are beaten prisoners and some beat the prisoners. Master Volrec wore clothes like this one often.”

Prax should have left this alone, but he kept following (forgetting why he was there to begin with). What did this woman do? The crowd dissipated as the guards got closer to the stockades, but a sizable group continued to follow out of curiosity. Prax whispered to Voljub, “I saw this woman last night…” He began to trail off, “..in my dream.”

Voljubs response was quiet and curious. “What happened in your dream master?”

They went around another corner, still trailing the guards, “Its, er, um, all kind of fuzzy.” Prax kept his eye on the girl. “There was this girl, she um, n- needed me. That’s all I can remember.”

The captive girl seemed to have sobered up slightly. She was now hissing threats at the guards, but she wasn’t fighting them.

Praxton wanted to try to get a little closer, they were going over a bridge now, a few bystanders still looked on towards the girl.

“This girl needs Master eh…mmm We follow her yes?”It was hard to stay balanced on his Masters shoulders with all the people bumping about.

Prax watched with the last bit of the crowd as they took the girl into the Stockades. Prax whispered, “I um don’t know what er to do?” Prax wasn’t thinking rationally. “Voljub, could you… um, maybe distract the guards?” He said, towards his shoulder. ‘What am I doing???’, the rational part of Prax head scream, but he pushed it aside. He couldn’t explain why he felt he had to help her, but the emotions were so strong; he continued to set aside rational thoughts.

Voljub whispered sinisterly “With pleasure my Master.” He leaped off of Praxton’s shoulders. Still invisible he hopped over to the Stockade. The guards were talking among each other. As one began to leave he saluted and said ‘For the Alliance’. Voljub spoke up mockingly with his raspy voice “For the Alliance”. Their heads began to turn in all directions. Voljub moved a closer. “For the Alliance, For the Alliance.”

“Who goes there? Show yourself!” barked a guard.

“TeeHeehee For the Alliance, For the Alliance” Voljub began running circles around a guard and slowly let himself become visible all the while chanting mockingly “For the Alliance.” When the guards noticed him he ran off down the street. Before he left the guards though he lit an Alliance flag up in flames. All three guards chased Voljub down the street as he continued to mock them. As he passed Praxton he smiled and did a little flip.

‘Now what?’ Praxton thought to himself. Then he saw that face again, that familiar face from his dreams. There were still a couple of guards; most of the onlookers were gone at this point. ‘It’s now or never’, he thought. Prax tried to act nonchalant, gave a poor attempt at whistling. He walked closer to the guards and the girl. He didn’t want to kill anybody, just get the girl away. He focused on the inner heat. Maybe he could just set the guards shoes on fire. His attempt at getting closer to the stockades did not go unnoticed by the guards whose attention were heightened.  Prax felt for the heat, he was the heat.

He heard the guard say, “Move along.” He could hardly notice, the heat was overcoming him. Prax tried to act like he was just walking by, he attempted to send the focused heat to the feet of the guard on the left of the girl. ‘Oh no’ Prax thought as he saw a stream of flames start to engulf the guard, the plate metal started to melt. Praxton was mortified; he didn’t yet have a good feel over the heat. He must have drawn too much.

The man started to scream in pain. The other guard let go of the girl and rushed towards Praxton while pulling out his sword. Prax just stood there in shock, “What have I done?” he whispered to himself.

Next Friday I’ll put up some more on this story. We’ll see what happens to Praxton and this mystery girl.

Okay, so I’ll be frankly honest with you all. If we don’t have Tuesday maintenance server down time, I don’t and won’t post as much for that week. I love writing on here, but I also love playing the game. I use that down time on Tuesday mornings to write a little something something about the game. Otherwise, I’m playing. I gives me something to do related to the game at least you know.

Man, there probably should be more down time (even though I would be very upset about it). I might get more accomplished with my life. dishes, feeding the dog (wait, I don’t have a dog), exercising (well, I do exercise, but it takes great motivation, that of which has been failing me lately), etc. I don’t know…

So, I went raiding on Tuesday with my guild thinking I would be the bomb with my hunter, much better geared than ever before. Or at least I thought I’d do better, but no. My dps was pathetic, maybe worse. I know part of the problem is (as mentioned before) my focus in the game. I’m not super focused on getting my dps up to uber levels with my hunter. My younger brother has been bugging me about it. He wants me to go sit in front of the target dummies and practice my shot rotation and such. I will eventually but I can’t get myself to do it, not when there is so much else to do!! Of course part of the problem was also the fact that I was super tired and I kept dozing off. Not very good for dps when you just sit there like a bump on a log.

Besides lack of sleep, the main thing that has gotten me bogged down lately are holiday achievements. I’ve decided, now that Eliahna (my DK) is level 80, I want to get her started on the road to a pretty 310% speed violet protodrake as well.  And… I still have holidays to do on my hunter. So, I have double duty when it comes to this. At least we are on really easy holidays even if they require a bit of work. I just need to drag my sorry butt to all the elders all over the greater Azeroth. No PvP achievements at all in these holidays so we’re doing good. I’m dreading the up and coming Children’s week holiday. I love the holiday, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to get all of those battleground achievements. I probably should start practicing now, on my hunter, my dk, and my wife’s mage.

So, I should be playing randoms to get frost emblems; instead, I’m running around trying to complete holiday achievements. Thus neither of my end level characters are improving their abilities.

Even if the holiday was over though, I’d probably just be running around on alts or something. I can’t stay focused very well. (Which is why I’m writing the post right now instead of working like I should. )

So, I want to dual spec my deathknight to be a frost dual wielding tank for 5 man instances with family and guildies, and a unholy dps for 5 man pugs and farming. I’ve been tanking all of these really difficult instances, like the underbog, and hellfire peninsula instances. Well, okay, maybe not quite so difficult, but its been fun to play with my brother and his wife, even if my character isn’t yet getting anything out of it.

I really want to also level my kitty druid. Right now she’s sitting at level 36, and she’s been ignored due to holiday stuffs and whatnot. But I really would like to get her to level 80 before the expansion comes out as well.

Rutabaga

Sorry, I’m jumping all over the place on this post today. Randomness at its best, I guess that’s how my brain works and when you get a quick post about what’s on my mind, that’s what you get. Sorry about that.

So, I’ve been ignoring my druid, and I really would like to get back to my other Deathknights (on Duratan US and Earthen Ring US). I’m still trying to work up their professions, which seems like its taking … forever! Especially when one of them have a crafting profession. I’m really guilty about putting those off forever, but not this time, we’re going to level them before we enter the outlands with these characters by golly.

Man, it seems like I had a lot of other things to say. Maybe I need to think on it for a moment.

Well, I woke up thinking that I was going to start my Valentines holiday with my toons. It did start today after all. Last year I got everything done with exception to the things that require you to be level 80, at the time, I still wasn’t, very sad I know. So, it’ll be a cinch to get this year. I already got the really difficult random drops. But as I’m running over to the inn keeper to start the once-an-hour routine (to hope to get the random drops on my DK) I notice that the inn keeper doesn’t have any thing for me at all.

Confused (as I assume most people in my predicament are) I turned to do some research and most people had great guilds how to get through the “Love Is In the Air” world of warcraft holiday for 2009 and earlier, not helping me at the particular moment.

By the way, here are some links with in-depth detailed information being updated as we speak: The WoWhead guide (which has usually been my favorite), the WoW.com guild (they’re updating as we speak as well), the WoWwiki guide (which tends to get updated much slower than the other two)

It appears instead of getting on once an hour, you need to instead do dailies to get Love Tokens, which then you can use to buy all of those difficult random drops (not so random anymore). You can also get Love Tokens by trading them in for bracelets which you can get materials to make them by killing regular mobs that you would be able to get XP for or would have even if you’re at max level. So, basically any mob that isn’t gray to you.  The drop rate is suppose to be roughly about 38%.

Instead of hoping to have enough luck to get the perm-pet Peddlefeet (ugliest one in the game), or the picnic basket, or the lovely black dress, you just buy them with the Love Tokens. Oh, and now there is a Rocket mount drop from the holiday boss.

There are plenty of other stuff you get to do, but this post wasn’t suppose to be a definitive guide, there are plenty other people doing all the work for that. I suggest that you go to WoWhead, for their “Love is in the Air” guide. Their guild will give you every bit of information you could care to know about the event (and some you probably didn’t care about).

So, I guess this is Blizzard’s answer to all of the complaints they had last year when many people weren’t able to finish the meta-achievement just because they weren’t able to get some random drop. The holiday changes from the hourly drudge to something that might actually be fun.  I think most of us don’t like much trying to get “random drops” to finish the meta-achievement. Many of us are attempting to do all of this to finish the big old grand meta achievement “What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been” so that you can get that 310% speed Violet Proto Drake. I know there are many people out there that were very diligent and already got this last year, but there are always alts and many of us weren’t cool enough to get it done.

So, get at it make love happen in your small part of Azeroth.

Happy St Patty’s day to y’all. I work at an elementary school so wearing green today was essential to my survival. (aghhhh, death by pinches….).

My Death Knight finally hit level 70 and after getting her mining all the way up she is now in Northrend. I decided to do something a little different. I’m actually attempting to play her slightly RP style. I don’t think I could ever completely play a crosstoon RP, because I’m not going to even pretend to know what’s going on in the female brain, let alone pretend to be one. However, I’m actually reading quests and interacting with NPCs. Northrend is perfect for this especially since the NPCs specifically talk to you a lot more now (remember who people in Dallaran say hello to you when you enter their shops?) Okay, the interacting with computer people seems a little silly to me, but the whole thing adds a new dimension to game play that I’m enjoying, trying to see through the eyes of my character.

Really why do we play the game? What do we get out of it? I for one love the social aspect of the game, even though I play solo quite a bit, but I usually keep twitter on and I chat with some of the other early birds in my guild. We play to try to get our next piece of cool gear? I know a lot of people who are all about getting uber gear (my little brother for one). Spending all of your time getting the best gear possible can be fun, but eventually it can get boring. I know so many people who were burned out on raiding before WotLK (and some who are as of now).

We play for the overall experience of the game, right? I say this, but that doesn’t explain why we farm. Farming can’t be that much fun. But we are trying to improve our toons, or collect cool stuff. It’s nice to be able to make a lot of gold in the economy (even if making gold IRL isn’t as easy… or fun). I say this but I’m pretty poor in Azeroth and IRL.

But I regress to random tangents as always. So, I’m trying out the RP thing (even though my main characters aren’t on an RP server). And so far it has increased the game play experience quite a bit. It adds a new element to the game that has made it exciting for me again. I’ll have to come up with some story about people doing crazy stuff, I best avoid capital cities I suppose.

So, maybe I’ll have to actually visit those level 1 characters that I rolled on RP servers and give them a shot. I just have a hard time spending time on other servers and redoing the whole leveling process. At least it’s a lot quicker than when I leveled my hunter /sigh. Yes, I know I could roll a Death Knight, but I really would like to try RPing a hunter. I guess that’s just something to look forward to.

So, another Holiday has come and gone. And no new title… /sigh. Couldn’t Pity any Fools in Naxx. So, I thought that I’d have to wait 1 year from this point to my Violet Proto Drake, but it turns out that the Brewfest achievements take an entire year on their own because of the Brew of the Year achievement. That’s right, for this achievement you have to join the brew of the month club and taste a new brew which comes… once a month. So, if you didn’t do it last year then the best you can hope for is to start it this next Brewfest holiday. Which means that most of us won’t be completing the “What a Long, Strange Trips Its Been” achievement till Oct 2010!!! Many of us might not even be playing WoW by then (they’ll have already launched world of starcraft or something).

I can’t get too mad about the achievements. For me, it has added a lot to the game. There is something more to work for other than leveling and new gear. My wife and I have really enjoyed the holiday activities, but were never before properly motivated to participate (as was everybody else). If anything these holiday meta achievements has given us proper motivation to get to level 80 before Children’s Week arrives

Alright is that time again, that’s right, Valentine’s Day (well, not quite yet). But the Valentines Holiday in WoW has began. The guild that I’ve seen so far is at WoWInsider. WoWhead has also post their guide. So far I just started it this morning myself. You go buy your self perfume or cologne and dowse yourself. Then you go hit on the guards (female guards in IF were difficult to find. Go talk to the lady by the tailor trainer.) There are a bunch of achievements you get to do. And you only have till Feb 16th (at least that’s what someone told me on twitter).

If you complete all of the achievements for Love is in the Air, then you get a meta achievement with a title: Fool For Love. And who wouldn’t want “The Love Fool” title, I mean come on?? Pull that out at parties to impress the ladies (or at least the lady guards if you can find one).

Pretty much my experience so far has been logging on once an hour to get your new gifts of adoration (actually my wife has been doing this for me while I’m at work). You’ll get the things you need to complete the many little achievements. Oh, and it took me a while to discover that Gifts of Adoration (needed for all achievements, but particularly for: Nation of Adoration(Alliance) or Nation of Adoration(Horde)) okay for this you need to go to vendors not guards. I thought Darnassus was broken for a long time until a twitter friend pointed me to the light (or rather… a vendor).

Oh and you need to be at least level 75 to get the meta achievement because you have to go into dungeons for I Pitied the Fool and My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose. I still need to do those ones myself. Anyway, happy valentine, good luck.

I’m sure everybody else and their dog (wow you let your dog play WoW?) has downed Omen, but we finally did it recently.

For those of you who don’t know who Omen is (Ryan, or Dave). Omen a 2 headed dog that’s bigger than a monster truck that only appears during the Lunar Festival. Killing this big hairy beasts is required for Elune’s Blessing, which is need to complete the meta achievement To Honor One’s Elders, which is how you get your “Elder” title and puts you one step closer to finishing the What A Long, Strange Trips It’s Been achievement.

We decided to not even try for the Lunar Festival achievement this year because we’re only lvl 77 and there is no way we’re going to hit 80 before Feb 14. You see, in order for you to get the Elders of the Dungeons achievement you must be level 80, because one of the Elders is chillin’ in a heroic dungeon. I was very upset. I could have made my toon look like a missionary.

Well, anyway, my sister-in-law really wanted to get the achievement so we decided to kill Omen anyway, anyway (could I use that word more???). So, we got our group together from our guild and made our way to Moonglade (we tried to get there by initiation, but we weren’t smart enough - but we did figure it out after we were completely done, /facepalm). One of our guildies told us to rush over there because someone else already summoned the dog.

So, we rushed over to see the battle already unfolding. For awhile we were fighting the big dog right along side with a bunch of horde. It doesn’t matter who taps him, as long as you are around to stand over his dead body once he’s… well, dead. We were all trying to kill him. Oh my gosh, he took forever to kill, like 20 minutes or something.

I think we accidentally killed the horde in the process, I kept seeing HK:Scout, HK:Private, etc, popping up on my screen. Maybe I used multi-shot once too many times, maybe my gorilla just didn’t like the smell of the Horde. I don’t know, but we ended up killing all of them. We could have used their help gunning Omen down.

Our clothies also died a lot, but since the graveyard is like, right there, it wasn’t a big deal (which is easy for me to say because I did die, thus didn’t have to worry about the repair bill). You see we did those horde a favor, cutting down their repair bill (I’m guessing that they probably didn’t see it that way).

Anyway, lots of fun, kicks and giggles. I love the holiday stuff, it breaks up the monotony. Not that the game is boring, but I love world events nonetheless. Oh, I think I got a little too happy with the Print Screen button.

Yay! Its time for lunar festival. Now that there are achievements attached to it, we get to stop everything we’re doing an get that title. How cool to be Elder Aoirselvar. That would be the second time in my life that I had that title. lol. (The first time took even more work).

So, there is a great article over at WoWhead that guides you through everything. I was ready to stop leveling my hunter and DK and start to work on this when I saw that Elder of the Dungeons requires a minimal level of 80. /cry, seriously, who still isn’t level 80??? /meakly raises his hand. I’m all the way to level 76 *woot*, but for reasons previously mentioned, I’m still not level 80. So, I’ll just have to catch this next year I guess.

Does anybody know if the achievement “What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been” has to be done in one year? I already botched it up if it does with not finishing my Hallow’s End achievement. But by golly I got my Merrymaker title!