The beautiful piece of art below was gifted to me by Fyreuni of Daily Quests! She did a brilliant job- Thank you again, Fyreuni!

My own contribution was a picture of Vanha of The Art of the Hunt.

More of the pictures can be found on this page.

I’ve not managed to find out if there’s anything new happening this year with Winter Veil, but I know that the achievements for the meta have stayed much the same and so, if you’re doing it on an alt, or didn’t make it last year, I figure my

2008 guide to winter veil

achievements, quests and some of the shinies that you can get will be of some use!   If anyone knows of anything new happening this year, or if I discover something myself, I’ll add it to the guide asap!

I may be slightly mad, a bit tired and my fingers are sore from pressing healing buttonz hard… but I has my puppy from Looking for Multitudes (and a hug from the dev team!) /happy /sleep

The model is really nice, the texturing and animations are sweet – like the corehound. Though, as you can see, he has some unsavoury habits…

On a separate, but related,  note: I love the new LFG tool!

Currently, I get to stare at this:

Why?

WHY!?

Because this is so goddamned ugly:

[Cloak of the Fallen Cardinal] I know that there isn’t much variety by way of capes and, sure, a half-cape now and then is sort-of cool… but could we not please have something which looks at least a little more cool than, well, a level 10 cloak? /saddruid

(Ok, ok I know I spend most of  my time in tree form but… shhh!  It’s still a terrible looking cape =( )

Seeing all the awesome-cute chibis Baenhoof’s been drawing recently made me want to do my own, and an evening of trying to kill mobs highly resistant to frost spells transmuted into this little doodle:

I have to admit, though, once I got past those my lackluster mage ’suddenly’ seemed to be a killing machine, slicing through enemies with bolts of deathly cold.  Hehe.  Pvp was a lot more fun, too, as I was nearing the end of the bracket… then I stupidly tripped over thirty and became Squishy Mcsquishface the Squishful.  This mage might actually get somewhere, though, she’s now over double the level of my last  one!

In other news…

For the Horde Eastern Kingdoms is, by far, the easier of the two old-world Loremaster achievements – but having done this one, it’s given me the determination to get my teeth into Loremaster of Kalimdor – just over 100 quests to go there.  I suspect, though, that the new patch will distract me away from it for a few days at least, hehe.

Silv got his wings, yesterday, much to my delight – it’s one of those spells which I always felt slightly envious of – especially at screenshot time.  He’s also rocking a very bloody familiar shield… Still, at least it’s prettier than most of the Northrend levelling shields – for which I’ll likely have to give up this one soon.

Also, apparently I still have a really bad case of altitis and shaman-lovin’:

I’ve promised myself to get on a bit with Loremaster before I level this baby-shammy up, though!  I always find the low-levels a nice distraction when I’m feeling a bit over-done on my main, though, so we’ll see how long it takes me to cave and play him s’more.

He’s rocking the cloth shoulders, at the moment, because I got them for my mage and tauren-priest-in-waiting – I’ve enough shards to buy the mail ones now, though, so he’ll hopefully be rocking those as soon as I can be bothered to drag myself over to Wintergrasp, hehe.  I just wish you could buy the chest pieces with Wintergrasp shards, too… re-doing all of the Argent Tourny dailies is not appealing and I’ve too much else to buy with badges.  Oh well, maybe later.

“Deino,

Ta’zinni sorry for disappearing on ya. If you’re reading this letter, then I be dead.  I been forced to work for Malygos’s armies under threat that the family would be killed if I didn’t. Ta’zinni wasn’t gonna let that happen!  Don’t worry about me, just keep your kids safe. I have them fooled and I’m sabotaging them from the inside.

I love you, sistah!

Ta’zinni”

This quest in Dragonblight, and its Alliance equivalent have always cut me up a little inside – you’re ostensibly overturning one of Malygos’ plots, taking down evil subordinates etc. etc – the usual fantasy hero stuff and then these letters drop in your lap.  My troll warrior was the most recent of my characters to go through this quest and I reckoned she’d be particularly cut up because of it – being she’s a troll, same as the npc, and I feel it would confuse her straight forward, cheerful, if slightly bellicose attitude.

_{In case of any confusion, since I use multiple online handles – yes, this picture is also up on my deviantart account.}

This year, we see a new holiday sashaying onto the social calendar - Pilgrim’s Bounty! This holiday is an in-game version of  Thanksgiving Day – the latest one to fall prey to Blizzard’s increasing lust for content external to raiding and the general ’srs bsns’ of end-game day to day drudgery.

Achievements

Pilgrim is the meta achievement, for which you get the Pilgrim title and a cute [Plump Turkey] – emergency rations for Northrend! *grin*

• “FOOD FIGHT!”
• Pilgrim’s Paunch
• Pilgrim’s Progress
• Terokkar Turkey Time
• Turkey Lurkey
• Now We’re Cookin’
• Pilgrim’s Peril
• Sharing is Caring
• The Turkinator

The Quests

Each capital city gives a daily and a smattering of quests – each requiring, of course, items that the other capital cities supply.  Don’t make the mistake I made and go tearing off from the first one to get the ingredients asked for – buy pumpkins, sweet potatoes, and cranberries and buy plenty (I picked up 40 of each) as otherwise you’ll need to run back to get more when you (inevitably) get the follow-up quests

Spice Bread is a recipe you get from the cooking trainer. If you’ve already levelled cooking, chances are you have it!  It requires flour and spices, which the pilgrim vendors have.

Take extra, but don’t cook it! A lot of follow-on quests from the ‘craft 20 of x’ require you to create and take 5 of said item on to another city or bring extra. If you craft extra before you get that follow-up, you’ll have extra food floating about.  But fear not, there’s a use for that extra food!  For one of each created food item, and a vendor bought basket, you can create:

[Bountiful Feast]

For seven days, a very cheap, easy to make version of a fish feast!  Except, from the tooltips, it gives one more spellpower.  Hmm.

Pilgrim Clothing & Turkey Shooter

Pilgrim clothing and turkey shooters are available as rewards from the daily quests.  It’ll take at least two days to get all of the items you need to complete the holiday achievement (though a very fast two days if you managed to do them all before the first quest reset). Turkey shooters only have one charge so don’t waste them unnecessarily until you’ve got you achievement – then have fun creating random turkeys! Preferably not used on your main tank just as they pull.

You only need two pieces of pilgrim clothing for the achievement – the hat and any of the chest pieces.  the shoes are entirely optional.  Nice for completing an RP outfit, if your character actually shows shoes on their feet…

The Spirit of Sharing

10% extra rep bonus! This is a nice buff if you’ve not topped off rep gains – perhaps more one for alts, rerollers and late starters.  It seemed to work for me in Sethekk, too, so if you’re looking to get TBC reps topped off for achievements, you might wish to check that out.

Turkinator

Pain in the rear end of a quest if it’s busy.  for those with a spammable attack  you want a macro like:

/tar Wild /cast MOONFARESPAMLOLZ

and run around like a loony, hoping you can find enough turkeys.  This is possibly amongst the most annoying quests I’ve ever done – it’d be fine if it were 20 or even 30 turkeys, but getting 40 in a row when there are a bazillion others around?  Painful.  Hordeside, I found Venomweb Vale (recommended by a guildy then tested myself) to be the best place – loads of them, relatively closely spaced and less competition than other areas.  I wore my resto gear so that I could spam more moonfire – I ran oom too quickly in feral spec/gear.

Table Locations

• Thunder Bluff – At the bottom of the front elevators
• Orgrimmar – Right Outside the Gates
• Undercity – Within the courtyard, just inside the front gate
• Silvermoon – Out the front of the city, on the road towards the scar

• Exodar – In front of the city, within the ‘wall’
• Darnassus – Past the warriors terrace, inside the city
• Stormwind – Outside the gates, a little way down the road
• Ironforge – Outside the front door, to the left

Shiny New Holidays

I like the way they’ve done this Holiday – I was assuming that getting the Pilgrim’s clothing would be another grind of holiday tokens.  Giving them with the dailies was a nice touch – I’m guessing they decided to do this because the holiday is only one week long, so not giving the chance for people with less time to grind tokens of any sort.  The whole event takes around two days to complete, if you can find the rogues, so it’s not onerous but it does have a depth uncommon to some of the shorter holidays – a pile of silly crafting and ‘games’ such as food fights.

The Pilgrim’s Paunch achievement was the only quest I found a bit tedious - five of each food? Surely one piece of each would suffice.  I was a very fat moo, wibbling between one chair and the next! Let me tell you, riding a zeppelin on a full stomach is not fun!

Now they just need to find a holiday for august and we’ll have at least 1 event going on in each month of the year.

Something Drug mentioned here (an excellent post) got me rolling on actually writing this post – I’d been mulling over it for a while and, whilst it’s mostly spurious personal speculation about class differences I do want to also address an important point. Simple does not always mean easy.  Hell, it needs bolding and bright colours:

Simple does not always mean Easy

I’ma go ahead and quote the direct bit from Drug’s post which is the base on which I want to build.

There is a very common mis-perception: shamans are easy to play. Most of the time, those people point at the few healing tools shamans have and then at the great variety of spells of a holy priest or a tree. This is wrong.

He’s talking about healing, specifically shaman healing, but I think it applies in a broader context and is something which is particularly keenly felt by the non-strongly-thematic part of some hybrid classes – mainly Druids and Paladins but also to some extent Shamans.

Whoa, back up there, what the hell are you on about Aurik!?

The easiest example would be druids.  Druids are, thematically, healers, casters then tertially feral.  Their healing repertoire is decently large and they are strong healers.  Sum durid is make strong hot, if you will.  Some durids, however, can B 4 tank. Tanking druids… don’t have so many buttons.  In fact, tanking druids have a ridiculously small number of actual go-to buttons for tanking to the point where ‘lol swipe spam’ has become a comment I’ve heard from other tanks.  It’s, in my experience, a lot harder to get up-front threat on a druid compared to the other classes, unless you rely on a 3 minute cooldown every pull…

How about Paladins?

Paladins have a decent number of tanking buttons – not out of the box, to be sure (as I’m sure Honor’s has attested though I cannot find the post I was looking for, annoyingly) and even though their rotations can be simplified down, there’s a complexity there that outstrips faery fire, lacerate, mangle, swipe, swipe…  not only that, but they have the, I won’t say benefit, but quirk of having mana-based threat which can be front-loaded.  Whilst ret and prot have clear thematic ‘protectzor and smiter of teh bad guyz’, holy… doesn’t so much.

Holy  is often looked at as the red-headed-step-child of the healing classes – the stereotype of a moronic paladin who sits, slack-jawed, pressing one or two buttons over and over is unhealthily prevalent and is a very unfair one, in my opinion (though, I admit, I have encountered the stereotype often enough to wonder… A few good players keep me disabused of this notion!).  Whilst holy certainly has a lot more tricks up its sleeve than it used to, it cannot match the arsenal of priests or druids.  I’d say they were on par, tricks wise, with shamans, but with less of a range to let them shine.

and Shamans?

Healing as a shammy is fun, they have a decent but more limited set of spells than a druid or priest and no defensive cooldowns anywhere near that of a holydin.  They are niche and often misused (as Drug mentions) and fall prey to being in a dip at the moment between Blizzard deciding to buff one side or other of their healing.

Ok, now you’ve stated the obvious can we have a point, please?

Right, point, yes.

I’m getting there.

As I stated at the beginning – simple doesn’t mean easy.

Caveat Lector - this is mainly from my current five-man perspective and raids can be different, but you can take out ‘makes it harder’ and mostly turn it into ‘makes it harder to do as well as’ and it oft hits the raiding perspective.  To summarise the above:

• Tanking as my druid is harder than my prot warrior – I have less skills to use, thus less ways to pull aggro back when I lose it.  Against a boss I lose any advantage of my healing abilities (bar frenzied regen, but warriors have enraged regen) so it’s not like being a hybrid is making up for me having a lack of buttons for one particular spec by allowing me to utilise ones from other specs.  On that point, despite the fact warriors can now charge in-combat and gain rage, bears still have to expend rage to charge.  Hmm.
• Tanking as my druid is harder than my death knight – rage is harder to manage than runes and bear spec doesn’t afford the dps a death knight can put out to contribute to aggro – especially at lower gear levels.
• Healing as my shaman is harder than my druid – despite my druid being undergeared, she can ramp up healing when it’s needed and has more variety in the spells she can cast to cover small or large incoming damage as well as far better mana regen.
• Healing as my paladin is harder than any other class I’ve healed with – I only have a few buttons and I have to use all my class can give me to play well and not lose some DPS on AoE.

Contextual Bias

To be honest, half of this post came out of my annoyance that my low-level warrior can easily hold aggro versus people 4-5 levels above her – my druid just couldn’t.  I’d almost forsworn tanking again because it had become an exercise in frustration wherein I couldn’t generate enough rage to hold mobs, they’d turn to dps, further reducing my rage, I’d maybe get them back on me and then had exhausted my methods of returning mobs to myself  when the next would invariably tear off.  Waiting on a taunt cooldown feels like forever…

On my warrior?  If someone does manage to tear a mob off me I have two stuns, three ‘taunts’, a couple high threat moves and all the while I can spam heroic strike or cleave like it’s going out of fashion because I have so much rage.  More complex, more buttons, hellishly easier to play.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had this feeling – it was very much the same healing through some heroics (say Halls of Lightning) which I’d had trouble with at first on my shaman and yet my not-amazingly-geared druid did in a beat-the-quest-reset speed run with ease.  I had more buttons, more niche spells, better ability to ramp up or down healing.  Again – more complex, but easier.

I don’t know, in retrospect, whether this post is a rant at certain aspects of classes which I just happen to feel particularly frustrated with, but it’s a topic which I figured the rest of you might have some feeling on (and not necessarily the same feelings I have) and I wanted to get down on e-paper exactly what was irking me.  I feel better now.  I love my blog.

<3

On a completely different note, I had an interesting comment in a pug, when someone referred to me as ’she’ (was playing my trollette warrior) after a BoE had dropped and someone had offered it to me.  I refused, saying I’d replace it in a level with a crafted one which was better so they might as well sell it:  “Nah, if he was a girl, she’d have totally taken the shield to sell for herself,  lol’.  Nice to see stereotypes are alive and well in WoW!  Oddly, Sporeggar seems more gender-biased behaviour-wise than Bloodhoof ever did – but I may just have been insulated by the wonderful peoples there.