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!

WoW crafts!

Well, my rogue finally broke into the 50s. She is sitting pretty at level 51 right now, though slightly disappointed with the end of the combat tree. And in much more exciting news, Laura got her first character into the 50s! Her shadow priest dinged 50 a couple of days ago. She had gotten a hunter to level 47 many months ago, but the hunter didn't do it for her.

This is a big problem in WoW, rolling the wrong class. My first character was a hunter, who I got to level 20, but my friends wanted to transfer to a PVP server, so I rerolled a mage. I tried pretty hard with this mage, but he was just not the right class for me. I finally got him to level 50 recently, and found that I enjoy playing him quite a bit more as a frost mage, but I am not sure he will ever find his way to the Outlands.

Hunter has been my passion from the start. I have tried every class, and while rogue comes in at a close second, I find I can't enjoy playing any class as much as I do my hunter. I think that finding the right class is a big part of having a good time in the game. People frequently get all the way to level 70, reroll, and find that their new class is a whole lot more fun for them. So, try everything out! I can speak from experience. I leveled a warrior all the way to 70 only to discover that I hate tanking endgame instances.

So, I am already three paragraphs in and I haven't mentioned the crafts from the title yet. I can't really say much about it, as it is a Valentine's Day gift for Laura, but I have been working hard on it, and I am pretty excited. I will post pictures of the finished product come Valentine's Day.

a day of patch notes.

Well, I've been waiting for Laura to write a post to introduce herself, but she is tied up with school right now, so I guess I should just go on.

There's a lot of talk about patch 2.4 on the forums today. Unfortunately, most of the nice changes they are making don't benefit me much. There is a lot of change for those who raid, a group that I have not been a part of since the launch of TBC.

This is always an exciting time, though, when they are planning a big content patch full of new goodies. It is hard to believe how little I used to know about world of warcraft back when I was raiding the vanilla wow dungeons. I was raiding MC and BWL every week and had never read a guide to either. I must have been a terrible guild member. heh.

Raiding has always been a problem for me. Maybe if I met the right group of people, but the people I have raided with get too caught up in it. It would be nice to meet a casual group to raid once or twice a week and not get upset at each other over wipes, but it appears those groups are few and far between. And it is very hard to balance a raid schedule with school and my social life. How do all of you balance the raid schedule with the rest of your life? Are there actually more casual groups out there than I realize?

But I suppose what I want most out of raiding is the epic feeling of killing bosses and clearing dungeons, and Blizzard is making an effort to open the epic experience to casual players in Wrath of the Lich King, so maybe that will solve the problem for me.

Well, I am going to get back to trolling the forums.