You had me at "zug-zug"

Mad and Lyr, ready to kick some ass.

During the holidays, the BF and I enjoy creating new alts and playing them casually. This year, we picked a prot warrior and a resto shaman. Mad wanted to make an Orc warrior, like the one he used to play back in BC. So I decided to create an orc as well, something I've never done before. I must admit I'm starting to grow pretty fond of her. I already have two shamans, but I never get tired of leveling new ones. It's my favourite class to level, and I lost count of all the shamans I rolled throughout my WoW career. This is my first orc one, though.

Since I have no room left on our main server for new characters, I had to create her over on Rexxar, since all my heirlooms are there. (This might be the only useful thing about CRZ's, being able to quest with people from different servers.) Apparently though, when I shipped my heirlooms over, I didn't think I'd roll a resto shamy, because the mail caster items are the only ones I didn't send. Which is why my poor orc lady has to wear leather heirlooms. Oh, the shame.

Please disregard the leather heirloom pants.

After three days of playing on and off, our little duo is now level 43. Mad likes to tank by aggroing huge groups of mobs and keep running to get more like his life depended on it. Fortunately, I'm the one healing him, and most of the times, all I have to do is keep Earth Shield up on him and throw a couple Riptides from time to time. It makes for pretty smooth, quick dungeon runs, and lots of fast xp. It's been a lot of fun, but playing with my boyfriend always is!

Mad and Lyr morphed into gnomes,
being naughty by the Christmas tree.

What I've been up to

I have a cold, so my thoughts might be just a tad incoherent. So please just bear with me. 

Alright, here goes.

The shaman has been diligently doing her dailies every day ever since she hit 90 over a week ago. Although, she's only been working on two factions so far. She's been working on the Tillers since day 1, and she is now almost exalted with the farmers. She's got 12 spots available, and she's been gathering motes of harmony in  the hopes of someday being able to craft some gear for the hunter and/or rogue. Which brings me to the second faction, the Golden Lotus. You only need to reach honored to buy the leatherworking recipes, which is only a week worth of dailies. I didn't start those dailies until last Sunday though, so by next weekend, I should be done with them. And it's been a bit painful. I love the Tillers and the cooking dailies. I really do. Even when there are no untapped mobs available and that other people steal quest items right from under me. It's still fun. But the Golden Lotus dailies very much feel like a chore. There's just too many people there, being rude, stealing from each other, shoving mobs your way on purpose to make you die. And for a miserable 110 rep per quest. I can't wait to be done with it, and am very happy that I'm not raiding, because I know it would be a lot worse. Then again, maybe I just suck that much at elemental shamy and that's why I have no fun doing those quests. I'm not even doing heroics or scenarios or any of that with her. I do dailies, I mess around at the farm, and then I log on alts.

The hunter has made good progress this week and is now level 89. She should hit 90 in a day or two, as I have almost a full level in rested XP. The dk is almost 86 just by farming motes of harmony for Engineering, as well as raw meats for my cooking needs. My mage is still sitting at 87 in Halfhill, only sometimes bothering to plant some seeds when needed for other characters' needs. I still want to get her to 90 at some point, if only to finish Archaeology and work on the Lorewalkers rep, but I just don't feel like playing her right now. I'm having way too much fun with the hunter finishing up the Pandaria Loremaster. I tamed a goat last night, and she is now my favourite pet of all.

I also bought a yak mount from Uncle Bigpocket in
Kun-Lai Summit. So adorable!

I've also spent way too much time indulging in pet battles. I didn't think I'd like it so much, but it's surprisingly addictive and fun. It took me a while to pick my three favourite pets, but I'm pretty happy with my team.

I'm terribad and haven't named them yet, but I find it hard to pick names. Chuck will remain Chuck, because he already has a name, duh, but the other two, I'm still trying to find the perfect name for them. Once I tried the pet battles, I looked up the achievements related to it, and decided that I must get them all! Yeah, that'll take a while. I've also made a list of all the pets I want to cage, and it's a pretty long list. But they're all so adorable. I don't think I'll ever get them all, or even reach 400 pets for the achievement, but I think I can make it to 250 easily.

I haven't had so much to do in game in ages, and I'm really trying to take it slow to make it last as long as possible. And with all the things I want to get done, making it last a long time won't be a problem!

Quick Post : Engineering is the best profession.

The lock hit level 60 today, and was able to start using this beauty. You know you want one.

The plan is to have the lock hit 75 before next month's Darkmoon Faire. 15 more levels to go, and 12 days left. This could actually be doable. Although tomorrow I'm taking a break from the Warlock to work on the shaman with the boyfriend. And then more heroic grinding to gear her up for the raid finder. So much to do! But since we still have no news about MoP's release date, I figure that once I'm done with all the things I want to do, I'll still have some time to take some kind of break from WoW before the "must-level-all-the-characters-to-90" begins.

Until then, I still have a shitload of stuff to do. But still. I'd prefer to know when Mists is coming so I can plan accordingly. And I'm impatient as fuck.

Quick Post : I did it.

For the first time ever, I have a level 41 warlock. This has never happened before. All the warlocks I've ever rolled before got deleted at level 40, as I always lose interest after I get the fiery pony from hell.

But not this time. Her professions are way too high for me to just delete her on a whim. I had planned on waiting on MoP to level her further, but screw that. I'm gonna take her as far as I can before the next expansion. Because I can. And because I got nothing else to level. It's either that or I start a priest. So yeah. Ima stick to the warlock. Go me.

Turtles, sharks and dragons.

I've been waiting forever for the bf to finally have time to sit down and level his dk to 80 (because I'm impatient and leveled my shaman without him for a while), so that we could start the Cataclysm zones together and eventually reach 85. He was level 72 when he started, and painfully made it to 74 the first night. Then he skipped a day, saying that Northrend was boring, and promised to make more levels the next day. Once he reached level 77, yet again painfully, I was way too impatient to wait yet another day. So while he was napping, I logged onto his account and went questing in Sholazar Basin. Less than two hours later, he was level 79. He woke up, logged back onto his account, and gleefully did some random dungeons until he hit 80.

And then we went to Vashj'ir. We had decided to skip Hyjal this time, mostly because I had just done it on the pally and didn't feel like doing it yet again, but more importantly because we had never finished the zone before. Back in december 2010, when Cata had just launched, we did half the zone before quitting, for many reasons. (It's not enough that I often get lost horizontally, in Vashj'ir, you can get lost vertically?!?) So we went there, and were mostly alone the whole time. 

Some sharks try to eat you...

...and some let you surf on their back!

It was a lot of fun to see some new quests, and some of them are pretty fun. I particularly enjoyed riding a shark and eating Nagas. That was fun. We still have about 40 quests to go for the achievement, but there are probably more than 40 quests to do in Vashj'ir at this point.

So now my shaman is level 83, and Mad's dk is 82. We stopped questing when we reached the guild reputation cap. We could have kept going, but Mad really hates questing, and will only do the bare minimum. And since we're after guild rep to buy heirloom leather helms for our future monks, losing potential guild reputation was a big deal. So now we wait for Tuesday. Hopefully, they will both hit 85 before Midsummer Festival begins next Thursday. 

I also worked on my leatherworking and went farming leather in Hyjal, on the dragonkins of Sethrias's Roost. I must be completely batshit crazy but I had fun killing those mini dragons and skinning them. 

Last night was definitely a good night. Can't wait for Tuesday to keep going!

Tuwtle!

Patience wearing thin

Cassie the pally finally managed to get some plate pieces to drop from random HoT heroics this weekend, and reached an item level of 374. She had no luck for days, and then one day almost everything dropped for her, and she was able to queue for the Raid Finder. Her dps isn't as good as I'd like it to be, but I didn't get thrown out of a raid so far, and she always managed to stay in the middle of the pack, dps-wise. We did wipe several times on Ultraxxion, which was totally sad, but it wasn't because of my somewhat low dps, but because of people not being able to press a button at the right moment. 

Nonetheless, Cassie got some nice tier shoulders and new boots out of RF Dragon Soul. Now all she'd need would be a trinket, a belt, and possibly another piece of tier so she can get her two set bonus, which makes her judgement give holy power as well. That would be a nice improvement, considering I still struggle with keeping Inquisition up (refreshing it too soon is something I'd like to work on) and using her cooldowns as efficiently as possible. (which I'm getting better at, but generating holy power faster would definitely be a plus.)

I was very happy when Pit Lord Destroyer dropped for her from Well of Eternity, as she was still rockin' an axe from Zul'Aman. Plus, I think it looks really good. I think I might start looking for a transmog set that will match with it. Her gear looks like hell at the moment, as I haven't transmogged it at all since level 80 or so. I'm waiting to see if I can get her some gear in the Raid Finder tomorrow before I go and transmog her, though.

Cassie has also started running Magister's Terrace daily to gain rep with the Shattered Sun Offensive, and for a chance at the mount. It's a lot of fun to gather whole rooms at a time and Divine Storm all the things.

The hunter is still running daily Underbog as well to try and get her last piece of the Giantstalker recolor set. The pants are the last piece missing, and it's been eluding her for days.Hopefully she will get lucky soon. I'm enjoying the daily routine of Sethekk Halls, Underbog, Magister's Terrace, cooking/fishing dailies that I'm rockin' at the moment with a couple characters, but I'm eager to get it all done and just casually level my lock or something for a while. My shaman still needs to reach level 85, and then the grind for gear and leather will start all over again. 

There really needs to be some kind of MoP announcement sometime soon. I'm trying really hard to keep myself busy with stuff in and outside of WoW, but I have very little patience to begin with. 

If you have nothing nice to say, just shut up.

Last night, I took the pally out for her first night of heroic dungeons. It was a disaster.

I got Grim Batol as my first heroic. As you might have guessed, we didn't kill a single boss. We kept wiping, because the healer went down, and the herp derp druid couldn't figure out how to battle rez him. I dropped group and re-queue'd. After a couple of dungeons that went relatively well, I was lucky enough to get a group of awesome people. We stayed together for hours, doing something like seven randoms together, netting me lots of gear, and some achievements. We even made the bear run in Zul'aman, and made a warlock very happy.

So in one evening, I went from 330 item level to 358. After Zul'Aman the group disbanded, as everyone was getting tired. But I kept going. I tried to do some Hour of Twilight dungeons, only to get a dps piece get ninja'd by the tank, and the rest went to another dps. 

Now. In all fairness, I shouldn't have queue'd for the HoT dungeons. I was tired. It was late. When I got into End Time, the people in there weren't as nice as my previous group. The healer kept saying something that no one seemed to understand. He kept repeating it, so I told him, not very nicely, that it made no sense in WoW to say that. And he said that he'd been playing WoW for years, and that he'd been saying it for years. I should have just dropped it. 

I mean, sure you can use other game terms in WoW, you can use em for years, but it doesn't mean that other people will understand what you're saying. I haven't played with every single people that play WoW. So I guess it's possible that I've just never played with someone using those terms before. But I've been playing for a very long time, too, asshat. If you have to repeat yourself five times so we get what you're saying, maybe you should take a hint?

Anyway, I was wrong, I shouldn't have told them anything. They can say whatever the hell they wanna say. But everything annoyed me to no end at the time. Especially the hunter who kept posting recount to show how awesome his dps was compared to mine (bite me, my gear is shit, I suck at ret, and you're a goddamn hunter. Anyone with half a brain can do good dps with a low-geared hunter.) and then linked all his gear in chat (one item per line mind you) to show us all the upgrades he needed. 

But I should have just let it go. I shouldn't let this get to me. That's why I'm usually silent in random dungeons. If you have nothing nice to say, just shut up. 

Quick Post : On my own

After weeks of waiting for Mad to play his DK tank with me, I've decided to just level on my own. My poor shaman was stuck at level 72 for way too long. Diablo kidnapped Mad and won't give him back. He did ask me to play D3 with him, but I just don't feel like it. For some reason. I played the beta a bit and liked it, and from what I've seen/read so far, it's an amazingly good game, but I just don't wanna play just yet. I will though. For sure. Some day. And it will be as a wizard.

But anyway.

My paladin is now level 80, and I'm waiting on her to gather some rested xp before going any further. So until then, I've started levelling the shamy again. I switched to her elemental spec and queued for dungeons. I'm having a total blast pew-pewing monsters with lightning bolts of doom. And I use thunderstorm only when there aren't any mobs around, because I'm considerate like that. It'd be easy to lash out in vengeance for all the times I've had dps knock the mobs out of my reach when I'm tanking (must knock back ALL THE THINGS! /evil laugh) but I don't. 

Even though some tanks kinda deserve it. >.>