the sad case of Noodle Master Chin

If this is so, then why do neither Noodle Master Chin nor his assistant Noodlemonger Yol actually sell noodles?

And does Noodle Master Chin resent not having been invited to bring a noodle cart to the Celestial Court?

Noodle Master Chin must be a very balanced, harmonious pandaren indeed for Dawn’s Blossom to not have become overshadowed by a Sha of Sulking after the Timeless Isle reappeared.

Read Full Post »

pandaren promises kept

Brewfest, 2012

Brewfest, 2013

I would have been quite disappointed if there had been no Pandaren Brewmasters at Brewfest this year. But Blizzard remembered, and, even more delightful, their stock of small-batch Pandaren specialties is a complete cellar list of brews that can otherwise only be obtained from the brewmasters at the Celestial Court on the Timeless Isle.

This year, Kaoling insisted that as a Pandaren from the Wandering Isle, she must have a Pandaren Brewpack to tote around as she explores the rest of Azeroth. A hundred Brewfest Tokens are quite easy to obtain, so I obliged her.

Read Full Post »

wtb jukebox pst

With my increasing number of level 90 characters, I’m logging in and out at Sunsong Ranch a lot these days, and I can’t help but notice that when you are inside the house, it is quiet. As soon as you go out of the house, one of the Valley of the Four Winds tracks begins to play, but inside the house, the only sound is the gentle rattle of the stove lid.

I think Sunsong Ranch needs a jukebox.

It should allow access to all of the music files in the game, letting the player pick their favorite(s) to play inside their house. It could allow one track to be played in a loop, or a small selection of tracks could be grouped into a playlist so that any one of the tracks in the playlist might start when the player logs into or enters the house.

I suppose it’s probably too late to get a jukebox for Sunsong Ranch… but if Blizz iterates upon the personal farm/house concept in the next expansion, something like this could easily be part of the package. It could be the reward for becoming Best Friends with one of the farming NPCs. Engineers could make it with some ridonkulous amount of high level materials. It could even be an item in the in-game store. However it is obtained/implemented, I would love to be able to choose my favorite World of Warcraft music to play inside my characters’ personal space.

Read Full Post »

those Blizzard Store hats

Ever since Navimie’s friend showed off what those Blizzard Store hats look like on a Tauren, the Underpowered Death Knight has been trying to convince me to buy her the Crown of Eternal Winter, saying that it will be the only hat she ever needs.

She would look good in it. That’s only because the skull face effect is less apparent on a Tauren, though. As much as I like the base design of the crown, I really dislike the skull effect on all other races, so she would be the only character who’d be wearing it. I’m not sure I want to pay $15 for it, but only having one character who’d be using this account-wide item isn’t really the reason why. I think it’s more that I haven’t wanted it badly enough for long enough.

Although only a few of my characters use the Celestial Steed or the Winged Guardian in their random cast mount macros, I went back and forth with myself about how much I really wanted those mounts for months before I finally decided to purchase them. I’ve bought Blizzard store pets that I eventually stopped remembering to summon and haven’t bothered to level for pet battles yet, either. A couple of those pets I bought as soon as they were offered because a portion of the proceeds were going to a disaster relief fund, but others I thought about for weeks or months before I actually bought them.

Speaking specifically of spending real money for an item that only one character will use, earlier this month, I spent $50 at the bat of an eyelash to transfer my primary banker from Bloodhoof, where all my Tauren live, to Winterhoof and back again when the Druid T11 lookalike shoulders appeared on the Winterhoof AH… but that’s because I’ve passionately coveted those shoulders ever since the beginning of Cataclysm. For me, having longed for that look for my Druid for nearly two and a half years in real time justified spending that much real money. As wonderful a look as the Crown of Endless Winter would be for the Underpowered Death Knight, I don’t want it that much — yet.

As for the other Blizzard Store hats, I suppose I might consider buying the Jewel of the Firelord if my leather or plate wearing characters decided that they needed a Fire Hat for some outfit or other. Kamalia already has the best Fire Hat in the game, ever, and the Circle of Flame just takes a lot of patience and persistence to farm from BRD. I don’t see myself ever wanting to purchase the Hood of Hungering Darkness. I’m not particularly fond of hoods in general, and this one doesn’t appeal to me at all. Even my Warlock doesn’t think she would ever want it.

If these hats were to go on sale for, say, $5 apiece or $15 for all three (perhaps at Christmas time?), I’d probably pick them up. In the meantime, there is a cosmetic hat that I would pay $15 for with only a moment of hesitation at the price:

Sungshin Ironpaw’s spectacles.
Kamalia would wear them.
All of my Mages would wear them.
DO WANT NAO

Read Full Post »

tinfoil hat time — the common ancestor of goblins and pygmies?

Keija’s recent romp through Cataclysm content reminded me of a question I’ve wondered about since that expansion was new: Where did the pygmies come from, really?

Pygmies are found in Uldum and on the Lost Isles. They apparently share an unknown common ancestor with goblins. I don’t have any good screenshots of my own of the pygmies in the Lost Isles, so here’s one that I’ve borrowed from Wowhead:

Then, while Keija was questing through Kun-Lai Summit, I saw these guys at Kota Basecamp:

And I wondered — could grummles be the unknown common ancestor of the pygmies and the goblins?

Grummles were created by a mogu emperor, so their birth, as it were, must have been millennia before the Sundering. After all, on the eve of the Sundering, the legendary Shaohao was the last emperor of the pandaren following centuries of freedom from the mogu, and the period of the pandaren emperors followed thousands of years of slavery under the mogu dynasties that followed Lei Shen.

What if, during the time of the great rebellions against the tyrannical dominion of the mogu, a troupe (or two or few or several) of grummles “got lost” — went missing, AWOL, exploring northward as far as they could go? They could easily have ended up in Uldum and in lands that became the Lost Isles of the South Seas in the Sundering.
Those that made it to Uldum or had islands to themselves might have slowly lost their original culture as they adapted their new homes, becoming pygmies.
Those that were unfortunate enough to end up sharing their islands with trolls might have found themselves enslaved again, forced to mine the strangely powerful mineral kaja’mite — exposure to which magnified their heretofore relatively limited intellects, tainted their skin green, and sharpened their facial features along with their minds… warping them into goblins.

But if pygmies and goblins are descended from grummles, then that means that, ultimately, goblins are descended from troggs!

Read Full Post »

faffing ‘folio

Since Katewatha reached level 90, she’s been busily working on her rep with the Tillers, the Shado-Pan, the August Celestials, the Order of the Cloud Serpents, and the Lorewalkers. These have all been going pretty quickly because I did eventually purchase the commendations for the “fun” factions as well as the serious ones.

Kate found an Onyx Egg while doing her very first set of Cloud Serpents dailies — something that Kamalia never managed to do — and that got her to Revered on that very first day.
She spent yesterday afternoon flying around reading lorescrolls, following this guide for mainland Pandaria and then this guide for the Isle of Thunder. I didn’t go visit the Seat of Knowledge until I’d collected all of the stories, and when I dinged Exalted, I still had five scrolls left to find.

Ketura, meanwhile, has been questing through the Jade Forest. She’s done a lot of rambling about in the southern part of the zone, following road signs to explore Alliance questing areas such as the Den of Sorrow and the Dreamer’s Pavillion. The Den of Sorrow uses the same cave design as Huo’s shrine on the Wandering Isle — I’m glad to see that such a lovely, unique location isn’t completely hidden away in that phased content. I wondered, though, how Lorewalker Cho acquired a poster of the Karazhan “Oz” backdrop to hang on the walls of his courtyard.

I was glad that I didn’t have to go all the way to the destruction of the statue to obtain the complete Fox Grove/Jade Witch set for Ketura.

After I initially collected this set with Kamalia (who didn’t keep it), I looked forward to collecting it for Ketura (to save) for a couple of reasons. First, I thought it would be perfect with this gun — the Bronze Blaster is a quest reward from End Time, but its design looks very Pandaren to me. Second, I thought it would mix-and-match well with the Gilneas City Guard set.

And it does — the two sets coordinate so very well that I’m having a terrible time deciding which of the following three combinations is my favorite!

While Kate was out searching for lorescrolls, I noticed how pretty the floor in the main chamber of the Crane Temple is:

and that’s probably why, when I was running LFR yesterday night, I noticed how pretty the floor in the courtyard where the Council of Elders meets is, too:

I haven’t run a meter since Ultraxion, so I don’t really know how effective my healing in LFR is. Perhaps I should start doing it again, though, because I’ve been feeling like I’ve gotten really sloppy.

I realize that I’m really quite late to the party with this observation, but with all the excitement about a new froggie model in Patch 5.2, I’m a bit surprised that none of my other Shaman friends (Effy, Matty, Saz) seem to have posted about how Hex now uses the new froggie instead of the old one.

Or did you, and I just wasn’t paying attention well enough and missed it?

Read Full Post »

they’d fit right in!

Although imagining, drawing, and posting the picture in my last entry was indeed an effective way of coping with an anticipated bout of depression, it wasn’t the blues that have kept me from posting again more recently — it’s been the busies. Between the flurry of end-of-the-semester responsibilities and packing my apartment to move back to Nova Scotia at the beginning of June, I’ve been rather worn-out. I can’t just leave that sad picture hanging as my most recent post any longer, though. I drew this picture in 2009 when the first STAR TREK reboot movie came out. I haven’t seen the sequel yet — though I very much would like to!

Female Draenei: “Don’t you think the Federation would just love our technology?”
Male Draenei: “Well, yes… but the uniforms are ridiculous!”

Read Full Post »

who says Tauren can’t be Rogues?

One of my favorite cousins posted this to Facebook, and I just couldn’t resist sharing it here.

Speaking of Facebook, if I have you on RealID (not battletag) — that is, you know my real name and I know yours — and you’re on Facebook, too, then I’d be happy to have you as an FB-Friend.

Read Full Post »

jumping games

Last night I was questing in Ighaluk Crag when I saw the Shoulder of the Chamberlain waaaaay up on the tip of a rock. I jumped around the base of that rock pile for several minutes, growing increasingly frustrated with my inability to understand the variables that control Saurok-form jumping. Why did sometimes I jump far and sometimes short? Why could I not get onto that one rock no matter what distance I jumped from, even when it seemed that the apex of my jump was high enough that if I jumped from just the right horizontal distance, I ought to be able to make it? Large muscle coordination has never been something I was good at in real life, either. Eventually I got so fed up that I looked in my quest log to see if the Crumbled Chamberlain quest rewards valor points. Upon finding that it doesn’t, only money and a Shan-ze Ritual Stone, I said forget this! and dumped the Head of the Chamberlain and the two other parts I’d already found right there on the beach.

Having run through the rest of the day’s quest sequence, I got to the Swollen Vault and found this little challenge awaiting me:

Despite an impressive and slightly intimidating number of skeletons on and around the pillars, I didn’t find that jumping game to be particularly difficult — well, this time, at least. Maybe it was beginner’s luck…

It reminded me of a cross between this:

and this:

So if the Swollen Vault’s lightning pillars are giving you trouble, you might want to go practice jumping in Blackfathom Deeps and staying out of the fire with Darwin.

Read Full Post »

the Divine Bell

Yesterday, I became Revered with the Black Prince (I still have to gain 1.5K Valor for his other Test).
Today, I finally completed the Dominance Offensive Campaign.
Tomorrow, I start exploring the Isle of Thunder.

Because this is a very screenshot-heavy post, I’ve put the rest of it behind a cut:

Read Full Post »