Mornara Profile

Full Name: Mornara
Race: Orc
Homeland: Durotar, maybe? Acherus in memory.
Age:  Physicaly she is a young adult. However, she doesn't seem to age since she was turned into a DK, and she isn't sure how long she was under the LK's control.
Height: Average female orc height. Slightly over 6ft.
Build: Stocky and muscular.
Hair: Black, slightly longer than shoulder length, but always up in two pigtails.
Eyes: Glowing blue.

Philosophy: "If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell."

Personality: Calm, cool, and patient, with a hatred of the Lich King that underlies everything she does. 

Job: Getting hit in the face professionally.  Mornara is a heavily armored adventurer and uses her Blood Death Knight abilities and skills to lead groups that plunder and defeat the enemies of the Horde and Azeroth.

Hobbies: Making beautiful jewelry. Capturing and fighting her battle pets.

Bio: Mornara has been able to piece together bits of her life. She has vague memories of controlling demons before she was captured by the Lich King's forces. After that she's tried to forget what she remembers of days of torture in the cells of the Lich King. She only barely remembers becoming a Death Knight, but after that everything is all too clear.  She vividly remembers slaughtering the Scarlet Crusade and villagers while under the command of the Lich King. Since breaking free of the Lich King Mornara has participated in campaigns in Northrend in Ulduar and Icecrown Citadel, against the Twilight Hammer cultists, elementals and Deathwing himself, and in Pandaria against the Mogu, Mantid, and Zandalari Trolls.

Currently Resides:
Summer's Rest Inn in Shrine of the Two Moons in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms.

 

Death Knight Love Story

I was looking at WoW Insider a couple of days ago and saw an article about Death Knight Love Story. Seeing as I am a big fan of DKs I took a look. As the title suggests this machinanima is a love story with Death Knights. It was only part 1, but was 15 minutes long. Sadly there is no real ETA on part 2, other than roughly six months and no guarantee there.

I was pretty impressed with DKLS. I'm biased because I just adore the DK lore and story, as you can tell from my main and my own fan fics. DKLS had an excellent story and the filming/acting was done with a combo of motion capture and a variety of expensive animation software.

I honestly could have been more impressed with the animation. I can see where they started from the WoW models and tried to upgrade them with more polygons and motion capture. However, for a number of the spell animations and fighting moves I think the film would have been better served by actually using WoW's animations. In particular the animation for Death Grip was kinda jarring. It took me a couple of times seeing it to actually figure out that it was supposed to be Death Grip. Possibly my gripes with the animation are due to the Vimeo playback being abysmal; it was both slow and choppy. I frequently had to pause and wait for the stream to catch up, even when it appeared to have buffer available.

The story, however, was quite intriguing. I am very much looking forward to the second part. It shines an interesting spotlight on Sir Zeliek from Naxxramas. And its yet another take on the process of becoming a Death Knight, and the effect of the Lich King's mind control on those he enslaves.

I strongly recommend everyone watch DKLS. It's got a good story and some decent animation. It makes me want to play through the DK starter area again.

Timeless Isle Explorations

 

DraNgNon and I have been exploring the Timeless Isle.  It kind of reminds me of Vanilla.  There are wandering elites, and mobs can really hurt you if you're not careful.  And by not careful I mean the Ordos Yaungol are brutal, if you so much as take your eyes off their ground effects for a second you're going to be dead. Anyway, we have romped over the island with all of our level 90s, exploring cool stuff and hopping here there and everywhere. 

I also took some time while running around to tame a few pets.  I have three new moths, and hopefully can get more new pets from the rares. It's quite a pain in the ass to get in on a rare kill though.  I'm not really interested in tracking spawn timers or waiting around for a spawn.  So I generally just run over when I see a skull on the minimap.  Most of the time I can get a hit on the mob and get credit for the kill, but sometimes I ride up just as the rare dies.  Annoying, but not unexpected with such a large population on the island slaughtering things.

Timeless Isle also restricts flying. This is super annoying, but does give you a more present feeling of danger.  You can't just hop on your Cloud Serpent and fly up a bit to be safe while you afk for a bit. It also has several areas that you can't get to unless you can fly.  There are a couple of mechanics to get around this restriction. One of them is the gleaming crane statue which tosses you up and gives you a slow fall.  Another is the Legendary Cloak, which takes you (and your alts) across the broken bridge to the Ordon Sanctuary. Note that the Cloak ONLY takes you TOWARD the sanctuary.  If you want to get back, you need to do something so you don't hit the ground at terminal velocity. The third mechanic is the Highwind Albatross. These giant seagulls fly loops around the island. If you hit one it will swoop down and pick you up. Let it carry you around and when you're over where you want, hit it again.  That will stop it, and then you have to kill it to get it to drop you.  You can visit the two mountain tops near the Horde and Alliance flight points this way to get the Sturdy Chests you are missing. You can also hold on for a long ride and be taken up to the Ordon Sanctuary high high up where Garnia spawns. In fact the area where Garnia is can only be reached via Albatross, even if you have a cloak you can't get up that last sheer cliff with out the birdy ride.

Legendary Pet Battler & WarcraftPets.com

Two things happened last night related to pet battles.

The first is that I have won 5000 pet battles. That number includes battles with wild pets, pvp pet battles, and tamer battles. Regardless of what it counts it's a ridiculously large number of pet battles won.

The other thing was that someone sent me a whisper during Darkfall's Siege raid. They had the good timing to send it during a bio break or I'd likely be much less amused. This was apparently someone who had seen my profile on WarcraftPets.com and wanted to know if I'd like to buy the Spectral Tiger Cub. I would love to buy that pet, however, the quite reasonable price they were charging was more gold than I currently have.

Mr. Pinchy

Just over a week ago I was spending a bit of quality time in Outland. I've been working, off and on, on getting Morn the last bits of rep she needs from the Skyguard and Ogri'la. While I was in Skettis I figured it wouldn't hurt to do a bit of fishing. I usually fish at least one or two Highland Mixed Schools, just in the off chance that I'll fish up Mr. Pinchy.

Apparently this was my lucky day. I did catch Mr. Pinchy!

My first wish gave me the Magical Crawdad battle pet!

My second and third wishes gave me Benevolent Mr. Pinchy as a level 70 guardian. Sadly Benevolent Mr. Pinchy can't keep up when I go through portals or fly anywhere, but still impressive looking.

It took me a couple of tries to get a name that would actually stick. Blizz pops a "Mature Language" error when you try to use any variation of Mr. in a name. However, Pinchy is allowed.

Women of Draenor??

With the announcement of the new Warlords of Draenor Expansion there is a lot of excitement and also a fair amount of shrieking. I'm hearing shrieks of joy about character models and garrisons and the change to toys and heirlooms. But right now the shrieks seem to be about gender equality and they are not joyful in the least.

If you follow the Warlords of Draenor link, you'll come to a lovely informative page. It's got a trailer and news and maps and art. The expansion looks like it'll be awesome.

Looking at that page you see it is full of Orcs. This makes sense. Garrosh has gone back in time and stopped the Orcs from drinking Manoroth's blood, and given them a tech boost. So the Orcs have formed the Iron Horde and are now rampaging across Draenor with the the intent of bursting into Azeroth and rampaging there too. So we get Iron Horde orcs as baddies.

However, that page is very male dominated. All the orcs on that page and all the humans are male. There are a few shots of a female draenei. But no orc women or human women or any other women. And a large number of people are full of unhappy shrieking about this.

Now as Big Bear Butt points out, this is Blizz's story. They can write it however they want to. And they do! That's fine. We the players are only entitled to enjoy the story as it is.

BUT.

Blizz doesn't always get their own story right, as the existence of the Wildhammer Fact Checker proves. They sometimes need some help to be reminded about all the info that their giant universe has. And I think they need to be reminded that Orc society is matriarchal. As any Horde player saw in Nagrand, Greatmother Geyah was the one in charge at Garadar. Yes there are warchiefs, but the actual town and village is controlled by the women. The warchief is just there to be in control the wars. (Unless you get craziness like Garrosh...)

So where is Geyah? Or Draka for that matter? If Durotan is around then Draka should be too. And as Anne Stickney puts it so much more eloquently than I can Where is Aggra?

I hope that all of the female orcs (and some non-orcs too!) show up sooner rather than later, but the fact that they aren't on the main Warlords of Draenor page doesn't give me a lot of hope as to the magnitude of their role in the story.

Yes, it's Blizz's story and they can tell it however they want. But it'll be a better and more interesting story if it isn't merely a boys clubhouse.

Warlords of Draenor

Blizzcon has come and gone with a whole lot of new things announced. I'm actually pretty excited about the next WoW Expansion. There are a lot of things to look forward to.

I have to admit that the thing I'm most looking forward to is the updated character models. The Vanilla and BC races are currently looking a bit tired. It wasn't so bad before, but when comparing an orc or troll to the pandaren is it painfully obvious that there needs to be more polygons for the original races.

The next most exciting thing I saw announced is the changes to raiding. Blizzard has finally entirely caved in and the flex model is going to be here to stay. Current flex will become the new normal. Current normal will become the new heroic, and current heroic will go up to a fixed size of 20 people and be called Mythic. I am overjoyed at both the extension of flex to two gradations of raiding and at the fact that the single raid size Blizz settled on is 20 people. I think that fits perfectly with the 10-25 flexible sizes of the other raids. It basically means that if you're going after Mythic raiding you'll take your entire roster into the flexible Normal level raids.

Something that entirely surprised me about the new WoW announcements was the Garrison. I think the comment I saw that best describes it is that Blizzard decided that Player Housing was boring, so instead they went with a Player TOWN. A full on walled town that you build and populate. This has some seriously awesome potential, especially since you can actually invite your friends to visit. The party or raid leader can allow a full 40 man raid into their Garrison. If I were into RP I'd be dancing for joy about that. I am looking forward to gathering followers and sending them on missions.

The one thing I'm a bit dubious about is the storyline itself. Yes, yes, Garrosh escapes before his trial, and travels into the past to stop his Daddy from drinking Mannoroth's blood. He also gives the orcs a big technology boost, and thus the Iron Horde is formed. I just am dubious about why we try to fight the Iron Horde after Garrosh has mucked about with the past. My rampant speculation is that this is the expansion that we see Nozdormu turn into Murozond.

See, if Nozdormu were still fully and truly on our side he'd help by sending a strike team back in time before Garrosh corrupted the timeline. Maybe he can't stop Garrosh from breaking free, but an assassin team waiting for him to appear in Draenor past would put a stop to his machinations.

We know that in the future Nozdormu turns into Murozond. And we know that Murozond still has the ability to control time. (See events in the End Time dungeon.) So clearly either Noz is holding out on us currently, or he's about to go bat-shit crazy and try to disrupt the time stream in some twisted effort to get his time controlling powers back. Either way I suspect that we'll see an end boss of some raid that is Nozdormu/Murozond.