Dearest Lyssith - Paladin Week

Blue Drake - Flying High

It's Paladin Week in Laeleiweyn's Alt Appreciation calendar and as my main is a Paladin, this should be easy right? Well, yes and no - the thing is my Paladin is not only my main, she's my very first ever toon so as of this week, she's four years old and we've done almost everything together. She's my achievement queen, my mount collector, my first love in game and these days, the wayward child I'm almost tempted to give up on!

Albino Drake

It all started so innocently - I chose human as a race and Paladin because of Sparhawk & Kalten - two main characters in David Eddings books, The Elenium & The Tamuli series. I love all the David Eddings books but Sparhawk is a grumpy old man wearing armor & armed with a healthy shield of sarcasm & cynicism and for some strange reason, that has always made me like him more! So once I chose the class & race, I needed a name. I wanted Lessa - the main female character in Anne McCaffreys Dragonriders of Pern series but that wasn't available so after about 20 minutes of thinking, I came up with Lyssith or Lyss as my friends and guildies call me in game.

Brewfest Kodo

I started playing just before Brewfest started and had no idea about any of the holiday events but the following year, I'd learnt a lot more about the game and set out to get as many achievements as I could. One of the very first special mounts I managed to acquire was the Brewfest Kodo. I'm cheating a bit here as I actually got it on my Gnome Rogue first and it was only with the arrival of account wide mounts in Mists that Lyss could finally ride her dinosaur! She did get the Brewfest Ram though so it's not totally cheating!

Leveling during Wrath was fun but kind of slow too - as my first character, I had no heirlooms, very few add-ons and no clue where to quest next or even really how to play well but I managed. As part of the gearing up process back then, grinding dungeons for the various reputations and currency was normal so when I stumbled across the Oracles in Sholozar Basin, it was just another reputation that needed grinding. I was super lucky though and once I'd hatched my first or second Mysterious Egg, I was rewarded with the Green Proto Drake, much to the chagrin of my guild mates!

Green Proto-Drake

I learned to tank and spent many hours in ICC as off-tank for my guild as well as running guildies through dungeons. I started working on Achievements seriously at this time including the Argent Tournament. I never quite finished that though so it's still on my list! Running all those dungeons did have their rewards though - the Blue Proto Drake and the Blue Drake both dropped for me quite early on - apparently in those days, the Gods of RNG liked me & Lyss!

Fast forward a year or so and I was struggling to adapt to the changes wrought on my Class by the Cataclysm - I hated the Holy Power mechanic and I'd lost my guild too. I did find another, by the name of Bloodthirsty Meercats which I joined just for the fantastic name! It was being run by 4 teenage Danish lads but at summers end, they all graduated to higher education and had to give up WoW to concentrate on their studies. By this time, my old guild was almost derelict so I re-joined and my Meercat guildie Ben soon joined me there.

All through that first winter of Cataclysm, I tried, I really tried hard to master the Holy Power mechanic but it just wasn't happening and after a particularly nasty hour in Grim Batol, I pretty much gave up on Lyss. We did grind the Wintersaber Trainers reputation before it changed so this beautiful cat became mine and was my main ground mount for a long while.

Winterspring Frostsaber

After that Grim Batol experience, I retreated mostly back to the Auction House but I did run quite a few dungeons on my other alts. None came close to my Lyss though so for the remainder of Cataclysm, Lyss & I ground our way through reputation after reputation - Sha'tari Skyguard for the Nether Ray mounts, Netherwing for the gorgeous Netherwing Drakes and the Kurenaai for the riding Talbuks - I absolutely love the White War Talbuk! Purple is my favorite colour and he is so regal! Look how proud & tall he stands!

White Riding Talbuk

So that brings us to Mists - a new chance to fire up my Zygors leveling guide, raise alts and explore new lands and that is exactly what Lyss & I did, straight out of the gate. She was the first to open up her farm and reach Exalted with various Pandaren factions but I still struggled with the Holy Power thing - she felt so squishy that doing the Golden Lotus dailies was a real chore. We struggled on though, after all, she owed it to the others in my team to get those Commendations to make their struggles easier and she is proud to be my Achievement Queen. She nags me constantly to keep trying, I have tried to ignore her & promote one of my other alts to Main but I always come back to her in the end.

If you look at my to-do list (on the tab at the top) you'll see a long list of things she wants to do before the next expansion but she has given me permission to get the others leveled too - she knows I need some 'alt time' occasionally. Dearest Lyssith, my demanding first love!

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Random Stuff is Random!

Guess who couldn't think of a topic for today? Well, actually I could but none of them would have made for a whole post so I'm gonna lump them in here all together & be a bit random for a change! This blog tends to be a bit random anyway so it should fit in nicely!

Milestone Interviews - I launched this last week on my other blog - it's kind of aimed at non-blogging goldmakers in the community but if any of my lovely peeps here want to join in, you'll be more than welcome! I've had a few interviews submitted already, the first will be going live tomorrow. I'm pretty excited by this mini-project - now I just have to work out how to get the shy ones to send their interviews in!

Paladin Week - yup - my main is a Paladin so I'll be doing a full Paladin post in the next day or two - she's my Achievement chaser, my first ever alt & still my favorite so I'm trying to work out which bit to write about for that post!

Hearthstone - Blizzard have just announced they are going to do a 'wipe' which basically means that all my progress over the last few weeks will be reset back to fresh meat level. I know I'll have the knowledge to get back to same level again (which isn't that high anyway to be honest) but it kinda feels like a waste of time playing now until after the wipe. That's good news for WoW though - maybe now, I'll log in and actually do something other than Auction House & cooldowns! If you're interested in Hearthstone, my friend Cold is a long time, very experienced Card game player & has written a couple of posts over on his blog. The Starter Mage Deck is the one I started with on his advice and it works really well.

Real Life - work is going great - I really like my boss even if she drives me a little crazy now & then. Got some niggling health stuff to sort out but nothing major and finally, after 18 months on the market, my house has sold! Yup - I'll have some cash out of the sale & the first thing I'm going to do is fly out to see my friend! It does mean I'll miss the Blizzcon London weekend meetup but hey, I need his hugs more!

Monk Week - I kinda got distracted by Hearthstone again last week so I totally missed Monk Week. I do have a monk - she's been level 5 since about 3 days after Mists went live! I was seriously put out when I couldn't send her any heirlooms straightaway so she got shelved until further notice. That was a full year ago now! I did pop in and get her to level 8 this morning but it's Paladin Week now so I guess she'll be sitting around for a while longer. Why Tishamaru? One of my old Etsy friends has a beautiful Siamese cat called Maru & her sister is Tisha - probably the most photogenic pair of cats I've seen in a long while & not only do I have a fondness for Siamese cats - it's vaguely Asian too!

Blogging! - as if I didn't have enough to do, I've been invited to contribute to a new site (along with a few other known bloggers) which I've accepted AND I've started a new one of my own. Once everything is running smoothly on that, I'll tell y'all a bit more about it but I want to polish the edges a bit more first! Oh and in my usual scatterbrained fashion, I have a great idea for another one too! Eeeek!

My Fav Guildie - I did log into WoW last night, intending to do just a little bit of crafting but my Fav Guildie was online & we started chatting (as usual!). He noticed I didn't have my new trinket from the Timeless Isle yet so he dragged me off to go get the Burning Chest across the broken bridge. We hit it lucky and the mobs were almost all dead so I just ran in & got the chest - one Trinket & a Burden of Eternity later & I was a happy bunny! On the way back, we stopped to join in on a Huolon(sp?) kill & he summoned the Tiger rare nearby for me too. He's pretty much been living on the Isle as far as I can tell so it was easy to pick up a couple more Rares to kill for the quest. I'd forgotten how much fun it is to do stuff with other players & once I reforge, gem & enchant, I think I may be pleasantly surprised with my Paladin. Big {{{hugs}}} for Ben - apparently I don't talk about him enough here - do you think this will keep him happy? lol

Okay, time to get back to my alt-hopping ways - got a Paladin post to wrestle with & I need screenshots! Got to discipline myself not to log into Hearthstone though - it is kinda addictive once you get going you know!

Have fun y'all, talk soon xxx

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Say Hello to Fyzz - My New Mage

Fyzz!

Yup, after all my expressed dislike of playing a Mage, I felt that it was time to give them another try thanks to Laeleiweyn's Alt Appreciation project! To be honest, Fyzz has been around a while but with 3 days played, she was still only level 2 - shows how much time I spend in the Auction House though! So late on Friday, I made a last minute decision to send all my cloth heirlooms to her & give this whole Mage thing another try.

As of this morning, she is now level 10 and I have no idea what spec to choose! I've always gone Frost in previous incarnations so perhaps I should try one of the other specs but which one? She does look pretty in her heirlooms though and as I haven't played a Mage at all since Mists arrived with all the changes that brought plus I'm now using keybinds more, I'll probably keep her going for now.

I think the highest I've got a Mage to previously was mid level 20's but as my character slots fill up on my main server, I tend to delete them to make space for new alts. I've leveled a Priest to max level before & my Warlock is in her 50's but for some reason, I've always found the Mage to be particularly squishy. One incarnation died about 6 times in 20 minutes over near Thelsamar and needless to say, she got deleted rapidly that evening!

This time though, I have about 6 or 7 heirloom pieces for Fyzz so I'm hoping she won't be quite so squishy! With all the blogging & playing of other alts though, I don't think she'll be leveling very quickly unless something magical happens and I fall in love with her!

So why Fyzz for a name? Well, she's a gnome & she's a Mage - she needed something expressive to go with all the whizzbangs & flashy spell effects of a Mage so I thought Fyzz was appropriate especially as I'm such a bad Mage, most of my spells fizzle out before reaching their target!. If I had to give her a family name it would be something like Flashmaker or Fireblaster but as I don't Roleplay at all, that's just a bit of fancy.

Next week is Monk Week and so far my female Pandaren Monk has only made it to level 5 in the first week of Mists, I don't think I've even logged her since! I'm planning on leveling her a bit for Monk Week though so it gives me yet another excuse to send Fyzz back to the Auction House for a while longer!

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Pet Battle Addons - Warcraft Pet Foundry Carnival

Thanks to Rez for organising another carnival I just have to join in with! The very first Warcraft Pet Foundry Blogging Carnival topic is Pet Battle Addons. Now I'm still very much a newbie when it comes to pet battles & at the last count, I have only 2 pet battle addons. I have however, just read Rez's post for the carnival & I have a feeling I may have a few more addons to manage once this carnival goes live! lol

I initially downloaded PetBattleMaster and I still use it all the time. It tells me which pets I haven't collected yet & how many of each I have already. When I enter a battle in the wild, it colors the border around the enemy pets so I know if one of them is rare quality. It gives me a little summary box of all 6 pets although I still don't recognise most of the icons instantly!

Here's the description from Curse

• Team view with quick selector and portraits of your mighty teams

• Team manager docked to the pet journal showing all pets of all your teams

• Tabbed view with details about the pets in a duel

• Colored border according to the rarity of a pet

• Information about the damage modifiers of the pets

• Notifies to catch a pet, if it's missing in the player's journal

• Notifies to catch a pet, if it's quality is higher

• Tooltip information whether a pet is missing (incl. Minimap)

• Many other features following 

The second addon I have is courtesy of Rez again! He spent so much time talking about pet breed ID's that I knew nothing about, I had to go with his suggestion for the Battle Pet Breed ID add-on. I'm still learning which breeds are best in what form but once I know what I'm looking for or at, it has come in very useful - especially at the Auction House! When I'm buying pets and there is more than 1 for sale, I can buy the one with the best breed rather than just buying the cheapest & hoping!

I think once I get all the Tamers finished and start doing some PvP then I'll need Pet Battle Teams too! At the moment, I only have 3 level 25's so they are usually on duty to help boost my lowbies. I've been focusing on getting my gold machine ready for patch 5.4 though so none of them have had much use lately. But Pet Battles and all those lovely achievements to work towards are on my latest big To Do List so once the patch chaos dies down, I'll be settling down to some serious battling!

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WoW TCG Ceasing?

Post Patch Blues? Fight It Before They Start!

With patch 5.4 landing next week, I'm really spending a lot of time in game right now but it's almost all focused on gold-making, crafting & being ready for the endless possibilities that a new patch brings. I've posted my to-do lists here before - usually just a few things I want to achieve that week and sometimes I actually manage to cross a few things off those lists!

Patch 5.4 is also bringing a whole new island for us to play in but from what I've been reading, you really need to be fairly well geared to survive there. As my Paladin is my only alt even vaguely geared enough for the first level of LFR, I'm guessing I have a lot of work to do before I can even set foot on this new Timeless Isle so I was thinking what else I could be doing once the Auction House patch furor has died down.

That's when my mega long to-do list was born! Towards the end of Wrath, so much had changed in game for me, I could happily have waited another 6 months for Cataclysm to arrive, I was that busy adapting & still learning the game. I had only been playing for about a year at that point though so much was still fresh & shiny new to me.

In the last months of Cataclysm, more changes were happening for me and again, I could happily have waited a few more months for Mists to arrive. See, that's what happens when you don't raid every week - you have time to do all the other stuff in game and you don't have to see the same boss every week for hours on end until you beat him! Of course, I do actually miss the old raid group even though things went nasty towards the end. We had some really good times as a group and I still wonder if they are ok or are they even still playing.

So where I am now in Mists is a kind of limbo - most of my guildies have wandered off and the rate that new content has been released has me beat! There is just so much stuff I haven't done yet, I kind of don't know where to start so I don't do any of it - I just fall back into crafting, farming & auction house lurking! Getting a proper job for the first time since I started playing has also cut down my play time & between adapting my sleeping patterns back to 'normal' hours & doing everything in the now limited spare time, I find myself faffing around even more!

I've decided to make myself a long, long to-do list for the rest of this expansion - the buzz is that this will be the last patch so we could have a whole year before the new expansion which hasn't even been officially announced yet! I'm going to make my to-do list a separate page & put a tab up the top there - I'll be adding to it as I see or think of things I want to achieve or as people suggest things too. That way, I'll have a kind of suggestion list for what to do when I'm a bit bored - nibble away at this achievement or that Reputation grind. I find lists very motivating as long as most of the items don't have a deadline - even at work, I make lists all the time - something my new boss appreciates as she is a list maker too!

How do you keep yourself interested in playing? Do you have lists of things you want to do? Let us know in the comments :)

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Alt Appreciation Week - Hunter-time!

Netherstalker Set

So this weeks topic for Laeleiweyn's Alt Appreciation Week is Hunters - I have a few dotted around various servers & just a couple of weeks ago, I dug out my level 86 Hunter on my main server to level her as my 2nd Leatherworker. She's only got to 86 by pet battling though so when I realised I needed to do a few quests to get the Magnificent Hide patterns for Leatherworking, I took her over to the starting area for Pandaria. Once I got my toolbars set up, it still took me a couple of hours to remember how to play her! I got her almost to 88 though so not too far off 90 now.

I used to play Marksman in Cataclysm and did quite a bit of PvP. I'm really not very good at it but I do enjoy it on a Hunter more than any other class. She's also the only alt I've really transmogged too - she was involved in an An'Qhiraj run when she was 60 ish & picked up the gorgeous Dark Edge of Insanity 2H axe. Not long after that, I was questing in Outland, killing Skettis if I remember correctly and some of the netherstalker armor pieces dropped. I love all kinds of purple anyway so once I saw that armor set & had the Axe in the bank, I just had to give it a try!

My US Account has a Hunter as my main - I broke all my reserves & created a Horde toon! She's a Troll with purple hair and I like her for that more than anything else! I did the Scroll of Resurrection
level to 80 instantly thing thanks to Cold, so I didn't have to level her all the way through unknown territories! Probably just as well because I spent the first couple of weeks lost in Orgrimmar!

When Mists of Pandaria arrived, I changed her to Beast Master & tamed one of the caterpillar/wormy things. I was still getting used to keyboard bindings etc but with lots of help from friends, I got there in the end. I did get her to 90 and did quite a few Scenarios early on but she's still not very well geared though - I had to let my US account lapse for the time being.

Grassfed

Then this week brought about a new Hunter - another Horde - a Tauren this time called Grassfed - I wanted to call him TwoVeg so his pet could be called meat but that name was already taken! Now I just need to think of a name that goes with Grassfed :) I created this Hunter to join in with the EU shenanigans over on Draenor - the Godmother got herself talked into started a Hunter only guild so it's full of fellow Twitter peeps! I did log in a couple of times but my Auction House stuff is building to a climax before the release of Patch 5.4 next week so I've been kind of busy elsewhere!

I also swore to myself that I wouldn't spend hours in the AH on Draenor but it's my first glimpse of a high population AH & I'm loving it! I created a bank alt purely to sell anything I collected whilst leveling but I soon fell back into my gold making habits. If you have TSM or Auctioneer - run the vendor scan - it really helps build up some starting capital! I went from 3 gold to 30 gold in about 15 minutes just buying stuff to vendor and running back and forth from Auction House, mailbox & vendor!

I was hoping I could knuckle down & get my main Hunter to 90 by the end of the week & I still have a day or so left to do it but I got lucky & the Hearthstone EU Beta test went live so I've been sort of busy there too!

Next week is Mage week but it's also patch week. Mage is my most hated class & one I've not leveled past level 20 yet! I have a feeling that there won't be a Mage appreciation week for me although I am playing a Mage deck in hearthstone! Does that count? lol

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