Bible of Dreams

My Warcraft Year in Review Meme

For the better part of this decade, I have been blogging this meme for myself. This year, I thought I'd do this with a Warcraft spin, and tag some of you to complete it too.

xo

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My Warcraft Year in Review Meme

Please leave a link to your meme post in the comments here. Please tag 5 other folks to complete the meme and copy these instructions and the questions into your blog with your answers.

1. What did you do in the World of Warcraft in 2009 that you'd never done before?
2. What was your favorite new place that you visited?
3. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?
4. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
5. What was your biggest failure?
6. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
7. What do you wish you'd done less of?
8. What was your favorite WoW blog or podcast?
9. Tell us a valuable WoW lesson you learned in 2009.

1) What did you do in the World of Warcraft in 2009 that you'd never done before?

I left my accomplished druid and my Alliance server -- where I knew a ton of people and had been raiding for 2 1/2 years -- and started playing my horde shadow priest full time, on a new server where I "knew" folks only from the Livejournal WoW Ladies community. Best. Decision. Ever. I've met so many awesome folks on the new server and wouldn't trade the fun we've had this year for anything.

2) What was your favorite new place that you visited?

Hmmm. I don't know that I visited many new places in 2009 really, since I'd had my first two 80s by the end of 2008. So, I guess I'll go with Ulduar. It had some pretty vistas.

3) What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?

I would like to have more opportunity to share my raiding experience and my passion for the game. Be that more blogging / podcasts / guild role I can't say. But it is a definite want. And I would like to have more time to write here.

4) What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Hmmm. I got my 4th character to 80, built my second motorcycle, and got to finish up the two BC instances my poor druid never got to see the final bosses die in (BT and MH) due to her having a scheming asshat warrior raid leader that drove her away from raiding and eventually out of that guild. Heh.

5) What was your biggest failure?

I suppose that would be the dissolution of my 10-man Alliance guild, in which I was an officer. But that was due primarily to a female guild member who was sad that the GM stopped spending all his in game time with her, caused a ton of drama and killed the guild. Remind me I need to post about married GMs with their borderline inappropriate in-game main squeezes.

6) What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Killing KT in 25-man for the first time on my shadow priest. It was the culmination of march hard work and effort, and was shared with some awesome folks. Kwick and Norm I am especially looking at you. Oh, and the first time we did Ony 25 and I did a million billion DPS on the whelps. MINNNNDDDDDDD SSEEEEEAAAAARRRRRRRR! Cough.

7) What do you wish you'd done less of?

Sitting around waiting for raids that didn't end up going. And the 45 levels I put into my shaman before the faction change service went into effect. I do love playing a shaman at level cap but I HATE HATE HATE leveling them.

8) What was your favorite WoW blog or podcast?

The WoW site I visited the most was definitely MMO Champion, hands-down. And all my favorite blogs are on the WoW Blog list to the right of this post. RAWR! It's awesome to have found so many new, interesting bloggers to read this year. They have each had a hand in making my WoW playing and blogging time a lot more interesting to be sure.

9) Tell us a valuable WoW lesson you learned in 2009.

I learned that it is not worth it to offer up constructive criticism or unsolicited advice. Even if you think you are friends with someone and see themselves repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot with their poor communication skills. Even if you see them run folks off with their communication style and their lack of respect for others' ideas and opinions. Just keep your mouth shut. Because all you'll get is a black eye for trying to help someone be more aware of how others are perceiving them.

5 Folks I'm tagging to Complete this Meme

• Psynister
• Deimonia
• dboverdrive (we need her to write more)
• Tessy
  
• Notosa

More Sunday Retro Raiding

 This week, it was AQ 40.

Back in the day, my guild got stuck on Twin Emperors. And as luck would have it, that's exactly where I got summoned in today. AND they let me tank an Emp to boot! 1 shot of them + 1-shot of C'thun, and much rep and many shiny toys had by all.

Friday Five: Five WoW Improvements for Which I am Grateful

I've been playing WoW for a while now ( I think it's my 4-year anniversary this January), so I remember the opening of the AQ gates, mounts that cost 600 gold with two discounts, and walking uphill in the snow all the way to 40. So, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, and with an eye on the WoW 5-year anniversary celebrations, I bring you today's Friday Five:

1. Easier transportation for the lowbies. I am so over leveling alts at this point, having done so many many times at this point. But slow mounts at 20, fast mounts at 40, and flight form for use 60-70? All of these bumps make it a heck of a lot more palatable.
2. Raid content I get to see most of. Yeah, my guild didn't perservere with the 10-man hard modes, and thus never saw Algalon. But I have cleared everything else. That's a major improvement over not seeing the end of BT last expansion, or the Sunwell at all.
3. Raid bosses that don't take weeks to learn. I'm looking at YOU Lady Vashj and Kael. That said, I didn't mind learning Nefarian and Chromag in BWL-- they took a few hours but we got them and it felt good.
4. 30 min hearthstones. My priest and druid rejoiced when thee went into use.
5. Cheap mounts. My first mount was my epic tiger at 60 (I got by with cat form until then.) I scrimped and saved up the 600g and had my SO, a Knight with Darnassus rep, buy it for me, so I could have the 10% Officer discount stacked with the city reputation discount. Now, I can buy even my lowbies mounts in every color.

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

May your bountiful tables have all their chairs, and may the spirit of sharing inmbue you with extra friends and family rep gain throughout your day.

Retro Raid Night, Take 2

 

 

Zin posted some screenies too. A fun night with friends plus some nice dress up items taken home as well.

Updated: Pilgrim's Bounty Cooking

You may have noticed a flurry of cooking leveling within your guild recently. People who'd previously poo-poo'd cooking and fishing suddenly taking up both with a vengeance. It's likely that the upcoming Pilgrim's Bounty in-game event is the reason. Pilgrim's Bounty is held November 22- November 28 and features virtual takes on many of the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday's traditions.

The cooking quests, and the achievements requiring the fruits of your cooking labors, all involve specialty items only available from specific Pilgrim's Bounty vendors, located outside of the capital cities. Although they share some of the holiday goods, such as honey and spices, certain items are only available from a specific NPC:

• Cranberries are from the vendors outside Ironforge and Orgrimmar.
• Sweet Potatoes are from the vendors outside Darnassus and Thunder Bluff
• Small Pumpkins are from the vendors outside Stormwind and Undercity.

Additionally, you'll need to hunt turkeys in Tirisfall Glades or Elwynn Forest to obtain Wild Turkeys. With the assistance of these vendors, you will be making five dishes:

• [lvl 1-100 cooking] Spice Bread Stuffing
• [lvl 100-160 cooking] Pumpkin Pie
• [lvl 160-220 cooking] Cranberry Chutney
• [lvl 220-280 cooking] Candied Sweet Potato
• [lvl 280-340 cooking] Slow-Roasted Turkey

Cooking all five recipes will earn you the achievement Now We're Cookin'. Your first stack of 20 of each of these foods will be used to complete the daily Pilgrim's Bounty Daily quests, resulting in the achievement Pilgrim's Progress.

Related achievements include Pilgrim's Paunch (Acquire the Spirit of Sharing from a complete Bountiful Table feast at every capital) and Sharing is Caring (Pass one of every dish at a Bountiful Table.) NOTE: if you eat five helpings of every food, you'll gain the Spirit of Sharing which lasts one hour and increases reputation gained by 10%.  Conveniently, tables come equipped with their own unlimited stacks of food, so you won't be stuck in the kitchen all day. These achievements are all part of the Pilgrim meta achievement which awards the title Pilgrim and a plump turkey vanity pet.

More achievement points are nice, and I'll definitely try to complete the achievement for the pet. But what I am most excited about is gaining five more recipes to add to my total.

I'll be updating this post with screenshots and more details once the holiday goes live this weekend.

For more cooking achievement details, see the Cooking Achievement guide.

Professions Synergy

 

This sexy Tauren is my bank alt. He is one of the primary keys to my ability to make my horde-side professions somewhat profitable. But the other equally important component to that profitability is my having chosen complimentary professions that can help each other out. For my horde characters, it breaks out like this:

• shadow priest is a tailor/herbalist
• mage is an alchemist/herbalist (elixir mastery for the flask procs)
• shaman is a miner/jewelcrafter
• druid is a skinner/leatherworker
• SO has an enchanter and an inscriptionist

Alliance-side is similarly aligned:

• druid is an enchanter/skinner
• mage is an alchemist/herbalist (elixir mastery for the flask procs)
• shadow priest is an inscriptionist/herbalist
• SO has a leatherworker, engineer, and blacksmith

That's right. Not only did I pick my alts' professions with an eye on how they could feed into each other, I took my SO's professions into consideration as well to come up with a mix that would cover most of our bases.

Each day, my alchemist transmutes an epic gem and sends it to the JC. The JC makes an icy prism daily, sending the blue quality gems back to the alchemist, along with the eternals she mines, cutting the epic gems and sending them to the bank alt. All herbs gathered go to the alchemist for making whatever flasks I need and whatever elixirs are selling well in the AH. The two maxed fisherwomen do the fishing daily (the third does it only when it's the sewers, slowly increasing her skill), sending any usable fish to the bank alt to be held for the druid's eventual push to 450 cooking.

Alliance side had mirrored this as well, until I faction changed the shaman and moved her over to the horde. Additionally, as I leveled the tailoring and the SO leveled the leatherworking, all excess items that were not especially saleable were funneled to the enchanter for DEing. The inscriptionist made me plenty of scrolls so no enchanting skill-up points were ever wasted.

These interwoven professions didn't initially happen by design. But when I moved my shadow priest to her current server and started up my army of alts there, I did take what I'd learned from several years of good professions synergy with my Alliance characters and apply it. Some professions, especially enchanting, are really expensive and time consuming to level without having additional toons and their professions excess feeding into them. And since the excitement over getting to train new recipes and make fabulous new goodies has long been a driver of getting me to work on my alts, it works out very well all around.

So next time you roll an alt, and are tempted to pick two gathering professions or a repeat of an easy profession you've previously breezed through, take a minute to think about if you have an opportunity to make your profession leveling less painful -- or more profitable -- by considering it in context of your own little crafting cabal.

Bronzebeard Horde-Side Guilds That Raid

While researching how other guilds on my server go about their application process, I made a point of checking out what the guilds above and below us on guildprogress asked of their applicants. As a result, I came up with a good list of guilds that raid, which I present for you here.

• Sassafrass
  Consistently the most progressed guild horde-side. Their News page sports a screenshot of their heroic-25 Twin Valks kill.
• Denied
  A solid #2 on the ToC-25 achievements. However, there has been lots of guild attrition lately, with a number of their members joining other casual raiding guilds on the server.
• Ascendance
  Third on the ToC-25 progression list, but their homepage features a screenie of their Algalon kill, taken 3-weeks ago. Grats!
• Ressurection
• Relentless Few
• More Chaos
• Ominous
• Inevitable

This list is a work in progress and will be added to as I find more guild website links. Interesting to note people talk a lot about how horde-side BB doesn't have a lot going on. But all of these guilds are ones ranked higher than our casual guild that raids. So it seems to me that although we don't have a bunch of guilds slugging it out for world firsts, folks are still keeping busy here.

Field Research: Raiding Applications

Looking for some links to guild application questions for comparison purposes to see how ours stacks up. Please link or copy/paste in comments.

Many thanks!

P.S. SHPers: please to be decloaking with your twitter names if you have 'em. I need more reading materials!

OMG! I was Just Night Elf Mohawked!

Oh, the humanity!

It is spreading like the zombie plague...

maybe I should retaliate...