Blaugust Day 1: Introduction

No idea what Blaugust is? Go read about it first (TL;DR I post every day for the month of August, and I’ve been doing it as part of a community for years now).

I don’t really post a lot of real life things here on my blog, keeping it to my hobbies (art, gaming, fiber arts like knitting and spinning, cross stitch) but every so often something creeps up and I talk about it. There’s no real explicit reason for this secrecy except that I’ve got young kids, and my husband is a first responder, so privacy is something we very much value. I figured for my first Blaugust post, I’d do a little bit of an introduction for anyone following along.

I’m a mid 40’s mom of two young kids, and like I said my partner is a first responder who tends to work very long hours. In between homeschooling and tending to the kids (who have complex needs) I like to play video games, read, knit, and things along those lines. When I was younger (not even much younger, but let’s say pre-children) I was not a very nice person. I have a temper – and I’d like to think that it is since having kids that I’ve morphed into my final form, who I am pretty happy with, overall.

I love animals (sometimes more than people) and I try to make an effort to let others know I’m thinking of them or that they’re important. I tend to retain weird information about people but rarely let others into my private circle. I have lived all over the world. My father was air force, and we were posted to Germany when I was 7. I have lived (and driven) from one end of Canada to the other. While most people I speak to have lived in only a small handful of provinces, some even living in their home province for their entire life – I love that I’ve moved so much. I have a very well rounded idea of what I like as far as a ‘home’ goes, and what I don’t like. That idea has grown and evolved over the years, especially after we had kids.

Because my partner is a first responder I find it difficult to keep tabs on some people. My hours of availability are sporadic, which carries over into my gaming. I’m not a night owl, and tend to game EU hours despite living in Canada. I do try, but I’m not very good at reaching out. The first responder side of things can be stressful. My partner has seen and dealt with situations that no one should ever be exposed to. He has saved more lives and helped more people than most will ever know. He has given so much of himself over to this job. I am incredibly proud of him, despite not saying it nearly as frequently as I should. Again, privacy issues. The stories I have could fill numerous books.

I feel awkward when I’m talking to people. I overexplain situations and give far too much information (like I’m doing here, in this post). I have maybe two close friends I speak to on a daily basis, and everyone else I’d categorize as acquaintances. I think I am probably not worth the time. Did I mention imposter syndrome? Well, stick that up there too.

As far as gaming goes, I prefer the meta game to the actual game. In World of Warcraft (my main game of choice) that means gold making. I have been playing since it released, in some form or another. I take breaks here and there, but I always return. I love collecting things, and old world content – but I also love the QoL changes that have happened over the years, and thus any form of ‘classic’ is just not for me.

I also love RimWorld, and Wurm Online, my two other most played games. Wurm is very niche, but has a dedicated and passionate player base. I’ve been playing that as long as Warcraft. RimWorld is single player, and I love it whether it’s modded or not. That game just speaks to my soul.

I’m a very prolific reader, preferring most evenings to curl up with a book instead of any games at all. I’ve recently started diving into audiobooks in the morning while I post my auction house stuff in WoW. I don’t think it will ever surpass reading for me, but it’s a neat way to explore books.

I think that’s about it for now, this post is already far longer than I intended it to be (yep, I ramble). I hope everyone enjoys their own participation of Blaugust, no matter how many or how few posts you manage to eek out. Let’s have a great one! As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Gold Making – Week 30 / 2025

This week was a slower one as I got myself situated across two accounts once again instead of just a single one. I know I’ve said this a few times in my gold making posts, but I sell across 20 NA servers, and I used to have those 20 characters on my main account dedicated to making gold but instead decided to shuffle them to my second account.

That leaves my main account dedicated to ‘fun’ while my 2nd account is dedicated to gold making. On days when I don’t feel like putting things for sale, at least there’s a little distance and I don’t have the characters looking at me waiting. Doing this shuffle means I had a number of days with no sales at all, or smaller sales than usual as I shuffled all the goods. I might level them up one day, but for now they can just sit at level 10 camped on their bruto where ever that may be.

I also spent some time (finally) leveling up pets. I don’t want to sell pets at level 1, instead I level them to 25 (and thus level up my alts at the same time) and then sell them – pricing them at the same price as level 1 pets. It’s my preferred way of leveling alts, and just plain fun. Here’s hoping everything is sorted enough so that this upcoming week will be a great one for sales.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Unique Ways to Level

I am not a fan of traditional leveling methods in most MMORPG. Since I mainly play World of Warcraft these days, that’s what I’ll be talking about. After running through a story or quest chain once, I’m pretty much done with it and I don’t want to do it again unless I absolutely have to. So over the years I’ve found other ways to level my characters, whether it’s purchasing boosts or through pet battles.

At the moment I have 11 level 80 characters (almost all of them leveled through timewalking, minus my main) and 27 characters at level 70 (almost all of those were leveled up with pet battles). When a legion trainer pops up who is repeatable (especially snail race) I know it’s going to be a great time to level a character (or two).

With the release of The War Within came a new race – the Earthen. This race has a bonus to exploration, and it didn’t take long for people to take advantage of that. The addon above (Dystinct Earthen Skyriding) allows you to level from 10-70 within a few hours time. It does take some time to get used to the method, you do need to use the fancy dragonflight and not just basic flying. You also need to spam a movement key as you fly for a lot of the discovery to actually register. Nothing to do with the addon.

I created a warlock since I don’t currently have one at 80 and I would like one – it took me 15 minutes to do their starter tutorial (I died, was rushing things) and then I was off, flying around Azeroth. After two hours of flying, I was level 42. It took me approx 1-2 minutes per level. I could probably shorten this time significantly as I become more familiar with the addon. For example, it doesn’t warn you before you fly over top of faction cities, and 6x (so far) I was shot out of the air by alliance guards. Not ideal. Instead of trying to get back to my body in a hostile land, I would just talk to the ghost and continue on my way.

It’s a really fun change of pace, and then once I hit 70 I have the option of doing more timewalking (if I’m not sick of it by then) or I can wait for a legion trainer daily and grind out some pet battles. Last night I managed to get from 70-80 on my mage with that method. Sure, she doesn’t have any gear, but that’s not a big deal as I have a lot of warbound stuff or I can just craft her some. Most likely I’ll just leave her at 80 without gear as I don’t really play that class, at all. I just like having an alt army available, if I need one.

I did also set 10 characters aside who are forever parked at their covenants, doing the covenant table twice a day. This is mostly for farming pet tokens and reputation, nothing fancy. These characters don’t really have a purpose, I don’t “need” 65 characters, but it’s nice to have, fun to level, and you just never know.

Have your own unique way of leveling up if you’re not in the mood to quest? Let me know in comments, and as always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Organizing Things (again)

When life is stressing me out (as it so often does these days) my default mode is ‘go clean and organize something’. That’s how I ground myself, feel productive, and move on from whatever it is in life that I can’t control right then. This morning I decided the cleaning that needed to be done was my Warcraft account.

I’ve multiboxed in Warcraft to some degree since BFA era, through Blizzard’s decision to no longer allow broadcasting, and then no longer allowing any ‘streamlining’ at all. At the end of 2024, I decided that maybe I didn’t want to continue with so many accounts, and so I moved all of my gold making over to my main account. That’s 20 level 10 characters who were not in use besides doing auction house stuff once a day.

Then I took a break from the game for a while, returning just over a month ago. I decided this reduction of accounts was a silly idea, and I wanted my auction house characters over on my 2nd account so that I could continue to do AH stuff while I used my main account. I also wanted them separated again just to give a bit of distance (even just visual distance) between my ‘fun’ characters and the ‘work’ ones. Plus, that would free up 20 character slots – since I was at 60/65, this would be a big deal. Paying for the 2nd account is no trouble at all, though I imagine I’ll only keep a few months of game time up, my main account I tend to do a few years at a time.

At 5am when I got up (the family gets up at 7am and you better believe I enjoy those two hours alone) I decided to shuffle everything over to the second account, after creating 20 new characters over there. Along the way I discovered I have 10 guilds that I’m the owner of. I thought I had about 5. Whoops.

I cleaned out banks, took stock of inventory, and while I didn’t actually set up the items on the AH, they’re at least in the mailboxes of the characters who will post them – tomorrow. I like to do my postings first thing in the morning, and I’d rather just skip a day and do it the next day than post it late.

It was refreshing to do such a deep clean and organization of my characters. I plan on purchasing some bag upgrades for all of them (just the main inventory bags) along with their bank slots (in preparation for the next update where all of that will change) and the reagent bank. I’m hoping this is enough to secure the cost for the level 10 characters but we’ll have to see. I don’t want to have to pay thousands to unlock their banks, and they also won’t be leveling up to 80 any time soon (that’s when you get those slots for free, supposedly). I also went through and deleted any characters who were not level 70, freeing up a few more slots. Why? Well, I wanted to make some earthen and experiment with leveling up through exploration discovery. I figured for any characters who were between 10-70 it would be easier / faster to just start over rather than leveling. Anyone who is 70+ can do pet battles or timewalking to earn their last 10. We’ll see how it goes, for now I haven’t created anyone new on my main account.

The rest of the day I meandered around and found it a bit difficult to focus. The world is in a state, and I’m trying to keep my head down and my family safe. The heat is slowly creeping back (gross) and honestly, gaming is a nice relaxing distraction.

I hope everyone out there is doing OK (well, ‘everyone’ the 3 people who maybe read this blog from time to time) and if you’re not, let’s have a chat. Maybe we can vent to one another. As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Achievements

I finally unlocked the Earthen race on my NA account (remember I decided to swap back? Well I did, I just have too much progress to give up) which means I can try out this ‘speed leveling’ addon that I found, where you level up via exploration. I’m thinking I might even make a YouTube video out of it, showing my progress on my first run. It is said that you can level from 10-70 within 1-2 hours just by exploration (Earthen have a 200% bonus, plus there are other xp bonuses going on at the moment) and I’d like to see if it’s true. The addon is called ‘Dystinct Earthen Skyriding‘ and you can find it over on Curseforge.

Of course I’m not the greatest at flying, so we’ll just have to see how it turns out. I’m excited though, I love finding different ways of leveling, my usual is to do pet battles from 10-70, then timewalking 70-80. I always have pets to level.

Have you used this addon before? How did it work out for you? Let me know in comments, and as always, happy gaming – no matter where you find yourself.