You know, there’s always something going on somewhere to talk about. Whether you folks think it’s relevant to what you expect here or not, well, that’s another story.:)

Last night, the Druid Q&A by Ghostcrawler and the Blizzard Community Team went live, and I read it, chuckled a bit, and hit Lady Jess with the high points I knew she would enjoy. Sure enough, I sent her into a Jessrage. All in good fun, of course.

Thing is, there’s a lot of nice discussion about the past, current and future overarching direction of the Druid class, but it was short on specifics I really felt needed to be discussed, at least from a Feral point of view. There was some confirmation that Feral tree split spec for either optimized Cat or Bear is working as intended, there was the surprising idea that they would consider changing things so that we would have to shift frequently, apparently because they want to see us wearing the artwork of the gear they designed (note: I stay in forms because I chose the Druid FOR it’s forms… me choosing to be in a Bear form all the time should be, in my opinion, considered a class design WIN, not a freaking problem. FWIW, anyway.).

But, there was nothing in the Q&A I was all that enthusiastic about talking about. I came up with what I thought would be a cute name for a post about it, “QQ&A”, but there wasn’t even anything I was particularly enthusiastic about crying over.

See, I already had two plans for blog posts for this week, and that’s not even counting the PBeM story post I’m still in the middle of, that is with Lauchlin, but that I scrapped because in my humble opinion it drifted into ‘teh suck’.

I’m enthusiastic about writing these other things, and not the Druid Q&A. So, I’m not gonna talk about it.

It’s not that I’m not enthusiastic about Druids. Far from it, I have literally done nothing BUT play my Druid with delight for weeks now, both Tank and Heals.

What brings me back blogging time after time? I’m still enthusisatic about what I do. There’s always something new, and I go bounce/bounce/bounce my Big Bear Butt off doing it. It ain’t never boring. If things seem quiet, well hey, bring your own fun!

Here’s a few examples of the things we’ve done lately, things that I’ve been having fun with.

I like soloing things as a Bear, but it’s too easy doing old world stuff. So, the thought occured to me, I’ve got this level 80 Hunter that is all decked out for raiding as a BM with a Spirit Kitty… why not Dual Spec my Hunter… as another Beastmaster? TWO Beastmaster specs? I can have my second spec be strictly designed to maximize pet survivability and damage, and I could take my Bear pet (named “Clawsome”), and I could go have fun soloing Attumen, a mount soloing spec-and-pet system.

Basically, I could be a Bear tank two ways. :) Maybe even see if my guild is crazy enough to let me do a Heroic with my Bear pet tanking. Sigh. It’s just… something that sounds fun, and gets my enthusiasm for new things going, ya know? So yeah, I got the Dual Spec and pet and all, haven’t had a chance to go take down Attumen. Why? Because while on the way, literally, to Karazhan, landing in Duskwood, Ratshag and his lovely and talented fiancé Shianti wanted me to come do Heroic Violet Hold.

I do so… and then have to go to bed. And later that same night, I’m told, Shianti liked my idea of doing Karazhan SO MUCH that she wanted to go try Attumen right away that night… and the damn Attumen mount dropped, and she got it.

That would have been MY instance of Karazhan… so by rights, that’s my mount drop she got. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. It was all an evil plot by Ratters, I’m sure.

Okay, another example.

I’ve been doing Argent Tournament dailies every day, to build up seals and work towards Crusader so when the 3.2 changes hit and Heirloom chestpieces are available, I can just pick one up immediately. As of last night, I’m done with Darnassus and Exodar.

Well, I’m banging around doing Threat with Jardal and Kaelynn, and Barre asks in Guild chat if anyone has the Molton Core zone drop enchant, Enchant Weapon – Spell Power.

It’s a rare drop in Molten Core, a weapon enchant that does +30 Spell Power and that can be applied to level 1 weapons… like Heirloom weapons.

Nobody does, and someone mentions Jess spent two days in Trade channel before she found someone that could do it.

Well, heck, right? I ask Jardal and Kaelynn if either has an enchanter. Jardal does, a level 62 Prot specced Paladin.

So I ask him if he’d like to bang around in Molten Core, like right after dailies, see if the enchant drops? Sure, sure.

So Jardal, Kaelynn and her 80 Rogue, my Druid tank and a few guildies all head into Molten Core on the spur of the moment of a Monday night, just for the heck of it.

We ended up doing a 100% full clear that night, just because it was so easy with level 80 tank, healer and 3 to 4 DPS to keep going.

And guess what?

Sure as hell, the Enchant Weapon – Spell Power does, in fact, drop. Thing has, according to WoWhead, a 1% drop chance on only a few bosses… and even if Blizzard upped it’s drop chance recently, it’s not BoP anymore, so it is farmable, and it’s still pretty rare. And now we have someone in guild that can do it. :)

Sometimes, it’s a good idea to remind yourself, the game is truly great, but shouldn’t be expected to always have to come up with new content, and work to keep your bored short attention span mind all engaged.

Sometimes, it’s nice to remember, you can take the initiative to look for things that sounds fun yourself, and then go out and do them

If you think about WoW, and you can literally find nothing about the game that you feel enthusiastic about, then it’s not really the game’s fault in my opinion. Maybe it’s time for you to go find something you ARE enthusiastic about and do it! Take a break, you know?

Fantasy Football Leagues are about set to kick off here in the States, Summer is here and there’s lots of stuff to do out of the house, there are great books and movies out there, concerts, whatever. Go out, go bowling, dance at a club, have fun. Get enthusiastic with life.

I still find WoW keeps me coming back, having fun and talking about it.

I guess I’m just getting pickier about what I write about, though.

Druid Q&A? I’ll let WoW.com handle the dissection if that’s all right with you folks.

This is, I have to say, is one of the coolest things I’ve seen… and it’s on my server!

Cassie mentioned it to me, I’ve been oblivious lately to general chat… but I am so taking part tonight!

Remember that whole ‘Isle of Quel’danas’ thing we were so excited about way back when? Tons of new daily quests? A new instance? A new raid area? A new badge vendor?

Pretty cool, right?

All the servers scrambled to be the first to do tons of daily quests, as each new stage of content in the Isle of Quel’danas had to be unlocked by server participation.

And what happened?

As soon as the new Badge of Honor reward vendor got unlocked, everyone stopped caring.

Well, a couple stages or so AFTER the Badge lady is the gem vendor recipe lady… she has a quest for you to do. It’s a damn cool quest, I loved it.

You get asked to go retrieve some stuff from the high plateau of southwest Hellfire Peninsula.

The catch is, what you gotta retrieve is buried… and it requires a sensitive sniffer to figure out where the tender roots you want are located.

It’s a damn truffle hunt!

You have to fly up to that plateau… you get to tame a Ravager as your pet! Just like hunters get pets! You get him as a combat pet to send out to whack stuff, the whole thing. Very fun! C’mon, isn’t that reason enough to go?

And one of the Ravager’s special abilities is to sniff out these tender truffles… I mean roots… and then you scavenge the suckas and return to the Isle of Quel’danas and turn them in.

And if you do this quest enough on your server, the gem recipe vendor lady will… have gem recipes to sell. Epic gem recipes. NICE epic gem cutting recipes.

Windburn is, of course, a maxed out Jewelcrafter with many rare recipes, such as Solid Star of Elune and Runed Living Ruby. I wants those Epic recipes.

But… I checked last night, vendor is still at 95%. It’s heartbreaking!

And I mention this to my wife, and she tells me that one of the best guilds Alliance side on Kael’thas, as far as friendliness and progression are concerned, Vendetta, has gotten sick of it too.

And they are taking action!

Check out this post on the Official WoW Kael’thas realm forums made by Showtyme of Vendetta;

In an attempt to hasten the arrival of the gem-vendor, Vendetta will be holding a quest lottery. The rules are simple. A member of the team will be in Shattrath ready to share the quest “discovering your roots”. More team members will be at Razorthorn Rise clearing out mobs and uncovering roots for you. Simply pick up the roots you see on the ground and fly back to shat and port to Quel’Danas. Turn in the quest. A final member of the team will be at the quest turn ready to port you back to Shattrath where the original team member will be waiting for you. In exchange for doing this we will give you 3g and put your name on a spreadsheet. You can do this as many times as you have toons per day until the vendor opens. Every time you do it on a main or alt you receive another chance to win the grand prize, which is a ZA Bear mount!!!!So its a win for you and the whole server, you get 3g per day per toon that does the quest and each time you do it your name is added into the pool. Once the vendor reaches 100% the event will be complete and the lottery will be held. The winner will be notified in-game via mail and there name will be posted in this thread. The bear run will then be set up for a time convenient for the winner and the server can finally get the gems they need!!

Any questions contact Showtyme in game. The offer will start Wednesday the 25th at noon server time. in front of the portal to Quel’Danas. Good luck!

Now that’s hardcore awesome…

I love the idea of working together like that. And would I love a bear mount? Sure!

But I am going to participate in this on all three 70s I have, NOT in desperate hopes of a bear mount, I have the awesome birdie mount from Heroic Sethekk halls to love. Okay, if I won Windshadow the Bear tank WOULD be riding a warbear. It is mandatory. Sorry, I slipped into some bear-on-bear daydreaming there. My bad.

But no, I’m going to take part each day because this is just an awesome attempt by a guild of great folks to get some hustle going! Get that damn gem lady in bizness!

If you’re on Kael’thas, and you’ve been blowing off the quest… please go out there and get some move on!

This is an old one, a very, very old one.

But I still remember the first time I saw it, as a series of pictures, not as a Youtube, and mailed it to my bud Manny.

Rememeber that, Manny? We’d only been playing for a little while, you on Kortenharig the short and hairy dwarf hunter, and me on the uber noob Windshadow the kitty drood. We saw this and we just about died laughing.

Anyway, maybe some of you have forgotten… maybe some of you have never seen it…

 If so… bless you. No sound needed, just pictures. Enjoy.

Okay, so recently Cassieann dinged 70. We all yayed, we gratsed, we conga ratsed… it was fun.

Now, she is driving me nuts.

“Since I dinged 70, there is nothing to do!” she says.

I stare at her disbelievingly.

“lolwut”, I reply.

I then mentally ran over all that we have done since she dinged 70, just in the last week.

We’ve run Steamvaults, Heroic Slave Pens, regular Underbog, regular Auchenai Crypts, Hellfire Ramparts and Blood Furnace.

Also, she has completed the Ogri’la chain of quests and has unlocked most of the daily quests in Ogri’la and mastered the Bombing Run, and the Simon Says crap (with the assistance of the addon Ogri’Lazy, might I add).

She has done tons of Netherstorm quest chains, the prelims of Netherwing faction rep (we should be doing Zuluhed the Whacked sometime this week), and she has done the soloable part of Karazhan key attunement, and just needs to start the key frag portion with her Shadow Labs run.

She even has her first epic, since together we farmed the mats needed to make the Shadowprowler Chestguard, and a guildie, Gandaulf, did the crafting last night. And with Ogri’la questing underway, the Shard-bound Bracers are on their way. Plus of course getting Skettis rep from the Bombing Runs, so the trinket from Skettis is also being worked towards.

For the love of Elune, wtf more do you want? It’s only been a week!

“But there’s nothing to solo anymore”, she replies. “I soloed everything up to level 70, and now everything but PvP needs a group. It sucks.”

….. Damn, you know what? She’s got a good point.

Anyone got any ideas for stuff to have fun soloing now that she’s 70?

Me, I hit this point, I start an alt. I guess I never really thought of it before.

Szobi said:
Quite a nice guide. Thanks to you I finally did the chain and started the Ogri’la dailies.As for wrangling: getting them down below 20% is sufficient to wrangle. I found it most comfortable to do in bear form, I tended to over-dps in cat.As for the relics: I found whispering to myself better than writing down on paper. I just number the pads from one to four, then pop enter and write the sequence down. There’s also a mod here to keep track of it: http://wow.curse.com/downloads/details/7774/but i haven’t tried it yet.

Thank you for the comments Szobi. You’re right, the amount is 20%, and as soon as I see the comment on being able to be wrangled, I try to switch to caster form instantly to stop doing DPS. I like your idea of not letting it get so close before switching forms, and switching to bear instead of caster to slow down the pain. Thank you very much, I’ll have to do that. Although if I do that, how will I ever level my staff skill? Lol.

As far as the addon is concerned, on your suggestion I downloaded it and took it for a spin.

The addon is called Ogri’lazy, and what it does is, when you start the Relics Emanations quest, it automatically opens a small popup on your screen that has some empty space, and four colored icon buttons.

As you can see from the image above, the box that appears has four colored icons in the right hand side. In the image, the colors of the icon buttons are aligned with the four mini-game buttons from the Relics Emanations.

In real life, the buttons do not align themselves. Also, be aware the box appears only after you have activated the quest. (Maybe you can open the box early. I didn’t see a way to yet though.) So when you start the quest by inserting your Apexis Shard, the box pops up and you need to either have already spun and zoomed your view so that your colors will match, or take the time to do so now.

As the mini-lightning bolt lights up each button, you must physically click each of the tiny icon buttons in the addon window. This adds an icon to your string in the addon. As you can see from the picture, I am at round 6 of the quest when the screenie was taken.

As soon as the mini-game has finished activating buttons, you can follow the sequence as shown in your addon window.

The neat thing is, as you click on a button, one of the buttons vanishes from the addon window, so you can always keep track of which color is next.

I have NOT tested a few things on it… such as, if I click the wrong color by mistake, does the displayed icon in the addon window vanish anyway? I wonder if it is looking for a correct button press, or just ANY button press to trigger the icon to vanish.

At any rate, I used it successfully, first time, and I have to say that it worked better than paper and pen.

Personally, for all the people that wrote in suggesting to use the /say box to keep track….

What can I say? Sometimes I’m just not that bright. I like the /say box method now that I’ve tried it, but I’ll probably give the addon a chance for a while, since I installed it already.