So it happens that I have a couple of months of free game time to give away.^*

I’ve been trying to think of an appropriate contest — something interesting but also easy. I wanted something creative, but I didn’t want it to be a huge hassle for anyone, including me. And honestly, I don’t want to have to judge anything creative because I know how creative you people are and I know I can’t choose between a whole bunch of great entries.

But last night as I was falling asleep I hit on the perfect thing: haiku.

Continue reading →

Lately I’ve been lackadaisically working towards the Loremaster achievement on Mania. (I want the tabard.)

I finished up Outland and Northrend first because I find per-zone count of quests both convenient and satisfying, but now I am working on Kalimdor.

(As an aside, I’ve been posting some of my more pithy-but-certainly-not-interesting-enough-to-make-a-post-out-of thoughts about my travels on Twitter.)

Anyway, since I outlevel the content in Kalimdor by at least twenty levels, and usually more like fifty, I figured I’d do my questing in style.

Above and to the left is my favorite questing shirt right now: a Watcher’s Tunic from a level 68 group quest in Nagrand. On a female character, the color of the sleeve fabric changes to match your skin color, leaving you with a spiderweb or fishnet effect.

The sleeves flare out at the bottom, though … which looks a bit odd if the fabric is supposed to be skin. But a pair of gloves fixes that! I am still looking for a pair of pants and a pair of gloves that look really good with this tunic, but for the moment I’m just wearing it with my normal combat gear.

But that’s not my only questing outfit! I also have the purple pleasure that you see above and to the right: Mordant’s Travel Tunic and The Wanderer’s Cover (both courtesy of quests in Dustwallow Marsh).

I know that you can put together some really nice purple outfits if you try, but I just happened to pick these two pieces up while I was doing quests in Dustwallow. Coincidence, or does Blizzard employ a fashion consultant for quest rewards?

And finally, for those times when I want to look like Wonder Woman, we have a Gleaming Scale Breastplate to the left, also from Dustwallow Marsh.

My thanks to Letters From Birdfall, by the way, for a recent ‘Outfit of the Month’ post that got me thinking about my own outfits again.

One of the things that has always bugged me about World of Warcraft is how the trumped-up hostilities between the Horde and the Alliance interferes with cooperative gameplay.

Okay, yeah, there’s PvP and that’s supposed to be a decent chunk of the game. And yes, sure, there’s lore and lore is important — I get that.

But Mania the character has no beef with most of the Alliance (except humans — she hates humans) and Mania the player could often use their help. And not being able to talk to them makes that a bit of a pain.

Sometimes we find ways around that, though, and I admit that it is very satisfying when we do.

Continue reading →

I am very excited about the upcoming Cataclysm expansion. A big part of that is the promise of new pets, new pet families, and possibly new mechanics for stabling our pets (which was mentioned in the last BlizzChat Twitter thing).

But even beyond the pets, I am just ecstatic about the notion of changes in old Azeroth. Do you have any idea how many characters I’ve leveled to 25 or so over the past 5 years? No, me either. (I tend to delete them when I get bored.) But I suspect that it approaches 50 at least. And after 50 characters, I am thoroughly exhausted by the existing content. I still like it, I’m just exhausted by it.

So I’m on the edge of my seat here, waiting for Cataclysm. Or even any tidbits of Cataclysm news, really, which have been few and far between so far. The two bits of information I am most desperate for: a launch date, and the date that beta will begin. I expect that I am not alone in wanting to know these things, either, although I admit that I have ulterior motives.

Continue reading →