New Hero Class Announced!

Well everyone, it is April first, and you know what that means: Blizzard [and everyone else on the internet] has put out their April Fool's Day jokes. Pictured to the right is the Blizzard joke from two years ago, Pandaren express. It was my favorite so far, and I think the most believable. From what I understand, Everquest 2 had a /pizza function in the game that would open a menu to order pizza from domino's. Blizzard pretended that they were adding a chinese food function to WoW, and I will admit, I was tricked. This year, however, is not quite as convincing. Though, I will say that I think it is pretty funny.

The Blizzard April Fool's Day prank this year was the introduction of a second hero class, the Bard. I guess they felt like they should make more use of those Level 70 Elite Tauren Chieftan models they spent so much time on. This is to the chagrin of many players who suggest repeatedly that Bard be implemented as a serious class. I don't foresee bard as a playable class in the future, it just doesn't really fit with the play style or lore of WoW. And in case you don't follow my link to the Official Site to check out the bard class, here is a picture of a bard battling around Northrend:
Wowinsider is also having a bit of fun today, and have announced that they will be changing their coverage to follow the upcoming MMO Hello Kitty Online, rather than WoW. They have thrown up a surprising number of posts about it already, and it is still early in the day.

Well, time for class. Happy April Fool's Day everyone.

2.4!

Well, yesterday was patch day. 2.4, the final content patch before WotLK, came out and the servers were packed. It introduced a new raid dungeon, a new five man instance, a host of new daily quests and a new zone far to the north in Eastern Kingdoms.

I have been busy with schoolwork and have not been able to test out Magisters' Terrace, the new five man instance, but I have heard good things about it. From what I hear it is more difficult that your average instance, but a good time as well. And the final boss drops some nice epics items even in normal mode, so it is definitely worth your while.

Additionally, there will be a bunch of new badge loot to be acquired in the further stages of progression in the Shattered Sun offensive, and badges can be acquired at a painstakingly slow rate via one of the daily quests. So, if you want your new purples soon, you're probably going to want to stick to kara, but for those of us who don't raid, this is good news.

On the pvp side of things, which is definitely more my style, the arena queue times have been decreased, which will certainly be nice, and they have taken away diminishing returns on honor kills. This is nice because it means that when you earn honor, you get it right away. No more waiting until the next morning. That will make day-long honor grinds a lot more satisfying when at the end of the day you can pick up that shiny new purple.

Not too much news for me. I am enjoying the new daily quests on my two 70s, and I picked up the new pvp mount for my warrior:


Nothing sillier than a gnome on an elephant, but I like it.

Noblegarden

Today is Noblegarden. Or easter, if you are more into the RL side of things.

Laura and I woke up early this morning because she had to go to work. But before that I.. err.. the Easter Bunny set up an easter egg hunt and a little easter basket for Laura. Boy, that easter bunny sure is nice.

After that we dyed some eggs. We used a really cheap walgreen's dye kit, and did not have any vinegar, so we had to substitute lemon juice, but they turned out pretty nice looking in the end:


Also this morning I jumped on WoW and did a little Noblegarden egg hunting for the first time in the 3 years I have been playing. And let me tell you, I was thoroughly underwhelmed. I rode around for about an hour while I watched television, and ended finding around 20 eggs, which seems like way too few. It would have been especially bad if there had been other people around, but fortunately for me I was up far too early for an average person on a Sunday morning. In the end I had 8 chocolate squares, 8 candy bars, 3 lollipops, and an elegant dress. And from what I hear that is not even a bad haul for Noblegarden. Supposedly the eggs only drop dresses and tuxedos 1% of the time.

With all the love for the other holidays, why hasn't Noblegarden seen any? It would be pretty easy to spice it up, I think. First step would be to make the foods better. Rather than the 61 health, make it 3% of health per second for 25 seconds, like the Hallow's Eve event candies. Next you can throw in some flavor items, like they tend to do with the other holidays. Maybe a vanity pet rabbit that has an idle animation of laying eggs or something. And if you really want people to go for it, throw some eggs in the outlands or after a boss in a level 70 dungeon, and have a chance for it to drop a nice ring/cloak/trinket in there.

I don't mean to hate on the devs so much. I really do appreciate what they are doing with the holidays. They are becoming a lot more fun than they used to be. Perhaps in due time they will fix Noblegarden.

Emergency Supplies!

So, over my spring break I had a little bit of free time to do some WoW crafts. I ran into the idea of an "In Case of Emergency" potion case on Craftster. It is a pretty simple project, and will take only a few hours and around $12 of input. The materials used were a 5" x 9" shadow box [$10] and a small bottle [$1]:



I printed out a close up of a map of the Eastern Kingdoms for the background. Anyways, there was some work making the labels for it. After the background was finished I put a label for the potion in the front of the window.

The potion is made of distilled water, so it won't get gross. I colored it with pink and purple food coloring to get a good purple. The finished product looks something like this:



So, I have happily hung this on my wall. It is a great little craft project for a Sunday afternoon to add a little protection to your gaming station.

Alternatively, if you haven't got the time to make one, I have a few up for sale on Etsy. I have an extremely limited quantity in stock right now, but there are more on the way. Check out wowcrafts.etsy.com if you are interested!

Enter Laura!

So I finally decided to join Andy in posting on the blog. I don't have anything of wow-related interest to say so I will talk a little about myself.

My name is Laura and I am a twenty year old college student majoring in American Studies and minoring in Art. I also DJ at my college's radio station, knit, cut hair, and bake obsessively.

On WoW I play a hunter and a priest both of which I have not yet leveled completely.

I'm more knowledgeable about crafting than World of Warcraft so I hope to contribute to the more DIY side of the blog.

Paladins!

So, my paladin may be neither a draenei, nor ret specced, but isn't that a sweet picture?

I spent the morning today reading all about prot paladins. My paladin is just a wee, young paladinlet, but he is currently specced prot, and so far I am really enjoying it. He is only level 25, so he does not have a lot of abilities that allow him to kill multiple mobs at once, but I definitely get a kick out of taking him to a zone a couple levels behind him and killing large groups of lower level mobs.

The reason I was reading about Paladins, and specifically prot paladins, this morning is due entirely to WoW Insider. This morning they had a couple of articles pertaining to Prot Pallies. The first of which, was the first "Pimp My Profile" article in which they made a list of dungeon blues that a prot pally could acquire to tank well. Being an extremely casual player who never raids, this was exactly the kind of post that grabs my interest. And while the list is a lot of work, it is something that I could complete without sitting down for more than a couple hours at a time.

I have found in the past that I don't like tanking as a warrior, but that is mostly because of the trouble tanking multiple mobs in a pug. Most players in a pug have no idea how to control their dps, and rarely even try to focus on the same mob as the tank. Pally tanks do not have such trouble with aggroing multiple mobs, so I am hoping that will fix my current aversion to tanking.

The second post that drew me in was really just a WoW Insider link to the forums, where Eyonix [a dev, in case you are unaware], was talking about his level 70 characters, and more specifically, his prot paladin. There was a lot of griping from other prot paladins about itemization and other changes they want, but it was nice to see a blue posting about what he likes in the game. And it is nice to know that they are playing these characters endgame and getting a firsthand feel for what class changes they need.

Well, it is midterm season around here, so I had better get back to my studies.

Craft Project

So, here is the craft project that I did for Valentine's Day:

I started with an Athena figurine that I purchased at Target for $5.



The goal of the project was to recreate Laura's first WoW character, a night elf hunter. This figure was really perfect, because her Hunter's pet was an owl, which took a lot of the trouble out of the project. This is her hunter:

So, since she was not level 70 I thought it didn't make sense to try to replicate her armor [not to mention that being very difficult], so instead I just tried to capture the essence of her hunter. This is what I came up with:



To replicate her hunter's hair I had to remove a lot of the hair from the original model, take off the crest from it's helm, and make some hair from epoxy to attach to the top of her head where the smooth helm was originally. I made the ears from scraps of plastic and the eyebrows from tiny wood shavings from her bow.
The quiver is a rolled piece of thick, almost construction paper, glued together with little wood scraps for arrows. The fletching on the arrows is made from bits of tissue.
When I was removing the shield I accidentally broke the arm. When I fixed it I ended up with a bit of a mess, and was without anything to clean it up. So, her upper left arm is a little lumpy.
The bird was already pretty perfect. I just repainted it to look more like her pet owl. Black and gray with yellow eyes and a blue beak.

After all that was finished, I finished the base with some pebbles and heavy drybrushing. Then enclosed the whole thing in a plastic glass that I bought at target and turned out to be a perfect size and shape to guard the figurine.

So, that's that. Happy Valentine's Day, Laura!