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.

hydra doesn't pvp. except when she does.

hydrargyrum, of the twisted nether blogcast and (when she remembers she still has a blog) almost evil,  is my oldest wow blogging friend. we met back when we were the only two wow bloggers on the now-defunct vox.com blogging / pre-facebook social media platform. long time ago, that was. somewhere along the line one of her alts on my server got lucky and picked up a winter's little helper pet, which she generously gave to me.

for years it sat in my bank or pet book, only coming out on occasion during the winter veil holiday. when we got the ability to name our pets this expansion, christening it "hydrargyrum" seemed the appropriate thing to do. and at some point, even though it was only an uncommon pet with a really strange spell set, i decided to level it to 25. then i found myself with an extra flawless humanoid battle-stone, so i stoned the little gnome because why hell not?

and then the other day i ran across a pvp team comp that caught my eye. kun-lai runt (a very popular and effective pet currently). slow tundra penguin. and winter's little helper. didn't have a penguin of that particular breed, so i substituted pengu - same spells, but a little faster and a little weaker. wasn't worried about it, because i still think that, with certain exceptions, having the right breed is greatly overrated. anywho, three pets, all with the ability to "chill" an opponent, and all with an ability that gets a bonus when hitting a chilled opponent. so how'd hydrargyrum, slide, and grievous muppet do?

they pwned teh face.

over the  course of the weekend they racked up twelve wins against five losses. not too shabby. along the way i picked up the experienced pet brawler achievement. fifty wins isn't a lot, at least when compared to my pve wins, but pvp is still so darn slooooooooow and doesn't offer much in the way of rewards. yet. can only do a few battles before my brain starts pointing out how many opportunities we're losing by not doing other stuff. but still, i have fun while i'm doing it, and i'm looking forward to the pvp achievement grind that will come in 5.3. mostly.

but remember - hydra doesn't pvp*


*old joke. she'll know what i'm referring to ;)