whew!

And after all that March Mogness flurry of posting, I’ve only reduced the size of my Drafts folder by about a third.
I’ve got a bunch more Mog collection posts that are a little-to-a-lot too incomplete for me to want to share them just yet.
The “Pretty Dress Collections” section is now threatening to take over my “Transmogrification” page, so I think it’s time to pull it out to be a post/page of its own…

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how I spent my Christmas vacation; Covenant Travel Network review

My husband came down with Covid a week before Christmas, so we were in quarantine for the holidays. I’ve had all three of my shots and my husband has had one, so our symptoms were relatively mild. My husband was achy and spent as much time sleeping as he could. I had a persistently scratchy throat, slightly achy lungs, and a noticeable decrease of stamina for reading stories or singing bedtime songs to the children. The kids had sniffles and some coughing, but otherwise seemed to be fine — no fevers, and completely normal behavior. We think the cat might have gotten it, too, because he was lethargic and sneezing for a few days.

My husband has long been a fan of the Wheel of Time series. Not having gotten into that series myself while I was a teenager/young adult, I used to say, somewhat flippantly, that maybe I’d read them while I was breastfeeding, if I ever had a biological child. Somehow, that didn’t happen this summer and fall. During the past couple of weeks, my husband watched the Wheel of Time TV series on Amazon Prime, and I got sucked into watching the last couple of episodes over his shoulder. He described the earlier episodes as being more like Peter Jackson’s treatment of Lord of the Rings… and the later episodes as being more like Peter Jackson’s treatment of The Hobbit. Naturally, then I had to find out for myself just how different the TV show was from the books. I read New Spring and Eye of the World with the baby either nursing or just sitting on my lap, while the older kids played with their Christmas toys or on the computer (they loved the Jacquie Lawson Advent Calendar that my Mom always gets for me). I found myself sufficiently interested by enough of the characters that I might have continued on to The Great Hunt — except that by then I’d received a book I was much more interested in, Rhythm of War, as a birthday present from my husband. I am currently about a third of the way through that tome. Speaking of Brandon Sanderson books, before reading the Wheel of Time books, I read Cytonic, which I gave to my husband for his birthday a month ago, after he finally finished reading it.

~*~*~

In Azeroth, Kateleina and Kaelyra have reached Renown 79 with the Necrolords and the Kyrian, respectively. They’ve also gotten their Covenant Sanctums as fully upgraded as I intend to do. So I guess it’s time to go do the 9.0 Campaigns for those Covenants. Then I suppose it will be back to their home Covenants and off to Korthia — and flying! — at last.

After getting all four Covenant Sanctums upgraded to level 3 Travel Network and level 2 Anima Conductor with the Treasure Box and World Quest reinforced, here is my personal ranking of the Travel Networks. The Kyrian Travel Network is the most useful because it is a true network, because it has points right on top of the Anima Conductor features, and because it has other points that are very conveniently located for other Bastion World Quests that I like to do. The Night Fae Travel Network is the next most useful; it has a point close to the Treasure Box and points close to some of the Ardenweald World Quests that I like to do — but for the Anima Conductor World Quest, as well as other Ardenweald World Quests that I like, there are conventional flight points that I find more convenient to use. The Night Fae Travel Network also has associated with it the Marasmius dailies, which give Night Fae characters an advantage for quickly collecting Anima. The Venthyr Travel Network I found to be much less useful. The Anima Conductor features are more easily accessed from conventional flight points. I only ever used two Venthyr Travel Network points — the Eternal Terrace mirror when “Secret Service” was up and the Feeder’s Thicket mirror when “Parasol Peril” was up. And the Necrolords Travel Network? Completely useless for getting to the stuff in Maldraxxus that I like or at least am willing to do.

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Deluge of Mog posts incoming!

Um, so, I’d gotten a bunch of cloth chestpiece posts queued up for Wednesdays and Thursdays, and then on Sunday I went and accidentally hit “Publish” when I meant to hit “Save Draft” on the White Leather post, and then all these other posts about leather leggings and kilts wanted to be assembled, and they didn’t want to wait around to be published, and so they’ve gotten scheduled into the Mondays and Tuesdays and Fridays. Nothing else is happening, though, so I might as well pump these posts out, rather than leaving them to gather dust in my Drafts folder.

When Patch 9.0.1 finally arrives, some of those Mog collection posts — both cloth chestpieces and leather kilts — will probably end up getting their scheduled post dates bumped down a week or two. Or more, if the rescheduled dates end up being after October 26th…

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Mog series in the works

For, oh, two or three years at least, I’ve had sitting in my Drafts folder a set of posts to add to the “Pretty Dress Collections” subsection of “Things my Characters Wear: Cloth” section of my Transmogrification page. Some of those posts have blank spots waiting to be filled with outfits using robes I have in my collection, but haven’t yet made an outfit with, before I publish them; these serve as a place I can look for inspiration if I’m wanting to make a new outfit for one of my cloth-wearing characters but haven’t got any exciting new ideas. Others have been ready to go, more or less, for a long time, and I just haven’t gotten around to publishing them quite yet.
So for the next few weeks, I’ll be putting up a post or two a week of Mog collections each themed about a specific robe/tunic style. These will all be outfits that I’ve posted before, so they’re sort of a “who wore it best?” show, too.

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Welp, I guess it’s time to get the Sanity Cloak now

If I’m understanding the changes to Echoes of Ny’alotha in today’s updates correctly, they won’t drop anymore unless at least one character on the account has the Sanity Cloak. Guess I’d better go get that now, so that’ll be how I spend my WoW session this evening, after the kids are in bed.

The Sanity Cloak is Wrathion’s project, which reminds me of this thing that I observed during the 15th Anniversary Event, but don’t remember seeing commentary about at the time*:

During the 15th Anniversary event, which began during Patch 8.2.5, with its “Where’s Wrathion?” questline**, I observed Wrathion, in whelpling form, accompanied by Medivh in arcane raven form, flying around in the Caverns of Time. They aren’t there now, so I wonder if they were just there during Patch 8.2.5, or even just during the Anniversary event? What is Wrathion not telling us about what Medivh and/or Khadgar are up to these days? He must know something…

* at least in the main body of posts on Blizzard Watch or Wowhead, though it may have been mentioned in the comments

** which now seems to be unavailable — I haven’t seen it pop up for any of my recently dinged 120s

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wibbly wobbly timey wimey Shadowlands

As if the time travel shenanigans of the first two Hour of Twilight dungeons in Cataclysm and the entirety of Warlords of Draenor weren’t enough, a recent interview by Ion Hazzikostas (Wowhead summary here) reveals that time has a “complicated”, “chaotic” flow in the Shadowlands, with consequences to the player character that may not be fully revealed until the end of the expansion*…

Here is where being the player and not the character allows some RP meta-gaming.
A few years ago, I wrote a story about Kerisa’s family. Since then, I’ve added to it. I’d already been thinking that because I’ve now described Kerisa as a mother of two small children — and with two small children myself — I couldn’t bear to put her family through the trauma of having her disappear into the Shadowlands. And if there’s going to be time screwiness happening, too…
So: once the new character customizations go live, which I hope will be in the pre-launch events patch, we will meet a new character, an Alter Ego level 12050 Tauren Druid: Kaurinka, a palomino with red-and-blue arm warpaint who devotes herself more strongly to An’she than to Mu’sha (though not to the degree of the Sunwalkers). The name is derived from the original name of Gnomecore’s Gnome Priest, “Aurinko”, which, if I am remembering correctly, is a Finnish word meaning “sun” or “sunlight” — a fitting name for a sun-colored devotee of An’she.

One might ask, “You have a BfA-level Night Elf Druid, why not finish leveling that character to be the Druid who does Ardenweald? With there being some Tyrande story in Ardenweald, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to experience that with a Night Elf anyway? Or what about your Highmountain Tauren Druid?”
Um, well…
I’ve already got Kerisa at level 120 and working through improving her stuff.
Furthermore, I’m trying to focus my altoholism and keep the number of characters I plan to take to Shadowlands — and thus need to prep with BfA endgame activities & gearing — as minimal as I can manage. This academic year that just ended was just one thing after another, and the next one is probably not going to be any easier.

* …or, at any rate, until the next expansion is announced at Blizzcon 2021 😛

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in which Kaelinda KonMaries her bank

I wanted to find a particular piece of non-Moggable RP gear. I thought Kaelinda might be the one who had it. When I looked in her bank, this is what I saw:

What a heap of stuff! Thank goodness for the bags & bank search function!

She didn’t have the item — and neither did anyone else whose bank I looked in — but it’s a craftable from a past expansion that had a readily available recipe purchase cost and a cheap enough materials cost that I simply acquired the recipe and crafted it.

Just looking at that overstuffed bank made me feel a bit overwhelmed, so I decided it was time to clean out all the stuff she’d been hanging on to for Mogging purposes and hadn’t really needed to since the introduction of the Appearances Collections during Warlords.

I didn’t get rid of everything, though. I kept any items that are no longer obtainable, some white quality (non-Moggable) items, her Legion Legendaries, an assortment of other expansion- or patch event-specific items as souveniers, a handful of Soulbound grey quality items with interesting flavor text, a few readable documents from quests, and holiday clothes (just in case she ever wants to wear any of them out-of-season).

Ahhhh, much better!

One of these days, I ought to get around to doing the same thing for Kamalia, Kerisa, Kaylynda, and Karaelia…

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what I did on the first day of Patch 8.3

To begin with, I failed my Will Save against Order of the Stick: Blood Runs in the Family. I got us the most recent OOTS book for Christmas, so I’ve been reading through all of the earlier compilations. After I got the kids to bed, I thought, oh, I’ll just finish the chapter I started earlier this evening, there’s only a few pages left. Two hours and a third of the book later…

Once I finally got logged into WoW, I didn’t feel like I had enough time to do anything major, so I just ran around doing small things.
I picked up the first quest of the N’Zoth Campaign and watched the cinematic, but didn’t continue to the Chamber of Heart. I finally got Kamalia’s Heart of Azeroth to level 70 over the weekend, but I haven’t done the final questchain for the Crucible of Flames yet. I want to do that before I do any of the major Patch 8.3 questline. Besides, I’ve been thinking about giving Kamalia an early retirement by not doing the major Patch 8.3 stuff with her, but rather waiting to do it until I’ve got one or the other of my Mages leveled to 120.
I saw that there was a new quest on the boat and followed Lillian Voss to Tirisfal Glades.
I went to the Orgrimmar Embassy, but didn’t actually pick up and begin the Vulpera recruitment questchain.
I noted Baine Bloodhoof and Mayla Highmountain standing in the Stormwind throne room at the beginning of the cinematic, and observed that Baine is now in the hot seat in Grommash Hold. Then I spent most of the rest of my relatively brief time in-game running around trying to find the questchain that would lead to the cinematic that explains how he got there. Is the new Horde leadership cinematic embedded in the major patch intro questline somehow?

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Patch 8.2 dance card

Looking at the Patch 8.2 notes on Wowhead, it seems that there will be a certain sequence of events.

First, Nazjatar.

After the Nazjatar base is established, then the Patch 8.2 War Campaign quest appears, as does the Mechagon starter quest.

The Tauren Heritage Armor questline has the 8.2 War Campaign as prerequisite, so Kam will at least have to do the opening sequence of Nazjatar to be able to get her Tauren Heritage Armor. *sigh*

I doubt that she’ll be there with the crowd next Tuesday, though, as she still has Tides of Vengeance and the 8.1.5 War Campaign to do — which will also unlock the Zandalari Allied Race recruitment scenario and the rest of the Vol’jin questline. She’ll go to Nazjatar whenever she manages to get all that stuff done.

After that, who knows how long it’ll be until I get BfA flying? Long, though. Definitely NOT “Soon”.

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some stuff from Blizzcon that interests me

* Tauren Heritage Armor!
* Nazjatar and Mechagon — new zones are always exciting just for the new landscapes they offer, even if I don’t manage to get all my alts through the questlines required to fully access them (I’ve only taken a few characters to Argus, and only one has gotten all the way to Mac’Aree, which is a bit of a shame because Mac’Aree is the nicest of the Argus sub-zones)
* Worgen model updates — that sweet smile on the new Female Worgen shown fits my Kymberlea a lot better than the original wierd side-growl face
* the Darkmoon Faire Roller Coaster will get me back to the Faire at least once just to see what it does
* centralized portal rooms in Orgrimmar and Stormwind — it’s about time!

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