Is it Tuesday yet?

We are less than a month away from Mists of Pandaria, and there are only a couple of hours left until the patch hits the live servers. 

omg omg omg.

I'm super excited for all the changed happening, and a little scared/worried. A lot of things are changing in the next 36 hours, and we don't know yet if we're going to like it or not. New talents, new abilities, new glyphs, new rotations. And we have four weeks to get our shit together before we go out in and explore a whole new world.  

I don't know about you, but first thing I do when I log on Tuesday, is check out my achievements, mounts and pets. I'm anxious to know how many achievement points I have total across all my characters. I'd also like to work on having 100 mounts for the red dragonhawk, so then I'll see how many more I need. Same for the pets and the 125/150 achievements.

Then I'll have to work on updating my addons. Tomorrow will be dedicated to making a list of all the addons I use, and see which ones can be updated, removed completely or replaced with better addons. I want to wait to actually log on to see which addons are broken before starting.

Then, once my UI is stable, I will be spec'ing my characters and then running some (many) dungeons. I'm really anxious to test out my mage, hunter and shaman in particular. I will most likely try out all my max level characters throughout the next few weeks, though. Then, hopefully, I will be able to determine which character(s) I will be playing in MoP. All of them will be leveled to 90 eventually, if only for professions, but it might take a while. On my main server, I have 9 max level characters, to which will be added a monk very soon. I only hope all those changes will keep me busy enough that the next four weeks will go by a little more quickly. 

Anyone got any special plans for Tuesday, or the following days?

That patch better be really entertaining

I haven't posted in a while and this bugs me. But I haven't exactly been doing exciting stuff in game in the last week. It's only been farming and questing, doing dailies in TB and farming some more and then fishing, and then some more farming. After reading this post from the Godmother, I took my skinner shaman extraordinaire to Vashj'ir where she skinned her little troll heart out. I had been farming cloth in TB with the potion, but I hadn't done any other kind of farming. It was pretty fun, and I got lots of goodies. It was a real shark carnage.

There's still some stuff I want to get done by next tuesday. I want to farm some more herbs, ores, cloth and leather. I want to get my priest to 85 and max her professions. I want to do dailies on all my characters (there are two left, including the soon to be 85 priest) so I can turn them in first thing when I log online on September 25th. 

But I just can't bring myself to do it.

Real life is being weird lately. Mad and I decided to have a baby, so I stopped taking the pill a couple days ago and my body doesn't seem to like it one bit. I cry for stupid shit, I have sudden and terrible headaches and I'm just really really irritable. So hopefully, this changes soon and I can come back to normal. Because I hate being like this.

So lately everything in game feels like a chore, and I just have no patience for any of it. So I do nothing. I spend my evenings watching Fringe and stressing about the fact that the priest will never be ready on time. But I just don't especially enjoy questing as a shadowpriest, and I can't even queue for dungeons yet. So I gather herbs and ores and level very slowly. I hope the patch will bring back some interest for the game, because I just feel really bored with it right now.

In the meantime, Mad and I plan on playing some Diablo3 together this weekend, because I still haven't tried it and I want to play a game with him. (He gave up on the rogue he was supposed to level with me on my priest -.- ) I was excited for D3 when I first heard of it, but then it came out and I was busy with WoW and just never installed it. I guess now is the best time to do just that.

Many yellow dots, handle it!

Look at all the shiny pretties.

The last week has been pretty productive in many ways. 

My priest is now level 69. Mad and I chain-dungeon'd our way to 68, then went questing in Borean Tundra for a while. Now that we can queue for UK, it's back to the dungeons! I loved the Outlands dungeons, but at 68, all you can get is Sethekk Halls or Old Hillsbrad, so we decided it would be faster to just quest a little. 

I've also picked her professions. I hesitated a lot, thinking I might make her my second tailor, and fourth alchemist, but then I read these posts over at Just my two copper, and decided I didn't need a second tailor, but should definitely consider making a "pure gatherer" character. At first, I didn't want my priest to be a miner and an herbalist, as I prefer my druid for herbalism and my paladin for mining (for flying form and crusader aura respectively), but it just made so much sense to have both professions on one toon, for faster farming, that I did just that. 

Leveling mining and herbalism at the same time is both awesome and overwhelming. It's nice to see all those yellow dots all over the place on your mini-map, but I was always afraid I'd miss some. At some point I decided to just stick to the routes I found on WoW-Professions, and not just follow all the yellow dots in random directions. I've leveled both professions pretty fast, and it's been fun, but now I want to wait for level 70 so I can buy a faster flying and speed up the process of gathering in Outlands and Northrend. Slow mounts are slow.

I've also cleaned out the transmog tabs of the guild bank and was able to reduce it down to one tab. The rest as been sold, disenchanted or is in my bank alt's bags, waiting to be put on the Auction House. With the ores and herbs I've gathered, I've been able to help Mad with his engineering, stockpile enough herbs to level alchemy on my future monk, and put aside enough ores and herbs in the guild bank for future glyph needs, or simply to put on the Auction House once MoP is here. I also have a tab full of various cloths, which will be used to make bags for all the new pandas, and also to be put on the Auction House in a couple weeks. Hopefully, I can make a decent amount of gold out of it.

I want to try and finish everything before September, so that I can have at least three weeks free of any farming or questing before we start all over again with the gathering and questing and grinding in MoP. 

Which leaves me about three weeks to get my priest to 85, max her professions, gather everything needed for various professions (For my monk's and a few of Mad's characters. Because he's such a slacker when it comes to his professions.) and max my warrior's fishing (because I'm also a slacker).

Hopefully by then the patch will be live and we'll have some new things to play with while we wait for the pandas. I'm hoping the patch hits either on the 21st or the 28th, more or less a month before the expansion. After that there will be much messing around with the new talents, figuring out how to spec each of my toons, and explore all the new changes. I expect there will be some last minute stuff to be done, like squeezing in some quick achievements, hunting down a few more pets, grinding for a few more mounts, or updating addons and such. And that's fine.

Favourite Transmog Sets : Death Knight Edition

My Death Knight is one of my favourite alts. She makes farming dungeons a breeze, with her Howling Blast of doom. I also enjoy player dress-up with her, even though she doesn't like it all that much. 

Like a lot of people, I'm fond of the class' starter gear, which can be bought back in Ebon Hold, but I wanted to use some more fancy gear sets for her. I was able to get my hands on one set of each color (blue, red and  green, for all three of the Death Knight's specs.) and even a second blue one. They might not be very original, but I love these sets nonetheless.

Blood

This set is, by far, my favourite. It is the DK's tier 12 set. I got it while I was raiding in Firelands, what feels like a lifetime ago. The boots drops in Firelands or can be crafted, and the belt can be bought for gold at honored reputation with the Avengers of Hyjal. Although the boots are Bind on Equip, so you might be able to grab them on the Auction House. Here, I am using two heroic Obsidium Cleaver.

Even though I don't have a blood spec at the moment, I do like to sport this set when I dps. I use the Hellscream's Reach Tabard (which can be bought with 40 Tol Barad Commendations when you reach honored reputation with the faction) simply because I think the colors match really well together.

Unholy

This one is my latest "acquisition". I had most of the pieces since my time in Firelands. Having six bosses on heroic mode on farm for a while, I was able to upgrade most of my gear to heroic versions of the previous set, except for the chest. I thought I had deleted it by accident, but no, I just never got the token off Alysrazor. So I went to the Auction House to find something to match this color. The Adamantite Breastplate looked perfect, but was a bit too expensive for my taste, so I farmed the ore and the primals myself, and had my blacksmith craft it. 

For the belt, I used the Acherus Knight's Girdle, which is invisible. It saved me the trouble of finding one that matched, as there are no existing belt for this particular set. The heroic version of the boots does exist however, and drops off Beth'tilac. Unlike the normal version, the heroic ones are not Bind on Equip. 

Her two-hander mace, which can't be seen well on the above picture, is the Pit Lord's Destroyer. 

Frost

This set is the first set I ever "created" for my DK. It is mostly the DK's tier 11 set, with Pauldrons of the Great Ettin (which are a warrior tier shoulders lookalike, I believe), Belt of the Ferocious Wolf, and Woe Breeder's Boots. It was the first set my DK used, and I like the feel of it. I use the Frostwolf  Battle Tabard with, because I love the colors. I want to eventually get the tier shoulders, since they would fit a lot better, but I lack the motivation to go back in Bastion of Twilight to try to get it.

Frost 2.0

Last but not least is gear from Dragon Soul, tier 13. I didn't like this set all that much at first, but it grew on me. Here I am using mostly pieces from the normal version, except for the belt and gloves, which are from the Raid Finder, and the boots were bought with Valor Points. Her weapons here are two Hand of Morchok.

There are a couple other plate sets I love, but I use them on my paladin. 

But that is for another post.

25 slots is not enough

I read this post today on Lae's blog and for a second, I had a "oh shit!" moment. My hunter's stable is pretty much full at the moment, with twenty-one pets total, which leaves only 4 slots for new ones. I even have a whole page for my pets. But with the pandas are coming a shitload of new skins and brand new types of pet you can tame, with only 25 slots available, and my first thought was : I'm so screwed.

Something had to be done.

I have all nine spirit beasts in my collection, and there is no way in a million years I'm letting any one of them go. I also have a couple rares I'm very fond of, which I will be keeping as well :

Terrorpene

Deth'tilac

Sambas

So that makes 12 pets I absolutely want to keep. Which leaves 13 spots. 8 of those were already occupied, so I went and tried to see if I couldn't get rid of some of them. I came up with the following:

- The wolf that hasn't see the light of day in months (if not years) has to go. 

- Same with the rare blue Fox from Loch Modan. It's on a 90 minutes cooldown, so if I ever change my mind, it wouldn't be too painful to get it again. 

- The bear I used to keep as a pocket tank can also be abandoned. Since in MoP we can turn any pet into a tank, I can use another model for this task. (Arcturis or Terrorpeme comes to mind.)

- The purple-ish cat from Winterspring (the one that matches the Alliance Wintrerspring mount) has to go as well. 

- The Core Hound gets to stay, if only for the ghetto Bloodlust.

- The dragonhawk can stay too, in case we need the +8% spell damage debuff.

- Same for the Devilsaur and his 5% crit buff. Unlike the wolf, I really love my devilsaur. I don't use it a lot because I usually take Loque'Nahak when I play BM, but I love him too much to actually abandon him.

The only pet I'm keeping only for sentimental value is Humar the Pridelord.

Back when my boyfriend Mad still had a hunter, he had only one pet, and it was Humar the Pridelord. Back in BC, he camped this rare for days before he finally got lucky enough to not get it stolen or killed before he could tame it. When Mad deleted his hunter a while back, I went and tamed Humar. I even named him Leonidas, just like Mad had named his. So unless I really have to, I won't be abandoning this pet.

Which leaves me with sixteen pets, and nine available slots for future companions.

Thanks to Petopia, I've been able to determine that when MoP is released, I will need to tame a Quillen, because they will let us resurrect dead players in combat, which could really come in handy. I might get a Water Strider too, for his Water Walking ability, and for his Spell Power buff.

I also want a goat, just because they are so frickin' adorable. 

Image from Petopia

And I must get this cat model, because it just looks too damn cool : 

Image from Petopia

I think it's a rare model, but I don't care. I must have it. At the very least, I will try to get another Siberian Tiger, in a different colour, like the black one perhaps.

If I ever raid as a hunter, I will try and get more pets that offer useful buffs and debuffs, but until then, I will tame rare and/or pretty pets, because that's just what I do.

Nothing exciting here

I don't have much to talk about lately, mostly because I don't do anything particularly exciting. I've been running Karazhan to try and finish my mage's tier 4 set, with no luck so far. I managed to bug the mount boss, so that was stupid. I will be going back this week, and hopefully not fuck it up again. I've also been leveling a priest, to play with Mad's rogue. We'll be starting Outlands soon, which I always find fun. Healing Outlands dungeons is something I enjoy a lot. Except for Ramps. Because that's all you get for what feels like forever. 

the Priest and her own little
Personal World Destroyer.

And of course, I've been doing some more bank/bags/guildbank cleaning, and selling stuff on the Auction House. I have way more stuff than I thought, and I'm making some profit out of it. I still haven't touched the "transmog" part of the guildbank (two tabs), as I want to make sure Mad and I don't need any piece before I start selling it all away. 

I want to be as ready as possible for the new expansion, but that is hard to do, since I also want to remain as spoiler free as possible. I'm sitting on a nice amount of gold, and I got some nice starter kit for my future monk, stashed away on a toon I will delete afterwards (enough gold to learn professions and buy all bank slots with some extra, eleven bags, agility and intellect leather heirlooms, lots of different kinds of cloth for a nice first aid boost, a skinning knife for her skinning profession, a fishing pole, some lures, and some transmog gear. I haven't decided on her second profession yet.) Apart from farming stuff for gold and hunting transmog items, I'm pretty much done with the stuff I wanted to get done before the end of Cataclysm. Now we play the waiting game.

In other news, yesterday, it was announced that Star Wars : the Old Republic will have a free to play option starting in November, and that really makes me happy. I really enjoyed playing Swtor for a couple months, but it wasn't WoW, and I ended up not even logging on for weeks at a time, so I didn't feel like paying for a game I wasn't even playing. So this news really is awesome to me. Of course, we'll get limited access to a bunch of stuff, like the dungeons and PvP stuff, but that's fine. We also won't be able to raid, as that is reserved for people who pay their 15 bucks a month. I guess to the people who are already playing and paying, it's not such a good thing. I feel for them, but it will allow me to play a game I love. I really enjoyed the leveling experience. The class stories are really fun, and I kinda miss it. I don't even want to raid, or do the dungeons, or PvP. I'd even be happy just playing it as a single player game, without access to the auction house or group quests or anything like that whatsoever. It really is a great game. Just not enough to justify paying 15 bucks a month, in my opinion. Your mileage may vary.