Recipes are for closers only.

Was checking out random engineering recipes last night, and noticed this conversation going on with the Goblins in Warsong Hold, Borean Tundra. Took me no time at all to recognize Alec Baldwin's classic scene from Glengarry Glen Ross. That's fucking awesome, Blizzard.
Anyway, checked out some of the higher-end engineering stuff, and wow. OK, must have: Truesight Ice Blinders (440), Gnomish Army Knife (435), and of course the Nesingwary 4000 (450). Damn that's a nice gun. Nice enough to actually prompt me to level Paquita's gun skill, which I swore never to do. Ah well...she's at 377 now, so I'm set.

Engineering is fun as hell these days.

Oh, and NO ONE from my guild got the Glengarry Glen Ross reference, so here it is for my own personal amusement:

Normalization

I’m still taking it easy, enjoying the win that is Wrath of the Lich King.

Dinged 75 on Wednesday night, and I’m still running on at least three bubbles of rested XP. The sneaky druid was 78 as of last night, and I expect he’ll be hitting 80 at some point this weekend.

I’ve fallen back into a regular schedule each night, first hitting the Dalaran cooking daily, then porting to Shattrath for the cooking and fishing dailies (croc pet and two cooking recipes continue to elude me). When those are finished I hearth back to Dalaran and hit up my three Kalu’ak dailies. Just passed halfway to exalted last night. When all of those chores are out of the way, I can get down to leveling.

I did take Monday evening off from Paquita to play my 61 mage…whom I’ve not actively quested with in nearly a year. A good RL friend of mine recently transferred to Perenolde with his 42 hunter and just dinged 60 last weekend. So he’s enjoying the Burning Crusade for the first time ever. It’s fun to watch (or listen, I guess) to his reactions.

Very awesome combo - my deep frost mage, his DPS and gorilladin keeping the aggro off of us. We had a nice AOE rhythm going by the end of the evening. And it was actually fun to play the mage again.

It was great, we were screwing around near the edge of Hellfire, next to the Expedition Armory, and I offhandedly told him that if he jumped off the edge, a healing wind would carry him back up onto solid ground. Very cool stuff, I said. He was like “Oh, OK,” and we moved on with questing. Then he whispers me the next night, telling me I’m a cruel bastard and that there was no healing wind at all. But the thing is, he did it TWICE to make sure he was doing it correctly. HAHA. /evil.

Encountered a shitty bug with my hunter pets in the last couple of days. I had my four stable slots filled – cat, wolf, gorilla and ravager – with my rhino on active duty. I saw an awesome black and red spider in the Grizzly Hills on Wednesday evening, and ran back to swap out for my ravager so I could abandon him and tame the spider. I successfully abandoned JuanRico and tamed the spider, but when I returned to the stables, the ravager icon was still there. So I pulled him out and he turned into the rhino.

Huh?

I swapped the pet icons around a couple of times, and then ended up locking in place. Showed my cat, wolf, spider and ravager – but no gorilladin. Kriegaffe! I opened a GM ticket and waited nearly two hours for a response…which was, you guessed it: delete your WTF, interface and cache folders. Seriously people, is that your response to every fucking issue? Could it not be that there is a bug with the hunter pet stable? How could something like this possibly be a UI issue? I dunno. I’m not an expert, so I can’t bitch. I thanked the GM for their time, and mentioned that Blizzard is doing a fantastic job with WotLK, since overall they really are. Felt good to give that direct feedback, for whatever it was worth.

In the end, of course the UI reset did not work. I found a solution on the hunter forums which suggested abandoning the current pet. /Sniff, goodbye Ryanseacrest. So, in letting him go, the cat jumped into active duty, and my gorilla’s icon appeared in the fourth slot, as though he was in the queue all along. /Sigh. I swapped him with the ravager, abandoned that bastard, and swept off to Sholazzar to tame another rhino. So now I have Ryanseacrest back, but the funny thing is that his skin changes randomly every time I dismount or summon him. Sometimes he’s grey, sometimes he’s brown.

I don’t fucking know. :D

Maybe I need to reset my UI.

And yet...no Baloo

Awesome enough to charter a Tailspin-style flight for one of the Scalawag Point quests in Howling Fjord, but to have my rhino strapped to the cargo hold is bloody priceless. This should be stock for all epic flyers. :D

My WotLK Weekend

I had great plans to have ongoing reports in here of my first hours and days of WotLK.

Big fat thanks to a great fucking game, I failed. :D

So since it’s Monday morning and I’m having a rough time adjusting back to any semblance of an RL schedule, let’s recap in brief:

Wednesday evening, Nov. 12.
Left work in a rush for last-minute errands; got home around 6pm, Pacific. Logged in to check server stability, since all servers were offline Tuesday evening. Everything appeared OK, and guildies were excitedly chatting away. Knocked out Shattrath fishing and cooking dailies and logged out.

Ate some dinner and then napped from 7:30 to 9:30p. Woke up grumpy and pissed off, for some reason. Actually considered blowing off midnight release. Smacked self across the face for blasphemy.

Hopped in the car – still grumpy – and drove across town to the mall. Why are there so many people out this late, and why do they suck at driving? Walked into the mall at 10:10p and found a long line of WoW peeps waiting patiently outside Gamestop. Some were chatty, some were somber. Some were wearing armor.

Got my receipt and number (52) around 10:45p and the milled around the vicinity inside the mall, waiting for midnight to arrive. Also picked up a WotLK game guide, so I was able to peruse those pages for a while.

Formed a new line according to copy number around 11:45p.

Thursday morning, Nov 13.
Copy received minutes after midnight.

Zoemgee.

Drove home, stopping at all-night Safeway for energy drinks, water and food.

Home by 12:50a. Popped game disc into computer for installation and settled back to watch Hellboy 2 while I waited. Only got through the first act of Hellboy before the opening cinematic started! Re-installed the previous two patches, and the game was ready to go. Sorry Hellboy, another time, maybe. (Great fucking movie, by the way, can’t wait to see what Del Toro does with The Hobbit.)

I logged in to World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King around 1:40a. Hot damn. Rolled my Tauren Deathknight and left him be. Logged on to Paquita and chartered a zeppelin to the Borean Tundra.

Now, I’m not a terribly expressive person in RL, but I think it would have been interesting to have a camera on my face for while weekend. My jaw was literally as far down as humanly possible in the first 10 minutes of Warsong Hold. And that place isn’t even all that awesome in retrospect, compared with what was coming. Spent nearly 250 gold upgrading all my tradeskills, with very little left for actual recipes.

On to questing. Kill these! Open these! Collect some more of these! I don’t really care about these sorts of quests, actually. It’s experience, it’s the game world, and it all tells the story appropriately.

The Borean Tundra is gorgeous. Took a magic carpet tour for the full effect, and even waved to Kel’thuzad! Played through those initial quests, encountered the viking giant dudes, the Tuskarr and the Taunka. Love, love, love, love, love the Tuskarr and their villages. That whole design is dead-on for indigenous arctic peoples, and the water, glaciers and ice floes are just beautiful. Loved the Tuskarr even more when I saw that Kalu’ak rep gets you a pet penguin at exalted! There’s also an epic fishing pole that allows underwater breathing! Immediately started doing these quests and dailies.

Stayed up until 7:30a on Thursday. Completed quite a few quests in the Tundra, and found my new most-hated mobs – the level 70 kobolds and gorlocs. /Shudder.

Very nearly hit 71, but alas I wasted some time exploring, fishing, mining and crafting. Wandered around the Borean Tundra, Dragonblight, Crystalsong Forest, Grizzly Hills and Howling Fjord picking up available flight points. Cursed Dalaran for being so high in the sky, and the Kirin Tor for being too snooty to let me teleport into the city at level 70.

Thursday morning, Nov. 13, part Deux
Woke up around 11:30a and made coffee. Logged in and found that to my eternal shame another guildie had already beat me to 71. Noooooo! Sneaky freakin’ druid. :D

Ah well. Moved on with more quests and DINGED 71! Played an unhealthy length of time throughout Thursday and dinged again before logging off on Friday morning.

Friday, Nov 14.
Limited playtime. Hit Honored with the Kalu’ak and Warsong Offensive. Leveled trade and secondary skills. Swapped my wolf, Fettgisicht, for Kriegaffe the Gorilladin since I seemed to be aggroing entire groups of mobs fairly often. Wandered into Sholazzar Basin and let Kriegaffe tackle groups of 4 and 5 level 76 mobs – hunter and pet were only 72 and 71, respectively. We survived. AND we got a the manual for Heavy Frostweave Bandages off a level 76 scourge mob!

Saturday, Nov 15.
Limited playtime again. Awesome guildie warlock summoned me to Dalaran! Niiiice. Hearthstone set. Wrapped up quests in Dragonblight and triggered Wrathgate. ZOMIFUCKINGGAWDthatwasawesome. And the follow-up quest with Thrall, Sylvanas and Vol’jin? There are no words to express that kind of badassery. WotLK wins on that stuff alone.

Sunday, Nov. 16.
Hangover. Let’s play WoW! The sneaky druid dings 76 and I’m left in failure at level 73. I later understand that he’s uber-leveling, neglecting tradeskills and anything not having to do with gaining experience points. I’m taking my time and not doing too badly in the larger scheme of guildie leveling progression, so I don’t feel that bad.

Hit Revered with Kalu'ak, completing all of their regular quests. That leaves 3 dailys per day at 500 a pop. It'll be a while, but I'm well on my way toward exalted. Also broke down and adjusted my Beastmaster spec to allow exotic taming. Got myself a rhino, Ryanseacrest. He's massive and gets my way all the time, but strangely comforting. Dinged 74 before logging Sunday night.

So, WotLK, from what I’ve seen, is pretty goddamn phenomenal. The quests are several steps up from those of the Burning Crusade in terms of fun and ingenuity, and the overall story is truly the stuff of legend. Many screenshots to come, whenever I get motivated to post them. :)

And here I was worried...

Not 10 hours after I wondered aloud how Northrend would come into play, and how Azeroth would come to send its heroes to meet the coming threat, we get this (I post this, taken from MMO-champion, and will gladly remove if deemed inappropriate without permission):

I was in Blackrock Depths pursuing some Dark Iron Ale for the Darkmoon Faire when this all started happening, so I hurriedly rushed my way up to the bar, tossed some coinage at Plugger Spazzring and hearthed out as quickly as I could.

Made it to Orgrimmar just in time to plink away uselessly at the soaring frostwyrms raining down ice, or sicc my pet on a few abominations. But I did get to see the final exchange between Thrall and Garrosh.

So cool.

Cold Winds Inc.

Feel that? Usually hot as effing hell in Orgrimmar, but I just got a massive chill.

Must be WotLK in just THREE FREAKIN’ DAYS.

I wonder, I wonder.

I wonder how it’s going to start. Yes, I know we’ve already had an invasion, but there’s been no mention at all of Northrend yet in the game. There’s gotta be some quest leading us up there. If I recall, the Burning Crusade was prefaced by a new invasion by the Burning Legion and we had to muster a resistance and bring the fight back to Illidan via the Dark Portal. (Love that special Tabard of the Protector, by the way…Mercot has it, and I hope there’s something similar Paquita can pick up while heading to Northrend.)

As I understand it, we have two options for our access to Northrend. For the Horde, we can take zeppelins from either Orgrimmar and Undercity to the Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord, respectively. Word is that the Fjord is amazing, and has better questlines (pst…because I guess the Forsaken are kinda pissed right now). Apparently the Borean Tundra is a bit bleaker for scenery, but carries the Orc storyline further. Now I’ve never been able to level an Orc past 12, but I loves me some Orc lore. And since I’m betting a lot of people are going for wow factor in scenery, I’m going to go where the crowds hopefully aren’t. So Tundra it is for I and I.

Plus, I’m from Alaska, so I heart tundra. And I need to see the Tuskarr.

The core officers and raiders in my guild seem to be inclined toward Howling Fjord, but that’s OK. I’m sure I’ll hook up with other guildies at some point in the leveling process. It’s a big world, and everyone’s always a whisper away.

But god, three days seems like forever. It’ll go quickly, I’m sure.

Wrapped up some long term goals this weekend, as well, running Magister’s Terrace for the first time on Saturday night. So now I can say that I have indeed run all the five-man instances in the Burning Crusade at least once. Also picked up the Hauberk of the Warbringer from Senór Sunstrider, a pleasant upgrade from my Scourge chestpiece.

We also pulled a group of eight or nine guildies together and rolled through the attunement quests for Ogri’la. Fun stuff. I loved the giant Ogre party at the end. And since we now have access to the Ogri’la bombing run daily, we can work toward that Winter Veil meta achievement. Five of us also stuck around to kill the four dragons summoned with Apexis shards. Saturday was a busy night.

Other than that, it’s all just been random achievements and daily quests while waiting for WotLK. Went on a super-quick run through Lower Blackrock Spire for the worg and spider pets, and bought quite a few others off the auction house. I used my Gnome warrior to summon a couple of Westfall chickens for some Horde guildies, and Paquita crafted a few more Tranquil Mechanical Yetis for those who wanted/needed them.

Saved my deathknight’s name with a new character, as well. I wanted to go with some form of Paquita combined with some sinister element. But Paquita is such a sunny, happy-sounding name to begin with that it was hard to think of anything. I considered Darthpaqqles (Paqqles being a running joke with another guildie), but after seeing that name for a while on the character list, I decided it would be a bit much. So I reserved the less silly name of Ragpale. Rags was my second character ever, a Tauren druid. He even outleveled Mercot at one time, reaching the tender level of 21. Then he fell into obscurity and I eventually deleted him. I always liked the name though, and I’d planned on a Tauren deathknight anyway, so why not? I can even think of him from an RP standpoint – a young druid caught unawares in the Plaguelands, slain and resurrected in service of Arthas.

This also makes me happy because that was what I had always thought the deathknights would be as an extension of WoW – a very tough decision for players to turn their mains into deathknights. I didn’t realized that the DKs were completely new characters until just a few months ago. From the original WotLK gameplay trailer shown at Blizzcon ’07, Arthas’ voiceover made it seem like Azeroth’s heroes would move through Northrend and at some point encounter a quest that would give them a decision to surrender the lives they’d led thus far and become a deathknight. It would be a huge decision for players and a real chance for the game to impact their characters for good or ill. In my opinion, this would have been a bit better than just creating a new character. Much like the actual deathknight, you’ve got to sacrifice yourself something to become greater. It would have also greatly limited the number of deathnights at launch. But I can understand the outcry this path would have caused.

Anyway, that’s how I’m choosing to think of Ragpale – my little druid who went off on his own for a while and was lost to the Scourge. Until now. And I’ll get to see where he went and how he comes back to the Horde in the deathknight starting quests! /nerd

Sooo…this’s turned into a nice little wall of text.

Not sure if I’ll post before launch, but I plan on picking up the WotLK game guide today (first time I’ve ever purchased a WoW guide, honestly, and I’ll only break in case of emergency). I also canceled my Amazon pre-order and will be in line at my local Gamestop on Wednesday night!

Ambassador Accomplished

The final stretch of the rep achievement was a bit tedious, but at least it involved a quick foray into Razorfen Kraul to kill Charlga Razorflank, earning me another 10 achievement points.

Reached Exalted with the Horde around 7am this morning, after an all-night session. Ambassador Paquita - woohoo!Might I also add, that with her Scourge purples, a new new hair-do and the Tabard of the Argent Dawn, Paquita has never looked better. I'm enjoying it now, since I fear she will soon be resigned to Skittledom in the frozen lands of Northrend.

Hallow's End, well, ended around 3am this morning as well. I kept putting off the [G.N.E.R.D. Rage] achievement, which was the final goal for the "Hallowed" title (that is, assuming Blizzard removes the [A Mask For All Occasions] requirement). I had four G.N.E.R.D. candies left on a 5-day duration, and had planned to use them in a battleground or something and achieve the 50 required kills fairly easily.

However, a massive group of Alliance players got a wild bug up their collective asses this evening and decided to zerg Silvermoon and Orgrimmar. So I ported to Org, popped a G.N.E.R.D. and got down to killing.They pushed in on Thrall, got shoved back out and then got cornered into the little alcove outside his throne room. Then they rushed back in and we eventually decimated them down (see below). Of course, I died three times during this fight, losing a G.N.E.R.D. candy each time, and while I managed to get my 50 kills while defending a major city for the [City Defender] achievement, 8 of those didn't seem to count for [G.N.E.R.D. Rage].Of course, the lot of us were all dressed up at this point with no one to dance with, so we descended on Stormwind for a half-hearted fight across the Valley of Heroes and into the main tunnel of the Trade District. Got my [G.N.E.R.D. Rage] there, so I was happy.I died fairly quickly, and rezzed in the sewers below the bridge. I was all set to Dimensionally Rip over to Everlook, when I saw a Night Elf hunter running out of the water toward me. I knew what was coming, and I was only at 1/3 health, so I waved, smiled, grinned and flexed at him. Must have made an impression, because he paused, shot me a couple of times and then paused again. I smiled at him again and patted his cat. Then I wished him farewell and began my portal to Everlook. He must have realized what was happening in the last 2 or 3 seconds, because he said something in Elvish and made a motion to shoot - but I ported out at exactly that moment. It was awesome. Even took his Hunter's Mark with me to Everlook, haha!
Pretty awesome end to the evening.

On another far more ADULT note I saw this Craigslist link posted on the Analog Hole Gaming forums:

That is...extremely specific. I find it interesting that she didn't specify whether her preferred man play Horde or Alliance. :D