For RL sanity!

We interrupt this normal blog post to bring you this breaking news...

My life is extremely stressful right now, and WoW is adding to the stress rather than decreasing it. Lyllea is not yet 85 (6 bars away) and I have not been on in 3 days. So instead of insightful commentary on healing heroics, or something, I give you random screenshots.

I found this in my screenshot folder. It seemed to fit this post perfectly.

I have an octopus on a stick! Best RP weapon ever. All of this gear has now been replaced, but I am keeping the octopus on a stick. I even named him Stanley. Every priest who dabbles in darkness should have one!

This quest amused me greatly. Oh, and someone get Hastur off my head, please.

I have no idea what the heck is going on in this screenshot. No clue at all, but it looks nifty.

Deepholm is ridiculously beautiful in places.

It's the yellow box graphic bug of DOOM!

It really really annoys me that my armor clashes with my hair and I can't change my hair to match. Seriously, I am so glad I spend most of my leveling time in shadow. WTB red or black hair dye please!

Again, Deepholm is pretty.

 I hope to have things settled and my stress level decreased by the weekend, at which point I get to start gearing up. Good thing I like the Deepholm dailies, right?

My First Night in Cat

First there was...

 Then a lot of staring at a log-in screen

 Then I got to the docks and took a boat

 Then a kraken tried to eat me

 Then I ran Gundrak with guildies to get a guild achieve, a bit of XP (but a very little bit) and some guild XP.

 Then there was a priest (not me) tanking the trash in Blackrock Spire, which was very entertaining. Gotta love really good heals (again not me) and an insanely talented shadow priest.

Then it was back underwater and time for some hardcore leveling. Vash'jir? is very lovely.

And it would have been far easier to level if my quest log had actually told me about quests. Oh well, thanks to the addon Lightheaded (which loads wowhead's quest comments for you) I did okay.

In the process of wandering around there was a ding!

And now I'm trying to figure out how to get back to the beginning of the zone to do the quests I skipped. Sadly, this seems to be beyond me atm, especially since I can't remember the name of the beginning place. Oh well, I shall figure it out.

Whee!

Really, really sleepy, so I'll make this quick...

Vash'jir is AWESOME. Lyllea's gone up a level and a half in 5 hours. It took me 20 minutes to get on once Cat hit, but totally worth it.

I have many nifty screencaps, and I managed to skip ahead somehow while looking for ore, so I'm halfway through the zone and don't have a mount yet. On the plus side, skipping ahead meant I got ore, and it was FAR less crowded. Now if I could just figure out how to get back to Stormwind to train the next level of mining. I remembered to pick up Old World Flight, and COMPLETELY forgot to train mining. Ooops. Still getting XP from nodes, and hopefully a ton of cash on AH.

And the server first profession achieve was cooking, and it happened before I even got in. Good thing I wasn't trying for one, right?

Hope you're all having a blast with Cat, and I will come back with a proper post with details and screencaps once I get a nap. All-nighters are not my friend.

Almost toasted, but not quite

Well, the sky turned red...

But I didn't die, so I ran up to the top of a tower for a better look. I didn't manage to get it in the screenshot, but I did see a large wing. Guess Deathwing wanted to flame all the lowbie undead, instead of the plaguelands.

The Alliance wants you... to quest in the Southern Barrens!

That's precisely what I've been doing. It's a great zone, really, much better than the old Barrens horde-side.
First off, you have several factions, Stormwind, the Earthen Ring, Cenarion Circle, Ironforge, and even a bit of Gilneas. Yay loads of rep!

Then you have the zone flavor. An embattled Alliance is fighting both against the Horde and against Nature itself. How cool is that? You have quests to, among other things, go save an ambassador, capture a hill for the Alliance (which isn't as easy as it sounds), get supplies, burn down catapults, save people from a burning building, and trust me I could keep going. Want to know what happened to the Tauren village outside Mulgore? Well, you got to find out.

And I just want to keep questing there. I've already gotten the quest achievement, but the storyline isn't done and I want to find out how it ends. That, more than anything, impresses me. I want to know how it ends, even if it isn't a good ending for the Alliance.

I wish I could tell you more about it, like the one questline that seems so ho-hum, until you get into it and it turns so epic, but I don't want to spoil it for you. Just go do it, preferably on an alt of the proper level (30 to 35ish). Anput hit it at 30, which was about right, and she's now 36 and is a bit overlevel for the last bit.

Waiting for Godot. Or Cataclysm. Whichever

Well, the last frantic push to "finish" raiding in WotLK is on. My guild, the ever awesome Murderotica, is 9/12 in heroic 10 man ICC, missing only Dreamwalker, Sindy, and Arthas.  Oddly enough, we had Blood Queen heroic on farm long before we defeated Blood Princes. Go figure. And wow, it's weird to call Murderotica my guild. Silver Dragoons was home for a long time, but now I feel more comfortable when I'm logged on a toon in Murderotica than I do when I'm logged on a toon in SD.  SD's kinda shifted, and I don't spend as much time there as I do in Murder, and I don't raid with them. I miss raiding with Fidelma and Gariath and Jes and Kana, but I'm less thrilled by raiding with some of the new members, and I really don't miss raids that never started on time.

Hopefully on Sunday I'll have a Sindy kill to report. I know we can do it.  And in a couple of weeks, I will hopefully have my very own sexy drake.

Otherwise, there's not much happening in my wow-verse. I'm leveling the rogue like mad, and having a blast wandering around the Southern Barrens. I've dabbled in the new fishing and cooking quests, but my 80s are mostly neglected. Economics-wise, I've been dabbling in the pet and vanishing powder markets, since epic gems are, well, kaput. It does never cease to amaze me that a pet you can buy in Dal for 40 gold sells in the AH for 100g. Yay lazy people, I guess.

I have laid in a supply of coffee for Monday, and while I am not happy about the servers going up at 12 PST (since that's 3 am my time), I am looking forward to my first midnight opening, and 3 hours gives me plenty of time to install, patch, and pray that the server gods look favorably upon me.

Oh, and word of advice. If you want to level quickly, get herbalism and mining as your professions. See the XP in that screeny? That's a bit more than I'd get for a single mob kill.  Grabbing all those yellow dots adds up REALLY quickly.

And yes, that's the rogue's UI. I mostly like it, but if I was raiding with it, I'd do some fiddling, make everything match, that sort of thing. I need to fiddle with Lyllea's UI, the default casting bar keeps showing up and I have to reload ui to make it go away. But since the Cat install will probably break a lot of my addons anyway, I'm thinking it's time to start from scratch again, see what I can come up with.

I didn't want to stop!

I logged on today to fiddle around on the rogue, maybe use up her rested xp.  4 hours and 4 levels later, it took way too much willpower to log off so I could a) write this post, and b) go to bed.  All I did was quest, and it was SO MUCH FUN!

First, there was running through the rather long questline in Darkshore to get...

my very own not-so-little pet treant. His name is Withers, and he's taller than a gnome atm, but will shrink.  The questline for the Alliance starts with the beginning quests in Darkshore, and is detailed here on wowhead.  Horde can just buy him, I think. I think I'll be picking him up on a lot of my toons, he's cute.

Then there was massive questing through Ashenvale. I've done over half the quests in the zone at this point, and have outleveled a few already. I'm still going to go back and do them, since this zone is pretty epic. For example...

that's me in a wind elemental fighting the fire guy who set Ashenvale on fire. There's also a great quest that made me want to slaughter all the orcs I could find.  They're killing Laughing Sisters while a good chunk of the forest they want is on FIRE and you have to go recover these corpses. It just made me really angry that orcs would be stupid enough to slaughter these dryads while there's this huge volcano thing going on. Hopefully the horde side of things has some quests to deal with that too.

So the new Ashenvale gets a pretty enthusiastic thumbs up from me. If you're Alliance, it's well worth the questing, even if you did it before Cat. Garetia did every single quest in the zone, and while some of them are familiar, Blizz has managed to make even the familiar ones fresh and new.

Plus... who doesn't love random tentacles?

Oh, and in case you were wondering, there are two other pets I'm aware of that are new since the Sundering and available via questing...
Brezie's Sunflower which is available through the Plants vs Zombies quests.
Tiny Flamefly which is available in Burning Stepps. Link goes to Alliance version, though I'd guess there's a horde version too.
I'll eventually be picking both of these up, if I can ever manage to stop questing on the rogue.