Since I happen to enjoy those old school swimming quests (I’m thinking of grabbing tablets from nasty murlocs) I really hated having to wrangle my camera around to actually see anything in the water. And then I discovered this handy option in the Interface menu:

Now, I had no problem with changing camera angles. I duck under the water, and my camera does too–no fiddling required! I’ve had this option checked for years.

However, I never tried to swim as a treant in a pit of lava. When I was burning my bark in the lava, I couldn’t see over my lovely afro of leaves no matter what I did! Above the lava–afro. Below the lava–afro and tree-trunk legs. So, I can’t really be blamed that this happened, can I?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3oO2ey6bHI&feature=player_embedded

Fortunately, I managed to remembered that Water Collision option, and rapidly unchecked it before that next attempt!

Challenge #6

Most of us have a favorite poet or song. Give us an image that you think represents your favorite line, or what line inspires you most. You should probably include said line and *maybe* give some explanation/reasoning behind it, unless you’re feeling overly ambiguous.

Well Saz just loves to play hard-ball, doesn’t she? This time around I was challenged to couple my favorite line of song or poetry with a suitable screenshot. I had a really hard time limiting myself to just one*, but I finally went with Yeat’s The Second Coming which I thought paired nicely with the apocalyptic future related to us by Nozdormu when we begin our quest-line for the legendary staff.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

*Slight post-note. I pursued my undergraduate degree in English Literature, so please excuse my pretentious and probably rather morbid looking choice!

Some of our desire to have an assigned “spot” just makes sense. We know exactly where to go, we know that no one else will be there avoiding the reshuffling game, and there’s none of that “I couldn’t find a safe place so I fell into the lava” excuses… at least not after the first time! We can all feel secure that there’s a special place just for us, and it’s oh so comfortable.

But many times, we’re not directly given a spot. The pack starts the encounter, jockeying for position, and making minute adjustments until everyone fits in just right. Or do they? Sometimes you end up so far from the boss that you couldn’t hit even if your bow came with titanium soaked dragon sinew. The tank you’re assigned ends up on the opposite side of the room. And now everyone has a spot. You’re stuck making the rounds, trying to find a better position or silently playing the chicken game, daring the other player to stand on you and doom you both to a horrible death.

Healers and tanks, of course, have jockeying advantage in any territorial dispute. I could almost see one the tail of our hunter’s cat being tucked one night when the resident shaman walked up, stood on his pixelated self and stated “I’m commandeering this spot. Find another.” The hunter shuffled left, then right, then forward and back, and could not find a spot that was suitable. Eventually he ended up jogging across the room, dooming himself to confusion and death as he re-oriented himself to the left side of the boss room.

It gets even worse when you rotate in players. Although everyone has marked out their territorial claim the night before, now you’ve got the other guy who is awesome. But confused. Instead of taking the mage’s spot like he’s supposed to, he’s trying to take my spot! How dare he?! Grumbling ensues as he tries to find the perfect place. Even if someone says “just takes Mage’s spot” no one really knows where that is so he’s left hunting and pecking until people stop snarling at him as he nears their territorial range.

Although this behavior has its advantages, it gets a little awkward when the boss mechanics single out a player to reshuffle to a new position. Where to go? What to do? Well, move of course… but where? This is where you can use your sneaky skills to discombobulate your raid-mates and reach your comfort zone in a faster manner. As you shuffle out of the bad and into your raid-mates range, don’t automatically begin the shuffle-dance. You’ll be doomed! If you shuffle around like a person with ants in your pants, I assume you’re going to keep doing that until: 1) You die, 2) You get the hell out of my spot.

However, if you shuffle into my spot and stay put, I start getting a bit nervous. Thoughts will randomly collide such as:

• Why isn’t he moving?
• OMG, I’m going to die if he stands on me!
• No time for vent, can’t type, healing. Fuck!

And then I obligingly shuffle a bit to my left and do the same thing to the raid member on that side until he re-positions himself accordingly.

However, the thing that worries me the most is what happened to our good hunter friend a few paragraphs ago. Having to play from a different side of the room. Intellectually, I understand: the mechanics are the same, I can still heal people, and their are not giant magma crocodiles on that side either, but…. it’s soooo disorienting! My little healing mannequins are not where they are supposed to be! Familiar colors and names are now dark, and I’ve got this new set that just isn’t the same.

What can I say? When it comes to PvE environment, I become a territorial monster (but with good reason!?)

Well I’m standing on the mountaintop and saying it for everyone to hear: I’m doing it wrong!

Or am I?

There’s always this fine line between what a raid team can and should ask of its raid team and what it can’t. If my raid leader came to me and said “it is mandatory for you to cap out your valor points or we’ll give your raid slot to someone else” I might re-consider my stance on ignoring 5-mans. However, will it actually make me run 5-mans? Would I go run them just to keep my raid slot? Today, when I’m free for the summer and kinda doing my own thing in terms of research, housework, and game-play, I might.

But when the Fall rolls around and I’m no longer a lazy student taking off a summer, I’d offer to review applicants instead. You see my raid time is my game-time. 9 hours a week hasn’t always been much to me, but it’s also been bloody impossible and a commitment I couldn’t keep even when I sincerely made every effort to be there. I make that commitment because I love slaying internet dragons, but depending on the time of the year and my other commitments, it can be too much to handle.

Which brings us to our game-time. If you read Syl today, you might have noticed an article about enjoying the parts of the game that are fun. This is different for every person, but there’s 2 main areas of WoW that I truly enjoy: raiding, questing/leveling. I don’t particularly like 5-mans. Oh sure, they’re a boat load of fun when you’re lazing away an afternoon with a party of friends, but I haven’t had that kind of 5-man experience since Wrath. Even then, I mainly became involved in running a ton of 5-mans because I was an add tank, and learning to control groups of adds is way more productive (and less incriminating) when pursued against strangers and not enacted in your raid group where adds are eating off the healer’s face causing a wipe. 25 people mad at you is 100 times more scary than 4 suckers you talked into running Violet Hold… just sayin’.

When I’m killing time waiting for my raid, or just finished a nice, tight 3-hour session, the last thing I want to do is put up with shit from stangers. Ok, even on my best day I don’t want to put up with shit from stangers. That’s all 5-mans are for me at this point: my ability to put up with crap (or silence) from random people in the hopes that my experience/gear gained will be greater than the hassle that the entire experience put me through.

Before, that wasn’t so much a problem. When attunement was big, at least the people you were running the instance with generally had the same goals. Now you just get a bunch of suckers together hoping that the dungeon will get finished as quickly as possible so that the potential for shit-swapping will be drastically reduced. And this is where Blizzard expects me to farm Valor Points for my (currently) 4 pieces of gear.

Screw that. Although it can be argued that I’m letting down my team by not providing my ultimate best in gear options as soon as possible I just have a hard time buying that story. Didn’t we all read the story about Ulduar in blues? While gear is a factor in raid success, it sure as heck isn’t the primary factor in whether or not my guild downs a boss. If that was the case, our poor paladin who hasn’t had a bracer upgrade since Cataclysm released would be destroying our chances of killing Ragnaros.

Don’t get me wrong: I’d love to be valor capped every week and have all that fresh, shiny loot that much faster. However, I’m just not willing to sacrifice lord knows how much time (you never really know until you die doing it) in the nebulous hope that my dungeon group will successfully kill things and I will walk away with some extra numbers in my character screen when I can just as easily pursue an activity I already enjoy and am committed to in order to gain those same little tokens, albeit more slowly.

In the end, a single piece of gear is not going to make or break my raid team’s chances. Hell, if every member of my raid team followed my philosophy our combined 10 pieces of gear would not break our chances. Giving into the fallacy that slight gear upgrades will make or break the ability of your team to down bosses is ludicrous, and I refuse to subscribe to it. If you love those 5-mans, love getting upgrades, and want everything as soon as possible: by all means, knock yourself out and send me the link I love seeing people get new shinies!

Ultimately, you need to gain that gear relies primarily on your guild. I think we all have some kind of social contract with our guild, much as Wugan discussed. I don’t feel that capping out any type of points was a part of my contract with my guild, implied or otherwise. Others may very well be in guilds where capping out your valor points every single week is absolutely required and implicitly stated either in the guild policies or in an addendum (what I generally refer to as an “oh shit, we haven’t said anything about wearing tabards, make a forum post!) If you’re in the latter type of guild, damn skippy you should be busting your ass to get those valor points, because that’s the type of tyrannical guild experience you signed up for.

But if you haven’t and your gear isn’t heroic level blues, then feel free to do it wrong. You’ve got a partner in crime.

Before You Get Started

This is not the best or easiest way to make gold for a leveling character. This is a method that is meant to maximize the fun part of the alt process (leveling/exploration) while minimizing things I do not consider fun. Because of that, it is a highly self-reliant character, and can be a great choice for those starting characters on new servers without a support network, or for those wanting a “throwaway” alt.

There are a number of assumptions I’m making about your character as I write this.

• This is a solo character.
• You don’t know if you’ll ever touch this character again past xx level.
• You won’t cry if you have to delete it.
• You enjoy questing/grinding. (Or you don’t have to run the dungeon finder to level).
• You are willing to utilize the AH at a basic level.

The advantages of this system:

• It will work for any class/specialization that you choose.
• It can be done at your own pace.
• AH interaction is minimal.

The disadvantages are:

• If you decide to keep the character at max level you’ll probably want different/more professions.
• It doesn’t work as well when partnering for leveling.
• It doesn’t work as well for healers since most leveling occurs outside of dungeons.

The Basics

1. Roll a character
2. Start questing
3. Pick up everything (characters on established servers can exclude things like fish oil and light feathers… but if you’re being truly self-sufficient, what’s the harm?)
4. At the appropriate level, pick up two primary gathering professions.
5. Vendor everything but cloth and profession related materials (this includes greens/blues that you acquire while questing).
6. Auction all cloth and profession-related materials.
7. Purchase basic riding/flying and appropriate level flying as needed (Azeroth/Northrend).

That’s it! Characters generally rack up between 15-20k or more during the course of their adventures in from 1-85. If you keep your investments on your alt minimal, that’s a pretty penny for your main (or your hoard) if you were planning on playing the character anyway. For alts on established servers that have minimal gearing needs because of heirlooms, the profits tend to be better since all quest rewards can be acquired solely on their sale price and then vendored away. Now, while all this is really easy, there are some tricks that I’ve picked up utilizing this method over the years.

Tips & Tricks

Character Choice

While I don’t advocate choosing an alt based on this particular “gold-making” enterprise, some characters will do a bit better than others.

• If you’re not using heirlooms, plate wearers make the best money. Plate quest rewards are almost always the most valuable vendor item.
• Healing isn’t generally a fun past time when trying to take down angry quest mobs. If you don’t want to level a DPS or tank spec, then stick to those dungeons and make a bit less coin.
• Tanks and strong AoE classes are great for the secret grind lover. Large groups of mobs, or low-level dungeons can greatly supplement your gold supply.
• If you want to spend most of your time gathering, druids with flight form are the best!

Profession Choice

Whatever you do, don’t craft. Crafting professions lose money until you reach max level and can sell high-end items to an end-game crowd. If you hit end-game and decide you want to keep your character, then by all means, change to crafting professions, but until then, stick to gathering. (If it works for noobs, it’ll work for you.)

• Mining and Herbalism garner you experience when you gather. They also require you to go to the resource. If you don’t like traipsing around the map chasing sparklies, then only take one.
• For most servers, raw ore and herbs are the best-selling raw material.
• Skinning relies on killing beasties. If you don’t relish standing around skinning a pile of dead dogs, don’t take it.
• On most servers, skins have widely fluctuating profit levels from different types of materials. While it is profitable, in my experience it’s a less steady source of income.

But what about inscription and enchanting?

• For an experienced Auctioneer who enjoys the process, these professions can earn you cash while you level. However, they require more time devoted to the process of making money than leveling your alt, which is why I don’t suggest them.

What about secondary professions?

• If you really enjoy cooking and fishing, then feel free to work on these as you go. They take minimally from your cash base and end-product cooked goods vendor for more than their uncooked brethren. However, if you don’t like it, don’t do it! You can level these professions just as easily at max level if you decide to keep your character.
• First Aid, however, is a no-no. While it feels very weird to say that (as I have always encouraged everyone to take it) in the current leveling environment, it’s not really necessary. Cloth will be your primary money-making machine, so don’t waste it! You can always quickly level up first aid by clearing dungeons for cloth at a later date.

Purchases

Purchases should be minimized at all points. However, sometimes you’ve just gotta have:

• Skills: If you’re really discerning you can cherry pick abilities you never plan to use such as Devouring Plague when you’re leveling disc, but I play it safe and buy everything.
• Professions: This is your prime money-making tool, so you need to keep up your gathering professions to match the area you’re currently exploring. It’s no fun having to back-track to an area you’ve completed to catch up your mining.
• Riding/Flying: Basic riding and flying can really speed up your leveling process and frankly, make it more fun. You’ll definitely want Apprentice, Journeyman, Expert, Cold Weather Flying and your Flight Master’s License, but I would forgo Artisan and Master riding unless you have another character bank-roll the purchase.
• Bags: My bag of choice is Netherweave Bags. This is the first and only AH purchase I make. For the size (16-slots) and price, they are generally the most affordable option. If you want to invest a little more in Frostweave, feel free, but you probably don’t need that much room until you hit max level and begin carrying around multiple sets of gear.

What you should never, ever do is buy yourself gear from the Auction House. If you haven’t been gifted with heirlooms and blues from a previous explorer, don’t worry–you’ll survive.

The Vendor & AH

Let’s face it, if you’re not an (RP) server, most low-level items are hard to sell on the AH. While you want to maximize your profits, you also want to minimize activities that aren’t a ton of fun, and re-listing auctions over and over again definitely ranks up there on my list! Below is a short-list of things that should definitely be vendored, definitely be auctioned, and things that depend on your server and your personal persistence.

I’d also like to take a moment to highly suggest a bank alt. I hate going to town unless I really need something (like skills!) so being forced to return to a capital city when my bags are full is torture for me. By having a level one character standing in a capital city, you can mail yourself auction-able goods from anywhere in Azeroth. Just don’t forget to log into the poor thing now and again to put up new auctions and pull off your lovely profits!

Things to Vendor

• Gear: Anything green quality or below. Most green quality pieces are allotted random stats which may or may not be desirable to discerning buyers. With the advent of heirlooms (and armies of alts), many players can keep their own alts in style without relying on the AH for gear, so don’t waste a lot of time (and money) constantly relisting. Just scrap these as soon as you find them.
• Grey Items: Pick up a handy add-on like TekJunkSeller that will automatically trash these as soon as you open dialogue with a vendor.
• White Items: You’ll have to sell these by hand. This can be anything from feathers to scales, and there are all a total pain in the rumpus to sell on the AH. With the advent of glyphs for reagents like Light Feathers, there’s even less reason to keep your hands on them.
• If you’re skinning, Ruined Leather Scraps.
• If you’re mining, Rough Stone. Stone after that level is debatable depending on server.

Things to Auction

• Cloth! Linen is the only questionable sale here, as it sometimes moves quite slowly, but from Wool on all cloth should hit the auction house.
• Whatever you gather from gathering professions. This includes ore, herbs, skins, gems, motes and crystallized whatever.
• Motes should always be sold in singles. Once combined they cannot be broken down and can take longer to sell.

But What About?

• Food Items: I personally throw these in my bank as I get them to make cooking easier in batches. However, if you never plan on cooking, or are unsure, just vendor the raw stuff. Most raw food products sell poorly unless it’s a seasonal item (like Small Eggs).
• Reputation Items: These generally can’t be vendored, but can be auctioned. If you don’t know/want to work on reputation gains, these can be a good AH item. However, they generally require re-listing depending on the number you have, so if you don’t feel up to it, bank or trash them.

Random Dungeons

Despite the great experience you can nab from running random dungeons, they suck for making reliable cash. This does not mean you never could, would, or should run them however, as there are several advantages to running dungeons selectively.

• Gear: The little bag of goodies can help you gear up your character without costing you anything. From 1-60 I believe that you can get 2 new items every 10 levels. (i.e. you’ll only get a neck and leg slot for a few levels, then you’ll get the chest and back the next few). Once you pass into Outlands/Northrend and beyond, you’re more likely to get sizeable upgrades directly from boss kills. Getting in to get a huge upgrade can be a good strategy so long as it’s a long term piece of gear.
• Quests: You can get some gold and goodies once per dungeon by doing the dungeon quests.
• Break up the grind: Sometimes, you just want to do something different, and I’m not going to tell you that you can’t. Just don’t whine to me when you’re party dies and you spend more money on repairs than you gain in cloth/gold

So if you’re looking to make some extra cash as you level your latest alt from 1-85, vendor heavily, auction sparingly, and don’t spend a dime you don’t have to!

What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer?
Terrielle, Restoration Druid

What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)
10-man raiding

What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why?
Tree of Life. I missed the days of tree form. I never cried over the loss of the stumpy, twiggy little log. While I’d admit it had a cute /dance, it just wan’t for me. Now, a giant treant, that I can get behind. I only wish my afro of leaves was orange instead of purple, but we can’t have everything! Tree of Life isn’t my favorite spell because of the graphics though: it’s some of the most fun you can have with healing spam. While druids are good at pushing out a smattering of heals all over the raid, Tree of Life just makes this stronger, faster, and better. Awesome.

What healing spell do you use least for your class and why?
Wild Growth. For 99% of fights, this provides perhaps 1/3 of my overall healing, and I just don’t like it. While it’s neat having a smart heal, having a smart heal that you just hit on cooldown and requires no thought whatsoever–I’m running, no problem, I got this!–leaves something to be desired. I’d probably scream if the developers ever decided to take it away, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s fun either.

What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why?
Mobility. When it comes to running around in circles like a mad dervish of healing goodness, you can’t touch this. As fights have come to rely more on getting the raid scooting around the dance floor, druids have really shined.

What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why?
Diversity. The druid’s answer to every problem is moar healz.

In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you?
I’d still have to go with raid healing. While druids are fairly versatile and can provide strong tank healing while still sprinkling the raid with HoTs, other classes have the ability to mitigate damage when on the tank.

What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why?
I’ve had limited chances to play with the full gamut of healing classes since I became a druid, but if I had to pick, I’d say Discipline Priest. Disc priests’ greatest strength is mitigation, while druids is flat throughput, and the combination could be a potent combination.

What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why?
I haven’t had to do it yet, but I’d hate to be stuck healing with another druid. Having a different class that can complement the strengths of my own class are always the best combinations.

What is your worst habit as a healer?
I can do stuff other than heal? I still myself a fairly new druid, and I still struggle with all the procs and cooldowns available to me.

What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing?

“Why did I die?” It’s not my job to watch your fail so I can report it accurately to you when you die. It’s your job to be aware that something is causing you damage and to read your debuffs/move out of crap on the floor/stand on the other side of the boss. If that doesn’t help, learn to read your combat log/WoL. This is not my job.

Do you feel that your class/spec is well-balanced with other healers for PvE healing?
Yep. While I might wish for an armor buff or mitigation cooldown, the absolute pumping through-put of druids is just awesome. Being able to mitigate damage to myself and healing on the run make me a great fit for grouping up with any set of healers.

What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?
World of Logs and (because I like to cheat sometimes) CompareBot!

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class?
Big numbers, weak healing. I think a lot of times, people look at all those HoTs and think druids aren’t effective without being paired up with another strong healer. Just because it’s best to let me spread the healing love around, that doesn’t mean I can’t drop strong, consistent healing on a single target as well as across the raid. All that overhealing isn’t because I’m doing my job wrong, it’s because HoTs help even out raid damage, and if some other healer can’t wait for that HoT to tick up my targets health, I can’t be held responsible for their lack of faith!

What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn?
My biggest struggle has been and continues to be using every single cooldown effectively every time.

If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)?
High healing output, high overhealing, and a failure to ever use that lock-candy I pick up!

Haste or Crit and why?
Haste! Crit isn’t even on my short list. Whatever I pick up as I roll along is JUST fine.

What healing class do you feel you understand least? Paladins. Last time I played a paladin healer they had a choice between Flash of Light and Holy Light. Now they have all these…. abilities. Why I hear that bacon is great, I’m not quite sure how Paladins get full credit for its awesomeness.

What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing?
Currently I’m using ElvUI, Clique, and WeakAuras to take care of the core of my healing needs.

Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?
I go for intellect whenever possible. I was attempting to balance haste and mastery until 4.2 dropped, and now I’m slowly switching over to a higher haste to mastery ratio.

And now, tag you’re it!

Chloe of Pocketheals

Laerith of Totemic Grace

Rhii of Oh My, Kurenai

Harmony

I currently have a love/hate relationship with harmony. It’s not that sustaining the buff is that hard: this week I’ve managed to keep a 75-98% uptime on the buff. It’s that it’s different. Instead of showing HoTs followed by a few filler heals, I’m having to do the opposite. I loved 3 Rejuv’s and Nourish spam, and while I can still choose to do that, it’s not the absolute best use of my healing… at least if I forgot to get my buff up first. So, Regrowth has re-entered my repretoire as more than a clearcasting proc filler, and often does duty in providing a quick refresh for my beleagured buff.

I’m also finding that my overhealing has skyrocketed with this mastery change. While I’m not particularly worried about over-healing generally, it still makes me question whether the mastery change has been the best for me.

Although I thought about adding the countdown to Elv’s buff list that grows over my player frame, instead I set up my tracking for WeakAura. I chose to make a texture depletes as the buff is running out with a swirling exit if it completely falls off. So far, it’s working pretty well and the green holds up very well against the drenched red hues of Firelands.

Dailies

I am the world’s worst daily quester. I absolutely fail at them. It took me until we were working on Heroic Nefarian to earn enough tokens for my Tol Barad trinket with our resident shamans yelling about the benefits time, and time, and time again. Pffffft.

However, there is an exception, and that was the SSC dailies. I imagine I enjoyed these dailies so much because it was more like a quest. You do some stuff, and it unlocks some more stuff. Good times. The Firelands dailies look to be shaping up much like the SSC dailies as you unlock different stories and quests as you repeat the different parts. Although I haven’t managed to get them done every day, I’m having a good time when I do get on and tally up my tokens needed for the next section.

Firelands

There’s just something extremely awesome about outdoor “dungeons.” I think this was my favorite feature in DDO, and I’m really glad that WoW has decided to give us something other than tunnels and circular rooms. Finally! Perhaps because it’s the only boss we looked at this week and didn’t get down, or maybe just because it was a bit different, the flaming druid-bird of death, Alysrazor, was my favorite fight even if I spent the fiery-hurricane phase running around in circles and screaming about the stupid bird blocking my view.

How was your first week of 4.2?

I know at this point many people would expect a list of little gems of posts: my favorites, my most commented upon, or even the ones that received the most attention. However, I really do have a hard time choosing. My style and thrust of my posts have changed as I’ve moved into different phases of my life and WoW career, and those who read me for my quirky leveling posts may have started running for the hills the minute I started writing up strategy guides. All I can say, is that I have enjoyed them all: the screenshots, the UI posts, the rambling thoughts and instructional manuals. I am all of those players, and although I tend to feast or famine my writing styles a bit, I’m sure those same types of posts will appear here again.

Instead of sending you scurrying through my blog to find posts you’ve already read (you have been reading them right?) I thought I’d take a moment to shout-out some of the bloggers who have kept my inspired while I worked on this project. While I’d love to just copy/paste my entire blogroll over with a personal note for each of you, it’s just not that practical Jaedia and Ophelie started with me over at Blog Azeroth, and it was always fun to see how our blogs were growing. Tam was my first non-family commentator. Llyra welcomed my first fledgling comments on shamans with patience and grace. Spinks showed me that just because you want to write about a game, doesn’t mean you’re stuck with just one. BBB showed me that writing a bear-wall can be entertaining, even if it breaks every “rule” in the short and sweet blogging handbook, while Bobturkey taught me that if you’re going to write a guide, do it with authority!

Although it hasn’t quite reached the two-year mark (that happens in September) I imagine that I will once again be plummeted into a frenzy of activity at that time, and wanted to take a moment to thank all the readers, followers, commentators, and fellow bloggers that have helped keep my small ship afloat in the sea of the interwebz.

For those who were around for my 6-month anniversary, you may remember the great Spell Cast: Muse party. I wanted to do something similar again this time around, providing a free Muse for all the bloggers who keep me active and engaged in the blog-o-sphere. Unlike last time, which was a bit blogger-centric, I also wanted to ask the non-blogging crowd to provide me with a prompt. Again, it’s a totally selfish celebration providing me topics to read and topics to write, but I hope that no one will mind too much. I really wanted to provide a raffle, but having no discernable skills beyond talking, and still in starvation graduate mode, hopefully my writing and ideas will be sufficient thanks!

To participate, simply request or provide a prompt by July 31st, 2011. I will do my best to provide return prompts within a couple of days of your comment. For those providing prompts, I’ll try to provide the date your prompt will be posted here at Jaded Alt within a couple of days of your comment. At the end of August, I’ll compile all participating posts for easy retrieval for those wanting to see what the A-Musement Party has spawned!

Challenge #5

Show us an image of you pimping your favorite title and give us a reason why you dig it so much.

This is how I feel about titles:

Confused yet? I don’t really care much for titles. I like the achievement, but I really find floating text above my head as I run around a distraction, a needless bit of information that I just don’t need. If you’re sporting a nifty title, I’m sorry that I missed it, but I don’t show those either! When I’m standing in Stormwind or somewhere similarly pressed for space, I’d rather see parts of avatar and the floor/wall/fountain than a huge purple blob that is an attempt at displaying everyone’s name. If I want to know who you are, I’ll click on you.

I’m probably going to cause some hideous faux pas here, but I really dislike screenshots that display floating names as much as I dislike seeing them in my own game-world. While I know plenty of people happily enjoy their game and screenshots with them (my hubby included) I just can’t help myself from going “gah!”

However, if you absolutely insist, I will admit that I giggled myself silly when I was granted the title of Slayer of Stupid, Incompetent, and Disappointing Minions although I never nabbed a screenshot of it.

Challenge #4

Proud of a boss kill? Excited about taming that rare? Over the moon about getting a title? Show us your greatest in game accomplishment!

There’s not many fixed goals that I’ve attempted to achieve in game. My most consistent activity throughout the game has been raiding, but anything that is accomplished in that team environment invariably belongs to the team. I can’t take sole responsiblity for either our successes or failures, as much as I may enjoy the activity itself. Outside of raids, my goals tend to be fairly limited: a pet that has caught my fancy, a particular quest chain to unlock a hub, or getting some particular trinket or codpiece through my crafting skills.

However, there has been one exception to this rule:

I created a character specifically to carry out this task, a death knight by the name of Nightfall. She actually sat dormant for a few months before I actively pursued the title, but once I began it ate up almost all of my non-raiding time. If I only had a 1/2 hour to jump into the game, well, that was enough time to garner a few more quests in the ultimate pursuit.

I think this is one of the few in-game pursuits that I have quested after (heh) solely to say that I accomplished it.