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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how to (temporarily) change your race for Mog modelling

Methods for appearing as a character of another player race while still wearing your own clothes, for the purpose of taking more varied Transmogrification pictures.

To appear as a Human, Dwarf, or Gnome: enter Escape from Durnholde Keep or Culling of Stratholme in the Caverns of Time as a Horde character or as an Alliance character of a race that wasn’t part of the Alliance until after the Third War.

Which race you become is randomly chosen each time you enter the instance, so you might have to try a few times if you want to appear as a specific one of these three races.

To appear as a Night Elf: enter the Well of Eternity in the Caverns of Time

To appear as a Blood Elf: use the Orb of the Sin’dorei

To appear as a factional counterpart race: use the Orb of Deception

This swaps Tauren/Gnome, Orc/Human, Troll/Dwarf, Undead/Night Elf, Blood Elf/Draenei, Goblin/Worgen, Pandaren/Random, Nightborne/Void Elf, Highmountain Tauren/Lightforged Draenei
(I’d have set it up as Undead/Human, Orc/Dwarf, Troll/Night Elf)

There are various other toys and effects that allow you to look like someone else entirely, but these are all the ones I can think of that still show your own clothes. Can you think of any that I’ve forgotten?

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micropost: something wicked this way comes

After reading the announcement for the new Hearthstone expansion, “The Witchwood”, now I have the “Something Wicked This Way Comes” track from the Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban soundtrack looping in my head.

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thinking ahead about the Battle to come

With the next expansion announced, the clock is ticking on Legion. Time to stop frittering away my limited playtime on World Quests and rep gathering — I can come back and do that stuff later — and focus on getting alts leveled and through their Order Hall campaigns. I need to do that stuff while Legion is still current because of all the required dungeon runs… At the moment, the Demon Hunter needs to kill 15 dungeon bosses to finish what I think is probably the penultimate step of her 7.0 Order Hall campaign, and my Paladin has one dungeon quest and my Druid has four dungeon quests for Chapter 3 of their respective Order Hall campaigns. Queue times even for DPS have been about 30 – 45 minutes lately, so I think I can probably spare that much time a few nights a week to log on with an alt, hop in the LFD queue, and then go do some questing while I wait for the dungeon to pop.

Despite being significantly less excited about Battle for Azeroth than I have been about previous WoW expansions, I still can’t help thinking about what I might want to do when it launches.

BTH has been playing the heck out of Stellaris for the past few months, but lately, he’s been making noises about maybe re-subbing to WoW. I’ll believe it when it actually happens. If BTH does decide to play WoW again for awhile, then I’ll most likely play Battle for Azeroth on launch day (or the day after), and level Kamalia first.

If BTH decides not to play WoW again, then I don’t think I’ll play Battle for Azeroth on launch day unless I’ve managed to complete my level 110 Legion goals — finish Suramar with the Blood Elf Mage, do Broken Shore up through getting the additional Champion with everyone, do Argus with at least one character, do the Xe’ra questline with the Demon Hunter, do the Deaths of Chromie with the Paladin. If I haven’t completed my Legion goals by the time Battle for Azeroth launches, then I might not play the new expansion until I’ve finished the stuff I want to do in the current one.
I will also most likely play Kaylynda first, because I’m a lot more interested in finding out what’s going on with Jaina than going to schmooze with the Zandalari Trolls.
I’ll want to level Kamalia eventually, though, so that I can then roll and level a Highmountain Tauren.
I will probably dither about whether I want/need Mages of the other five Allied Races from now until I’ve unlocked them…

Will I want to level all my alts of all the other classes, though? Depends on how excited I get about the new armor & Mogging options as those details come out of the beta.

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minipost: Stitch, is that you?

Is it just me, or do the Marsuul creatures that will be found on Argus indeed look quite a bit like Stitch?

image from Petopia

image from Wikipedia

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pretty kitties with wings

I’m sensing a trend here…

The only other Blizzard Store mounts I’ve gotten are

and

Not exactly kitties, but definitely pretties!

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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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