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...

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....

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

on the other hand, it's only gold

my wife started picking up some of the new pets that drop in old raids on the auction house, i believe mainly because she liked how they looked. but she ran out of cash about the time she realized she was actually getting credit towards raiding with leashes. so she gave me a shopping list of what she still needed and sent off to pick up the remaining ones. the viscidus globule was the priciest, at 17k on our server (the others were running 5-10k). a few minutes later:

she thoroughly enjoyed her mr bigglesworth, and promptly leveled him to 25. i do find the idea of an undead pet that does beast and elemental damage to be interesting, from a mechanics standpoint.

for myself, i'll be doing it the old-fashioned way (in part because i now find myself with a lot less gold than i used to have). i've resumed working on weekly molten core runs with ratshag, as he pushes towards his 50th exalted reputation, so i figure i've got decent odds of getting the pets from there along the way (picked up a harbinger of flame last week). then the missus said she'd help me farm for the rest. i know they're all theoretically soloable now, but these things always go faster with a healer, and she's good company.