Why Transmogrification Is A Good Idea

I think the belt really pulls it all together. *shudder*

This outfit says it all.

Shattering Changes

A lot has changed with The Shattering, but since I’m busy writing my NaNoWriMo novel (or selling glyphs >.>), I leave you with this single, shattering change in one character’s life.

My bank alt before The Shattering:

 

"No one ever gave me pants. T_T"

My bank alt after The Shattering:

 

"PRAISE BE TO THE LIGHT! I AM MORE CLOTHED!"

I think he’s happy to finally have that Barbaric Loincloth covered with a smexy red Tabard instead of ‘bar-baring all’.

*dodges tomatoes*

-Misha

New WoW Alts!

Recently, I’ve created new WoW Alts. Yes, that’s right — even more characters. I only really made them because I’ve gotten myself another account (a purchase that may or may not have been made to be able to ride on a rocket).

Whee!

>.>

So since I recruited myself to play, I decided not to waste the triple experience and level up some pairs of toons. My goal is to get them to 60 before the triple XP runs out, but I’m not too sure if I’ll make it with two sets of two… but we’ll give it a go!

Pair Numero Uno

The first pair (and in the original plan, the only pair) are on the US-Feathermoon server, which is an RP server. Please keep that in mind when I introduce to you…

Crèmè

A human mage

and Brûlée

A draenei paladin

(Yes, I have trouble spelling their names too).

And if you don’t get the reference, let me explain…

I’m a sucker for naming things with themes. I love love love cute names like that. My previous specially-made dual-box pair? Priest/Hunter draenei combo named Obladi and Oblada, with the hunter’s pet named LifeGoesOn. My ‘main’ hunter? Mamisha, with her ‘main’ pet Rexxa, a play on Rexxar and Misha. My dwarf hunter? Abbota, with her pets Costello (the white bear), and Costella (the black raven bird). My orc hunter? Maxwel, my orc hunter, with her pet boar SilverHammer. Heck, I even got The SA to make a toon with me on Moon Guard once to go with the ‘Christmas theme’ guild Xcessive made there (even though we never actually met up with any guildies):

That's right. Hallee (Holly) and Aivee (Ivy). They're priests.

So when I had to make two toons that would be dual-boxed with each other, I had to pick names that matched. But I also had to keep the names reasonable-sounding, as Feathermoon is an RP server. While searching for pair names that weren’t outlandish, I came across the dessert Crème Brûlée, and immediately decided that that would be a great pair of names (besides the fact I love Crème Brûlée — I’ve only had it at restaurants, and I wish I discovered it sooner!) The names stand on their own, I think, and only together do they make a phrase that references something IRL. And really, it’s a benign phrase compared to some of the names I’ve seen on RP servers.

Unfortunately, some folks had already taken the proper spelling of Crème. Then I tried Creme, but that was taken too. Luckily, my last resort of Crèmè was still available. (For some reason, no one had taken Brûlée… I wonder why?)

Anyway, I really love Brûlée’s hair. I had this style planned for a draenei mage at one point, but when I decided to make a paladin instead, I kept the style.

Best hair and horn combo -ever-.

Crèmè and Brûlée are already level 18 or so. There were only a few ‘double dings’ while they were leveling, though, due to class quests for each of them. But I did get a screenshot of one:

The Elusive "Double Ding"

Plus, I get to giggle when I see things like this in chat:

Pair Numero Dos

The second pair I originally didn’t plan to make. What changed my mind was that one of my guildies decided to start playing again on the US-Windrunner server with a few other guildies, and I decided to join the fray (although at this point in time, I think I’m horribly behind them in level, and/or they stopped playing on that server). They all rolled dwarves, so I decided to keep with that theme when I made them.

So here are my two new dwarves, Thymine and Adenine.

Thymine is on the left, Adenine is on the right.

Thymine’s a warrior, and Adenine’s a priest, but you’d never be able to tell from the gear they were wearing in the picture.

Yes, I did name them after a DNA pair. I’ve had about three LFD groups comment on that so far. And yes, I’ve already saved the other DNA names on the server for my bank alt (a dwarf paladin) and planned cataclysm toon (who will be a dwarf of some kind).

These two have recently dinged 31, thanks to a productive run through Gnomeregan. You can certainly get a lot of quests to complete in there, which is especially handy if you get triple XP!

It seems like only yesterday they were completing Fire Festival dailies (gaining a level for the quests each day I remembered to do them, which was two XD) and spinning in the fire.

I have a lot of pictures of my toons spinning around the Fire Festival pole, but not too many of two of them spinning in unison!

So How’s The Leveling Going?

How considerate of you to ask. It’s actually going fairly well. As I mentioned before, Crèmè and Brûlée are 19 and 18, respectively, while Adenine and Thymine are both 31. So one pair is already over halfway to 60, while the other is almost a third of the way there! Considering my usual (extra-slow) leveling pace, I think this is going really really well.

The speed at which they level can in-part be credited to the ease of getting into dungeons using the LFD system. With the triple-XP, I usually get at least one level per dungeon! At least! That may change once they get to the later dungeons, especially if the queue time increases (I’ve heard not as many people queue when you have such gems as Sunken Temple and BRD in the list).

I only queue as DPS, so I can fail dual-boxing in non-critical roles (though I was realizing that I could probably tank with one while dual-boxing if I dps’d with the other. But for now it’s just safer for me (and the group) if I just dps!)

Another handy thing about the triple-xp is that I don’t need to worry about rest XP, so I can park the toons wherever I feel like, if I need to log off in a hurry. But I still usually drop them off in cities and inns; a good habit, I guess.

But there are downsides to this rapid leveling. I’ve neglected to give any of these toons professions, as I’m trying to focus on leveling. They would have likely out-leveled any gathering profession I took, and due to the 90-day limit on the XP bonus, I don’t want to stop leveling to farm things. This means I’m in a non-self-sustaining loop. No professions means no gold coming from the auction house, and leveling mostly through LFD means I don’t get a much quest gold to pay for skills.

They did get starting gold from various sources — Crèmè and Brûlée received gold and bags from Likal, my only other toon on Feathermoon, who has been making money from tailoring and herbalism. But I haven’t been playing with her as much, so less gold is coming in. (On a side note, I find it amusing that Crèmè and Brûlée’s “sugar mama” is currently level 18, and they both have more XP than her). But it shouldn’t be hard to use Likal’s professions to get more cash for the dual-boxed pair.

Adenine and Thymine, on the other hand, got their initial cash from my guildie’s old main on Windrunner. But I’ve squandered all the start-up gold on ‘skills’ and ‘mounts’ and ‘weapon training’, so they’re getting exteremly low on gold. My plan is to fund them with the cloth and other useful items they’ve picked up in dungeons — I just need to get all their stuff transferred over to the ‘bank alt’ I made. And then sell it. XD

Another downside to rapid leveling is that the toons have a tendency to out-level their gear! I was replacing a gray on one of them in their mid-twenties (Note: I’ve actually done this before on a not dual-boxed toon. >.>;; ).

An easy way to solve this would be to buy gear from the AH, but due to me being low on gold on these servers, I think it would be best to save my “hard earned” gold on more important things (like skills). I guess all my LFD groups will just have to suffer. : )

What about you?

Have you ever got yourself another WoW account just for those recruit-a-friend rewards? Or do you have actual honest-to-goodness friends that want to start playing WoW? Do you like coming up with silly names for toons, or do you have a different method for naming toons? How often to you make new alts? Let me know!

-Misha

A Screenshot Tells A Thousand Words (A Shared Topic Post)

Today’s post is a Blog Azeroth Shared Topic for July 26-31. Nuniel, from the very art-filled and aptly-named blog “The Rambling Draenei Death Knight”, asked us to share a screenshot, fan art, or handmade drawing, and then tell us about it and how it makes us feel. Since I love art and pictures, I’m going to do, not one, but TWO posts on this subject — with multiple pictures in each post! (That’s allowed, right? I could hardly pick just one image to talk about — I couldn’t make up my mind! Which reminds me – this is an image heavy post!) Later this week there will be a post focusing on user-made art, but today’s post will be about screenshots.

Screenshots. Lots of people take them. I know I do; I’ve even ‘graduated’ from manually taking most of them to letting the addon Achievement Screenshotter take pictures for me. And let me tell you, there are a lot of reasons I take screenshots.

The majority of them nowadays come from Achievement Screenshotter. So obviously, I get a lot of screenshots of my achievements (which include my usually messy UI!) It was fun to flip through and see all the ones I have gotten in the past.

It only took her until level 80 to get this achievement! Poor DKs.

I see this one a lot. No comment as to why. >.>

Getting achievements while dead in BGs is more common than you'd think.

Achievement Screenshotter also conveniently takes pictures when you ding!

Ding!

I have tons of screenshots of my toons dinging now. Sometimes they are in quick succession when they are going from 1-5 in a single play session, but quite a few of them are toons dinging from turning in quests, and more commonly, while in the middle of a dungeon (but I won’t bore you with any more of those. XD )

In addition to both the ‘dings’ and the achievements, Achievement Screenshotter can also grab the battleground info. I eventually turned that off, because I participate in quite a few battlegrounds where I lose horribly the score is uninteresting, so I figure I can save the space on my computer for screenshots that don’t show such crushing disappointment aren’t so boring.

But here's one that's interesting, since the Horde won. Check it - I even capped the flag to win. Hooray!

But not all of the screenshots I have are taken with the addon. I do still use the good ol’ fashioned ‘print screen’ key to take them. And after going through just one of my screenshot folders (the one on my main computer — I’m leaving the other computers out of this post), it’s occurred to me that I take screenshots of a lot of random stuff.

I mean, check out these chats I saved:

You've probably seen this before, but it still makes me giggle.

I have used a quiz addon to keep some of our raids occupied during downtime. Please note which player gave the correct answer first, and that Lightness, bless his heart, is a paladin. Quizzes are so much fun!

Another quiz question, another silly answer by Lightness. To his credit, he IS Canadian. (And an awesome healer!)

Usually I don’t screenshot chats, so I bet I thought these were extra funny (I hope you find them amusing too, actually!) I’ve started using WoWScribe to log chats (for RP purposes), so in some cases I won’t have to take screens of chats anymore. But it’s only useful if you start logging before the funny happens. XD

Of course, some screenshots were more congratulatory. Like when the raid would pose for a boss kill:

We won, hooray! Now if only we could pose better after a kill...

That's better.

I was surprised at how few of those boss kill screenshots I had. I distinctly remember lining up for some when we killed Moroes and Netherspite, way back in the day when we ran Karazhan all the time. Since it was so long ago, I probably took those screenshots on my old computer. Hopefully their in my backup folder on my current computer (Remember folks — when you move between computers, make sure you always grab the screenshot folders from you games! They’re easy to forget, and you may miss those screenshots you took!)

Of course, there are other reasons we took group shots. Like after we took out the Alliance Leaders — FOR THE HORDE!!!

After trouncing of the Alliance cities, we obviously we had to go pose on our bears in front of their inn, right?

This particular bear run was set up by Dreykala. She set up weekly runs for months (maybe even more frequent than that), with an almost 100% success rate. And if they did fail on one, she always made sure to follow up so everyone could get a bear. It got to the point that people wouldn’t go on a For The Horde run unless she was leading it. And then she would sing a song in vent after the raid. It was pretty cool, even if you had to stay up ridiculously late. Eventually, server trade chat troll Hemoomoo raised gold (through trade chat and word of mouth) to buy Dreykala a motorcycle. That was pretty cool.

Of course, not all the screenshots I take have massive groups in them. Some of them can actually be rather silly situations:

Love is in the air! Horde and Alliance (and Undead Ghouls) all sitting together and having a good time.

"I stand on the divide between good... and evil. Or something like that."

(Incidentally, it was a little tricky to get up there. I think it happened while I was gathering herbs. A few screenshots later in my folder, Mourninglory is standing at the patch that has three different terrain lines. I guess this will end up being a rare sight in Cataclysm!)

Characters end up being the focus of many of my screenshots — it’s kinda hard to avoid that when the camera is usually centered on them. But the reason why I take the screenshot of my character differs, though. Sometimes it’s to show off some armor…

I love that shield. I think I still have it.

Check out my totally awesome gear. It's so rare, I doubt anyone else has ... wait a minute...

Or because I have a weird effect…

OH NO! I'M GREEN! Also for some reason my horse turned green too... check out those glowing hooves!

Pink now!? Enough with the color-changing already!

Can YOU find the Tauren in this picture?

Stop - hammer time!

Or just because I look cool…

"That's not the moon! That's my holy radiance you're looking at!" >.>

But my character usually isn’t the only thing on the screen. For example, I have screenshots of my hunter pets:

Mamisha and Moonshine.

Mamisha and Rexxa (her first 'real' pet)

(And I’m not even showing you the ones with just the pets. XD )

And I also take lots of pictures of my mounts, especially ones where I’m flying around.

My very own Cenarion War Hippogryph.

(On a side note, my keyboard is too big for me to reach from the ‘w’ key to the ‘print screen’ button with one hand, which is what is needed to take a screenshot of a mount ‘soaring’ from the side, as the mouse is holding the camera. I always forget about the arrow keys until it’s too late!)

Three, three red drakes! Ah ah ha...

Oh, I'm not doing much. Just guarding these eggs here.

But my favorite type of screenshots, out of all the ones I’ve shown from my extensive collection, are the ones that take the character out of the picture, and just admire the scenery. The World of Warcraft can be a beautiful place.

But these are only my favorite types of screenshots. Do you have a favorite type of screenshot? Do you take lots of screenshots, or only when you think it’s a ‘special’ moment? Let me know!

-Misha