WoW

A Sunday of Pet Battles #WoW

stargrace January 27, 2014 0Comment

I decided to spend most of Sunday in World of Warcraft, working on pet battles. There were a few key achievements I wanted to finish off, not to mention it’s an incredibly relaxing endeavour to partake in. When I had to step away I would just mount up and fly into the air to hang out.

One of my main goals was to defeat 40 master pet tamers so I could earn myself the safari hat. This hat gives a 10% bonus to all experience gained while leveling up pets, and I really wanted to make the task as painless as possible. In order to earn the achievement you have to basically defeat every pet tamer out there – but – you only need to defeat TWO pandaria tamers because the horde and alliance each have their own tamers starting out before you get the quests for the continental ones. I wasn’t aware of this at first, and I was hammering my way through the panda tamers slowly counting down the number of battles to go. I relogged to my 71 deathknight, did her lowbie tamer quests, and before I knew it each character had a safari hat in the mail. I also picked up a handy addon that will automatically swap the hat when I enter a battle.

That wasn’t the only accomplishment I had throughout the day though. I also managed to finish off Raiding with Leashes thanks to help from Kanad. This granted both of us Mr. Bigglesworth, an incredibly cute kitty with magical whiskers. Then I slowly worked through other pet achievements, taming in all of the Pandarian zones, in all of the alliance cities, Northrend, and Cataclysm. It was glorious.

Will these achievements help my character in the future? No, not at all. They don’t grant gear or any special skills and they’re not a true method of progression – but they’re incredibly fun, and I had a great time spending my Sunday this way. I can’t wait to see what fun pet battles I come up against next. I’m working on getting 15 of my pets to 25 so that I can participate in the Celestial Tournaments, but that is quite some time off still.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

RNG Plays Nice (Sometimes) #WoW

stargrace January 22, 2014 0Comment

I make a lot of jokes about my lack of luck – my favorite saying is “If I didn’t have bad luck, I would have no luck at all.” Every so often that theory is blown out of the water, and yesterday was certainly a good day for that.

I have been ill so I haven’t been able to play for very long, but I did want to get a celestial kill done since it was Tuesday and things had reset. I queued up in the flex raid finder and before I could blink I was ported over to a PVP server and in group. Only one problem, being a PVP server meant that we were all flagged automatically and a lot of us came from PVE servers. The horde tagged the first celestial while we looked on so we had to wait (while being randomly attacked). Then we tagged the next celestial and since there were so many of us compared to the handful of horde that had gathered, we made quick work of the encounter (and a few of the horde, too as you can see by my achievement progress above).

That is where luck first showed up – I won a pair of ilevel 553 pants, part of my heal set. I was incredibly happy. I was already wearing pants that were my 2nd best BiS, tailor crafted, but these are my BiS (best in slot). Once the raid was over I went back to Stormwind and gemmed them and added an enchant, then I decided to head to Karazhan to try for the fiery warhorse’s reins.

It’s really easy to try for this mount because it comes from the first named in the zone. I had been running the raid zone for a while now on all of my characters in an attempt to get the mount, but with a .8% drop rate, I had never seen it – before yesterday, of course.

I continued on through the raid zone in an attempt to collect a few pets and got lucky when it came to the theater encounter, the mob up happened to be the big bad wolf, and he dropped the Lil’ Bad Wolf pet collar. All in all it was a pretty productive day. I finished things off by going broke and purchasing all of the mounts available from the Golden Lotus. I love mounts and while I may not collect them as eagerly as I do pets, I still collect them (I’m up to 70 at the moment). Money is normally what holds me back, having so many alts can get expensive. I put up a few items on the AH and called it a night.

Now to decide which mount I want to go after next! It will probably be the Deathcharger.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Raiding with Leashes #WoW

stargrace January 20, 2014 1Comment

Thanks to some amazing help from Kanad (one of two guild mates), I’ve been able to get a really good start on the achievement posted above, raiding with leashes. Not that long ago pets were added to older raids, and of course that meant that there was an achievement associated with them. Four more pets are all I need to earn Mr. Bigglesworth, and I need 5 more pets to earn Tito’s Basket. This weekend Lil’ Bad Wolf finally dropped from Karazhan, a pet that’s all the more difficult to get because the encounter at the theater is not always that particular scene.

Eventually I’d love to earn the ‘crazy cat lady’ title but I need some pretty rare cats in my collection in order to do that. Mr. Bigglesworth is a part of it, so at least I’m making some progress.

I love these little achievements and things to keep me busy when I’m not doing something ‘productive’. These are the things that keep me playing a game.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Ding, Level 25 Pet Obtained! #WoW

stargrace January 18, 2014 0Comment

Last night I just wanted to relax with something easy that required almost no thought. It has been a really long week and I didn’t want to deal with other players. I settled in to do some pet battles and I wasn’t disappointed. I have been leveling up lil ‘xt a mechanical pet, along with a dragonkin and a beast. This combination is not always the best when fighting against NPC tamers – but it’s a fantastic combination when out in the wild. A lot of the pets you’ll be up against are beasts and mechanical pets do very well against them.

Before I knew it, I had my first level 25 pet. The others are quickly following because once your pet stops gaining experience the experience earned is divided towards the other team members. Now my team consists of a 25, and two level 24s. Next on my ‘to do’ list is to finish beating the tamers in the world so that I can earn the safari hat and boost my experience gained by 10%. There’s a lovely addon that allows you to swap out your regular hat for the safari hat when you do battles, and this will help me actually make use of it for once, instead of having it sit in my bags doing nothing like I would normally do.

I also managed to raise my collection from 212 pets to 232. 250 is my next objective for the achievement – and I couldn’t be more pleased. Over all? It was a fantastic calm evening spent doing pretty much nothing which is what I wanted right from the start.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

AddOns Galore #WoW

stargrace January 15, 2014 0Comment

There was a post over on google plus today by Robert Anderson that inspired me to take a look at the AddOns I currently use for World of Warcraft. I tend to keep my UI very minimalistic, and I want the least amount of addons running as possible to keep everything running properly, especially after a game update thus my list isn’t that long. I use a complete UI replacement that’s recommended on Icy-veins called ElvUI and it takes care of so many things for me I don’t really need that many others. It changes the font of the UI, all my windows, hotbars, map, etc. and I just copy a profile over for each character. You can also set it up depending on the role your character plays. Highly recommend this addon. It’s very easy to install and it is constantly being updated.

My other addons include:

1. Auctionator – AH replacement stuff
2. Collect Me – For battle pets and mounts
3. DBM – Complete collection, this is of course deadly boss mods. Used for raid warnings and the like.
4. Oqueue – for joining flex raids since the Blizzard format is not exactly intuitive.
5. PetBattle Teams – More pet battle stuff
6. Pet Tracker – Even more pet battle stuff
7. Recount – Because I like parses
8. Zygor – An amazing guide addon that will tell you how to do anything in game from leveling to working factions and collecting mounts.

That’s it. If I didn’t use ElvUI as a complete UI replacement I would probably have a lot more on that list, but like I said, I prefer to keep things simple. It makes updates much easier, and when something breaks I don’t have to worry about being unable to play. What are some of your favorite addons? Let me know in comments!