World of Warcraft

Transmogrification – First Attempt

This is my first real attempt at transmogrification. The pieces I need are hard to find – and it doesn’t help that I am (mostly) colorblind. So consider this a Work in Progress…

The Hunter's New Clothes, Before (right) and After (left)
The Hunter’s New Clothes, Before (right) and After (left)

…I still think it’s an improvement over the standard look for the normal gear.

Soloing: Cavern of Times, Part 1

I continued my solo runs by doing the first two Cavern of Times instances; Escape from Durnholde and Opening of the Portal. Both are very easy, which again comes not as any surprise. The Opening of the Portal is a little confusing, and two dragons actually got through to attack Mediev. Still, you can easily solo that instance without any sort of preparation.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get any notable loot. At least I got to ride a dragon.

I won’t continue with the Cavern of Time instances for now; next would be the Battle for Mount Hijyal raid, and then the Old Straholme level 70 instance. Instead, I will continue with the instances in Outland – Terrokar is next, I guess.

Faction- and Server Switch

While it hurt me a little, Kitiralaysha Summernight is now a Blood Elf. She also moved to the (German) Blackhand server. The reason is simple; while I love Earthen Ring and the Pact of Wolves guild, that guild is simply not doing anything. A few members raid with Time and Tide, but there’s never anything being organized as a guild – and there are not enough people for it, either.

Mojo Madness, on the other hand, has a good chance of clearing 10-Man content, at least on non-Heroic, and some of the members are old friends of mine from Hamburg.

Kitira was the character chosen because of the needs of Mojo Madness. I’ll convert Kitira back to a Night Elf, some day, but for now she is in Blood Elf guise.

She will still kill dragons. That’s the important part.

Soloing: Zangarmarsh Dungeons

I continued my solo efforts with the next logical step: I moved on to Zangarmarsh and defeated the five-man instances there. Again, as with the Hellfire Peninsula dungeons, I expected no challenge from them and they were easy mode. There are simply no weird mechanics in these fights that could cause a problem. I didn’t get any worth-while loot either.

As a side note, you do get pretty good reputation gains from the Hard mode dungeons. I think I got 5-6k Cenarion Expedition reputation for the three dungeons together, plus maybe 20-30 Coilfang Armaments. I didn’t even do a full clear of any of these dungeons.

I’ll want all reputations maxed that I can do with reasonable effort, but the Cenarion Expedition is one of those reputations where it makes more sense than just to get the achievements; the Cenarion Expedition sells the Cenarion War Hippogryph mount to those who reach Exalted.

Soloing: Hellfire Peninsula Dungeons

I started off my soloing ventures by doing the three dungeons located in hellfire Peninusla: Ramparts, Blood Furnace, and Shattered Halls. I didn’t expect any of them to be a challenge and I was not disappointed, they were all really easy. I still need a decent setup for my keybindings, and I need a better macro solution to work misdirection in, but that’s why I am starting off with the easy dungeons.

I didn’t obtain anything overly unusual or special – and I found myself reminded at how ugly most of the Burning Crusade loot was. The one item I found I actually like is the Skyfire Hawk-Bow. It’s one of the better looking bows I’ve discovered so far.

The Best Laid Plans

The Cataclysm hit and I missed it…

Between my job, a new girlfriend, and more things to do at said new job I have hardly been playing since last year. I did level some character, including Kitiralaysha to level 85, but simply couldn’t get raid-ready with the time available to me. In the end I decided to quit the Raid Group I was a member of, and went on a Hiatus.

That hiatus has now ended and I made some progress in getting Kitira decent equipment. It still isn’t quite at a raid level, but it’s okay. My “in character” narrative, unfortunately, won’t be happening – I did too much in between, and I have too little time. On top of everything, I am almost certainly going to migrate to a different server, to play with real life friends there, which means Kitira may morph from a Night Elf into a Blood Elf. At least temporarily.

In the meantime, I will try to do what I always wanted to get into with Kitira, and that is, I will try to solo stuff. I am not a stellar player any way you want to look at it – I am a decent DPS though – and I figure that is something that may help me practice. Besides, that’s something I can do at my own pace and it will be fairly satisfactory to get various things down. I actually should start a new blog for that, but hey, I already have too many blogs, so I will just recycle this one.