Sundries

Well I finally reached Exalted with the Nagrand faction of Mag’har:

Having PeterFile, my Goriladin, made this so much easier.  I almost never had to fight one mob at a time.  It was mostly 3-4 at a time, sometimes even was able to get 5 at a time.  No problem and doesn’t take much longer one at a time.

The main thing I wanted was a new mount, the same one I got on my mage that I posted about before.  The only thing is with the addition of the new achievements in the game I really want to get the 50 mount achievement so I figured it’s a good time to get started:

At about 80 gold each it didn’t really set me back much money.  I’m very eager to finish getting my orgrimar faction up so I can get my Wolf mounts.

**James

Another busy day in WOW today, it was the start of Hallow’s End, their Halloween festivities.  That means the L70 Headless Horseman quest out in Scarlet Monestary.  This was my first time doing any of the Halloween stuff while being in an active guild and its been very fun so far.

After doing 5 or 6 initial quests out in Brill I then was able to get together a group of 5 great guildies and head over to take down the Headless Horseman about 10 times.  It’s great fun and a pretty basic fight, nothing special to do – just a basic “tank and spank”.

When you start the quest he comes  riding out fo the sky on a horse and then lands. Just get the tank on him, start up the DPS, and have a healer ready.  Just wear him down and get the loot.   There are a few purple rings, I got a nice ring with 60 attack power and +31 stamina but there were a number of caster rings.  A very nice plate head piece dropped as well as a few brooms.  I got one of those as well.

The brooms scale based on your riding talent.  If you have training for epic mounts you get the 100% speed increase.  In outlands they also let you really fly.  The absolute best part of the brooms is that they are instant cast, just click the button and off you go.  The bad part is they only last 14 days.  I’ve heard it’s 14 days of summoned time, not real life time, but a permament mount would have been incredible.

In the old world they act as a land mount, you just hover over the ground:

When you are in Outlands they act as a regular flying mount.  Since I only have the first level of flying skill so far I’m only going at the 60% increase of speed but it’s no slower than my regular flying mount for now:

I really whish this was a permament mount, I love the look of it and as I mentioned the instant cast is great.  I was picking some herbs as I saw the Fel Reaver heading in my direction.  I knew I had a few extra seconds since I had the broom, I didn’t feel I needed to get away sooner.

Being Halloween, there is also a large amount of candy to be had.  Most give you a nice little buff of some kind but don’t eat too much or you may get sick:

Yes, they programmed an action of you vomiting from eating too much candy.  Yes it’s a little disgusting but it’s so fun.  I just love how Blizzard makes the game interesting with their holidays and they go all out on Halloween:

For more information about Hallow’s End check out the WOW page on it.

**James.

I went out tonight and got another new pet to get ready for Wrath which is going to go live in just a few more weeks.

Right now I’m working on some reputation grinding, mostly killing Ogres out in Nagrand to get reputation with the Mag’har.  I really want to ge the White War Talbuk you can get from them once you reach Exalted with them.

Since the Ogres are a few levels below me, killing them is pretty easy but can be time consuming.  I decided to get myself a Gorilladin.

I can hear you out there saying:  “What’s a Gorilladin?”  Basically it’s a Gorilla that has a nice AOE (Area Of Effect) spell that’s great for doing huge damage to multiple mobs at one time.

Gorillas are tenacity pets so they are great tanks and his ability makes him like a mini paladin where he’s able to hold agro on many mobs at one time.

Gorilla + Paladin = Gorilladin

I looked around online for the best looking Gorilla to go tame but the pure white one is rather rare and has a long respawn timer and though he looks nice, he’s not that muc nicer.  I went out to Un’goro and found I really like the gray ones:

After I trained him I realized I only had meat for food and they don’t eat meat!!!!  Ugh.   I was able to get som fruit for him and make him happy.  I then went to Nagrand to go slaughter some Ogres and had a blast.  It was hard getting more then 4 or 5 at a time unless you wanted to do a lot of walking but he did great.

He has tons of health and I was seeing his Thunderstomp AOE spell hit for 500 – 800 damage on each mob per hit.  I did see one or two break into the thousand range but not too often.  He’s still only L65 so I guess he’ll be able to do better soon.

I ended up having to come up with another name but that was no problem at all.  Thanks to a great British Comedy called The IT Crowd and a helpful reminder from a co-worker I’d like to introduce to you my new Thunderstomping Gorilladin, PeterFile.  (See the below clip for why he’s called Peter File):

I’m anxious to see if anybody online notices his name and comments on it.  It would be cool to meet some other IT Crowd fans, especially in my Guild.

The only sad part of the evening was that I ended up letting loose my first trained pet.  Even though we got 2 new stable slots with this last patch it’s still not enough for all the cool new pets.  I figured I currently have 2 cats so I only need one.

Poor NikoMimi.  I trained him at L10 and he stayed with me up till the early 60′s.  I later got another cat from Winterspring and he spent his time in the stables waiting for me to come back and get him.

Below is a shot of me saying goodbye to him.  We went on a few more kills for old times sake just before I let him go so I could train the Gorilla:

It’s rather funny how non-hunters don’t understand about the attachment to a pet, I don’t think Warlocks feel this way since they don’t really loose their pets for the most part and they can’t personalize them by giving them a name like Hunters can.

I don’t know if I’ll get so attached to my new pets since I won’t have spent so many levels with them as I did wiht NikoMimi.  The 50+ levels he was with me represent hundreds of hours playing together so I don’t know if Mashimaro or PeterFile will be able to compete with that.

Here is one last shot that turned out very well.  We are standing outside of Tanaris getting ready to fly over to Ungoro.  I really like the dark blue sky of the Tanaris night and the almost white of the sand.

Click to see a much larger version.

**James.

(I also got my mounts back from Blizzard.  It included a 2nd copy of my flying mount which I not only don’t need but can’t even use.  I also can’t sell it.     It seems a shame to trash it but it’s soulbound as well.)

Well, WOW patch 3.0.2 hit a few days ago and boy did it hit hard.

To make a long story nice and short – few of my addons are updated and working yet and I’ve lost access to both of my epix land mounts and I’m still waiting for Blizzard to fix that but I do have a Core Hound now:

He is the Spawn of Uvuros Core Hound, isn’t he cute?  If you are a hunter looking to tame one of these you will find the biggest problem being that there will be 2 or 3 other hunters in the area looking to tame one as well.  Finding one before someone else is tough.  The other trick to tame these is to make sure you use your ice trap to hold him of course but don’t stand too close as his fire breath attack has some range to it.

It’s best to lay your trap down as he’s walking in your direction then back up about 20 feet or so.  Start your taming spell to agro him and pull him into the trap.  I was able to tame him just as the ice trap was about to break and since his fire breath couldn’t hit me the channeling wasn’t broken at all.

Once again the toughest part of this was thinking of a name I’m happy with.  Some variations I though of but couldn’t use or decided against were:

• GENSHIKEN
• Loli-chan
• Loli Pedo Fiend
• Ichigo Mashimaro
• Souichiro
• Inuyasha

I really was close to going with Inuyasha since he is a dog demon and so is my pet but I thought that may be too obvious.  I also almost went with his brothers name of Sesshomaru which I like but since I’m not a huge Inuyasha fan I decided against it

I also prefer cute and funny anime which brought me to think about Ichigo Mashimaro, a fantastic show, but the name wouldn’t fit.  I figured if I just went with Ichigo everybody would think, “Oh, Ichigo from Bleach..” but that would be wrong…  Not that I don’t like Bleach.  I decided to go with Mashimaro which is really just the Japanese pronunciation for the English word Marshmellow.  I liked the contrast of a soft, spongy, sweet desert topping and my double headed, green lava dripping, demon dog.

They did shrink him a good amount compared to what we saw in some of the videos from the beta but he’s still pretty big.  He also still makes a nice loud stomping sound when he walks around.  So far it hasn’t pissed me off yet, well see how it goes in a few weeks.

The other benefit over getting this version rather then the Red or White ones is his level.  He’s already L69 where the other ones will only auto level to 5 levels below your own, or L65.  That’s just more time needed to put into leveling your pet before Wrath of the Lich King comes out.  Plus, I really like green.

Core Hounds are ferocity pets (High DPS) which isn’t unlike my cat Momiji that I have.  I’m going to start looking for a good tanking pet to get now as well.  I really want to get a rhino since they are just so freakin’ huge but I’m also interested in the Gorilla for their AOE ability.  I’ll have to do some further reading before I decide which to go with.

**James

Well, I’m a little over a week late updating this but……   DING 70!!!!

I didn’t get to ding on any special boss mob but it was still enjoyable.  As soon as I hit L70 I switched to my new bow that I bought earlier:

I then head over to purchase the training for the flying mount.

Then it was time to get my new mout and hit the skys:

As great as flying is, the super slow speed of the first flying mount really sucks.  I’m so used to flying my elite mount on my human mage that I forgot just how slow this guy really is.

It’s still better than having to be stuck on the ground all the time.  Having the freedom to bypass mobs or just being able to go over mountains or lava flows is great.

After buying the training, the mount, and some new gear I was down to about 200 gold across all my horde characters on this server.   Thankfully money comes in very quick.  In about 9 days I’m now over 2,300 gold and I’m well on my way to the 5,000+ gold needed for the elite flying mount.

It almost seems a bit pointless to buy the elite flying mount now since in just over a month the Wrath of the Lich King expansion will be coming out and I won’t be able to fly till L77 in the new expansion.  Maybe I should just go and buy an armored bear mount when I get into the expansion, I’m sure I’ll make at least 5,000 gold before I hit L77.

**James.