core content update complete! *phew!*

After about a week and a half of spending my night hours after baby’s bedtime feverishly working on downloading images from Photobucket, uploading images to my WordPress library, updating image links, and subdividing behemoth mog posts, I’ve finally finished updating what I consider to be the core content of my blog: my Characters page, my artwork (most of it was already in my WordPress library, but I still went through and double-checked it), my stories, and the “Things my [Class] Wears” Transmogrification posts. Everything else will stay broken indefinitely.

I don’t know why I was worried about the capacity of my WordPress media library. It’s now at 264 MB out of 3 GB — or not quite 9%. I should have started putting everything in my WordPress library as soon as Photobucket started giving me trouble about the bandwidth my account was using years ago…

All those new Transmogrification posts put me over the 1000 post milestone mark — counting this one, I’m now at 1030 posts. The Shaman pages weigh in at 72 outfits (75 if I split out all of the Broken Isles leveling sets into separate entries). That’s a lot, but not really surprising given that I was actively playing and mogging two Shaman up until about a year ago. But that’s not actually the most outfits I have for a given class. The two Death Knights together have 77 outfits, and the two Mages, Kaelinda and Kaylynda, have 79 outfits between them.

As I was going through all my characters and reviewing their Transmogrification history from the time that the feature debuted, I noticed that most of them really start to take off during the timeframe of Mists — not surprising, because that was the expansion when I had a ton of free time to level all of my heretofore low-level “one of each class” characters. And everybody has gotten new outfits a lot more frequently since last summer, when I started doing the Sunday Mog Show posts.

That means that the Sunday Mog Show is doing what I intended it to do: by documenting outfits as soon as I create them and publishing them relatively soon after I create them, I don’t get stuck waiting for weeks or months to make a new kit for a character because I haven’t yet gotten around to documenting & posting their current outfit. It’s allowed me to get through pretty much all of my backlog of ideas from the Transmogrification challenges that I participated in during the first year or two after the feature went live. I still have plenty of other half-forgotten ideas lurking in the back of my brain, though, and plenty of new ideas piling up…

The next installment of the Sunday Mog Show will probably be next Sunday, unless something crazy happens IRL.

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starting to work on updating Transmogrification posts

Now that I’ve got the story posts updated, I’m slowly starting to work on updating Transmogrification posts.

I decided to combine all the minor Mages into a single post called “Signature Outfits of the Minor Mages” and give it its own tile on my Transmogrification page.

Kyraleia the Dwarf Paladin was up to five outfits and she’s likely to get more (though not as frequently as my active characters), so I pulled her kits out onto their own post.

I posted “Signature Outfist of the Minor Mages” and “Things my Dwarf Paladin Wears” earlier this afternoon.

Then I decided that the Underpowered Death Knight should get her own post. She’s one of the Big Fourteen, and if Kaylynda the Alliance Mage can get her own post — and if Kyraleia, who is not one of the Big Fourteen, can get her own post — shouldn’t the Underpowered Death Knight be able to get her own post? Plus, her outfits tend to be colorful and fun rather than being particularly Death Knight-y. That post is still in the works, though, because Kaumaleia has enough outfits that her post will need to be subdivided.

Although I broke out the Dwarf Paladin and the Underpowered Death Knight onto their own posts, I will not be breaking out the Male Tauren Warrior onto his own post. He only has two outfits so far and will probably not get very many more. If and when he ever does get up to five or more outfits, then I’ll pull him out onto his own post. Although I’ve had two Druids, Shamans, Monks, and Hunters in the past, I won’t be pulling out the kits I made for the secondary characters of those classes onto their own posts, either. Their kits have been generally thematically consistent for their classes, so they don’t disrupt the flow/continuity of the collection the way the interweaving of Kregga’s and Kaumaleia’s outfits disrupted both of their collections.

I’ve only gotten two votes on my poll, but both of them were for 10 outfits per post. The more I think about it myself, the more I think that 10 outfits per post is about the right balance between not too many outfits per post and not too many posts that I’ll have to make. So I will be subdividing all of the “Things my [Class] Wears” posts into new posts of 10 outfits each. The actively updating post will be the one linked with the tile, and the posts of older outfits will be linked in a text list below the array of tiles. Expect some barrages of posts once I get going on this big project.

After I’ve completed the enormous task of subdividing and updating the image links in all the main “Things my [Class] Wears” posts, I’ll probably take a break — maybe even a rather long one — before I tackle any of the themed Transmogrification collection posts. The rather old Transmogrification challenges posts may never get updated.

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story pictures updated

My obsessive-compulsive tendencies kicked in, and I’ve stayed up until 2 am most of the past three or four nights working on updating the picture links in all of my favorite story posts. I’ve rationalized neglecting my almost-but-not-quite-finished organic chemistry lab manual project by telling myself that I would be so distracted by wanting to work on reconstructing my blog stuff that I might as well just go do it and get the distraction out of the way. All the pictures for the story posts only increased my WordPress media library from 4% full to 5% full, so I am encouraged that I probably won’t run out of space when I start putting in Transmogrification pictures.

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an opportune time for some remodeling?

Because I’m going to have to be reconstructing all of the image links in the “Things my [Class] Wears” posts anyway, it occurs to me that this might be a good opportunity to do some more extensive reworking of those posts. To wit, the number of outfits — and hence the number of images — in each of those posts is starting to get rather staggering. When I responded to Z & Cinder’s “Best Dressed” challenge, I took a census:

Since Transmogrification went live in Patch 4.3 (29 November 2011), my characters have worn a lot of outfits. If I don’t count things like the new character creation screen sets or the starting zone sets for Death Knights and Demon Hunters, I have posted…

12 Demon Hunter outfits
28 Warlock outfits
29 Rogue outfits
37 Druid outfits
44 Warrior outfits
45 Paladin outfits
45 Monk outfits
47 Hunter outfits
56 Priest outfits
67 Shaman outfits
69 Death Knight outfits
and about 100 Mage outfits (I didn’t go count exactly how many outfits all the Minor Mages have)

Since then, all of those numbers have ticked up at least once or twice.

Because the “Things my [Class] Wears” posts are getting so cumbersome, I’ve been contemplating in the back of my brain the idea of subdividing each of them into a series of smaller posts.

Please explain in the comments why you think the number that you chose would be the best!

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Now, where did I put — oh, there it is. (Z & Cinder’s Blog Challenge)

Z & Cinder want to know:

What’s in your bags and why?
Are you are hoarder of every scrap of material that comes across your path? Do you have the tidiest bags in Azeroth with nothing extraneous left to clutter your space? Let us take a peek inside and see your bags in all their glory!
No cheating or pre-organising allowed!

Following the lead of others who have posted on this topic so far, I’ll just show you my main’s bags.

Only two bags are really important in my organization scheme: the main Backpack (F12) and the far left bag (F8).

In the Backpack go consumables (food, flasks & potions, augment runes, etc), Artifact weapons, and any quest items that actually need to be clicked to use.

The F8 bag is usually tagged as my “Trade Goods” bag. I also keep in that bag anything that I don’t want to accidentally sell: hearthstones, shirts & tabards, Stormheim grappling gun, derelict Skyhorn kite (which I also put on my right action bar), fishing gear, miscellaneous odds and ends with sentimental value. In the lower right hand corner of Kamalia’s F8 bag here you see The Last Relic of Argus, which I carry around just in case I get stuck somewhere and would rather not just boringly hearthstone to get out of it. There’s a Mourning Glory above the fishing hat, and a Finkle’s Skinner next to it. At the top of the bag, next to the Garrison Hearthstone, is The Innkeeper’s Daughter — I would feel bad to leave her in my bank. Characters who have done the Badlands questline carry around Rhea’s Last Egg for similar reasons. If the F8 bag gets too full of miscellaneous stuff, I make the F9 bag be a Trade Goods bag in addition to or instead of the F8 bag.

I try to keep the F11 bag clear so that while I’m out questing or running old dungeons & raids or whatever, it can fill up with all the junk I pick up. Every now and then, while I’m out and about, I’ll stop and manually sort the contents of F11 into stuff I want to vendor and stuff I want to keep either for that character or to mail to another character. If I don’t have much junk yet, I’ll sort the F11 bag top-and-bottom — stuff I want to vendor on the top, stuff I want to keep on the bottom, or vice versa. If the F11 bag is getting full, I’ll move the stuff I want to keep over to the F10 bag or the F9 bag. Here we see that I have filled up the top of Kamalia’s F11 bag with recently-acquired gear that she needs to equip to replace the gear she is currently wearing.

At the top of the F10 bag, Kam has her Thunder Bluff Doublet and her Totem of the Earthen Ring, a keepsake of the removed pre-Cataclysm Shaman class quests. In the row below that, all of the War Harnesses from Highmountain Tribes reputation. Below that, some spare jewelry for swapping out her Legendary necklace or ring if she gets a better item for a different slot and some Agility trinkets for when she uses Enhancement spec. At the bottom, the ICC Shaman tier sets that she’s been farming. I know that I don’t have to physically keep the items anymore, so I’ll probably sell them once I finish collecting the sets. My other characters also have piles of gear that I’ve been farming from legacy content in their F9 and F10 bags.

Kamalia’s bags are unusually tidy right now because I’m not doing much with her and when I do go do something with her, I try to clean her bags out before I log out. My other characters’ bags are messier, full of more random stuff — but it would get quite tedious to show you all of them.

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is it Patch Day yet?

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m starting to get really itchy for the pre-patch to arrive. Of course I’m looking forward to the questline — which I will probably do with Kamalia, then my two Mages, and then with other alts as I have time and energy — and the unfolding lore reveals and so forth. What I’m anxiously awaiting, though, is the inventory cleanup and Garrison wind-down that the patch will bring.

I’ve already got what I need to do on the evening before the patch drops all planned out:
*Bring in all Followers and don’t send them out again that night
*Trade all Garrison Resources for gold
*Turn in Primal Spirits for Savage Blood and dump them in the Guild Bank, just in case I want/need to craft a Warlords item in the future
*Open up Big Crates of Salvage, put stuff I do want for Transmogrification in the mail as a temporary storage, and vendor stuff I don’t want for Transmogrification — I seem to recall reading that Salvage Crates obtained before the patch will be unchanged after the patch, but I don’t want to risk my accumulated crates turning into junk
*Move alts who are Retiring to capital cities

Then on Patch Day itself (and probably for the next several days) I will be systematically logging on with each of my characters in turn (including the low-level toons that I haven’t actually played for two or three years), loading their clothing inventories into the Wardrobe, binding all the stuff I’ve been hoarding all these years, and vendoring just about everything once it’s bound. After that’s done, then I can jump into the actual patch content…

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Tracer

In honor of the official launch of Overwatch, here’s a clumsy attempt at a Tracer Transmogrification kit. This idea was primarily inspired by the slight stylistic similarity between the Spireflame chestpiece and Tracer’s jacket & chronomodulator device.

Gnomish Battle Goggles, Spireflame Spaulders & Chestguard, Supple Waistguard (3-670), Blastguard Pants, Gazlowe’s Gloves or Ranger Gloves + Ghostwalker Bindings, Goat Hide Boots or Blastguard Boots, Rustic Workman’s Shirt

There is no good match for Tracer’s brightly coloured leggings. I decided that these brightly coloured pants were the best choice, even though they’re the wrong bright colour. I thought the Goat Hide shoes were the best style match for Tracer’s sneakers, but they’re also the wrong colour. The Blastguard Boots that go with the pants might be a better choice — what do you think?

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