Scenario Night

Tonight was scenario night for me. When I read about Greater Cache of Treasures being awarded each time you complete a random scenario (and not just once per day), and that they could sometimes contain epic gear, I decided to give it another try. I say another try because the first time I tried scenarios, I didn't like it.  But this time around, I'm enjoying them quite a lot. They're pretty addictive, actually. I managed to get quite a few achievements in a couple hours, and it was a lot of fun. Next Saturday, I think the boyfriend and I will try to knock as many scenarios as possible, both for gear and more achievements. And maybe even a title!

I did score some useless blue items and even epic bracers! That gave my mage an item level of 467, one step closer to being able to queue for the Heart of Fear and Terrace of Endless Spring in the Raid Finder. I bought the serpent's deck for her for 8k the other day, which I thought was probably a bargain, considering buying the cards would have been more expensive, and I'm too lazy to farm mats/trade cards. Now I just need the Darkmoon Faire to get here so I can turn it into a nice trinket. With the neck I'll buy off the Klaxxi's next Tuesday, I think I'll be all set!

The Not Golden Hopling

A couple days ago, I read this post over at Big Bear Butt's blog. I always enjoy BBB's posts, but this one particularly intrigued me. I had no idea there were hidden things in the Stormstout Brewery. I guess that means I suck at exploring. That's ok, I'm good at other things. But after reading the post, I absolutely had to go in this particular dungeon and try it out for myself. I had to wait until just now for that to happen. I've been busy, what do you want from me.

As I zoned in the dungeon, I spoke to the lady standing right next to the portal and purchased five Ling-Ting's favourite tea. I waited until the dungeon was done, for all the bosses and trash packs to be cleared, and then I drank the tea and started looking.

I soon found my first of 30 Golden Hopling. It took me about 15-20 minutes to find them all. (Only reason I know is because the debuff granted by the tea only lasts 5 minutes and I had to use at least three teas. Maybe more.) I don't know what that says about me. The last one was cleverly hidden behind Uncle Gao's bar, or whatever that is he's standing behind in the last room. About midway through, it occurred to me that it might have been a good idea to count the Hoplings I found in order to know how much more I needed. Heh.

As soon as I got the achievement, I received some in-game mail!

BoP, of course.

 And I had a new companion pet to add to my collection!

How does searching for "hop" result in
Celestial Dragon and Stinker? /boggles

It's a blue quality humanoid pet, same model as the Feral Vermling, but in a different color. It was a very fun little "mini-game" and I wish Blizz put more of those things in game. Then again, maybe they do and I just don't know about them! This expansion is just full of surprises. 

Fun with the Anglers

This is so much cooler than water walking.

I've always been a big fan of fishing in WoW. Most of my characters have their fishing skill maxed out by the time they reach the level cap. I enjoyed it even back when your casts could miss 20 times in a row if your skill was too low for the zone you were in, and your fish could escape more often than realistically possible. That was also back when you needed to fish between 12 and 20 (if memory serves) to get one lousy skill point. Granted, I enjoyed it less than I do now.

Nowadays, fishing is easy and fun to level. One of the new Pandaria factions, the Anglers, offers three dailies  (from a larger pool of quests) that are quick and easy to complete. Once you do every quests at least once, you are granted an achievement.

The best part is that every daily gives a fishing skill point. If you aren't in a hurry to max out fishing, this seems like the perfect way to get more players to enjoy this profession. Once you are honored with the Anglers, you can buy a companion pet and a fishing pole. At revered, you get access to an even better fishing pole, as well as the raft shown above. For classes that don't have the luxury of a water walking ability, the raft really is an amazing item. Pools that were once out of reach from the shore suddenly become a lot less annoying. And at exalted, you get a nice tabard and a cool mount!

Those are all incentive to work on raising your reputation with this faction, if only to get the mount. Leveling fishing as never been so easy and fun, and I am grateful to Blizz for giving some love to this profession, it really needed it!

Quick Post : Tailoring Surprise

When I went to the Silken Fields to use my Imperial Silk daily cooldown, I was surprised to notice the icon had changed.

Instead of the Imperial Silk icon is now one of a cocoon!

When I opened the cocoon, there was an Imperial Silk in it,
but there was also and Imperial Silkworm! 

As you can see, this companion is NOT bound on pick up. 

I learned it this time, but subsequent Silkworms just might
 find their way to the closest Auction House!

This is a good day for altoholics

When I logged on today after the maintenance, the first thing I did was to visit the Tillers Quartermaster and purchase the commendation.

It costs 40 at exalted.

Then, I went to harvest my twelve songbells of the day.

The (+55.0 bonus) is a nice touch.

Harvesting now grants double the reputation, which is a nice boost, considering twelve times 110 rep equals 1320. which is more than what you get for doing ten Golden Lotus dailies. And that is not counting the dailies.

Yes, this'll do.

Each Tillers daily now grants 770 rep a pop, so with five dailies, it means you can get up to 5170 reputation each day with harvesting and dailies combined! This means that it is possible to go from revered to exalted in about four to five days. And that doesn't take into account the various quests you can get from the farmers as you gain with reputation with them as well, or the "<insert NPC name here>'s vote" quest you do as you gain more reputation with the Tillers faction. My characters benefit from the Mr. Popularity guild perk though, so your mileage may vary.

Of course, to be able to buy the commendation, you need to have at least one character at revered with a Pandaria faction. But it does mean that once you get there at least once with each reputation, doing it again on an alt (or more) will be twice as quick, and the last stretch from revered to exalted will be a lot less painful than ever before. I believe this is a great way to reward players with an altoholic tendency, and a convincing incentive to do dailies on more than one character. The Order of the Cloud Serpent is a great example of this, as you cannot use the mounts on alts once one of your characters reaches exalted with this faction. With this commendation system, it is now a lot easier to get your pretty dragon mounts on multiple characters!

For someone like me, with 10+ characters, this is very good stuff.

Thoughts on Patch 5.1

According to MMO-Champion, the Patch 5.1 is coming live this week (in a couple hours, really) and I wanted to highlight some things I'm excited about. Complete patch notes can be found here. My comments are in red. 

Classes

•  Hunter 
  • Aspect of the Fox has been removed.
  • Steady Shot, Cobra Shot, and Barrage can now always be cast on the move.
  I very rarely ever used Aspect of the Fox because I suck. I usually spam Arcane Shot when I'm moving, so this change is really awesome. 
   Monk (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
• The Tiger Power provided by Tiger Palm now reduces target armor by 30% with a single application and no longer stacks.

Not a big change, but if the buff ever drops, it'll take 2 less GCDs to apply it back.

Pet Battles

• A new item has been introduced that can be used to upgrade the quality of Battle Pets: Battle-stones. I have some uncommon quality pets who are really happy about this. 
  
• Pet Journal
  • Pets can now be filtered by name, type, rarity and level, and filters will remain in place each time the Pet Journal is viewed.
  • It is now possible to search locations in the Pet Journal. For example, searching “Westfall” will display all the Battle Pets that can be found in Westfall.
• Battle Pet tooltips will now display whether a pet is owned, and how many pets of that type are owned.
• Pet Quality is now displayed in battles, and will be visible on portraits, names and tooltips.
• The level of battle pets in a zone can now be seen on the map, and it’s now possible to see the strength of wild pets relative to your team at a glance.

Until now, I needed addons to do most of this. And have Warcraft Pets open on my second monitor. This will save a lot of time and effort!  

Raids, Dungeons and Scenarios

• Raid groups are no longer necessary to enter pre-Mists of Pandara raid dungeons. Enemies in these raids that previously required more than one player to defeat are now more easily dealt with by players battling alone.

Wonder how much easier these raids will be. The fact that we won't need to bother friends or guildies to form a raid just to enter raids is a nice plus.

These are only a portion of all the things that are coming tomorrow, so you should definitely read the complete patch notes. It's nice to be getting a patch so quickly after the new expansion's launch (almost exactly two months later, I think this might be a new record!) bringing so much quality of life improvements. 

I'm a bit worried though that I didn't see anything about reputations in those patch notes. I thought I had read somewhere that with patch 5.1 were coming new items you could buy once you hit revered with a faction that made gaining rep on all your characters easier. Maybe I'm mistaken, or maybe I missed them. Either way, fingers crossed!

Mage's first Panda raid

The mage hit revered with the Tillers today, so she started planting some Songbell Seeds to harvest Motes of Harmony! This is my third character farming Motes, which means I can get more Golden Lotus for transmutes, and that maybe I can start getting some Trilium ore and (re)start using my Living Steel cooldown every day. Not that I really need Living Steel at the moment, but it will come handy at some point to be able to craft Belt Buckles if I ever start raiding again.

Speaking of which, I have taken the mage in Mogu'shan Vaults over the weekend (the Raid Finder version)  and I still don't really enjoy it all that much. The Spirit King is kinda fun, with all the shit there is to dodge, and Will of the Emperor is chaotic enough to keep me on my toes. But the other bosses aren't exactly exciting. To me, anyway. Your mileage may vary. My dps was meh, but some of her gear isn't reforged or properly gemmed/enchanted. I know, this is terrible, and I would never go into an actual raid like this, but like they all say: "It's LFR, no one cares." But I didn't do as bad as I thought, even as frost. I tried to go fire but hated it with a passion. I've never been a big fan of fire, and while I did go fire for the better part of Dragon Soul, I didn't like it. Frost is a lot more fun, even more fun than arcane that I used to love like crazy. I picked Invocation as my last tier's talent point, and I run out of mana so fast, it's not even funny. Since it makes Evocation's cooldown only 10 seconds, it's not all that bad, but I don't like having to stop and use it 4 or 5 times in a raid fight.Then again, Rune of Power probably wouldn't be that much better, since I'd have to recast it everytime I have to move. I remember in Dragon Soul, especially on Madness of Deathwing, I had to use my mana gems and Evocation on cooldown, but it feels even worse now, on every fight. It seems it's just a thing we have to deal with now. Until we get better gear, I suppose.

I do enjoy playing my mage though, and the both groups I got in LFR this weekend were relatively good. In total, we've wiped only once on the last boss, Will of the Emperor, because the tank died early and lots of dps died before we could get him back up. I got some gloves I didn't need, and only got gold for every other boss. I have everything I need to craft an epic robe, but I'm waiting until I run MSV again tomorrow after the reset. I would really hate to craft something and replace it the same day. If it can last me at least a week, it's a bit more worth the mats.

Quick Post : Monk Awesomness

The bf and I used to play our monks together, but he completely lost interest in the class, so I can now level mine on my own. Our monks were level 48 when Mad decided he didn't wanna play his anymore, and now my little panda lady is level 60! I kinda enjoy the playstyle, now that I have most of my abilities. Handling the chi can be a bit tricky, but mobs die so fast, it's hard to tell what it's really supposed to be like.

First thing I did when my monk hit 60 today was to buy my flight license in Orgrimmar. Then, I picked up herbalism and mining and headed for Durotar.

Just as I had hoped, picking flowers and mining ore did not dismount me. (Even using my Hearthstone didn't!) Up until now, my rogue and druid were my dedicated herbalists, while my paladin was my miner. I also had my priest as my gatherer toon, which means she could both mine and herb, but I had absolutely no interest in leveling her aside for her professions. 

So now I have my solution. The monk is officially my new gatherer character!

Edit: It seems though that the Zen Flight is a lot slower than other actual flying mounts. I'll have to check it out further to see what's the deal with this.

I am the worst blogger ever

It's been way too long since I last posted (over three weeks!), and I feel guilty about it. Time to change that!

The month of November hasn't been all that good to me so far, and lots of crap happened, preventing me from enjoying anything or even thinking about blogging. WoW is my constant companion, and I have been playing as much as I normally do, but my state of mind wasn't good at all, which resulted in me saying: "screw this!" each time I tried to sit down and write, or just try to pick a toon to play. I normally have trouble making decisions, but it's been worse these past few weeks. 

I finally sent my warrior over to Rexxar, and now my alliance mage is now all decked out in heirlooms. She made it to 70, and then I didn't feel like playing her. She's in an awesome guild, with awesome people that I really like, and I will play there more regularly once my brains stops being a bitch. Which will be soon, hopefully.

On the Horde front, I finally played my mage long enough for her to hit 90 last weekend, which made me a tiny bit happy. I have been doing dailies on her ever since and am now trying to gear her up for the raid finder. I didn't enjoy Mogu'shan vault all that much on my hunter, but maybe I will enjoy it more once I take my favourite character. By Saturday the mage should be honored with the Golden Lotus and have enough Valor Points to buy a ring from them. She will also be able to get patterns for some gorgeous crafted gear such as the Spelltwister's Grand Robe, which should grant me the last point I need to reach 460 item level. Then I will need to get another 1250 VP to buy the neck off the Klaxxi. After that, I'll need some luck and some Elder Charms of Good Fortune to try and score enough gear to be able to run the Heart of Fear on the Raid Finder. It's the first time in a while that I feel I have a real goal in mind and it feels good.