a new winter wardrobe.

Finally putting her leatherworking skills to use for personal reasons, a little bit of farming followed by a run to the auction house to spend just over 850g on leather and Eternal Air to make the vast majority of the Eviscerator’s collection. This was the choice: Which is the most fun, farming for hours to slowly gather a huge stack of Heavy Borean Leather or, OR! Blowing a large chunk of money on buying them from others and recouping the money from fun and interesting quests? Of course it’s the latter.

Of course, the old quandary of Defence over Resilience resurfaced, given that the items stack plenty of agility with The PvP Stat in order to stay uncrittable whilst keeping the Dodge rating in check and not bothering with any sort of mucking around in the realms of Parry and Block.

It’s her first major change of outfit since arriving in Northrend, with the exception of some fringe accessories, thanks to small-improvement drops being eschewed in favour of the set bonus of the Merciless Gladiator Outland set and, of course, those gorgeous shoulderpads. The replacements are perilously close to bordering on chunky ugliness, although the rest makes up for it. One guild member’s first reaction was “Woah! Cleavage!” and he got a /slap. ;)

So, there you go, bad points, the shouldergear. Good points, with a minor change of rings, necklace and trinkets, it’s a snazzy all-in-one soloing, tanking and PvP outfit. A test run in normal Utgarde Pinnacle proved to be a crit-free crazy amount of DPS and threat, topping the DPS meters for the first time ever! Now to try heroics, maybe after spending a bit more money on some enchants, perhaps.

Anj would like to confess to her most shameful achievement, nothing to do with recently dashing around low-level regions to boost home city repuatations (for fun, because that’s what achievements can be if you want them to! If they’re a burden, hey, you don’t have to do them!), more like… (ahem)… My Sack is “Gigantique”. Well, you see, now listen, no, just hear me out for a sec… After the bag drop from Obsidian Sanctum, there was only a small number of extra slots needed to have BaudBag display a neat and tidy four rows of 20 slots (not including quiver, mind you).

So with no desire to need the creation of a whole new row, Anj has reached her bagspace cap. Yeah, okay, not since Wintersong of the Shattered Sun has so much money been spent on so little. I am weak. :(

it’s the nutty, nutty patch 2.4 show!

Yes, it finally arrived and it’s madness, madness I tell you! But what does it mean? Well, for one thing it means that the once-every-thirty-damn-seconds “Whn iz pach 2.4 comeing out?” questions in city chat have been thoroughly nerfed, yay! Also, the Sunwell Isle, the honour changes, the daily quests, the combat log, the… the…

To be honest I’ve barely scratched the surface of the new stuff. I had a brief look at the new island but not for long, as populated as it is entirely expected to be on Day One, and my computer being of the type that gets nervous twitches in Shattrath City, it’s not what you might call a trouble-free experience. Not as bad as I expected though. I had other things on my mind…

Well, first there was the job of resorting all the addons. WoWMatrix updated them all fine, no problems there, although Parrot (my scrolling combat text “of awesomeness” mod) is doing nothing towards displaying the actual combat damage done, and DamageMeters is similarly lackadaisical in its operation which must have something to do with the reworked combat log stuff. I don’t know. I don’t work for Blizzard. Omen, on the other hand, has gone somewhere entirely WEIRD and SCARY! The highly irritating on-screen messages and border flashing when I passed 90% of kitty’s threat were easily disabled before but now, nope. You can disable all warnings but I’m still going to get crap on my screen telling me things I should already know because, being a hunter, keeping an eye on a threat meter is something I’ve become quite accustomed to. Try it, mages. If you have a threat meter, whatever it is, try looking at it once in a while. Thanks. Omen2, you get no milk and cookies until you sort out the mess you’ve made of your otherwise excellent mod.

I like the new notes area for the guild bank, even though I expected a small window to the side of the tab that’s being viewed rather than a wide, bank-sized expanse of space that you can only type something like 500 characters into. I still used it to whole-heartedly tell off every single member of my guild for being the ultimate tight-wad in using the carefully gathered funds for their own repairs without putting anything in themselves.

I don’t like the channel filtering. In a nutshell, to keep myself able to track a guild conversation anywhere, even a city where the nutters reside, I created a new chat window just for guild talk and placed it above the regular chat window. This still works fine, but it seems that every single time I log on (!) I have to open the main chat window options to enable and the disable guild and officer chat just to stop the same text appearing pointlessly in two separate windows. Not happy.

And that’s… the patch. As far as I’ve seen. The day was also filled with doing some alt-work as Girlpants (me) and Bupu (Powdor), two draenei girls hungry for blood and justice, a shaman and priest respectively. Also made a few changes to Anj’s gear set-up, like swapping the Beast Lord Leggings for the PvP pants (for the extra stamina and crit-rate which had been dipping too low, as well as coordinating better with the PvP boots I’m still wearing, and all without even breaking the Beast Lord set(4) bonus, yay!) and spending crazy money on fitting a Stabalised Eternium Scope onto my recently-acquired Lohn’goron, Bow of the Torn-heart which may or may not be a drop in DPS but I’ve wanted to go back to a trusty bow for ages and it is such a beautiful bow.

It is a bee-yootiful bow! I love it and I want to keep it! Daddy! Can I keep it?!

(pretty patch photograph by sheeshoo and is shared under a Creative Commons license)

crazy beast lady.

Steamvaults and Mechanar both completed in the last two days, another fragment of Karazhan key as well as the bottom half of the Arcatraz key. Woot, this is crazy progression! Well, it is for me.

Firstly, Steamvaults. Regular questing buddies Ghem and Powdor came along, together with the Night Elf Priest that joined us for the infamous disconnection attempt at Shadow Labs as well as an ex-Guild member from way back when we had less than ten unique players. Given that he’s a balance Druid with full epic gear, for once I wasn’t at the top of the damage meters – not something I’m used to. But Beast Lord Mantle dropped from the last boss, so I was happy enough.

Next up, having worked through the introductory quest line for the Arcatraz key during the morning, I quickly signed up to a group of strangers to get through The Mechanar in the evening. Back to the top of the damage meters, I was told I did “really good kiting” for the second boss with the annoying fire elementals and, wooty toot, Beast Lord Helm dropped with no other Hunters around to compete with me on the roll! Yep, I’m pretty happy. I’m getting pretty bored with my PvP gear, not just because it has stamina over attack power (a Good Thing for PvP but for solo and instances I’d rather have more damage) but I need a change of outfit and a drop from purple to blue is good enough given the set bonuses the Beast Lord Armor.

So… yeah. Look at me, movin’ forward.