Little Surprises

The last time I posted I was in a snit and did nothing but whine so I thought I’d better take a little break. What did I do on my break? The final Rift beta and I really enjoyed it. I loved the public groups when battling rifts and I do like the incredible range of customization available when building your character but in my case it would probably mean a bazillion alts as I’d want to try most everything.

I don’t know when the change above took place but when I logged back into WoW I was pleasantly surprised to find that my Phosphorescent Stone Drake has stopped dragging me around in the dirt, he now lets me ride up on top. I guess he was just letting me know who’s the boss and now feels I have got the message. This is going to save tremendously on armor dry cleaning bills.

I decided to work on a rare archaeology project and got another surprise. I know this is nit-picky but it was always annoying to me to have to get out of flight form to use the survey tool, and behold, I can now use it in flight form. Using it puts me in caster form but that’s fine. Another thing I noticed is that while my druid always did a little magical puff when changing forms I don’t remember every character doing it when getting off their mounts but they are now and I’m a great fan of magical puffs.

And while I’m on the topic of things that make me happy I have to mention the Thieving Little Pluckers. I have the feeling that I will still be doing this quest long after I’ve reached exalted with the Ramkahen. I do this every morning, first thing, with my coffee. I even stand there a while so I can hear them jabbering at me. I don’t know what makes it so satisfying to bonk these guys with that giant mallet but I could do that all day. I control myself though and only do my 30 little pluckers so as to leave some for everyone else, it’s right up there with Gnomebliteration.

Is Solo play Dead or just Grievously Wounded?

Yep, this is kind of how I feel about things right now. I was brought up by a mother who had a lot of rules about manners one of them being if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything. Boy us parents can really do a number on a kid, lol. There is nothing wrong with constructive criticism but I have a hard time with it so I usually just keep my mouth shut.

Others apparently feel the same about some aspects of the game that I do, this, and this. There, they said it better than I could.

I don’t want to get into the whole mmo debate thing, yes, yes, multiplayer, yada, yada. Nothing about multiplayer means you have to join a guild. I mean when I first started I thought I kinda was in a guild, my faction. I had the idea that all the Alliance/Horde players were going to cooperate to accomplish goals like group quests, dungeons, etc., silly me. So I joined a succession of guilds and with one exception I still had no one to accomplish goals with. I still had to pug. I realized that since I played at odd hours and sometimes in odd little bursts with a lot of afk in the middle that the fault was probably mine, perhaps if I had been on in the evenings things would have been different so I gave up on it. I put all my characters in my bank guild where they will get no guild perks (okay, I lie, as of yesterday I’m in a level 2 guild) they will have druids flying past them 10% faster to beat them to the herbs and they will have to put up with that, sigh. My cook will have to come to terms with the fact that she will never be able to complete Iron Chef because the two recipes I need are guild achievement recipes. I might indeed be able to single-handedly cook 5,000 Cataclysm cooking recipes for the one recipe but there’s no way I’m catching 50,000 fish from a pool, just no.

I had already come to terms with not being able to complete anything involving raids and if I want to see the inside of a dungeon I wait til I can solo it. This is not the way I wanted to play the game but it has been a workaround that well, worked pretty well until now. I got by on the solo content which was fun, sometimes challenging and plentiful. I do not like the linearity of questing in Cataclysm. I feel I’m being pushed on a fast track to level cap so I can RAID with a GUILD the way Blizzard wants me to play the game. The solo content is no longer challenging, there are some great quests, Gnomebliteration comes to mind (my apologies, Gnomes, really) but it was clever not challenging.

I feel like a poor unwanted relative that showed up at the family reunion, a second class citizen, I feel that Blizzard doesn’t want my type in their game. Loner, misanthrope, join a guild and cooperate or get out of Azeroth. Some of the blue responses on the forums seem so, well, arrogant. It’s as if they are appalled that these sleazy little loners were having fun playing their game and are now trying to force them to conform, there will be no enjoying of the game unless it’s as intended. Okay, maybe it wasn’t intentional on Blizzard’s part, maybe they didn’t intentionally change their game so that it was less enjoyable to solo but it is for me.

I still love Azeroth, I’m still playing, and when I get in a place like this I usually make an alt, which I have he’s glaring at you above. Prompted by comments made by Ironyca and Döra in response to Will the Real Me please stand up? I’ve made a male character. I’ll let you know if he begins to cause my play style to change, oh, and I just pre-ordered Rift as a backup in case Blizzard starts hunting down us loners and expelling us from Azeroth.

Mysterious Glowing Figure in Ramkahen Inn

A day or two ago what appears to be some flavor of Elf appeared in the Inn in Ramkahen. You can’t target or speak with her, at first I thought my video card was going, getting double vision but it seems not as others can see her.

Anyone know who she is? Is she a harbinger of something to come? Is her appearance a portent of some great looming threat on the near horizon? Inquiring minds want to know, well, mostly me but I’m sure you do too. I haven’t seen a glowing figure in any other location but maybe they are appearing elsewhere too.

Did she get stuck in a transporter beam? Well, so far I can’t find any information about what this might mean but knowing how things go in Azeroth I don’t think it can be a good sign, eeeeeeee!

Reins of the Phosphorescent Stone Drake

Aeonaxx, Mate of Aeosera, yes! But this isn’t a how-to post on camping Aeonaxx. The comments section on Wowhead has plenty of those which I hadn’t read as I wasn’t out to get him. I just knew the general area he spawned in and that you had to mount him. My brief period of trying to camp locations where Deathwing might appear to get Stood in the Fire made me realize I’m not made of the sterner stuff those ladies and gentlemen are. In fact after reading some of the posts describing weeks of camping I feel kind of unworthy, but hey I don’t know how many times I’ve done Strath and still no mount so I guess it evens out.

First thing in the morning with coffee but before I put my contacts in I login to do some dailies that are safe to do without being able to see and my miner and herbalist go to Hyjal and gather. I start with my druid who does the cooking daily, goes to Uldum to do the two Ramkahen dailies and then I go to Deepholm to see if Lost in the Deeps is available.

This morning as I flew out of the Temple of Earth NPCScan alerted almost immediately. I flew around and luckily he was big enough that I finally was able to see him, so I flew up and mounted him … that’s when it got tricky. Okay, first I was shaking so bad it was a little hard to do much of anything but hang on. When I came to my senses and tried to attack nothing was happening. I stuck my nose closer to the screen and saw my health going down and his at 100%. I could see I was in human form, ugh, if I couldn’t change to kitty things weren’t going to go so well. Luckily while my nose was pressed against the screen I noticed a message saying something like “you can’t attack while pacified” which is the message I get when I accidently hit any key while in bird form. Okay, although I saw my human form I must still be in flight form, yikes. I tried to change to cat form, couldn’t, then finally found if I first changed to human form and then to kitty, yay, now I’m in business.

During all this ridiculous near-sighted fumbling my health had dropped and I had no idea why as all he’s doing is flying around giving me a scenic tour of Deepholm. After I got him I looked him up and found that he spawns whelps that spit flames at you so that must have been why my health was going down but I didn’t see them so obliviously I never bothered to kill them. I finally got him, he fell to earth, I got a nice parachute ride down, looted and got my Reins of the Phosphorescent Stone Drake. If there’s a moral to this story I guess it’s if something is supposed to happen it’s going to happen whether you’re prepared or not, so maybe someday Deathwing will deign to kill me, I can only hope.

Just one other thing, if you plan on hanging out in front of the bank for all to see your new-found uber coolness don’t land. As you can see in the inset the little red glow is me kinda laying in the dirt and grime on the cobblestones since he insists on carrying me in his claws so it sort of ruins the whole uber cool thing, stay airborne!

Edit: I was looking at the blog stats and this post is by far the most viewed. From the search terms used to reach this post I realized people were hoping for some actual help in hunting down Aeonaxx rather than just one person’s experience. While there are probably more I looked around and found Find Aeonaxx a blog with a lot of useful information on hunting him down. Also be sure to check WoW Rare Spawn’s Aeonaxx post. Good luck to you!