Z and Cinder’s Blog Challenge Topic 29: Return to the 2017 Bucket List

Cinder and I have opened up our shared blog topic challenge for everyone to join in on. The more the merrier! Every second Saturday we post a new topic that’s open for a fortnight for everyone to write about. Cinder and I will link all  posts for this topic on our shared blog website here.  

Way way back at the start of the year, our first blog challenge was to write down our 2017 Bucket List and then we’d come back and re-visit this list.

It’s revisiting time! Let’s see how I got through my WoW to-do list, especially as there hasn’t been much WoW lately.

1. All classes to 110. Complete!

It was really fun levelling all the classes in the one expansion and getting to see the different playstyles while going through the same content. There were a few that were incredibly easy to level – DK and Demon Hunter especially. The Demon hunter in particular was probably the fastest to level as well. While I wouldn’t want to main either classes, they gave me the most enjoyable time levelling.

2.  Finish the quest line for each of the Sharptalon pets and transform them into Mounts. Complete!

The quest lines were really cute, even if they seemed to take ages. 4 new mounts and 4 pets at the end was more than worth the quest grind.

3. Get Z her last 2 reputations for The Beloved title. Complete!

The new factions helped to get Zee this achievement. I still need to go grind the reps for the Insane title though.

4. Finish the Fishing Legendary. Nope!

At the start of the bucket list, Z hadn’t even started the quest chain.. and at the end – still hadn’t started. Maybe 2018?

5. Get the Family Familiar achievement. Complete!

This took ages at the end to finish as one of the last tamers I needed wouldn’t show up. I much prefer the Argus version where I can stand at the one pet and battle as much as I like.

I’m actually pretty happy with how I went in WoW this year. Even though my play time has dropped off quite a bit in the last part of the year, as I’ve found other games, I still got through what I really wanted to do.

Let’s see what 2018 brings.

Mythic Botanist down!

I’ve been with the new guild for a couple of days now and so far they seem quite nice. Pretty noisy on discord which is fine and usually has me laughing a lot behind the scenes.  Outside of raid I haven’t really done much with them apart from running the timewalking dgns with one of druids from the raid team (there are 7 of us! 2 guardians, 2 resto, 2 balance and a feral!) which was a good introduction so at least at our first raid night I already knew one of the guildies a bit.

The first raid night on Wed we started mythics straight away and I was in for the kills on Skorpy and Chron (yay new ach) and then I sat for Trill as we were dropping a healer for Botanist progression (we had been 5 healing Chron) so they had me sit out so the healer that was sitting had a chance to raid for a bit as they wouldn’t be coming back in for the rest of the night.

They had Chron on farm for quite a few weeks now so I felt like it was pretty much a carry though my tranqs were needed during power overwhelming.  They have the raid set up so if you’re moved into group 5, you’re sitting for that fight. I might need to make vuhdo hide group 5 because it changes the size and direction of my panels once there’s more than 4 groups and it’s distracting having it show a group that isn’t actually in the raid.

We spent the rest of Wed night on Mythic Bot. Botanist was interesting, it’s a freaking chaotic fight at the best of times and mythic version just gets worse. You start with all 3 bosses up and when one dies, the other 2 reset to full health and the abilities that boss had is combined into the other 2 bosses abilities.

The team pretty much had P1 and P2 under control so for them the real progression was on P3 but for me, P2 onwards was completely different (P1 is the same as P3 on Heroic, just hits harder). I picked up the changes for P2 pretty quickly though a few times I touched a spore and got the debuff and got called out for it. You can bet that not touching spores became a huge priority! (as the night went on I realised I wasn’t the only one that was getting called out for it but I didn’t want to hear my name on vent for that reason again). P3 scared the hell out of me because if you get the call of night debuff you have to go kill yourself on the spores in a specific spot and I was so nervous about being in the right spot at the right time.

I felt like the biggest idiot when on one of our best attempts I dispelled the wrong tank and we wiped. I immediately apologised and the healing lead said it was fine, they had all had a lot of wipes/practice compared to that being my first night. After that a specific healer was assigned to dispel as they knew the voices. I had discord sitting open on my other monitor so when ppl spoke I could match voices to names but not everyone has the same discord name as their toon so it’s going to be a guessing game for a bit.

We didn’t end up getting him Wed night so on Thursday after clearing through a few heroic bosses we went back to Botanist progression. We were consistently getting through to P3 which was great and then we had an attempt where everything went really smoothly.

There’s so much to look out for; make sure you’re standing at the right marker with a person if you have call, avoid all the crap on the floor, stand next to spores but don’t touch them and I think for most of the attempts I was holding my breath. I ended up getting the first set of call of night debuff on the  kill attempt which meant I had to go kill myself in a patch of spores to avoid triggering a mechanic and to clear spores so it was great in a way that meant I could watch the fight but crap because being dead for so long I look terrible on the healer meters (I’m so competitive /sigh) but it was sooo exciting seeing his health just steadily dropping and then the ach come up.

I ended up bonus rolling mythic titanforged boots which were a massive 20ilvl upgrade! It’s exciting to have my first piece of mythic loot.

I asked if the guild takes screenshots after kills which they do, but rather than the line up I’m used to they tend to pop toys for the photos.

I love all the green bears! The two tanks are Guardian and both use the artifact skin that turns them bright colours. One is neon purple and the other is neon green so it’s very easy to pick them out in the middle of a fight.

Next boss up in the progression chain is Krosus and I’m fairly sure we’re only going to be 3 healing so a good chance I’ll be sitting, but I still better have my head around that fight by Sunday and then after that it will Spellblade. Most of the guilds on our realm that are 4/10M have killed Krosus as their 4th. Hopefully by killing Botanist which is harder,  it means Krosus should die quicker which would be a big boost to the guild.

All I hope now is that I actually make it through my trial and keep being a mythic raider because it’s an awesome feeling and I’ve really missed it.

Z and Cinder’s Blog Challenge Topic 12: Design your own Zone

Cinder and I have opened up our shared blog topic challenge for everyone to join in on. The more the merrier! Each Saturday we post a new topic that’s open for a fortnight for everyone to write about. Cinder and I will link all posts for this topic on our shared blog website here.

My all time favourite zone is the Ruins of Gilneas.  I love the spooky deserted English/Scottish countryside feel of it.  I head up there fairly regularly just to spend time exploring in the deserted Gilneas, poking my head into all the gorgeous little houses and wandering through the rooms of Greymane Manor.

I’ve made quite a few Worgens to get to see Gilneas in its hey-day. One of my biggest regrets about the zone is that more of the houses in Gilneas city itself aren’t able to be entered into. It would be awesome to be to click on a door and have it open so you can go see inside. Given how much I Iove Gilneas, it shouldn’t be surprising that I really enjoy going to visit Bradensbrook in Legion, as it uses a lot of the same architecture and feel of the zone.

So if I could design any zone; I would want to actually take the existing Ruins of Gilneas and modify it a little into an awesome enchanted adventure zone. I’d like to see secret passages inserted into Greymane Manor that you can activate by clicking random panels on the wall and get to wander through secret rooms hidden away. Or stepping on  specific floor boards that then open up staircases that lead down into winding tunnels that could come out into main city or even down onto the beach. I want a library inserted that has all of the readable books that are currently available in the game in the one place, and I would put in  extra books where the text is actually clues or maps to follow to go find random treasure chests.

I’d like quest givers to be there but their quests would be randomized each time you talk to them and offer a series of riddles or clues that you would have to solve to reach the next part of the chain or next quest giver.

One of my favourite books when I was little was the Folk of the Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton. So I think the insertion of a big spooky forest that you could wander through with daily shifting paths that lead to secret little dells with random portals  that lead to other places would be awesome. No names or distinguishing features on the portals so stepping through them is an adventure in itself as you wouldn’t know where you might end up. You wouldn’t be going to this zone with your hearth on CD. Oh and no big spiders in this forest, we’ll stick to populating it with the cuter critters of Azeroth.

I would adore to be able to have a zone that you can just visit solely for the purposes of exploring and each time it’d be slightly different so exploring and meandering through it would feel a little new each visit.

Trying something new

This raiding thing has really been taking up a lot of my attention, I haven’t really even felt like blogging that much because pretty much all my time has been spent in a mental tug of war over what to do; stay with friends or go looking for the raiding I want.  But I made the decision that since I’m obviously not that happy in my current raiding situation, I could either sit there and be unhappy (even surrounded by guildies I liked) or I could go try something new. So I did.

I had whispered a few guilds over the last few days that had interesting looking ads, but while the people I was talking to were friendly, their existing team set up didn’t really grab me as being a good fit.  I had noted on my profile on wowprogress that I was looking for a new raiding guild and the next day I got a whisper from a guild looking for a healer. I jumped onto discord to have a talk with them and it went pretty well. The team sounds like what I’m looking for, I’d make the 4th dedicated healer (and they’re fine I don’t do raid level dps on my OS). They lost a healer a few weeks ago to real life stuff and have been having one of their dps fill in as heals which is handy as it means they already have a decent swing healer in place.

The GM is also the healing lead and is another Rdruid so he and I spent a while on discord talking druid chatter which was nice. I said I’d missed healing with another druid and he said the same. Apparently, the rest of the healing team is girls so I’m a little excited about getting to be in a guild with more girls again. For ages it’s just been me in Deadline. I just hope with the difference in our ilvl I’m not going to look really horrible against them. The guild is 3/10M currently so I did point out that I’m a bit lower ilvl/progession and offered to link logs for him  but he said he’d looked at my logs and was fine with them. I was surprised he’d already checked up but he said he wouldn’t have whispered me if he wasn’t happy with what he saw.

Last night was my last raid in Deadline and I was hoping we’d finish off Elis/Gul’dan and move onto Chron for mythic prog. But we ended up with a team of 13 in the raid group… People just do not turn up to progression on Sundays which was frustrating as it meant no working on mythic and it made killing Gul’dan, even on heroic, difficult as with such a tiny team there is just no room for error. It was horrible to tell the team, that’s already having roster problems, I was going but the frustration over the last raid made me sure that I’m making the right decision looking for something closer to what my expectations should be. Even if the new guild doesn’t turn out to be what I’m looking for, it’s a step in the right direction. My alts are staying in Deadline so I’ll still see my friends a lot as I’ve got a lot of levelling of alts to do still.

I ended up swapping guilds after the raid. I was actually doing a mythic + with Deadline guildies after the raid and made the swap part way through. It was really weird to have a different guild name after so long in Deadline.  I didn’t go alone though. Neuro came with me and is going to trial as well. Hopefully we both go well in our trials and find what we’re looking for. Guess only time will tell.

 

 

Random Tuesday Mutterings

Random Tuesday Mutterings is the perfect place to put the random assortment of what-nots I’ve got up to in Azeroth each week.

It feels like it’s been  a relatively quiet week in WoW. I don’t think I’ve got up to much out of the ordinary. Z’s sitting at trait 53 so there was quite a few mythic pluses done over the week to gather up more artifact power. She only has 2 mil to go and then I can stop the serious grind for a bit and just gather AP as it comes my way. I only did a 15 this week, I didn’t really feel like pushing higher keys and a 15 does give good loot. Maybe next week I’ll try for a higher key.

I ran some old raids and picked up a few achs. AQ 40 gave me the last bit of rep for Brood of Nozdormu, so now only 9 reps to go! I also got a new transmog out of there and only have Tier 2 to go and my order hall racks will be full.

I also ran through some old WoD raids with Twice and Kublas and picked up two new titles and a few extra achs.

I’ve been working on my Demon Hunter’s campaign and I  was super excited to see a Vikings reference in the quests for it. Lucky I’m only doing it now because a few months ago I had no idea of the series and I wouldn’t have got the references at all. Funny enough I was actually watching one of the new episodes while doing the quest!

A couple of weeks ago I want into SOO with Kublas  and he tamed Thok, so over the weekend we went back so I could also grab him for my own. He’s so adorable as a mini dino. I want to find a blue flashy transmog to match him. 

On one of my pugs into Heroic EN this week (I really do like that raid), the hidden appearance for bear dropped! Now I have all the hidden skins for the 4 Druid specs so I’m pretty lucky.  I really like the hidden appearance for bear, in its little cage of bones.

The hatching of the Hippogrpyhs was on so I popped down with Toco as we were both on druids and had the easy port into Feralas! I got my hippogryph baby and picked up the item that made it last the extra days. It was really awesome having it travel around with me and so  super cute how it sat on my back in cat form.

And ever since I’ve started paying attention to the Star Augur scenery I’m still seriously blown away by how gorgeous it is.

This week I’ll have to try to get some better screenshots and ones of the void infested planet as well.

And that was my week in WoW. Let’s see what next week brings.

How was your week in WoW?

Skorpyron.. our first Mythic Nighthold kill

I was really nervously watching the guild numbers tonight just before raid time and had my fingers crossed that we would have 20 log on. Luckily we did and then the next finger crossing was that we’d actually look at mythic before going to heroic. It’s probably no secret in my guild that I’m rather impatient to be working on mythic bosses, so I was utterly delighted that we did end up turning it to mythic and going to look at Skorpyron. And I’m so glad we did because he died! So now we’re 1/10M and I’m a very happy raider at the moment.

He is a much more interesting fight on Mythic;  instead of just one type of crystals that fall off him that you use to hide behind for shockwave, there are 3 different ones. Blue which act the same as in normal, green which do ticking damage to the raid and red which pulse and do aoe damage if you get within 5yards and which do large amounts of aoe to anyone in 15yards when the crystals are hit by shockwave.  There’s also an extra type of add that drops green goo pools on the ground. And the tether that the tanks have to deal with lasts longer so they have to dance around that more.

Despite the differences, he really wasn’t that much harder and we downed him fairly quickly. I was hoping that we’d go look at mythic Chronronmatic (of course I’d be hoping that) but other raiders were really worried we’d not clear heroic this week so we turned it to heroic and cleared up to Elisande. On Sunday we have the last 2 bosses in Heroic and then, fingers crossed depending on how many log on, some time on Chron.

Hopefully, everyone will actually look at what needs to be done on Chron. I was pretty surprised (and annoyed) that some people hadn’t looked at Skorpyron’s changes given we knew we’d be at him at least sometime this week. It’s the little things like not looking at boss fights that make me wonder if everyone’s priorities are all on the same page when it comes to raiding. Skorpy was obviously easy but moving forward they’re not going to be that easy and since we only raid 2 nights a week, people need to know what they are doing before they step into the raid so time doesn’t have to be wasted explaining fights. Hopefully that attitude changes as we go forward and people do the preparation.

I’m starting to sound like a negative nancy sometimes about my guild’s raiding mentality and it’s driving me nuts, I should just put the negatively aside and be super glad of our first mythic kill, which I am! But now I want the second one.

Random Tuesday Mutterings

Random Tuesday Mutterings is the perfect place to put the random assortment of what-nots I’ve got up to in Azeroth each week.

Well it was a week of being busy in both WoW and the Blizz universe. I went and did 15 games in Heroes of the Storm with Wingy for the Primal Flamesaber. I really don’t mind Heroes of the Storm as a game, though even at level 30 I still don’t feel confident  enough to want to play with real people, so I was really glad that we just did our matches against the AI.

And I dug and dug and dug and got a beautiful new archeology mount. I really like spectral models and this one is no exception, he is just so gorgeous.

I finally finished the Balance of Power questline. I was wondering why everyone in the raid group was getting their achievements and I wasn’t until I realised that one of the quests in my quest log that  I had been ignoring for weeks was from the quest chain.

The achievement unlocks some really lovely skins for the artifact weapons.

Resto

Balance

Guardian

Feral

I can’t wait until I get the skin for doing 100 dgns with a hidden appearance and then I can start using the Balance of Power skin for Resto. The colourway I like the most comes from doing a mythic 15 in time but it’s blue and finding a transmog to match it might be a bit tricky because I don’t have any blue dresses for a leather wearer.

There was a world quest in mythic COS at the same time that the emissaries were for Nightfallen so Twice and I popped in there to make it count as one of the emissary quests,  and we randomly got an achievement for overhearing the conversation between Elisande and the final boss. I don’t know why I’m only getting it now, I’ve done that dgn so many times. But it’s one achievement off the list of dgn ones for Legion hero so I don’t mind. Now that we can duo mythic dgns, hopefully we can finish some achievements off and work towards the mount.

Twice’s comment relates to his glaives – I really really like that appearance but he’s telling me they come from the balance of power questline. I doubt my DH will be in Nighthold anytime soon so probably won’t get them.

My Demon Hunter hit 110 with a full week of February to go!

Now I have to choose a new class to level, I think it might be the Mage for March.

The love dgn run has been fantastic for catching up with friends quickly. I jumped into a few queues with Cinder the other night when she logged onto some horde characters. Another year down and no mount but there’s always next year!

Twice created a new video for Nighthold:The Movie.  It’s such a beautiful raid, I love watching his videos  because I get to see so much that I miss during the actual fights. I am so blown away by  the Star Augur fight! I honestly have never looked out of his platform before watching the video tonight, so the 3 different planets we go and visit were brand new to me.

I can’t get over the planet taken over by the old gods and covered in void tendrils. Imagine if we could go see a world like that. And now, the fight also makes a lot of sense why we go through different phases, they line up with the 3 different planets we visit.

Seriously though this raid has got to be the most beautiful one in the game and Twice has taken some gorgeous shots of it. Well worth watching 🙂

And that was my random week in WoW. How was yours?

Zeera the Beloved

Zee finally got her 60 reputations to exalted achievement while running Cata tiimewalking dgns last night. Cata dgns are the best because you can equip a tabard and get extra rep in there for the various cata factions.

60 reps gives the Beloved title which is one of my favourite titles in the game.I’ll be wearing this one for a while I think.  You know what would be a cool, a random title function where you can favourite the ones you like the best and it randomly changes your titles so you see different ones regularly.

I originally started rep hunting when my mage was my main and she went back and got all the previous expansions reputations. Then when I changed to Z, I was doing double the rep grinds, on Z as part of doing dailies and opening factions for gear, and then again on my mage. When I finished the reputation grind for  the Emperor on the Timeless Isle with Z in MoP I realised I didn’t want to do it all over again and decided to make Z my main reputation gatherer.

Next reputation achievement  is get 70 to exalted.  I still have quite a few BC reps to get along with the ones that make up part of the Insane achievement and title, which is my favourite one (I wouldn’t be changing that title for a long while!). That’s a big one on my to-do list so those reps will be the next I go after.

My poor neglected blog

Wow, time sure does fly. It’s been ages since I last blogged. I feel so bad for my blog, I just haven’t been in much of a chattering mood lately.

My wow time is pretty low at the moment, I’m pretty much logging in Wednesdays and Sundays for raiding. We’re currently sitting at 8/13 Heroic and 13/13N. I think though once we get 13/13H I may unsub from wow until Legion comes out. I’ll revisit that idea when I finally get there but paying the sub fee to just  log in every now and again seems a bit silly. Of course I could be wrong and I’ll get my wow interest back and I’ll be playing and blogging up a storm by the time Legion is released.. I’ll wait and see.

I’ve still been flitting around the game universe a bit. I have a level 70 seasonal Witch Doctor on D3 which is incredibly fun to play. The build I’ve been working on for her involves dropping large clouds of acid onto mobs heads and not only is she quite strong at dps, graphically she is really fun to play. I’ve just started a crusader which isn’t as interesting to play, and she takes forever to kill mobs but nothing seems to be able to kill her so I’ll keep going along with that.

I downloaded Civilisation 5 last night and have already invested quite a few hours into that.. my Sunday morning run may well have been delayed by me heading to bed at about the same time I normally get up.. next week.

And I’m currently waiting for Payday 2 to download. Not the style of game I normally play but I have a few friends playing it and it’s on a massive sale.. down to $4.99 US so not a big loss if I really don’t enjoy it.

On the personal side of life.. I have a new job which so far (it’s only been 3 weeks) is looking really promising. The work is quite interesting and in a field which I like working in and best of all it’s only a 6.6km drive from home rather than the 45km my last job was located away. So it’s amazing to only have to fill up the car with petrol fortnightly rather than weekly and be at work in 10mins. Makes quite the change.

Well wow friends.. let’s keep all our fingers crossed my wow mojo comes back because it’s a little frustrating to not be interested in the one game that I used to think defined me as a gamer but seeing all the other types of games out there is good and I’ve even been making room for some TV watching. I’ve worked my way through the 3 seasons of Orange is the New Black and now only have a year to wait for Season 4.. so plenty of time to explore the gaming world.

A lot of Noblegarden luck

I haven’t had a great deal of time to spend in wow lately, real life and trying to get my head around a research thesis which I just can’t seem to find inspiration for has kept me out of Azeroth more than I’d like. But a friend texted me today to see if I had collected enough eggs to buy the new Noblegarden pet and as I hadn’t logged in since the event started I decided I’d make a little time and log in tonight.

I’ve never hunted for eggs as a hordie before and even though wowhead suggested that Falconwing Square is the best place to collect eggs in, I was able to get to Razor Hill faster so thought I’d try there. I was pretty lucky in that the place was almost deserted and I could collect eggs in druid flight form (yes I did feel a bit guilty but the convenience outweighed the guilt) so I did a few laps until my free bag spaces were full of eggs and started unwrapping them to get the chocolate currency inside. It was going to take me 100 choccys to get the pet and 500 more for the mount. Seeing it was so deserted and the eggs were piling up really fast I thought I’d see how far I could get into the 600 needed before my patience and time I could justify ran out.

I couldn’t believe my luck though, as I was clicking on the 97th egg to unwrap it, I looted the mount!  So I was able to get the mount, pet and a pretty easter themed outfit (shame it’s not transmogable) in record time, meaning I can go back to struggling to find an original research angle and not miss out on wow events. If ever this was the time I needed wow luck, I got it. Thanks Blizz xx