Oh Noes!

So, WoW is down for some reason (something involving them screwing up while doing rolling restarts and messing with the authentication servers) and in the meantime I thought I'd write a bit about hunter pets. One of my favorite aspects of being a hunter is being able to choose a [preferably] shiny companion to join me on my travels, and hunting the perfect pet. Yesterday I found a model of Quilen (some variety of a Chinese lion-dog guardian) that is very unique. The skin is a purple stone model and I found it after realizing that Quilen are the exotic version of a wolf (crit buff) with a battle res thrown in. After browsing for awhile on Petopia, I found this. It's a very rare model, at level 88 anyway, because you can only tame it while on a specific part of a specific quest-line, and I had not yet seen anyone else with one. Usually uniqueness is a key attribute I search for while researching pets. I also try to find pets that match with my character's color and personality scheme. In this case, her name has to do with the night and her coloring (as a Night Elf) is pink/purple and blue. Therefore I usually seek pets that are either pink, purple, blue, or black. 

During Cataclysm I decided to level her, raising her from her permanent-alt status to a level 85. During that time I had a lot of fun hunting and taming all of the pets I wanted, including Skoll, Skarr, and the oil-stained wolf. (Yes, I know two of those were from Wrath, but I listed them because they were part of the leveling experience, especially because she had been somewhere in the 40s or 50s prior to Cataclysm.)

With a new expac comes a variety of new skins and new families of pets. One such new family, the waterstrider, is very helpful to keep around while leveling in Pandaria, because it provides a water walking buff and we are all ground-ridden until level 90.

Alright, back to either real life or WoW, depending...

[As a final note, the links above are to either Petopia or Wowhead and both are trusted and widely-used sites.]

Sucked Back In

Well, that didn't take long.  It's been less than two weeks since Mists of Pandaria was released and I'm already sucked back in.  I was up until 4am-ish just trying to complete a quest-line.  I've been focusing on solo-leveling my Alliance hunter on Malygos for now, and have been trying to enjoy reading all of the quests and paying attention to the stories.  My husband has been doing the exact opposite and reading as little as possible, and it doesn't seem that he has been that much more time-efficient than I.  I had not been focusing on leveling this character until a few days ago, and am now almost level 89.  In addition to questing, I've run the dungeons that have been available to me, in the queue-while-questing style, and have been moderately impressed by them.  Even more than the main things, it's the little things in this expansion that have me intrigued.  I'm looking forward to the entire cloud serpent acquisition process, as well as the farming and reputation with the Tillers.  I also maxed out her professions, skinning and leatherworking, last night and was pretty pleased and impressed with how easy it was.  Other than running around and skinning other peoples' kills, I haven't actually farmed any leather, and had more than enough to achieve max level with just my own leather.  Speaking of leather, I find it interesting and convenient that while you can create Exotic Leather from the "scraps" through leatherworking and gain points from it, you can also click-to-create, and while it is a short cast time, you can do it while mounted and moving, so after having achieved the max amount of leatherworking skill points from it, I was able to just click and create while running (of which we do plenty in Pandaria, due to not being able to fly yet).

Why is it so damn easy to distract myself from real life?