Mend Pet

Over the summer, @Xandarr2112 of The Experienced Noob held a couple contests, and one of the prizes was a t-shirt he won at Scott Johnson‘s Nerdtacular (wish I could have gone!). As you may have guessed, I was lucky enough to win the prize!

The picture isn’t very good or focused… but if you’re looking for me at Blizzcon, it might give you an idea of what to look for!  My brown hair with glasses combo doesn’t stand out much, but I’ll also probably be accompanied by a guy a foot taller than me (6’6″), who will almost definitely be wearing a baseball cap.

The shirt is a bit large on me, I had to roll up the sleeves and the bottom to make it look suffiently girl-sized, but it will make a good PJs shirt

Make sure you drop by and check out The Experienced Noob! They’ve got some great fiction and in-game stories along with lots of other bloggy stuff.  Oh, and don’t forget to congratulate him on his new baby!

Next post should be mid- or post-Blizzcon!  Hope to see you there, and don’t forget to e-mail me or hit me up on Twitter if you’d like to meet up!

3 DAYS TO GO!

Having just returned from a mini-vacation this weekend (a night in Toronto and a day at the Zoo!), I’m all pumped up for the next one… 4 days of Blizzcon and Disneyland goodness!  It’ll be the longest real vacation I’ve ever really had, and my second vacation outside of Canada.

Now that I think about it, both of the vacations I’ve had outside of Canada have been WoW related.  Guild trip to Las Vegas, and now Blizzcon!  I’m such a nerd.

I’ve got my packing checklist ready, and I’ll be printing up all my flight/insurance/ticket information tonight.  Heading off Thursday afternoon and hopefully will make it just in time to pick up my badge and goody bag before they close at night!

I am probably a little too excited about the goodie bag.  Of course, the murloc pet will be awesome, and while it looks adorable, my first reaction on reading about the “n00bz” figure was “I hope it fits in my suitcase!”  I plan to give away the Blizzcon authenicator to any guildies who want it, and if none do I’ll probably give it away here.

If you’re going to Blizzcon, be sure to follow me on Twitter, as that will be my only real method of communication!  If you’re not going… well, follow anyway!

Probably won’t be a lot of updates around here until I get back in gear on Tuesday… but I’ll try to do quick posts if I can while I’m there!

This is my druid, Ayrshire.  Like so many druid alts out there, I’m raising her as my  “Brajana-can’t-afford-to-buy-flasks” herbalist/alchemist!  I also rolled her because I wanted a Tauren, and Twitter voted Druid over Shaman when I polled.  The highest I’ve gotten a druid is mid-20s, but hopefully this one will make it all the way, like my paladin before her!

Walk with the Earthmother!

Notice her attractive shoulders and chest piece? Yep, they’re heirlooms.  I ran some heroics over the weekend and realized I had exactly 200 Stonekeepers Shards, and over 80 Conquest/Valor/Heroism badges.  So I rolled out the Wintergrasp to grab her Exceptional Stormshroud Shoulders, and plopped down 40 Heroism tokens for her Stained Shadowcraft Tunic.  I originally thought the chest would only be available through the Argent Tournament, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn otherwise!

I’m really happy with the heirloom system.  I think it’s a great compromise between the extremists who say “All characters should start at level 55!” and the others who say “Leveling too fast is CHEATING!”

Where do I stand?  Well, I like leveling.  But sometimes it is just too time consuming.  I don’t feel like it’s a waste of time… and while you don’t exactly learn how to play your character as you would in a level 80 raid setting, you learn invaluable lessons and know the mechanics of your abilities front-to-back, so that when you do begin to change to the raid playstyle, it’s just the way you use the abilities that you have to learn, not what each ability is for.

A 20% increase to my experience gain does give me a noticeable boost, but it’s not as extreme as just jumping straight to 80 – I still have to learn to play.

As you all know, patch 3.2.0 dropped yesterday.  Hydraxis had some extended maintenance, but it was up just in time to get our raids together.  The plan was to take 2 10-man groups into the new Argent Colliseum.

Although my group didn’t get started until about an hour and a half into raid time, when we finally did go in, we were raring to go!

I’d briefly glanced over MMO Champion’s list of abilities for this fight, but I am horrible at putting a list of abilities into a coherent strategy.  All I knew is “there are some knockbacks or poisons or something.”

None of us really knew what to expect, we didn’t know if we would have to fight all the “Beasts” at once, or if it was timed, or if we’d get a break between them.

And we were fine with that.  More than fine, in fact!

Last night was one of those rare opportunities where something is so new, that there is no well-known strategy to use.  Instead of reading the strat and evaluating ourselves on how well we can execute it, we had to be attentive to what happened in each attempt and develop and evolve our own strategy.

All ten of us participated in this process, adding suggestions and observations and asking plenty of questions.

It was one of those times where I remembered why I love playing this game, and how it really does help develop real world problem solving and teamwork skills. We had to learn and adapt how we played, and each attempt was nearly better than the last.

I hope everyone who is able to get a group together can give this a try!  Don’t just wait for someone else to develop a strategy, use your own!

A big thank you to everyone who participated in this event.  In the end I think you are all winners for helping out a great cause!

But… some of you get prizes for being winners, too.

I did a /roll for the total number of entries, and here are the results!

I had to reroll a couple times because I didn’t want to pick the same person twice (remember, people could have multiple entries).

Congratulations to everyone!  I’ll be sending an e-mail out to the winners so they can help pick which prize they’d like.  They will have until next Friday to get back to me, or I’m rerolling their spot!

Thanks again to everyone who lent their support!  Once the SPCA gets back to me to verify the total amount donated, I’ll let you all know!