The lazy week full of pets before a storm hits

I didn’t plan to play WoW during the week but I managed to squeeze a few hours in and played most of the weekend.

I finished Pandaria and Nothrend Safari . I was missing about 8 pets on each achievement so it only took some Wowheading (if “googling” can be a word, this works too, right?) and flying around those continents. Fortunately, Undead Val’kyr is not part of the achievement, I met her once but accidentally killed her before I could capture her. That was a bit of a fail.. Oh well, I’ll be more careful next time.

I had almost nothing done for Outland and Draenor Safari so that was a grind and after that, all I was missing for World Safari was Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor. I’d been avoiding those because there was so much to do and those continents are annoyingly big but I knew I’d have to finish those achievements eventually so I did it. It was less fun than the previous ones but I don’t have to worry about it anymore. Eastern Kingdoms Safari is done and al I need for Kalimdor Safari is a sandstorm in Tanaris and summer (Qiraji Guardling is not available now).

I also did some fishing in the Underbelly for Underbelly Tycoon. I’d been occasionally doing some stuff there since the launch, mostly the quests, but not PvP, that PvP is bad.. You get a rat as a mount. I don’t hate rats IRL but this one is huge. Eww! I still added to my favourites because it is sort of cool even if it’s disgusting. Maybe I’ll get used to it.

We got confirmation that 7.2 is coming this week. I didn’t feel ready but the amazing trailer got me so hyped out I can’t wait to see it all. And flying is finally coming in a few weeks! I miss flying so much! It will still take us some time to finish the Broken Isles Pathfinder, Part Two achievement but it makes me so happy that I can start working on it! I can mostly manage (and enjoy the game) without it but especially if I spend some time in the older zones, coming back to the Broken Isles sometimes feel bad because I’m stuck on the ground. Now I can count down the days to the glorious moment when this is not an issue anymore!

I know that not everyone is happy about 7.2 coming so soon but I still hope we can all have a good time on the Broken Shore. See you there!

Me as an NPC

Lovely ladies Z and Cinder are doing a blog challenge and anyone can join! Topic of week 5 was “You as an NPC”. You can find other people’s posts on their website. This is an older topic but it’s an interesting one so I wanted to go back to it.

After writing this and then reading others’ posts on the topic again, Z actually wrote something similar so I might be subconsciously ripping off her idea.. Read her post here and consider this a version of Z’s idea for new players.

WoW offers a lot of different activities and I enjoy almost all of them. PvP, professions, pet battles, mounts, toys, questing, dungeons, reputations, achievements, transmog, basically everything except for raiding.

I usually know what I want to do when I’m logging on but there are days, especially on weekends, when I don’t have a plan and start going through my reputations or achievements until something catches my eye and I decide to do that. And that’s what my NPC could help with. This is how it works:

I’m in a convenient place (this expansion in Dalaran) and when you talk to me, you choose an activity you feel like doing – pet battles, mounts, reputations, … and I give you a tip what you could do. Few examples:

• mounts – “There’s Vitreous Stone Drake in Stonecore. How come you don’t have it? It’s been there for years. Go get it!”
• reputations – “Kurenai almost love you! Go kill evil ogres.”
• pet battles – “Major Payne is the only pet master in Northrend you haven’t defeated. Go to him and try your luck!”

I don’t ever tell you about something you’ve already done. I also prioritize easy-to-get things, reputations you already have on revered, mounts you can farm in an instance on normal, meta-achievements that are missing only one part, …  The idea is to get something done in a few hours (or even minutes), to finish something so that you can log off with a sense of accomplishment.

If you don’t like my tip, I give you another one and you can also blacklist the ones you don’t want to see again.

I probably wouldn’t be much useful to veterans who’ve done most of the content in game but as a new player, I’d love something like this in game. It would save me all that time scrolling through achievement/reputation/collection tab or using sources outside the game and it would help me decide what I want to do on lazy weekends because I don’t want to make decisions on lazy weekends. Decisions are hard.

The NPC would be my mage in a pretty dress with a cute cat. And she would definitely be sitting down. How can NPCs stand 24/7? That must be hell. If I needed to be a Horde, I’d choose my undead mage (well, she’s the only Horde toon I have so.. not much to  choose from but I like her).

The week with all the falcosauring

I got to “Defeat 3 Pet Battle WQ with your hatchling and 2 Humanoid Pets” on Monday with my direbeak and managed to do 2 of them on the first day. I struggled at first but then I changed one of the direbeak’s abilities to defence and it went much smoother. I did the third one next day without much issues. All that was left at that point was to heal the matriarch and enjoy my Brilliant Direbeak.

I went back to Emerald Nightmare to kill Ursoc for snowfeather hatchling and Xavius for sharptalon hatchling. I’d only run it once or twice when it opened on LFR so it was quite nice to come back. And the fights were obviously much shorter because we were all overgeared, Ursoc almost too short, I was having fun.

I struggled with “Defeat 3 Pet Battle WQ with your hatchling and 2 Undead Pets” for snowfeather hatchling and I wasn’t able to do any of the 3 WQs on the first day, it was a bit discouraging. I obviously need to get Unborn Val’kyr because all the guides recommend using her. But the next day, I finished two so it was all good again and I managed to do the last one the day after that.

The sharptalon quest was “Defeat 3 Pet Battle WQs with your hatchling and 2 Magic Pets” and my magic pets are apparently quite good so this one was easy. And I got lucky and one of the WQ was to defeat/catch a regular pet which is much easier than battling pet masters. Thank you, RNG!

When I started doing falcosaur dailies, I was angry that I had to do pet battles for mounts. I hadn’t done them before and I suddenly needed a bunch of rare high level pets of specific families. I wasn’t even planning to get into pet battling this year, which was the thing I struggled with the most.

I was getting frustrated and considered it a very poor design. But I want to get all the mounts in the game so I read guides, watched videos, worked my way from the beginnings to higher level areas and after about a month and earning a lot of achievements, I finally got my first falcosaur mounts. And the rest followed soon.

I’m so proud at myself. I went from being miserable and whiny to being capable of pet battling. I’m not super good at it (yet) but that was not my goal. My goal was to be good enough for the falcosaur mounts. And I achieved it, even much sooner than I expected.

I also fell in love with pet battling in the process. I knew I would, it always looked like fun. That’s why I wanted to start in 2018, I had other plans for this year. But you know what? F*ck the plans. My love for pet battling is even stronget than my love for plans (and I love plans very, very much and it makes me anxious when I fail or have to change them).

The thought of getting into pet battles was also a bit scary because there’s so much content! I’ve barely scratched the surface but I’ve already got some easy achievements and I have a general idea how the whole thing works. I’m not scared anymore and I still have a lot of easy things to do before I get to the challenging ones.

 

It was battleground bonus weekly event thingy so I did a lot of BGs. I’d been stuck on lvl prestige 3 + 36 lvls for quite some time because I got burnt out of PvP but I got back to it, mostly because the weekly event and the fact that the next Reins of Azeroth episode in going to be all about PvP so I got inspired. It took some time but I finally got to prestige level 4 which gives this beautiful mount, Prestigious Bronze Courser. I love it.

I also killed Gul’dan on LFR again and this time, I survived it! Well, we wiped the first time, but the second time was successful and I was alive for the kill. And I caught Khadgar standing in fire. What a noob.

 

I started playing Assassin’s Creed II this week, after my flatmate finished the first game for me, I sucked at the combat so much I wasn’t able to do it on my own but I wanted to see the story. The combat is much easier and I’m enjoying the story so far. It has a similar effect on me as Overwatch – it turns me from peace-loving calm human to bloodthirsty killing machine. Not even WoW PvP can do that to me. But once in a while, I like it.

So if there’s no new post next Sunday/Monday, I probably spent the week being an assassin and not playing enough WoW for a weekly update. It’s starting to look like 7.2 is not far away so I want to play that a bit until I’m too busy with Legion again. And if 7.2 hits this week, then forget I said anything because I’ll be all over that. Either way, I’ll definitely be back in two weeks for weekly update and even sooner for a blog challenge. In the meantime, keep Azeroth safe for me, will you?

VL 1 – Are orcs intelligent?

This is part one in my “vegetarian leveling” series. You can read the rules here.

Hello and welcome to my journal!

I’ve recently began  my journey to become an accomplished monk and heroine of Azeroth and I would like to share my adventures with you.

I started my training in Northshire, as humans do. The very first task I was given was to kill wolves. They were peacefully living there, not even attacking anyone unless provoked. So I took care of goblin assassins and blackrock spies in the area instead. I thought orcs were supposed to be intelligent but they were saying things like “Blackrock take forest!” and “Eat you!” so I might have overestimated these particular ones.. What does “Eat you!” even mean?

This one was also walking a very short distance and kept turning my back on me so I couldn’t get a proper picture of him. What a dummy.

The goblins were smarter and much more photogenic. Also cute. But evil.

After those were gone, I left Northshire. I met Falkhaan Isenstrider who told me to get some Rest and Relaxation in the Lion’s Pride Inn at Goldshire.

People there wanted me to kill kobolds which I don’t do but I found one person I could help. Smith Argus needed me to deliver A Swift Message to Stormwind. Goldshire’s supply of armor was getting thin and he wanted to ask someone in the city for more. Maybe that’s why everyone in the inn was naked.*

I even got a ride to the city. I know the place, Stormwind is my home but I’d never flown over it. It’s so beautiful. I wanted to tell the gryphon to take a few laps around the city but I apparently don’t speak gryphon-y and it’s probably trained to take people directly to the flight master. It’s a shame.

I’m looking forward to having my own gryphon when I’m a bit older and stronger. And not just gryphons, I’ve seen people on many different things, other animals, mechanical inventions and even flying carpets! How awesome is that?

But for now, I’ll just help the nice Goldshire smith and see what other adventures I can experience in Stormwind now that I’m an aspiring heroine. I’ll tell you all about it later.

I hope you’re adventures in Azeroth are as exciting as mine and you have a nice day!

Pannyi

 

* I play on Argent Dawn EU so Goldshire Inn is.. interesting.

An Azeroth Holiday (sort of)

Lovely ladies Z and Cinder are doing a blog challenge and anyone can join! Topic of week 4 was “An Azeroth Holiday”. You can find other people’s posts on their website. This is an older topic but it’s an interesting one so I wanted to go back to it.

I don’t RP but I do have a head canon (and write fan-fic) for most of my characters. It doesn’t always make sense (especially the timeline, I have no idea when certain things happened lore-wise) and I’m definitely a special snowflake (my main is dating a king..) which is why I could never seriously RP. But I still have fun with my stories.

Anniy, my main, was born and raised in Theramore. After it was destroyed, she moved to Stormwind and she fell in love with that place.

Anniy likes big towns and cities. Not only because of their convenience but because they’re loud and full of life. She’s an introvert so she mostly keeps to herself but the energy around her makes her happy and reminds her why she fights.

She loves those moments when she’s sitting on the stairs to the Cathedral of Light, watching people run around, have ordinary jobs and beautiful, ordinary lives in the most amazing place in Azeroth.

And Anduin Wrynn, her best friend and partner lives there.

So when she has time off, this is where she goes. Not some place in a distant land. She’s seen them all and some of them are beautiful too but they’re not her safe haven. They’re not Stormwind. They’re not home.

The week when I killed Gul’dan (sort of)

I had a fun week and even got some new mounts, which is always nice 🙂

I almost forgot that Gul’dan was on LFR and I could finally get the Arcanist’s Manasaber. I died in the first few minutes of the fight, there was too much stuff happening. I don’t really like fights with too much stuff happening, even if I didn’t die, I wouldn’t have a very good time. But it’s okay, I took some screenshots, watched Khadgar being all strong and sexy and shouting and casting Arcane Missiles and it was quite enjoyable. I’ll watch some youtube guides and kill Gul’dan properly next week. And this is me on my gorgeous Arcanist’s Manasaber.

I’m making progress on falcosaur hatchlings. I’ve been following Wowhead guide Falcosaur! by Purgatorywolf and it’s super helpful. I’ve found out that it gets surprisingly easy with time and my general progress on pet battling.

I got to “Defeat 3 Pet Battle WQ with your hatchling and 2 Beast Pets” on my bloodgazer hatchling. My highest beast pets were a 25lvl uncommon fox and a 24lvl rare beaver, I had no stones to make the fox rare and no patience to level the beaver so I just thought I’d try some WQs to see if it can be done. Surprisingly, it can. It took some time to find three easier WQs but I eventually did it (I completed the last one with one pet alive with 3 health though.). I was so happy! I didn’t expect to get one of these mounts anytime soon and it actually happened. It was frustrating, hard, took a long time and was definitely worth it. I felt great. And the Predatory Bloodgazer looks awesome.

MoP timewalking is finally here so I bought Yu’lei, Daughter of Jade. I had 5000 timewarped badges saved up because I was looking forward to it. I really like Pandaria mounts, it’s a shame I don’t have too many of them. I should start farming MoP reputations and get those beauties.

I started doing Argent Tournament dailies again because there are still mounts to get (and toys and transmog!) and bought Exodar Elekk. I think I’ll do them about twice a week and not get bored. It’ll take long to get everything this way but I can’t do them more often. I tried. It makes me miserable and I don’t want to feel miserable.

I did the first timewalking dungeon on my mage to get the quest and go buy the mount and then I switched to my holy pally to try healing them. I’d done MoP dungeons only once while leveling and I’d never healed them so I was a little worried but I figured that timewalking was always easy and I didn’t need to worry. I was mostly right. It went well until the last boss of Mogu’shan Palace. That fight was a mess, there was poop, blades, people dying, me trying to heal them and trying not to die, .. We wiped the first time, I apologised, we almost wiped the second time (two dps died) and I apologised again. Not only there was a lot happening, people were also not in line of sight at times and I didn’t know where to stand. Fortunately, people were nice and understanding but I felt bad.  I only ran couple of them after this and then switched to Legion normals. Those were easier and I eventually calmed down.

I had one of my “lazy weekends”, which meant I didn’t want to do anything complicated. I usually do reputation runs and old achievements. I realised I had 53 reputations at exalted so I got 54th, the Cenarion Circle, by running Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj. I thought I’d need to run it twice, but the Darkmoon Faire reputation bonus helped so I got it on the first try.

I also wanted to get more pets to help with raising my remaining falcosaur hatchlings so I decided to catch every battle pet in the Broken Isles for Broken Isles Safari. It took about five hours, without obtaining the Dust Bunny from Dalaran. To see them, you need to find a dusty carpet in Dalaran and it disappears after someone clicks on it. Wowhead says the respawn time is about 15 minutes but I wasn’t the only one looking for it  so it took me a while. It was worth it though, I like the dust bunnies. I like all the bunnies in game, they’re cute 🙂

Next week should be fun, I hope to get at least one falcosaur mount and kill Gul’dan properly. And take some screenshots of the fight, which I forgot, of course.. I got about twenty screenshots of my sweetheart Khadgar in action though! This is my favourite.

Story Island – designing my own zone

Lovely ladies Z and Cinder are doing a blog challenge and anyone can join! This week’s topic is “Design your own zone”. You can find other people’s posts on their website.

For the purpose of this post, let’s pretend that copyright law is not a huge mess and Blizz can use any material related to WoW that’s ever been done (with a permission and a fair compensation for everyone involved in making it, of course). My zone will obviously never happen but I like to dream so let’s dream!

My zone is called “Story Island”.

There’s a lot of lore in game but also outside the game, in books, comics, videos and audio stories. And I would like to get all those into the game.

For every story, there is a NPC which starts a quest chain that will take you through summary of the story. You obviously can’t fit a whole book into quest text but you could fit the most important events.

I’m going to use the Warcraft movie to explain how it works. I know that the story in the movie is an alternative reality but don’t mind that, it’s also Warcraft. Spoiler alert.

You pick up a quest from an NPC called Duncan Jones which takes you to Hellfire Peninsula. When you get there, you watch a few minutes from the movie where orcs are building Dark Portal and Gul’dan is being all evil and talking about his plans. Quest text provides you with a context and more information and you go to Azeroth to see things from our end (us being the humans). In Black Morass, you participate in one-person scenario when the place is being turned into Blasted Lands, then you go to Stormwind to warn the King, meet up with Khadgar, travel to Karazhan for a chat with Medivh, …. Along the way, you watch short parts of the movie or in-game cinematics, read quest texts, listen to NPC talking to each other,…

For example books don’t have video materials on their own but there are a lot of people in community doing lore videos (I watch Nobbel87‘s stuff), machinimas, songs (Suramar from Sharm is my favourite right now), art (I ❤ Sirius and her work for Reins of Azeroth), podcasts, stories and other amazing content Blizz could use if they didn’t want to do all the work themselves.

Story Island works like mico-holidays. No achievements and no rewards other than lore knowledge and a good time. But it’s there all the time. It doesn’t come all at once, there’s a new quest chain every month so that you don’t need to rush and can take your time with every story and enjoy it. I’d like that.

 

Some more realistic ideas would be Pet Island (all the battle pets live there and can be captured) and Portal Island (with portals to all the zones), which would make my WoW life much easier.

Crashin’ legendary pet battling

I got my third legendary, Rhonin’s Assaulting Armwraps! The effect is “Arcane Missiles has a 18% chance to make your next Arcane Blast cast within 6 sec cost no mana”, which is great. I’m often running out of mana during long fights and this helps a lot. I also have Shard of the Exodar which prevents me from getting Temporal Displacement/Exhaustion so I have Time Warp effect every five minutes (or more often if someone else casts it), which is also a very strong legendary. I’m swaping them with Prydaz, Xavaric’s Magnum Opus, if I’m not taking too much damage.

I was close to having 200 toys so I looked up some easy-to-get toys and earned Crashin’ Thrashin’ Commander (btw I’m glad I have a blog and not a podcast, I wouldn’t be able to pronounce that..). The last two were from a vendor who also sells “Gigantique” Bag so I got My Sack is “Gigantique” too. Yey for random achievements!

I did the third wing of Nighthold on LFR and got Nightspire. I  was in a good group so it was enjoyable and not frustrating. Krosus is an amazing fight, I had so much fun! I don’t know the fights before I zone in and only read the Adventure Guide for basic strats so I get surprised with how the fights actually look like and I loved this one. In comparison, Elisande was a bit boring but it was still nice to finally kill that evil woman. Get ready, Gul’dan, me and bunch of other LFR noobs are coming soon. I hope you are prepared..

I’ve been slowly making progress on raising my falcosaur hatchlings into mounts. I need to do pet battle WQs which is not easy because I’m a pet battle noob but once in a while, I find one or two I’m able to finish. I was frustrated when I started but now I’m taking my time, reminding myself that the mounts are not going anywhere and I that don’t need to stress about it. And I’m having much better time. I also realise that I obviously can’t catch up to years of pet battle content in a few weeks so now I’m doing lower level content and slowly going up.

I spent most of Sunday afternoon working on Continental Tamer, I was missing Kalimdor and Pandaria. I like that while I’m working on a big achievement like that, I’m also getting bunch of others, this time Family Reunion, Master Pet Hunter, Going to Need More Leashes, World Pet Mauler and Ultimate Trainer. It reminds me of my the first few months playing WoW, I was getting achievements all the time and it felt good.

I ran some more dungeons on my holy paladin and damn, is healing hard or what? It went well most of the time but I got really frustrated when a frost mage decided to be a tank, kept pulling and almost dying. Silly mage, you’re wearing a dress and don’t have a lot of health, you’re not supposed to tank! Trust me, I’m also a mage! And your healer! I asked them not to do that several times but they didn’t stop so I let them die twice and they left. No one said anything bad to me so I guess it was fine. I need to learn to breathe and stay calm and not rage when a random DPS is doing sh*t. I never rage on my mage. But I’m still having fun overall 🙂 And the short queue times are great!