Red Panda

With the 5.2 patch there were many new things introduced into WoW. Aside from the new islands and their denizens and daily quests and the Throne of Thunder raid there was also some other fun stuff. The players got the farm from Yoon if they were exalted with the Tillers. Alliance and Horde got access to the opposite faction's scenario. There was also a new set of pet battles added.

The new pet battles added in the idea of solo battle pets. Not for players to have, but for players to fight. They are the Beasts of Fable. (Dun Dun DUN!) These mythical creatures live around Pandaria, and if you defeat all of them you get a Red Panda. The red panda is quite simply adorable! Not necessarily top of the adorable scale, that goes to Baby Blizzard Bear, but it's pretty far up there.

So Mornara set out to thrash the Beasts of Fable. Being creatures native to Pandaria they were all beast, critter, flying, or aquatic. Most of the fights were relatively easy. In fact only Gorespine was any trouble, but his Spiked Skin really was an issue until I remembered that my Clockwork Gnome had a missile instead of turrets.


And then I flew back to the Shrine of Two Moons and acquired my absolutely adorable Red Panda.

Monk

When Mists of Pandaria was released I rolled a monk. An Orc monk to be precise. Little Sucan was always going to be a brewmaster monk. Because tanking is fun, and really with his name he must be a brewmaster.

Anyway, I'd gotten him a few levels here and there since Mists came out. But being little is tiresome. You have no mount and, even with the Cata streamlining, everything is far away. At least the Monk skill Roll makes that a little faster.

Last week, while DraNgNon was out of town, I took some time to get Sucan more levels. I was questing him up through Northern Barrens. Because of Cross Realm Zones it was mildly painful. There was a fair amount of competition for quest kills. But, even worse, there was some jackass level 90 ret pally flying around killing the quest givers. Fortunately I hit level 15 before too long and could queue for a random dungeon.

Sucan ported in to the start of Ragefire Chasm. The group grabbed up all the quests and stomped our way through the dungeon. It was fun and weird to be an at level tank in RFC. Especially since at that level I had very few of the actual tools of Monk tanking. Basically all Sucan could do was throw beer and kick a little bit. But once I got the hang of it I found it's really nice to pull with beer. Just throw beer everywhere and all the mobs are mad at you. It's ranged, and pretty cheap to use.

After that dungeon was done I queued and ran a bunch more. Between the heirloom shoulders and staff that Sucan had I was level 30 before the evening was done. Also, starting at level 20, Monks can go to the Peak of Serenity in Kun-Lai Summit and once a day get a +50% xp buff. It's pretty spiffy and the extra xp is kinda ridiculous. Anyway, there were some good groups and a few ridiculous ones that were utterly confused about what to do and where to go, but for the most part it was pretty good.

By the time Sucan was level 30 I actually felt like a tank with some basic tanking tools. In addition to throwing beer I can now set people on fire if they are covered in beer. I also have short and long CD damage reduction abilities and a self heal. Oh, and I can make people charge into me; Clash will force someone to charge into me as I charge into them, and it stuns enemies around where we meet. It gives brewmaster Monks a more mobile and dynamic feel than Blood DKs.

I do think that before I run anymore dungeons I need to take a bit of time and have my Leatherworkers make Sucan some gear. The instances weren't hard, but there was always either a rogue or a druid who outrolled me on all the leather agility gear that dropped. So I got a few quest item upgrades, but missed out entirely on any dungeon gear. And now that I'm level 30 the greens I got for questing at level 15 are not really cutting it.

the world of our imagination

Blizzard has put out preliminary notes on the upcoming 5.3 patch "Escalation."  A glance at it shows they are taking some care with the story line and are actually following up on some early 4.0 story laid down and neglected since.  Good for them, the world and its story hasn't been this "interesting" since the original game.

However... that's not why I am writing this post.  Or maybe it has something to do with why.  Remember the original game?  The MMORPG that is.  The opening cinematic?  The very first scene, with the dwarf warrior and his bear walking towards Ironforge?  Shown with a detail - hair, snow, muscle movement, one only expects on console games or movies?

That's, unfortuantely, the world of our imagination.  We try to pretend we are in that world, when not actually in PVP or a Raid.  Shut off the names, the name plates, the glowy sparkles, the heads up displays, and just watch the events in Azeroth like it's a movie unfolding a story.  And our imagination often fails, of course.  Becuase everything looks sorta goofy.

I bring this up becuase of a small graphic in the webpage with the patch notes.  Along with screenshots that look like they are taken from a turned-up Windows box with bad gamma, and therefore look more like cartoons than 3-d reality, there's a matte drawing of a Horde lookout in the Barrens.

Look at that.  It looks like one could walk right up to it... taking care not to turn an ankle or stumble in the loose dirt of the chaparral.  I wish so much the game looked like this at all.

I wonder where this is.  Kuanchichi will need, before this patch drops, to clear all Barrens quests reset from Cataclysm, if I find it I will take a screenshot to compare.

Brawler's Guild

Mornara bought herself an invitation to the Brawler's Guild. It wasn't cheap but the Black Market AH prices have really gone down since it initially came out. So she didn't need to break the bank to get in the door.

I have tried a couple of fights so far. I know she is only rank 1, but they seemed ridiculously easy. Morn was handily able to beat the enrage timer despite being in her blood spec and gear. I'd like to stay blood for all of the fights if I can, some of the fights I saw had people die to boss abilities and not just the enrage timer.

However, I'm not really seeing the allure of the fighting. OK, sure you get to kill stuff, and that is always nice. However, you need to wait your turn, because only one person can fight at a time. Also the only actual reward I can see is that at rank 4 you can buy Clock'em a mechanical gnome battle pet with spiked boxing gloves. I'm going to guess that once you get to max rank (rank 8 I think?) you'll get a title or achieve or both. However, before my two fights I was subjected to the worst sort of e-peen waving from someone talking about their past Gladiator achieves.

I'll try it again, I'd like to at least get to rank 4 to get the battle pet, but we'll see how far I get after that.

New Mouse / Redoing Macros

New Mouse
So, I finally caved in and got a new mouse. I'd been using a Logictech trackball, and I liked that I didn't need to have a flat surface for mousing. However, I was unable to turn up the dpi of the trackball enough to get across the screen without 2 or 3 scrolling motions on the trackball. So DraNgNon finally convinced me to buy a Razer Naga. It arrived the other day and I installed the drivers last night.

I'm liking it so far. The higher dpi is a lot nicer, and I'm already liking having a mouse again. I'm not entirely sure what spells I want to put on the thumb pad, but I've set up another bar in Dominos for the numpad. Minimally I'll want to put the targeted AoE spells on the mouse pad. I've also put a mouseover rez macro for Morn. And I'll definitely want to get the dumb healing mushrooms for Khryie on the mouse as well.

Macros
So with a new mouse I've been looking at my macros. I needed a mouseover macro for rez and I wanted to put my focus interrupt/cc macros in a central place so I don't have to worry about copying new macros over for different characters.


Focus CC Macro:
#showtooltip
/cast [target=focus,exists,nodead] [] Strangulate
/cast [target=focus,exists,nodead] [] Mind Freeze

Mouseover rez:
#showtooltip
/cast [target=mouseover] Raise Ally

Mouseover healing with fallback to targeted ally heal and then self heal:
#showtooltip
/cast [target=mouseover,help] Lifebloom; [help] Lifebloom; Lifebloom

Mouseover heal with trinket use:
/target mouseover
/use FabulousTrinket
/cast Swiftmend
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

Bat Hilarity

Khyrie and Tylara both finally hit exalted with the Klaxxi the other day. The holdup was all Khyrie slacking on the dumb daily quests. Anyway, we finally did the quest to go along with Malik the Unscathed to break the siege the Empress and her loyal minions have around Klaxxi'vess.

This quest is one big phase, and it's done such that we can actually fly with Malik as he makes his way to the Heart of Fear. Keep in mind that it's about 1:30am at this point, and I've had a long week at work so far. Also that my favorite druid form is flight form, and especially the Bat form that Trolls get.

Anyway we're flying along next to Malik, and I am providing a small stream of consciousness for Khyrie and her fabulous bat form.
"I'ma bat. I'ma bite you.
"unya, unya, unya." *
"I'ma eat you Malik, because you're a big bug."
"unya unya unya unya."
"You're a big tasty bug, and I like eating bugs because I'm a bat."
"unya unya unya."

At this point DranGNon turns her head slowly, looks at me, and asks "What the hell is wrong with you?!"

My response, before we both dissolve into laughter: "I'm a BAT! Unya unya unya"



* - I'm really not sure how to spell the chomping/gnawing noise I was making. Unya is the closest I can come, but it doesn't really capture the teeth click as I close my mouth on the ending 'ya'.

Pet Battles: Master Tamers

I defeated Grand Master Aki the other day. It was a rough fight, and I only won by the skin of my teeth. It was pretty nice to get three achieves all at once. And even better, the I Choose You Achieve gives you a heavy sack of gold. I was expecting maybe 500g, if that. However, that sack was actually heavy! There was three thousand gold in it!

My current goal with the pet battles is to defeat the Pandaren Spirit Tamers. The master tamer fights started getting more difficult towards the end of Outland, and once I got to Northrend I needed to make sure that I wasn't bringing a pet that was rock to the NPCs paper. However, once I reached the Cata tamers, and especially the Pandaria tamers I needed to bring a set of pets that was scissors to their paper.

So my progress against the master tamers slowed down quite a bit. It turns out that the pets I think are fun aren't necessarily the ones that can get the job done. I've had to go back and level a few different pets to fill holes in my pet family roster. Specifically the Dragon Kite, though awesome, is not a good flying pet at all. I had to level a parrot to replace it on my rotation. I also ended up needing to level a crab to replace my lovely Golden Civet.

Most recently I've leveled up a Protodrake whelp to fight the Darkmoon Tamer. So my rotation against him now is: Protodrake whelp, Phoenix Hatchling, and Clockwork Gnome. I'll restart the fight until I get the Darkmoon Eye first. The magic eye goes down fast against my Protodrake Whelp. And then I can handle the other two Darkmoon pets with my correct counter pet.

For a while I was entirely stuck against the master tamer in Krasarang. That wiley Hozen had a badass parrot on his team, and I didn't have any magical pet that could take it out. In fact all my magic family pets were green quality at best, which, when fighting against the purple quality pets that the master tamers have, is just not sufficient. I tried for a while to get a blue magic pet by slaughtering the Arcane Eyes that spawn in Deadwind Pass. I never did see a blue quality one of them, but eventually the game apparently felt sorry for me and one of the fights dropped a flawless magic battle stone. I immediately used it on Legs, and then went and tromped the Hozen's pets.

I also leveled up a hopling for it's humanoid attacks. The last master tamer in Pandaria has a dragonkin with some powerful mojo and I need a counter to it. I looked through my pets, but couldn't find an undead pet that could do some humanoid damage. Ah well, the hopling took out that dragonkin pretty handily. Now I'm considering what combos I need to beat the Pandaren Spirits. I haven't had time to do more than lose horribly to the earth spirit and his stuns.

Now that I have a bunch of pets at 25 I'm considering what I can field for a PvP pet team. I'm leveling up is the Mechanical Pandaren Dragonling so I try a PvP team with that, the Dragon Kite, and the Clockwork Gnome. I think that the lightning storm from my Kite will combine nicely with the mechanical attacks from the other two pets. I'm also looking to try a team with a Darkmoon Crow, Dark Whelpling, and some third pet I've not decided on yet. Something that can benefit from darkness, or that is anti-humanoid, maybe both if a handy battlepet exists!