A Happy Harpy Day

The first thing I did yesterday on logging…

 

He’s my fire

Last night I was a little bit down and so when I woke up this morning, Mr Harpy had a little surprise for me.

Yep, he’d taken me minfernal hunting in the middle of the night and had caught this little chap so now Sprout gets to pretend she’s a warlock (aided by pet biscuits).

Buoyed up by this, I spent the afternoon catching the remaining pets I needed to pick up my very own Venus. All I have to do now is resist the temptation to rename Venus to Bananarama.

You know you’re taking Pet Battles far too seriously

When the sight of this

makes you really happy in real life. It doesn’t matter that I have a horrible cold and can’t stop coughing, it doesn’t matter that I have to get up stupidly early to go to work tomorrow because I have a rare baby ape!

The fact that I hate pet battles and am only doing them because there is a list and I have to tick everything on it off is totally irrelevant by the way.

Thoughts on being 90

Whilst levelling is a journey full of wonder and amazement, arrival at 90 is like landing at the airport to discover they’ve lost your baggage, customs want to strip search you but you’ve won the lottery to compensate. Sure there are a lot of positives but some definite negatives thrown into the mix as well.

1. Dailies, dailies, dailies as far as the eye can see. The choice is overwhelming as is the feeling that you should ignore the “fun” ones (Tillers/Anglers/Cloud Serpents) whilst concentrating on the rest in the run up to raids and the arena season starting. Given that I don’t go back to work until Thursday, we have been spamming the lot but it definitely feels like overload. On the plus side (a phrase I never thought I’d ever use in this context) most of the daily hubs involve going to one specific area and slaughtering & collecting. On top of that, compared to the Molten Front, killing vermling, playing catch with baby dragons and beating up sharks with your bare hands is a refreshing change.

2. Heroics aren’t really heroic in any shape or form. When I queued up for the first time I was really nervous remembering back to the start of Cataclysm when on some trash packs mana was an issue. I didn’t need to worry, in fact even after boss fights my interweaving of power word:solace into the mix meant I didn’t need to drink then either. I know the challenge modes are there for just that purpose but I would have liked the Heroics to be slightly tougher. It just feels a bit wrong where the Stormstout brewery for example felt harder on normal at 86 than it did at 90 on heroic (just wearing blue 450 gear in every slot apart from my 463 legs and my epic trinket from Coren).

3. PvP is awesome. My favourite all time battleground now has to be the Temple of Kotmogu. It’s fast paced, fun and a bit like arenaing but with objectives other than making sure you’re the last team standing. I definitely don’t feel squishy as Holy unless the whole opposing team piles on top of me (or I’ve been hogging a power ball too long) which is a good start to an expansion too. I plan on doing a proper post covering my choice of glyphs + talents as Holy for each of the maps once I’ve finished testing a few things.

4. Scenarios! I love all of the ones I’ve played so far (apart from Theramore). They’re quick, varied and because it’s not just standing still and healing like a proper dungeon, great fun (ignoring the lore side of it, Theramore is just a bit too much like running a dungeon).

The loot bags are annoying though, I know RNG is RNG but so far Mr Harpy has had an item from pretty much every second bag and I’ve had zero which makes gearing up a little more irritating.

5. Priesting. Why oh why can’t chakras last after death and on zoning. I know it’s not a massive issue for most things but it’s still a quality of life issue. Other than that, I’m pretty happy with Holy. Mana is 10 times better than it was at the start of Cataclysm in both pve and pvp. In fact the only other thing which annoys me is the lack of useful minor glyphs for my chosen spec. We have a choice of ten, four are shadow specific, one is disc specific, one is holy specific but requires your death and the others are just flavour.

6. Pet battles. Fear my Hopling because it will lick you to death! This turned out to be more addictive and less annoying than on the beta. I’m still working my way through pre Outlands pets but I hit 250 unique pets a while back and am route to 400 albeit slowly. I have to admit I went and tamed an Infested Bear Cub even though I said I never would. (By the way, they only seem to spawn after midnight if you’re looking, at least that’s the only time I’ve ever found any sign of them). Also whoever designed Jaguero Isle to have a separate weather system to that of southern STV can take a spinning crane kick to the face.

7. MoP transmogrification. Yes please! The cloth pvp set consisting of a pants suit had me panicking slightly but the weapons and off-hands are stunning.

8. Pandas. I’m still not 100 percent convinced, but I’ve made one even though she hasn’t made it out of the start zone yet. She’s a Priest (surprise surprise) called Snowflower after a book I fell in love with a little while ago when I found a beat up copy in a charity shop. I’m slightly saddened by the fact that my favourite beta hairstyle isn’t available at the character creation stage but am hoping it will be an option once she escapes the Isle.

9. The Storyline in general. I’m really impressed with the stories this time around. Blizzard have added some really lovely touches and some tragic moments. I was particularly taken with the fact that my evil double giggles.

It’s a great mix of tragic, comedic and thought provoking.

I think I started out looking for things to criticise, wanting to believe that WoW had nothing left to offer me, that I reached my final destination as far as the game was concerned but it seems that somehow despite my cynicism, Pandaria’s beauty and sense of wonder has managed to pull me back.

Hoplings

I’ve been a bit of a vermling fan ever since I first encountered them on the beta and so when I discovered that they would also be available as cute little pets I knew I had to have one. (Yes, I fully understand that cuteness might be in the eye of the beholder).

Acquiring one of your very own is simple. First of all make sure that you have friendly name plates key bound on something, it defaults to shift – v but if you’re using that for something else (like me) bind it elsewhere.

Next queue up for Stormstout Brewery and speak to Auntie Stormstout who is in the alcove as you enter. You need to purchase Ling Ting’s favourite tea which gives the ability to see small golden vermling dotted around the brewery. There are thirty of them in total and you need to find all of them. You can only carry five teas at once and but each application lasts five minutes.

This is what you’re looking for. They are quite small but with the name plates up are easily spotted. You can also clear the dungeon first and then work your way back finding the little fellows. They’re usually hidden up against the sides of the room or beside crates and barrels.

The achievement which rewards the pet is very group friendly as one person can click on say five vermling, another fifteen and someone else ten and yet everyone in the party will still be rewarded with the achievement and pet. You don’t even need to have the tea buff when someone clicks on a vermling, but it will still count.

Now I just need to finish battling my way to 250 pets so little Bean can have another vermling to play with.

A few of my Favourite Post-Patch Things

In no particular order:

1. Basilisks

I thought these would be a bit like crocolisks, i.e. really annoying as pets with their skittering little legs running after you but somehow their garish colours and whiskers have grown on me.

Staying with Hunter’s pets, up next is something I’ve been wanting to tame ever since they were first introduced with the Burning Crusade.

2. Water Striders

3. Being able to name my mini-pets. I’ve still got a long way to go figuring out names for all of them but I love being able to show a bit of their personality through a proper name.

4. Scarlet Monastery.

The re-make reminds me of those wonderfully bad Hammer Horror movies I grew up hiding behind the sofa watching re-runs of. I particularly like the fact that you have to pretty much “stake” Whitemane to try and ensure she stays dead.

5. Spectral Guise. Perhaps not for the reason that Blizzard would like to me to love this talent though. It has saved me a couple of times by cancelling spell casts but because it doesn’t work like true “stealth”, your pets remain visible and for some reason my Darkmoon Balloon drifting along seemingly by itself amuses me no end.

6. Glyph of Disguise.

Here we see my rogue masquerading as a rather fetching Harpy. Unfortunately it only lasts five minutes and breaks in combat but for idling there is nothing better.

So what is everyone else excited about this week?

Mixed feelings and enough pumpkin to make a giant pie.

Last night Sprout went to bed a scrub with 2 titles, 25 mounts, 3660 achievement points and 43 pets. This morning she woke up, still a scrub but with 30 titles (including the Bloodthirsty, Conqueror of Ulduar and Hand of A’dal), over 10 000 achievement points, 91 mounts (ignoring the Horde ones) and 157 unique pets. There might be more but I got sick of logging characters and decided to start playing around instead.

It’s hard to put into words how I feel about this. I know I’ve written about account wide achievements before but that was before they were implemented and I could see exactly what I’ve got. Sure, it’s nice to be able to ride the Headless Horseman’s reins on a character I actually play and it’s wonderful to be able to summon my Hyacinth Macaw rather than have it linger on a character that hasn’t been played properly in years but I still have a sense of doubt tingling away.

First of all, the lack of consistency annoys me. I have the achievements for five different pvp ranks but the titles are only accessible on the individual characters who ranked up back in vanilla. Compare that with the fact that I got “the Bloodthirsty” title from shared hks from 3 Priests, 2 Druids and a Mage. Personally I feel that all titles and achievements should be account wide or none should be, having exceptions here and there is just messy. Did they do it to stop people using the old pvp sets for transmogrification? Perhaps but that goes against the whole concept of account wide stuff. Whatever happened to “It’s you the player who achieves things, not the pixels on the screen”. I’m also slightly miffed by the fact that I don’t have access to my chopper and other such mounts just because they currently reside on a Horde character, it’s still one account.

This did sweeten the pill a bit though. I like the fact that it tells you which character achieved a specific achievement. The fact that Blizzard keep adding achievements also helps. It doesn’t look as if we’ll run out of things to do any time soon.

In the long run though, I played alts before there were achievements to tick off, I hugged the corpses of fallen enemies mainly to get them to release and I wandered around looking at things and taking screenshots. I’ll never be the greatest fan of account wide achievements but I’m not going to lose any sleep over them. Sure, finishing up my Loremaster mark 2 is going to be a little harder now everything is already ticked off once but who knows, that might make it even more fun…

I am fairly surprised by this. I knew I had a lot of evil vegetables but didn’t realise I actually had army of them. Sprite darter hatchlings and Snowmen are also clearly breeding in my bags. So far the patch and playing around with it’s various bits and bobs has been a far more positive experience than I was expecting. Anticipation is starting to build.

On a slightly different note, my battletag is Erinys#2261, feel free to add me if you’re in the EU!

The Infested Bear Cub: The most distressing Mini Pet in-game

When I ride through Hillsbrad I give those bears with the spider eggs on their back a wide berth because I have this visceral moment of fear whenever I set eyes on them. However this little cub inspires another sort of reaction.

I’m left wondering why my heal pet button doesn’t cleanse those evil eggs off his little back.

He and his similarly effected brothers and sisters can be found with their parents running around between the mine and the Sludge fields.

My guilty secret: Pet Battles and Me.

I have a confession to make.

I hate pet battles.

I want to like them, I really do. I’ve been a pet collector in-game right from the very start. I sold the clothes off my Night elf’s back to buy my first pet, a bombay cat and ever since then I’ve run dungeons, quested and grinded my way to various pets. I’ve bought them from the pet store and the auction house. I’ve even jousted just for pets but the truth is, pet battles leave me cold.

I love the detail which has gone into the flavour text for each pet.

I’m in awe of the huge scope of both pet families and models which will become available to us and I already have a sort of wish-list in my head. I wanted quite a few of the new pets for years and now we’re finally going to be able to get them. In fact the only way they could improve in that regard is if they made a mini harpy (which is clearly a huge oversight on Blizzard’s part). In fact I look at the different spells available to the pets, to the love and attention shown to them and then I look at my own class. At the clunkiness of Chakras, Power word: Solace and Holy Nova requiring a glyph slot and I feel slightly annoyed.

Then there is the actual battling itself. In the average battleground, Sprout uses over forty five different buttons/binds on vud’ho. Now that includes both defensive and offensive spells, drinks, racials, trinkets, nets, pots and cooldowns and would be much higher if I included her party favours for graveyard camping. In the pet battles, each pet has three abilities and as you level, each of those three slots ends up with a choice of two abilities to fill it. So you have a stunning choice of 6 abilities per pet but you can only use three at once. To make matters worse, at least from my perspective, the only interaction I have is choosing which pets and which of the few abilities to use. There is no equivalent of the hit cap, instead I’m a 100 percent at the mercy of RNG which can be frustrating to say the least. I suppose I’m so used to being able to improve my performance through the use of addons, keybinds, talents, enchants, gear and consumables that paring everything down seems unchallenging and almost boring. Sure you can cherry pick your team but to me at least that’s another issue. I have certain favourite pets, these aren’t particularly special creatures but they have meaning to me. They are the ones that ideally I would want to use in the pet battles but it’s hard to ignore the fact that other pets would have a higher success rate, perhaps due to the whole rock, paper, scissors effect or simply because they have better stats. So far I’ve just been steam rolling my way to victory with a suboptimal team but I’m not sure I can do that all the way.

Once you’ve captured the pets, the frustration doesn’t end. All critters aren’t created equal which means that quite often you find yourself having to let go of little Flopsy the cottontailed bunny because he’s a common bunny and you’re after his rare big brother. I’d much prefer it if there wasn’t a cap on the number of pets we are allowed. 500 seems like a decent number until you start doing the maths.

Now of course there are some plus points, seeing a horde of rats run at an unsuspecting critter is always good for a smile plus it reminds me of the many day trips to Hamelin I had to go on as a child. I’m hugely in favour of anything which gets people out of cities and into the world (unless of course they’re the jerks who like to follow people around trying to kill the critters people are trying to battle). I imagine that just like with Archaeology the gankers will be out in force for the first few months of the expansion.

Will I partake, yes. I at least want to collect my very own baby Vermling but I don’t see myself going beyond that point. I’ll pick up the various pet models that I like along the way, oddly enough, most of these despite being labelled “tiny” are bigger than my Gnome but I miss the complexity of playing my actual characters. I also don’t like the anonymity of the whole system. What’s the point of keeping score without recording losses? In a way I find it a bit insulting that Blizzard are basically implying that the whole pet collecting community can’t take competitive combat. In my experience at least, knowing who just flattened you can go a long way into pushing you to improve, something we should all be striving for. WoW is a multi-player game in which we compete on so many levels, why should this be exempt?

In short, pet battling feels a bit like a single player Strand of the Ancient, only the demolishers have cute little faces.

BETA: There is something terrible in the Turnip Patch

This little chap to be precise, the terrible Turnip mini-pet.

So how do you farm him up?

When you start work on your Tillers farm, (which by the way you can currently do at lev 85)  you can ask Jogu the Drunk for crop related tips. I followed his advice and the next morning when I was harvesting my carrots, I got this “interesting” looking seedling from amongst my crop.

Once planted, it turned into a spiky looking plant and the following morning, I found this:

I tried again on another character and didn’t get an ominous seed however the advice I got that day was to plant witchberries so I’m thinking it’s either got to be a root vegetable like carrots (what I originally planted on Sprout) or it’s just a random chance to get. Either way, starting off your Tillers rep and also growing lots of ingredients for cooking as soon as possible is probably a good idea. My advice today was to plant carrots again, so hopefully there will be a seed awaiting my Monk tomorrow.

So far the only idle animation he has is a sort of roar, where he throws his little leafy arms up into the air but when you pull him out, he leaps out of the ground rather adorably.

All in all, another reason to play around with the Tillers.