Kamalia, then and now

I wanted to participate in Vidyala’s “Then and Now” challenge, but I had a little bit of a hitch. I don’t have very many really old screenshots. I think I only took a few screenshots, from the character selection screen, on the first computer I played WoW on. I took lots of screenshots in 2008 and 2009 on my second computer, but then the hard drive failed in early 2010, and I hadn’t considered my WoW screenshots valuable enough to back up and didn’t consider them valuable enough to pay for data recovery. Only a few of my pre-2010 screenshots survived — the ones I’d printed out for my WoW notebook or posted to the Kirina’s Closet forum. A scan of a poor-quality printout isn’t great, but it’s the best I’ve got.

This picture is probably the oldest of them all.

Kamalia crafted the Turtle Scale set for herself as soon as she could both wear and make it, around level 42. The picture is annotated “42”, and I’m pretty sure that Kamalia was around that actual character level at the time I took the picture. Her horns are still the stub size I chose when I first created her; I later changed them to the upward pointing style when the Barbershot debuted. I wouldn’t have kept that shield after I upgraded it, and I probably didn’t keep that weapon around for very long after I upgraded it, either.

Here she is in her level 70 raiding gear, as good as it got.

I think I might have come back to Shattrath to take this picture at level 80 prior to deleting most of those items at the beginning of LK.

At level 80, in her Naxx gear.

I was so proud of my first complete Tier set, even though it was from mixed difficulty levels. I only kept the T7 chestpiece, though, because I thought I could make it work with the T6-lookalike kilt from the Nexus.

I took screenshots of each of her Tier sets, either when they were completed or at the time that I’d fully replaced them with the next tier and was ready to discard them.

Here is Kamalia on the Armory today. She’s still wearing her T12 set, though she’s upgraded her weapon to early T13. The shield is the Ward of the Red Widow, Transmogrified to Zom’s Crackling Bulwark, which I though matched the Vagaries of Time quite nicely. Her belt is also Transmogrified.

I have tokens for a couple of T13 items in my bags, but the T12 4pc bonus is so good that I was reluctant to replace it until I could get the T13 4pc bonus all at once. And then I stopped doing regular guild raiding, and I haven’t felt like venturing into LFR… If I did have full T13, I’d take a screenshot of it for the record — and then I’d Transmogrify it into something else for everyday wear.

Among other reasons, one big reason why I haven’t done any LFR is that I’m not particularly enthusiastic about either the Shaman or the Druid T13 designs. I just don’t covet the look of that gear for my characters. (In contrast, if Blizz retrofitted BoT and BWD with an LFR setting, I’d be running it regularly to get Kerisa the T11 shoulders she’s lusted after all expansion.) I’ve also been thinking that I probably won’t raid in Mists unless the T14 designs are really super beautiful and exciting to my sense of aesthetics.

I also found this fun picture from way back when Ketura was level 28. BTH’s Hunter, Farrier, was about the same level, and he suggested that we go do the Nesingwary quests in Stranglethorn together.

That was back when the end quests for each part were group quests, and when Stranglethorn was a few levels higher than it is now. We were barely high enough level to get the Nesingwary quests at all. It was a crazy, crazy day, with lots of trapping and kiting and running away, but in the end, we completed Big Game Hunter and got our Nesingwary Master Hunter’s Rifles.
Though she has tamed a variety of other pets, Cosmo has remained Ketura’s faithful companion for almost all of her questing. Farrier has gone through several preferred pets.

Ketura spent a lot of time just idling, and then she’s spent a lot of time doing alternative leveling — holiday travel-the-world quests, archaeology, dailies, grinding for mats, that sort of thing. She’s currently level 82 and schlepping around in Icecrown doing Argent Tournament dailies and debating whether or not she really wants to do the Orgrim’s Hammer questlines and get herself exalted with the Horde Offensive so that she can buy the Chopper schematic.

BTH spent the last week or so before LK power-leveling Farrier. He wanted her to be level 70 before she set foot in Northrend, hoping that would make her a little less of a target for PvP in those earliest days of the expansion. Farrier has been BTH’s secondary main throughout LK and Cataclysm, and he did quite a bit of LFR with her over the holidays.

I don’t have any pictures that show an old UI, but I still play with more-or-less the default UI, and all there would be to see is at what points I added Grid and Power Auras.