I have had my email address for at least ten years. I do still check it every day, but I get at this point over 115 emails a day at least, most of it being spam.
I was going through recent email today to settle a purchase dispute when I noticed I had an actual email that had not been checked. I almost fell through the floor when I realized it was from WOW Senior Community Representative, Zarhym!
I met Zarhym at DragonCon this year, so I guess he had added me to his email list of “community fansites.”
Here is part of the email:
As we’re about to take a little (and welcomed) break for the holidays to spend time with our families; reflect upon the trials and tribulations of the past year; embrace our loved ones by the fire with ardent spirits filling our goblets, and frankincense and myrrh nipping at our noses; meditate for answers to the anticipated riddles 2013 is sure to unleash… or whatever; I’ll probably just be playing a lot of games! (Goblets, fire, and incense still involved.)
But, I digress. With this final address of 2012 to all fansites and influencers, the North American Community & eSports teams wish you all a very merry holiday season! Attached is a digital version of this year’s official Blizzard holiday card signed by the Diablo III, StarCraft II, World of Warcraft, and eSports community managers here at Blizzard headquarters. You’re welcome to share it with your audience too. We hope you enjoy!
Attached was this Christmas card, so here is my share:
Instead of the traditional WOW Santa outfit in green or red, I decided to just put together a red outfit for Chatmay. I got 2nd place in the best dressed contest.
Instead of doing a seasonal (ie winter) guild party, I decided this year to throw a Winter Veil/ Holidays party.
About 10-15 guildies showed up at the Old Town inn in Stormwind, many dressed in Christmas colors. As usual, the standard alliance booze was handed out or placed down.
Breaking the Ogre Pinata
After taking care of some lottery prizes that were needed to be done, we did an ice breaker game. I chose this to do because we have lots of new members in the guild right now.
The “it ” person would throw a Heavy Leather Ball to another person. The person receiving the ball had to answer a random question from a list I made before the party started. Some of the questions included “What song describes you?” and “What is the best advice you ever received.”
Meanwhile the guests exchanged their Secret Santa gifts. We had previously in December had a signup list available to the guild on Facebook for any that wanted to participate. It was not required to attend the party, but we had around 18 participate.
I then split the attendants into three teams. They had to work together in seperate vent channels to complete an item list of activities. These were:
All team members must get smashed drunk and stay that way throughout the whole contest.
One member must get a stranger in dwarven district to hug you.
One team member must get a stranger in dwarven to give you 15g.
All team members must send a random guildie a ingame mail saying – Happy Holidays.
One team member must run around naked saying Merry Christmas From “Guild Name!”
After 1-5 are completed, the whole team must line up on dwarven bank stairs and dance together.
Besides the wordage above, there were no rules on how to actually accomplish these things. I did have to open up the hugging and 15g to trade district as well because there were not a lot of people standing in dwarven at that time. The winning team all received a battle pet.
For the party finale, we all took a Preserved Holly and flew to trade from dwarven on our reindeers. Then we lined up on the bank stairs there for this screenshot:
Reindeer Treats
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all my guildies and to all my blog readers!!!
First of all, just want to make sure all my readers know I am still alive. I haven’t posted anything in quite some time. During that time I have missed things like IntPiPoMo 2012, but life just happens that way sometimes I guess.
I hit 90 on my hunter, Illayeria, about a month ago. (I am taking forever to level toons this time.) I still haven’t even got her to LFR level, but I did make some cool leveling screenshots to share.
We’ve all heard the word “huntard.” But even though everyone jokes about hunters being huntards, no one actually wants to be known as one.
My recent hunter experience, though, left me feeling a bit inadequate.
First off, let me say that my hunter is an alt. I started raiding with her in cata but only as a backup for my husband’s team. Towards the end of cata, she had respectable dps and item level, but it isn’t like I’m an experienced hunter vet.
Up until cata, the only difficult pet I had tamed was my white beetle from the former AQ40 raid. My husband’s paladin took me in there and pulled mobs of beetles, while I ran around trying to tame one while being punted all over the place. I named that beetle “Trouble,” but he was worth it as far as I was concerned.
During cata though, people constantly mentioned a rare pet that had just come out- Ban’thalos the owl in Mount Hyjal.
Ban’thalos
There were at least three times that I traveled as fast as my dranei legs could take me over to Hyjal to try to attain this bird. Every time I went was fail though because other hunters would steal it from me by doing things like hitting tame first even though I had trapped it, etc…. I became so enraged at the whole idea of even attempting to tame this pet, that I pretty much said I would never have it.
Fast forward to last week. I had deleted a profession to train mining, and I was up to obsidium in Hyjal. I had one free pet slot that I had saved. It suddenly occured to me…well, I could go get that stupid bird. (I actually looked for the rare turtle first, but he wasn’t around.)
It’s not that I really wanted the bird by this point. I even considered killing it if it was there just to spite everyone. But something in me wanted to say- hey, I tamed Ban’thalos.
Several deaths and at least 20-30 minutes later, I still had not tamed this pet. I had tried standing at several places on top of the statue/monument thing at Sanctuary of Malorne as well as several ledges behind trees around the statue. He was always either out of range from standing position or I would die from fall damage if I flew up to shoot at him.
At this point I decided to consult Wowhead. Good ‘ol Wowhead.com. I decided to try another method, which involved falling backwards/disengaging into the lake near the owl’s flying area.
Two more deaths. This time from stupid mistakes like pressing the wrong button. Maybe I was getting too tired to do this (I had woken up at 4am and was still online blah blah…), but I was determined.
So I took a deep breath and decided to try one more time.
This is the order that has to happen when taming Ban’thalos with this method:
(Be in BM spec)
Position yourself between the pet’s spawn area and the lake in front of Sanctuary
Fly up to his range, which is very high
Hit dismount on flyer (thanks Blizz for adding this step)
shoot Ban’thalos with gun or bow
disengage with back facing the lake, land in the water or you die
get trap down
hit deterrence when he attacks you, especially if he uses ‘Harsh Moonlight’
hit tame beast
Flying up to Ban’thalos
This is what actually happened when I tried to get Ban’thalos:
I was OK until landing in the water…
I tried to jump out of the water, and I got stuck in the wall…had to waste deterrence
I laid my trap and ran around trying to get him to fly into it…he did not
I forgot to hit tame beast…ok ok, I admit that I haven’t tamed a pet in almost a year or more, but that is really embarrassing
I finally hit tame beast with 15% health or less left, was sure I would die
After taming this pain (note health bar)
But SCORE- I tamed Ban’thalos!!! I named him PITA without a second thought.
So I guess it was a good thing I missed out on this pet all those times in cata. Since I could barely tame him at 87, I am sure there is no way I would have done it at 85.
I haven’t posted in a while, so I thought I would post some of the last few transmogs I have done here. Two of these were done at the end of cataclysm- the first cloth transmogs I have done with wands as main hand.
The last one is my first Mists of Pandaria transmog…not much of one, but I thought it was a good way to start the new expansion.
For the first time ever since I started playing WOW in 2004, I decided to level an alt to max (Meridia- holy priest) before my main toon (Chatmay- warlock). It was a very hard choice for me to make, but I needed my priest to 90 for raiding.
Somehow I have finally made it to 90 as shadow spec. These are some screenshots I made from 85-90:
QUESTING SHOTS
Kicking You In the Butt
Not sure what this is- but hey it looks cool
Making the Raft
The Klaxxi Dudes
FLYING SHOTS
The Birds
Dragon Ride
Bug Helper
LEVEL 90 SHOTS
Preparing for Trinket Grind
Hilarious Boss Down in SM Heroic*
* I was last one standing. The rogue, Picklock, got the killing blow at the same time he died. Sad but true healing story.
My guild on Terokkar, The East Kingdom, had an end-of-summer party a few weeks ago. Sorry I am just now getting around to writing about it….
The party location was the beach at Bittertide Lake, which is West of Glimmering Pillar in Sholazar Basin.
Start of the party
After the usual booze hand-outs, we started the party with a Heavy Leather Ball Contest. Everyone was given a heavy leather ball. The objective was to throw balls like crazy, and the person with the fewest balls left in their bags would be the winner.
This is the first time I have attempted to do this game at a party, and it didn’t really work out like I thought it would. I don’t know if people were playing without the required number of open bag spaces (eight) or someone was afk, but we ended up having seven winners from a tie. This is fine if you can afford that many prizes (I gave them Winterspring Cubs), but just be aware.
We then voted on best dressed for the party, which was a prize of 500g.
After that, we did another new contest: Skinny-Dipping Diver Dueling. The rules: Standing on the slope between shallow and deep water two toons will duel under water with no gear on. Each player starts with eight points. If any part of the player’s body moves above water during the duel, they lose one point. The winner of the duel receives two points. So the highest possible score overall is ten points.
The trick to this contest was making sure people were staying on the divider between the shallow and deep parts of the lake. If they are not following that rule, it really isn’t as challenging. We did have one winner with ten points, and he received the Mini Mount WOW loot card.
The last contest was a number-guessing-game based on the trap door located in the lake area. The trap door has coordinates you can see when you scroll over it. I have been told they are some kind of Lost reference, but I have no idea. In order to hold this contest, you need to make sure the party takes place far enough from the trap-door that players will not be able to look at it.
This is a picture of it:
Coordinates for Contest
Everyone participating had to guess a number six times- one time for each trap-door number. The first and second numbers were between 1-10, the third and fourth numbers were between 1-20, the fifth number was between 1-25, and the sixth number was between 1-50. Another option for the answers could be for the judge to pick their own coordinates (if you think anyone has looked before-hand to see what the answers are). The 500g prize went to the player with the most amount of winning guesses (closest number to the answer wins each time).
After all of this, the party moved to Vashj’ir to do the whale shark kill for the achievement. We did this at last year’s party, but we decided to do it again for newer guildies who didn’t have it.
For those of you that don’t know, I live in Atlanta and have for a while. There is a huge sci-fi/fantasy/popular culture convention here every Labor Day weekend called Dragoncon, which gets an estimated attendance of 40,000-50,000. (according to some sources)
I had never really gone to Dragoncon on a serious basis before now. I say it that way because I had actually intended to twice. The first time I won’t get into, but I ended up not going. The second time I worked as a volunteer for the MMO Track, so I spent most of my time in that area.
I decided very early this year that I was attending 2012 Dragoncon no matter what. I seriously had my babysitters lined up in February. Anyways, I was there for three whole days and ended up completely exhausted (and sick), so it has taken me a week to get this post written.
While I did attend panels such as “Time Travel in Science-Fiction” and “Bollywood Dancing,” most of what I attended was gaming-related. Here are my highlights:
1.) The Guild cast Q&A Panel
This panel was one of the first things I went to and the longest line I stood in the whole weekend (2 hours). If you have never seen The Guild, it is a webseries about to be in its 6th season that you can find on youtube (or HERE for season five). It is a fictional show about six guildies based on different gamer stereotypes, and it is very funny.
According to star/writer/producer Felicia Day, Dragoncon 2012 is one of the only times the entire cast has been on a panel together. The Q&A session took place in a huge hotel ballroom packed wall to wall with fans.
Full cast of The Guild
Most of the panel was dominated by Felicia (Codex), Sandeep Parikh (Zaboo), and Jeff Lewis (Vork) (who showed off baby pictures), but they all had great things to say about their experiences with the show.
My favorite question was- If The Guild Cast decided to cosplay at a convention together as a group, what would they dress up as? They answered Winnie And The Pooh, etc., although I think it was undecided who would be which character in the show.
Another great question was- If your character switched personalities with another character on the show, who would you want to be? Most of them said Tinkerballa. I guess everyone wants to be the bad girl.
2.) Cosplay-Watching
There were truly awesome costumes all over the place, lots of them posing for pictures. The only gaming-related picture I have ready right now is a Codex (from The Guild). The outfit is the one used in their “Do You Want To Date My Avatar” music video:
A+ Outfit
Note: I don’t have it ready to post yet, but I got a great shot of someone as Illidan. I will try to upload it later.
3.) WOW Costume Contest
There were only 13 entries (if I am correct) in the WOW Costume Contest, which surprised me, but they were all great! What I loved about the contest is that they gave several prizes out besides just 1st-3rd.
Here are some pictures I made of the event:
1st Place Overall
Some of the Winners
The troll warrior and Onyxia in human form both won judge awards. The resto druid in tree form won Most Creative and 2nd Place Overall. The tree had to be led around by two volunteers everywhere she went (couldn’t see?), which was amusing.
More Winners
The dwarf hunter team won 3rd Place Overall. The Defias Bandit clinched the Audience Award with her dramatic onstage death (plus quick respawn time). Note the rogue in black in the background wearing what I believe was a full Nightslayer set made by a real-life leatherworker.
4.) The Dragoncon Parade
This was the first parade I have attended in Atlanta ever. I got there at least 30 minutes early, and I was still barely able to see the street there were so many people there! I was also surprised at the number of parade participants- my camera battery died before it even ended. (the before-mentioned NEW camera that apparently only has 114 minutes of battery time)
This is one (bad) picture I made that is somewhat gaming-related, Skyrim maybe? These are dark elves:
Dark Elves
5.) WOW Meet-n-Greet / Trivia Contest
The last event I attended of my Dragoncon was this one. The room was packed with tables of trivia teams. There were many categories of what I would call medium-hard to very difficult questions, so it was quite a challenge!
My team, “Pandas Go Both Ways”, did not start out well… because of ME! I was the only alliance player at my table of eight. The first category was ‘Alliance Characters’, and I did not know the answers to ANY of the questions! (so embarrassing) We ended up only getting one right out of five, so that put us behind.
In a surprising end, we bet all of our points on the final question: How many character models have appeared in Warcraft games of Sylvanas? We were one of the only teams to get the question right, but we tied for second place (aw).
The winning team got to have their picture made with the Bling Gnome trophy as well as submit their idea for an item name to be included in the Mists of Pandaria expansion. (There was a Blizzard game designer present who was going to choose one idea to use, but they did not announce which one was chosen.)
6.) Learning About A Popular Korean Song
After Dragoncon was over, this awesome music video was posted on the Dragon*Con forums group on Facebook:
This was my first time to hear the Korean song, “Gangnam Style” by Psy (ok I am slow), and I am totally hooked. I have been watching the original video and parodies all week.
7.) Shameless Blog Promotion
Last but not least, I should mention that I actually handed out WOW Debutante business cards during DC. Please don’t laugh.
I actually had the cards made in the first place to try to get a free press pass to the con. (I was declined.)
My best experiences from handing out the cards were 1) a lady geeking out that she got to meet me and 2) meeting another WOW blogger, Akabeko from Red Cow Rise.
***Memberships for Dragoncon 2013 are already on sale at the Dragoncon website. They are cheaper the sooner you buy them. Also be aware that some hotels are ALREADY selling out! Even though it is in five host hotels, the rooms go fast.
I don’t think the host, JD Kenada, or the judges knew what they were getting themselves into a few months ago. What started as a few WOW bloggers competing against each other’s transmogs ended up being 47 contestants and over 450 outfits.
The winners can be seen here. Even more awesome is that JD has made a website just as an archive of this event (still in progress)!
Ok so here are pictures of my outfits from the last three categories that were featured:
FENCING (1h sword)
Pally set…or is it?!
This was the most frustrating outfit I had to make, mainly because my husband’s toon not only had full bags but also a full bank and full void storage. I think I spent two hours sorting gear sets and deleting/DEing/selling anything possible. (he ended up having duplicates of several items)
I was really proud of myself with the finished result- this outfit looks like a matched set, but it is actually about 1/2 level 70 gear and 1/2 level 85 gear. I finished it off with a weapon enchant and a shield off the auction house that matched.
The criteria for this category was “best use of a 1h sword,” but I did notice that all three medalists used a fencing-type-sword, not just any sword.
I got the idea in my head from the beginning that my NPC needed to be a musketeer. Then I ended up only having a male gnome left as far as gender/race combinations that I had at a “decent” level (I actually had to level this toon to equip the crafted musket). I came up with this description, which I sent the judges:
A musketeer was an early modern type of infantry soldier equipped with a musket. Musketeers were an important part of early modern armies. They sometimes could fight on horseback, like a dragoon or a cavalryman. The musketeer was a precursor to the rifleman. The Gnomeregan musketeers are steeped in tradition. While technology for the gnomes and types of military fighting have both progressed, the musketeers prefer to guard their home in the old ways of gun and sword. Being a Gnomeregan Musketeer requires a code of honor and loyal service to their race.
This was the hardest outfit to put together gear-wise because I had almost no gear saved on this toon, and the toon was not even level 70 yet. At one point I even got Model Viewer out just to figure out what gear I needed to go get.
I was a little bummed because I was not able to use the Gnomeregan tabard as part of my outfit since I was Gilneas faction (one of the rules). I did find, however, a purple chest to represent one of the Gnomeregan colors.
