This Was A WoW Site

This used to be my weblog devoted to things World of Warcraft, but I’ve moved that over to Alterior Motive. So I’d like to transition this over to be my personal site. Fear not. I’m not abandoning WoW. Some of you might wish I would, of course. But I’m still having too much fun in Azeroth to quit.

You may notice I’ve basically stripped my old WoW-related blogroll. That blogroll lives on at Alterior Motive. I want the blogroll for Gutterspeak to be made up of non-WoW blogs I read. It’s pretty bare right now, but I hope to rectify that over time.

On the Twitter front, I’m having a lot of trouble tweeting and following tweets. It’s complicated, but it has to do with the fact that I am, basically, anti-social by nature. Occasionally I can be social, and on those occasions I find that my tweeting rate increases dramatically. But other times my anti-social side rests control of my brain and I’m back to little-to-no tweeting. Sorry about that. I’m working on it.

That’s about it for now.

Lending a Helping Hand

Ecgric, over at Alterior Motive, is swamped with other things and has asked me to help out on the AM weblog. So I’ve decided to continue my Ceridwyn posts over there. I won’t bother duplicating them here. I might eventually also talk about my other characters there as well. Time will tell. For now, though, I’m going to restrict my posts to Ceridwyn.

As for this weblog, it’s not going anywhere. I’ll still try to write on occasion, though what I write may be about things other than World of Warcraft. I’ve already got a couple of non-WoW posts here and perhaps there will be more of that in the future.

The Time Has Come, The Walrus Said…

When Burning Crusade came out, I decided I was going to roll a Blood Elf Paladin. Yeah, me and pretty much everybody else. Blood Elf because it was one of the new races. Paladin because I’d never played a Paladin before. And, of course, Paladins were new to the Horde, so I figured it was all new and wonderful. The result was Daemonica, my Blood Elf Paladin. I played Daemonica to 60 and decided I just couldn’t stand the Paladin class anymore. Remember, this is BC we are talking about. Retribution was difficult to level and Protection was painful to level. It was a heavy heart that I decided to stop playing Daemonica and promptly rolled Orgaria, a Blood Elf Warlock who was my first level 70 Horde toon.

I might point out that as soon as 3.0 was released, with all the changes to Paladins, I returned to Daemonica to see how things had changed. I respec’d Retribution and felt like a god (for the first several weeks after 3.0, ret pallies were so OP). Paladin quickly became my favorite class and basically still is. I had so much fun leveling Daemonica to 70 that I decided to roll Veleni, my Draenei Paladin and promptly leveled her to 80.

Anyway, I digress. The reason I told the story about Daemonica is that while I was leveling her, my friend was leveling a Blood Elf Hunter. And boy did she look good. Ever since I’ve wanted a sexy Blood Elf Hunter, but I kept getting sidetracked with other characters. I believe, however, that the time has finally come to level that Blood Elf Hunter. Ceridwyn, pictured above with her pet spider, is that Hunter.

Yes, I’ve leveled other Hunters. But none of them to 80. I’d really like to have a level 80 Hunter. And I’d really like to level a Horde toon to 80. I’ve been having some trouble with that and this time I am determined to do it.

So although I still have outstanding goals from my goal list yet to do, I have embarked on something entirely different. Experience tells me that it usually takes me about three months to level all the way to 80. So, in three months, I hope to have a new level 80 Blood Elf Hunter.

That’s the plan, anyway.

Achieve My Goals

In the distant past (or so it seems now), I wrote a post in which I listed some goals I hoped to achieve. Believe it or not, I’ve been plugging away at those goals and I can now report that some of them have been achieved. And, I have one new goal to add.

I’ll start with what I’ve achieved.

One of my goals has been to acquire 50 mounts and then get the Albino Drake that comes with the corresponding achievement. As you can see from the screenshot above, Rubeola is now the proud owner of one Albino Drake. I was going to wait on this for her to become a Champion of the Alliance, because I thought I’d need all of the mounts from all races before I could get to 50. But when 3.2 hit, the cost of all racial mounts was reduced quite a bit, and I suddenly found myself going on a mount buying spree. And then I thought, what the heck, I’ll go ahead and buy the rest of the Netherwings I didn’t have (which were still 200g a pop) and the rest of the Talbuks as well. And before I knew it, I hit 50 mounts and got the achievement.

The next step, of course, would be to shoot for 100. I think that’s largely out of reach for me, though, because to get to 100 would require picking up all of the special mounts that can only be obtained from instance runs and raiding and I’m not likely to get any of those. But I’m still going to continue to add mounts to my collection and we will see where things go.

Speaking of adding new mounts to my collection, I’ve already added one important new mount: the Engineering Flying Machine mount. You might remember that another of my goals is to become an Engineer and attempt to build a Mekgineer’s Chopper. I’ve taken the first step. I’ve dropped Mining and replaced it with Engineering. And I’ve managed to level Engineering high enough (300, as of 3.2) to build a Flying Machine. With just a bit more effort, I’ll be able to build the turbo version as well. It’s going to be a while before I can build the chopper, though. First I need to get my Engineering to 450, which will be a bit of work itself. Then I need to save up something on the order of 12,000g in order to buy all the materials to build the chopper. I expect several months at least before I’m to that point.

Another goal on my list was to get to Exalted Argent Champion of the Alliance on at least one toon. I had thought I would do this on Veleni. But it now looks like I’m spending all my time working on this with Rubeola. Unfortunately, Rubeola is at something of a disadvantage with this achievement. Being a Death Knight, she doesn’t get Argent Crusade rep for completing tournament quests. She gets Ebon Blade rep instead. So to get exalted with the AC, she’s going to have to do the dippy Pa’Troll quest every day for the next several weeks. I’m not a fan of that quest and its parts. Especially the one offered by Alchemist Finklestein.

As you can see from the above screenshot, I have also achieved my goal of getting a flying carpet. I was planning to craft it with Lyune, my priest, but I ended up crafting it with Marol, my warlock. I find I’m playing Marol more than Lyune, so she just happened to get her tailoring to 410 first. I assume Lyune will get to craft a flying carpet at some point, of course, but the goal was to craft a flying carpet, and I can now check that goal off the list.

As I indicated at the beginning of this post, I’m adding a new goal to my list of goals: level at least one Horde character to 80. I’ve been struggling with this for a while, actually. I don’t quite know why it should be so hard. I enjoy leveling Horde as much as I do Alliance, but for some reason I can’t quite stick with one Horde character long enough to get all the way to 80. Lately I’ve been playing Orgaria, my warlock, quite a bit, and I think she has the best chance of making it all the way to 80. She’s already 74 and has even visited Dalaran. I’ll keep you posted on her progress.

Dual-Wielding And Loving It (for now)

As you can see from the screenshot, I’m giving dual-wielding a try on Rubeola. So far, so good. The reason for the experiment isn’t because I now hate Unholy. I think Unholy is still my favorite spec. And truth be told, I’m already missing my ghoul (not for his damage, but for his sparkling wit). But I thought with the changes to Frost to facilitate dual-wielding that have been introduced in the 3.2 patch, this was as good a time as any to try something new.

Actually, I decided to blow 1000g for Dual Spec so that I could play around with one spec while leaving my original Unholy spec alone. It was, perhaps, a frivolous use of 1000g. I could have just spent the 50g, or whatever it is these days, to spec one way, and then another 50g to spec back (or to something else). But I figured I might have a need for two specs anyway (DPS and tanking, or PVE and PVP, or who knows), so what the heck.

I’m using a 53/18 Frost spec that I found in a forum post on the DK forums. This particular spec focuses on Obliterate to be the big damage dealer. Frost Strike appears to be the main runic power dump, though I’m not quite sure yet if I should forgo Death Coil completely in favor of Frost Strike, or if I should mix them up. I need to do a bit more research. Also, I’m not exactly sure the best way to work Howling Blast into my rotation. I’m going to have to experiment a bit to see when and how best to use HB.

Currently, for weapons, I’m using two Reaper of Dark Souls, which can be obtain fairly cheaply from the Ebon Blade quartermaster (assuming you are revered with that faction). I’ve enchanted one blade with Fallen Crusader, and the other with Razorice. I plan to have Rubeola craft herself a Titansteel Bonecrusher as soon as she has enough titansteel. I’m also toying with buying an Ironforge Smasher from the Argent Tournament. They go for 25 Champion’s Seals. Rubeola has enough seals to buy one, but I can’t quite convince myself that it will be enough of an upgrade over her current swords to justify spending the seals. If Rubeola were going into instances and raiding, then yes, the upgrade would be worth it. But I’m not currently doing those things, and mobs die plenty fast with just the two swords.

For glyphs, I’m using Icy Touch,  Obliterate, and Frost Strike.

I’m not sure what to do about my ghoul. I could summon him ever 3 minutes for a 1 minute increase in DPS, perhaps. Is that what Death Knights without Master of Ghouls tend to do? If so, I should probably invest in a Glyph of Raise Dead so I don’t need to worry about lugging around corpse dust wherever I go.

So far, I’m liking new play style of dual-wielding quite a bit. I’m not yet sure that I like it as much as my Unholy build. But it’s new and I need to get used to it a bit more before I can decide.

Tale of Two Warlocks, Part 2

As I explained in part 1 of Tale of Two Warlocks, I’m currently leveling both an affliction warlock (a Gnome named Marol) and a demonology warlock (a Blood Elf named Orgaria). As a bit of background, Orgaria was the first horde character I leveled to 70 back in BC. Marol came along much later. I didn’t actually expect to level Marol all the way to 70. She was just for fun, really.

Lots of stuff happened has happened since I leveled these two characters to 70. I wasn’t quite sure I’d ever get back to either of them. But here I am, leveling both.

Over the weekend I managed to level Marol to 74. She’s already visited Dalaran, and in fact, I think she’s hanging out there now. Orgaria has gotten to 73 and will soon join Marol for cocktails in Legerdemain Lounge. Except, of course, for the fact that they are on different severs. And would kill each other on sight.

When I got started leveling these two, I fully expected to enjoy Marol’s affliction spec over Orgaria’s demonology spec. But a strange thing happened on the way to the forum. I found I really like leveling with the Felguard. He can take a beating, although I do occasionally need to use Health Funnel to keep him alive. But that’s ok. That’s just part of his charm.

But I have to be honest with myself. The reason I like playing Orgaria more than Marol may have more to do with the fact that she’s a sexy Blood Elf. Marol is a cutey, there’s no denying that. But she doesn’t quite have the charm of Orgaria.

Plus, Orgaria looks really good in her Frostwoven set.

Death & Taxes

This post actually has nothing to do with either death or taxes. But that popped into my head when I created the post, so that’s what I used as the title.

What this post does have to do with is Rubeola getting a Talbuk mount by becoming exalted with the Kurenai in Nagrand. Getting to exalted with the Kurenai is surprisingly easy, especially for a level 80 Death Knight. I think Rubeola started out neutral with them. The first order of business was to do absolutely every Kurenai quest I could find that Rubeola hadn’t already done. It turned out that she hadn’t done any of them, which was a little surprising as I thought I would have at least done the first couple of quests in Nagrand before heading to Northrend. But I guess I was so eager to get to Northrend that I dropped everything as soon as I hit 68.

Anyway, upon completing all of the Kurenai quests, Rubeola was revered. Your mileage may very a lot, though. Rubeola is human, so she has what I consider one of the best racials in the game (if you mostly solo, like I do): Diplomacy. Diplomacy gets you an extra 10% rep. Which means that when Rubeola kills an ogre, she gets 11 rep with the Kurenai, instead of 10. And when she hands in 10 beads, she gets 550 rep, instead of 500.

As a side issue, why do humans get Diplomacy? The Orcs seem to me to be a lot more diplomatic. I know. Historically the Orcs weren’t diplomatic at all, being corrupted by demons and such. But they are a lot better now, and I think Thrall is far more the diplomat than the king is. But I digress.

Once Rubeola had finished all the quests she could for the Kurenai (including Durn the Hungerer, which is quite soloable at 80), she started in on killing ogres. 1 ogre gets you 10 rep (or 11 if you are human). Plus, you have a chance to loot Obsidian Warbeads from each ogre killed. Hand in 10 beads and you get another 500 rep (550 if you are human). A level 80 Death Knight with slightly-better-than-crap-gear can generally one or two shot any Nagrand ogre. It helps to be Uhnoly with a ghoul as the ghoul gives you more killing options. If you’re competing with others for ogres to kill, you can start the ghoul on the next ogre while you finish off the current one.

The whole rep grind, from neutral to exalted was just a couple of days. Not bad at all.

Personally, the Talbuk mounts are some of my favorite mounts in the game. As I’ve probably said before, the Undead epic mount is my favorite of the land mounts. But the Talbuk is a close second. The only way that Rubeola can get an Undead mount is from Baron Rivendare, and since I don’t think that’s happening any time soon, I’m going to have to settle for a Talbuk.

One cool thing about getting exalted with the Kurenai (or Mag’har on the Horde side) is that there are a total of 8 mounts that you can buy. That gets you a long way to getting the 50 you need to get an albino drake.

A Tale of Two Warlocks

I have two warlocks: Orgaria (pictured first) and Marol (pictured second). One is Horde, and the other is Alliance. One is just getting started on Howling Fjord and is level 71. The other has finished Borean Tundra and is level 73. They are both tailors. One is an enchanter. The other hopes to be an enchanter some day. One is a Demonology warlock and the other is an Affliction warlock.

Oh, and one is evil (*cackle*) and the other is eviler (*giggle*). Can you guess which is which?

Felguard Go OOM

I was leveling Orgaria, my Horde warlock, a bit last night. Late last night. Ok. 3am, to be exact. I couldn’t sleep, if you must know.

Anyway, Orgaria was my first Horde toon to 70 back in BC. And I’ve never really played her since. I did mange to get her to Howling Fjord, however, and occasionally I play her with the intention of leveling her to 80. What? It could happen.

Orgaria happens to be spec’d Demonology. Truth be told, I’m partial to Affliction. Marol, my Alliance warlock, is Affliction, and I really like the way it plays. But because I already have an Affliction warlock, I figure I should level my other warlock as Demonology.

So there I was, killing bad guys in Howling Fjord. Except, as a Blood Elf warlock, maybe I’M the bad guy. Anyway, I was killing guys in Howling Fjord, when I noticed that Orgaria’s Felguard was OOM basically all the time. What the heck was up with that? I took a quick look at Orgaria’s talents and noticed that for some strange reason I’d never put a point in Mana Feed. Basically, Mana Feed gives your pet mana whenever you Life Tap. I’m Life Tapping all the time, so if I’d put a point in Mana Feed, the Felguard would always have mana.

I could go back and respec, but my plan is to keep questing until 71 and put a point in then. On the other hand, it occurs to me that if I screwed up putting a point in Mana Feed, what else might I have screwed up?

Better go look at the rest of Orgaria’s spec!

Wandering In The Wilderness

Apparently I’ve been gone for a while. I’ve not really been gone. But I obviously haven’t been updating this weblog. Sorry about that. I’m not promising I’m back. But I thought I might give a bit of an update about what I’ve been up to for the last couple of months.

Except, I’m not going to give much of an update because it’s kind of a secret. Instead, I’ll update what I’ve been up to with Veleni, Rubeola, and Lyune.

I’m afraid I’ve not been up to much of anything with Veleni. I’ve logged in a few times to say high to my guild. But that’s about it.

Rubeola has been spending some time at the Argent Tournament. She has managed to become Rubeola of Darnassus. I had her do a bunch of quests in Teldrassil in order to get to exalted with the Night Elves. I wanted to make sure she was exalted before becoming Valiant of Darnassus, so she could get the title as well. She’s going to work on Exodar next and then the Dwarves. The Gnomes will be last, because getting rep with the Gnomes is the most difficult.

Lyune has done just a very little bit of questing in Howling Fjord. I did a bit of questing with her last night, in fact, and it was a lot of fun. More fun than I remember questing as a Shadow Priest to be. I’m hoping more questing in, but that depends on whether or not I continue to get distracted by my secret project.