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Archive for the ‘general’ Category

It’s a Mod World: Pet hunting with Rarity

Posted in general, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 20, 2011| 3 Comments »

I may not play a hunter, but man do I hunt pets. Just not the helpful kind that actually assist in battle. No, I’m more of a minipet collector, though my true dedication to the pursuit has only happened recently.

I’ve always liked pet collecting on my main. I made it a point to get whatever holiday pets I could for her, along with all of the Horde and Alliance faction pets. At level 60, I prowled my way through LBRS to get myself the worg pup, which is actually what kicked off my love of minipets in the first place. Still, I never went particularly crazy for farming the rare drops. The only rare drop I had is my magical crawdad, and I got that from pure luck after five casts in Terokkar. Really getting into the collecting was always something I planned to do “someday.” A couple of weeks ago, I realized I was really close to 100 pets and the Petting Zoo achievement and figured that I might as well work on getting there. Possibly up to the 150 achieve if I was lucky because the Celestial Dragon is awesome.

Around that time, I happened to notice one of my closest WoW friends hanging out in strange places like Winterspring and Zul’Drak. When I asked her what she was up to, she said she was working on getting to 150 pets as well. I suppose that motivated me, because since then I’ve been actually putting effort into my collection.

So I started looking over my collection of pets, seeing what I would need to do to hit 150. Unfortunately, since I started playing only shortly before Wrath, I’ve missed out on a lot of promotional pets and one time event pets. I’m still missing two Children’s Week pets. And that’s when I realized…..shoot, I have a crap ton of farming to do!

After getting lucky with a quick Sprite Darter drop, I spent a little time on WarcraftPets.com trying to figure out how long I could expect to see an Emerald Whelp drop. When I saw people saying things like “700 kills and still nothing!” I wondered if there was some addon out there that kept track of these things. The only one I saw on Curse was outdated, but in the comments, another author linked to the addon they’d been working on. I quickly downloaded it and was thrilled that it does exactly what I wanted!

Rarity is currently in beta, and from what I’ve found, it’s an awesome addition to pet collecting. Now I know exactly how many times I’ve killed random mobs in Winterspring, hoping that the stupid Azure Whelpling will drop (Hint: way too many times).

From Allara, the author:

Inspired by Bunny Hunter, Rarity tracks how many chances you’ve had to obtain various rare items throughout the game. It will tell you how likely you are to obtain the item, track how long you’ve been farming for it, etc. Primarily, this is useful for farming companion pets and mounts, but it also supports virtually any item including patterns and designs, archaeology projects, etc.

Some of the features are:

  • Fully user configurable—you can add things to track on your own
  • Supports zone-wide drops (i.e. Hyacinth Macaw)
  • Supports containers (i.e. White Polar Bear)
  • Supports two-level loots (i.e. Disgusting Oozeling)
  • Supports archaeology projects (i.e. Scepter of Azj’Aqir)
  • Supports fishing (i.e. Sea Turtle)
  • Supports item usage (i.e. Mojo)
  • Supports items dropped from bosses that require a group to defeat (i.e. Flametalon of Alysrazor)
  • Supports items obtained from the holiday boss bags (i.e. Big Love Rocket)
  • Supports some special cases (i.e. Elementium Geode, Mysterious Camel Figurine)
  • Supports things other than pets and mounts (i.e. recipes, legendary components, etc.)
  • Will properly ignore skinning
  • Lets you modify your kill count without having to edit saved vars, in case you started farming before you installed Rarity
  • Automatically imports data from Bunny Hunter
  • Shows an “achievement” alert when you finally obtain the item!
  • Automatically scans you to determine if you already have any companions or mounts
  • Shift-click to report your progress to chat

Personally, I mostly love this add on for showing me how many times I’ve killed stuff, and I especially love the achievement pop up telling me when I do actually get the pet. I would have definitely missed looting my Firefly without it, since I was half asleep when that sucker dropped and my bags were full!

Pet farming is generally a mind numbing experience, but addons like this actually make it more fun. Or at least easier to scream about how bad your luck is. If you’ve decided your crazy enough to try for the 150 achievement, definitely download this one to help you along the way.

Oh and as for me? I’m at 132 pets now, with a bunch of rare drops in my collection. 18 more and that dragon will be mine!

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Transmogrify Me

Posted in general, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 18, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Let me introduce you to the bane of my existence. It’s called Masterwork Elementium Deathblade. It’s not the bane of my existence because of the weapon speed (though I hate that too) or the fact that it has haste on it (also not a fan of that problem). No no. My issue with this sword is the hideous, horrible, overused model. Dear god, I am sick of it.

Let me explain. My pally is my favorite toon. She’s not my main and I don’t get to raid much on her, but she’s my favorite. While I spend most of my play time on my druid (and I love her too!) the pally is the one who has most of the achievemtents and collects the mounts. She’s my main RP toon, and during Wrath, I got to raid on her as well, and she was extremely well geared. I obsess about her dps and I keep up with ret pally theorycrafting. I don’t get to raid on her because I am the raid healer for my group, and that’s where I’m most useful. I’m not particularly good at holy healing, so even when I can bring alts into the raid, I usually don’t get to bring her. It’s sad, but I’m okay with it.

I still like making sure she has good gear though. The Deathblade is the best that’s available to me without raiding, so that’s what I’m using. But MAN do I hate that model.

Prior to the Deathblade, I was using the pink version of the sword, Blade of the Fearless. I had been using that since about….I don’t know….maybe three or four weeks after Cata dropped. I joked with my guildies that I felt like She-Ra with it, and changed my pally’s hair to resemble her for awhile. But after six months of looking at that sword, I’d had enough. I was stoked when I saw there would be a crafted sword because it meant I wouldn’t have to look at that awful thing anymore. Then I saw the preview and it was the SAME MODEL. It’s just blue this time, which I guess makes her He-man? Arg.

Needless to say, when 4.3 hits, the first thing I will be doing is running to the ethereals and transmogrifying the crap out of that sword. My first choice is my long lusted after favorite sword model in the game, Twinblade of the Phoenix from Tempest Keep. I honestly think this is one of the best swords around for a blood elf paladin. If RNG doesn’t smile upon me, I’ll probably use Greatsword of the Sin’dorei  until it does. I loved that sword model during Wrath, and I only got to use it for a few days before an upgrade dropped for me in the five man ToC.

And possibly more exciting is that, as a ret pally, I have grown used to my belt and boots never matching my tier. It’s always either DK or warrior stuff, and sometimes that looks okay (like in t11) and sometimes it looks terrible (like in t10). Finally I will be able to use the models from those healie belts and boots and will not look like I’m color blind. And I will never have to wear a WWE style belt EVER AGAIN!!!!

I’m not just excited for my paladin here. My first thought when I heard the announcement was that I needed to go farm up the entire t6 set for my druid. Then, while playing Atlasloot dress up in guild chat last night, I realized that the off set drops from Black Temple look amazing with T12. While it’s not my favorite, I don’t mind t12, except for the shoulders and helm which I don’t care for in general, and make my poor tauren girl look like a deranged linebacker. But oh, it looks amazing with those two off set pieces!

Plus all of those gorgeous feral staves that look so perfect for a druid? Yeah. They will be mine.

My mains aren’t the only ones I’m excited for. I’ll probably deck my DK out in his starter gear again and will dual wield Tankard O’ Terrors. My engineer priest will be wearing her Wrath goggles full time. My warrior will get any other sword model than the freaking Blade of the Fearless….twice. And the beauty of it is, I’ll be able to change the look of these rarely played characters of mine who don’t often get upgrades, so that when I do get the chance to play them, I don’t have to look at the same gear for months on end.

I’m happy with the way Blizzard is doing this as well. I like that you still need to go get the gear if you want to wear it. I think it adds another level of achievement onto the whole thing. And I’m really looking forward to running old content with my guild so we can deck out our toons the way that we envision them. I would say that this is such an awesome thing for RPers, but really, I think it’s awesome for everyone to have more options. And it will be great that max level characters won’t just be complete clones of each other.

Oh, and as for void storage? Let’s just say my pally’s bank is rejoicing.

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Tree dance!

Posted in general on August 5, 2011| Leave a Comment »

For quite some time, I’ve wanted to start a blog that chronicles my love of WoW.and the community attached to it. I kept myself from doing it because I felt I lacked having anything to share that hasn’t already been covered somewhere else in the blogging community. I’ve decided to go ahead with it anyway, and hopefully along the way I’ll have some interesting views that others in the community will find entertaining.

About me: I started playing WoW almost three years ago, a couple of months before the launch of Wrath. I had always been interested in WoW, but never had the time to play. I blame Mr. T for finally luring me in. After seeing his commercial, I went and downloaded the trial (and was thrilled that it ran on my Mac, by the way), rolled myself a night elf druid, and immediately fell in love with the world that Blizzard gave me. The moment I walked into Darnassus, I was completely overwhelmed by how beautiful it was. Something about the entrance and the huge “Alliance Territory” that flashed on the screen really hit home for me that something epic had occurred. Then I glanced down at trade chat, was vaguely horrified by what I read, then was asked if I wanted to eRP by some random night elf warrior, and I promptly signed off. A few days later I told a real life friend of mine (who was a former WoW player) about my experience, and he told me to reroll Horde on his old server. Despite the fact that I didn’t want to be “one of those big cow things,” I listened to him and have been an avid Horde player ever since. I still love Teldrassil and Darnassus though, and will occasionally roll up a new baby druid just to experience the zone again.

Do not invoke the wrath of an angry tree

These days, my mains are a restoration druid and a retribution paladin, because I enjoy healing things and smacking stuff in the face with a sword. I’m an officer in a guild that focuses on both RP and 10-man raiding. I’ve never been interested in doing 25-man raiding because I like the tight nit nature of a smaller group. I make it a point to set aside time each week to RP. For me, if a toon doesn’t have a good character and story behind it, I can’t get into playing it.

In the real world, I work in the a creative field, and my degree is in graphic design. Unsurprisingly, I’m fairly obsessed with having a nice looking UI. I’m the person in my raid who will say random things like “Huh, interesting, they’re using the main melody from ‘Invincible’ as the undertone for the music that they play here,” while waiting for people to come back from a break. I love that Blizzard takes the time to add so many “flavor” items to the game, and think it would be pretty boring if everything in the game were about upgrades.

My hopes for this blog is that it will have a fair mix of entries about raiding, RP, lore, and general silliness in between. I’ll let it evolve naturally and see where I can find my niche in this very vocal community.

-Faye

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