Wednesday January 16, 2008

Pfft. I should've known that making plans for hunter pets was something doomed to failure.

I was levelling the hunter some more last night. After clearing through most quest in Western Plaguelands (bar one I couldn't pick up and one that would've led me deep into Eastern Plaguelands, but including the entirety of the cauldron series), I decided I'd go to Felwood and then proceed to Winterspring for my last few levels before Outlands.

After completing an escort quest in Jaedenar, I unwisely decided to just run out. (Mount up, ride out, dismount and feign death - how hard can it be, right? Very hard, turns out, when you get dazed off your mount and half the mobs in the pack that's chasing you resists your feign death. They were green to me by that point, to add insult to injury; I could've easily cleared through them. Sigh.)

So - after dying, releasing to graveyard, and finding myself up in the northern graveyard, I decided I couldn't be bothered running all the way south again in ghost form; I figured I'd resurrect at the graveyard, run up to the northern flight point, fly to the southern one and deliver quests - and by that point, my resurrection sickness would be gone, and I could keep questing. Same amount of time spent, less manual running.

While running up from the graveyard, I ran right into Olm the Wise.

Now, that particular owl is the lowest level white owl available in the game. And he comes with Claw 7 and Dive 3 (the highest levels of those skills I could learn at that point).

And he was the second pet I'd originally planned to tame with my first hunter, about two years ago.

"Oh hey, nice, Olm" I commented out loud to my boyfriend. "I wanted to tame him so badly back when I was playing my Tauren hunter."
"So why don't you tame him now?"

Why not, indeed. "Keeping two pets levelled at the same time is painful" was the original reason I'd given myself for taking only one pet to 70, and then restricting myself to creatures that are close to 70 in level for my second pet; but pet levelling changes were implemented in 2.3.2, and there I was, staring at Olm, at level 53 with a level 53 cat by my side and a good 30% of experience still left to hit 54.

So I ran up to the flightpoint, then ran up further to the furbolg tunnel, ran to Everlook, stabled my cat, took the flight back down to Felwood and tamed Olm.

So far, so good - I've just hit level 55 and both the cat and the owl were level 54 long before that. Here's hoping it lasts.

So much for my taming plans, though. But I don't mind. White owls are pretty.

Tuesday January 15, 2008

So I'm levelling a hunter (she just hit level 52 last night).

As those who know me might know, I'm picky about the look, names, and so on of my characters - I even put effort into getting my bank alts nice clothes, I levelled my primary bank alt (also a hunter) to 16 so I could tame Mazzranache and Echeyakee, and so on.

So it should come as no surprise that I'd already planned out what pets to get my hunter as she levelled to 70. Considering what she looks like (white-skinned, white-haired Draenei), my first choice was obvious: Humar the Pridelord, the only black lion in the game. Took me a few days of camping the spawn point to get him once I got to the appropriate level, but he's been with my hunter ever since.

Knowing exactly how much of a pain it is to keep several pets levelled at the same time (my first - now abandoned - hunter, an all-black Tauren whom I'd planned to tame Echeyakee with, got attached to The Rake in the process of levelling, and then trekked all the way to Teldrassil to get an owl), I skipped through Petopia's list of pet skins, hunting for something that looked nice, would match my hunter in looks, and was in levels as close to 70 as possible.

For my second stable slot, then, I'd planned (and still am planning) to tame a black owl (probably Gutripper, although she's painful to tame - the next closest alternative would be to save this quest until I hit 70, so I can spawn the Windroc Matriarch on command, but that cloak's too nice to wait to get it), since I've been wanting an owl for a hunter pet for years. (Took me a while to settle on the color - the owl skins are all pretty - but I figured I'd keep reverse-matching my hunter's coloring.)

For the third one... well, I'd planned on taming the Grimtotem Spirit Guide. Low-level, yes, painful to level, yes, but I really liked the transparent look and color changing. The taming process was really complicated, but it tickled the perfectionist player in me.

Given that it required a helm with a meta socket to tame, I'd planned on waiting until I hit 70 to tame one so I could do it without inconveniencing other people too much. (Although I could've gotten such a helm much earlier than 70, it would've required people 4-manning an instance - either normal Sethekk Halls over and over and over, or heroic Hellfire Ramparts / Blood Furnace - just to get me a Primal Nether, and... no. Heh.)

I guess I should've been faster in levelling, though, because a stealth hotfix went through that made that particular wolf untameable.

This after a Blizzard employee had said that while unintended, the ability to tame it was considered a "fun use of in-game mechanics" and therefore they had no plans to remove it.

Sigh.

I guess I'll go tame myself a color-changing ravager (I wonder if the name AngryLittleRainbow would be too long for a pet name...), or grab a sporebat just because they're pretty (utterly useless, though - bleh). Or just keep the stable slot free for learning skills come the next expansion.

Monday January 14, 2008

So.

What have I been up to?

Well, for one this blog has clearly been recognized as one of the "it" places to go for World of Warcraft information, because it's started getting goldselling spam. :P

It's a good thing that only comments with an approved email address get auto-published, and everything else gets filtered and doesn't show up unless I manually publish it, no?

What else... well, the biggest thing is I've been 3-manning old-world content with my boyfriend and a guildie of his. We cleared the entirety of Molten Core and killed Razorgore in Blackwing Lair, among other things. (And yes, I'm aware of the irony in linking to my posts on a LiveJournal community from my weblog - but I'm lazy, what can I say? ^^)

For a while after we did it, it was entertaining to watch it being spread across the internet - WoWInsider picked it up, for one, as well as MMO-Champion.

Even more entertaining was to watch people's reactions - they ran the gamut from "Congratulations" (thanks!"), to "This has been done on a private server, the people don't show up on the US WoW Armory" (have to love people who don't realize EU servers exist), to "This isn't really an achievement because Onyxia can be two-manned" (when Onyxia is nowhere near MC in fight complexity - but whatever floats their boat), to five billion comments along the lines of "Can you upload your UI?" (I listed what addons I'm using in the comments to my first post - I refuse to cater to the lazy any further than that, it's not like I use some esoteric addon configuration, I run things mostly out-of-the-box), and even to "There's five names showing up in the screenshots, not three, you lied" (it's fine, l2read).

Have to love it when the idiots come out of the woodwork.

Other than that... not much. I've been levelling a hunter off and on (engineering ftw), running Zul'Aman with my boyfriend's guild (timed run ftw: three bear mounts - one of which went to my boyfriend - and counting, we'll have to take a screenshot somewhere fancy when all 10 of us have one), and that's about it.

And for those wondering about the outcome of the previous post - no, I didn't get my lobster. And of course, Mr. Pinchy has been hiding from me ever since. Ah well.