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.

Welcome to the 90 Club Death Knight!

     Congratulations newest 90.  Now that you have hit the level cap you can join the rotation of old raid soloing.  You must now do your part to collect our battle pets and cool looking transmogrification gear.  You must always look your best.  We at Daggerspine appreciate the hard work and effort you have given us so far.  You also have the added benefit of being a Death Knight so you can solo things that others cannot.  This is why we value your dedication.  So get in there to Tempest Keep and Serpent Shrine Cavern.  Walk bravely into Naxxramas and Icecrown Citadel with your head held high knowing that you can now pwn everybody's face.  Step into those Cataclysm heroics knowing that you will come out unscathed.  You are Death Knight, let's hear you roar.

The Unknown Soldier

     The other day, I was headed to clear Karazhan on my hunter when my NPC Scan went off.  It was a rare spawn named "The Unknown Soldier".  This immediately caught my attention since this is a reference to the actual unknown soldier tomb in Arlington Cemetary.  I was intrigued since I myself was in the military.

     One thing that is pretty cool about the place he spawns is that it looks like the area was actually built for him and him alone.  It is a really remote place in Duskwood that you would probably never see unless you were looking for it.  He is found kneeling over what I presume is his own grave, standing a silent vigil.  It's a really pretty area as well, complete with a waterfall and small stream running through it.  After exploring a little I found that this little nook is located right behind Abercrombie's tower to the northeast, through a gateway and up a hill.  He is the quest giver that gives the quests leading up to Stitches attacking Darkshire.  

     He was apparently an Alliance soldier in his past life as he is wearing level 60 Alliance PVP armor.  He has a vrykul model with a skeletal skin.  Very cool looking.  Well done Blizzard, once again you have impressed me with your attention to detail and your real world references.  Continue your awesomeness forever please.  Thanks.

The Super Splendid and Spectacular Shamanistic Sex Change.

     So this week Blizzard is having a 50% off sale on all of their account services.  The options were endless and I could have very easily broke the bank.  Willpower won out in the end, and I narrowed down the things I wanted to do to just one.  I turned my shaman to a man!  This is what she used to look like.

     I will definitely miss her.  The main reason I made the decision was pretty much that Cataclysm tier set looks better on males.  Bigger shoulders just look cool and male draenei have some of the biggest shoulder models.  I don't think they have the biggest, I would say that distinction probably belongs to orcs or tauren.  I don't have the whole complete Cataclysm set yet but will start farming it when I hit 90 what with the recent nerf to Serpent Shrine Cavern and the addition of new battle pets in there with the 5.3 patch.  So Kallista, formerly known as Angilyque, will now be known as Tyrionn.

     I first tried Kallisto but it had been taken already.  So I went with the Game of Thrones reference.  The girl shaman was way hotter but now I have big shoulders and it only set me back $7.50.  Not too shabby.

Meeting Eitrigg

So I'm finally getting around to reading The Shattering novel.  One of the great things about the Warcraft novels is the fact that you can actual go and visit these characters in the game.  I'm very new to the Horde side of the game so I'm not as familiar with their towns and cities as I am the Alliance locations.  It's almost like playing an entire new game.  So I'm tooling around Orgrimmar (this place is so confusing to me).  I go in to Grommash Hold to check out Garrosh to berate him for being such a huge douchebag.  Then I get my first in-game glimpse of Eitrigg.  He is Thrall's most trusted advisor at the beginning of the novel while he is still Warchief.  I'm only in the first few chapters so Garrosh is not warchief, and has not killed Cairne yet.  As a lifetime Alliance player, I've never had the chance to just walk around and explore these places without being instantaneously one-shot by guards and players alike.  I'm sure I will see many other familiar faces in my travels through the Horde quest lore of Azeroth.

Toon introductions: Anjelique the Warrior

     Aaah my warrior.  She will always have a special place in my heart since she was my first character on Daggerspine.  My first 60.  My first 70.  My first 85 and my first 90.  (I leveled my mage first during Wrath of the Lich King since I was raiding with her at the time.)

     One thing some may be curious about is why all my toons have the same name spelled differently.  My first wife's name was Angelique.  I named my toons after her thinking it would make her less mad that I was playing the game and maybe to actually get her to play with me.  That plan failed miserably on both accounts.  Any toon not named after her was created after the divorce with the exception of my Shaman.  My current wife paid for a name change back when she actually played the game with me, for reasons that should be obvious.

   So back to my warrior.  This toon actually raided MC when it was current content so she has been around.  I don't raid much.  In fact, until the addition of raid finder, I have never beaten the last boss of an expansion while it was still current content.  This is the toon that did it.  My mighty warrior stared the fallen Aspect of Earth in the eyes and struck the mighty behemoth down!  I don't know if it will ever happen again. End game stuff is just too time consuming for me.  I like to have fun while I'm playing so I stick to doing solo quests and doing old school raids for fun and transmog loots, mounts and legendaries as well as pet battling.

     My warrior and I have been though alot together.  She has the most /played of any of my toons.  Has done the most quests, got the most gold, had the most achievements up until they made them account wide.  She's just been around.  I would definitely not say that warrior is my favorite class to play in-game as there are others that I enjoy more, but I would say that she is my favorite toon and probably always will be due to sentimental reasons.

No friends that play WoW? Just talk to yourself about it...on your brand new blog!

     Hello anybody who must be super bored and is actually here reading this.  I love World of Warcraft.  Nobody else that I know in real life plays.  This fact sucks.  So I have decided to just talk to myself about it. I will post anything that is interesting to me on this page and it will also serve as a running history of my wonderful Warcraft experiences.

     Just on the odd chance somebody cares, I shall share my WoW history up to this date.  I have been playing since November of 2004.  I didn't buy it the day it came out or anything but a Navy buddy of mine got me started after he started so for all intents and purposes, I have been playing pretty much since the game came out.  I have only played Alliance until recently.  I now have 11 toons, all Alliance, on Daggerspine (PVP) one of each class.  At the time of this posting, I have 5 level 90s and my Death Knight who is 89 and close.  The rest are 85+ except for my Monk, who is still a lowbie since he was just made this expansion.  Over the years, playing on a PVP server, I have grown an INTENSE hatred for Horde.  But now that I have actually done a few quests and learned some of their history by reading the Warcraft novels and such, I realized one thing.  It's not the Horde that is the problem, it is the huge dickheads and douchebags that are playing the Horde toons.  I'm sure if I had "grown up" playing Horde on a PVP server then I would probably hate Alliance players just as much.  So don't hate the toon that is ganking you, hate the stupid, puke swilling jerkoff that is playing the toon ganking you.

     I have a really good WoW friend in game.  He has a guild on Darrowmere which is a PVE server.  All the fun of World of Warcraft without all the stress and griefing.  He is the one who gave me the idea of making some Horde toons and he would park me by all the grand master pet battle trainers who reward bags for their dailies using his passenger mount.  This is how it started, but then I got the itch, so then I thought why not, and I made 11 toons on that server too, one of each class.  I've actually even sunk a good amount of time in to some of them.  And hey, it wouldn't hurt to get at least one of them to 90 for the Double Agent achievement!  I have always been curious about the Horde side of things but never bothered because my Alliance toons took up so much of my time.  But why not find out a little bit more about the amazing lore that this game contains.  Remember, other than Garrosh, who is a huge dick, the Hordies aren't that bad.