Although I’ve not been playing as much, I have been thinking about WoW, and in particular what I want to achieve this year. With limited playtime I need to prioritise what I want to do in the game. And so, here are my WoW New Year resolutions:

1. Get better at making gold on the Auction House
2. Level my Mage to 80
3. Finish questing in Storm Peaks and Icecrown with my Druid
4. See the endgame of Wrath of the Lich King and defeat Arthas

I’d like to achieve these by the time Cataclysm is released, and I’ve already made some great progress on the first one. I will of course report here as I go along.

Happy New Year (belatedly) everyone!

I was already a big fan of my Blizzard authenticator. It gives my WoW account another layer of security, which is very important to me. And now Blizzard have given us a little thank you for using this additional security on our account, in the form of a special pet, the Core Hound Pup (pictured above). It’s a little baby version of the Corehounds that I still remember from my Molten Core days. He’s still young, and very playful, and in the short time I was watching him last night he was rearing up, rolling over, and digging a hole – so cute!

With the introduction of two new pets available from Breanni’s pet store in Dalaran – the Albino Snake and the Calico Cat – I’m now up to 101 pets! Still no achievement for 100 though – come on Blizzard!

Due to some friends taking a break from the game, coupled with me being so tired over the last few weeks and unable to stay awake past 9pm, my lovely regular Heroic group has melted away, leaving me with little else to do in the evenings but level my Mage (she’s now 64).

My Guild has now moved into Trial of the Crusader, so now I’m staying awake better in the evenings again I thought it was time to go back and see if it really was me or just Ulduar that put me off raiding.

I’ve only done a couple of raids so far, with mixed success. We had a very successful clear of 10-man ToTCr last week, which netted me this lovely little achievement:

Then last night we tried a 25-man ToTCr. The first two bosses went down easily, but then we came up against the Horde Champions group. And we wiped and wiped and wiped. I never like ending a raid night on a wipe, it feels like a failure, even though we had killed two bosses already, and I’d even got a lovely new pair of boots . It wasn’t even a productive kind of wiping, where you learn the encounter gradually and make progress on each attempt, it was a completely chaotic, loss of control kind of a wipe.

Why Blizzard, why? Why put “mock PvP” events into PvE content? It’s just frustrating. Grrrrrr.

So, mixed success on the raiding front. But at the end of the day, it was fun to spend time with friends. So I think I’ll keep trying to raid when I can and see how it goes

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 have a friend who’s in the early stages of writing his own MMORPG. I don’t know if it’ll ever come to anything, but there’s one thing I’ve been quite forceful in telling him, as he works on his design.

There must be dragons.

For me, there is something magical about battling those huge, mythical creatures. In Everquest one of the first raids I ever went on was one to kill Lady Vox. The feeling when our Guild bested her for the first time was wonderful. Raiding was very different in those days. We had to co-ordinate buffing by bringing several higher-level characters along. Once each group was buffed, they’d log out, and connect to the chat server, then when everyone was buffed the call would go out in chat to relog, and we’d be on a strict timer to kill the dragon. And if you were above level 52 you would get ported out of her lair as soon as she was engaged, and yes, we did kill the foolish Wizard who had levelled to 53 back down to level 52 so he could join in!

In World of Warcraft the first dragon I encountered was Onyxia. Again, this was one of the first raid encounters I ever experienced in WoW, and it really convinced me that WoW was going to be a long-term game for me. First of all, the quest to gain access to her lair was long and complex, and thoroughly enjoyable. Then the actual encounter – the mechanics, the different stages, the joy of working with a large group of friends to learn the encounter and finally to beat it was something I really enjoyed.

So when Blizzard updated the Onyxia encounter, and the Officers of my Guild set a date for an encounter, I dusted off my raiding head, and signed up. We got enough raiders signed up to attempt the 25-man version of the encounter, which, whilst not as large as the 40-man original, still felt large And it took us a few tries to learn the encounter, especially as most of my guildies had not seen the original version, but by the end of the evening we had a dead dragon on our hands

And I’m happy to report that the Onyxia encounter is still my favourite encounter in WoW. It’s been updated for level 80s, with some added complexity, but the fundamental mechanics remain the same. And standing in the huge cavern, watching Onyxia take a Deep Breath and fly from one side to the other, breathing fire, made me feel small and vulnerable. And it was magical.

Yes… There must be dragons

Personally, I’m still here, and I’m still enjoying World of Warcraft. I’ve levelled my little baby Mage to 55, and I’m still enjoying blasting stuff, although she is still very squishy if anything gets close enough to hit her! I’m also still enjoying running Heroics with my Druid, who is pretty much permanently Boomkin these days, despite my initial misgivings. She’s still predominately in Resto gear, and her +hit leaves a lot to be desired, but it’s a fun way to spend the evenings Thankfully my group of friends in game are still enjoying running Heroics, and I’m hoping that enthusiasm only gets more intense with the arrival of 3.2 this week

I’m not getting as much playtime as I’d like, and that’s probably the main reason this blog hasn’t been updated recently. Work is crazy busy at the moment – we’re in the middle of a major restructure and I’m having to fill out a nightmare application form to attempt to remain employed. This is seriously eating into my WoW time, but at the end of the day, it’s a short-term thing to ensure I can continue to pay the subscription, so it’s well worth the investment of time.

The deadline for submitting my form is tomorrow, so I intend to celebrate with a lot of WoW 3.2 is arriving at just the right time

It just kind of happened. I’d been enjoying the raiding, and had started taking a bit more responsibility in terms of running the healing assignments.  My guild were regularly clearing Naxx10, and could pretty much clear Naxx25. With the 3.1 patch we headed in to Ulduar10, and started making good progress.

And then it just stopped being fun. And I can’t work out if it’s me, or if it’s Ulduar. But at the moment I don’t feel any motivation to raid at all.

I’ve been enjoying the Argent Tournament, and have managed to gain my “Crusader” title. And I’ve been running a lot of Heroics with a group of friends, which is a blast. Scarily I’m now predominantly a Moonkin, and starting to feel like I’m making a useful dps contribution. In fact, I thought I might be needed to heal the group on one occaision recently, and felt quite disappointed. What a turnaround!

I’m also dabbling around with a small troop of alts, but haven’t really set my heart on any perticular one to take to 80. I’ve got a Rogue, Mage and Warlock all sitting at 44 (thank you, Recruit-a-Friend), a 61 DK, and a very low level Priest and Shaman. The Big Red Kitty baby hunter guide videos on ProjectLore inspired me to start a Hunter, and she’s really fun.

I’m certainly still finding plenty of things to keep me busy. And I’m not missing the raiding at all. At the moment. I don’t know if it’s me, or if it’s Ulduar. And it’s not bad. It’s just different

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!