A Warlock Cries

It’s really not like I forgot though. Between 6:00 and 8:30 every morning I login. It’s a great time as there will be no phone calls I’ll have time to do dailies, make money, whatever. I’m usually anxious to check auctions and do my transmute for the day so sometimes I jump right on without putting in my contacts. My eyesight with glasses is not optimal to say the least though.

I really, really shouldn’t do this. My hunter accidently killed Loque’nahak this way (I got rid of the Gorilla after that) so I should have learned my lesson. This morning I decided I should do the Headless Horseman, it was about quarter to 8:00 so I didn’t want to waste time and put them in. My warlock will be fine, I thought, it’s not like on my kitty where I have to see to chase his backside, it’ll be no problem.

Apparently after we started the tank DCed but I couldn’t see that. I’m happily casting away secure in the fact that everyone else has better gear than I do and I am usually not at the top of the threat meter. Uh oh, thank you really good healer whose name I couldn’t see, and apologies to the group. We all made it through because of the healer and I promise no more randoms without contacts, geez … will I ever learn.

WoW Anonymity

The Real ID debacle certainly made clear that privacy is a hot topic among World of Warcraft players. The kind of anonymity I’m talking about is different. When I first started playing I realized I was grouping and spending time enjoying (or not) people’s company without knowing whether they were male, female, old, young, brown, white, rich, poor, I could go on but you get my drift. If you played long enough with someone you might get an idea of who they were in rl depending on how chatty they were. Apparently my female adultness doesn’t come through in chat as I can’t count the times I’ve been called dude.

I’m happy to keep it that way. I had a wow friend I met when he saved my shaman from certain death in the Wetlands. Every time I logged on if he was on I’d get a cheerful greeting and an offer of help if I needed anything. I remember sending him a Chocolate Celebration Cake when he dinged 80 and he commented, “Dude, are  you a girl?” I guess you dudes don’t send gifts? Anyway, I said yup, I’m a dudess and apparently that was cool with him. But one day he was bemoaning the fact that he felt old now, he’d just turned 18. I assured him he had a long way to go before considering himself old, I said geez, I’m married and I don’t feel old yet. There was silence in the chat panel … finally he typed “You mean you could be like forty or something?” I said lol, yes, I could. That was the end of a great wow friendship. After that, no more whispers, no more offers of help. I guess being female was okay but possibly being 40, that’s just over the top.

WoW Spillover – The Boots of Canine Restraint

Okay it’s a good thing my husband doesn’t read this because even I’ll admit this is weird. I don’t do it with everything but I have a few pieces of wardrobe that have developed wow names. It didn’t happen on purpose, it just kind of happened. Our dog MUST be walked every day no matter what the weather. There have been times, like Snowpocalypse 2010 when we had two feet of snow, that I really wasn’t in the mood. One day I was angrily rooting around in a pile of outside shoes asking myself where were my boots of canine restraint. Up until then I wasn’t aware they actually had a name but apparently I had named them. The dreaded wow spillover into rl hits again, stealthily even as it was news to me that they had a name.

It’s getting that time of year again and I just dug them out of the closet. They’re pretty scuffed and dingy I’ll have to pay a visit to The Threads of Fate and get Sheddle Glossgleam to shine ‘em up.

The Warlock’s Evil Sparkle Pony

Everyone knows how the RNG likes to rub your nose in it. I had been fishing for months in the sewers for that sewer rat when someone came up beside me and got it on the third cast. I know people who have received the Reins of the Raven or The Baron’s Mount on their first try. But it’s the other law of wow that really hurts. It’s the “if you do something with more than one character whatever it is you want will drop for the character that can’t use it or doesn’t want it” law. I don’t know if anyone has come up with a name for it but they should.

For my druid I would really like the Reins of the Raven, if any of the others drop that would be great but that technicolor bird is what I want for her. Now my warlock is picky, anything she rides on must be sufficiently evil looking to maintain her standing among her minions and fellow warlocks. She would not ride a sparkle pony, she didn’t want a Brewfest Kodo but she definitely wanted The Baron’s Mount and she got it. I think this is the first time this has ever happened. I am flying around taking screen shots like crazy. She doesn’t care if her ring drops for the druid or she doesn’t get those 20 flimsy masks, yayyyyyyy, she got her evil sparkle pony!

What’s up with Crusader Silverdawn

I’m on good terms with most of the NPCs in game, even the ones you have to beat down to get information out of, we’re cool. I just have a problem with Crusader Silverdawn. What’s up with this guy, I mean calm the frick down man. Death to all who oppose us? Isn’t that a little harsh. I mean what if they are just philosophically opposed.

I always feel that I’m a disappointment to him. I think he might be pissed off because I never accept The Fate of the Fallen and I have only ever killed one Kraken. I just take the easy free gold quest from him, flying along in comfort throwing spears from a dizzying height with no danger involved.

But I’m not sure I’m the only one he makes uncomfortable, look at High Crusader Adelard he’s like totally ignoring Silverdawn it’s almost like he’s embarrassed. Adelard seems to be stable laid-back guy maybe he’s tired of standing next to all that fervor.

The only other thing that might be going on here is that I’m the one who’s getting weird. I have been doing these dailies for a long time. I would stop but I feel I have to do the least annoying ones for the money. Absolutely no jousting though. I didn’t mind the jousting it was just that I spent most of the time trying to keep the little buggers I was jousting in the ring. I don’t know how many times I would almost have them and then they’d run out of the ring and disappear.

Sorry, I digress. It could just be me, I seem to remember getting a little hinky around the  Shattered Sun there towards the end but really watch out for Silverdawn, just saying.

WoW 4.0.1 Patch Bug Woe

Patch 4.0.1 came and left us with a myriad of bugs, and they are still here for me at least. I guess I wasn’t being very realistic as I thought that Tuesday’s patch might address some of these. BUT, I really, really had hoped that the Headless Horseman encounter would be de-bugged. I mean this is serious business, I HAVE to try for the mount every … single … day. Yesterday it was like some kind of digital version of musical chairs, one of the group would DC we’d wait and as soon as that one came back, poof, another one DCed. Finally it was my turn to DC, then I had trouble logging back in and by the time I got back the group was long gone and I had a bag of treats and double Justice Points for doing nothing.

The rest of the bugs I can live with for a while, I can’t buy Northern Spices because I get an internal bag error when I try. Frame rate which for me has never varied from 60 fps is doing strange things in Dal. Buffs intermittently display on top of my map. Spells disappear from the action bar and are replaced with different ones. My Warlock’s talent point frame is flashing insisting that she is owed one more talent point, although she isn’t. The Warlock enters “A Hero’s Welcome” at her own peril as when exiting the Inn she loses her minion.

There is the tabard one where your shirt is kind of replaced by your guild tabard whether you own a tabard or not. The one that seems to be stirring up the most consternation is the “not being able to inspect” bug. There is a whole lot of shrieking on trade about this one. I’ve never understood inspecting. I think the only time I inspected someone was when my bank alt inspected someone to make sure they weren’t wearing a bunch of blues and Heirlooms before she gave them money for their first mount.

Anyway, there are a lot of bugs. I can’t remember exactly but wasn’t this patch somewhere around 10 GB. I’m kind of surprised anything works at all. It is pretty frustrating to look for fixes on the Tec Support board and just get the time honored deleting your WTF, CACHE, and INTERFACE folder fix which of course fixes nothing. I feel conflicted, after repeatedly DCing on the Headless Horseman I felt a senior nurd rage coming on. But on the other hand this patch is a major undertaking and I’m sure Blizzard is doing everything they can to get things back in working condition. The support staff have my sympathy, my single stint filling in for technical phone support at a company I worked for had me yelling “BITE ME” at the customer by the second phone call. It was very satisfying, and no I didn’t lose my job as we were all about to get laid-off anyway so it was a freebee.

I’m going to try not to obsess about my dwindling chances to get the Headless Horseman’s Night Charger, I’m going to think happy thoughts and take deep breathes and hope by next Tuesday they may have a handle on the problem.

Happy Hallow’s End!

Dying While Questing Coming Soon!

My favorite character is my feral druid. I like feral so much I’m dual specced feral/feral. When WotLK came out I raced along with all the raiders to 80, I have no idea why, I don’t raid but the point is this druid has been 80 a long, long time. It’s been about a year and a half since I died from anything other than stupidity.

I spent a lot of time going back and doing all the quests I had skipped for The Seeker and Loremaster achievements and nothing gives you the feeling of being in God Mode like that does.

Right now she could probably walk across Icecrown on foot in her bikini killing everything unarmed (okay she does have 400 in unarmed combat so she’s no pushover) and make it, really, not kidding. I’m thinking I’m going to have to learn to be a bit more respectful of NPCs once cata gets going. I’m thinking soon I’m going to have to come to terms with dying while questing again. It’s kind of scary to think that soon she’ll be just another Night Elf tasty snack for some cata beast but I’m looking forward to it.

Remembering WoW Newbishness

With Cataclysm almost here I’ve been wandering around the old world visiting places that will on longer exist or will be forever changed. It brought back memories of the pain of newbness my first character went through. I started with just a game card thinking that that would be plenty of time to see what wow was about, right. I just had the little pamphlet that came in the box, had no idea of the online resources available. It showed.

My first character, the one who suffered the most and financed the rest is a hunter. I remember feeding my pet repeatedly, thinking that if I gave my pet four fish at a time they’d REALLY like me fast. I think she was in her twenties and had four silver in her pocket so couldn’t really afford all that fish.

She only had four silver as I hadn’t discovered the auction house. I bought and sold everything through vendors and couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get ahead money-wise.

I thought feign death was a horrible cowardly thing to do, leave my pet to do my dirty work? I didn’t understand the concept of dumping aggro at all and died many times bravely defending my pet.

This poor hunter pretty much leveled by grinding alone, if Quest Helper was out there then I sure didn’t know about it and I would wander aimlessly about looking for quest hubs. Frustration at not finding them caused me to go into fits of rage and decimate the wildlife population so I finally did level in spite of myself.

As my server was pretty new it also took a long time to actually get a pet trained as every time I tried to tame one, someone ran up to save me from it. Ah, those were the days. Actually sometimes I do miss those days, that’s usually when I start a new alt.