Moggin’ Around

Posted by Lerali on Dec 21, 2011 in Transmog! | 0 comments

In which I change my mind. Again.

In my previous post about tranmogrification, the characters I showcased were mogged into basically tier sets or matching sets of gear. This second post is more about making custom transmog sets that use armor pieces that do not necessarily come in a set or that can be combined with other armor pieces to make something unique looking.

My baby worgen rogue, Rhanek, (who isn’t so much a baby, he’s level 71 for chrissakes) I had originally planned to get the Bloodfang armor set out of Blackwing Lair for. However, at this time I have only been able to get the gloves, belt and boots. I knew the Burning Crusade offered a couple of recolor sets, one in a dark blue/black combination and a second in a washed out maroon/silver combination. Neither were very attractive in my opinion but I decided to gather the maroon/silver combination from Karazhan since the blue/black version didn’t really look very menacing to me.

In the process of gathering the maroonfang set, I found another set of gear that had some appealing pieces: the Opportunist’s Battlegear – the beginner’s faction PvP set that only required honored reputation from the various BC factions. The Opportunist’s Battlegear is a pretty attractive set (save for the helm, it looks like a funky muzzle on worgen) and was fairly easy to obtain by running a few heroics with my paladin dragging Rhanek along. At this point I decided to combine all three gear sets to make something unique.

The nice part about the three sets of gear I picked out, is the fact that while the colors are not exact between the sets, they still complement one another and present a cohesive set.

Transmogrification!

Posted by Lerali on Dec 19, 2011 in Featured, Transmog! | 0 comments

The good, the bad and the what the @#$% was I thinking?

Transmorgrification has officially made it into my Top Ten Things I Love About WoW list. No longer do I have to worry about my characters looking like they fell out of a rag bag or the dreaded rainbow clown vomit of the Burning Crusade. However, since its announcement and implementation, I have found myself basically playing dressup or paper dolls with my characters as I attempt to find the “perfect” transmog outfit for all my characters. I have had more success with some than others.

The good.

So way back when Transmogrification was announced, I immediately knew what I was transmog’ing for several of my characters. Haitia (druid) still had her Cenarion Rainment from way back in Vanilla, Ophélia (priest) had been collecting all the pieces to the white offcolor Absolution set,  Rwn (mage) was gathering the Tirisfal Regalia and I had Leralie (paladin) collecting as much of the Judgement set as possible.

Now the Cenarion Rainment has sentimental value as I was first person in my Vanilla guild to get all of their class set from raiding Molten Core (“Hey! My bush is sexy!” D’oh). Ophélia spent much of Wrath looking like a warlock and that really made me sad so I wanted a transmog set that would look very priest-like, i.e. white. The Judgement set has always in my mind been the pinnacle of the best looking paladin armor ever, I know everyone and their dog will put their paladin in it – but I don’t care, I love it. Leralie just needs a nifty shield to match.

The bad.

Now, there were some of my characters that I had no friggin’ clue what I wanted to transmog for them. One of the culprits was my warlock, Lerali. The trouble with her is that while I love her to bits, I’m not a very good warlock. In my head, she is something of a reluctant warlock and therefor should be reflected in her transmog outfit. Most of the warlock sets out there are very heavy on the whole demonic, helfire, death, fire and taxes look which is appropriate for the warlock – but not my warlock.

Had I my rathers, I would have put her in red offcolor pvp Absolution set, however, that set is priest specific (much to my consternation). The only other alternative is the white offcolor which would make her look like a priest and that will not be happening, so for the time being she’s in the Deadly Gladiator’s Felweave set. Hopefully Mist of Pandoria will bring something cool.

What the @#$% was I thinking?

My hunter, Lerai, was another problem child. Much of the hunter armor sets out there were not in line with how I envisioned her. She’s a young draenei, a sharp shooter who is in touch with her animal companions and has a background in the draenei armed forces as a tracker and sniper (I have no idea if this works within the lore to any extent but its how I see her). I’d nearly thrown my hands up at the prospect of her having a nice transmog set until I stumbled up the WoW Roleplay Gear and found the Mistshroud set.

What I love about the Mistshroud set is that it is a mail set that doesn’t look like mail. However, when I decided to gather up the set, I completely missed the awesome guide that was available at WoW Roleplay Gear and just started haphazardly gathering stuff via Wowhead research. Little did I know I was going to need to be exalted with the Consortium. Anyway I grinded it out and have managed to get all the pieces save the boots. I didn’t opt for the head piece because it was ugly and went with one of the few mail eye patches in the game (I know it doesn’t make any sense for a sharp shooter to wear an eyepatch but whatever, I like it). The only other thing I would have loved to get for Lerai’s transmog set is the Black Bow of the Betrayer that drops from Illidan in Black Temple, but I didn’t have any luck getting it. Instead, I went with the Golden Bow of Quel’Danas (or whatever its called – it drops from the twins in Sunwell) and I think I like it better.

How to not go crazy…

Posted by Lerali on Nov 3, 2011 in Featured, Mounts | 0 comments

for Mountain O’ Mounts.

This is not intended as a “how to” guide for the achievement ‘cuz everyone is going to do it differently. I chose to research, farm and grind out as much as possible to see if I could solo this achievement as much as possible. This is a break down for anyone who is interested in a different way to go about getting this achievement and the nifty mount.

I decided to try and get this on my paladin Leralie for several reasons, specifically because I knew I would have an easier time solo’ing some of the content and grind than I would have, say on Ophélia. Now, Leralie is also an engineer, in addition to being a paladin – this puts me at 2 pally mounts, 2 engineering mounts (3 if you have the means to have the chopper made, I didn’t so I don’t count it in this breakdown) and an Argent Tournament Paladin mounts. So five mounts right there to plan on.

My mount breakdown in no particular order:

40 Flyer/Faction
8 Talbuks
1 Green Proto Drake
2 Paladin Mounts
2 Engineering Flying Mounts
1 Zhevra
5 (5 Seal, 500g) Basic Tourny Mounts
5 (100 Seal) Tourny mounts
1 (100 Seal) Pally Mount
3 (150 Seal) Tourny Mounts
1 Frostsaber
6 Nether Drakes
5 Nether Rays
1 Polar Bear Mount
1 White Drake
1 Armored White Gryphon
1 Armored Brown Bear
1 Drake of the West Wind
1 Ice Mammoth
1 Black War Mammoth (Honor purchase)
1 Cenarion Gryph
1 Celestial Pony
1 Winged Lion
1 Dark Phoenix
1 Guild Lion Mount
1 White Hawk Strider
1 Raven Lord
1 Rivendare Charger
1 Red Drake
1 Sea Horse
4 AQ Bug Mounts

The hardest part of this grind is the time it takes to do each reputation grind. In all honesty, I did not try to accomplish too many dailies all at once. I chose to take maybe one or two at time in order to keep from going nuts. As an example, I would do all my Argent Tournament dailies (ATD) and then go grind Sha’tari Skyguard rep until I had a ton of turn-ins so I could just kill lots of mini-bosses and Terrok all at once on one night. The next night, I might do all the Tol’Barad dailies and then go work on my Netherwing dailies and run Magister’s Terrace or Sethek Halls. By varying what I was doing each night, I didn’t get bored or frustrated nearly as quickly. I kept no schedule and therefor felt no pressure.

One tip that was immensely helpful was going and getting the Ahn’Qiraj bug mounts from AQ40. I would kill the trash up to the first boss (I think it was all of 5-6 trash packs/patrols), run out of the raid and reset it. In about two hours of farming, I had all four (red, green, blue and yellow).

Splatting Sheep

Posted by Lerali on May 6, 2011 in Mounts, Non-Combat Pets | 0 comments

Okay, so my speculation was way off regarding the winged lion mount, but its cool – we got Cenarion Hatchling pets and their proceeds go to help a very good cause! I know there’s been a lot of talk regarding the fact that the Hatchling is the same model as the very early TCG pet Hippogryph Hatchling. I also recall that the Landro’s Lil XT and Lichling are the same models as the Blizzard store pets. All I can say is that the choice to purchase one from the store or acquire the pets via the TCG is up to the person. I don’t like the fact that people are making judgements based on a personal choice.

Anyways. The newest patch dropped and came with a ton of new stuff! Namely more pets! I still need to get Haitia through the baby Raptor quests so she can get the pet. Children’s Week also brought some other awesome pets and I now have both a baby Oracles and Wolvar on a couple toons!

Leralie is now 85, having only gotten through about half of Deepholm and only 114 seals away from having all the mounts from the Argent Tournament. I’ll be trying to get through the rest of the Cataclysm zones as a break from crazy dailies. Her next exciting adventures will be Baradin Warden’s rep for mounts and more dailies for the Netherwing drakes and the Sha’tari Skyguard. Current mount count is 68.

Lerai is now 83 and I’m slowly leveling her up so I can tame a couple rare spawn pets, namely: Sambas, Ghostcrawler and Jadefang – not too terribly original but I like the look of them anyway. At some point, I want to get her far enough into the Argent Tournment to get a Hippogryph of her own.

Now for something completely different!

I had a strange dream the other night. I don’t dream often and I don’t normally dream about WoW.

So I was in Storm Peaks, camping the Time Lost Protodrake as Leralie on my white Hippogryph (this dream was a very vivid dream), freezing my horns off in a blizzard. I kept thinking, “He said it would be here.” And then the drake slowly materializes out of the snowflakes and I get all excited, getting ready to throw my shield at it. The drake gets closer and I let fly with my shield, the shield hits the drake-

…the drake turns into a sheep and falls to it death, splatting in the snow and at this point, I’m pissed because somehow this meant I didn’t get the mount.

What the hell subconscious?!? I haven’t even thought about camping for this mount yet!

Moar Speculation

Posted by Lerali on Apr 21, 2011 in Speculation | 0 comments

Random speculation time.

The PTR files are looking pretty solid for a 4.1 release to happen soon. Current theories for the winged lion mount is that it will come out with 4.1 (the files are included in the patch).

Blizzard is taking their usual part in the Make A Wish foundation support.

World Make A Wish day is Friday, April 29th.

So, the patch drops on Tuesday, April 26th with the flion being made available for purchase on April 29th as part of Blizzard’s support with the Make A Wish foundation with a percentage of the flion’s cost going to said foundation.

In theory… it looks plausible. But with the craziness of major patch weeks… maybe not. Who knows? But it gives me hope.

Dick bags are everywhere.

Posted by Lerali on Apr 14, 2011 in Featured | 0 comments

All right, this Call to Arms thing is starting to piss me off. Not so much the new feature itself but some of the reactions to it. Now, the basics are this: Call to Arms will reward whatever group role is in demand in the LFD system with some extra rewards including mounts, pets, gems and potions. This is in response to longer queue times for DPS and to incentivize people to queue in LFD.

Got that? Good.

The reality of this feature is going to be that tanks and healers will be the ones to receive these extra rewards. People, being people, will try to work the system and there will be DPS (that have this capability)  queueing as either a tank or healer with no gear or skills as to how to play that particular role. There will be a lot of griefing going on as well. The only way that I can think of that Blizzard can counter this is to include into the dungeon finder the ability to see if the toons queueing for certain roles meet some kind of gear/spec requirement. An example would be for the LFD system to check to see if a Death Knight who has queued as a tank has a tanking spec and the appropriate gear to fill the role of tank. However, this raises more complications and could be seen as an attempt to tell people how to spec and gear their toons – thus removing some of the personalization that is available to players. Another quandary this raises is the fact that there is no way Blizzard or this proposed scan by the LFD system could tell whether this person has any of the experience or skills that their chosen role in the LFD system. I can even use myself as an example of this. My paladin, Leralie, has the gear and the spec to be able to tank dungeons. However, my tanking skills could be considered questionable but how is Blizzard or a computer program/system going to know that? There is not.

So if a computer or Blizzard can’t police people in LFD, then what? Well today, I was listening to All Things Azeroth and the topic of the Call to Arms feature was highly during the show. Shade outlined and proposed a very different idea of how to combat the LFD “problem”. Her premise is that the reason this feature was brought out was due to all the dick bags in LFD who can get away with their griefing since in all likelihood, they’ll never be grouped with those same people ever again. Her solution was to, instead, make the LFD realm wide and not worldwide, thus allowing the realms and players to police themselves. In theory, this is makes sense but again there would be longer queue times. Throughout the podcast, Shade stressed a desire for a return to the sense of a realm community that was present in Vanilla in allowing players to police themselves in a realm wide LFD. Myself, there are dick bags everywhere. Depending on the size of the server, there may be more or less. In my experience from Vanilla, yes there was a sense of realm wide community – however, it was not always a land of cookies and smiles and friendly competition. There were guilds of dick bags for one reason or another, or players that you never wanted to group with and they did not always go away or realm transfer, etc. I think this is simply the nature of people, some people are dick bags, some are not and we can only hope that we find more that are not.

Either way, this feature is optional. I’ve been largely doing guild heroic runs as much as possible to minimize my exposure to dick bags.

Blargh

Posted by Lerali on Mar 23, 2011 in Noob | 0 comments

So what have I been doing? Some of this, and some of that.

Haitia finally got enough tokens to get the Drake of the West Wind from Baradin’s Wardens. My work schedule hasn’t worked out very well for the last month to be able to raid with any sense of consistency but I have been able to see some of this tiers content. All of her Cataclysm reputations are currently exalted and I am eyeing some of the vanilla and BC reputations such as Hyrdraxian Waterlords, Cenarion Circle, Netherwing and the Sha’tari Skyguard for farming. I’m still not quite sure what I want to do yet as I haven’t really decided what alt I want to focus on to level next. (Also, archaeology is still painful, I haven’t touched in over a week. Stupid bug mount.)

Ironically, I haven’t been really leveling Leralie (my paladin) but she is now 83. She’s seen some of Hyjal but I’ve been mainly focusing her on getting more Champion’s Seals from the Argent Tournament dailies. I currently need 600 more seals to get the last 100 seal mounts and at roughly 14 seals per day (if I do all the quests) that puts me at roughly 43 days. Have i mentioned how much I hate the Battle before the Citadel daily? The damned gargoyles spawn like rabbits.

Rwn, my little worgen feral druid, is now 69 and working through Borean Tundra and the LFD system. I haven’t been leveling her seriously either but she has become my little “Oh, I don’t want to do anything else seriously, so I’ll go putz around her.” In turn, that means she levels kind of quickly (with crap gear. Sorry baby!). Its been kind of fun sneaking around and pouncing on mobs, but I know my damage is crap whether due to crappy gear or my own lack of knowledge in playing a kitty druid.

Now, I haven’t leveled any of my higher level alts such as Ophélia (priest), Lerali (warlock), or Lerai (hunter) at all for various reasons. Ophélia as I want to make sense of all the healing changes and bug my guildies for advice when I finally feel up to it – also, because with Tailoring and Enchanting, I wanted to get her fairly high up in order to make the profession leveling “easier”. I haven’t really worked with Lerali as I don’t really know if warlocking is really for me but she is useful for her high level cooking (/squint) and her fast flying (and I’m not looking forward to leveling her tailoring/enchanting in combination with Ophélia’s). I don’t really want to touch Lerai until after the next patch drops for the simple silly reason of pet leveling, she has a bunch of pets and I don’t really want to have to worry about them falling behind my main team.

My little lowbie alts are still all well and good but I’m waiting till my guild hits level 20 when I can get the heirloom head pieces – which will work well for the account that has Haitia as she is exalted with guild. My other account doesn’t have a level capped character or high guild reputation character, so I’ll have to wait for some of that on that account. My plan is still to level alts and I have a worgen warrior and rogue in the wings waiting for me to stock them up with bags, gold and boa stuffs.

Must focus!