chocolate, chocolate and vanilla twist, or neapolitan?

As the Patch 5.3 PTR dangles the possibility of Triple Spec before our astonished eyes, it seems almost too late for me.

For some of the eleven classes, I am only interested in two of the three possible specializations because the RP/personality flavor of one of the specializations doesn’t appeal to me. For those classes that do have three specs I think I’d like to play, I already have a dual spec’d primary character for the two specs I find most interesting and a single spec’d secondary character for the third spec. By now, I am sufficiently well-attached to those secondary characters that I’m not much inclined to delete them and tack the third spec on to the primary character. If triple spec does eventually go live — whether it’s in Patch 5.3 or not until the next expansion — almost all of my characters will stay as they are.

Although some of them have not always had the same specialization that they currently have, my Mages are exclusively single spec’d. I don’t think I’ve even purchased the dual spec option for most of them. Now, however, my Blood Elf Mage is poking me and saying “hey hey triple spec me Arcane/Frost/Fire, and then you’ll never need to bother with any of those other Mages again”. Poor Kaelinda, I think she’s probably jealous that Kinevra burned to 85 while she has languished in Outland for well over a year (perhaps even two).

My Dwarf Elemental Shaman is still too low-level even for dual spec, but I’ve been having trouble deciding whether to pick up Restoration or Enhancement as her second spec when she gets to level 30. Triple spec would solve that problem (assuming I could scrape up enough gold to pay for it on that server), and it might aid her quiet campaign to become my Double Agent.

Only one of my characters would be truly excited to have triple spec. Karaelia, my Tauren Paladin, has been a dedicated Prot/Holy Paladin from the beginning. Although she had no intention of ever giving up one of her two chosen specializations for Retribution, she still chose the Greatsword of the Sunwalker from her level 20 SFK weapon quest because that 2H sword has a completely unique design, whereas the 1H maces with stats appropriate for a tank or a healer are identical to a mace that drops in Sunken Temple. So Karaelia would leap for joy and eagerly pay whatever gold cost was required to pick up a third spec and be able to put together Retribution-flavored Transmogrification kits featuring her Greatsword of the Sunwalker.

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going to see a Hyldnir about a Bear

A few weeks ago, Ketura went back to Northrend and began camping in Brunnhildar Village, smacking around poor tired miners and Hyldsmeet contestants and aspiring Val’kyr in hopes that someday Gretta the Arbiter would deem her worthy of a Warbear of her very own.

A week or so later, I brought Kinevra back to Brunnhildar Village, too, thinking that if I had two characters doing those dailies, I might get the bear a little sooner.

Today, Kinevra opened up her sack of Hyldnir spoils and lo and behold, there was the bear!

Hurrah! No more snowballs and salted yeti cheese!

That’s one more mount for my tally, but more importantly, now my Dwarf gals can have a loyal bear friend without having to be Hunters.

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Naviechan <3

After seeing that the various toys from Winter Veils past had been added to the toy vendors, I’d been hoping that the Gaudy Winter Veil Sweater would show up on one vendor or another, too. Sure enough, the Smokywood Pastures folks sell it for the princely sum of ~20 copper. While I was cycling through my alts that had been created since last Winter Veil — most notably my Monk and my Pandaren — and taking them to get their Gaudy Winter Veil Sweaters, I got a whisper from Navimie telling me to check my blog email.

A code to redeem? Ooh, what could it be? Oh, my!

I’d been meaning to visit Navi on her home server sometime anyway, so after a bit of confusion about how to find her realm, I was able to give her my delighted thanks in person.

Isn’t he adorable? Not having gotten into pet battling, I haven’t bothered to name most of my pets, but this one definitely needed a special name. And so, thinking of Jackie Chan, I named him Naviechan.

Thank you so much, Navimie dear!

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Omnitopia Dawn

I’m rather fond of books by Diane Duane. I read and enjoyed the first three or four books in her Young Wizards series (beginning with So You Want to be a Wizard) when I was in high school. She’s one of my favorite authors of Star Trek novels; I particularly like her development of the Rihannsu (that’s the Romulans’ name for themselves). So when I saw a new novel by Diane Duane when I was at the library a few weeks ago, naturally I picked it up!

This new novel, Omnitopia Dawn, has a most intriguing premise — one that I probably would not have found nearly so intriguing, or understood nearly so well, if I were not a WoW player.

It’s summer of 2015, and the most successful game company on the planet is counting down to the launch of the newest expansion for their incredibly popular MMO game world. The four main threads of the plot follow an ordinary player of “the Great Game” (he’s a healer!); the founder, head, and “First Player” of the game company (named “Dev” — no, really); a reporter come to the game company’s business campus determined to dig up some dirt; and the hackers and their backers who are trying to not only ruin the launch of the new expansion, but also totally destroy the game company. One of these hacker-backers is the head of a rival game company… who is also a former business partner and ex-friend of Dev.

The “real world” in the book is almost, but not quite, like our own; its virtual reality technology is much, much more advanced than ours — and, of course, none of the game companies have recognizable names. Because I play WoW, it’s tempting to associate Omnitopia with Blizzard, but I don’t know enough about Trion or Turbine or Bioware or the various other MMO producers to associate them with any of Omnitopia’s rivals (and it wouldn’t necessarily be fair to any of them to do so).

Dev uses a forest of trees as a visual representation of Omnitopia’s overall code structure, and I couldn’t help but think of Crystalsong Forest.

I thought the core idea of the Omnitopia game was pretty cool — indeed, any company that could really get their gaming platform to do that would certainly profit beyond the wildest dreams of the goblins and the ethereals combined. Diane Duane described and expanded upon such common MMO concepts as guilds, raids, loot distribution, professions/crafting, and spellcasting within the Omnitopia game setting in a quite delightful way. Omnitopia has a nifty program for company-mentored player-developed content and a deviously clever method of dealing with players who behave badly. The characters were engaging — if somewhat idealized (even the bad guys!) — the plot kept me turning pages, and the twist at the end has me looking forward to Omnitopia #2. I do wonder, though, how the most successful game company on the planet could possibly get away with launching an expansion of the described magnitude without having at least some kind of public beta-testing period, which they seemed to not have done….

If you enjoy playing MMOs, you might also enjoy reading Omnitopia Dawn.

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BAHLEETED!! (and other Patch 5.0 initial responses)

As I looked at my server login screens last night, I felt a little overwhelmed by the chore of curating the action bars, talents, and glyphs of so many characters. I hadn’t even played several of these characters in months — over a year for some of them — and I didn’t think I would anytime soon. I decided it was time to prune the dead weight from my roster and said goodbye to the following ten characters:

Katelaira Blood Elf Death Knight, 59, Blood
Katelyra Blood Elf Hunter, 45, Survival/Marksmanship
Karaveline Blood Elf Warrior, 22, Fury
Kilannas Night Elf Druid, 16, Feral (bear)
Kerithian Night Elf Hunter, 15, Survival
Kermione Goblin Shaman, 12, Enhancement
Kryztalya Draenei Shaman, 12, Elemental
Khitka Draenei Paladin, 11, Retribution
Karolynne Dwarf Rogue, 11, Assassination
Kronakka Orc Warlock, 10, Demonology

This represents a loss of 163 effective levels, bringing my remaining roster down to 1456 effective levels or 1396 actually played levels; at this time, I am formally dropping out of the 2012 in 2012 challenge. I will, however, continue to keep a running total of actually played levels on my Characters page.

~*~*~

I had some trouble getting WoW to start after downloading the patch — I kept getting the Error #134 message. I moved my Interface, Screenshots, and WTF folders to a backup location on my harddrive, and then the game started up for me. I play with a fairly minimalist set of addons to begin with, but the prospect of having to reconfigure them all has made me want to cut even that list back. The addons I simply cannot live without are the following:
Grid + Clique — this allows me to free up some action bar space by clique-binding any spell that can be cast on a friendly player
Tidy Plates + Threat Plates — cleaner nameplates with integrated dot-timer monitoring
Quartz — it’s nice to see my lag integrated into my cast times and also to see my dot/hot/buff/debuff durations, but the visual GCD spark is what I rely on most!
Power Auras — to keep track of my CDs
MogIt — still waiting for the 5.0 compatible version of this WoW fashionista essential to come up
I don’t think I’ll bother with getting DBM, Omen, Recount, and EPGP again until I get to level 90.

~*~*~

I got to the beginning of Chapter 7 in Tides of War and decided that before I went any further, I needed to see the Alliance side of the Southern Barrens story.

I did the Horde side last month, with Kaohana.


Playing through Southern Barrens as a Tauren, the audacity of the Orcs to claim that this land was “their” land, when it had been part of the traditional Shu’halo nomadic circuit for generations upon generations before the Orcs even set foot upon the shores of Kalimdor, really got on my nerves!

So with Theramore not in immediate danger of destruction, my plan for the next couple of weeks is to 1) play Kinevra through Southern Barrens and 2) level her to 85 so that she can participate in the Alliance-side Theramore scenario.

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a Time for Business and a time for play!

When I logged on yesterday afternoon for a session of Scholo farming, I saw on my RealID friendslist that not only was a level 1 Navimie on the same realm as Millya, but also Navimie and Millya were in the same zone. Hmmm, suspicious…
I hoped they wouldn’t mind me joining the party.

Millya ported us to Theramore, where we got our picture taken with Lady Jaina.

Rhidach joined us there. I had wondered where he’d been and what he’d been up to lately, so it was great to see him again!

Rhi couldn’t stay for long, though. Afterward, Navi (and her 4-year-old daughter, who is adorable!) and I spent a very pleasant half hour or so hanging out and chatting with Millya and Vosskah. It was lovely to meet you!

~*~*~

A week or so ago, I noticed that Martha’s WoW characters are on Fizzcrank. So I thought that before I deleted the character I’d made there for the WoW Factor show, I ought to try to see if I could catch Martha when she was on and say Hi! After a couple of days of popping over to Fizzcrank and looking for Martha, I succeeded . Sadly, I got distracted by other blog posts I wanted to write and didn’t quite get around to making a “taking a leaf from Navimie’s book” post about it. So here, somewhat belatedly, are my pictures of us dancing together and laughing at our mutual silliness

~*~*~

And hmmm, while we’re on the subject, I don’t think I ever posted my own pictures from when Navi visited me. I ought to remedy that deficiency, stat!

~*~*~

Just look what you’ve started, Navimie! It’s fun to talk to blogging friends on RealID, but somehow actually meeting in avatar and being in the same (virtual) space at the same time is even more delightful! <3

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over that horizon

BBB has been pondering his plans for the expansion. So have I.

First up, there’s Patch 5.0 just around the corner. Next Tuesday, I’m going to go to the bookstore and buy Tides of War. Maybe I’ll go to the grocery store and get some chocolate and ice cream, too. Then I’ll curl up with the book and read it cover-to-cover. Only after I’ve finished the book will I fire up the game, download the patch, and go play the Theramore scenarios — so that might not be until Wednesday. I’m not going to be looking at any other bloggers’ commentaries on the Theramore event/Tides of War until after I’ve seen and experienced it for myself, either.

The next looming date for me is September 7th. That’s when the semester begins at the university I’m adjuncting at this term. It doesn’t make much sense to start off a lab class in the middle of the week, though, so my actual first day of class will be the next Monday, September 10th. The lab class is closely integrated with the lecture, so I’m anxiously awaiting the completely finished lab manual and syllabus from the lecture instructor/course director so that I can make my own first-day handouts. I’m excited about the course because it’s something new — an upper-division biochemistry lab after years of teaching freshman general chemistry labs — but I’m also a little bit nervous and anxious about it because I haven’t actually done all of the procedures in the scheduled experiments myself. I didn’t take this type of course as an undergraduate because I was a pure chemistry major (I did an upper-division analytical chemistry lab instead), and I only used some of the techniques during my graduate work.

My lab classes, each four hours long, are on Monday afternoon and early Tuesday morning. I probably won’t be staying up late on September 24th saying goodbye to Cataclysm! At this point, I’m planning to swing by Walmart or GameStop or something on my way home from campus on Tuesday afternoon to pick up Mists.

In the short term, immediately after Mists launches, BTH and I will be leveling from 85 to 90 together with his Bear and Kam. We also plan to roll up (har har) and level together a pair of Tauren Monks. Mine will be Mistweaver/Windwalker, and his will probably be Windwalker/Brewmaster. I’m really looking forward to playing WoW together again!

I will also create and level initially at least to 20 and eventually at least to 40 a Pandaren Mage, who will choose Horde because she is a woman of action in-character and to even out the faction imbalance in my coterie of Mages out-of-character.

In the long term, across the whole 1.5-to-2 year expected duration of Mists, I have been thinking lately that Mists will be the Expansion Of The Alt for me.

After we reach level 90, BTH will definitely be gearing up to raid. He’s not too happy with his current guild, so he may go guild-shopping… and if he transfers server again, Kam may not follow at all.

There are so many other things I want to spend my time on in the game besides focusing on getting a single character raid-ready and keeping her raid-ready. In the past two years, I’ve had lots of fun playing my Tauren Paladin as Protection and my Blood Elf Paladin as Holy. I enjoyed tanking with my Paladin so much that I thought I’d like to try out the other shield tank, the Prot Warrior, too — but I haven’t spent much time with either one of them for quite a while. I am planning to level Kerisa as a Tree in Mists, via dungeons and scenarios, because I want to try my hand at Druid healing and haven’t really managed to get around to it yet. I still haven’t finished questing through Shattered Kalimdor with my Tauren Disc/Holy Priest, let alone seeing the Alliance side of the story with my Night Elf Mage. I want to make more significant progress on my very-long-term goal of getting a character of every Class to max-level. And my gaggle of Mages all want to be levelled so that I can play Transmogrification Dress-up with them. For all the angsting and whinging about what am I going to do about raiding in Mists?! I’ve been doing, it’s looking more and more like LFR and LBR may be all the raiding I really, truly want to do, after all.

As for all that “preparation” stuff — inventory space, gold, professions, glyphs, et cetera?
/kermitflail

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art post: New Year paintings

For several years, one of my family’s Christmas vacation traditions has been painting. Not everyone participates every year, but new paintings always get made. I typically end up doing my painting on New Years Eve or New Years Day.

Crooked Ukelele, 2006
I should have laid down the strings — or at least one of them — before I painted the bottom tension bar of the ukelele. Then it might not look quite so warped.

Fezant, 2010
During 2010, my parents frequently observed a wild pheasant on the grounds of their church building. They took lots of pictures of him, but I never got to see him myself. That year, my brother made fezes for me and BTH for Christmas. I couldn’t resist the punniness of a Pheasant in a Fez! The background is several layers of spattering done over snowflake stencils cut using TTT’s Snowflake Seeds method.

Moose in Cattails, 2007
I painted this picture over a canvas that was pre-printed with lineart of fairies flying around among sunflowers. As I thought about what to paint, the fairies in sunflowers morphed into dragonflies in cattails. Then I decided that it needed a moose. By the time the moose was done, I realized that I didn’t have a brush delicate enough to paint appropriately scaled dragonflies, so I left them out. I’m still ridiculously well-pleased with how it turned out.

Catnap, 2011
My five year-old nephew had poured out enormous pools of yellow and two shades of blue, so I decided to use those to make a portrait of my sister’s marmalade tabby as he lay napping in a shaft of sunlight. With a dark green backround, the result is quite delighfully pop-art-ish.

In His Own World, 2009
At the time that I painted this portrait of BTH, I wasn’t sure whether the trees and sky represented the real world that he was ignoring by playing a game, or the game world that he was immersed in in his mind. I’m still not quite sure which it is, and I rather like that ambiguity of meaning.

~*~*~
So, Mists is due on 25 September? I predict, therefore, that Patch 5.0 will be on 4 September because the pre-patch is usually two or three weeks before the launch of the expansion proper and 11 September would be a TERRIBLE day for the Horde to begin its attack on Theramore. That gives me about a month to finish up the Theramore quests with the alt who has been living there ever since late Wrath….

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Coming Soon: Stuff my Characters Wear

This weekend has been pretty exciting.

I went to put something in Void Storage, not having looked in my Void Storage since I transferred most of my characters from Lightninghoof to Bloodhoof nearly a month ago, and was horrified to find that it was empty! Completely empty, on all the characters who had it! I put in a ticket, and after a false start when I got a boilerplate response about loot being misassigned during a raid, GM Jeydolen chatted with me. Jeydolen assured me that all the stuff was still there, and suggested that a UI error might be why I couldn’t see it. After performing the UI reset that Jeydolen suggested, I still couldn’t see my stuff. The Void Storage dude was giving me the tutorial box, without asking for money to (re)open Void Storage, so I clicked through it and voila, my stuff appeared! Then I felt a little silly — perhaps I had just needed to click through the tutorial boxes again to begin with, and I didn’t really need to have done the UI reset. I was still very appreciative of Jeydolen’s prompt, gracious, and helpful response to my second ticket. Thank you, GM Jeydolen!

Then I went to this weekend’s Laid Back Raid with Kerisa. Karazhan and Gruul’s Lair were on the ticket, and I hoped to get the T4 shoulder token. I didn’t, but after Kara and Gruul, part of the group continued on to Magtheridon and from thence, at my suggestion, to Tempest Keep, where Kerisa scored the T5 shoulder token. Many thanks to the estimable Coolidge for heading up that part of the evening!

Kerisa earned the T9 and T10 shoulders as my raiding main in late Wrath, and she still has them in her bank. After the debut of Transmogrification, she farmed Molten Core for weeks on end until she got the T1 shoulders. In ES guild fun runs (prior to the server transfer) and previous LBRs, she has picked up the T3/7, T6, and T8 shoulders. Now she just needs to get the T4 and T11-Normal shoulders to complete her collection of Favorite Druid Shoulders! (and then I’ll have to start working on outfits to go with them all )

One of my greatest regrets about Cataclysm is that I didn’t manage to get the T11 Druid shoulders when they were current content. I wanted them from the moment I first saw them, but I left Kerisa untouched for months to ensure that Kamalia would be my raiding main. By the time I finally got Kerisa ready for raiding, there wasn’t enough time left in T11 for her to get a pair of those gorgeous blue feathered T11 Druid shoulders before T12 arrived. Well, actually, she did see the T11 shoulder token drop once… and she passed on it, because she felt like the Resto Druid raid leader of ES’s alt run deserved it more. (Sometimes, in my more selfish moments, I wish I’d gone ahead and rolled on it normally.)

Finally, ever since I started writing this blog, I’ve intended to eventually do a series on “Stuff my Characters Wear”. Over the last few days, I’ve begun working on it. I’ve been going through all the alts for whom I have long-term goals and attempting to put together for each one of them a coherent, attractive ensemble that I’d be happy to see her wearing for a long time. It’s a lot easier for the higher level characters! On my lower-level characters, the outfits I’ve been making are frequently only partially Transmogrified, but the idea is to make something that would also be an attractive full Transmogrification Template Kit for a high-level character. Some of my characters will need to gain a level or few of XP before I can get them into an outfit that I like. For the time being, I am focusing only on Transmogrification-friendly outfits. After the initial set of posts is done — but not immediately — I also plan to expand the series to include “wrong” or mixed gear-type pure RP outfits.

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oopsie daisie

Sorry for pinging folks’s feedreaders with a mysterious Transmogolympics post — I have no intention of breaking the Mogolympics rules, and that was one of those “hit publish when I meant to hit preview” errors. I am finished with my Mogolympics designs, but y’all will have to wait to see them along with everyone else.

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