Reporting From the Sunspire

I thought really hard about doing a Warcraft post, but sadly I just don't feel like doing it. What am I to do with all these screenshots I took, then? Well, I'll just throw them up here anyway.

On my other blog, I used to upload a series of photos every month and label it a "Visual Shocks" post, the terminology inspired from what is possibly my favorite band (X Japan). It was all just straight photos, and that's pretty much what I'm doing here. At the end, though, I think I'll make an Inori table at least summing up what my past month has been like.

Here, I made it on top of the Sunspire in the Bloof Elf starting zone! I remember I used to fly up here when I used to play on private servers for lulz. My friend and I would duel up here and hang out and stuff (before dueling was removed from starting zones. This was way back in the glory days of The Burning Crusade). I used the Falling Flame and the Goblin Glider to get up here for the beautiful view... Which reminds me, I should try seeing what other places I could get to in Quel'Thalas... Quel'Danas.... however it's spelled (I should be ashamed since I love Blood Elves so much).

Here's just a couple of the grand achievements I've made in engineering on my death knight.

This is... I can't even explain really.

Lastly, the other cornerstone of where my time went with this game is in tanking with my awesome warlock!

I also gave it an xmog makeover. I thought it would look great with the demon wings since nearly bare skin is what demons are all about to me. I kind of feel guilty about the outfit, like some inner part of my conscience is telling me, "Hey, this could be seen as degrading," and I suppose so, yeah. But I'll save that topic for another post and attempt to prove that I'm not trying to be misogynistic here.

So in lieu of a table, I'll just write normally and see where that goes. So a few weeks ago I really wanted to pick up this game again for the Summer and fulfill some things that I never got around to doing. Originally I thought this was just getting better gear for my death knight, but then within a few days the RNG deities blessed me with a continuous stream of Burdens of Eternities, so I managed to raise her ilevel from five-hundred to five-hundred and twenty-five. So with that out of the way, I decided to finally finish Siege of Orgrimmar on my original main, a paladin. After this, I was stumped and left with nothing else really to do. So I decided to raise the skills I cared about to six-hundred, and boy what a grind I was in for.

For her engineering, it took me about three days to level it up completely. Not bad considering it took me like two weeks to level up jewelcrafting, but it was certainly not a very exciting experience. I basically flew around all day searching for ore nodes, which became kind of fun when I had to find ghost iron since there is so much fierce competition for it in the Valley of Four Winds. I had PVP left on by mistake and some level eighty-nine fool thought he could take me on. This was on my warlock, so I was really grinding for herbs to raise her alchemy, but same point really. Anyway, the grand moment here was that I used Carrion Swarm and sent that loser flying off Skyrange (I think that's what it's called). I hope, with all the ability pruning that's going on for Warlords, that I will not miss most of these moves like Carrion Swarm too much.

When I got her engineering to six-hundred, I managed to quickly find Jard's schematics, so I learned all the cool stuff that engineers got in 5.4, and now I'm off trying to make Pierre since I cannot make the Sky Golem in time before my game time is up. For some dumb reason there is a daily cooldown on making Jard's Peculiar Energy Source, which you need fifteen of those in order to make Pierre, and thirty for the Sky Golem. If you don't know what either of these things are, basically the Sky Golem is this really cool sort of mech mount that you can use to fly around and actually gather herbs without dismounting. Pierre is this robot stove that can serve as a cooking fire when he's out, allowing one to cook anywhere at anytime. Not that big of a deal really since the Cooking Fire spell that comes with cooking doesn't really have that much of a cooldown, but Pierre is still awesome so yeah. I could also make the robot from the Bad Robot logo, but I don't really care about it.

Since I also needed Living Steel, I decided to finally raise my warlock's alchemy. To raise her alchemy, I also needed to raise her herbalism. Or I could've just bought the herbs, but I have more time than I have gold, so raising herbalism it was. It was no big deal anyway since I still needed to gather a ton of herbs for alchemy, so raising herbalism came off as secondary, or something that just passively grew with alchemy. I was worried that I would have a hard time getting the transmutes once I reached six-hundred, but it seemed like I was either very lucky or everybody learns all of them by the time they reach six hundred. Whatever the case, I managed to learn both of the Living Steel transmutes, and so I set to work making them. So basically, most of my time with this game was spent taking hours to grind up hundreds of ghost-iron ore.

I also spent some time grinding for the Turbo-Charged Flying Machine, and also, while I was leveling up engineering, I managed to make Jeeves along the way! It felt really good having made these things myself. When I made Jeeves, I also decided then to raise her cooking to six-hundred, even though I essentially already did that on my paladin. Now that I think about it, I didn't really need to do that since I could've just had my paladin make noodle carts and send them to her. Noodle carts serve as feasts for groups, but the good thing about them is that it is actually a "shop" where your raid-mates can grab up to five plates of noodles, which come in varying degrees of stat boosts. If you are not familiar with raiding, even on LFR, people usually eat food for stat boosts. The way it's usually worked is that people would lay out "feasts," which are one-time use items. However, as I explained with the noodles, each member can get up to five of them, so that way the person making them won't have to keep making new ones. It's great because the recipes are relatively less demanding, and you make five of these noodle carts at once.

So anyway, getting back to my plan with her, I'm going to use her awesome cooking skills to make whatever feasts Blizzard creates in Warlords. So between that and Jeeves, she will really serve well in the department of raid utility. But that's not all! Because she is a Blood-specced death knight, and because I have a great brain for tanking, her will also be an awesome LFR tank (I don't really do much real raiding, but maybe in the next expansion I'll take up "flex," or I think what is now considered "normal"). Couple her great raid utility with her awesome capabilities as a tank, and I'll have one of the best raiding characters ever! People are going to miss me specifically when they find themselves in another LFR group with a tank who wears DPS gear and ignores raid mechanics. Guilds will be jealous of my friend's guild and constantly request that I switch her over! She'll be so popular! This is pretty much why I decided to switch mains and make her my main instead of my paladin. I love paladins, and I've always played as them since the days of Burning Crusade, but death knights are just so good at everything. Plus I can't forget that her has Jeeves and all those noodle carts/future feasts in Warlords. It all just makes me very excited.

So really, I think that's about it. I don't think there's really much else that I've done with this game, but this all feels like a lot. I'm just really glad that I got these skills raised, because now in Warlords I won't have to worry so much about spending the time to raise them.

Update: I got the Pandaren Treasure Noodle kit recipe! They are surprisingly cheaper to make in gold than in time (as far as I know it takes days to get enough of the "crop" ingredients for all the food. I'm talking about the carrots and vegetables and whatnot), since the food you need to make/get has never actually cost more than three-hundred gold on a full stack of twenty. Since I got full stacks of twenty for each food, I wound up spending about a thousand gold, which I guess is kind of a lot but it's really not that hard to make back. Plus I manage to make twenty carts with all that food, which in turn equals a hundred "feasts" to give out. I'd say a thousand gold is totally worth it and nothing compared to the otherwise days that probably must be spent to accumulate a similar quantity of ingredients (remember, enough to make four sets of carts, i.e. twenty of them).

I also tanked as this character in raids for the first time since forever. Both times were very interesting: first, my group sucked at both healing and dps. So what happened? On Sha of Pride, everybody got their Pride meters full, and the boss was just about to mind-control the entire raid, and somehow we managed to kill the boss and succeed even though we were mind-controlled at the exact same time. The second raid I did was the first wing of Throne of Thunder, and that went strangely as I had a Frost death knight for an offtank. Oh brother. I wound up getting nearly twenty stacks on Horridon, which seemed scary and of course I did end up dying, but thankfully since it was LFR, I managed to mitigate the damage long enough to let the raid pull through. But then right after some idiot hunter kept Aspect of the Pack on for like a good twenty minutes. That was annoying. Other than these things, though, nothing wrong with my tanking! I guess the Random Number Gods, in spite of not actually being that huge of a role in this matter, paired me up with a stupid tank to prove to me that I am actually capable and good at tanking. Well we'll see how that goes if I decide to run the rest of Siege of Orgrimmar on my death knight.