Weekly Update: Pandas and Loot

For reference; initial post.

I'm at 11700 achievement points, up 80 from last week! Still second place in the guild...

• Finished the last Hallow’s End achievements; A Mask for All Occasions and Treats of Northrend/Cataclysm. (Also been deleting wands like crazy and stacked up on Female Murloc masks for agility buff.)
• Bloody Rare: Killed Kraator and Bro’Gaz the Clanless, and only have 4 left in Hellfire and Terokkar.
• Got 3 achievements in Firelands since last update: Share the Pain, heroic Beth'tilac and heroic Baleroc. Mucho happy. :)
• The Loremaster: Finished Wetlands --> only 5 missing zones in Eastern Kingdoms (and a bunch in Kalimdor).

Young draenei girl
from Deviantart

• Found 3 new companion pet friends: Creepy Crate, Feline Familiar <3 and Murkablo.
  I also grinded for Disgusting Oozeling for hours without luck, so no more of that!
• Mount: Reins of the Green Proto-Drake from Sholazar egg!!!
  Headless Horseman didn't give his mount to me so far, but I'll keep trying. Got rings for some alts though; second hunter got agi-ring, warrior got strength-ring and shadow priest got the two intellect-rings.
• Loot: Heroic Grips of Unerring Truth (not the non-tier piece I’m looking for, but noone else wanted them anyway. Aiming for helm from Shannox, as killing Ragnaros heroic is not likely to happen immediately.) and heroic The Hungerer.
  Also got Legacy. Wasn't gonna use it for transmogriphication, as it's butt ugly. ;) But still wanted it for sentimental reasons (was my hunter's only item from Kara that was actually obtained in BC). After 5.0 I won't have to worry about transmogging melee weapons at all. :)
• Hydraxian Waterlords 13100/21000. This is 1199 more than I had last week. Calculated time to be exalted: 7 weeks.
• Thori'dal, the Stars' Fury. Didn't do Sunwell this reset. Having difficulties getting people.
• Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker. Didn't get any of the bindings, and seriously considering dropping the seek for this one, as I won't be able to equip it after 5.0 anyway...

Random thoughts about pandas

When I first heard about Mists of Pandaria, I think it was in june, I didn't like the idea at all. Pandas?!? Come on... Then Blizzcon came, I saw the trailer, the previews of the pandas, the artwork and the monk animations, and... It's really cool! We'll have so much fun! Oh my God so happy I am they're still making new content for my game! Fact is, one big reason why I started to play World of Warcraft and sticked with it instead of changing to any other games or MMOs, is the cartoony look of it. A lot of games never tempted me at all cause they're too "realistic". Pandas will be great. :)

Also, initially about the pet combat system, I was thinking "I don't mind them adding this to my game, but I probably won't try it". Well, that's changed to: "A new mini-game inside my game? And I already have 158 companion pets? Of course I'll try it! I wonder what achievements they'll add for this..." So from being superpositive and psyched 2 days ago, I'm now looking forward to Mists of Pandaria even more! :D

Draenei from DeviantArt

They also mentioned at Blizzcon that pandas was supposed to be the alliance race in the Burning Crusade... I wonder how that would have impacted my playing of the game, not being able to roll a draenei? Impossible to know for sure, but I think I might not have been that interested for so long.

Random thoughts on loot

Crystallized Firestones were a good idea! It seemed to me they were trying to add more universal loot drops, like a kind of an intelligent loot drop system. Perhaps especially for 10mans who often only have one or two people with same gear preference. At least my guild end up sharding a lot of stuff even though we are far from completely geared. But the drop chance is really not good enough to complete this task. I've participated in 15 heroic kills in Firelands. I've seen one Crystallized Firestone drop (which I totally took to upgrade my crossbow, yippi hunter loot!). That makes it a 7 % drop chance for my guild, and haven't really helped at all with gearing. We keep getting the same drops every freaking week. Ragnaros (normal) drops the caster staff and the strength trinket every week! EVERYONE has it for mainspec, offspec and third spec. While Fandral's Flamescythe only dropped one time, and of course in the raid when our feral druid wasn't there. And Shannox's scalp? Still attached to his head apparently. Really hope the 4.3-equivalent of Crystallized Firestone will have better drop chance!

On the same note, I wish they'd make tier tokens available for all classes instead of divided into three tiers. I think they were in tier 9 (Trial of the Crusader). Our guild seems to keep getting the DK/druid/mage/rogue-tokens dropped, while the other two tokens hardly ever drop. Not sure why they changed it back from tier 9, I think the "one size fits all" would have... Well... Fit us.

Lae