Pets, Mounts and Achievements

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This is as good a time as any to make a post. I'm at a temporary loss of internet since early this Friday morn, and don't expect it back untill tomorrow afternoon, Sat. Apparently an underground wire wasn't quite where it was suppossed to be, and is now waiting repair.

I did have a short time in game this morning before the incident and Sol managed to obtain the last two TB commendations needed for his staff upgrade. He took a minor loss to spellpower and hit with the change, but gained in all the other stats. Besides, he will make up the loss somewhere else before long. The power of positive thought, or so they say.



My little green Disgusting Oozeling

I'm not what one would call an avid pet collector in-game, though I do like watching for those odd pets to come along or the ones not everybody in Azeroth already has. This is not to say that I don't have some of that flavor, as they were collected during early leveling years. I'm sure that I also don't quite meet "Hoarder" status such as perhaps Saz would define pet collecting. With something like 57 pets, I'm somewhere in the middle sitting on the fence. Khrox, the hunter, uses Petopia to guide his cravings for rares and exotics. Sol wanders through the pet and mount listings with Warcraft Pets and Warcraft Mounts respectively. (Links in the sidebars will take you to his collections, if your interested) While updating his pet collection mid-week, Sol came across two he thought would be nice additions, so the next morning found him off on adventures to round them up. Not hard really, one had to be farmed, but the other was a simple continent jump to purchase. The Disgusting Oozeling took about 30 minutes to farm in Swamp of Sorrows. The Winterspring Frostsaber Cub was adopted for his Winterspring Frostsaber to raise. This is kind of like a 'set', now. And I guess now, that the Frostsaber's true identity is for sure female. I'm sure she'll be a wonderful Mom.


The Winterspring Frostsaber mount turned out to be a Mom!

Sol's mount collection is in about the same boat, somewhere inbetween causal and "Hoarder." His only drake of coarse is the Albino Drake offering from the mount achievements. Actually quite useful on long flights. Sol has made consious decision to go for the next level of achievements on both pets and mounts, it's just a matter of time before he gets there. And that brings us to the last section of the post title, "Achievements."

There has been something of an on-going "discussion-debate-opinionated postings" thing around lately over game achievements. Are they "real" or "not", are the people seeking them actually accomplishing anything, their life value, yada-yada-yada and so on. I'm not going to bother with linking the original and "debating" posts, (general use of terms here), but I will reccomend Pshcochild's take on the whole matter, and his post does have links. As for myself, yes, I do like my game achievements. Yes, I do feel that each one does bring me some moments of satisfaction when accomplished, and I look forward to the next victory be it minor or a rough journey. So yes, at least for me, they are "real." And that is what it boils down to. The individual person and how they feel about game achievements. BTW, I also spend time working at other achievements with pleasure, those which benefit the guild. My way of contributing to the overall good of the guild and my guild mates.

Okay then! What do you like collecting? Pets? Mounts? Achievements? Or are you like Sol and dabble in a little of everything? (Psssst, his archaeology rares are up to something like...14?)

One more little cutie to share with you....



Gotta love this little panther cub!



UI- Growth of the User Interface

Yes, I did originally say that this blog would not be about guides; theorycrafting and so on. There are plenty of folks in the WoW blog community much more capable than I to fulfill your needs in these areas. The reasons for todays' post does come under the other heading of writing about what has my interest in the game at any given point. Which brings me to the slow but sure development of my user interface. Which is still a work in progress!


Background: When Sol finally hit level cap in Wrath, his attention turned towards end game. In particular, he wanted to PVE and raid. This all happened rather late in the expansion, with most other folks already farming ICC. Undaunted by the hills ahead of him, everything came under the microscope. Gear, dailys, LFD, various add-ons he never used before and the user interface. It became a long journey of learning things, and then trying to put them into use.

Our first screenshot is from July 2010. Still working with the basic WoW interface, add-ons were the first additions made according to much of the blog and website info I had read through. Recount, so I could monitor my dps on the training dummies. Omen for the needed threat meter. The "must have" Deadly Boss Mods, and Chinchilla Mini Map. (because I thought it was cool and I could resize/pretty the map up) I was also learning that the better players were key-binding their spells and abilities. As you can see, my early attempts at this were rather...noobish, to say the least. Although I seperated my buffs and debuffs from my spell rotation (such as it was), I keybound the rotation to the number pad. I'm sure you can also tell that I was still clicking at least half of it. The transition to key-binds went slowly for me, but I eventually got kinda used to it. Mind you now, I was still using the W-A-S-D movement keys. Yep, I had a lot to learn yet.

This second screenshot from November last year shows some improvement, both in style and my learning experiences. Everything is being down-sized here to allow for better views of what's happening all around me. On the top bar, I'm still clicking things. The spell rotation though, has been moved to the hot bar numbers (1 thru =) I've also managed to learn how to go through most all movements with the mouse, rather than the associated keys. There was a point in time a bit before this ss, where one of the patches had done some weird thing and I lost all the changes in the action bars. It was like, back to clicking again. It was, horrible. By this time I had become so used to using the keybinds that I was really lost trying to click spells. Needless to say perhaps, it didn't take long to re-do the UI.

On this last screenshot in the present time: The further additions of Bartender and Chatter have shown up. I find myself still tweeking both of them every so often. Everything has been down-sized a bit more, and I'm currrently working on getting Grid set up. Over all this time, I'm still learning how to use and tweek all these add-ons. It's been a long journey, with both entertaining and frustrating moments. Overall, I'm very happy with all these changes and look forward to growing some more.

TL:DR; This post was written with the "new player" in my thoughts. Hopefully, it will be of some encouragement and/or help for them in the days of Azeroth to come. If I were to offer advice, it would be to start out slowly with a basic add-on (such as your mini-map), and build from there. Take time to use each one to see if it fits you, then move on to the next.

Happy Gaming!

Random-ness

Sometimes, it's the smallest things in-game that can kinda sorta make your day, or not.




Sol's new Panther Cub--sooooo cute!

 Sol hadn't been around Azeroth for something like 10 days or so, he was trying to figure out what he was going to do after his failures in Lost City and Grim Batol. The end result of that little break found Sol pretty much set on just being a behind the scenes support player. You know, farming and dailys, providing things like buff foods and flasks and potions for others. Perhaps helping younger guildies with quests and the such. After all, these are the sort of things he's really good at doing.


So, logged the ol' boy back in and give it a go again. We found the bulletin board lit up with a quest mark, funny, it's been empty for ages now. Grab it and run, hope for the best. Turns out to be one of those 'report to' thingies, go see someone in N. Stranglethorn. What a quest line this turned out to be! Filled with story/lore background, fighting unrulely monsters, and finishing off with a quest to go into the new Zul'Grub. Now obviously, Sol is neither geared or ready for this in any way. Simular to many other dungeon quests, it will sit in his quest log and gather dust for some time. One of those, 'maybe someday to do things.' BUT, the little panther cub at the end of that line was really the best 'made my day' surprise. He is just sooooo cute!

In other randomness, Sol did visit his trainer at the start of his journey back into Azeroth, and promptly re-specced. His main spec is still balance, there was just a shifting of talent points to hopefully build up his dps and spell powers a bit. (BTW, if you've got any better suggestions on talents and/or glyphs choices, feel free to drop them in a comment.) I think he's pretty well set up for now and just needs to aquire some better gear. The first day under this new spec arrangement did show some improvement. But what really 'made the day' in this area was the guild news he happened across.

Sol has always been supportive of the guild, and found new friendships with everyone there. Even after (imho) he was a real embarassment to the guild leader and mates over his pitiful dungeon preformance and ready to /gquit, he logged in to find that everyone was still supportive towards him. And to top it off, was the shocker that he had been promoted during his absense, from initiant to member. Heck, any other GL on this server most likely would have /gkicked him. But so not true with DUT. Sol was provided with info about training and learning things, and found himself just as welcome in the ranks as ever. Sol loves helping others when and where he can, and he is certainly blessed by Elune to have come into a guild where many of it's members are of the same mind. Friendly and helpful people all around. DUT isn't one of the top progression guilds on this server, but it certainly is THE BEST GUILD, imho. Maybe, just maybe, Sol's dream of getting into a raid group still has some hope. Time will tell, of coarse. And if it's going to happen anywhere, it will surely be with DUT.

So anyway, Sol is back to grinding out TB commendations for a new staff, running about 15 different dailys for rep points here and there, and still digging his way across those archaeology sites. Heck, got himself 13 rare artifacts now and still looking for more! Ehhh, maybe that sands vial will show up, eventually. And then there's always the pet collection to work on, or the mount collection (going for 100), and that "I don't know what I'm going to do" Loremaster.