I’m running through Un’goro trying to finish off the “To all the critters I’ve loved before” achievement, looking desperately for a parrot, and bombing out.  Suddenly, my sweetie, who was watching over my shoulder, yelled “THERE’S ONE!”

Parrot, Pterrordorax … both have wings, right?

“And,” I added, “they both begin with the same letter!”

This was not taken in the spirit offered.

-=-=-=-=-=-

Incidentally, the comments on WoWHead indicate that if you kill snakes, parrots will spawn in their place. So much for my “egg” theory.  But, I dutifully killed off every snake I saw, and when I returned to my starting point, a parrot was flapping around in the same location … so there might be something to it.

“… and so she said she’d never visit the Scryer’s tier again!”

LAUGHTER ERUPTS

Eventually one orc sits up a bit in his seat. “Well, boys, ladies, if nobody else can top that, I think we have a winner. Everbody pony up and buy one for good ol’ …”

“’scuse me, sir!”

“Eh?”

“I mighta seen something, you could say, might top that, when I was standing duties in Orgrimmar.”

“Orgrimmar?!? Now yer just makin’ stuff up!”

A Blood Elf stamps the butt of his spear on the floor. “You know better than that, soldier. True stories only!”

“Well, I’ll tell you, and you can decides amongst yerselfs, okay?”

The Sarge narrows his eyes; “You better make it worth the wait, Private, or I’ma gonna send you to stand a post in Wintergrasp.”

“Yes sir, as you wish, sir.

Well, it’s like this.

I was standin’ a rotation in Org, which is fine since I get to womanize and drink a lot …”

(several in the room spontaneously cheer)

“… yeah, thanks you … when this Night Elf in cat form (not bad looking, either) comes running up the back alley.

Naturally, we gives chase, but  the Corporal made me go back to my post, just in case she had friends.

I think he just wanted to have more time to beat on her with his axe –”

(more cheers)

“– yeah, I like hittin’ stuff with me axe, too — but anyway … where was I?

Oh yeah!

So I heads back to my post when I sees … well, a nekkid Dorf.”

“That’s it? We get so many naked Dwarfs in Org that they count towards the Census!”

“Aye, that we do, Sarge … but this one was ridin … a chicken.”

The room erupted into chaos. “You expect us to believe that you saw a naked Dwarf ride through Orgrimmar on a chicken?“, the Blood Elf yelled. “Sargent, I thought you trained them better!”

The Sarge glared at the hapless private; “Give me one good reason not to send you off to Northrend this very minute, private!”

“Well, I have this picture what some Goblin took for me.”

“Ugh …. ” the Sarge muttered to himself briefly. “Okay, you glubberthumpers, what are ya waitin’ on? Drinks for the private!”

THE BAR ERUPTS IN CHEERS AND DRINKING.

I think all 3 of our readers use RSS so nobody probably noticed that the site went dark for a couple of weeks. Meta’s bad … he forgot to pay the Internet bill and it died right in the middle of Dragon*Con … anyone knowing about that knows that attendees … or spouses of attendees … do not have money of any sort during that period of time.  So, apologies all around.

It’s been pretty quiet around our neck of the woods anyway. We’ve got some new blood in the guild, and we’re trying to train them up and raid with them and hope they don’t bolt for another, more ambitious guild. A certain guild that has been poaching ours forever imploded, so now we’re considering “co-raiding” with them, or vice-versa. Fai’s taken her place amongst us and has been terrorizing Hellfire right proper, and collecting herbs and ores like nobody’s business.

And I got to run my first 80 instance. Since Jas is the belle of the ball, I rarely get to see much of any action. No worries, that’s the way it rolls. Plenty of books to study and reagents to grind. But it’s nice to lay down a table for a party of five and rain down some destruction every now and then. This particular instance run became one of what Meta calls Epic Tales of Battle. Well, only one part of it, really, which was a wipe. Spectacular in its nature.

Our GM is a mage named, well, we’ll call her Songbird. Normally it wouldn’t be important except that she invented, more or less, the “Songbird Maneuver”, so I must use a name. Anyway, that maneuver goes down when the mage notices the tank going down and the priest appearing next on the aggro chart, and nobody left to heal or tank in the group, and no chance of ending soon. She lays down a frost nova, turns around, BLINKs, and runs for the entrance, blowing cooldowns on frost nova, ice shield, and blink whenever they come available.

That night, it was my turn, and I executed perfectly. I’m around 1/2 way out when around the corner comes our recently deceased priest, now hale and hearty. Waving, I went past trailing my retinue, and she just had to drop a heal on me. Down she went. Then our tank came around and I stopped to heal him. Only one problem, which you probably saw already. I’m not Jasra. So off I go again, and just before hitting the door, I went down. Of course, to add the last laugh, our hunter came in the door just as I went down. I shall ever remember “Hey, what’s going — WHOA!!!!” just before he splatted.

Now, one might say that in one’s “pro” guild, that would never pass. Lie down and force the wipe, already, you might say. And I generally agree. But, you see, we’re not a “pro” guild. We’re a bunch of friends getting together to have fun. Silly things like this provide a chuckle to the gnarly veterans, and help us judge our new recruits. If you take this sort of thing too seriously, you probably need to find another guild, because we roll a little differently in the Order of the Vorpal Bunny.

This is not to say that we don’t get down to business come raid time. We do. And next time, I will most likely just lay down and take it like a mage. But sometimes you need the image of a lone mage, frost nova-ing and blinking down the hall, screaming at the top of her lungs GET IT OFF GET IT OFF GET IT OFFA MEEEEE with a legion of angry frost giants hot on her trail.

Oh, and by the way. 2nd on the charts. Me, as a 79 mage, grouped with an 80 hunter and 80 DK.  So I’m quite content with Frost right now.

Warning: the following is an attempt at humor. Temerity Jane is a real person, and I did not make up her boyfriend on a dare. The internet, however, is fictional.

Aye, there’s been a kerfluffle in the Paladin-verse. If you’re not familiar with the story, WoW Insider has a good overview.

Even after the sniffing, interviewing, and research, there are still conflicting data points. Ferraro’s own “meh culpa” obfuscates more than it clarifies, WoW Insider’s IP snooping is less than comprehensive, and none of the alleged other perps have spoken up.

What, then, is going on here?

Well, I think we’re far from exhausting all the possibilities, so let me list a few that may or may not have come up so far. Print this out, and as each is eliminated, line it out. When all is said and done, you’ll have it narrowed down to one or two possibilities.

1. One person, bad lying. The most elegant theory.
2. One person, multiple personalities. Also fits the facts. In fact, Ms Townsend could be one of those personalities. I used to live with a gal that had MPD, and the differences between personalities are striking. One didn’t smoke, the rest did. One wore contacts, the rest wore glasses. I wish I was joking but it’s a real possibility.
3. Multiple persons, just as “she” said. Only one which ever visited WoW Insider, I guess.
4. She is the Dread Pirate Roberts. There will be no surviors!
5. Jagoex. “She” said “other WoW blogs.” ¹ Where better to hide than in plain sight? And traffic spikes? Well, let’s consider that WoW Insider links usually kill sites dead, and leave it at that. Also, both blogs are on Blogspot. You know how unusual that is?  Wait. What?
6. Sarah Townsend.  We’re totally through the looking glass now, peeps.
7. I’m Spartacus. No, really, it was me. The subterfuge is just too much to bear any more.  I’m also Matticus, Ratshag, and Temerity Jane. That last one is the hardest. I’ve never been able to make Phil as believable as I wanted to. I originally wanted to make him like Phil in Night Court but that caused flashbacks.

Well, as Jong said (post pulled, sorry), “lol@ Ferraro”. Content stealing is such an un-paladinish thing to do.

But it might work for “Death Knight Shmeath Knight”.

Which does not appear to be live yet.

1. ”We run other WoW blogs, as well.” – from the initial bullet list in her “meh culpa”. [↩]

We’ve certainly been a busy little guild. When last I spoke of such things, we had completed the Arachnid Quarter, and were one boss short of the Military Quarter.

Saturday, we crash against the wall of the Four Horsemen, again and again. Part of the problem is that I was calling the switches, and I think I was off. Eventually our two tanks took ownership of the process and we downed our first one, then the second, and moved to the back, and Oh MAI GAWD we’re gonna … WE DID IT!  Despite one of the warlocks in the back insisting that we move on because we’d never be able to do it. ¹

Sunday, we find ourselves outside the entrance to the Plague Quarter. First up is Noth, and with decent DPS we brought him down before it got crazy.

Then came Heigan.

You have heard of the dance. I’ve read up on the dance and watched the videos. The one person in the raid that had done this extensively took 10 minutes to explain the fight, did a good job.

Of course, we were doomed. The first dance saw five out of nine (yes we were nine-manning at this point) fall victim to the dance. Left standing: the MT, myself, a healing Shammi, and a Survival Hunter² . We set about proving that Heigan could be taken down by such a crew … and we did.  A good 10 to 15 minutes later, we stood victorious. To commemorate this, the GM insisted that the four of us stand before the corpse while everyone else lie on the ground before us.  Clever idea.

All righty then, Loatheb! Nine-manned! Two-shot!  /flex   OK, is this a “healer fight” or a “DPS” fight? The two biggest obstacles to overcome here were (1) getting the healing timing down to fit into that 3-second window, and (2) remembering to toss some dots and use my wand during the downtime in between.

The GM is on fire now, so we’re charging hard into Construct Quarter, still nine-manning it. We decide that Patchwerk isn’t going to work on a nine-man configuration, so we get a former guildy to step in to the vacant slot³ .  No training vids now – the raid has outpaced my expectations⁴. We’re taking this one cold, with some instruction from our druid. After one wipe, he shifts to HoT assist mode and we are able to keep the tanks up.

Hey, look, it’s frogger!  OK, I expected a lot more pain here, to be honest. People have problems with this?  I can see lag playing a factor, but that aside, dying on this should be hard to live down.

Grobbulus! We two-shot this one as well but I really think we need to learn more about this boss to make it go smoother, such as how to dump one’s poison bomb, and so on.  In the end we were all dead, but so was he, and we were able to loot, so we’ll take it.

We ended the evening getting omgpwned by Gluth, with the realization that we needed to read up a bit on this one and Thaddeus.

But what a night … five guild-first kills in our Naxx progression. It’s nights like this that make all the drama bearable.

Oh, and this final screenshot serves two purposes.

1) Hey lookies, I haz epic rug now!

2) Fuubar was commenting on his ugly UI. I offer this as evidence that it could be a lot worse. As Grimm told him:

It is the TRUE reason that bin Laden is still in hiding.

It is what actually made Romney drop out of the presidential race.

Someone at Chrysler tried using it, and see what happened there.

McG used it on his WoW account.

Christian Bale saw it.

Seriously, my UI has been weaponized. Classified. Probably going to fight the Taliban.

To which I’ll add: and we totally took down Heigan with it.

Tonight: can we finish Construct? Will Sapph be Our Little Dragon? Will K’T get revenge for Bigglesworth’s untimely demise?

1. This is what we get for looking the other way while he pegs 25s – he starts thinking everything should be easy. /sigh. Can’t have a run without drama, can we?  At least nobody quit the guild, though our MT left the raid until the GM called him out and made him come back (good on her). [↩]
2. Our MT conjectures that we were probably the only ones to watch the vids as instructed. A good guess, I think. [↩]
3. we later found out that the DPS warrior he replaced had gone offline because the police raided a house on his block, and they killed power to the whole block [↩]
4. I’m in charge of finding and posting training materials on the guild site [↩]

Being a warrior doesn’t mean you get an automatic out for dying. It happens. In this case, it was that goblin at the Altar of Tides. Jas waited for weeks for them to fix the bug where that guy wouldn’t show up at all. Very frustrating when the quest reward is a serious upgrade.

Me, I was just there to kill murlocs and read the stupid inscriptions, and every single time I got close to that altar, there he was, beating on me with – usually – two or more murloc friends.

Glad they added a new graveyard close by.

Before I got started on the day’s questing, there was a moment of WIN in Stormwind’s general chat. I know, I’m shocked as well. But there it was.

<3 A______ .

I left the bit about ORLY in because, well, it amuses.

Level 39. Next time I run, I’ll be putting on my very first piece of plate armor.  I’m ready for it. I’ve been training for that day all my life.

The Paladin of Paladins, He Who Dances In Knightly Armor, the master of the spin, jump, and bounce, is back!

I can never get enough of Shepiwot. Mostly because he annoys the dickens out of Flora.

Now he adds vehicular brainslaughter and spinning parachutes to his resume. Well played, sir. Well played.

HOW TO PALADIN XXXI

OMG I’ve been so pwned.

No, rilly.

I think his post stands on its own merits. Enjoy.

PS: “Tropes” works too. Liek, totallay.

Dear Event Drama Llamas,

“Achievement” means it’s supposed to be hard. While the random number generator does not favor your little nook of the world, that does not mark the Love is in the Air event as a “fiasco“, nor does it justify petty name calling¹.

If you insist on working my side of the street, please be aware that we have standards. While whining about Warlock nerfing or Ret Palli OP are barely legitimate, we generally require better subject matter and, well, skill on the part of the whiner² .

Since skill is probably not possible to fix, please limit yourselves to something that matters, at least within the limited scope of a fantasy RPG in a client-server configuration based on a RTS from the 90s. I mean, if you’re going to crai about things not dropping, how about a little Flora love with regard to Tier drops?

Love,

Flora

PS: Try to have fun. I know that’s an alien concept to some people, who view WoW as a second job, but please review Yahtzee’s comments on that subject if Unclear On The Concept of Recreation and Fun, for I share similar if not identical views³.

PPS: I’m too lazy to post the Angry Baby picture. But it belongs here. Oh, yes.

PPPS: I’m very proud that I avoided all references to “big purple drake-shaped strap-on”.

<.<

>.>

1. BTW: WTF does “Wang Blue” mean outside of the Watchmen movie, anyway? Your guess is as good as mine, but looky looky, we got scatalogical, ain’t we special. [↩]
2. Note: memorizing the names of certain Blizzard employees and spewing them in a blog post does not constitute actual Skill, nor does merely generating page views. Thanks for playing, stick to the SEO career track, kiddo. [↩]
3. WoW Insider worker bees are not excused since part of the job is understanding the difference. [↩]

Oh noez!

The stone of ice, it has melted!

True story.

Melvin’s exploits over at Renoobed have inspired me to add a new section to my bio called “You might be a Locktard if …”   Only one item so far, lifted straight from that page, but there’s plenty of material out there. I’ll update it as new mats present themselves.

Grimm will probably steal this idea too. Light knows there’s plenty of material there, and I won’t even mention Grimm on the Gnomeregan elevator¹ .

Suggestions, anyone?

1. Hint: *smack* *smack* *spat* [↩]

I just ran across a reference to the Rabbit’s Foot loot drop in-game, saying that many people always carry one of these. As far as I know, they only drop from wolves, and maybe rabbits, but since I don’t go killing rabbits, I’ll not know.

But here’s the thing. It wasnt’ lucky for the rabbit. And it wasn’t lucky for the wolf. So why do you think it could possibly be lucky for you?

We live in a land of living gods and demons, who bestow their powers directly upon us, and yet people insist on making up superstitions?

Unbelievable.

Well, this is both embarrassing and humorous. I’m currently wearing Trial-fire Trousers; however, I just realized that all three sockets are empty!

Embarrassing for obvious reasons.

The humorous bit is pretty obvious too.

My entry for the Penny Arcade Ten Words contest:

Lonely Dwarf looking. Giant Alabaster Maiden found. Love blooms, unfortunately.

That’s right. And my guild knows, too – every time we get there.

Poor fellow. Poor, neglected fellow.

The other day Flora and friends busted him out, but I guess they caught him again.