After spending ages in Dalaran waiting for a Troll rogue to show up, I finally got my husband to create one on his account, and I ran over to Durotar to cover him in turkey feathers.

I was really pleased to complete this world event, as it rewarded me with another pet – the Plump Turkey This was my 98th pet. I wonder when Blizzard will introduce an achievement for 100 pets. I’m nearly there!

I’ve managed to get all the easy achievements done so far, and even a couple of the more difficult ones.

Last night I took a little tour of the horde celebrations, and sat to partake at each table. This is where being a druid who can sneak comes in very useful! The picture above shows Tiniane sat enjoying the feast in the Undercity.

This morning I woke up early, determined to kill some turkeys whilst it was quiet. A guildie had given me some Tracker Snacks, so I chomped one down, and took a little run around Elwynn Forest. The first run through I got up to about 20 turkeys killed before running in to somebosy else coming the other way, and the turkeys all dried up. Undeterred I set off again, and I found a nice quiet spot around teh Eastvale Logging Camp where I was able to finally have this happen:

So now I just need to round up a few more rogues, and defeat the Talon King, and then I’ll have my cute little turkey pet!

Here’s a quick guide on how to level your cooking using this world event. It’s written from an Alliance point of view, but works for Horde too, the locations will just need to be adjusted to the Horde equivalent. Please note, as you skill your cooking up, keep everything you make, as it’ll be useful for future Daily quests. Also pick up and complete as you are able all quests in all the places you go to.

This guide should work for all levels – we tested it out on a level 9 character last night, and were able to get her all the way from zero skill to 300 in a very short time

1. Head over to the event hub (Stormwind). Buy the set of cookery recipes from the vendor, and talk to the cooking trainer to get the cooking skill if you don’t already have it. Also learn the Spice Bread recipe from the trainer.

2. Skill level 1 – 35 (ish – you might get more if you’re lucky). Buy Simple Flour and Mild Spices from the Pilgrim’s Bounty cooking vendor and make Spice Bread. You’ll need at least 60 Spice Bread, so get as many skillups as you can out of this stage.

3. Skill level 35 – 100. Learn the Spice Bread Stuffing recipe from your seasonal recipe pack. Buy Autumnul Herbs from the vendor and make Spice Bread Stuffing. Note this recipe doesn’t go yellow until you reach a skill of 90, so you should mostly get one skillup every combine. Don’t forget to revisit the cooking trainer any time between skill level 50 and 75 to train to Journeyman Cook.

4. Skill level 100 – 160. Learn the Pumpkin Pie recipe from your seasonal recipe pack. Buy 60 Elwynn Pumpkins and 60 Honey from the seasonal vendor, and make at least 60 Pumpkin Pies. Note this recipe doesn’t go yellow until you reach a skill of 150, so as before you should get one skillup per combine until right near the end, but you may need to buy another few components for the last couple of points at the end. Don’t forget to revisit the cooking trainer any time between skill level 125 and 150 to train to Expert Cook.

5. Head over to Ironforge and find the seasonal hub just outside the gates

6. Skill level 160 – 220. Learn the Cranberry Chutney recipe from your seasonal recipe pack. Buy 60 Tangy Wetlands Cranberries and 60 Honey from the seasonal vendor, and make at least 60 Cranberry Chutney. Note this recipe doesn’t go yellow until you reach a skill of 210, so as before you should get one skillup per combine until right near the end, but you may need to buy another few components for the last couple of points at the end.

7. At this point you’ll need to visit a cooking trainer to train to Artisan Cook skill level. I did this by returning to Stormwind to hand in the next step of the quest chain, but if you’re purely focussed on levelling your cooking, and travel is more difficult for you, you might want to head on over to Darnassus, and train there.

8. Head over to Darnassus, and find the seasonal hub between the Warrior’s Terrace and the exit to Teldrassil.

9. Skill level 220 – 280. Learn the Candied Sweet Potato recipe from your seasonal recipe pack. Buy 60 Teldrassil Sweet potato, 60 Autumnal Herbs and and 60 Honey from the seasonal vendor, and make at least 60 Teldrassil Sweet Potato. Note this recipe doesn’t go yellow until you reach a skill of 270, so as before you should get one skillup per combine until right near the end, but you may need to buy another few components for the last couple of points at the end.

10. Head back over to Stormwind, and start hunting those Wild Turkeys. They can be found all over Elwynn Forest, so just keep running around. If you manage to kill 40 with no more than 30 seconds between each kill you’ll get The Turkinator achievement, but this is difficult to do if you’re also looting the corpses, which you’ll need to do, as you want to collect the Wild Turkey meat from each kill. Collect at least 20 Wild Turkeys (which will get you to cooking skill 300, which is the highest you can go if you are less than level 58), more if you want to gain more skill.

11. Head back to the Stormwind seasonal hub.

12. Skill level 280 – 300. Learn the Slow Roasted Turkey recipe from your seasonal recipe pack. Buy at least 20 Autumnal Herbs and and 40 Honey from the seasonal vendor, and make at least 20 Slow-Roasted Turkeys.

13. If you are level 58 or above, when you reach 300 cooking skill you will need to head over to Outland and find the cooking trainer in Honor Hold to learn the Master Cook skill, and with it the ability to level your cooking skill above 300. You should then return to Stormwind and continue to make Slow-Roasted Turkeys to skill level 340 (the recipe goes yellow at 330 and green at 342).

Although not yet confirmed, it’s highly likely that one of the prizes you can get from this is an in-game pet. It looks like the 3.1.2 patch will introduce two new pets – a little robot available in both red and blue. It looks suspiciously like you’ll be able to get yourself one of these pets by participating in the Mountain Dew promotion…

… as long as you live in the US. I just tried to register for the Gamer Fuel website to see what it was all about, and as part of the registration you have to enter your address. When I tried to log on to the website I was told I was not able to participate, as the promotion is only available to “legal US residents”.

*sigh*

This disappoints me. It seems unfair, when World of Warcraft is a global game, for this kind of thing to only be available in the US.

Where’s the love for all the other WoW players?

It was most frustrating when trying to do the Argent Tournament dailies – to be getting the better of a Champion, only to have my machine lock up for long enough for him to shield-break and charge me into oblivion was making me very cross.

I’ve got a savings scheme maturing in June, and so I resolved to use some of the money to buy myself a new PC. But when my husband and I started investigating what was available I discovered that I actually have a pretty good spec PC. It’s only a couple of years old, and is a Core2 Duo processor, plus I got a brand new Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 graphics card at Christmas. So I’d be spending a lot of money for not much of an upgrade. It didn’t seem a sensible thing to do…

So we bought me a new hard drive, and I used that to install Vista from scratch, keeping my old hard drive as a data drive so that I didn’t lose anything. I hate reinstalling PCs. There are always so many little “tweaks” that I make and forget how I did, and I have to dig around and find everything out again. Moving the iTunes library around is fiddly (but thankfully not impossible), and it was only after several days that I realised that I needed to dig out my password manager data file. Times like those I’m glad I kept the old hard drive intact!

Once the reinstall was complete everything started off well, and WoW was much better, but after only a couple of days I had some more problems with WoW. I exited the game one night, and my computer locked up completely. I wasn’t happy with this with a clean fresh install, so the only thing left to do was reinstall WoW. So I downloaded the client from the Blizzard website, and for the first time since I rolled on the EU servers a year and a half ago, I installed WoW cleanly from scratch. I removed all my addons, and logged in to see if it made much of a difference.

It has made a HUGE difference! My loading times are much improved, and even though most of my addons have snuck their way back in, I’m still getting great performance. Most importantly smooth loading with no grinding to a halt to hammer at the hard drive. So I can now best the Champions once more (usually), and my enjoyment of the game has come back

Things have been quiet on this blog recently, which is due to the amount of fun I am having with Patch 3.1, and in particular the Argent Tournament. As soon as I saw the list of non-combat pets available I wanted them, and of course the first one I wanted was my own little pet tree.

Isn’t he cute? He dances and sleeps, just like me!

There’s been a lot of commentary regarding the Children’s Week achievements, and I don’t have much to add. I didn’t complete the meta-achievement, and the one achievement that prevented me from doing so was “School of Hard Knocks”. Unlike a lot of people, I already have incomplete World Event achievements, so that Proto-Drake is never going to be mine. Thus I didn’t even try to complete this one.

This particular PVP requirement was always going to bring out the worst in people. There are stories of people co-operating to get it done, and other stories of people deliberately setting out to kill anyone with an orphan out on the Battlegrounds. Personally, I have no idea how the Battlegrounds work, I don’t know where to go or what to do to “cap” or return a flag, and I wasn’t going to start now. One very kind Guildie who knows more about PVP than I do did very kindly offer to run me through the Battlegrounds and “show me the ropes”, but now that my playtime is more limited I have far more things I’d rather be doing with my online time. But the offer was very much appreciated

Perhaps my lack of Merrymaker title allowed me to be a little more relaxed about this one. I felt hugely frustrated at Christmas-time when I did fail to achieve the title. The main cause of frustration was the PVP element, which I did try for. So I do sympathise with all those who tried and failed for this one.

I do think, however, that if Blizzard were to remove the requirement for School of Hard Knocks it would make this World Event achievement trivially easy. Nothing else in here was difficult or time consuming, unlike the others. It could all be completed within a few hours. I suppose I am lucky in that I am a member of a guild that runs instances quite a lot, and I managed to join an Utgarde Pinnacle group that blasted through on Normal mode just to get the achievement. I’m sure some people found that one as difficult as I find the PVP.

I will still like Blizzard to find some way of making some of these achievements not require PVP. I’ll reiterate again the suggestion made by Renata on the World of Warcast podcast – how about making it a requirement to complete all but one of the achievements, allowing those who don’t want to PVP to skip the PVP one, and those who can’t PVE to skip the instance one? It seems that Blizzard are trying to make the World Event achievements span the whole range of WoW content, and there are a lot of players who do not want to experience that whole range!

My thoughts on this world event:

I managed to do all of it solo, apart from the Bouquet of Ebon Roses, which I managed to duo with my husband’s level 80 Warlock. I liked that there was nothing required that needed a full group, or more. I enjoy logging on and just noodling around on my own for a bit

The PVP element was entirely achieveable, although I doubt people liked me joining an Arathi Basin fight, running for the Blacksmith, pitying my Fool and then AFK-ing out. I still don’t like that there is a mandatory PVP element to all these meta-achievements, and I think it breeds bad PVP behaviour, like mine.

Everything was very random – I spent the whole weekend logging in once every hour to see if I could get the items I needed. Thankfully I did (well, apart from the pet), but I’m sure there are frustrated people out there that didn’t.

It needed a lot of bag space, and I ended up with a whole load of leftover stuff. I did think about leaving it in the bank for next year, but last night I came to my senses and just deleted it all!

On the whole I enjoyed the event. Children’t Week next, and having had a peek ahead at the achievements for that I am not looking forward to it. It’ll be the PVP requirements that I don’t do, I’m sure.

Following the “Merrymaker” disappointment, I’m trying not to get too obsessed with completing all the World Event achievements, but I do feel that the Lunar festival is a very druid-oriented festival, and I think it’s appropriate that I, as a druid, bear the Elder title. I also think it plays to our strengths, with a lot of the achievements being made a lot easier by our ability to sneak. I hate PvP, but will quite happily sneak in and out of the Horde capital cities when the need arises

By the time I’d finished, it was almost bedtime, so I thought I’d head down into the Dalaran sewers and waste one lure trying to fish for the rat pet down there. I’ve been levelling my fishing in the sewers – I find it helps to have another goal, as well as trying to the pet. I’ve lost track of how long I’ve spent down there, but I’ve managed to get my fishing up to 440 so far, so it’s been quite a while. Anyway, with only 48s left on my lure I was amazed to see the thing I’ve been chasing for so long – yes, my very own giant rat pet.

I went to bed a happy druid last night

I wasn’t needed for the raid last night. The last few raid nights we’ve had enough people for two 10-man groups, but last night there weren’t quite enough, so only one group went. It was a bit galling when my husband was invited and I wasn’t, but my guild is really good at making sure everyone gets a fair shot at the content, and there were healers online who’d not been in Naxx as much as I have, so I was pleased that they got the chance to go.

So as I was at a bit of a loose end, I made a start on the Coins of Ancestry. I found a great list of all the Elders on WoWWiki, and decided to follow it through and see how far I could get. By the end of the evening I had completed the achievements for the Elders of Kalimdor, Elders of Eastern Kingdoms, and the Elders of the Horde. As a bonus I soloed my Strat key whilst I was in there as well I still need to get into a couple of old world dungeons (primarily Maraudon), and then make a start on the Northrend stuff.

At the moment I’m feeling more positive about this series of achievements than I did about the Winter Veil ones. I know some people will find getting into the opposite factions capital cities harder than the PvP objectives, so again, it won’t suit everyone, but I’m hopeful I can get to be “Elder Tiniane”