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.]

WoW: Professions in Harmony...?

While still far being being "wowed" by the news released on the newest WoW expansion, Mists of Pandaria, I will be purchasing the game and might even end up playing it some.

I came across this Blue post from Wowhead on Facebook (it was quite unintentional, I swear!  It shows up in my feed!)    http://www.wowhead.com/news=205515/professions-living-in-perfect-harmony

While not exactly what I would have had in mind had I thought about harmonizing professions, it still might be a step in the right direction.  I believe all professions should be able to work together, encouraging players to help each other out by crafting things needed by other professions.  For example, there are some Tailoring recipes that require potions made by Alchemists.  Most, if not all, professions have a "materials" tab which houses the things they can make that might be needed by others during crafting.

I hope they do not make these obsolete as the expansion progresses.  Updating profession rewards while still utilizing Chaos Orbs was a nice feature in Cataclysm, even if they did greatly devalue the orbs when they removed the binding property.  "Back in my day" I paid 1k gold per orb to have a weapon crafted by a Blacksmith... and I think that was actually considered a fair price at the time.  Last I checked Chaos Orbs were selling for about 30g each in the Auction House.

Professions in WoW are something that needs to be taken advantage of in a timely manner to actually profit from, and I always seem to fail in that department as I wait too long to max out my professions.

There is a note about Engineers in there and I hope they do what they have failed to do in previous expansions: update the Engineer profession-only rewards as the expansion progresses.  Engineers don't catch much of a break: they're not very profitable and they don't get a great bonus from their profession, with the exception of helms, so I hope they are updated as new tiers come out.

Righteous

Last night I played Righteous (now level 83) for awhile.  I decided to quest because I didn't want to get "too into it," and make a time commitment by running a dungeon... well, that didn't quite work out, because I ended up playing for about two hours anyway.  While questing in Deepholm, I was reminded that while I still suck at Retribution spec, I don't completely hate it, and on the off-chance that I actually hit my cool-downs appropriately, I can do some decent damage.  I suppose I am finally confident enough with my gear to tank some dungeons, as I don't think I have run any Cataclysm ones yet on that character, despite having crafted the entire Hardened Obsidium set for her before she had even hit level 80.  Waste of gold and time?  Probably.  Isn't it all, though?  Ah, it is a sad place indeed when you add the word "obsidium" to your Blogger Dictionary...
So, now that I've actually linked one of my characters, does this mean I'm about to be flamed or stalked?  Probably not, as, despite my blogger stats, I doubt anyone truly reads this.

And hey, what's a "blog by Veronica" without some ads?  So, here goes:

Oooh, that's pretty sexy.  Unfortunately, I'm not rich enough to buy something like this, but you can certainly click on it for me!