I’ve been away for a while. I got a life and – ironically – it was because of WoW. Two weeks ago I got my ass on a plane, then on a bus, and went to Ireland to play my cow.

Ok, that wasn’t exactly the plan.

Let’s say I went to Ireland to visit the real people behind the cows. We did end up playing WoW for quite a while. And Mario Kart on Wii. And got our asses kicked by a 4-year old.

Now that I’m back I can confirm that yes, people who are nice in WoW are also nice IRL and that The Game That Kills Social Lives doesn’t really – this is not my first WoW-related travel and it won’t be the last. We played, we walked around, we ate dead cow in various incarnations (does that make us cannibals?), and I decided that Ireland has very nice people and very bad weather.

A cow post will probably show up here in a couple of days, but for the moment my lunch breaks are quite busy (two new co-workers to train) and my evenings are spent playing (trying to get Khrista past the horrible 50s) and watching Lost. I don’t know when job no. 2 will hit again, so I try to make the most of the break.

P.S. Altitis is bad, mkay? I’m trying to raid, level Khrista (priest), level Avilion (SAN lock) and then a friend makes a hunter on Alonsus and I dust off my hunter and go massacring The Barrens. Oh yes, and when the new RAF mount is released I’m making a rogue. Then, if time allows us, another druid which I plan to X-realm to Defias.

Not that I have 2 more slots on Alonsus, that is. Gah.

[Continued from here]
[Warning: this post has a LOT of pictures. The file sizes are small, but there's ~30 images after the break.]

Last time we saw our group of gnomes, we were trying to eat a horse. Sadly, it got away, so we tried to satisfy a different kind of hunger – the intellectual type.

Except we couldn’t reach the shelves.

We did manage to get on top of the table for a group picture.

Unable to quench our thirst for knowledge, we went on to explore the museum. A giant chicken you say? Sadly, it was too old to make a decent meal, but we hoped…

We know we aren’t supposed to touch the exhibits, but we couldn’t resist. How many gnomes can you fit in the mouth of a long-dead animal? All of them.

The next stop was the great forge. Which, aside from being big and forgey, was also hot.

At the other end of the forge, a surprise was waiting for us.
It’s not clearly visible, but it was a gnome on a hawkstrider.

The new sight was intriguing, so we debated for a while. As you can see, some were more interested in the potential source of food than in meeting our gnome sister.

I think we scared her, because she hid her chicken after a while.

After the chicken encounter, we finally found our destination: King Magni Bronzebeard, who was to read our petition and grant equal right to the vertically challenged.

He’s a bad king, though. He ignored us so we realized we had to fight for our rights elsewhere.

Elsewhere, in this case, meant a pool. Yes, we got naked and took a bath in the middle of Ironforge. The penguins were happy, though our brave leader Maximilian was concerned for our safety.

Another group pictured followed… Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Gnome Issue.

A passing cat proved once again to be an intriguing animal. (I admit I found this gnome inclination to eat mounts a bit disturbing.)

It was a lucky cat though, because we spotted the pub and it managed to make a getaway.

Our fearless leader knew that even the bravest gnomes need to relax after a hard day’s work, so he funded a short party. I will spare you the pictures of naked gnomes dancing on tables (and, in one case, on a candlestick). Let’s say some things are better kept quiet.

The journey was coming to an end, so we decided to make one last stand for gnome rights, in front of the bank, where our message would reach the most people.

Our final attempt at a group picture was temporarily thwarted by a herd of big animals stepping on our heads, a fitting demonstration of the prevailing problems the gnome community faces in every day life.

However, small we may be, but we are not stupid. We moved inside the bank, where the beasts couldn’t set foot, and took this final memento of our epic trip.

From Ironforge, Gnavi the warlock bids you good day.

Yesterday, an event of epic proportions took place on Argent Dawn-EU. We came. We saw. We killed, we boozed and we campaigned for gnome rights.

[Warning: this post has a LOT of pictures. The file sizes are small, but there's ~40 images after the break.]

At 4 PM, a great number of mostly level 1 gnomes were gathering in Coldrige Valley, bearing appropriate gnames – such as Gnavi (me) and Gnawmeankles (the boyfriend).

Herded forth by our mighty leader, Maxmilian “Blueberry” Twinspark, we start our march towards Gnomeregan. We had periodic headcounts to make sure no gnome was left behind, and we bravely entered the tunnel – the bane of all bank alts.

Our leader, Maximilian, tried to line us up in a proper military formation. Unfortunately, even simple instructions like “one melee, one robe” proved to be too difficult, so the order was short lived.

The troggs didn’t stand a chance against armed and dangerous gnomes. They didn’t even know what hit them. (Well, if they did notice the fire- and shadowbolts rushing towards them, they didn’t have time to do anything with that knowledge…)

A bunny rabbit fell victim, too.

We then made a short stop to get our mail and our army of penguins, while general Maximilian dashed off to get a guild charter.

Then we met a bear and its master. Do bears eat gnomes? Do they eat penguins? Difficult questions, but at least the hunter seemed friendly.

Friendly and a bit confused, so we dispensed useful advice on the procurement of Core Hound Pups.

We had to interrupt the conversation for a bit, while we signed the charter and received our tabards.

The hunter inquired about our agenda, and wanted to join us.. despite some olfactory matters.

Our destination was getting closer, spirits were high, we tried some motivational cheering. We failed – turns out gnomes can’t spell.

Some of our group were tired, but we marched on, heartened by the prospect of beer and pie.

And then, suddenly, there it was: Ironforge.

It saddens me to say, but we didn’t represent the gnome rights cause as well as we should have – we interrupted our journey to inquire about the availability of food and drink.

At about the same time, we noticed that the smelly hunter and his bear were still following us. Was it out to eat us?

Finally, our mighty group enters the city of Ironforge.

The charter is turned in, and Single Abstract Gnoun is born.

Our first stop was, naturally, a visit to our king.

Then we met a horse burger. Erm, a human and his horse.

I don’t think the poor human liked what happened next.

Being surrounded by a group of hungry gnomes must be a traumatic experience.

Being small does have it drawbacks, though: the horse simply jumped over us and escaped its fate, leaving us hungry.

The adventure continued… but that is told in part 2, here.

Tuesday was a big day for me: deadline day at job no. 2, which means that the book was delivered and I was free as a bird. Or free as a lazer-cow, at least.

The Moodles are mostly a weekend project, but since it was a non-raiding night, we went out in the world to slaughter some more.

I didn’t mention this before, but in the meantime our guild grew. A couple of our main chars’ guildies remembered they had horde-side alts, and it just so happens that they are in our level range. Naturally, this can only mean one thing: guild run!

We queued on LFG, crossed our fingers and got lucky: SFK, not WC! Since our priest was specced Discipline (when you have a Disc priest main, what alt do you roll?), I went lazerspewpew and we started killing puppies. Ok, blood hungry ghost wolves or something.

As an aside, I usually ninja pull. If there’s a bad place to be, I’m there. Now I managed to run ahead of the tank, but I was safe… safe in the perfect spot to see a pink parrot running down the stairs being chased by half the instance. NOT my fault for once, and revenge for all the times Baloon’s main stealthed in front just to see me run into bosses.

The parrot in all its glory, while not pulling whole rooms.

Because we’re pro, we survived without a scratch, while happily playing the angry pugs:
FFS TANK!
OMG NINJA PULL!
healer wtf u doin???
omg guys u suck!!!

I’m actually surprised we managed to kill the mobs, we were laughing so hard.

Archmage Arugal was no more.

Next up: Deadmines! Our little killing squard pressed on, mooing, laughing, going “FFS HEALS” and discussing English slang. We came prepared with BiS gear and proper enchants and gems (heirlooms and +1 stamina on wrists, plus some Malachite in our bags), we’d all read the strats, we were ready.

…or maybe not. Mr. Smite is srs bsns.

We somehow managed not to pull all the pirates on the boat, we didn’t get an epic parrot, but VanCleef ended up staring at the floor in record time. We’re not progression raiders for nothing…

The evening ended on a high note – literally. Thunderbluff is a dangerous place. Turns out that if you’re on the bridge, trying to get to the shaman trainer… you need to be very careful.

It was a long way down and it ended painfully, with a squashed cow and her kodo. The rest of the group was amazingly supportive: they rofled for 10 minutes and gave detailed descriptions of how much fun they were having IRL. Comic relief, that’s me.

The best part? I was 1 bar from level 22 so I didn’t have any spells to train.

[Picture editing by Pat. Click for big version. Jokes too subtle for me, I'm told, but I hope the rest of you get them.]

Computer problems and lack of time have delayed this post for a while, but rest assured: the cows are doing their thing and rocking Azeroth.

We’re going to be dungeon-leveling, so the first and foremost goal was hitting level 15. But our hunter was late, so me and Truffles starting playing the “Make Lurky dance” game.

We waited. Nothing.

Truffles tried to dance with him, maybe he gets the hint.

Nothing.

She tried intimidation.

It didn’t look impressed.

We both tried to dance… how can you not love two sexy cows?

Didn’t work.

We gave up, got our tardy hunter and went our merry way, slaughtering the fauna of the Barrens and wondering what the hell were the developers thinking when they created the damn quests. Luckily, we’re three terror machines so the only problem we had was boredom and trying to keep track of what everyone needed. (Seriously, did they really have to ask us to bring 3 pieces of each mob on the map?)

(Of course, when Lucky finally decided to dance, I missed the screenshot.)

After the most boring walk in history, escorting a slow-ass elf to Ratchet, we hit 15 and went headfirst into RFC. Taragaman was vanquished and there was much rejoicing. We even convinced a pug to pose for our kill shot.

(Click for bigger version)

A couple of dungeon runs and a handful of quests do wonders, so before long we were hitting more milestones.

Sadly, it was getting late for our little cows, so we just posed for the camera, waved and went to sleep.

P.S. This is what happens when someone a 10-year old* rolls a tauren.

Truffles has a /moo macro. I think she tried to moo bosses to death a few times.
*We could try explaining to people that we’re not actually 10, but they wouldn’t believe us.

P.P.S. My convincing worked, so from now on the boyfriend is in charge with making our boss kills pretty. He refused to play with us, so at least he can make himself useful outside the game.

Cows are not everything I leveled lately. Thanks to Love is in the Air, Khrista got a bunch of free levels (well, I paid good gold for the bracelets, actually). Level 40 was in sight – epic mount, dual spec, all the goodies!

I went a-pugging again. I ran SM Cathedral over and over and over (boring, but lots of XP and flowers to pick). Most groups were fine, except for when I ran into a bunch of idiots on my realm. I don’t care to remember the details, but it ended with me leaving and an exchange of whispers and ignores.

Uldaman, on the other hand, was suprisingly easy. I was dreading it a bit, since it’s a dungeon I haven’t run very much on any char, and I manage to get lost even with maps. To my surprise, I got a group of nice, talkative people, who knew the way, didn’t mind the occasional wipes (they even said “It happens, don’t worry”… but they didn’t know we wiped because I was taking screenshots instead of healing, oops) and made the whole experience very enjoyable.

Bouncy tank!

Things seem to have changed since the last alts I leveled in LFG – there’s way more characters with BoA and most players seem to know what they’re doing. I can only be happy about that.

Totally slacking

In the end, all was well. We had…
- the ding…

- …the dual-spec…

- …and the tiger. A white tiger this time, not the dirty pink one in the screenie.

I had a moment of panic at level 39-40, because my only choices were SM Cathedral (/yawn), Uldaman (not hoping I’ll get as lucky the second time) and Maraudon (I’m not touching that place with a long pole), but now I got ZF in the Dungeon Finder, so yay!

Next up, Khrista learn to shadow and hopefully gets to level 50. On my brand new computer I built myself and almost broke but which should be working in a few days OMGPRETTYPIXELS.

So, I made a cow.

I stayed away from the dark side for the longest time. So far, my highest horde is a level 21 paladin abandoned on some server I don’t even remember the name of. And yet, yesterday I spent an afternoon giggling at my cute cow and her two companions, and had an absolute blast.

The trouble with me and horde is… aesthetics. Belfs are hot, but they can’t be any of the classes that interest me. Undead seemed ok, until I rolled one and hated her walk. My troll lasted 3 levels before I decided I can’t play something that hideous, and I haven’t even touched orcs. And then… I saw a couple of drawings of tauren and they suddenly looked very cute. Shaman was one of the classes I hadn’t tried, and my boyfriend’s fresh 80 elemental is pumping out crazy DPS. And since Blizzard gave us cross-faction heirloom mailing and my druid’s spellpower chest was just gathering dust in my bank… Muffin was born.

I wasn’t exactly expecting to play her more than a few hours; my horde alts tend to have that fate. And then there was a herd – my friend Laura and Barry rolled their own taurens, Truffles and Baloon, so now we’re a happy group of hunter, future bear/kitty and future elemental/resto. Leveling is srs bsns, so we already have a guild (Moodles!), big bags, lots of BoA and a burning desire to pwn RFC and DM. I even invested in a new heirloom weapon, because hey, my abandoned alts have emblems they’re not using.

We’re proud level 10s and so far our exploits have included:
* dancing in the happy fields.

* lazying around while bugging friends for charter signatures and deciding which set of BoA gear to use.

* enjoying the view (Mulgore is PRETTY! I never knew!) while yelling “aaaa a level 6!!” (Mulgore has wolves that want to nom level 1 cows on their way to the mailbox).

* obliterating every mob in sight (mobs not pictured because they were dead/about to be dead).

* made friends with an Alliance raid who eventually killed Cairne and left us unable to turn in quests (oops).

The first day was a success, with me getting my earth totem, Truffles getting her bear form and Baloon his first pet, so we look forward to the future!

P.S. Yes, /moo as a cow is hilarious.
P.P.S. Yes, we are very excited. This is what we were doing while at work today:
Jen: i want to go home and moo
Laura: me too!!

So, after the week from hell at work, I finally had a weekend all for myself*. I sadly spent the good part of Saturday watching my neighbours argue, but the rest was good – mainly because I still had the yummiest cake ever left over from my birthday on Friday.
[*actually written last week]

So I woke up, got angry, got back home and entertained myself with some good ol’ questing and pugging and my tartlette chocolat.

I tend to get sidetracked by alts easily, so I’ve been focusing on Khrista. Jen doesn’t need anything outside of raids and the daily heroic, Shiny is on a break since the guild doesn’t seem to need alt tanks, and farming heroics for holy gear is not very exciting… so baby priest time it is. I’m a bit masochistic, but I like the dungeon pugging (and my friends keep talking about raids and heroics in our channel, so I want to do that faster!).

I’m so pretty admirers are showering me with roses

First off, Love is in the Air dailies are pure gold (and by “gold” I mean “XP”) for lowbies. they’re short, they’re fast and even the ones that require more work can be sorted easily with money (if I don’t feel like questing, I just buy the bracelets). So I shared some chocolates with the world, killed a couple of baddies for Crushing the Crown, did a couple of quests until 30 Lovely Charms, and then I went out to meet some new idiots err friends in PuGs.

In love with some random guy or girl who happened to give me some chocolates. I’m so easy.

I came, I saw, I kicked ass even if I’m holy

After a week of SM Graveyard, I had a major surprise when I found myself in Razorfen Downs, and a second major surprise when I realized I’d never been there before. Makes sense, since my highest horde is level 21 and I never bothered with dungeon achievements on my Allies… but I thought I’d at least set foot in there with a guildie or something.

Look at me and my yellow balls of holiness!

After the initial surprise, I remembered RFD being mentioned as one of the confusing dungeons for Alliance, alongside Wailing Caverns, and I started worrying… but I had a group who knew the place and I just had to follow them around. Result: fun! It’s been a long while since I discovered a new place, and the company was pleasant. Thank you, random guys on the Rampage battlegroup.

RFD was an one-time-only thing, afterwards it was SM all over again (Library this time). Things are going better than when I was leveling my druid and it’s easy to see who’s more likely to know what they’re doing: orange gear = good.

Ok, I cheated, my DK was closer to Scarlet Monastery.

Well, up to a point. I join a group – me healing, a mage and a ret paladin in full heirlooms, a druid tank and a hunter. We pull, a BoE caster staff drops, everyone needs, the druid wins it, is happy and equips it right away. Equips it instead of his +agi fist weapon and +intellect offhand, that is. I inspect and find the usual “super-hybrid” druid you’ll find so often in the low level instances – if it’s leather, it’s his, stats be damned. I make a mental note that he might be harder to heal and we move on. Then druid starts tanking in cat form. The paladin has Righteous Fury and he either doesn’t understand English or doesn’t care. Me and mage start bitching in /say about someone with full BoA being so clueless. I tell druid he’s not getting any heals until he goes back to bear form… so he goes ahead in cat while me and mage hide behind a corner. At some point, the paladin leaves, still with Righteous Fury and still without saying a word. The druid finally gets the point, switches to bear and gets heals. We eventually wipe at some point because druid couldn’t hold aggro, then the group disintegrates.

I wave farewell to the mage and wish him happy pugging. It won’t be, but we can at least try to look on the bright side of WoW.

Valithria Dreamwalker is supposed to be a healer’s dream. We get to shine and prove our worth! Damn you, DPS and your e-peen!

Well, I’m thinking of dusting off my feathers and going critchicken for the fight, because so far I suck at healing it. When we started our 10-man tries last night, strategy was pretty fuzzy to me, but the other dragon healer had already done it and the RL explained in detail, so everything sounded just fine. Keep HoTs up on the boss, go in portals and get stacks, collect loot.

Hah. As if.

First off, of course Valithria doesn’t show up on Grid. However, thanks to Keeva’s awesome guide, I was prepared. Or at least semi-prepared – I didn’t know we were going to do Valithria that night, but I have Quartz so I just enabled the appropriate module. Now I could see my HoTs, but healing a boss portrait instead of my nice green rectangles was still annoying – not to mention that the portals made me lose my target. Another macro, another try, lots of frustration over refreshing HoTs (did I ever mention I hate stacking Lifebloom?), anyway I was starting to get the hang of it.

Except not. I was flying around and hitting green clouds… but apparently I wasn’t, because my stacks were still pitiful. I still don’t understand what animation I should see, because my tree sure looked like she was hitting things… I could probably get 4-5 stacks tops in a portal. Come out, frantically try to target the dragon again, mess up my rotation and Nourish too soon… then miss the next portals. Or get the portals, but lose the stacks before I got in. Or just after I got in. The other healer had 30 stacks or more; the most I managed was 8 (and it was by accident).

[This should be a picture of me in the portal. However, I was too busy failing to hit the clouds, so I didn't have time to take a screenshot. Use your imagination.]

Now, it’s not like I wasn’t expecting it. Playing in 3D on 2D screen is hard, and this kind of fight has always been weird to me. I can’t see if I’m above, below or on the same level with the clouds/dragons/orbs of death! To make things worse, it was already midnight, on a Thursday evening, and I was tired even before I started raiding.

To make a long story short, we manage to wipe at 99% a few minutes before the raid end time. We pushed on (even though it was 1 a.m.) with the other dragon healer doing all the work. I was told to stay out of the portals if I didn’t need mana, because I was getting her clouds – erm, I seriously doubt my 2-3 measly stacks were getting in the way – and help with raid/tank healing (our raid healer was a very nice but undegeared shaman who was struggling).

Our best attempt after that 99% was a 90%, by which point (1.30 a.m. already) I wanted to strangle someone. Probably myself. With 2 dragon healers with proper stacks, it would’ve been a breeze. So I’m sitting out tonight, partly due to tiredness/work, partly because I’m sure that any other healer with half a brain can probably manage the bloody stacks better.

My only hope is that we go to Valithria on Sunday evening for our 25-man. Getting proper sleep before the raid might help.

So, I like healing. My druid rocks, but there’s a problem – once she does the guild runs, she’s locked and can’t help out friends with their runs or just go wipe with a PuG, for fun.

To solve this, I decided that my pally tank should be holy offspec. Said and done, I grabbed some crafted gear, healed a couple of dungeons and heroics, even managed to get a decent collection of purples in the end. However, queuing as tank/healer means that 99% of runs I end up tanking, so my holy experience is limited.

When I changed my offspec, the friend I was leveling with told me I’ll enjoy holy so much I’ll never go back to my druid. She couldn’t have been more wrong. The longer I heal on my paladin, the more I love my druid. No, she’s not that good at tank healing, but I can run! And throw HoTs all over the place! And even a quick Nourish! Swiftmend myself while running instead of counting on the other healers!

This was never more obvious than last night. After a not-very-successful ICC25 plagued with lag and drama, we decided to get an alt run going to ICC10 for the weekly. Lots of tanks, not enough healers, so I reluctantly volunteered to do it. The final setup consisted of two good tanks, an assortment of decent to good DPS, a good healer (tree) and two mediocre ones (tree and my paladin). It didn’t bode well when I saw the second tree’s gear – no T9, some blues, decent for heroics but not much else. My gear’s in pretty much the same shape (ilvl 219 mostly), and ungemmed/unchanted to boot (it was too late to do anything about it).

Healing was hell. Oh, she’s amazing at tank healing, I won’t get those crits on my druid in a million years. I can’t run out of mana with Divine Plea. Beacon of Light is an amazing invention. …Until Marrowgar starts throwing blue flames at me and I need to move or die. Move or die. Never finish a cast. My Grid setup works fine for a druid, but it’s very well suited for a paladin. My healing technique isn’t well suited for a paladin either.

In short, I sucked. We didn’t down the boss. I shouldn’t have set foot in ICC with my gear and my experience. But I’m not giving up! Paladin Schmaladin and WoW.com have been helpful, and I’ve got a holy pally in the guild to bug. I bought a ilvl 245 helm after the raid (it’s even got a meta socket, unlike my former crappy blue) and I’ll invest all future emblems in holy gear. I’ll look for some Grid addons that display what I want to see. I still want to heal, so I’ll at least give it a decent shot before I give up.