Ogres are for killing

Last Updated on Tuesday, 14 May 2013 10:56 Written by Kadomi Tuesday, 14 May 2013 14:00

If yesterday’s return to blogging accomplished anything, it was a desire to actually finish one of the things I started in WoW, namely the goal of obtaining 100 mounts. I gave my reputation panel a long, hard look, and the Mag’har grind just seemed by far the easiest. I have a two monitor setup, so one monitor I fired up episode 5 of the current season of Game of Thrones, and on the other monitor I slaughtered ogres. Many ogres.

The inside of the cave looked similar. Fantastic respawn rate though!

On top of the plentiful amount of ogres, I think I walked out of this with about ten stacks of adamantite ore, which will sell nicely. I think the episode wasn’t over before I had finished the grind. I was at 7k/21k through Revered, and it took me exactly 150 warbeads plus slaughtered ogres to hit Exalted. I am currently reading Christie Golden’s Rise of the Horde, which fills my old-school, TBC-loving, horde for life heart with joy, along with a desire to wish that my WoW farm was in Nagrand and not in Pandaria. Mag’har of Draenor is an achievement every orc should strive for, if you ask me.

A bit too bright red for my tastes, but hey, here’s my dragonhawk!

WoW-wise, the rest of the day was spent playing Yamaline the disc killing machine priest. I mean, seriously? I recently leveled an affliction warlock to 56, and killing things on her was sort of a slog. Which might me an issue that affliction is crap for leveling. And yet here’s my little pandaren who goes through mobs like a hot knife through butter. Questing has been very pleasant on her indeed, a nice break from having to deal with idiots and abuse in instances. I might have to switch from questing to pet battling full time though, because wowza.

Nearly 8k experience for a pet battle? I’ll take it!

On top of that I got the 150 collected battle pets cheese, so now I have a Celestial Dragon of my own, hooray. According to WarcraftPets, 72.4% of my battle pets are uncommon, which just goes to show you how very little patience I have when it comes to collecting pets. The moment I see an uncommon pet I snag it and am done with it. Then I go read comments on Breanni’s site and see people who went for like 200 battles to get a rare version. I did use a couple battle stones to upgrade a few pets I really like. My current team that I am leveling so I can take on the Pet Battle guy in Feralas is Mini Thor, a rare Yeti and my lovable maggot.

I am still working on Raiding with Leashes but am slightly discouraged by my inability to solo Razorgore. Unfortunately I got ZERO pet drops in BWL the one day I had a guildie help me with Razorgore. I might try again, maybe it’s just a matter of me learning to solo this, but I am not convinced. I got one of the Molten Core pets, but MC is not a problem to solo anyhow. Naxxramas and AQ40 see me missing one pet each, off Gluth and Viscidus. Hardest work was probably Twin Emperors because it took me like three tries to actually understand that being a dual-wielding frost DK is probably the worst class you can be for this fight. Seriously terrible. With our mix of spells and physical attacks, I found I didn’t have enough oomph with either to outdps the healing they receive. 2H would have been better because Obliterates are all physical. In the end, I played it safe and went with the ‘I win!’ spec blood in my DPS gear, and down they went.

The RL battle pets

I am the feeder of three cats, two striped ones, Luigi and Jenny, and our tuxedo Merlin. They’re all not normal in their own way. Luigi is obsessed with non-stop contact to hands. A life where he is not petted constantly is empty and hollow to him. Jenny is a prissy Princess with hygiene issues. She feels she clearly shouldn’t share a litter box with stinky boys, so in protest pees in the shower and big potted plants. Needless to say, we no longer have big potted plants. Oh, she also licks walls, windows, and rocks. Worst, this is contagious and Luigi now also passionately licks windows and the shower walls. Last but not least is Merlin. We often refer to him as Kiffer-Katze, a pothead kitty. He’s a bit on the slow side and lets you do things with him no other cat would tolerate. My SO has a famous act where she slides in using him as her air guitar. He likes being vacuumed, on low. He leans into the breeze of the vacuum. Which cat does that?!? He regularly gets his crazy five minutes where he will bounce up walls, and his favorite sleeping place is my SO’s armpit where he sleeps like a baby on his back. Sometimes she will tie him into a baby-sling like blanket and he loves it. Needless to say, we love all three crazies quite dearly, and worry our heart’s out when they have to go to the vet. Jenny is our biggest problem kitty. She is prone to get really sick, and it took us til last year to find out that she has a feline heart disease, HCM. Merlin is usually our robust boy, but for the past couple weeks he’s had this big lump under his left eye. We finally took him to the vet and when they tried to take a tissue sample, relaxed pothead kitty turned into a ferocious tiger because he thought getting poked with a long needle right below his eye was really uncool. I don’t blame him, really.

Please meet Merlin. He fits into any box, honestly.

Yesterday, he went into surgery for it, and we are very relieved that it turned out to be a harmless adenoma that was removed. He also got his teeth cleaned, hooray. After I picked him up again from the vet, I no longer had quiet WoW playtime because he was full of neediness. Also, they did not tell me that the adhesive tape on his leg needed to be removed the moment we got home, so by the time my SO came home, his right foot was like…three times the size of his other foot. I still feel like a terrible cat mommy that I did not notice that straight away. Today, his foot is back to normal, his behavior is as normal as we can ever claim that he is, and we can breathe easier.

Game of Thrones

I am currently in the process of catching up on Game of Thrones. Remember, the show I recapped for like the first three episodes? I don’t know, I kinda stopped watching halfway through season 1, and still don’t know why. I gobbled up the rest now and am almost caught up completely. It’s a great show that really brings the books to life, but I am not 100% sold on the changes they did. What’s up with Robb’s storyline? I guess they really wanted to make him seem like this noble, fantastic King in the North, with the beautiful wife and a lovestory to match it. Also, in season 3 it really struck me that I doubt they can pull this off with their younger actors. Go back watch season 2 Bran, and then turn in again for season 3. He’s enormous now, and his voice has completely changed. Same with Arya growing up. By the time the show ends, they won’t be able to pass as kids anymore, at all.

Unsurprisingly, I am going with Brienne and Jaime being OTP. I really think Brienne’s actress is fantastic.

Am I the only one wondering what the success of the show is doing to GRRM? If I were him, I would really feel the unbearable pressure of having to knock out the rest of the story much faster than he’s been in previous years. Not that I am complaining, because I would rather continue reading than waiting years and years again.

What to play next?

This week of vacation I want to use the time to actually play something that’s not WoW. But what? The Witcher 2′s desktop icon is staring at me every day. I thought the prologue was tremendous when I played through it, but then when I reached the first town in the playthrough, my joy went poof. I don’t like the combat, and I do suck at it. I felt there were a multitude of quests, but not enough guidance where to go for them. Yup, that’s me, being ruined by mostly linear gameplay. Sorry, sandbox lovers, but I like following a thread through games. Running through the woods for ages without finding what I need for the quest makes me stop playing instead of being inspired to search some more. This is the prime reason I have never considered buying Skyrim.

I have a couple more games I could play. The Longest Journey started very nicely. I have both KotORs. Also, Deus Ex and a ton more. Hell, I never even finished Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood nor Arkham City. I just need something that totally grabs me, in the way L.A. Noire did.

Maybe by tomorrow I’ll be able to tell you that I managed to find something.

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Ahem…a gaming update

Last Updated on Monday, 13 May 2013 12:54 Written by Kadomi Monday, 13 May 2013 14:00

This past week I was thinking what to do about this blog of mine. I often find my mind filled to bursting with thoughts on gaming, blogging and other such things, but often no time to express those thoughts. I tried whipping me into blogging more often by coming up with pompous new year’s resolutions that I failed already after a month. As spam comments on this blog are always on the rise, this leaves me with two options: 1. don’t renew the domain and close shop or 2. actually start writing again.

Belghast of Tales of the Aggronaut has recently returned to blogging, writing something every day, taking his time to do that, and the thought appealed to me. Just write something every day, to get back into the habit. A couple days later Jaedia asked me on Twitter if I would return to my blog, and that decided it for me. I don’t know yet what exactly I’ll write about every day this week, but I have a week off work, and I am going to use it!

Six months ago I made the decision to quit my US WoW-account. I re-rolled from scratch on my EU account, horde-side on Argent Dawn and have not really looked back at all. This isn’t news because I have posted about it before, but six months later, I am still equally happy. My guild is full of nice, generous and relaxed people and I am having tons of fun hanging out with them. So much in fact that I am going to fly to the UK in June for a pubmeet of the guild. I never felt like an outsider or newcomer, and am looking forward to meeting all those great folks I am raiding with, including finally meeting Spinks, always my blogging heroine.

The main

Yatalai in full T14 glory. I loved that set.

Yatalai remains my main character, a dual-wielding frost Death Knight. I have settled happily in a DPS role which is both very relaxing after years of main tanking and at the same time quite challenging because I always try to improve my performance. I think great DPS is equally as important as great healing and tanking. High DPS output throughout a fight will make everything easier for everyone in the raid. To challenge myself, I have a friendly DPS rivalry with our raid leader Savitr, a kickass Windwalker monk who plays at a very high level. He’s leaving me a bit in the dust gear-wise at the moment, but on cleave-heavy fights, like Horridon, I can beat him. We also have an excellent mage, so I feel in very good company trying to perform well.

We raid twice a week in our progression group, but we’re not super-pros. Our stumbling stone in T14 after I joined was Wind Lord in Heart of Fear, and so we didn’t finish the tier until patch 5.2 had dropped. I still find T14 oddly tuned. Mogu’shan Vaults had the tough Stone Guards with lots of personal responsibility, then a fairly easy middle part, the fantastic and challenging Elegon encounter, and Will of the Emperor which was…not a fitting final boss for this raid. Elegon deserves that crown much more. Heart of Fear in general seemed quite tough, and I did not actually finish it, as I wasn’t along for the Empress kill. After weeks of wiping we entered Terrace, and pretty much rolled through it easily. I don’t think any of the bosses took more than two pulls, including Sha of Fear.

You have no idea how much work it was for us to get this sucker down.

T15 is again oddly tuned. I hear that people are saying the latter parts up to Lei Shen are quite easy. I don’t know really know, because we’ve been stuck in the first part for two months now. Jin’rokh is a good DPS check, but he’s followed by Horridon, which is this massive brick wall we smacked into. Our last kill, number 3, a oneshot, was the first time that I actually thought ‘I think we finally got this fight’. Kill number 2 was almost as much work as the first kill. Council I found a little bit easier, but not much, and we only got this last week. We started on Tortos last week, and on a certain level I find this fight again easier than Horridon, but we’re not close to killing him just yet. 3/12 after two months. I think I am inclined to agree with Zellviren, and think Blizzard has made normals too punishing for the casual raider. Casual raiding does not mean being satisfied with LFR. LFR is a means to an end for me: to get enough gear to improve performance in normal raids. I am only missing one piece of gear from ToT LFR, shoulders, and that’s the only reason I am doing LFR. I did not do parts 1 and 3, because it’s not fun enough for me to play like that.

Alts and other activities

I have a second level 90, Yagara, the Mistweaver Monk. I was quite intrigued with monks when they were released, but am not sure Blizzard hit the mark with them. I did not find the Windwalker melee anywhere as enjoyable as say, frost DKs or even warriors. Part of it for me is that the combat doesn’t provide me with the sound feedback that I like. The ‘swoosh’ of a Blackout Kick is not as awesome as the sound of an Obliterate or Bloodthirst. Mistweaving also did not quite do it for me. Again, mostly me. As far as healing goes, I like reactive healing or proactive healing like disc. I don’t like HoTs which is why resto druids are usually a short-lived experiment for me. Enter the Mistweaver, a healer with a channeled heal, two different kinds of HoTs, and one emergency reactive heal. Oh, and fistweaving. Which was sort of nerfed to the ground with 5.2 and does not even come close to Atonement. Not even close! So here I am, having a healer of the style I enjoy the least, and who doesn’t really seem to fill any niche. I don’t think I’d be decent at tank healing. Raid healing seems quite strong, but my experience is mostly LFR, which is a giant snoozefest full of healers eager to boost their numbers through copious amounts of overhealing. I usually cast Renewing Mist and Chi Wave on cooldown, and then if there’s any sort of raid damage, I start Uplifting. If there’s a lot of raid damage, I use Revival. If I get really bored and there are a lot of people clustered, I use Spinning Crane Kick, Spin To Win! I get bored just reading about it. I took her to the first 3 parts of ToT LFR and then decided that maybe Mistweaving is not for me. At least I tried. I healed one 10-man raid on alt night, Heart of Fear, and that was a million times more fun than LFR. We’ll see. She’s there, and I can still play her when I feel like it, but currently, I am more driven by my latest alt project: Yamaline the disc priest.

You know disc is the flavor of the month when you have multiple disc priests in 5-mans. Atonement in 5-mans is just awesome, even though the 5-mans get worse and more abusive, the higher you level. I went from 1 to 49 in full heirlooms just through dungeons and herbing, and decided that I was done with that after yet another fail Zul’Farrak group where DPS pulled willy-nilly with the statement ‘Hurry the fuck up, I don’t have forever’. Why queue for 5-mans if you are in such a freaking hurry in the first place?

My only pleasant ZF experience. Tank dropped early, so we four-manned it with a voidwalker and two hunter pets.

Disc is so much fun that once I start questing, I will likely not even get a shadow spec for now. While herbing I easily defeated multiple mobs at the same time, which were 3-4 levels above me. 5 stacks of Evangelism + Atonement=hax! Seriously, so much fun. I am itching to play her some more. I started playing a lock as well, but she’s on the back burner for now. My fuzzy-wuzzy panda is more fun.

Chercolis the Fabulous Banker

One of the concerns I had when I started over was that I would have to adjust to a life of being poor again. On US-Bronzebeard, I had over 200k gold and an army of alt crafters. On Argent Dawn I had nothing. Needless to say, my worries were for nothing. As my GM might say, most of my worries are always for nothing.

The gold state of my characters, as of this morning

I started quite small when I arrived on the server, selling limited supplies recipes that I bought off vendors. I still sell those regularly, they’re a nice, steady income. Yatalai is a blacksmith, and with MoP something has happened that I never thought would happen: blacksmithing is a profitable profession. Now that crafted PvP blues are also excellent pieces for PvE for fresh 90s, I made a lot of gold with them. The Covenant set sold quite nicely, and the Crafted Dreadplate stuff was extremely profitable for a couple weeks. Income from that is finally slowing down as just about every blacksmith has learned all the plans and the market is now flooded with pieces way below my threshold. I tried to get into the transmog market for a while but I don’t have the patience for it. It takes forever for some pieces to sell, and I like immediate rewards. I recently switched to buying underpriced Cata and MoP greens. I buy everything with a decent suffix (avoid Tiger, Beast and Whale at any cost) that is priced below 75 gold, and flip them. Works fantastically well. A disappointment so far is JC. Everyone on Argent Dawn seems to be a JCer, which means that most cuts sell for less gold than the uncut gems cost. Even Primal Diamonds are not worth it.

Yes, greens really sell that nicely. I think I need to up my fallback.

As you can see in the screenshot above, I use TradeskillMaster for auctions. It’s insanely powerful. It cuts down on the time spent at the auction house and can do so many things. My crafting routine is very simple. I log on my banker, collect the gold, leave him by the auction house and log on Yata. Open TSM_Crafting, click on Restock Queue, and it will queue all the items I need to restock the AH with. Log back onto the back, click on Crafting Mats, with a couple clicks have him buy the mats for Yata’s crafting. Head to the mailbox, click on Auto-Mail, and the ghost iron and living steel bars automatically head Yata’s way. Log her on, open mail, find an anvil, click on Craft Next til the queue is empty, find a mailbox, click on Auto-Mail and all that I have crafted heads to the banker. Also, all the cloth that’s in her bags heads to my tailor. Etc. This whole process takes less than 5 minutes. The only TSM plugin I don’t like is TSM_Destroying. I like using Panda for that instead. The rest is all wonderful. The screenshot above is TSM_Accounting, btw. Combined with the addon in-game I use the TSM app. Instead of running an auction scan in game, the app downloads the latest auction info via Blizzard’s API once an hour. Additionally, it can access any Dealfinding list you have created in-game in TSM and alert you on your desktop when a new deal is up in the auction house. When I am not in-game, I go to the WoW website to purchase it on the auction house, or if I am actually playing, it’s a sign that my banker needs to come out and play. The TSM app also gets the latest files from WoWUction, which is another fantastic gold resource.

Pet Battles and Mounts

I never actually saw this coming, but pet battles are strangely addictive. It’s not actually the battles that are the most fun for me, but the completionist aspect. I like collecting pets. I’ve been slowly going through all the zones trying to collect the uniques, at least as long as they’re in a level range that my team can actually beat. My highest level pet is a level 16 rare maggot. I never thought I’d say this, but maggots are kind of awesome. The way it Leaps at its foes, so awesome. Don’t judge me.

I wish I was as good at collecting mounts. I am now sitting at 97, when all I want is that nice dragonhawk. I find myself struggling with the TBC rep mounts, because I usually don’t feel like grinding. I am halfway through Revered with the Mag’har, and have a lot further to go with the Sha’tari Skyguard. Only friendly with the Cenarion Expedition. Haven’t even started Netherwing yet. The drop mounts are eluding me on this account. No mount of the Ravenlord, no Ashes, no blue proto. I did get both Malygos drakes, and am just four achievements short of the red proto. I started the Argent Tournament, so in just a couple weeks, I will have my Dragonhawk. If I remember to do those Tournament dailies. Ugh.

Other games

I have been so absorbed by WoW, to my SO’s great regret, I feel, that I have not had the time to play other games. None of my Steam collection, despite my grand plans. I think this week I’ll change that up a bit. I recently dipped my toes into Neverwinter, to create Yata the halfling trickster rogue. All I can say is that I had more fun playing Neverwinter than I ever had with Guild Wars 2. And it’s free! At the same time, it was not captivating enough to make me play all the time. I did enjoy the Forgotten Realms setting that I have such wonderful memories of. I GMd an FR campaign a lifetime ago, and some of my best computer game memories are the old SSI gold box games set in Forgotten Realms. Curse of the Azure Bonds, aw yeah. Plus Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc. Good times.

That’s it for now. More shenanigans tomorrow. Thanks for reading.

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[Books] January Reviews

Last Updated on Saturday, 9 February 2013 13:03 Written by Kadomi Monday, 11 February 2013 14:30

So that this blog doesn’t end up being one book review with not much else in it, I have decided to talk about my read books in a monthly summary post. Hope that works out!

I didn’t meet my Goodreads goal of 40 books last year so I went with 35 this year. I am however quite convinced that I might make it 40 this year, if January is any indicator. I managed to read four books in January, though some of them were favorably short.

I started off with Feed by Mira Grant. Highly recommended by many of my friends, I had been looking forward to it for quite a while. I loved the play on RSS Feeds on the cover. I had incredibly high expectations, and I have to say they weren’t really met at all, sadly. The setting is in 2040, many years post Zombie apocalypse, which seems to be its own genre now. The three main characters are Georgia Mason, her brother Shaun and Buffy Meissonier. They are a team of high profile bloggers in a world where blogging is the prime source of reliable news, their site called After The End Times. Georgia is a newsie, a news blogger, her brother is a so-called Irwin, poking zombies with sticks, and Buffy is a fictional, releasing poems and other fiction. The team gets the opportunity to join the up-and-coming Senator Peter Ryman during his presidential campaign, as exclusive bloggers. Though the campaign is very successful, it is overshadowed by incidents involving zombies, like a huge-scale attack in one of the towns the campaign stops at. The bloggers keep digging up dirt, and are soon deep in the middle of a conspiracy in regards to the origins of the zombie apocalypse. It sounds more exciting than I actually found it. The story is mostly told from the first person perspective of Georgia. As newsie, I kinda found the story through her light-sensitive eyes very dry to the point of boring. The whole presidential campaign read more like a political thriller a la The Pelican Brief or any other Grisham, and not like the exciting horror story that I had expected. Maybe I am raw from the Obama campaign in 2012, and it’s more enticing to read as American, but I for one kinda don’t care about American elections that much, at least in not so much dry detail. In the latter parts of the book, things finally start to happen, and that’s where the book hugely improved for me. I originally gave it 3.5 stars, but in retrospect, thinking back, I really didn’t like the whole package that I got, making Feed an average to me.

Next up, we have Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay. I actively avoided Kay since hating on his Fionavar Tapestry books that I read in the 90s. Just not my style of fantasy. In the meantime he seems to have changed his focus to historical fantasy, the fictional retelling of history in fantastic worlds. Under Heaven is one such book. It roughly follows the events of the An-Lushan rebellion in the late Tang dynasty in feudal China. Our protagonist is Shen-Tai, younger son of the famous General Tai who had won a great victory for his people, the Kitai, but regretted the price of lives that the biggest battle took. When the General died, Shen-Tai went off to officially mourn him, by burying the Kitai and Taguran dead at the site of the battle, away from civilization, for two years, bringing peace to the ghosts there. As reward, the Tagurans award Shen-Tai a present of 250 so-called Heavenly Horses. Horses are prized greatly in the Kitai Empire, and none more than the Heavenly Horses. In one instant, Shen-Tai is transformed from humble young man to important member of the Empire, in danger of assassination and of being used in political plots to gain access to those horses. Political intrigues eventually lead to the downfall of current Emperor, and Shen-Tai is at the heart of it all as it happens around him. I really enjoyed this book even though it didn’t quite match the Asian mythology profile that I had been aiming for. Characters were interesting, and I enjoyed Shen-Tai and his younger sister. Villains fell a bit flat, Wen Zhou being a somewhat boring character. Still, I enjoyed it, and I am mildly excited that Kay is going back to this setting sometime later this year.

My personal highlight in January was Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. I don’t think it’s for everyone, but I loved it. It’s the story of pretty much the worst marriage one could imagine. The first part of the book is told from the view of Nick, smalltown Missouri boy who moved to New York, was a magazine writer, and found the perfect wife, Amy. They fell on hard times, both losing their job, and then Nick’s mother fell sick, so they moved to his hometown in Missouri where he opened a bar with his twin sister. When the book starts, it’s their 5th wedding anniversary, and things don’t seem so well for them. When Nick gets to work, he gets the news that Amy has gone missing. When police looks into her disappearance all signs point at Nick being involved in her disappearance, possibly murder. Did he kill her or not? It’s hard to tell for the reader. It’s certainly obvious he bore her no love. So what happened here? I loved this book, despite its utter absence of characters being remotely likeable. Nick is quite douchey, for sure. It’s a book with a seedy, gritty underside, full of mature themes and words. As a psychological thriller I enjoyed it greatly. Hard to put down! I think it deserved it’s Goodreads award 2012 for best thriller. for me.

Last but not least, I read Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris. It’s his first novel from 2005, and has all the trademarks of a Sanderson novel: unique, interesting magic system, and skillful world building. As it is his first work, his flaws stand out more than they did in later books. Elantris is the name of a city that used to house divine beings. Normal people were transformed through an event called the Shaod, granting them magical powers that allowed them to turn dirt into food and heal the gravest of wounds and sicknesses. People worshipped them, until a catastrophe happened that took the magic away and turned all Elantrians in nothing better than lifeless zombies. The main character of the story is crownprince Raoden, Prince of Arelon, the country that contains the city of Elantris. He is taken by the Shaod, which means he gets locked into Elantris. He meets others inside the city, and begins with trying to improve the situation inside the city instead of turning into savages suffering inside. He begins to look into what could possibly have caused the loss of magic. On the outside, Sarene has arrived, Raoden’s fiance and now contractually bound widow. She discovers that the Fjordell Empire is trying to take over the country of Arelon by forcing it to convert to its state religion, Shu-Dereth, through machinations of the priest Hrathen. The different viewpoints ultimately mingle and end up in an exciting, action-packed climax. What is it with books like Feed and Elantris that start slow and then go all out? Characters are the big weakness of the story. Neither Raoden nor Sarene nor Hrathen are particularly memorable and unique, unlike the setting. It does make me nod with appreciation when comparing The Way of Kings with Elantris to see how far Sanderson has come. He will return to the Elantris setting, and I can’t wait what a more mature Sanderson will do with the world now. Though, really, instead of going to Elantris again, I really want the next Stormlight Archive book. Is that too much to ask? Elantris gets 3.5 stars from me, which rounds up to .

And that’s it for January. February will probably be a slower month, as I am slogging through a very slow historical novel right now.

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