pretty purple pox pictures

I’m too far behind in posting to give you all full recaps, I fear, but here are some pictures from our last few weeks of adventures. I hope you enjoy them!

From the first time we poked our heads into the Scarlet Monestary a few weeks back: Look! The mobs are red! Well, orangish-red, at least…

Good ol’ Azshir the Sleepless. I think I’ll have that necklace, thank you very much.

Oh noes! A wipe!

Eat hot death, Ironspine! And we’ll take that chestpiece while we’re at it!

How do the Forsaken sleep in these things?

Running around the next week. How fierce is Harisan with that sword? Rawr!

Uh-oh. Resistance is futile!

I said…

Running off into the sunset.

Back to the Kraul for some guano.

Overwhelmed! Well, almost…

How cute is that felpuppy?

Window shopping. I don’t think I’m wearing this outfit without the tabard!

Back into the Library. Eat it, Locksey!

Firedancer!

Doan!

Dead.

‘dwenne and her pets. Aren’t they cute?

How’s this dress? Shexy, yes?

We hit that Library so hard it got fogged over!

Night, night!

more podcast goodness

(Again, cross-posted from my /afk blog, because there’s some nice gaming podcasts in here for y’all.)

Item the first: Go donate to the Maximumfun.org Maximum Fun Drive. Do it! Be like all the cool kids (and me)!

Item the second: I found a new knitting blog to add to my reader, if only because of the title (well, the content looks cool, too): The A.D.D. Knitter. Hurray, knitting! Hurray, AD…wait, what was I talking about?

Item the third: New podcasts to try, from friends’ suggestions and the depths of my memory! Here’s some updates to my previous list (which I promise to fill in with linkage in the next day or so):
- The Savage Love-cast
- Shut Up. We’re Talking.
- Witty Ranter
- You Look Nice Today (recommended personally by his awesomeness, Jesse Thorn)
- Cast On
- Sticks and String
- Y Knit
- Stash and Burn
- It’s a Purl, Man
- News from Lake Woebegone
- Car Talk
- NPR: Hidden Kitchens
- QN (formerly known as Quirky Nomads)
- A Brobdingnagian Minute
- Marc Gunn’s Irish and Celtic Music Podcast
- And how could I forget retroCRUSH, the Podcast?

That’ll keep you busy for a few days, eh?

N.B.: I haven’t yet listened to many of these, but they’re recommended by people I like and whose taste I generally approve of. Just saying. YMMV.

podcast suggestions

(crossposted from my /afk blog, sciencemonkey.net)

Hey, gang. I need some advice from y’all. I b0rked my iTunes library the other day and am having to reload everything. Since I’m going through and resubscribing to all of my podcasts, I figured I’d take this chance to see if there are any that you’d recommend that I’m missing. So…what’cha listening to?

So far, here’s my list:
- This American Life
- NPR: Science Friday
- NPR: Sunday Puzzle
- NPR: Wait, wait…
- alt.NPR: What Would Rob Do?
- All the awesome stuff from maximumfun.org (Jordan Jesse Go, The Sound of Young America, TSOYA Classics, Coyle & Sharpe, Kasper Hauser, and The College Years)
- The Instance
- Cory Doctorow’s Podcast
- How I WoW
- EFF Linenoise
- Radio Free Burrito
- Radio Lab
- Krulwich on Science
- retroCRUSH

What am I missing?

announcement

Ahem! May I have your attention, please? I would like to say CONGRATULATIONS to my friend and (hopefully) yours, Ess, for having the Blog of the Week on this week’s Shut Up We’re Talking. Ess is an excellent author and gamer and an all-around awesome person, and I’m proud as hell to call her my friend.

Three cheers for Ess! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray!

alternative post

I can’t believe how behind I am in posting. Well, not behind, as there aren’t deadlines or schedules or what have you, other than self-imposed. Feh.

Waradwen: I’ve been playing a lot of my alts lately. I’ve done a little raiding with Wara in Karazhan, but not much else with him. Some dailies, I guess, and am pushing exalted with the Shattered Sun, so that’s nice. I’m tired of the dailies and usually only do a few each day to support my modest raiding habits.

Waradwenne: Awesome fun with the Poxers, as usual. The past few weeks we have torn up the Scarlet Monestary Graveyard and done a bunch of running around, filling out class quests. I have lots of screenshots that I will someday get posted, but probably not before tomorrow’s adventures. I have my felpuppy now and we’re anxious to start pushing deeper into the Library. We got through half of the Library a few weeks ago but were pretty overpowered by the large groups of mobs post-Locksey. This week they’re going down. Woo! And Arcanist Doan is going to drop his robes! Umm. That didn’t sound right.

I’ve also swapped ‘dwenne’s professions around. She had been doing mining to make some money, but since I don’t play her much other than on Pox Nights I never did much leveling. So I dropped mining and picked up engineering, which is pretty awesome. Not having a rogue (or other engineer) we’ve been passing all of the locked chests, and I’m looking forward to my first seaforium charge. Heheheheh. Plus, there’s some really cool headgear coming up soon…

Rotaan: Most of my game time lately has been with Rotaan and I’m starting (starting) to get a feel for playing a warrior. I’m getting better about remembering which move to use when, etc., and am having a heck of a lot of fun with him. Rotaan’s up to level 26 and I’m currently leveling him as an Arms warrior. I started with Fury but am having more success with a big, two-hand weapon, so Arms seems to fit better. I’m having some trouble figuring out just where to be leveling, as this is my first real Alliance character, but I’m starting to get the hang of it. I spent a couple nights banging my head against the Wetlands before discovering Redridge Mountains which was so much more appropriate for my skills. I’m back to Wetlands now and am starting to plot where to go next…maybe somewhere on Kalimdor? That’d be fun to see as an Alliance toon.

I’m also looking forward to (but am very nervous about) tanking my first instance with Rotaan. I ran Deadmines with an overpowered guild group a few weeks ago (whence the Rolling Pin of Doom) but not as the tank. I think that’s the next thing I really need to do. I just picked up a ton of Gnomer quests late last night, so maybe…no. That’s probably not a best choice for first tanking experience. I never did the Deadmines quests, so I should probably go back and pick those up. Easy XP, baby.

Miscellany: Sidhe Devils are awesome. I had one of the most fun evenings just farting around on Friday night thanks to my awesome new guildies, as well as an older friendship that I’m getting to develop more lately. Oh, and the tastiness of a few Honey Moon Summer Ales. (Not my favorite beer ever, but certainly decent and enjoyable.)

fishy dwarf

OPP: the second P is for Purple Poxers

The missing P is a typo.

Another week, another dungeon down. Last night the Purple Poxers tore up Razorfang Kraul, making us an undefeated 5-0 against dungeons this season. As is becoming usual, we had no deaths. We did, however, break a sweat at one point when we aggroed an entire room of level 26 and 27 elites, but even they couldn’t bring us down (although Daxe ran out of mana towards the very end). Let’s see some of the highlights!

Here we are, about to take out the first boss of the instance, Aggem Thorncurse.

And here he is, 30 seconds later, dead.

Next? Why it’s boss number 2, Death Speaker Jargba. It’s hard to tell in this picture, but I’m dancing on his corpse, to avenge the bullying he and his thugs used to do to poor Cait.

Another boss…

This was just after killing the giant pig boss. Somebody skinned him before I could grab the picture, but you can see the hole where he used to be.

Oh! Look who makes an appearance! The Blind Hunter!

You should’ve stayed home, man.

And the last boss, about to go down.

Here’s the most frustrating part of this instance. Although we were clearing it handily, we were still too low a level to do some of the quests! Srsly!

Ah, our most difficult fight. See all of the mobs in this room? We’re about to be attacked by them all. (Plus, isn’t that a nice shot of Daxe’s rear? Meow!)

Of course, we survived. Them? Not so much.

After tearing through the escort quest and discovering that the tuber collection quest was bugged (it wouldn’t let any of us open the tubers! Maybe we were too low a level, eh?), we decided to try to get Harisan the nice helm that the second boss drops. No luck the second kill, but on the third? Jackpot!

Time to hearth and do some training!

See you guys next week, when we start reclaiming Gnomeregan from the troggs!

warrior woes

Leveling a warrior is tough, man! Little Rotaan is up to level 14 and it has been tough slogging so far. I’m getting better at pulling single mobs away from a group (hurray for cheap guns!) but still have trouble when I get swarmed by more than about three comparable-level mobs. Oh well. Practice, practice, practice, I suppose. Or as a guildie recommended, I need to go to another zone and try some green-level quests for the time being.

in which our hero blathers on…

…about his new main guild, Kiss My Murlock.

You guys are seriously awesome. Congrats on the first ever full clear of Kara! I wish I could have been around more this weekend but I’m so proud of you. I hear the drums calling us from ZA and I’m looking forward to spending more time with you guys.

…about his new alliance alt and associated guild.

I’m a total follower sometimes and have joined BBB and Cassieann’s new guild, Sidhe Devils, on Kael’thas. Having always rolled Horde, I’ve been feeling an itch to explore the Alliance side of the game. I’ve recently learned about how important the social aspects of the game are to me, so when I read the announcement it really scratched my itch nicely. I’ve rolled a dwarf warrior named Rotaan (there’s a story, naturally, but probably not one worth sharing). It’s really odd talking in guild chat and seeing this “other,” non-Wara-prefixed name speaking in my voice. I’m starting to get used to it, but it’s still a little disconcerting. “Who is this guy, and why is he saying what I’m saying?”

So far, I’m really enjoying the dwarf story. I like the snowy wilderness that we start in and I think Ironforge is really cool. I’m totally lost, still, but have gotten good about flipping between the map and where I’m running. QuestHelper has been a blessing, too.

A few more words about the guild, before I forget. It’s awesome. I’m still a little starstruck when BBB or Cassieann are on but they’ve been nothing but kind and friendly and funny. In fact, BBB made one of the worst puns I’ve heard in a long time the other day. There’s another guild member with the exact same first name as me (a rarity, at least in these parts) and the same first half of his last name, and we were chatting about how to translate our names. “Hegge” roughly translates to “rocky” and I thought that “stad” roughly translated to “land” — so my last name would mean rocky land, which is quite appropriate for the town we came from — but my alter ego informed me that “stad” actually means “city” from the old Norwegian. So, rocky city. After which BBB interjects, “Philadelphia.” Huh? Oh. Rocky city. Not rocky, Rocky. /golfclap, sir. You win this round, but I’ll get you yet.

There are also a bunch of Poxers in the guild and I’m having a blast spending time with them. One of my regrets about the way the Pox Arcanum project is going is that we’ve become a little insular in our groups and we don’t get a chance to spend a lot of time with the other groups. I know it’s mostly due to the innate difficulties with scheduling but it make me a little sad. And now, here’s a chance to hang out with them! Hurray!

…about the new dailies.

Honestly, I’m split. I like the diversity of the dailies and really like that there are some that benefit gatherers and fishermen, rather than just kill-10-of-these-dudes, but they’re not very stimulating. Especially when you do them day after day after day. Consequently, I’m not. I’m doing enough of them to keep me supplied for raids and keep all of my armor sets well-repaired, but that’s about it. If there’s a little extra I might try to upgrade a gem or two, but I’m not doing enough dailies for there to be much extra.

My typical routine is to do the Outland quests three or four days a week, then go to the Isle of QQ once or twice a week. This seems to work okay. The Outland dailies are enough to meet my monetary demands easily, so the rest is gravy. I tend to do the Nether Residue quest by skinning clefthoofs in Nagrand, so I’ve built up a few nice stacks of Thick Clefthoof Leather and Heavy Knothide Leather which will be useful for either myself or other crafters.

As for the Isle, phooey. I do them occasionally, but find them very boring. I’m not in a huge hurry to build my Shattered Sun rep but am already at Revered, even with my casual play. I picked up [K'iru's Presage] to replace my current healy mace ([The Essence Focuser]) and love the [Naaru Rations], but otherwise…*shrug*.

…about his gear.

Nothing terribly exciting to report. I grabbed an [Ember Skyfire Diamond] for my beautiful new helmet. I also got my bracers enchanted (Greater Intellect) and have the mats for most of what else I want.

belated weekend update, continued: Saturday

Saturday’s Kara run almost, *almost* didn’t go off, and not because we were short a healer. You won’t believe me when I say it, but we were short DPS. DPS! Everybody wants to DPS! Fortunately we were able to find a priest from another guild (the guild leader, in fact) and we were off, just a little bit late.

First stop, Prince. Trash clearing went very smoothly and after a few minutes of stratigizing, we were good. In we go to Netherspace, position an imp at a certain mystical spot (not sure why, actually), and after his next patrol we were off. As soon as the tank started running to his position I noticed that one of my group-mates, another DPS-er, disappeared. D’oh! I assumed that the raid leader was going to call off the attempt, but he didn’t and we hit Prince hard. The tank did an amazing job holding Prince and we poured on the damage. The infernals fell fortuitously and we got that bastard down to 2%. Two percent! With only nine of us! Unfortunately, his axes went nuts about then and chopped us all down. We ran back, found another DPS to replace the still-missing guy, and tried again, twice. During the second attempt the infernals fell almost directly on top of us each time, and we had some bad falls the third attempt. By that time we were getting fatigued, I think, so we decided to go back to the other targets, then maybe come back at the end of the night.

Next: Netherspite. This was a pretty straight-forward fight. I got assigned the blue beam for half of a round which was pretty cool. I didn’t see the giga-crits for uber damage that I was led to believe I would see, but maybe I missed them. It was hard keeping track of what was hitting where and when. I really need to get WoWWebStats running so I can go back and figure out how to improve. I know I need to get better about using and swapping my trinkets, but I’m sure there’s other ways to improve my damage output.

Next up, dragon number 2: Nightbane. What an amazingly fun fight! There was so much going on that I didn’t get many screenshots until the end, which I’ll share with you when I get home. It’s a nice picture of me, dead, watching the last 1% of Nightbane’s health drain out. It seems to be a recurring theme for me in boss fights, that I die just before the very end of the fight. What a pain. All that time I’m lying there, dead, I know I could be pumping out more Starfires. Hell, even Moonfires at that point. Why conserve mana when the boss is at 2%? I die so freaking fast, though, that I hardly even notice before I’m dead. Hmm. In loot news, Llanion finally got his [Stonebough Jerkin], so grats to him!

By this point we’re all fired up and full of ourselves, so we race back upstairs to try Prince again. This time the fight is almost a piece of cake. We get reasonably-placed elemental drops (that is, we didn’t get the two elementals that surrounded the tank, like in an earlier fight), and we blast through Phase 3 before the axes do too much damage. Hurray! Prince is dead! So here comes the minor drama.

[Helm of the Fallen Defender] drops. We had been joking all run that this would drop, so our tank could get his Tier 4 helm. I had forgotten that this could represent *my* Tier 4 helm, too. There’s two other druids, me, and our warrior tank who could use it. Two of the druids pass immediately; they’re happy with their current helms and the drops they’ve already gotten this run. And I’m torn. Two things are clear to me. 1) We only go as far as our tank takes us; if he’s undergeared, we don’t go far. 2) I want that helm. By guild loot rules, it’s mine. I’m a main, he’s on an alt. He’s got an epic helm already — one of the ones crafted from engineering, I think — and I’m in a blue. A decent blue, to be sure, but this would be a significant upgrade. And I’m now torn. Can I take this drop, knowing how rare tank drops have been in the past? Who am I? I’m new to the guild. The tank has been in the guild for a long time, and is actually one of the acting GLs while the regular GLs are on a hiatus. Nobody else wants to venture an opinion. I keep trying to convince the tank to roll for the helm. That seems reasonable to me. We’ve both got a claim to the drop and it represents an upgrade for both of us. What would you do if you couldn’t decide between two druids? You’d roll, right? He keeps refusing to roll and eventually gives in, citing the loot rules. He’s on an alt, I’m on a main. So now I’ve got this awesome helm and feel absurdly guilty. Am I a loot whore? I sure hope not. I’ll probably feel guilty until he ends up getting it, assuming he does.

That wraps up the adventures for Saturday night. When I got back to Kara there was an announcement that somebody had just defeated Kael’thas (the real one, not the Sunwell one) and so there was a buff to Sha’tar rep and damage done in Tempest Keep. I tried to organize a Bot run but we couldn’t find a tank. After asking around for a little while and getting no takers, I realized how late it was and decided to turn in. A waste of the buff, but I really didn’t want to PuG a tank. DPS I could possibly tolerate, but not a tank. It just seems like a recipe for frustration.