Ancient Tome of Dinomancy...Check!

     Today I decided to head out to the Isle of Giants for the first time to get my tome so I could tame me a triceratops.  Checking out the horror stories on the Wowhead comments, I figured I was in for the long haul. In all actuality, it only took me 17 kills for it to drop.  The downside is that I didn't get any of the pet drops which made me a sad panda.

     After getting to book to drop I took a stroll around the island just to explore.  There are all kinds of cool colors to choose from.  It's like a pet department store.  Just stroll through the aisles and pick your colors.  As soon as I saw the white/albino one I knew I had to have one...so I got one.  I named my new pet Ghost.

Welcome Ghost.

The next one I came across that I had to have was the blue one.  Super cool skin with the stripes adding a nice touch to it.  I named it Stormcloud.

     I tamed both as marksman spec so I ignored the Devilsaurs at first.  I did come back though because they had some really nice brand new colors for them as well.  The first that caught my eye was this bluish/purplish one.

     Then I saw these.  Black with orange stripes.  Little mini versions of Oondasta, without the armor of course.  Totally pimp.  I abandoned my purplish one since my 5 stable slots were full, so I could get this one here.

     Now I think I'm gonna farm here a bit longer to see if I can get some of the battle pets to drop.  I was hoping to get at least one or two while I was farming for the book but alas, such was not my luck.  Until next time, stay thirsty my friends.

Qiraji Guardling, the new Minfernal.

     June 21st, a day that will live in infamy.  OK Well maybe not, but it is the day that summer starts in WoW, at least as far as battle pets are concerned.  I knew this in advance, but alas, I work now, so I can't stay up until midnight server time (3 AM my time) to get them right when they spawned.  That may have been easier, or may have been just as bad, I'll never know.  But as soon as I was able to, I hightailed it to Silithus to go ahead and grab my long awaited title and achievement.  And this is what it looked like...

     There was almost as many people camping this pet as there were back in Vanilla when these gates were being opened for the first time.  It was insane.  My Daggerspine camping was short-lived though as I learned very quick, Cross realm zones mean "dump as many Horde toons into one space as humanly possible so Alliance can do absolutely nothing on a PVP server."  After many attempted gankings I became frustrated and quit.  Then I remembered that I had a 59 Death Knight on Darrowmere.  I headed over there post-haste, headed out to Hellfire Penninsula and it took only a few minutes for me to hit 60.  Headed back to Orgrimmar, and bought my flying skills and headed out to Silithus.

     I ran into an unexpected problem upon first arriving there.  Since it was summer, I thought I might as well honor/desecrate fires while I was there.  Come to find out that desecrating fires flags you for PVP...duh!  So after defeating the whole entire purpose of even coming to this server, I logged and would try again later.

     I camped for hours to no avail.  No little green paws on my screen anywhere.  A couple times I had one spawn right where I was standing, only for somebody to take it while I wasn't paying attention.  I went to bed that night Guardlingless, but my cat did have 3 brand new and healthy kittens while I was waiting for the spawns.  Fast forward to the next day and a new Blingtron party buff outfit.

     So I'm just standing there in my chosen camping spot.  I have personally seen multiple people battling guardlings right at this spot so I know it's a good spawn point.  I finally see a green paw!  I run over there to see that it's only a stupid Scarab.  By this time, I'm bored, so I click on it to battle while I wait.  Not even 10 seconds after I go into the pet battle screen, a damn Guardling spawns EXACTLY WHERE I WAS JUST STANDING before I ran over to battle this garbage.  Somebody jumps on it and is already battling before I can even forfeit and get out of my battle screen.  Needless to say I was in an uncontrollable rage at this point.  The ONLY thing stopping me from causing damage to my keyboard/mouse or some other expensive piece of stuff in my room is my step daughter who is in the room with me watching.  It took everything that I had to choke back the flowing river of profanity that was trying to push its way out of my lips like a really foul mouthed newborn baby.  This was right when my wife got home from work so it was time for another break.

     After dinner, before I went to bed I wanted to of course check again to see if I could get lucky.  All the sudden there is another green paw!  Somebody beats me to it...but it's only a trash battle so they just kill it.  Then BAM!  Another green paw spawns near me.  I run to it as fast as my 150% speed mount will take me spamming my targeting+interact macro all the way.  It's a race between me and at least 2 others, I'm guessing my interact macro got the better of their mouse clicking because my pet battle screen opens up and there she is in all her glory, the Qiraji Guardling!

     The battle was pretty uneventful, I had filled it with some non-25 pets to make it less likely that I would kill her.  I had one close call when one of my moves crit and it lowered her to only 40 health.  That would have been a totally new string of profanity and rage.  It took me 3 cage attempts to finally lock her down but I got her.  The last 2 pets went down easily and BAM AGAIN!

     Oh yeah, who's a Zookeeper?  Oh yeah that's right!  This guy!  Screw you Kalimdor Safari, no longer will your incompleteness haunt me.  My Guardling was an uncommon and it looked to be the balanced version with the exact same amount of speed and attack power.  It was OK though because I had been saving a Humanoid battle stone just for this occasion for weeks now.  It's been sitting in the bags of one of my pet battle daily campers, my Forsaken rogue Timothii.  The before and after stats are below.  She only loses one level due to the fact that she is 16 when caught.

     I can go to bed tonight a happy camper.  Today was a good day.  And now I don't have to spend the next 90 days bored out of my mind standing around in the gates of AQ looking for little green paws.  I can do something productive...like level more 90s!  Woot!

     And if anybody is interested the targeting macro is super easy.

/cleartarget
/target Qiraji Guardling

     And for the interact macro, which is the most important because it actually starts the battle, is not really a macro, it's a key binding.

Go to Game Menu -> Key Bindings -> Scroll down to "Targeting Functions" -> Bind "Interact with Target" to a key of your choosing.

     I chose the zero key on my number pad for the targeting macro and the decimal button on the number pad for my interact.  They're both right next to each other on my keyboard so I could spam both of them really fast with two fingers.  Good luck and happy hunting!

And now introducing...My 7th level 90...The Mage!

     Today I got my seventh level 90.  It seemed to go really quick for a couple reasons.  Of course the most obvious reason is that 5.3 made leveling to 90, 33% faster.  On top of that, I leveled Archaeology on my mage up to 600 which got her well past 86.  Jade Forest got her to 88.  Ran a couple dungeons and very few quests in Kun-Lai Summit to get to 89.  Then once at 89, headed to Dread Wastes to finish it off since the XP per quest is the best out there.

     And just a side note, questing in Dread Wastes in mostly Jade Forest iLvl 384 gear is easier said than done.  But I survived.  Now on to the next one, which I haven't decided yet between my Paladin, Shaman or Warlock.

Welcome to the stable Paddington Ravager.

     I was just browsing Petopia looking for some pets to tame to fill up these 50 slots that I have now.  I found a pretty good looking ravager that I thought might match my Dragonstalker transmog.  There is an orange and purple skin ravager, it's the ravagers that swarm Toshley's Station in Blades Edge Mountains every hour or so.  The actual name of the mob is the Gore-Scythe Ravager.  It was super convenient that my hunter just happens to be an engineer and had the transporter that sends me straight to Toshley's.  I actually only had to wait a few minutes.  I logged on the game about 5:45 and tamed at about 5:52.  Lucky me.

     So since this isn't technically a rare spawn, I had to actually think of a name.  I always name rare spawns whatever their actual name is to differentiate them from other non-rare pets that may have the same skin.  I threw around a couple names but they just weren't 'ravager' enough for me.  Then a totally random thought entered my head.  I remembered a cartoon I used to watch when I was a kid.  Paddington Bear.  I thought "Holy crap, what better name for a pet ravager than that of a living stuffed adorable teddy bear!"  And the rest is history.  And the colors aren't really a perfect match but it's definitely close enough to be pretty cool.

Taming Hutia

     So tonight I'm in Jade Forest leveling my mage and I'm getting ready to do the quest where I have to kill the sprites for the chunks of jade.  I see the porcupine spirit beast Hutia there chilling by the log.  Now this isn't the first time I've seen him there but I wasn't really interested in taming him before since my stable was all full.  But now, we're in patch 5.3 and hunters now have 50 stable slots!  So I figure what the heck, might as well try.  I log on to my hunter and make my way to Jade Forest.

     So after Googling the taming directions I realize I need to be specced into Silencing Shot, which I have on neither of my dual specs.  So now I'm hearthing, going back to Stormwind, buying Tome of the Clear Minds and respeccing.  I take the portal back to Pandaria and luckily he's still there waiting for me.  It took a while for me to get this guy because he will 2 shot most 90s, he hits like a truck traveling at mach 3.  After a while I got it down.  My 'Tell Me When' addon was super helpful.  I had it flash a huge unmissable icon whenever he tried to use his heal and I had my Silencing Shot keybound to my middle mouse button since this is usually where I bind all of my interrupts to.

     Basically the tame is as follows.  You pull Hutia and you are going to kite him around the log where he spawns at.  Concussive Shot and Frost Traps are your friend.  I had Aspect of the Cheetah on but make sure you don't get hit because that daze equals a short run back to your dead corpse.  On top of this you have to interrupt his Spirit Heal spell which heals 30% of his health.  Like I said, once I had the 'Tell Me When' icon set up, it made interrupting this pretty easy.  The 24 second cooldown on my Silencing Shot was short enough to interrupt every single heal so I didn't need any other moves.

     It took me a while to DPS Hutia down enough to where his untamable buff drops off since you have to be BM to tame, and a BM hunter without a pet out is pretty useless.  So I'm kiting him around the tree pretty much spamming Concussive Shot, Serpent Sting, Cobra Shot and Arcane Shot.  The buff finally drops off and so I make sure that I am far enough away from him so I can start the tame.  I give him one last Concussive Shot for the road and start spamming my tame button.  He gets off only one hit on me before the tame finishes, drains half my health, but I have another pretty spirit beast to add to my stable.

Baine Bloodhoof, I am sorry for your loss. You have my deepest condolences.

     So still making my way through 'The Shattering' novel.  Cairne has been killed by the treachery of Magatha Grimtotem, that bitch.  I just had to go and see Baine just to let him know how sorry I was that his father had to be taken from him in such an awful way.

     If you haven't read the book, I'll try not to spoil too much.  Let me start by saying that Christie Golden does a really good job writing her WoW novels.  I hear alot of negativity about Richard Knaak but I like everything that I've read of his also.  In 'The Shattering', the first half of the book has a lot of buildup of Cairne and pretty much how awesome of a guy he is.  So Cairne is pretty much the best thing since sliced bread.  Garrosh is portrayed as young and brash, but he still respects Cairne for the great leader that he is although they have more than one disagreement.

     After the slaughter of the druids in Ashenvale, Cairne pretty much flips his wig and blames Garrosh and challenges him to a duel (both Ashenvale attacks are actually Twilight's Hammer framing Garrosh).  Garrosh accepts, but only if it's to the death.  So long story short, Magatha asks to be the shaman that "blesses" Garrosh's weapon Gorehowl.  The stank ass cow blesses it with poison.  Cairne is pretty much kicking Hellscream's ass when he finally receives a flesh wound.  He instantly gets all messed up and out of it and Garrosh does his Mortal Kombat finishing move and almost cleaves the defenseless tauren in half.

     OK so that isn't even the last of it.  Once Cairne is dead, she has the Grimtotem clan attack Thunder Bluff and some surrounding towns and basically just murder everybody in their sleep.  How heroic of her.  Luckily, thanks to Stormsong, a Grimtotem with enough sense to realize that what these retards are doing is wrong, Baine escapes the purge with his life.

     The more I read about and play as Horde, the more I find myself gaining a new found respect for them.  Just as the Alliance in game, I myself have always hated them and just considered them as monsters and beasts.  If you take the time to see both sides of the story, you see that there is so much that you have been missing.  The tauren are a majestic and honorable people.  The orcs are a strong and proud people who live, laugh and love just like any human or dwarf.  I shudder to think how many cool stories and lore that I missed out on before the Cataclysm revamp of the old world.  Now I'll probably never know, but I plan to enjoy my time leveling though all the Horde content and gaining a new appreciation for these "monsters and beasts".

Brand New Darkmoon Eye!

     I was doing my Darkmoon profession weekly quests today.  I thought I would stop and try the pet battle daily.  I don't normally do it because it's so frustrating and his pets are such damn cheaters.  Especially that monkey, dammit do I hate that monkey.  I hate that monkey so much that just thinking about that stupid monkey sends me into a blind rage.  Well to make a long story short, I finally won the second time after he cheated me the first time and I got my first Darkmoon pet out of the bag.  It made fighting that cheating monkey worth it.  Ladies and Gentlemen, say hello to my Darkmoon Eye.