The week with the bug

It’s not technically a week but time makes no sense in 2020 so who ever cares anymore?

Raiding

Team Easily Amoosed (that’s the fancy name of GGW EU raid team) started working on HC bosses and got 6/12! That was definitely more than I expected. We were working on the football boss on Wednesday and almost got him. I still can’t play the stupid football..

Mythic+ dungeons

I did Atal on +16 which meant that I was only missing Tol Dagor on 15+ to get my Keystone Master. I was asking around in the guild if anyone had a key for TD and I wasn’t lucky and I was getting a bit sick of constantly asking my guildies for help so I decided to be very brave and pug it.

It went surprisingly well, no one was rude, actually no one was saying anything which felt a bit awkward but I’ll take that over rude people. We had only one death (not even me!) and we finished it with plenty of time to spare and I got my achievement..

.. and the mount but the mount is ugly.

My goal for the season was +10 across the board and one +15 in time so I’ve got much more than I expected which is great! I used to be so scared of +15 and I’m still a bit nervous but I proved to myself that I can run them with (almost) no issues. It was a great confident boost.

Visions of N’Zoth

I got the bug!

I was very close so I waited for Stormwind and ran it thrice with 4 masks. I’m so happy to be finally done with the grind. I didn’t think it was a pretty mount but after using it for a few days, it’s not that ugly as I thought.

I still need the mount from a mailbox but I can just run the vision with no masks, only open the mailboxes and not even finish it if I don’t feel like it. And there’s no rush so I’ll take a break from visions for a few weeks. I really need it.

Collections

RNGesus smiled upon me and gave me many, many drops lately.

Drake of the Four Winds from Ishak..

.. Everliving Spore from Wailing Critters much sooner than I expected..

.. and then on Wednesday, I got 3 new mounts! Blue Proto-Drake from Utgarde Pinnacle, Clutch of Ha-Li from.. well, Ha-Li and Ivory Cloud Serpent! I got the lasso and then spend about 3 hours in the air, spamming aggro to catch the serpent and fortunately was in the right spot.

My daily playing time is now all about farming the invasions and playing with auction house to sell stuff and buy some pets I’m missing (and can afford) so I’m hoping for new shinies soon.

I’m now mostly done with BAzeroth, we just need to get +15 in time with the Mooseketeers and I should finish some achievements I’ve been avoiding. I might play some Classic again.

Catching Up

I haven’t written anything here in ages so let’s catch up!

Raiding

I’m in a proper guild now! A friend invited me to their guild that raids on heroic so I took my main and moved to Aggramar. I joined them when they were reclearing The Eternal Palace so they mostly carried me to “Ahead of the Curve: Queen Azshara” but I progressed through Ny’alotha with them and I earned my “Ahead of the Curve: N’Zoth the Corruptor” and the beautiful mount that comes with it.

I cleared the raid on normal with lovely people from Girls Gone WoW discord community. It was much bigger mayhem but it was an efficient mayhem and N’Zoth died eventually. We’ve also killed the first 3 bosses on heroic and might get even more in the coming weeks.

Mythic+ dungeons

I got into mythic+ and I love it. I was even the best arcane mage on my server in Season 3! (Mostly because no one really plays arcane in high mythic+ dungeons and because Aggramar is a tiny server but let’s not focus on that, I was the best arcane mage on my server in Season 3! Bragging rights!)

I now play fire which is better for mythic+ and more people play that spec so I’ll have much less bragging rights..

In both Season 3 and Season 4, I got “Battle for Azeroth Keystone Conqueror” for finishing all dungeons on 10+ or higher within the time limit. My highest dungeons are a couple +17s. That was hard.  My highest dungeon not in time is Motherlode +19. That was even harder. And took very, very long. We finished it eventually though! More bragging rights!

I can’t believe that during one expansion, I went from a solo player to a heroic raider and M+ player. It’s ridiculous. What even is my (WoW) life?

Visions of N’Zoth

I was originally very scared of this content (because it’s legitimately scary) but I started running them with a friendly demon hunter who was tanking for me and it made it much easier.

I bought the backpack for transmog as soon as I could. It’s so pretty!

I eventually ventured there on my own and slowly progressed to 5 masks. I was clearing both Stormwind and Orgrimmar with 4 masks for weeks before I was brave enough to try 5 masks. I completed Orgrimmar on the first try and Stormwind took 2 tries because I couldn’t just blow all the cooldowns on Alleria and ignore the mechanics. The mechanics hurt on 5 masks much more than on 4 masks which I learnt it very quickly.. I was more careful next time and I killed her before she killed me!

Now I’m clearing it on “only” 4 masks each week and grinding Corrupted Mementos for the mount. I’m getting close but I skip weeks with Orgrimmar because Stormwind is much easier for me and I’m not in a rush.

When it was introduced, I thought it was another Mage Tower and I would never finish it but the gear from HC Ny’alotha and high M+ and also the practise I had with my class made it possible. What even is my (WoW) life? Seriously?!

Collecting all the things

I’m still doing old content for achievements, pets and mounts.

My favourite new mounts are Deathcharger from Stratholme..

.. and Ashes of Al’ar. I got this one shortly after switching from arcane to fire so the timing was perfect.

I was avoiding pet battle dungeons because I always thought they were too hard and I didn’t have enough pets to handle them but then I got the achievement for 1000 unique pets and I had to admit that I was just making silly excuses. Some great pet abilities are getting nerfed for Shadowlands so I wanted to go through the dungeons while the current strategies still work. I succesfully did all 5 of them and got all pets from Deadmines and Stratholme. I need one more week in Blackrock Depths, a few weeks in Gnomeregan and good RNG for the last pet from Wailing Critters.

Alts

I made a Kul Tiran druid and healed in LDF all the way to 120. I thought I would heal some low M+ on her too but I’ve been postponing getting her the legendary cloak for weeks now so I might never get around to it.

I used the Shadowlands preorder boost to get a Dark Iron shaman and she’s gorgeous! I doubt I’ll play her much in BAzeroth but she’s ready for Shadowlands.

Preparing for Shadowlands

I’m reading some of the coverage from Shadowlands beta and having an existencial crisis over possibly having/wanting to choose my Covenant based on the numbers and not the aesthetic. Are the numbers that important to me? Should they be that important to me? I’m a heroic raider but it’s not like I’m a mythic raider so can I slack a bit? What even is my (WoW) life? Have I written that already? Because seriously?! What even IS my (WoW) life?

Yeah.. Existential crisis.. Fun times..

The weeks with being distracted by Classic

This post doesn’t include anything from 8.2.5 so you don’t need to be worried about spoilers if you still haven’t played through it. Or 8.3 because it took me so long to write this that we now have info about that too. I’m so behind.. But I’m already working on a post about 8.2.5 stuff!

I’m still playing retail but it’s mostly raiding, doing mythic+ dungeons and occasionally old achievements.

I was going to do more WoD achievements but you need a specific daily to do some of them and it wasn’t up so I got grumpy and went to Pandaria instead. Pandaria is always lovely, right?

For some reason, I hadn’t finished the whole Operation: Shieldwall Campaign, I was missing last few quests (it was gated behind rep and I’d probably forgotten to come back after becoming exalted) so I took tiny Anduin for more adventures and after hanging out with the Monkey King, he ended up under a bell and almost died.

Yeah.. Fun times.. So lovely..

After that, I got to my garrison to sort out my buildings for the remaining achivements. Completionist’s life is hard, y’all..

Raiding is much more lovely, we cleared The Eternal Palace! Za’qul was a weird fight. I don’t really know what was happening, there were different realms and I was supposed to be in specific ones at specific times and I was very confused and at one point I ended up all alone with no one else in sight (oops) but we fortunately killed it. Let’s hope we won’t have to do this fight too many times.  You know it’s bad when conversation like this happens (and that’s the person who was telling me the mechanics):

Azshara was just busy and I kept dying to too many stacks but we defeated her in the end. It was great 🙂 We’re now going to try heroic or reclearing normal if we don’t have enough people.

Mythic+ dungeons are going well and we even got our first +10 in time! It was Freehold and we’re making good progress on other dungeons too. I unfortunately lost my 8th place in arcane mages on Argent Dawn and I’m 10th now. A dwarf called “Mysticbeard” and a human “Xrw” got ahead of me and I don’t mind the dwarf, they have amazing name so they’re forgiven, but I hope to beat Xrw. I’m not that far from them. Not that it matters to me that much, it started as a joke and I’m not a competitive person anyway but I might as well do it for the lolz 🙂

Anniy the Esteemed

My return to blogging is going as badly as expected but I wrote this post so yay for me! Baby steps. 

After the grind to get flying, I needed a little break from Nazjatar and Mechagon so I took a few days off and played The Sims 4, became an astronaut, built a rocket, went to space and met aliens (in The Sims, not IRL, unfortunately) and after that, it was time to grind to exalted in those zones. I missed my human reputation bonus a bit (my Kul Tiran’s hips are still worth it though!), I didn’t realise how spoiled I was by that but after a few weeks, I got both to max which also meant the achievement for 100 exalted reputations and the pretty Pureheart Courser pony!

I realised that 100 reps is quite a lot considering I hadn’t played WoW for that long. I did some math and found out I’d been playing for 50 months, so that’s 2 reps a month. It made me question my life a bit but I shared it with a friend and she made a very good point about other people spending a lot of time on things like drugs and straight prides and making mean comments on the internet so I decided that getting pixel people to like my pixel character in a video game is actually an acceptable way of spending my time.

It was my main WoW goal for a while so I need to find a new thing to work on. I still don’t have a big goal but I’m keeping busy with other things I want to accomplish. Now that I have flying, I did all the “Adventures of” and “Treasures of” in both Kul Tiras and Zandalar and a few other Exploration achievements. Flying all around those zones and enjoying the view was amazing. I love flying.

I looked into old achievements and realised garrison stables had mounts to raise and I hadn’t finished those quests. It took a few days of simple dailies and now I have six new mounts!

I really should go through old achievements properly to see if I’m missing something with good rewards I would really enjoy. I’m continuing with garrison buildings in the meantime.

I did a bit of leveling on my hunter and she’s now lvl 120. I got her Hati and benthic gear and she’s now working on her professions, skinning and leatherworking. I also made a Kul Tiran druid and healed a few dungeons. I still don’t know if I’ll stick to it, healing scares me and I’ve never been good at it but maybe with a bit of practise, I could get into it. We’ll see. I can always go boomkin and just pew pew stuff.

I fished up enough fish to make 50 Bountiful Captain’s Feasts for the “Catering for Combat” achievement and I still don’t have the Great Sea Ray which makes me a bit salty (sea pun not intended). I guess I’ll fish some more. To be fair, I would keep fishing anyway because we’re still using those feasts in raids but I want the mount. RNG deities, get on it!

I’m raiding with Team Easily Amoosed and doing mythic+ with the Moosketeers as usual and both is going well! We’re clearing The Eternal Palace one new boss a week and we’re starting to get mythic 8+ in time.

I also went on a deep dive on raider.io which is a site that tracks mythic+ progress and found out that I was 10th arcane mage on my realm (8th when I’m writing this, 6th on Alliance). It doesn’t actually say anything because not many people play arcane and I’m doing these dungeons with a team so it’s not just my accomplishment and the numbers are very different when I look at my rankings worldwide as a mage or a dps. But 10th or 8th on my realm was a good ego boost. Let’s not pick it apart too much and just enjoy it, shall we? 🙂 I’m awesome!

And last but not least, after months of using a wand, I finally got a good staff so I could transmog it to Aluneth (Legion arcane mage artifact)! I have my creepy friend back! He’s once again complaying when I’m out of mana, making mana buns for my friends and getting them a portal instead of letting them walk. I missed my creepy friend.

The week I mastered lore and was on a podcast

On Wednesday, my laptop decided to almost die. I’d been having issues with it for a few weeks and I think it ran out of patience. I tried to scan and repair but it didn’t work and it even completely froze during that so I reinstalled Windows and hoped it would help. So far, it looks like it did so fingers crossed.

The Team Easily Amoosed (my raid team) finished Crucible of Storms so we’re going to do some older raids for achievements until the new raid is opened. All the cheese!

I thought I didn’t need to back up anything because all my stuff is in cloud these days anyway but after I installed WoW back, I realised I had no idea what addons I was using. Oops. I’m still getting them back with the method of “This looks strange and hard to do. Did I have an addon for it?” and then looking up addons for it until I remember the name. It’s a good thing I have an excellent memory! (I don’t. My memory is terrible. I’m not recognising any of these addon names. Send help.)

I was missing about half of Icecrown for Loremaster so I prioritised it before everything else and fortunately finished it before the new patch!

The amount of times the Lich King popped up to threaten me and to tell me to go get him in his Citadel was ridiculous. I thought the rest of Northrend was bad but Icecrown has him in every other quest. I understand that they wanted to get me all hyped up for the raid and to make me want to kill him even more but I was just rolling my eyes instead. And I didn’t have time to go kill him so the poor guy is still waiting for me.

It was the last week of season 2 so The Moosketeers (the team I’m running mythic+ dungeons with) assembled to try and raise our score and hopefully get a good Atal’Dazar key because we only had lower scores on it. We fortunately got it for our last run and finished it in time so this is how I’m ending the season:

I only started doing mythic+ dungeons seriously about 7 months ago and I was very scared to even set foot in them, especially with people I knew, but I’ve had a lot of fun and seeing us get better and progress was amazing. My goal for the next season is to have 10 in all dungeons. It doesn’t feel doable saying it but looking at my results from season 2, I should be able to do it. I still can’t believe I’m doing these dungeons.

I’ll probably write a post about both my raiding team and mythic+ dungeon team (both from the lovely community around Girls Gone WoW podcast) later but for now, please bear with me if you have no idea who I’m talking about and how I got to them.

I was also on their podcast. That was a first. It was also scary and incredibly anxiety-inducing but I have anxiety so everything is scary and incredibly anxiety-inducing.. But I enjoyed it 🙂 Our whole team was there so less attention on me helped a lot and we had a lovely (and educational) chat about mythic+ dungeons. We also made fun of our healer and the Moose (our hunter’s pet) as we always do. It was almost as random as our runs but E-J managed to keep us in line. You can check it out here. I’m the nervous person whose first language is obviously not English. You can’t miss me.

Patch 8.2 is coming out today and I can’t wait to finally get my hands on it! New zones to explore! New quests to do! New reputations to grind for flying! New shinies, pets and mounts! All the things!

The Week with Cursed Sausages

I’m writing an update for this blog! I’m like a real blogger again! Go me!

Our healer was at a wedding instead of doing mythics+ last week so we had to find our own fun. We did enough island expeditions for the weekly quest and I got a mission for Azerite power which I was already capped on so that wasn’t useful but I also got some Seafarer’s Dubloons and a pretty transmog piece so in the end, it wasn’t that bad 🙂

We also did a bit of PvP which was new with this group but not terrible. We started with Warsong Gulch and people were actually doing mechanics and playing well so I could often just damage and slow people and all that and I got a lot of honor! Then we did Alteral Valley and even though we won, it was very long and I still don’t understand that battleground so it was less fun but it had its moments.

I was cleaning up my bank and found some cursed meat so I made some cursed sausages and I got cursed. I really should’ve seen this one coming..

In raiding news, we killed the first boss in Crucible of Storms in only six tries! It was so amazing! During our first five tries, we barely got under 50% but in the next attempt, things somehow clicked and we managed to finish the fight! I’d heard scary things about this raid so it was very encouraging to see that it was possible to do. Hopefully things go well tonight and we’ll either finish the raid or at least make some good progress on the second boss. We have time until the next raid so I’m not worried.

The date for 8.2 was announced today and it’s coming next week! Hype! There’s so much awesome stuff in the patch and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. New zones with new quests! Flying! New pets and mounts to collect! Flying! Two more reputations which will get me to 100 exalted reputations and I’ll get Pureheart Courser! Flying! You get the idea.

I wanted to finish Loremaster before 8.2 but I’m not sure if I’ll have the time. I’m only missing a few parts of Icecrown but it’s a big zone with long quest chains and they’re interesting and fun so I don’t want to rush them. I don’t think I need to do anything to prepare for 8.2 but I’m sure I’ll think of something. Planning.. Not my strong suit..

Warning! Rant incoming. Feel free to stop reading here if you don’t want to read my grumpy complains and see you at another blogpost!

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I was stuck at 297 mounts for weeks and it was starting to bother me so I looked up what easy-to-get mounts are coming in 8.2 and I was a bit angry when I found out that they added reputation mounts that cost 90k gold each. I try to pay for my subscription with gold if I can and if the cost of these doesn’t change, I’ll never get them. I can’t justify buying 2 mounts when I could get a month of playing for the same price.

Expensive mounts had been discouraging me from mount collecting for the whole BfA and this killed off the last of my motivation. These are reputation mounts, I already worked to get them and while I understand why some expensive mounts exist, this seems excessive. I had about 110k gold so I decided to use it to get to Lord of the Reins and then never spent too much money on mounts again. I bought a few profession mounts and starting now, I will only farm drops, do achievements and make the rest of profession mounts myself.  I used to enjoy mount collecting very much (which is how I got to 300 mounts in the first place) but I don’t like how much new mounts cost these days. Fortunately, there’s still a lot of old mounts I can work on.

And a few hours after this, I got a mount from Darkshore which was a nice band-aid for my grumpiness 🙂

Battle for Azeroth and all the things!

Alright, let’s try this blogging thing again. I might not be able to keep to a schedule but I can make an attempt, right?

The last time I wrote any kind of week(s) in WoW update was.. *goes back to check* August 2018. Oops.

So.. Battle for Azeroth started! Yay! I went in first with my Alliance human mage as always (well, this is my second expansion so “always” actually means “once before” but you know what I mean..). Before BfA pre-patch, I was considering switching to my death knight but I couldn’t abandon my mage and I’m glad I didn’t. Looking at it now, it would’ve been a mistake.

Leveling was amazing. Drustvar was the best zone ever for my dark, witch-lore-loving Slavic soul. I loved hanging out with Flynn and Taelia in Tiragarde Sound (and Taelia has a huge potential as a character so I really hope they do something with her). Stormsong Valley was slightly creepy and had way too many random farms in need of saving but overall, I had fun there too.

I absolutely loved The Pride of Kul Tiras storyline with saving Jaina. One of the main reasons why I was looking forward to Kul Tiras was the potential for more Jaina stories and it delivered. I was in tears. (And not for the first or last time in BfA.)

(The war campaign happened and I don’t enjoy the faction conflict so let’s just move along and not talk about it, shall we?)

In November, I joined Girls Gone WoW discord and started raiding (if you don’t know GGW, it’s a lovely podcast with lovely Raven and lovely E-J and lovely guests and you should listen to it). I hadn’t done much raiding before so it was.. interesting but apparently, I am (usually) not a terrible raider! I sometimes stand in sh*t or forget about mechanics or miss some raid instructions because when more people talk at once, I can’t understand anyone (especially in English which is not my first language) but it’s working (and it’s “only” normal so it’s more forgiving than the higher difficulties).  We cleared Uldir, Battle of Dazar’alor and this week, we killed the first tentacle thingy in Crucible of Storms! Go us!

I’m also doing mythic+ dungeons with some of the people from there and we got Keystone Conqueror for clearing a mythic+ 10 in time! It was hard work but it was also very rewarding. When the mythic+ dungeons were first introduced, I knew I would like them if I had a stable group to progress with and it actually happened for me!

I love the GGW community. It’s basically the first time I have (friends!) people to play with in WoW and those chill raids and mythic+ runs are making BfA even more enjoyable 🙂

My human mage became a Kul Tiran! My mage has hips! I love my mage’s hips. Those are some good hips. I wrote my human mage a little farewell and she’s now a beautiful Kul Tiran (with hips!). Look at her!

Isn’t she gorgeous? I love her so much!

I’ve also been doing some old content because I’m getting slightly bored in 8.1.5 but I still gave a few things to do, for example the Loremaster! I feel like a terrible slacker for not having that already but I’m almost there. I did Dragonblight and for the first time in my WoW life, I saw the Wrathgate cinematic in-game. I’d seen it outside the game of course, it’s legendary, but it was even better with the build-up (especially knowing it was going to happen!) and the aftermath.

It was beautiful. And scary and sad. It gave me all the feels.

The last remaining zone for Loremaster is Icecrown so I’m now working on that. And then I’ll be done with Loremaster and will need to find some new fun until 8.2 hits. I could start doing the circle of disappointment again and smack some bosses until they give me their mounts. Or work on all those garrison achievements. Or finally try Wintergrasp.

Yeah.. I’m not getting bored anytime soon.

 

 

 

The weeks with raising a pixel kitten

I completely forgot I was writing a post with the things I’d done before launch and just randomly found this in latest drafts. I might as well finish it, right? Next one will be all about BfA.

Death knight

I got her the class mount! The questline was evil, again, and I liked it. I don’t like dragon mounts that much but that’s alright, she’s using Invincible and that’s basically a DK mount too.

Leveling

I got some work done on my alts before they all got abandoned for months. Don’t worry, my babies, your time will come again. Eventually.

Hunter is enjoying Pandaria and “saving” the White Pawn (he didn’t really need it) and doing dungeons.

Druid did a few dungeons with Laytis and their friend! I was healing and it went well at first but then it went a bit.. poop. Not sure if it was my fault but it was bad. I’ll read up on 8.0 changes and it will hopefully be better next time.

Mage

More Loremaster! I finished Feralas Quests and the last remaining storyline for The Empire of Zul’Drak. I was also halfway into Terror of Terokkar so I got that one and with Into the Nether (which took half a day) finished Loremaster of Outland!

The first tip about doing Loremaster is not let Outland be your last one and I definitely see why. The storylines are not bad but it takes so long!

When I was doing Winterspring Quests, I found the quest to raise your own mount. I knew about it for a long time but it was one the things I kept putting off. What I didn’t know about was that there is a reputation which comes with it, Wintersaber Trainers! That was a lovely surprise. I love me some more reputations 🙂

You need to do 20 daily quests and I’m about half way there so they’re still a little cub but I’m feeding them, teaching them to hunt and play and we’re having a great time together.

I doubt that I will remember to do the daily now that I’m in BfA but that’s okay, it’s not going anywhere. The cub might have a very long childhood.

I really like that working on Loremaster makes me do all these things I haven’t got around to and explore parts of the world I’ve barely seen before.

I also took advantage of the reputation buff from the Darkmoon Faire and finished Timbermaw Hold rep and got The Diplomat achievement and “the Diplomat” title.

The Faire has a new toy, Hot Buttered Popcorn!

I occasionally do stuff there to have enough tokens for new stuff so I was able to buy it immediately. And now I should get more and replenish my supply.

 

I hope everyone is having fun in BfA! I sure am 🙂

Last minute activities

I expect to be busy with new content from today so I wanted to finish some things. I got carried a bit and ended up doing a few zones in Kalimdor which wasn’t the plan so.. oops? I still had fun though!

We can now get reputation with Gelkis Clan Centaur and Magram Clan Centaur and it’s very easy, you just need to do their storyline in Desolace. The story is just awful, you unite the clans by mercilessly killing their leaders. I’m sure there was some other way to do that. It made me angry. But I did it and got my reps and achievement for 80 Exalted Reputations!

I can’t get to 100 without the PvP ones so my current goal is 90 and 100 will come eventually in a few patches/years.

I was only missing a few quests for Loremaster there so I finished it and got Desolace Quests. I also did Tanaris Quests to get some rep with the Steamwheedle Cartel. I was enjoying questing so I continued with Un’Goro Crater Quests, Silithus Quests and Felwood Quests.

I had a lot of fun on my mage so now I’m reconsidering maining death knight in BAzeroth. I got nostalgic about leveling her and all the things we’ve done together and I don’t think I can leave her behind. As much as death knight is convenient to play, do I really want to prioritise that over my mage, my first love and one of the reasons I started playing WoW? And after seeing the Warbringers: Jaina video and it’s pulling me even closer to my mage. Why would I main death knight in an expansion that finally gives us Jaina back? So current plan is to main mage and you can start placing bets on how many times I’ll change my mind before 8.1 comes. I say four.

Death knight

Spoilery pictures from death knight class campaign are coming so beware.

I feel like everyone and their mother and grandmother already talked about the death knight class campaign because it’s amazing so I’ll just share a few screenshots.

My favourite skin for the swords. They look awesome.

Haven’t we been here before?

I made my death knight only a few weeks before so doing the class campaign so soon after the starting area was just the best. We came again, just older, more experienced, more.. evil.

Such a pretty mount!

Just a bit of dead humour here.

 

With all this done, I’m ready to go into War of the Thorns. I’m so nervous and excited and I can’t wait to see what happens but I also don’t want to see it because bad things are going to happen and I have all the feels!