20 Days of...WoW Blogging Challenge - Day Four

Day Four - My fondest memory


I'm a bit strange when it comes to WoW memories. Unlike Fannon or Saga, I don't raid, so I don't have memories of taking down a particularly vexing boss. I get more of a sense of accomplishment from achievements that I earn solo, since it was ME ME, all ME that did it. One in particular was especially gratifying.

After killing my first rare in Northrend, and earning the first step towards Frostbitten, I started learning about the other rares in Northrend. I was especially intrigued by the Time-Lost Proto Drake in Storm Peaks, since just killing it would give you a bad-ass Drake mount. Unfortunately, it definitely lives up to its name. I would spend an hour at a time flying around SP, or just perched in the intersection point of the TLPD flight paths, but I....just...can't stay AFK in a game. I log in to play, not to do nothing. So, after a while, I gave up on it. I figured, "Hey, I already have the Red/Green/Bronze Drakes, that's enough for me."

I was flying out to Storm Peaks on my rogue Thrillkiller on 10/13/2011 to try to look for Dirkee, since I was knocking out Frostbitten on all toons. All of a sudden, my NPC_scan went off! I figured it was Vyragosa, which would have been great too, since she's on the endangered species list from all the TLPD hunters. But, it was the real deal this time. I quickly hard logged, deleted my creature cache, logged in on Bloodshrike, and headed over to the area where Thrillkiller was. I started scanning for the Drake, hoping and praying that nobody had gotten it in the few minutes I had lost. I finally located it, got its attention, and quickly downed it.

I had been trying to get that mount for at least a year, and finally obtained it. That was a great day! :)

20 Days of...WoW Blogging Challenge - Day Three

Extended maintenance tonight, so it's time for me to get back to the challenge. Nobody SAID it had to be done in 20 calendar days.... :)

First Day Playing WoW (Day 3)

Like I said on Day 1, I had resisted playing WoW. I had heard the horror stories about Evercrack, and how WoW was just as addictive. But, I crumbled, and finally gave the trial a spin. Hmmm, I actually forgot what year I started, I just remember it was October, and The Burning Crusade came out shortly after. Wikipedia says TBC came out in January of 2007, so I started mid October of 2006.

I picked a troll hunter, since I had always favored ranged classes, like the Amazons in Diablo II, and the ability to have a pet that helped you was pure win. After finding out how to adjust the hotkeys to my liking, since WASD controls isn't how I roll, I set off in the training valley. I know I probably hoarded every drop, running back to the vendor to clear out my bag(singular) of trash, since that's how I've always been. The thing I really remember was finding a treasure chest on my way to Razor Hill, and seeing a green texted jewel come out of it. I was excited!! That Kawasaki green had been branded into my brain from Diablo II as relating to sets, and it was always a rush finding them. I think I changed professions from miner to skinner to herbalist to alchemist to leatherworker all in the same day, because I couldn't decide which I wanted to pursue. I finally picked Alchemy, since I figured health potions are always a good thing to have.

In the next few days, my stable of alts started growing exponentially. I figured, why pay someone else for crafting something for me, when I could just have an alt that could cover that profession? And once my 4th toon Bonescourge took up engineering, and I saw the benefit of having AoE attacks with bombs that could hurt multiple monsters at once.....well, shoot, that meant ALL my guys needed to be engineers!

20 Days of...WoW Blogging Challenge - Day Two

Why did I start this blog?

I started this blog back in November of '08.....well, not really. Actually, I had a bunch of posts that I had written on my laptop beforehand, and started throwing them up there when I finally got around to making my blog. That's why there's about 50 posts within the first 3 days. The introduction was actually written a year before that. :)

Why do bloggers write? It's usually for a multitude of reasons, not just one. I had been reading BigRedKitty for a while beforehand, and BRK's sheer joie de vivre in playing his hunter was infectious. I've always enjoyed writing, and really like teaching/sharing my knowledge with others. The best way to learn is to teach, as by going over a subject from the ground up, you often learn surprising new things. I had noticed that nobody really talked about the Engineering profession, treating it like a bastard crafting profession, and that annoyed me. Ever since my 4th toon picked up the Engineering profession, I was hooked. I dropped max level herbalism on Bloodshrike to take it up, and haven't looked back. As of right now, 26 of my 30 toons are engineers, with only my priests and my mage Banesidhe not having the engineering skill (Priests have Levitate/Resurrection, Bane had too many hard to find enchanting/tailoring recipes to give up).

So, I started a blog with the intent of perhaps swaying people's opinions towards engineering, through the enthusiasm I showed for it in my posts. That's the reason for the blog title, as well as the picture.

The blog is also my release for stress, such as when my guild bank on Darrowmere got items ninja'd from it. As a Spider Robinson quote says, "Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased — thus do we refute entropy." Just typing out my feelings and thoughts is a release in itself, and if people comment, that's a bonus.

20 Days of...WoW Blogging Challenge - Day One

I was blog-crawling the other day, and somehow I ended up at the Dwarven Battle Medic. Looking through his previous posts, I stumbled on the 20 Days of...challenge, originally presented by Saga of Spellbound over a year ago.

The idea seems fun, so I'm gonna try it. Given that my posting has slowed to about once a month, this'll serve as a goad to get the creative juices flowing.

Who am I?
I'd have to say my first toon is Bloodshrike, a Troll Hunter on Demon Soul. I was wooed into playing WoW by a friend at work, after years of resisting. Not because I didn't think I'd like it, quite the opposite. When I play a game, I stay for the long haul. But, after 7 years of playing Diablo II, developing variant builds for classes (Crushplosive archers for all class types), and posting on the forums, it was time for a change. From the first moment I logged in, I was enthralled. The ability to look up, down, around....which happened a lot, often unintentionally, as I had changed the controls to have my mouse used for movement, which I was used to on Diablo II. But once I figured that out, I was off and questing. I avoided the AH at first, but got used to it after a while, and my 4th alt Banesidhe actually funded a lot of my professions, using gold gained from selling enchanting mats to buy mats for engineering/blacksmithing.

Bloodshrike has been my nom de guerre for a while now, ever since reading the Westmark novels by Lloyd Alexander, and feeling curious about the name "Shrike." The blood got tacked on to the front of it, and I've been Bloodshrike while playing Half-life, Halo, Diablo, and now WoW.

Blood is certainly my achievement whore, but I hesitate on calling any of the toons I play my "main." I don't RP, I don't identify strongly with any one toon, I just like playing them all. I've got at least 3 or more (cough, hunters) of each class, and enjoy them equally.

Where’s MAH money?

6/1/09

I’ve been reading http://wowalone.blogspot.com/ about a guy’s adventures in solo WoW, during downtime at work. He was talking about being proud of having 32 k gold again, after spending 21 k on the Kirin Tor ring and a motorcycle mount. I’m a recovering AH house addict, but I felt like helping him out with a few quick tips on making gold, especially since he had an Ally toon. So, I typed aboyandhisdeathrays into gooogle to go cut and copy some of my tips, and this was the first entry on the list http://www.cubestat.com/www.aboyandhisdeathrays.blogspot.com.
Website Worth: $273,750,000.00 Daily Pageviews: 125,000,000 Daily Ads Revenue: $375,000.00

So, where’s my money?!? I should have installed a pageview counter a while ago, but there’s been only 1 comment on the site, so I figured there wasn’t any interest in it. I tried BigBearButt’s site, and BigRedKitty’s, and both had less Daily Ads revenue coming in. Granted, both of those are their personal websites, so they don’t do advertising. But I tried www.4haelz.blogspot.com, who is someone that BigBearButt links to, and also had low pageviews.
Website Worth: $2,842.62 Daily Pageviews: 1,298 Daily Ads Revenue: $3.89

I’m guessing those are real people though, who leave comments and have interaction with the author, which I’d much prefer. I also saw that further down the list one of my posts was cached on an Asian site, but it was a post about Fury Warriors, not gold making. Strange.