Epic, the sleazy way

It was a busy weekend for achievements for me. My assignment in the aforementioned “Get that Achievement” Game was to complete the Empire of Zul’Drak. When I started, I was something like 40/100. Ugh. I started in on Saturday afternoon while my little one napped, and by the time he woke up I was about 50/100. I finished another 47 quests that night before bed, ending at 97/100 and having no clue where to start looking for the missing 3. I had already looked on wowhead for quests in ZD and also for “this item starts a quest” and I had done those 3 already. I have a not-so-great memory so looking at a list of quests that are available to me doesn’t really help because I don’t always remember if I had done it, or just read about it. So I woke up Sunday morning with a bit of dread about finding the 3 quests I needed and while in Dalaran, I saw the notice about Wintergrasp starting up soon. I hopped in a raid and joined the fun and completed a couple quests - OOooo! I now had enough to get a Black War Mammoth! Finally. I don’t instance much so I didn’t have a ton of the Stone Keeper Shards so this was a bit exciting for me.

Now - enough stalling. Time to finish my assignment. I tried a new technique - which is now my new favorite for finishing a zone of quests. I headed to Zul’Drak and looked at the map to see which hub I don’t recall doing much in. Well that didn’t help so I started in the upper left corner, Thrym’s End, found a random mob and then looked it up on wowhead to see if it was part of a quest. I didn’t remember killing these things before so maybe that was my missing part. Wowhead didn’t have it listed but I killed one anyway, and when I moved in to loot it I got close enough to see 2 exclamations on the east side of my mini map. I almost screamed out loud. Surely one of these 2 would have a follow up and that would be my missing 3. So I picked up the quests, headed to the Crusader Forward Camp and got my achievement! The quests seemed really fun and since I was already there, I decided to finish up the quest chains there. Wow, controlling that big guy Gymer was so fun! I was picking up mobs and throwing them around - RAWWWR! So fun! So I finished that quest and upon turning it in, I see this mob patrolling and I thought, well he looks different. Yup! A rare! Whee! That netted me Northern Exposure!

Took a run out to Sholazar to do the fishing daily and pick up another egg. Yeah, I forgot to pick up the egg - I hate it when I do that. I checked the Oracles daily - I’m only missing one for Savior of the Oracles. Since I can get the egg now, there’s no rush for me to hit Exalted right now so I just do Oracle dailies when I feel like it, and on the off chance I’ll get the Wind and Water quest. So I go and check and sure enough, the daily is the one I’m missing : ) Happy girl! The quest was fun, but I’m not sure I’d do it again without a really good reason. So on turn-in, I got the achievement and that’s about the time I forgot to get my egg.

I hopped over and checked my bank alt to see how my auctions were going. I had picked up a ton of greens, some blues, and frostweave cloth when I was questing (not to mention about 1200g just from quest money). Quite a bit of it was selling already so I figured I’d pick up a pet or something reasonable from the Auction House as a reward for me since I had knocked out the achievement assignment quicker than I thought. I had been doing some pvp and since I’m still trying to figure out the Equipment Manager, I was messing with that and getting my boomkin and resto sets saved. I moved my trinket from 10 man Ulduar from one slot to the other and got the Epic Achievement. How cheap. I feel so dirty, I didn’t do anything to earn it because I only have 1 trinket ilevel 213 or higher. To kinda cleanse me of this, I headed to Ironforge to check out the pets on the Auction House. I picked up the brown rabbit, which I was surprised I didn’t already have, and one other (I can’t remember which hehehe) and got the 50 pet achievement. I got my skunk from my mailbox and ended up logging for the night. 5 achievements plus 1 dirty achievement for one weekend was pretty damned good : )

Back up and running :)

Technical difficulties

It started like it always did, some flashes of light on my screen in places like Dalaran and Sholazar Basin. I put off cleaning my video card, even though I knew I would have to eventually. As the weeks went on, I got more flashing, more artifacts showing up, and finally when the flashing was noticeable on my bank alt in Stormwind, I knew it wasn’t just a regular cleaning that my video card needed. I couldn’t log in and do my dailies anymore because the flashing was unbearable. Usually I just use a whole can of compressed air on it and blow out the fans and anything near the video card, but this time that didn't solve the problem.

We tried running a video card stability test on it, and after 6 mins it crashed. Then we tried running it again, this time keeping an eye on the temperature and it hit 80* C within 3 minutes. Not good : ( So, we took the side off the case and broke out the vacuum and pulled huge chunks out of the inside of the card. Gave the whole thing a thorough cleaning and voila! No flashes! No artifacts (or as I like to call them, helmet kabobs)! Yay! Now I can turn my spell detail back up…

The split server decision

When I first started playing WoW, on release day, there were a bunch of us from City of Heroes that decided to stick together and play this new game together. We decided on 2 servers, Argent Dawn for Alliance characters and Silverhand for Horde characters. Just in case one server was down, we’d have another server to play on. Well as anyone could have guessed would happen, no one really played on both servers. Most people who rolled Horde on SH are still on SH, people who rolled Alliance on AD are still on AD. It’s just too hard, honestly. You miss out on so much when you try to do that, and at least for me, I’m very monogamous with my characters - I play one until I start playing another one. I don’t switch gears that quickly to play different classes effectively.

So, fast forward 4 plus years and I’m still playing on Argent Dawn. I have a small network of people I play with, and everything is hunky dory. However, I am mostly fresh off a transfer back to this server after moving to the Kirin Tor server shortly before Wrath released. I followed a group of friends to KT who had similar playtimes and were very casual and liked to have a good time on vent/guild chat. This meant I was leaving behind a server and friends I had known for years. I participated in the KT realm forums and organized many raids to accomplish For the Alliance! I did meet some good people there, and still keep in touch with one of the people I went there with. Eventually, I transferred back to AD after about 5 months on KT; I just never felt like part of the community and was missing playing with some of my friends and my family.

I’m just curious how other people are able to play on different servers. I wish I could, because then I could have my cake and eat it too, and omg I love cake : ) As it is, I think I’m going to concede and actually level another toon with my friend from KT. I hate leveling, and swore I’d never do it again - it’s so painful, the rep grinds, some of the quests are so boring, ugh. And knowing me, I’ll fall into the trap of wanting all the achievements on that toon as well. Arggg. At least I won’t be starting over from level 1. I have a warlock that is 25, and is the guild leader of my alt bank, essentially. Ah well, only 5 levels to go for a mount! At least that is a plus…