New Pet, $10.00. Psycho Tendency Assuaged, Priceless.

I saw this freakish little scene up by the tournament:

Druid in Tree Form, just standing there. (I was killing Cultists.) It was not. It was just standing there.

Seems they had gotten a new pet, the Lil K.T..

And they took it to the penguins to watch it kill them. Two of them where enjoying the scene when I took the screen shot.

 

 

Remember

3.2 = 3.1415926

What the heck’s going on in Irvine?  Have you seen all the changes coming with the 3.2 Patch?

If you haven’t, if you’ve been living under a rock, say, or busy doing your dailies, fishing for Mr. Pinchy, whatever, go check out WoW.com’s coverage.

Today we’re learning about substantial changes to Paladins.  (Seal of Blood no good anymore.  Not working as intended?  Too harsh?  Blood Elves came up with this masochism???)  Then you’ve got new pets.  A Winterspring type mount for the Horde (Ravasaurs).  Argent Tournament mounts, something new for Paladins (yay!) and other gear and goodies.  Like heirlooms?

I mean, do we get out our water skis from storage and hook up with Fonzie to go jump that shark?

Or are we talking about stuff whose value is the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter in Euclidean space? I.e. it’s all pi?

I mean, who doesn’t like pie?

Why are they throwing this much at us, all at once? Before BlizzCon even? … Is there going to be “bad news” at BlizzCon?  (Did you notice:  “Blizz” Con.  NOT “World of Warcraft” Con.)  Is something going on that the average Joe is unaware of?  Because we’re too busy, and happy, eating pie?

I’m wondering if this is going to be tasting a little like Andrew Zimmern’s saurkraut pie that he got up in Minnesota.

HMMMM.

You’ve come a long way, Baby. Again.

The wife finally beat me to Dalaran.  Mages get in at 71!   Nerf Mages.

Honorus is sleeping on a cot down below in Star’s Rest.

Expand the previous expansion.

Blizzard can blow open some bottlenecks in their old content.

The wife and I are leveling through the Outlands now.  We’ll be leaving as soon as we both hit level 68.

I plotted out a course for our two couples.  Honorus and Effilda turned north and reached level 68 in Netherstorm.

Cenotaph and Ombria turned south and hope to reach level 68 in Shadowmoon Valley.

But, for both locations, ALL quests begin at level 67.  We’ll be there for 1 level and then blow those pop stands.

Blizzard could “open up” their previous expansion with one easy, easy change:

Lower the “level requirement” for all Outlands quests by 2 levels.

That would recognize players starting at 58 and leaving at 68.

I’d prefer to see more of Shadowmoon Valley, rather than spin wheels in ridiculously easy Terrokar Forest and the Bonewastes.  So start the quests 2 levels sooner at Level 65.  We’ll survive.  If we don’t, we can backtrack some.  Our choice.

It is recognized that certain things were created with the point of keeping max level characters occupied.  In previous max level areas that ship’s long sailed.

Queen of Orgrimmar

No, Thrall.  It is *you* that have failed to receive the memo.  After all, Lady Sylvanas got it.

Now, release the fish.  And it will be like we never were here.

(Apparently they’ve fixed the “phased fishing” in Orgrimmar.  Sigh.)

Me of There. Tag Team hardly chivalric.

Hard to believe, but I’m not Exalted with any of my home cities on any of my characters.

In fact, I’m not Exalted with any city with anyone.  (Shattrath aside, but that doesn’t really count for this exercise.)

How does this happen?  Doing every quest you come across for the life of your character, and you reach level 80, and you’re nowhere near Exalted with your own home town even.

I’ve got a level 56 Rogue, Darkhand, who is running around Kharanos at the moment.  No, he is not doing the Noblegarden stuff.  He’s simply doing every noob quest he can find in order to get the Reputation.  Some quests gain reputation with all the Alliance, others just one particular faction.  He’s after a Gnomish Mechanostrider.  Being an Engineer, how could he not?  Next steps will be flying machines and then a chopper.  In another four years perhaps.

But, back to the original point.  How could I not be Exalted with any city on any of my 80’s?  It seems I must either 1) Turn in 1,000’s of stacks of Runecloth, and/or 2) Do every quest in every 1-20 area for every faction.  Any of those 3 options sounds outright stupid.  Some Blizzard Design Exec is thinking to himself: “The players, they absolutely love the fruitless grind?”

But it’s not fruitless.  Now that I have three Champions, each of them has to turn in commendation writs in order to become Exalted with their home cities.  And then claim their titles, Greenclaw of Darnassus, Stormsoul of Thunderbluff, and Msaker of Orgrimmar.

Msaker, actually, is after a riding raptor, and if he gets Exalted with the Darkspear turning in writs, he’ll be their Champion, and maybe he’ll be Msaker of Sen’Jin (and Thrall and Orgrimmar can go pound sand because they’re a touch too tough to please).  (See, with a riding raptor, he’ll have a “dinosaur” dragon for a flying mount, and a “dinosaur” raptor for his land mount, and he’s already green and rather brutish…  Style points.  Grind out the three factions to become “The Diplomat” and we’ve got a plate full of irony.)

Tag Teaming the Champion at the “Enemy at the Gates” daily (or the Champion version of it actually), is hardly chivalric.  But then do the scourge really deserve our chivalry?  We reserve that for folks like us.  Honor bound.  That’s the same principle behind Thrall and Jaina being friends and showing each other respect.  Thrall is the honorable brute, Varian Wrynn the hot-headed human who’ll see victory without worrying about the honor behind it.  (So the bad are good, and the good are bad, and you’ve got yourself a game that either side can claim a higher moral ground, allowing you to play either side in good conscience.)

Dang, jumped the tracks again!  (I was actually trying to remember which philosopher talked about “Noble Brutes.”  Was it Thoreau?)  Tag Teaming the Champion in the Enemy at the Gates, Champion version, of the daily, makes the encounter MUCH easier.  One person holds him, the other just reduces his shields and charges him.  If he changes targets, you change roles.  Easy peasy.

A Tale of Two Eggs

Droonda and Msaker have gone into the animal husbandry business.  Into the egg hatching business in particular.

The Oracles give a nifty reward at Revered with them.  They’ll sell you eggs you can spend a week keeping warm and hatching.  You might get a rotten yolk, a pet, or a flying protodrake out of it.

So there we were, our first ever eggs about to hatch.

“Now remember it’s all random,” I tell the lovely Orc Shaman Princess Droonda.  “It might be the first egg, it might be the thousandth.”  We’re after the green protodrakes.  I thought they looked very Orcish, being green and armor plated and brutal and all.  And they don’t make that “swooshing” sound the Netherdrakes make.  I have a Netherdrake, and Droonda isn’t that many dailies away from getting her own.  But she chose not to.  “Too loud.”  And she liked her swift windrider.

But I thought the protodrakes looked cool, she agreed, and we set off getting into the good graces of the Oracles.  It was no more than a week after saving Jaloot from Artruis the Heartless, and doing the dailies every day, that we arrived at Revered with them.  And our first eggs were purchased.

On that sixth day we readied ourselves.  The lovely Droonda counted down as her egg hatched.  5-4-3-2-1.

You know how you want to undo Time sometimes?  Kind of take back stuff, maybe have the opportunity to swap some stuff around, and then return and get a different outcome?  That was me, that was my wish.

Her first egg produced an Aged Yolk.

My first reaction was thinking to myself “Ah.  It’s going to take some time after all.”  And to my wife, “It’s all random.”

And if I could have swapped stuff around, gotten some different outcomes, I would have.

Because I’ve got a Netherwing.  I didn’t need a protodrake.

My first egg produced the reins of the Green Proto-Drake.

But it’s random, and we’ll be back at it.  Six days from now our next eggs hatch and she’ll have hers.

Will the last sane person please close the hatch?

Freaks.

Arrogant American Organization view of Canadians.

Alliance are the pure hearts, Horde are blood caked baby seal slaughterers, supposedly Canadians with accents from the American South.

Just all around insulting to everyone.

Gamers, activitists, Canadians, Southerners, fur wearers, you name it.

Can you freaks over at PETA just stay the heck out of our games?

You know where the real fur is sold.  Go protest there.

P.S. For those thinking of trying this, the name “NgridNewkirk” is already taken over on Whisperwind.  >:/

It’s the end of the world as we know it.

So there we were. 

Cenotaph and Ombria, the wife’s and mine Deathknights, in the Bone Wastes, at Auchindoun, looking at a quest giver.

The only living beings we’d come across were a Forsaken and another Blood Elf Death Knight. 

There was a Gnome Mage out fighting spiders in the lost corner, but they don’t really count as full living beings, do they?

Anyway, we’d just collected some bone piles for some mad Draenei standing near the entrance to an instance, and there was the shimmering portal.  I forget which instance he actually stands in front of.  Shadow Labyrinth required a key, so that was out.  Maybe the Auchenai Crypts.

The point being is nobody new is going to see those places, and that’s sad.

All that effort gone into designing places, and they’re left behind, in the virtual dust bowl that the Outlands have become, serving only as a pass through location to get 10 levels while you cruise to the end-game back on the world of Azeroth in Northrend.