a farewell to tol barad

so, after collecting a crapton of rusty rifles, killing a legion of already-dead ghosts and skeletons, and putting an ice jacket on poor lost problim more times than i can count, danger mouse has done enough tol barad dailies to purchase both a rustberg gull and a fox kit. along the way she got her first exalted reputation, and leveled from 85 to almost 88. i'm thinking it's time to give her a break and let her finish leveling with some soothing pandaria scenery.

mouse being mouse, she gave the fox kit a name that accurately reflects her pleasure at having achieved this milestone.

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.

...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....

some yays and boos

item one: the quiraji guardlings did not appear in silithus at midnight last night. or at three am pacific time. or after some rolling restarts. it appears very likely at this point that nobody is getting their zookeeper title before may 1. not unexpected, but that's still a boo.

item two: people were reporting when patch 5.2 came out that they stopped getting xp from pet battles once they reached level 89, which seemed like an odd thing for blizzard to do. apparently this was not "working as intended", because last night my shaman dinged 89 and the pet battle xp kept coming in. it wasn't mentioned in any blue posts that i saw, but it appears that this got fixed some time in the last few weeks. so that's a yay.

item 3: the npc tamers used to alternate what pets they sent into battle first, resulting in the annoying tactic of yielding repeatedly until you got the initial match-up you want. since 5.2 i've noticed that they now always send out their pets in the same order (expect for when they swap pets because you stunned one). so that's a yay.

item 4: FAILSTORM is still an amazingly craptacular move. no change in 5.2. so that's a boo.

item 5: nothing to do with pet battles, but my nelfette warrior picked up something that has been missing from the game for far too long a time: a strength-based polearm! promptly re-specced her for arms and then farmed up the glorious looking hellreaver for the transmogalypse. so that's a yay.

is it summer yet?

back when we got our first looks at all the new pets for us to capture, it was quickly obvious that blizzard was following the same model that they had used with the oceanographer achievement for fishing. That one required you to catch winter squid (only available in winter) and raw summer bass (only available in summer). Now we had the snowy owl and the qiraji guardling. since it was well established with the fish that in azeroth "summer" and "winter" switched at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, we knew when we'd be able to get our pets and thereby our achievements and zookeeper titles. right?

ummm.... maybe not.

the snowy owls didn't show up until november 1, long after september 22. well, maybe that was because they'd been delayed as part of the expansion release. but it now looks like they disappeared after february 28. this suggests that, as far as pet collecting is concerned, winter (and, one suspects, summer) are only four months long, with a two month spring and fall in between. if this is correct, then the qiraji won't begin buzzing around may 1. sorry folks.

unless, of course, blizzard is still monkeying. wouldn't be the first time.

hasn't been the best of weeks

we had a death in the family last week - not unexpected, but it was still sad. then we had to get everyone to the middle of  upstate new york for the funeral, including various travel arrangements, getting the dogs to the vet, and buying a whole lotta winter clothes (you tend not to own parkas when you live in texas....). but there were good moments mixed in with the sad and hectic. including:

1) got to meet my stepson's lovely girlfriend

2) the hearse did not get stuck in the mud

3) this happened

into the darkness

i recently reached the 75 pets at level 25 achievement (and got the no-longer exciting reward of a level 1 rare critter). since there is currently no higher achievement for leveling, i no longer have any means of tracking how many pets i've leveled (other than manually counting them). which means leveling joins unique pets and captured rares in the ranks of "things the game used to track for you but don't no more." so be it. it's not really that big a deal.

however.

based on past experience, it seems almost certain that there will be new achievements at some point. what isn't certain is if there will be a "level 150 pets to 25", or if they'll simply introduce a new level cap and have all the achievements point to that, eg, "level 10 pets to 30" or whatever. given that the current achievement counts dings and not actual pets (allowing you to double dip on non-rare pets by stoning them and re-leveling) i expect that any pets i level to 25 now won't be counted towards a hypothetical new achievement. mildly annoying if my completed work isn't counted, but it could be severely sucky if i level so many now that the only way to hit the new achievement would be to release existing 25s and catch new pets. hrmmmm.....

probably best if i don't think about it.