I think it’s because I don’t understand how they go. How do they keep propelling themselves ever forward as I stand astride them from flight point to flight point?
Do they have a little engine inside? Does the air flow through the bamboo and somehow propel them that way?
It’s probably for the best I haven’t gotten a player mount version yet. Otherwise I’d work myself into a tizzy trying to figure out how they hover midair.
But they sure look lovely gliding through the air.
Sometimes looking up at the sky can be a little less relaxing than clouds…
I’m not exactly sure where I was when I took this screenshot, but I bet a Sha was around.
Or I was dead. The spirit-realm sky has its share of freaky skies too.
So the other day I went to play World of Warcraft on my laptop, and being that I haven’t played on my laptop for awhile, it had to update to the latest patch, 5.2. I waited for it to update fully… or at least I thought I did:
Censor bars for Tauren – it’s the new thing!
At first I wondered if there was a ninja patch since last I played that was purposefully adding that… but then I thought better of it and assumed my copy was glitching out just a little bit.
(My first hint at that is when I got to the login screen and the flashing cursor marker on the password field was about 10 times as tall as it should’ve been. It looked hilarious but I wasn’t able to grab a screenshot as it flashed. Oh well, maybe next time).
The sky is often beautiful rendered in World of Warcraft. I suppose it should be, with all the flying done in and around it. But the clouds! *swoon*
My only wish is that I had been wearing something a little prettier in this shot, haha.
(Okay, two wishes — the second wish is that it would be easier to take screenshots while flying!)
I haven’t been completely idle during my long posting absence (and won’t be next time I disappear, I’m sure). In fact, I’ve been busy doing all sorts of WoW content, aka mostly complaining about dailies, gearing extremely slowly, being unable to pull together a second raiding team for my guild and therefore not raiding, playing the AH to mild success, and — most importantly — remembering at the last minute I actually want to participate in a holiday celebration.
You see, last year I didn’t realize Blizzard had added a new mount, the Swift Lovebird, to the Love Is In The Air event until after the event had finished. And alas, it was one of my favorite model/skins, the pink tallstrider Mazzranache (two of my many hunters use this as one of their main pets – Mamisha, my Tauren hunter, and Likal, my Night Elf hunter. Yet for some reason I had not gotten the Mulgore Hatchling pet until just a few weeks ago when I purchased it off the AH. Wait, I remember why — it has to do with dailies). As soon as I saw the mount I knew I had to get it.
Flash-forward to this year, and on the Wednesday before Love Is In The Air ended I remembered my deep desire for this mount. A bit late there.
Nevertheless, I carried on, and with the help of a few guildies and Jed from twitter to get into a farming spot, I got enough tokens to get my very own!
A fellow Tauren also got her pretty pink mount. 
Even more excitingly, my Night Elf hunter Likal, who is on an RP realm, can use the Swift Lovebird as a way to ‘ride’ her pet bird, Kanoni!
Here she is with her pet…
Likal and Kanoni
And here she is riding her pet!
Likal riding her trusty pet and steed, Kanoni
I’ve even made a macro to assist in the mount switching, so two Kanoni’s don’t show up at once!
The ‘Ride Kanoni’ Macro
Here’s the macro text:
/cast [pet] Dismiss Pet
/cast Swift Lovebird
/cast [nopet] Call Pet 1
Sure, it takes a little longer to mount up, but it’s totally worth it!
(Especially once I get into RPing on the Alliance side again >_> ).
… Was the farm, of course — to take ownership!
Yes, a greater responsibility. Now hand it over!
And after commandeering the farm, I immediately set about working on some work orders, due to my aversion of actually doing dailies (my dislike of quests is high enough that I would rather do this activity of farming than quest. Though admittedly the farm is pretty fun).
Come to me, oh sweet sweet rep.
And did you know the nice seed vendor now sells bags of seeds? You can throw them down in a targeted area, reaching a 2×2 square of plots. Faster planting? Sign me up!
Only downside is that they sit around, taking up bagspace. Of which I don’t have much. Because I never throw anything away.
(And when I do I regret it).
Merchant Greenfield shows off his new wares. I show off my incredibly full bags.
I went to pick up my Collector’s Edition from Best Buy Tuesday night (I had to order from a Best Buy farther away because the closer one didn’t have any for some reason). Stopped at a Wendy’s for dinner to avoid cooking, so that way I could get straight to Pandas! I’m gonna share with you what I did that evening, and why I haven’t been (entirely) gripped by this expansion (yet).
First thing I thought I would do would be to make a baby panda monk on my main server. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of a name that fit my naming scheme (must start with an M!) and I really didn’t want to just rush one together. Thanks to @_anea for suggesting Maizhu; that just might do. We’ll see.
I did like the look of the new character creator though. Pretty spiffy.
Also, what is up with hair highlights for Pandas? Weird, amirite?
Their technology and culture are so advanced that they can make hair highlights! I haven’t decided just how many of my pandas will get said highlights though… (It’s neat you can have black fur base with brown hair highlights!)
So abandoning panda creation for the time being, I logged onto my main and made a beeline for the pet trainer. You know, to train battle pets. Then began the arduous process of picking out my favorite pets (like near half the list), then adding some more favorites to make sure I had a good cross spectrum of abilities there. And then the battles began!
Pet Battle – Capture That Dung Beetle!
And it was very fun! It’s a little repetitive if you do a lot at once, but it makes for a nice break. I kept switching my pets around so I would always have attacks that worked to my advantage (after the first disastrous battle in which I had the weakness!) It would be nice if you could save sets for your team. Maybe this would be a good addon… (and it turns out it is! Fancy that. Thanks to @vitaemachina for pointing that one out!)
I also love that I’ll now have another activity to do on my bank alts, or on my twinks/leveling toons while I wait for a dungeon. I have plenty o’ pets that could use some leveling, so I think it will last me quite some time. A much better mini-game than archeology, I reckon.
Only downside about it being account wide is that you’ll get achievements for collecting pets and winning battles on alts instead of your main. I know the achievements are account wide, but it bugs me seeing an alts name instead of my main’s name. Maybe because instead of them being “Mishaweha’s pets” they are now “Everyones’ Pets”. Obviously this means I’m going to need duplicates.
Sweet! An achievement! … on Methril? But Misha did most of the work!
Because I do. A lot. I’m not sure why; it’s probably because I prefer healing to dps. And if I’m not in the right mood for questing, it seems to take a loooong time and I get bored easily. I suspect I’ll get most of my leveling done through instances and not quests, and it will still take me forever. (I have a feeling my guildies are making bets as to when I’ll hit max level and are probably placing it sometime late October, haha…)
My Fugly Enhancement Gear. It’s mostly leftovers from raids. Turns out we didn’t have a lot of people wanting mail agility gear. Either way, I’m too cheap to transmog something that will be replaced soon.
But if the storyline is interesting enough, I’ll be more willing to quest. And while the Horde introductory questline is interesting, it really rubs me the wrong way, which is not good for my ability to keep questing.
And that brings us to the title of the post:
Because I don’t think I can support the Horde if they keep acting like real, actual bad guys.
As that is what they are most definitely doing with the introduction to Mists (Nooo Theramore) and the few quests I’ve completed (I haven’t gotten very far yet; I’m still in the first zone. Hopefully things change direction and I’m just jumping the gun here. But it bugged me that much!)
It’s a little rough, coming in with a Manifest Destiny attitude to an obviously well developed and lived in land (did we not see those ANCIENT RUINS and this VILLAGE WITH PANDA PEOPLE IN IT?) when throughout the rest of the game we have been Heroes of the Horde. Suddenly attacking (presumably) defenceless alliance because Garrosh made angry faces at us? Not a heroes style, certainly not my character’s or mine at any rate.
Sure, I can understand that in theory, a good portion of the Horde is following Garrosh. But I’m presuming the majority of players are definitely not with him, and not having a voice — in-game — to voice a dissenting opinion is a little annoying.
And I know the Horde and Alliance have fought in many places throughout the game (*cough*Battlegrounds*cough*), including the destruction of town in Cataclysm itself (excluding Theramore), but for some reason the current expansion’s initial entry to Pandaria seems more direct and generally more unpleasant. From the sounds of it, I can only expect it to escalate the rest of the expansion.
Even the Pandaren we meet early on seems to question the Horde’s idea to “paint the continent red” – why are we fighting? (Wait that sounds familiar…)
You’re preaching to the choir, Gi-Oh. Preaching to the choir.
At least we (probably) get to kill Garrosh later, which should smooth things over a bit (I hope). But how can I, in the meantime, support the Horde like I have in the past OOC like when we are obviously the bad guys now? The Alliance can always hold this against us forever, so then I have to be all apologetic all the time. What a pain.
Unless the Alliance do something equally as horrible as what the Horde does, at which point we can both just put our atrocities behind us and be friends. Right? RIGHT?
Anyway, all this ‘killing alliance because we can’ business got me down (and the infinite mob spawns that were swarming me got me down too, but nevermind that), so I decided to check my auctions for a bit.
Glyph sales have actually stagnated for me a little bit, from the 15k in one day high it was when the patch first hit. I’ve had a little more competition than I usually have had (Ysera has quite a few people who post glyphs); usually I see a decrease in my sales when someone new joins the fray or I happen to get caught posting right before my competitors do.
However, I think sales will pick up as people start leveling more, maybe later this week or next week. Either way I think I’ll stop refreshing the auctions every day and go back to my two-ish day cycle for awhile.
Cancel/report glyphs every day? Ain’t nobody got time for that!
Inspired by the auction house and incredibly fast mob spawns, I logged back onto Mishaweha and started farming leather from the cats in the first zone. Mmm, leather!
One of our guildies always used to say “Just leaving money on the ground!” when there were leather mobs unskinned (and unlooted. She would always call out to the people who didn’t lot their skinnable mobs so she could skin them!) And boy, is there a lot of money on the ground! I followed a few people around and skinned their kitties (and helped them kill them too, once I knew they weren’t going to skin them. That’s the one thing about skinning other people’s mob – you wait until they leave the kill site before going in the skin them, lest you steal their skin!)
I got a little over 3 stacks of the base leather, which isn’t too shabby considered most of the leather was sha-touched. Still haven’t decided if I’ll sell it or use it for my LW. I know you’re supposed to sell it but I hate buying mats off the AH because I am cheap. And I’ll need about 300 leather or scales to level LW up, too! Sounds… fun. XD
The Leather – It is Exotic! Also, check out those prices! Let me waffle on selling them until it is too late.
The last thing I did was run a dungeon with a mostly guild group. I was skinning while we waited for one person to get his iLvl up high enough to run the instance.
We got the brewery one. I had a pretty fun time, though I didn’t get a chance to really read anything that was going on because my guildie tank is definitely of the ‘gogogo’ mentality (also, he’s good at tanking and I’m good at healing so no problem there).
However, we did hit a little snafu at the first boss when I and two others followed the monkeys out of the boss’s room and then got locked out. Whoops.
So that just left the tank and the pug dps fighting the boss. Needless to say they died. Whoops.
Both a guildie on vent and @NicolaiGrunnet commented that this was a fairly common occurrence, even in beta, so I feel a bit better. I felt even more better after I got to ride around on barrels during the fight itself. Whee!
But the rest of the instance went well. It was pretty fun, actually. Like the part when you heal while drunk (in-game). Whoo! Blurry screen!
So how have your pandaland adventures gone so far? Let me know in the comments!
Ah, this is much more pleasant than staring at Deathwing’s face.
I’ve been quite content the past few months, with nary an update. I seem to only get motivation to write at work or while otherwise occupied, but today I’ve finally decided to write — if only because there will be little point to talk about this expansions exploits with Mists just around the corner!
While my out-of-game time has been filled with house hunting and playing in the Pathfinder Society (and work), my in-game adventures have been filled with Heroic Raiding (a relatively new experience for Xcessive!) and Auction House playing. Both activities have been done with great success.
As of writing, we’re 6/8 in Dragon Soul Heroic. This is, by far, the farthest we’ve ever gotten on Heroic in any dungeon — a huge accomplishment for our raiding team, even if we’re definitely not ‘cutting edge’.
Our first successes were Morchok and Ultraxion, which I think it fairly typical for raiding teams. We stuck with them for awhile until we felt ready to tackle Yor’sahj.
I had looked up the Yor’sahj Ooze calls on Icy Veins’ Heroic Yor’sahj Strategy Guide (and I would highly recommend their site for looking up boss fights – it’s very informative!) Based on their recommendations, I came up with the prioritized slime kill order… and therefore became the person who called out the slime kills for the fight. I think on our first day it only took 2-3 attempts to get him down, and we got the Rainbow achievement too, haha. So from then on I became the slime call person, which works out pretty well since I can easily tell the other healer when we need to count our heals.
I’ve even put them kill order into a handy dandy chart to read, though it’s a little late to be helpful now. Oh well.
After Yor’sahj, we moved onto Zon’ozz (it took a little bit to get the fight but we have it down pat now, as long as the DAMNED BALL BOUNCES CORRECTLY). Ahem.
Hagara gave us a bit of trouble for a few weeks, but our fearless raid leader found appropriate strategies for both the lightning and ice phases that lead to minimal deaths. I believe we have only four people total chaining lightning during that phase, so it’s easier to heal. We’ve got that phase down very well. Ice phase takes us longer and people are more likely to die, but now that we know you run inside to be dispelled we can actually do it. We’re definitely better off when the fight starts with lightning phase though.
And just recently we’ve got ship down. Most of our trouble was with the ship dying right before we got to the second phase, but we worked on our ‘standing in purple’ thing and I’m very certain we can repeat our success.
We’ve looked at the Spine fight, but I’m not sure we’ll get it down before Mists, especially with the patch that will change everything arriving tomorrow. We’ll see. I’m not really looking forward to it, because Spine is one of my least favorite fights of the dungeon; it’s a competition between it and Zon’ozz.
Raiding is only really fun when you’re doing it with friends who can all joke around. And be flexible with strategies.
For example, did you know you can have a Shaman soaker for Heroic Ultra? It can be done — I know from experience! However, it can only be done once… and only while reincarnate is off cooldown. 
(We didn’t plan it that way, of course. One of our soakers just happened to die pretty close to the time they were going to stay out, so I merely stood in their place).
Also, make sure you look out for mealstroms in your raid. I’ve heard they can rain mashed potatoes on your head, with a side of peas.
(Yes, someone said mealstrom instead of maelstrom. It was funnier then, you had to be there.)
I’ve steadily kept up with the glyph market. Some weeks I post every other day (or slightly more often); other times I barely make it once a week. Either way I’ve done fairly well for myself the past year+. I’m up to around half a million (that sounds much more impressive than five-hundred thousand, doesn’t it), though if I moved into more markets and/or posted more often I’m sure it’d be higher. After all, that’s pretty much my entire profit for the year or two I’ve been doing it. I know those ‘real’ AH players make waaaay more than that in the same amount of time, but I think I’m doing pretty well for myself.
It’s been easier since I’ve branched off to three characters to post my glyphs. They all get the right amount of glyphs so they can hold extras of every glyph without running of of inventory space so multiple trips to the mailbox aren’t necessary as they were in the past. And I only craft when I need 3-4 more glyphs, which cuts down on the number of times I need to craft in a week, which is the major time-sink.
And all my success of late is due to TSM, the heavyweight AH addon. I setup my groups in there and bam — don’t need to think much about it anymore. I’ve taken to using it for setting up other characters to sell ‘random items’ and other mats I have extras of that aren’t part of an active crafting business. I have a few who do that on my main server, and quite a few on my ‘alt’ servers as well! They bring in the money for my Ally toons, as I am accustomed to a certain kind of gold stockpile as I level. XD
I’ve been up to quite a few other things as well, as presented here in no particular order:
Busy times, I’m sure! And we can add to the list ‘relearning my class, again’ once the patch hits tomorrow.
What have you been up the past few months? Hopefully it’s something fun!
-Misha
In case you haven’t heard, there has been a deluge of information about Mist of Pandaria, since the NDA was lifted. Suddenly, press releases abound! (I’ve been reading (and stealing images from) the excellent information compiled at MMO Champion and Wowhead. Mmm, information).
There’s a lot of really interesting stuff about the expansion there, and I’d invite you to read it (if you haven’t already). I’ve only skimmed the content myself, but that doesn’t stop me from opining on it! Today I’d like to focus on the Pandaren, specifically the female model!
There has been much speculation on the female Pandaren model for many months now. It’s only ramped up since Blizz posted a teaser image last week (I know about that since my site hits shot up with search for ‘pandaren’!). But the long wait is over, for behold the Pandaren female model!
Female Pandaren!
Overall, I’m pretty happy with this design! Sure, I would’ve been happier if the model was a little more similar to the male Pandaren model, such as in the fanart I had linked to before:
Fan-made Pandaren Female Design
She’s a little bit wider and a bit shorter than the official female model, as this drawing was based on the male model (which already existed before the female ones, as Blizzard seems to like designing the males of the race first). It is fairly close to their official design, though! And I think it’s better than design in the art Samwise had done. Having a Pandaren look like a skinny red panda (or in this case, more like a fox!) would not be cool!
Although you can still give your panda some red fur:
Red Female Pandaren
That’s fine by me, as we all can’t be the awesome black and white pandas, can we? Also, this fur color supposedly gives you a tail, so there’s that.
A minor critique against the female model (besides it not being quite big enough) is the fact the faces look a little too… cute. Sure, cute faces may be preferred, but I could totally use some fierce ones too. Especially when a lot of the official art has the male Pandaren looking totally badass while the females… not quite as much. And I’m pretty sure they could kick your butt just as well as the men could.
Case in point:
Male Pandaren Horde Concept Art
Look at him — he’s all ready for battle (For the Horde!) Awesome.
Now check out this art of the female Pandaren:
Female Pandaren Concept Art
She’s, uh… probably not ready for battle.
Now I figure that drawing is mostly to pin down the anatomy for the model, but why don’t we see the concept art of a male Pandaren in some fancy skivvies? (Wait, maybe we don’t need to see that).
Oh well. I’m just going to say that this sweet-looking Pandaren art is of a woman, to even things out:
Awesome Pandaren Concept Art
I’m going to interrupt myself here to talk about Worgen. You remember them, right? The big hairy wolf people who came out in Cataclysm?
Well I recall that when Cata was being developed, male Worgen models were out fairly early in the process. After all, they were vaguely based off existing models/designs so I assume they were fairly easy to make. And they looked pretty impressive too, with their broad shoulders and general wolf-like physique.
Except when wearing ugly robes.
Although they look fairly ridiculous when casting spells…
Trust me, it looks much funnier when in motion.
But besides issues of them casting with long, dangly arms, the Worgen model was pretty solid.
And so we waited for them to show off the female Worgen model.
And we waited.
And waited.
Dangerously close to the release of the game*, the female Worgen model was finally finished.
*I may be exaggerating slightly, as time ruins my memory completely.
Many of us were not impressed.
Tall, spindly women with dog and/or fox-like features (with an incredibly annoying sniff noise) were Blizzard’s answer to female Worgen. They didn’t look very scary or fierce like their male counterparts.
Reby, a female Worgen
They aren’t bad models, not the worst you could get, but they most likely could have been better.
Did they lack a clear vision for what the female Worgen should look like? Did they get sidetracked on perfecting one model that they ran out of time for the second one? Did their initial design test poorly so they had to redo from scratch? Beats me.
But could some of their issues with the female Worgen model been fixed if it had been completed sooner in the process? Say… like the female Pandaren were?
Perhaps. And I think the female Pandaren model benefited from its earlier release. Perhaps Blizzard is learning.
(Now only if they start designing female models first…)
If you’re an altoholic like me, your main server’s character list is probably full… which would make it a bit difficult to roll a Pandaren there. However, there’s good and bad news on that front.
The good news: The available character slots are increasing to 11! 
The bad news: The available character slots are only increasing to 11. D:
There had been rumors in the past that the account limit of 50 characters would stay, while the server limits would be removed. I was really hoping that would be the case for this expansion, but alas, it is not to be.
So yes, I can have a Pandaren on my server. Just one. And if I want a Monk on my server too, well, I’d better make that Pandaren a monk! Just like everyone else! Unless I want to forget the whole thing and use that spot for a goblin!
/sigh
Luckily for me, I can use my second account to make one or two other Pandaren characters. But even that account is running low on available slots.
I really hope the reason why they only increased the character slots by one was a technical limitation (too much effort to code, server space issues, etc). Otherwise, I’m liable to think it’s motivated by greed. What’s a better selling point to an altoholic than saying you get a new character slot every expansion (as long as you buy it)? Or encouraging you to race change to Pandaren if you want more of them on your main server? Cha-ching!
Any of you want to be a Pandaren? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
(Yes, I know some of you would race change a toon anyway. I personally have only race-changed once, renaming the character, and then re-rolled the old character. Yeah, I’m crazy like that.)
If they ever do bump the character slots up to 50, I assure you I would definitely keep two accounts going (100 characters, 1 server!). Not only that, I’m pretty sure I would start racking up character transfer costs as I moved old alts onto servers I currently use.
But alas, that plan is for another day…
What are your thoughts on the Pandaren models? Awesome? Not awesome? Just okay? And how about the rest of the announcements that came out? Let me know in the comments!
The Twitter Secret Santa Art Trade 2011 finished late December and was quite successful, if you ask me! Tons of great art are posted on the site, and I’d encourage you to check it out!
I received my art from @rithtthewarluid, and it’s of Likal, my night elf hunter, and her pet Kanoni!
I just love it! I currently have it as my twitter avatar. And even more excitingly for Likal, I’ve started playing her again (at least a little bit). She’s ecstatic to get some attention again. Thanks again, Rith!
And of course, I ended up making some art too. This year it was for @greyseer!
Here’s a re-enactment of me on the day @Technophobia was drawing names out of a hat for who would draw for who:
Please not a person with a male character please not a person with a male character please not a person with a – Greyseer? Let’s check out his refs… Doh!
No offense Greyseer — I’m just not that good at drawing guys! And I knew I’d have a hard time expressing the awesomeness that is Tharion, because he looks totally badass.
My inability to draw guys probably shows a bit in the drawing, especially since I spent quite a large amount of time on the background and maybe not as much time on Tharion himself. (but check out that foreground cliff; it’s so pretty!) Also, I maaaay have left out some weapons and armor because they are also hard to draw. >_>
I saved “in-progress” images as I worked through this design so later I can do an in-depth post about my drawing process! And I may write an RP post describing what Likal is doing in the picture Rith had drawn; it just screams for a story, doesn’t it? I’ll probably do this for last year’s image too. :3
In the meantime, you really should go check out all the amazing art that was made! And if you participated, I hope to see you around next year for another year of art trading!
-Misha
