Bible of Dreams

The Benefit of Being a Hybrid

I have a thing for hybrids. My first character and long time main was a druid. And my primary BC alt was my shaman. And then, of course, there's my shadow priests. I guess I like to be able to pinch hit in the middle of a fight, and to have the day-to-day variety that being a hybrid allows.

I was reminded of this fact in our alt ICC this week. I got to bring my poor neglected shaman. We ran about 4 such alt runs this week since the weekly raid quest was Lord Marrowgar and thus we had a ton of interest. In our run, we ran into a few bumps along the way -- the bulk of them being in fighting the ice giant for the weekly ICC quest.

In true hybrid fashion, I started pumping out the chains of healy goodness whenever I saw things get hairy for our healers (or when we lost a healer.) Yes, this meant my DPS numbers, which had been great along the way as we cleared through lower spire, went into the toilet. But it also meant we were able in several cases to keep pushing forward instead of wiping.

I love having that utility -- to seamlessly swap between roles mid-fight to keep things rolling. But it is interesting that with few exceptions (such as a druid in our raid team who has dropped into bear on more than one occasion when a tank went down, saving us squishies from insta death) I don't see a lot of that. I see shamans insisting on putting down fire DPS totems when a totem of wrath would help the raid as a whole. Or standing and dying, DPSing, when they could easily toss a heal on themselves instead.

Yes, I feel the pain of the shadowformed priest or the Boomkin form druid who lose time and mana by popping out of their forms (I know I hate to do so except when necessary.) But it seems like for too many folks, the meter humping necessitates their never feeling there *is* a moment that warrants making an on-the-fly decision to swap their role for even a moment or two in the spirit of helping the team deal with an unexpected hurdle.

Whyfore all the meter humping? You don't do any DPS when you're dead. And no one cares how much DPS you pumped out on the boss attempts that failed. It's about the attempts where the teamwork was there, and the boss goes down. Not about how much DPS any one of us individually did. It's about how we played our role in the team as a whole. That MM part of the MMORPG.

Goblin Ladies!

Yes, I am going to do a real Love is in the Air post soon, but I had to share these goblin chick pix now. Too adorable! So far this is the highlight of this holiday revamp -- getting to run around as a goblin lady.

 

Friday Five: 5 Things That Made Me Smile This Week

1. Yes, being named an officer in my guild was totally the highlight of my week. I am incredibly excited about being empowered to help shape our future, and keep our raiding momentum going, along with the help of fellow new officers Moober and Ox, the latter of whom joins the fabulous miss Sawyer as the 25-man RL team! I am confident we will collaborate to do great things together.
2. Related to that, it's been awesome to get tells cheering me on for that promotion, including from a lot of folks whom  haven't really talked to a lot in game. I had a few old timers chat me up too which was cool. I know I am a new kid on the block when you're talking about a 5-year-old guild, but I promise I'll do my best to do right by them and myself. And thank you for such a warm reception.
3. I found a cool shadow priest blog to add to my reading list: Lucky Lurky. Go check it out. They have a couple of recent posts on how to shadow priest that may be of interest to folks.
4. I suckered yet another victim...er, guildie...into joining twitter. whoohoo! One.of. us.
5. We're hopefully going back into Ulduar tonight to try to get that last achievement out of the way so we can go and slap Algalon around. Thank you guys for pulling this together.

BONUS: Despite a rough week wherein we had two of our core raiding team members (who also scheduled our 10-mans) leave, plus our 25-man schedulers (who were also core raiders), go on hiatus, we dusted ourselves off as a guild and kept marching in the same direction. The week's raids all got scheduled. All the same old bosses got killed. And we had a good time doing it. No, we didn't take down anyone new yet, but we did hold it together, and that means a lot.

Happy Friday.

P.S. Today's screenie is my Boomkin, doing a Scarlet Onslaught quest wherein you play dress-up as an Onslaught Raven Priest. Apparently they are very easily deceived...

Wheeee! Guess Who's an Officer Now?

That would be me. Huzzah! To say that I am excited is an understatement.

Spoiled Alts Update

Baby Warlock Hit 35!

• Engineeering maxed out at 300; next skill up opportunity available at 50.
• Felhunter procured after much running around in Azeroth.
• Need to go to Gadget and visit Jordy Lapforge to learn the recipe for my gadgetzan transporter.
• Enjoying pulling out my sexy Arcanite Dragonling, especially when standing around in Dalaran on important business.
• Not yet hitting that mid-30s "OMGIAMTIREDOFQUESTING" slump, but I've only spent an hour or two in STV so there is still time.
• Overall just really having fun dinking around on her, even with her being in the bank alt guild and not a real guild. It probably causes me to be more immersed in what I am doing to never have more than 3 folks online at a time.
• Must mail her the mana return trinket that I have pretty much stopped using on the druid in favor of the blue trinkets she's procured.
• Enjoying the things that feel similar in playstyle to my shadow priest, but noting there is enough variety and difference that I don't understand when people say they are the same. No sir, they certainly are not. They just have a dark affinity is all.
• Have not yet random dungeoned on her but will start it soon so I can work on my pet choice and management.

Baby Druid crept up to 74

• Managed to eek out exactly 1 level on the druid this weekend.
• Spent rest of weekend thinking about how I didn't feel like playing the druid.
• Dragonblight's primary non-group quests completed, and thus onward to Grizzly Hills next time.
• In the "SICKOFNORTHRENDQUESTING" slump
• Had horrifying realization I have done some of these quests...6 or 7 times now, in the past 12 months. More if you count helping friends do them. Bleh!
• Had a Nexus run last weekend where she did 1600 DPS on a boss fight; in light of that, boggle at level 80 rogues in randoms not breaking 1k DPS. Why? Why?
• Recalling how painful the gear grind was on my druid when WotLK was shiny and new a year ago.
• Wondering if the druid will be shelved alongside the mage once she dings 80, rotting away save for a daily or weekly quest at a time.
• Resolved to keep slowly at her leveling, playing when it feels right to do so, not worried about the slowness of speed. 80 will still be there in a month. Or two.
• Will try to stomach the impatient chain pulling random instance tanks in order to get questing and XP done in a less repetitive manner.

After these two hit 80, no new alts! My Alliance shadow priest and mage still linger in the 70s so they'll be the last alt projects. Until Cataclysm strikes and I have to make new toons to see the new starting areas, that is.

;)

Happy Alting!

New Armory is Full of Fun Toys

Like this imbeddable 3-D representation of your character. What's not to love about this? I can blow kisses on my shadow priest all day long. Alas, I can't figure out how to shrink this enough to cram it into a sidebar here on the site, or else I would.

This was the most immediately visible of the changes they released to the armory this past week. One  of the other fun toys that I may try to incorporate here is a customizable RSS feed of up to five of your characters' recent activities. You can show their recent achievements, boss kills, and gear upgrades. The gear upgrades and achievements allow you some fine tuning so you can show only epic gear obtained for instance, and show only specific categories of achievements.

The activity feed keeps a running tally of how many times you've killed each raid boss, or heroic final boss, and adds it to your daily activity stream each time you kill them again. But what I really like is how it shows you if a person is wearing that shiny new piece of gear they obtained or not, thanks to the handy [equipped] notation that follows the items they are actually using.

Yes, we all bank gear from time-to-time, especially if we are juggling hit, but it's always nice when you have a nagging feeling someone has already looted that item before to be able to check. I had one former guildie who had "accidentally DEd" an item then felt entitled to taking the item again the next time it dropped (raid said um, no.) And the guildie who would forget they already had the same item in the bank, the guy who won the BOE bracers in MC (that he already was wearing and felt entitled to have a second pair to sell, under his own name, in the AH.) I could go on and on but I think the utility speaks for itself.

The new feature that got a lot of folks in my guild excited, however, was the calendar feed you can import into the calendaring tool of your choice (i.e. Google calendar, Outlook, iCalendar or whatever it is that you use to keep yourself on time.) As with the other feeds, you can choose to show data from up to five of your characters. Back when I was actively raiding on two characters on two different servers, it would have been awesome to see their schedules together.

During the twitter developer chat last night, I added in a few questions regarding some future enhancements I would love to see. They didn't answer them, but I am posting them here, because I bet you have some similar things you'd like to see too:

• Will we see recipes learned added to the armory pre-Cataclysm?
• Will we see more professions tracking improvements, such as recipes we have not yet learned, come to the UI?
• Any chance you will partner with blog platforms like typepad on creating modules that pull from armory feeds?

I know that if I were able to sneak a project onto the armory development team's to do list it would definitely be adding professions tracking data to my character feed. Being able to see, at a glance, while offline, everything I can make and what recipes I am missing (and how to obtain them) would make me a happy camper. I used CraftList2 in game to help me with the not-buying-multiples-of-the-same-recipes portion of that equation, but it was still not as scannable as something web-based could be.

How about you? What would you like to see in future armory releases? And what do you think of these new toys?

Friday Five: 5 Things I'd Like to Accomplish Over This Long MLK Weekend

1. Determine which -- if any -- of the shiny new armory feeds I want to add to my blog template. 3-D SP model would be nice, yes?
2. Get baby lock (currently 27) to 35. Lofty goal but with 2 levels of rested XP + 2 BOAs, it could happen. Why 35? To train up engineering again, of course.
3. Find some nice quiet time to write some posts for the blog. The last week or so has been way too busy and my "to write" idea list is getting pretty long.
4. Do a few hours more of random dungeons on my shaman, to enable her to acquire her second piece of T9.
5. Continue to push along the druid, as she edges towards 80. She's now 71 and needs to do her Coldarra quests and get in a Nexus run.

Whata re your plans for the weekend?

On Shimmering Druid Wings

My baby horde druid is now in Northrend, and having attained level 71, has her pretty epic flight form. This shot, however, is from right after she got her plain old regular flight form, at level 60, in Hellfire Peninsula, but I love this Christmas Eve shot for the gorgeous sky.

I'm no fan of HFP due to many bitter memories of quests that took hours and respawns that randomly went from taking forever to all popping at once on top of you back in the early days of BC.

But I am a huge fan of flying, especially on my druids (baby druid being my first horde druid, but my former Alliance main is a level 80 druid.) My first druid got a significant portion of levels 68-70 from flying around exploring the rest of Outlands. The only reason I didn't do the same on this one is I have been leveling her with a friend so I couldn't get ahead in XP like that. Ditto for why I have yet to do the druid swift flight form chain, which I thought was incredibly well-done, but I will go back and do it at 80.

But there is something incredibly peaceful about gliding around on druid wings. I pan around to see the sights, and enjoy the traveling to and fro. While on other characters I might still hop a flight path and AFK, even though they also have epic flight, on my druids I always want to take the me-directed route there.

She's a skinner, not an herber or a miner, so the epic speed flight won't really help her gather. But it does give her the independence to make her own path, and show off doing loop-de-loops with /mountspecial. And sometimes, it's those little things that matter, at least to me.

Happy Tuesday!

How Patch 3.3 Helped me Get my Mojo Back

 

I was surprised that so many folks gave a big "Meh!" when 3.3 hit. Because it honestly gave me my mojo back in game. I went from being a wee bit bored to having more stuff I wanted to do than I could conceivably find time to complete.

Suddenly, I had reasons to run heroics on my shadow priest. 100 random peeps grouped with later and I took home an adorable PUG puppy plus a few achievements and a smattering of frost emblems to boot. We had a new raid instance to hack at, new screenshots to take and new patterns to look forward to.

And then there is the lore aspect. I LOVE how the three new dungeons have a storyline that carries you through them. It's awesome to once again be fighting by the Dark Lady's side. And I am driven to emote every time I enter the ICC raid instance for the first time each week...but I won't say what I always say to keep the spoilers at bay. But the fact that I enter the raid each week with a purpose makes me smile.

Leveling the druid got even easier. She went oom less frequently than before. She could turn in the heavy borean leather for arctic furs and quickly leveled to 440 leatherworking, a day or so after hitting 65, thanks to all the leathers I'd banked from the last alt's leveling as a skinner/herbalist.

I have renewed hope the shaman has a chance in hell of gearing herself up respectably, if I can find the time to do some random dungeons with her. Of course, given our current guild situation of more folks who want to raid than we have spots for, and a policy of rotating folks in and out to ensure everyone gets a chance at content, things will slow down soon. In fact I was sat tonight from ICC 10, while they work on a new boss, so they can ensure everyone gets a crack at seeing the new content.

But instead of logging on to tackle any of the above to dos, or to level the baby warlock, I'm sipping a glass of wine, writing in the blog. And that feels great as well. I have a backlog of stuff I want to write about here, just like my in game to do list grows longer every day.

It's nice to be re-engaged with WoW. I hope you are as well.

ICC Lower Spire Cleared!

Tonight, our first night ever taking a look at Saurfang, and we downed him our third try. We had 101k raid DPS which is one of the best I've seen from our team. A nice quick raid giving me plenty of time to keep nursing the flu and go to bed early. I believe we are the 6th horde guild on our server (per WoW Progress and our realm forums) to clear this wing.

Congratulations Pirates! And a whole new wing awaits us this week!

ICC by the Skin of Our Teeth

Last night, after weeks of banging our heads against 25-man Lady RepairBill, as Moober affectionately nicknamed her, my guild finally took her down, and did a gunship 1-shot victory lap to celebrate. To say that we were pleased is an understatement. I think shocked was a little more like it.

In the first 45 minutes of our raid, we had wiped fully or partially on the trash 3 or 4 times before getting to Marrowgar. We had ass-pulling of mobs, face pulling of giants, AOE pulling of every mob in the room. Oh yes, we had fun times. And Marrowgar wasn't a cakewalk either. Although we'd previously 1-shot him on 25-man, it took us 4 goes, losing our MT multiple times, bone spikes staying up too long, switching around our tanks and adding in an off-spec healer so we could get him down on our fourth attempt.

Despite all that noobing it up, this week's raid was able to finally take down Lady Deathwhisper where previous raids with better execution could not. Why? Logs point to the fact that we went up 15k in overall DPS from our previous best attempt. A good deal of that seems to be from having had a raid that was stacked with melee, who completely kicked butt on the meters overall for the night. I don't think the difference was in gear, despite the fact that we clear three ICC 10s every week, because we've had 30+ raiders in ICC ready gear for over a month now.

The gear component is one that comes up a lot though, with lots of wishful thinking hoping that if only we do another legacy raid of 25-man ToC and get a last little pinch of gear, that will make a difference. But our guild at least has shown that isn't our block. We do have some folks in our raids doing well under 4k DPS. We're casual and inclusive, so this happens. But it is important to note that those folks are not at the bottom due to having poor gear. Their gear scores put them neck and neck with folks outperforming them. And our weekly raid quests, which usually end up being two 25s and a few 10s worth of mains and alts before the week is through, have shown many undergeared alts performing as well as - or even better than -- their well-geared counterparts.

It's hard to determine why one DPS pulls 2500 while another of their class pulls 4k+ when their gear is not disparate. Could be lag or low FPS on their computer. Could be they don't watch their threat meters and spend their time hugging the floor. Could be that they have Skype or IM open on their computer and are distracted. Or they could be like that former guildie of mine who was always watching a movie or television during our raids, interjecting Vent chat with commentary to that effect. Perhaps they're not doing the optimal DPS rotation, or their spec needs some work.

It's impossible to troubleshoot what's going on from the outside. But the fact remains that at this point, we're not able to carry folks through the content and succeed. The past three weeks of wiping on Lady Deathwhisper showed that pretty clearly. Folks need to bring their A game. Being casual doesn't mean it's OK to not be flasking up, or coming to a raid wearing gear that is unenchanted or poorly gemmed. Casual is not a bandaid to cover up not trying. Yes, casual is putting having a good time first. And it is about having a life outside of the game. We don't have minimum attendance, or spec requirements, or any of the standard rules a raiding guild has. But the fact that we are casual that way shouldn't absolve anyone who raids from having personal accountability for doing their best.

Next week, a new wing of ICC opens up. I know our 10-mans will be up for the challenge. As for our 25-man? We'll see. I am optimistic that last night's victory will push folks to give Saurfang their all on Monday. But putting your best foot forward in raids isn't a one-time event. It's something you need to do every time you head in the door to a raid instance. Here's hoping we continue to be up for the challenge.

Lower Spire Cleared

We had a rough start to the new content. We spent an entire evening in the 25-man wiping on Marrowgar due to folks 1) not keeping impaled folks healed and 2) many DPS not switching over to freeing the impaled folks. We split up into two 10-mans over the weekend to try again. The other team got off to a great start, clearing 3 bosses the first night.

My team? We kept losing the OT after the first whirlwind. Every go. And losing team members to unexplained/unannounced AFKs. We spent 3 hours and got nowhere. Except for fat repair bills.

It was especially frustrating because we had amazing DPS. Our impaled folks could barely announce on vent they'd been spiked before we got them out. My SO's DK had gone unholy, which, along with the haste change to affect DP and VT DoTs, meant I was rocking the DPS. So the fail was especially hard to swallow. Even in vanilla content, I was lucky to have raid teams that were good at identifying and fixing our strategy holes. It was discouraging to have not seen any sort of improvement over the course of the attempts.

Sunday night, with one of our more geared and experienced pally tanks at the helm, we stepped back into ICC and smashed through 3 bosses. Last night we came back in to tackle Saurfang. And after only a couple tries, we stomped him.

Hooray!

I am thrilled to have challenging and fun content to raid again. This should keep me happy for a good while.

As a parting gift for this Tuesday, I leave you with this shot of my schmancy new mace, courtesy of the Quel'Delar quest chain.

A Trip to the Sunwell...to Purify Quel'Delar

so I could pull a sword out of a rock in a frozen lake...

More screenshots behind cut to avoid spoilers.

More Sunday Retro Raiding

 This week, it was AQ 40.

Back in the day, my guild got stuck on Twin Emperors. And as luck would have it, that's exactly where I got summoned in today. AND they let me tank an Emp to boot! 1 shot of them + 1-shot of C'thun, and much rep and many shiny toys had by all.

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

May your bountiful tables have all their chairs, and may the spirit of sharing inmbue you with extra friends and family rep gain throughout your day.

Retro Raid Night, Take 2

 

 

Zin posted some screenies too. A fun night with friends plus some nice dress up items taken home as well.

Professions Synergy

 

This sexy Tauren is my bank alt. He is one of the primary keys to my ability to make my horde-side professions somewhat profitable. But the other equally important component to that profitability is my having chosen complimentary professions that can help each other out. For my horde characters, it breaks out like this:

• shadow priest is a tailor/herbalist
• mage is an alchemist/herbalist (elixir mastery for the flask procs)
• shaman is a miner/jewelcrafter
• druid is a skinner/leatherworker
• SO has an enchanter and an inscriptionist

Alliance-side is similarly aligned:

• druid is an enchanter/skinner
• mage is an alchemist/herbalist (elixir mastery for the flask procs)
• shadow priest is an inscriptionist/herbalist
• SO has a leatherworker, engineer, and blacksmith

That's right. Not only did I pick my alts' professions with an eye on how they could feed into each other, I took my SO's professions into consideration as well to come up with a mix that would cover most of our bases.

Each day, my alchemist transmutes an epic gem and sends it to the JC. The JC makes an icy prism daily, sending the blue quality gems back to the alchemist, along with the eternals she mines, cutting the epic gems and sending them to the bank alt. All herbs gathered go to the alchemist for making whatever flasks I need and whatever elixirs are selling well in the AH. The two maxed fisherwomen do the fishing daily (the third does it only when it's the sewers, slowly increasing her skill), sending any usable fish to the bank alt to be held for the druid's eventual push to 450 cooking.

Alliance side had mirrored this as well, until I faction changed the shaman and moved her over to the horde. Additionally, as I leveled the tailoring and the SO leveled the leatherworking, all excess items that were not especially saleable were funneled to the enchanter for DEing. The inscriptionist made me plenty of scrolls so no enchanting skill-up points were ever wasted.

These interwoven professions didn't initially happen by design. But when I moved my shadow priest to her current server and started up my army of alts there, I did take what I'd learned from several years of good professions synergy with my Alliance characters and apply it. Some professions, especially enchanting, are really expensive and time consuming to level without having additional toons and their professions excess feeding into them. And since the excitement over getting to train new recipes and make fabulous new goodies has long been a driver of getting me to work on my alts, it works out very well all around.

So next time you roll an alt, and are tempted to pick two gathering professions or a repeat of an easy profession you've previously breezed through, take a minute to think about if you have an opportunity to make your profession leveling less painful -- or more profitable -- by considering it in context of your own little crafting cabal.

OMG! I was Just Night Elf Mohawked!

Oh, the humanity!

It is spreading like the zombie plague...

maybe I should retaliate...

Baby Tauren Druid Hit Level 40

Despite the small amount of time I have to play her, my baby druid hit 40 today. It was a momentus ding thanks to it bringing me BOOMkin form and enabling the purchase of her epic Kodo!

Kids these days...grumble grumble...they don't appreciate how hard we old timers had it...we used to get our SLOW MOUNT at 40! And the epic at 60! And we LIKED IT THAT WAY!

Oh hai, wait, no, it was a pain.

Special thanks to my lovely leveling partner, Candelie. Boomkin+ Elemental Shaman=win. We have consistently done orange quests throughout our leveling process, and only run into trouble in a bugged ruin in STV that had invisible mobs come out of the floor to murder us.

At this rate, we may be to Outlands before the 3.3 alt mana preservation changes hit.

Nothing Revives the Fun Like a Retro Raid

If you had asked me a year ago if I'd like to go spend a few hours knocking back Lady Vashj and Kael, I would have told you to go die in a fire. Benn there. Done that. Never wanted to see it again on my druid.

But a year's absence makes the heart grow fonder for the BC instances. Somehow spurred on by our weekly For the Horde! runs momentum, we found ourselves itching for some retro raid action on a night when our 25-man composition wasn't right for working on the keepers in Ulduar. So, instead, we decided SSC and TK were due a visit.

It was fun to get to see these instances and soak up the ambiance. During all my at level forays to these raids, I healed on my druid, so my view of them was only the bits that peaked out from behind the 25 little health bars I fixated on. Who knew that TK actually had some nice music before those 4 packs of doom?

Now,  at 80, those trash packs that used to cause wipes were easily mind seared down as our paladin tanked them all. Lady Vashj was an easy one shot, while Lurker killed a good chunk of the raid since we didn't bother to clear all the trash and fought him with the nasty fish still in the water.

Kael, on the other hand, was a piece of funny business. You see, he's a loquacious fellow, and we tried to rush him along. And he didn't like it. He turned into a big ghosty stalker and followed raid members around in his room, taunting us with out inability to get past his bugged state. So, we had some folks kill themselves and summon us all outside so we could reset him and start over.

Our second time through, we took it easy on him, doing about half as much damage. We picked up those legendary weapons and marveled at how the stats for the ones we carry around now dwarf them. We killed him nice and slow, letting him give us his monologues. Big dress-up dork that I am, I was excited to get the tier chest token, which I turned in for the pretty Shroud of the Avatar robe. Now *that's* a pretty dress up outfit.

There's been talk of doing some more (guildies have recently done the AQs, Black Temple, and Mount Hyjal recently) and I'm in. It's nice to get to revisit some of this formerly challenging content in a fun and relaxed raid with many folks who've never gotten to see it before. A great way to spend a weekend day.

Friday Five: 5 Things More QQ Worthy Than Blizzard's New Pet Store

1. The likelihood that, given the sound file transcripts from 3.3 and how everyone dissects such things to death in forums and on twitter and in trade chat, we will never again get to experience a spoiler-free raid instance for ourselves the first time.
2. As of 3.3 players will no longer need to kill the final bosses in all four wings of Naxx in order to teleport to Sapphiron. Teleportation orbs have been added to allow players access back and forth from Sapphiron's lair. This presumably makes Sapphiron and KT farmable without the PITA of Thaddius.
3. Everyone hates their Tier 10 gear. Mine makes me look like a Harry Potter movie escapee but at least I can cover it up with shadowform.
4. We still know very little abut the Pilgrim's Bounty holiday that starts this Sunday, but we do know there are achievements that involve cooking, and that makes everyone who hasn't leveled cooking see red even though this holiday's achievements are not part of the violet drake meta-achievement.
5. Macabre Marionette didn't get deleted from our accounts after Day of the Dead, but it is still an item taking up a bank slot that summons a friend to run around with you instead of being a learnable vanity pet you don't have to worry about accidentally tossing out.

Gosh so many things for us all the complain about...or not. Maybe this is a good time to reflect on past years where we had queues up to 1k players and DCs left and right and zombie plagues keeping us from spending our happy free time in game. So if these are the top of our complaint lists right now, then perhaps we should count ourselves lucky.

cheers!

I Joined the Kel'Thuzad Fan Club

I joined the Kel'Thuzad fan club today. I know, I know! After my, you know, killing him a few times, you might have gotten the impression I didn't like him.

But, you see, he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. By the name of Lil' K.T. And it was contingent upon joining his fan club. So there ya go.

I simply...could not...resist.

Day of the Dead Festivities

I got up bright and early this morning, thanks to our falling back to standard time here in the U.S., and set about completing Day of the Dead festivities on my favorite characters across three servers.  Day of the Dead is a celebration of one's deceased ancestors. For this reason, it's imperative you head to the graveyard outside your race's home city, or to Shatt. Otherwise, though you can obtain the achievement, you won't be able to complete the quest for honoring your ancestors' spirits. Apparently you can also complete these activities at Dalaran's graveyard, but for the life of me, I have no idea where it is.

It was fun getting a festive 12-hour costume, and the adorable (yet, alas, not permanent) teeny macabre marionette pet, and dancing with the graveyard spirits. I am more than a little disappointed that the marionette is only available to you during Day of the Dead-- he was set to become my undead shadow priest's favorite pet ever. *sniffle*

A nice bonus was the 26g and change my 80s made from making the day of the Dead bread and fulfilling that quest (which is how you get the marionette.) The XP awarded to lowbies is pretty nice too -- 3k to my level 31, 9k to my level 58, and 20k to my level 72 who completed it. Smart of Blizz to include this little push to get even the most bah humbug players amongst us into the holiday spirit.

For a look at all the things you can buy and links to the quests, check out the Moonglade blog's Day of the Dead guide. More pictures of various races' dancing spirits after the cut. And don't tell anyone, but my favorite so far was the synchronized male NE dancers in Darn. It was epic.

Happy Halloween!

Radio Silence

I've been keeping to myself this week due to having too much going on IRL and in-game. And knowing when to hold your tongue is a good thing.

I have encountered some interesting glitches as of late that I shall share with you now, in lieu of more words...