I’m rushed off my feet at the moment, it’s 10:30pm and I’m just about to finish work for the day. While my stuff was saving/compiling I cooked my sushi rice and wrapped more presents, and earlier today I managed to squeeze in time to weed the back lawn and put fresh straw into the chicken pen. Tomorrow I’ll probably assemble the sushi while my hair is colouring..

TLDR: super busy, got lots to write but no time to do it!

However, here’s some blatant filler content, courtesy of Drucie, who is now 78, and last night noticed something a bit funny on the ground in Storm Peaks. I decided to fly around and see what else I could find.



Code on the ground near Dun Niffelem – weird.


Crystalsong looking a little more colourful. Patriotic, perhaps?


Merry Christmas from all of us here at Voltarus!


The Bay of Keys in Howling Fjord (with icebergs painted bright blue and green for high visibility)


This water code was blinking on and off.


Sadly, these worgs don’t survive long in the wild, as they have little capacity to blend into the underbrush, making them easy prey for predators.


This one was my absolute favourite – instead of steam rising up from the anvil area, lines of code wiggled upwards – it looked awesome!


(By the way – it was just a random WoW hiccup – not my graphics card having problems, as I first thought. A restart of WoW fixed it)



Happy holidays everyone, back in a few days

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Q: It’s summer here and my computer seems to be overheating a lot. It’s slow to respond, and makes a grinding noise sometimes. When I play World of Warcraft, sometimes my game locks up and I get stuck on loading screens for ages.


There seems to be a little bit of dust on the case – when is a good time to clean it out?

A: Oh, right about now is probably a good time, I would imagine.





Look how festive! It’s a little snow scene!

*whistles Winter Wonderland*



Edit: In response to a question from a guild member – yes, Azjol Nerub is actually located inside my home computer:



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Quick update before I head to bed.

Icecrown is a breath of fresh air. I’ve quite enjoyed it, although I do feel as though Lady Deathwhisper is a bit of a zzzfest for healing. Bit spammy. Gunship was much more fun than I anticipated.

We didn’t get Saurfang down, which is disappointing – would have been nice to clear it the first night, but we had a lot of issues with disconnects, and we were a healer down for the fight. Being undergeared (going in with mostly 10 man gear, rather than 25 man gear) and down one healer made it slightly too difficult for us. Hopefully we’ll get him tomorrow though. I’m hoping we can get him, despite being undergeared.. then it’s off to do 10s

But here is the absolute highlight of the evening (and may or may not have attributed to a little bit of time lost on Saurfang attempts..):



Holding up the raid to bounce around as a rocketbear is VERY NAUGHTY.

(But I couldn’t stop laughing)

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OK, not a huge deal I suppose – but I was pleased to notice that the Night Elf Mohawk “costume” that has been put into the game persists after you shift into a form and shift back out.

That is, you can be wearing the mask, shift into Tree form (no mask in forms, though, obviously), and when you shift out again – you still have the mask!

Why do we care? Because we never get to keep any of our other costumes! As soon as we shift, we lose the costume and the fun. But NOW – there’s a costume that doesn’t break when you shift!

Please Blizzard – make other holiday costumes and novelty items like the Iron Boot Flask, orbs, Deviate fish, Pygmy Oil etc last through our shapeshifting by making them a buff like the Mohawk. We’re not asking to be Night Elf Mohawk boomkins or anything crazy like that (as cool as that would be) – just don’t make shifting remove the buff and waste the costume.

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I’ve been thinking lately, about all the changes Blizzard makes over time – some of them are applauded, others are opposed. Some are things that we all believe that we should have had a long time ago. For example – remember when..



• HoTs didn’t stack, so the only druid who could use them in a raid was the person with the highest +healing (A more powerful spell is already active) and everyone else was stuck with HT spam duty?

• Gift of the Wild was cast group-by-group?
• Omen of Clarity was cast, and lots of new druids didn’t know it? (so they couldn’t work out why they never got any procs!)
• there was no mailbox in Nighthaven?
• we could wear costumes and use Noggenfogger?
• ToL aura used to affect healing done, not received? (mmm stacking healers)


Your turn!

How long have you been a druid? What are some of the things that you remember and look back on, and find amusing?

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I really wanted them, but I’m trying very hard to pay off my car at the moment. I have $6000 to go, and I will have paid it off in 9 months instead of 5 years. I’m very proud of myself, but it does take a bit of commitment.

When a friend found out about them – he bought them for me as an early Christmas present! <3 Frosty!

(I'll lecture him later about HIS car payments..)


If you aren't already aware - Blizzard is selling these pets for $10 each. Until the end of December, $5 from each Monk sale goes to the Make a Wish Foundation.

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The goblins are out, in cities, for Hallow’s End. This made me giggle:





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Got bored. Went to Wailing Caverns to farm raptors, despite having earlier said something to the effect of “screw Wailing Caverns, I hate that place, I’ll just buy the pet.”

But I was bored, and an instance is the one place that you can farm by yourself without five billion other people camping the mobs that you need – so I figured I’d give it a shot and see how easy it was to do. As much as I LOATHE this instance, I discovered that the part in which you farm the raptors is right inside the instance door, and you just run in a big, straightforward circuit. You don’t need to go deep into the bowels of the instance (as I had feared). The whole thing takes around 5 minutes per run and is actually FUN.

I know – I was shocked, too.

Without further ado, here’s my ultra top secret method for farming Deviate Hatchlings:



• Ignore all of the raptors outside the instance portal – they don’t drop the pet. The ones you want are immediately inside the instance.

• Turn thorns OFF.

• Remember: nothing in an instance will leash. Run through every raptor you see. The room is basically a big rectangle – just run right around the whole thing, gathering every mob.

• When you have them all, Hurricane or kitty Swipe as appropriate.

• Loot the sparklies.



Result:



Now, I may just be crazy lucky, but those three came from just two runs, out of 5 runs total (I got two on my fourth run, and another on my fifth run). I kept one (that makes 87 pets) and I am going to sell the other two while the prices are up. Obviously these are one of the easier raptor pets to farm, so the price of them probably won’t stay very high for long (at the moment – 2000g to 4000g). I suspect they will plateau somewhere in the low hundreds – it’s still annoying to have to go to WC in the first place, after all.

I don’t really intend to farm for the ones that drop from elites.. too many people camping them already, and it’s too stressful to sit there and watch the spawn point for hours, waiting to mash your moonfire button. I’d rather do a few days of dailies and buy them at inflated prices, to be perfectly honest.

(If you’re on Cael and you have one to sell, drop me a line. I buy and trade!)


Isn’t he cute?




Aww, bless.



DISCLAIMER: I cannot be held responsible for any raptor-related maulings which may result in injuries ranging from feelings of mild discomfort to death. Raptors are wild animals and should be respected (I recommend paying particular respect to their pointy ends).

Remember: raptors run at 10m/s and they do not know fear.

Boy howdy are they cute though! /chin tickle



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I’ve started my quest for a Whistle of the Venomhide Ravasaur. Horde characters can do this quest, it is basically the equivalent of the Alliance Wintersaber – but nowhere near as grindy, contrary to what many people assume.

I’ll sum it up:


• Go to Un’goro Crater, speak to the trainer to get the quest.

• Take off your clothes and go aggro a handful of Venomhide Ravasaurs. Being naked helps the mobs stay alive for longer.

• The raptors’ skin is full of poison – and you have to get splashed by it by hitting them over and over (you can’t just stand there). Keep hitting them until they have splashed poison on you 20 times. Note: if you are grouped, you will get credit for other people in your group getting splashed – so group up!

• If you go with a friend and aggro a handful, it will only take 5-10 minutes. If there are lots of people competing for spawns, it may take longer.


• Hand in the quest and get your baby raptor. He will give you a random daily quest each day for 20 days – for example, go kill 20 dinosaurs and feed him the meat. Very simple.

• At the end of the 20 daily quests, return to the trainer with some extra materials (80g 20 Runecloth, 20 Rugged Leather), and you get your mount.



That’s it!

Note: if you are soloing this quest, you’ll need to be at least around the level 50 mark, to be able to kill the appropriate mobs. However, this mount can be used from level 40 and up – so if you have some higher level friends who can save you from being eaten by things in Un’goro, you can let them do all the poison-soaking while you get credit too. (I can’t find anything that suggests there is a level requirement to accept the quest, so I assume a level 40 can do it)

As an aside – have you bought an Obsidian Hatchling from Breanni in Dalaran? He’s adorable. But the little Venomhide hatchling is even TINIER! Of course, he won’t be tiny for long; only 20 days if you quest for him every day – then he’ll grow up and let you ride around on his back.

Aside from Breanni’s, There are also a number of other baby raptors that you can adopt as pets. They are BOU (bind on use), which means you may find them on your local AH.




Keeva keeps a watchful eye over her new charge.


Now, as cool as it is to ride around on raptors and have them as baby pets.. frankly I’m slightly perturbed. Did we learn nothing from Jurassic Park? These animals are SMART. They learned how to open doors. I think we need to ask ourselves – are they just biding their time until they can rise up and eat our faces?

You won’t be cooing, “aww, cute” when that happens, will you?



Non-combat pets my foot.

In the meantime, if you’re happy to be lulled into a false sense of security, here are some resources to help you:

Wowraid’s quick guide to the Ravasaur quest
MMO-Champion shows you which raptors drop the BOU pets

Enjoy!



(but when your new pet eats you, don’t come crying to me about it.)




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