The One Where I Took Lots of Screenshots

Yes I know, I have enough characters, but I love levelling! Plus it contributes to the Year of Faff!

Since my last post I have made a new druid, who is currently residing in the all Druid Guild Druids of the Beast over on Shadowsong. She will likely go the same way of my poor Warlock in The Tweeters guild on Doomhammer and be rarely logged in, but I will level them both eventually and enjoy being able to connect with people I interact with on Twitter!

In other news, The Friday Fun Run group went to Mogu'shan Vaults! I know, a proper grown up raid!

I spent the Thursday and Friday actually levelling my priest to get to 90, and she hit 90 at about 4pm. Queue me rushing around alts finding Timeless Isle gear, and taking said priest off to the Isle for her free Burden!

The raid itself went fine, but I definitely felt a little overwhelmed healing wise, and definitely felt very low on mana on more than one occasion. I need to do some more reading up on holy at 90, but for now, I have switched her to disc and will try that :)

I've also spent some time on the alts, with the Druid looking for Aeonaxx, the hunter actually getting the mount to drop from Stonecore (Woohoo!!), and more levelling with friends :)

 Peekaboo!

Friend's shield just spinning in mid-air.... 

The Drafia are still raiding, and still working on killing Garrosh (got to Phase 3 this week! Progress!!) However, it seems this week, Thrall decided he was hungry and dived face first into our Noodle Cart!

I also finally figured out how to get up on the bridge by Huolon! (Yes I'm aware this is old news to most, but its taken me a while :-p) I spent a nice half hour there AFK while i browsed Imgur.

And because this post doesn't have enough screenshots yet, have this one that I don't even remember taking!

In wider WoW news, new character models for human female have been released! Even when I played Alliance, humans were one of the last races that I would choose for a few reasons. The biggest reason is that I felt playing a human in a fantasy game was a waste of a character, but also, the fact that the model itself looked completely naff.

I am so glad that the new model looks so good, it gives me hope for the rest that we are yet to see (I'm even starting to hope that troll females will have more than one face to choose from!)

Apart from this, I have mostly been playing Donkey Kong on my 3DS, and am awaiting the arrival of Pokemon Y (the first Pokemon game I will have ever owned) to see what all the fuss is about!

The Important Things in Life

A few things have happened in real life this weekend that have made me appreciate what, and who, I have.

You've heard me talk about my Nephew many times. On Saturday morning, we heard the sad news that his other Grandfather (his Mum's Father) had suddenly died from a heart attack. My Nephew's Mum and my brother and broken up (amicably) and she was due to be moving back in with her Father - much shock all round.

Due to this we had my Nephew all weekend as the last thing his Mum needed to worry about was a two year old running around.

Even though I didn't know her Dad very well, it was still a shock and made me want to re-establish my own relationships, both outside of the game and inside.

My very good friends Landerolin and Siorai have alt characters in my horde guild, and we spent the day yesterday levelling together, nattering on Vent (until I had to go afk to help with dinner).

Kudos for those of you who can tell where we are!

I also have applied and been accepted for one of my old Alliance alts back on SWC to rejoin The Wanderers, so I can re-establish old friendships there also. My shaman has started the levelling path between 85 and 90 (currently 86!) though she was very confused when visiting the inn at Dalaran:

Yep, someone had managed to get Gymer the Storm King up here and he is dead in Dalaran - at least it looks that way. I'm starting to think it may be a bug as the corpse has been there for a few days now (and I doubt someone is purposefully bringing a new one here every time it despawns!)

My druid is settling in well in Draenor, she has a nice new transmog also!

Her gear is also coming along nicely, she has gone from ilvl 494 on SWC to a current ilvl of 517! She's done a bit of Flex raiding and has started making her way through LFR, and is currently queued for ToES for the legendary part (tho I doubt I shall get all the way to the end of the legendary questline, already have umpteen characters at various parts of it.)

My gold making plans for the next expansion keep going awry as I keep spending the gold....

I needed a Traveller's Tundra Mammoth okay? Honest!

Iron Skyreaver is a Go!

So yeah...I bought it (shhh its okay, we won't look at what's left of my bank balance!)

Apart from being a pretty funky looking mount, it also runs rather weirdly, and when you fly it seems to alternate between normal flying and Sky Golem style flying. (If you wonder what I mean by this, here' s a video: Sky Golem in Flight, complete with barrel roll).

Also when in flight the two side cannon-esque things shoot fire which is pretty awesome!

As you can see in the pictures, I've finally moved my lonesome druid over to Draenor from SWC - this means she can finally get some nice gear and not be left out in the cold in Normal MSV level gear. (I can also stop feeling guilty at abandoning her for my hunter and all my other characters - huzzah!) While it is nice to have her over here, I still feel decidedly odd at her being a Tauren. Its at times like this that I wish Blood Elves could be druids as she is most definitely still an elf at heart! I could have made her a troll druid but I already have one of these, and definitely wanted the bird flight form again. I guess I shall just have to get used to her until druids can be other horde races!

My druid was my main through all of Cataclysm and the second part of WotLK, so for me to leave her behind and ignore her was a massive thing for me. She was my first level 90, yet she has missed experiencing all the fun new stuff in each patch after MSV. 

To make it up to her, she has a nice new server to use her Tailoring on, and I have started gearing her up with some shiny new gear. She hasn't quite made it into Siege of Orgrimmar yet, but with the Throne of Thunder LFR thigns she has picked up, and the two pieces of gear from her first Heroic Scenario, she is well on her way there!

Guild wise, The Drafia is still making it's way through Normal Siege of Orgrimmar. I'm back on the raid team (and actually enjoying it now I'm not trying to lead it!), and we are up to Garrosh. We've had a fair few goes on him and have managed to get to Phase Three now, even getting him down to 24%, so we're getting there :)

In other news, I found a really cool looking Boar last night while levelling yet another alt, so had to take the hunter out to tame it - am yet to think of a suitable name for him though (and will likely still be stuck using my Sporebat in raids, ho hum ^^)

Am still trying to find a suitable transmog to go with him ^^ Will keep you guys updated if i do find a good one!

It Ain't Broken Yet!

So, all seems to be going well, People haven't upped an left in disgust and I haven't broken the guild system yet!

I even managed to cobble together a full group for Flexi last night with some different tanks and some friends of a guild member to make up numbers. We didn't get as far as usual, but it's a start!

Some Mid Raid activities that happened during break!

As well as our ex-GM not being around now, we need to get used to standing on our own two feet and doing Flex without him hand holding us through it. So I need to work on actually being "in charge" rather than sitting back and minding shop.

Other than that, things are going smoothly.

I've made a few minor tweaks so far, like changing the colours on the guild crest slightly so you can actually see them, and organising the guild ranks. Also promoted a few of the more regular trustworthy people to Officer rank, and fiddled about with the guild website ^^

Next on the agenda (and actually already ongoing!) is a big recruitment drive and fundraising for the guild bank so that people get to keep their guild repairs! (If any lovely people have some good suggestions of how I do this (or how I set up bloody TSM) then I'm all ears!)

I still haven't decided if this is a scary or awesome thing that has happened yet as I've always been happy to be a follower, but we shall see :)

In other news, I attempted tanking Vale of Eternal Sorrows LFR on my paladin yesterday - and came to the conclusion that she is not "quite" ready for that, so I shall be inflicting her upon a ToT LFR soon (if I can find one!).

I also want to link to this fantastic thing that has been happening on the General WoW forums - http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/9051918105

A heroic raider has set up a group for Flex raiding on Saturday, primarily for people who have been unable to get a group before due to not meeting the (often ridiculous) ilvl requirements being asked on peoples' servers.

The group does appear to be full at the moment, but it is a fantastic idea and looks to be being taken up by others as well so good on you WoW Community! I knew you were still alive!

Riding Without Stabilisers!

So - this happened about an hour ago:

(This happened after a fairly long talk in Vent, not just out of the blue so not as much panic as you would assume!)

Our GM had been raiding elsewhere on an alt and when not raiding offline doing RL things, so felt it wasn't fair for him to keep the guild lead when he's not around if anything does go wrong.

As the most active officer, I've been pretty much minding shop for a while anyway (and had previously been in a similar situation with The Wanderers) so didn't mind taking over the leadership.

So I've had my practice run (rad: with stabilisers) and now its time to really run the guild and make sure it works (read: riding without stabilisers!).

A fairly frightening prospect even if essentially nothing has changed but my guild rank!

Now I need to make sure I'm fully switched on and operating for the good of my guild and my guidlies as opposed to just faffing along with it all.

Whilst I am aware that 2014 is The Year of Faff, I feel that I need to be at least partially aware of things that I could ignore or let slide before, like recruitment drives, guild making efforts etc etc.

First point of business - reducing the amount of guild repairs that everyone (even non-raiders) have as they are very high and guild bank reserves are very low!

We shall see how things go from here ^^

New Year Resolutions are Hard!

So yeah, I may have slightly forgotten about the blog posting!

In my defence I'm a bit ill at the moment so haven't been at the computer much :)

In other news, my RaF characters are still levelling, along with a pair of monks for fast XP! I now have a level 51 Druid levelled purely by granted levels so far, not sure how high she will end up going ^^

Yes, still in starter gear! :D

As we can no longer see our RaF links on the website, I'm not entirely sure when my account link runs out so am racing against time to level my alts as fast as I can ^^

Other than that, have levelled Inscription on my Warlock to give her something useful to do, and am just generally faffing about atm :)

Happy 2014!

I have started as I have said I would - with cleaning my PC!

I'm yet to clean the d3esk around it as you can see by this pic, but the PC is running quieter and all should be well :)

Tis a monster of a PC but it has served me well ^^

I have also started yet another pair of RaF characters (that makes four pairs currently) but with the intention of speed levelling an Alliance Druid via Grant a Level, and seems as though I've partially done this already with an Alliance Hunter, I need to level another pair to get some more granted levels before the linked accounts expire!

I have also started levelling a char on Doomhammer with @MrandMrsWow's Guild The Tweeters! She's only level 20 odd at the moment, and as per usual I have gotten myself sidetracked, but I shall return there eventually!

I have also made myself a US account while everything was on sale, so if anyone has any server/guild recommendations send them my way!