Tag: WoW

Last night I just wanted to relax with something easy that required almost no thought. It has been a really long week and I didn’t want to deal with other players. I settled in to do some pet battles and I wasn’t disappointed. I have been leveling up lil ‘xt a mechanical pet, along with a dragonkin and a beast. This combination is not always the best when fighting against NPC tamers – but it’s a fantastic combination when out in the wild. A lot of the pets you’ll be up against are beasts and mechanical pets do very well against them.

Before I knew it, I had my first level 25 pet. The others are quickly following because once your pet stops gaining experience the experience earned is divided towards the other team members. Now my team consists of a 25, and two level 24s. Next on my ‘to do’ list is to finish beating the tamers in the world so that I can earn the safari hat and boost my experience gained by 10%. There’s a lovely addon that allows you to swap out your regular hat for the safari hat when you do battles, and this will help me actually make use of it for once, instead of having it sit in my bags doing nothing like I would normally do.

I also managed to raise my collection from 212 pets to 232. 250 is my next objective for the achievement – and I couldn’t be more pleased. Over all? It was a fantastic calm evening spent doing pretty much nothing which is what I wanted right from the start.

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

There was a post over on google plus today by Robert Anderson that inspired me to take a look at the AddOns I currently use for World of Warcraft. I tend to keep my UI very minimalistic, and I want the least amount of addons running as possible to keep everything running properly, especially after a game update thus my list isn’t that long. I use a complete UI replacement that’s recommended on Icy-veins called ElvUI and it takes care of so many things for me I don’t really need that many others. It changes the font of the UI, all my windows, hotbars, map, etc. and I just copy a profile over for each character. You can also set it up depending on the role your character plays. Highly recommend this addon. It’s very easy to install and it is constantly being updated.

My other addons include:

1. Auctionator – AH replacement stuff
2. Collect Me – For battle pets and mounts
3. DBM – Complete collection, this is of course deadly boss mods. Used for raid warnings and the like.
4. Oqueue – for joining flex raids since the Blizzard format is not exactly intuitive.
5. PetBattle Teams – More pet battle stuff
6. Pet Tracker – Even more pet battle stuff
7. Recount – Because I like parses
8. Zygor – An amazing guide addon that will tell you how to do anything in game from leveling to working factions and collecting mounts.

That’s it. If I didn’t use ElvUI as a complete UI replacement I would probably have a lot more on that list, but like I said, I prefer to keep things simple. It makes updates much easier, and when something breaks I don’t have to worry about being unable to play. What are some of your favorite addons? Let me know in comments!

 

In my attempts to get at least one pet battle team to 25, I’ve been collecting a lot of pets. I always considered myself a collector even before pet battles came out, but of course now that there are over 600 different pets in game things have gotten a bit more extreme. I wanted to show off some of the pets I’ve gotten and while there may not be anything exceptional about them, each battle is an exciting attempt to further my collection (and experience) so I’m hoping to make this a weekly feature. We’ll just have to see. First up? The Snowy Owl!

The Snowy Owl is a seasonal pet that can only be found during the Northern hemisphere real-world seasons. That means you can start seeing this pet around from December 21st, and it lives in Winterspring. There are a lot of great technical details posted about the pet over at Warcraftpets, a site that I’m constantly using to keep my collection up to date. It is of course categorized as a flying pet, and if you click on it you’ll hear typical owl sounds.

Winterspring was full of neat critters to try to capture. The one issue I had was that I kept accidently killing the ones that I wanted to add to my collection. It can take a bit of patience to get a rare quality of the pet you’re after, but it’s certainly worth it in the end.

Thanks to my adventures in Winterspring and then a bit of time in Hellfire Peninsula, I was able to raise my team to level 21 and I’m currently working my way to level 22. It has slowed down quite a bit, but it’s incredibly relaxing and I’m in no rush.

Every so often the loot gods smile down on me and I win something I can actually use. It’s rare, there’s no way I should let that one piece of gear entice me to thinking that I will constantly get something I want and can use, but it’s just enough of a tease that I keep coming back for more.

Yesterday I was headed off to the Timeless Isle in order to do my daily and as chance would have it there was a flex raid going on for the celestials. I’ve talked about them before, four giant creatures that roam around a center arena. You get an achievement for defeating all four but you only qualify for loot from one kill per week. Not per encounter either, just one total. It makes sense really. The loot that drops also comes from regular raids (there’s also PvP gear) and if players could attempt it every week on multiple encounters what would be the point in raiding.

I try to defeat at least one celestial a week but it doesn’t always work out that way as I’m spending less and less time on the island. Yesterday when I arrived I saw that a celestial was almost dead, and as luck would have it the group stuck around to take down a second one. I stayed outside of the raid but still contributed and decided on a whim to use my seal for an extra loot roll.

That’s when the loot gods smiled at me for a brief moment, and I won a pair of ilevel 553 pve gloves. Sure, they’re for my DPS priest spec and I spend most of my time healing unless I’m out and about on my own (I keep forgetting that I can designate loot to go towards any of my specs) but they were still an enormous upgrade and I’m really glad I won them. They’re my 2nd BiS (best in slot) and I couldn’t be more pleased.

I may spend an enormous amount of time working on pet battles, collecting silly mounts, and working on pointless factions, but I also enjoy being good at my class and one of the measures of being ‘good’ in world of warcraft, is gear. That doesn’t mean you can’t still be good without, but the game IS very gear driven (after all, you can’t even queue for some LFR without having a specific ilevel first, no matter how good a player you are). Is it the only qualification? Of course not, you can have the best ilevel ever and still be a really shoddy player. It just happens to be one more thing in an ever growing list of things that I enjoy working on while I play.

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

In pretty much every MMO I have ever played, there is ‘busy work’ to keep you logging in. A few years ago it became dailies and with Pandaria (at release) pretty much ALL busy work was dailies. It became a boring grind for me and was one of the main reasons I quit. Logging in to complete 20-30 dailies was just not my idea of fun. These days there is a lot more to do – but I regret not doing those dailies back when they were relatively fresh.

There are a few factions I really need. One is Shado-Pan. I need this to purchase a few enchanting recipes, like the weapon ones I want. This faction isn’t too bad because I only need revered not exalted – but the dailies themselves are annoying.

Another faction I need is August Celestials, and that one is also for some recipes.

I have also never finished faction for the Anglers, nor for the folks that sell serpent riding (Order of the Cloud Serpent). That’s right, NONE of my characters, even my main, have this skill. The problem is I still hate dailies, especially when it comes to completing them on multiple characters. It’s a bother for me to remember to do my crafting dailies, let alone the multiples that are involved in farming and every other faction under the sun. While it may be a successful method in getting players to log in daily, it is one of my least favorite things to do in game. How about you, do you enjoy logging in for dailies, or are they something you could do without? Let me know in comments!