qiraji guardlings for everybody!

in case you missed the news, last night blizzard hotfixed a major boost to the spawn rate for qiraji guardlings. from what i was seeing the on the forums, the tidal surge of players hunting them had already started to ebb as more and more people got theirs and left the zone, and the hotfix finished it. this morning i logged on to the alt i had parked in silithus, and there was a guardling fluttering right in front of her. after capturing it, i cruised around the area and saw four more, completely unmolested.

so what prompted this abrupt change from blizzard? was it the wailing and threatening to quit the game on the forums? was it the swarms of death knights being created on the handful of servers that have no crz? was it the griefers killing guardlings before someone could capture them? or was it the massive gold rush into silithus in general? whatever it was, doing it as a hotfix instead of waiting for weekly maintenance suggests things were not going as planned. given that all these factors were things i as a player fully expected to see, i have to wonder once again what game it is the folks at blizzard play. it may be called "world of warcraft" but it doesn't appear to be the game we are playing.

if you don't have a minfernal yet ...

... now is probably the perfect time to go snag one. all the pet farmers are in silithus camping for their guardling.

gotta name 'em all

got my second lil' bad wolf the other day (i gave the first one to julie) and now it is time to bid farewell to karazhan. over the years i have farmed it for loot, for badgers of justice, for attumen's pony, for transmog gear, and now for pets. nothing left to go back for now, at least until blizzard puts something new in there. seems only appropriate to name the little fella after kara's biggest fan.

okay, yeah, i realize it would've been better if it'd been a rabbit. nothing's perfect. there was a spiffy bit of hunter loot that dropped along with the pet, though...

...and now it is summer

people are reporting seeing qiraji guardling spawns in silithus, so it is now finally possible to capture them, completing world safari and getting your zookeeper title. me, though, i'm gonna wait a week or so for the crowds to die down. they'll still be just as fresh.

raiding with leashes ii progress

farming the burning crusade raids for the pets has been a big honkin' time sink for me since patch 5.3 went live a few weeks ago. i've been running karazhan with a dozen different toons each week, and tempest keep and serpentshrine cavern with several. along he way i have discovered a few things. loot reaver is immune to leaching poison, which resulted in my poor level 85 rogue getting smooshed rather brutally. on the other hand, a level 90 protection warrior's second wind talent regenerates health fast enough that i was able to go afk for several minutes right in the middle of lady vashj's phase 2 with no trouble.

so, how am I doing on finding the new pets?

boss	pet for julie	pet for me
big bad wolf	x*	-
curator	x	x
terestian stranglehoof	x	x
prince malchezaar	x	x
al'ar	x	-
void reaver	x	-
high astronomer solarian	x	x
hydross the unstable	-	-
morogrim tidewalker	x	-
lady vashj	-	-

* = i just went and bought one off the auction house for julie

big bad wolf has been my nemesis in karazhan. he shows up plenty of times in the opera event, he just has yet to drop the pet for me. bastard. good news is, since he's fairly early in he tower, i'm not spending a lot of time there anymore. if it was prince i still needed pets from, and i was still having to run chess many times each week, i'd be a sad ratters.

as for the rest? they'll drop eventually. and then tito will be mine! but i do wish ssc was easier to get to, particularly when things go south and you have to run from one of those graveyards halfway across the zone....

the very rare turtlepede

was out in the valley of the four winds, doing my daily imperial silk transmute (yes, someday my tailor will make it to 90 and grind to exalted with the augustus gloops so he can learn to make royal satchels. maybe). anywho. saw this rarely-seen-in-the-wild eight-legged turtlepede patrolling around the silken fields.

oh, those silly mages and their glyphs....