I almost forgot

I mentioned the other day that I was working on a side project that was eating up some time.

It was finished shortly thereafter but I have a horrible memory and completely forgot that I said I would post the results.

Hopefully by now my longer-time readers will have noticed I have a new header.

(Go on, scroll up to look if you don’t know what I’m talking about. I know I had at least one person miss it entirely. Even though it fucking MOVES! If it was a snake it would have bit you! So says my Granny.)

I had been toying with the idea of getting a new banner since my original one was so BLAH. It was just a generic shot of a moon on a starry background. Whoop-de-doo.

An invite went out to the blogging community to submit ourselves for inclusion in the new Azeroth United project. (And it’s more than just bloggers, it’s a gathering place for the whole WoW communication-community.)

Catch was, they wanted a 200×200 pixel shot to represent my blog.

Duhhhhh…. I got nothing.

So that forced me to really kick it into high gear for designing a banner. Then I would have something to sample down to the appropriate size.

Was checking on the image size requirements for my banner on this blog and noticed that the site accepts gifs. And if it accepts gifs then it accepts animated gifs!

Downloaded the latest copy of WoWModelViewer and I was off. This is really a neat toy to play around with. You can check out all sorts of gear, mounts, characters, NPCs, monsters and items – as well as their animations. For giggles find the Lich King files and select the “mount” animation; had me laughing pretty hard.

Got my banner done, sampled it down to submit to Azeroth United and then had one of those creative fits where I absolutely had to do another one.

Antidote

So yesterday’s post was a bit angry.

Just a teensy weensy bit.

At various points Sunday evening I was so mad I couldn’t formulate sentences.

On the plus side, I clean when I’m angry so the master bed/bath is sparkling. I was so torqued I even did some dishes.

And I have come to the conclusion that the easiest way for me to get something changed is to rant about it on this blog.

Good things happen when I rant.

It’s a bizarre form of positive reinforcement.

My First Impression of Trial of the Grand Crusader

That’s right, we were scheduled to run the 10-man version of the Trial of the Grand Crusader.

We have successfully cleared the normal version at least twice as a guild so it was time to step up.

So here’s how it went down:

.

.

.

It didn’t.

We couldn’t get enough people on.

So I don’t know what the Trial of the Grand Crusader is like.

Incoming spew of venom in 5…

4…

3…

2…

1…

Haste is Swedish Fish

I’m working on a side project and it’s eating up some time. But it’s one of those things that won’t rest until it’s done so it’s driving me nuts.

As soon as I’m done and happy with it I will be posting the results to share.

…

Wednesday night I ran VoA 25 and 10.

The T8.5 gloves dropped in the 25 and I won the roll against another mage. Minor upgrade for me since I’m sporting the T8.

Broke down to the 10-man and the other mage left.

Realized after the fight that I was only a couple emblems away from being able to buy the T9 gloves – which have haste instead of hit. Nummy nummy haste.

Dammit.

Logged on Thursday evening with some time left on the item to be traded.

Pull up Recount and find the other mage’s name.

I had to cheat…

I got enough tokens to join the Brew of the Month Club.

Turning that quest in, by the way, does NOT count towards any Loremaster achievements. Blizzard’s a bunch of bitches sometimes.

I’ll easily be able to get enough tokens to get the pink elekk, I should have that in about 4 days.

That just left one thing I needed to do to get the Brewfest achievements done to earn the Brewmaster title…

I needed the stupid mount.

Of course I couldn’t get one to drop in my group and I don’t want to wait until the end of the festival…

So I cheated.

I bought the hops and transformed a random mount into something more festive.

The hops buff this year actually lasts through dismounts and such, major improvement over last year.

What’s that at the top?

A long, strange trip has been completed?

You know what that means!

Back in Black!

Well, actually – Back in Arcane, but that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

Arcane.

Was.

Buffed.

/cheer

That’s right ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages: Arcane received a little patch love.

I logged on real quick after loading the patch to do Direbrew with some guildies (got me a remote, woot!) and totally forgot about the changes.

Wow, I’m getting a lot of Missile Barrage procs… my mana isn’t hurting very much guess I can push my stacks… hey! My blast stack goes to 4 now!

Oh yeah…

Hot damn!

Logged back in later for the 10 man ToCr raid (normal) and hit up a training dummy with both specs.

Instant Headache

Just add Brewfest!

Or, Jusht add Brewfest! … hic!

Horde is getting hosed.

Seriously.

Right now, on my server, there are 3 bugs that I’m aware of with Brewfest that I have heard from a reliable source are not being experienced on the Alliance side of the same server.

1. The S.T.O.U.T. quest is bugged. In order to hit the damn guy you have to either disable all your adds (I did not try to verify this option) or stand on the guy and drink/throw. This is best accomplished by picking a side where he pauses and starting to chug when he gets close to you. There is a rumor that this is being caused by a specific add on but Blizzard didn’t know which one last I heard.
2. The Dark Iron Dwarf attack is suddenly bugged. I was able to complete it earlier on Sunday but by Sunday night, we were having the same issue throwing the mugs as in the S.T.O.U.T. quest. Follow the same advice to try and remedy that. Trouble is trying to get 50 other people to pay attention and make the same changes. And even then, it’s probably not going to happen.
3. The troll vendor is bugged. Two options to get your troll brews: either stand behind the vendor to talk to him or find the troll vendors at any of the minor beer gardens.

A guild mate got the remote control, which is very cool, and we tried to use it on Monday. Apparently additional instances could not be launched as we spent 3 minutes staring at a loading screen for BRD while listening to the Brewfest festivities around us. Eventually the screen cleared and we were still standing in front of the gates of Org. But this is why mages are cool. Port to Stonard and flew over. Oh, and the cooldown was used on the fail mole machine.

Simulated Manatee Sex

See the kinds of things that come up at pirate parties?

I hope you all had a wonderful National Talk Like A Pirate Day, I know I did.

There will be pictures at some point… I have to wait for them to be sent to me.

…

Brewfest is up and running, but I won’t talk about that until Tuesday or Wednesday as I am not sure which parts of what I did were truly dailies and which were the non-daily holiday quests.

The one really important tip I have so far:

When doing the Coren Direbrew kills make sure that only ONE PERSON talks to him at a time. We lost a summons when 2 of us tried talking.

…

Got into a 25 VoA Friday night.

Yarrrrr!

It’s National Talk Like A Pirate Day!

What are you doing reading my blog?

Go do something piratey!

http://www.talklikeapirate.com/piratehome.html

Shiver me timbers!

Note to Self

Dear Self,

Can we for once try NOT to load new adds or make keybinding changes right before a raid? Or the night before the raid when we KNOW we won’t have time to remember that we did that?

Thanks,

Arioch

…

We’re finally trying to get regular raiding nights set up.

And it’s been trying.

But that’s a whole ‘nother incoherent ranting post.

…

Monday night I had the bright idea to change the keybind on my main nuke for both arcane and fire.

Not a big change, just a little teensy change.

And that little change of course rippled through a few lesser-used spells, but no worries.

Spent some time at the target dummy, ran through both specs a few times and decided it would work for the time being.

I wanted to just relax for a little bit before logging off so I popped over to my reincarnated warrior to kill a few spiders.

Not enough rage.

Need more rage.

Oh FFS!