Jockeying For Position

Jockeying For Position

When the Battle For Azeroth begins everyone will want to go first. Let the jockeying begin:

(1) Tiphaine claims that she will engage first. She is the guild leader and is the most experienced.

(2) Mahakeya begs to differ. She is the most powerful and the most dangerous. Plus she has a really cool mount. 

(3) The rest of the possibles were told to wait their turn - that would be Wildshard, Sista, Atkar and Java. Of course, the three farmers will be out doing their gathering thing, so expect them to butt in frequently.

(4) The family also has an open slot. Should the guild decide to accept a new member, the guild could also use the available Boost to jump start the member to level 110.

(5) Two new allies of the Alliance could also play a role. They are Void Elves and Lightforged

Draenie. So far no decision has been made on that possibility.
The allowed Draenie classes are: Paladin, Warrior, Mage, Hunter, Priest.
The allowed Void Elf classes are: hunter, mage, monk, priest, rogue, warlock, warrior

Chaitee Battle Gear

Wildshard Battle Gear

Sista Battle Gear

Atkar Battle Gear

Begin the Squishing

Begin the Squishing

Patch 8.0 went live a few days ago. One of the biggest changes in the forthcoming expansion is that all the numbers get squished. All those great men and women who like to brag about their numbers, be prepared to be pruned severely once the patch is accepted. Almost all of the Wild Family had gear scores of at least 900 or better. Now take a look at what the numbers are after the squish.The numbers below are for gear and main weapon.

Keya (202/212)
Wildshard (193/202)
Tiphaine (181/191)
Sista (176/185)
Chaitee 162/175)
Atkar (161/168)
Java (160/174)

On the Horde side:
Jocy (143/152, Level 100)
Fist (143/156, Level 101)

All of the above are Level 110 unless noted otherwise.

On a personal note, I have been ill for weeks fighting a cocktail of problems since the trip that I am finally starting to get a handle on.

On the Wild Family side, Patch 8.0 went surprisingly smoothly. The addons broke down a number of times early on but all have settled down without having to delete the interface. The actual launch WILL likely crash my addons. In a few days I will find that out.

Oh, and while recovering Chaitee had little to do since there were parties all night at Stormwind City. Very little auctioneering going on.

There is more, but rest is best, and it's naptime.

The Auction House Unfreezes

The Auction House Unfreezes
    and Two Rants

Chaitee had a big grin on her face this morning. Prices for mats and bags have been unhealthily low (in Chaitee's opinion of course) for several weeks. Chaitee held the line, refusing to bow to the lower standards, even though she was not earning any gold. Bag prices were way under priced and she simply would not sell them. The price for a Silkweave satchel had ground down to only 355g, which is less than ten gold what it cost for Sista to make it.

The barriers fell this morning. The price for a statchel jumped to 698g and Chaitee immediately dialed it down to 625g so that the embersilk bags could also be sold again at higher rates. That allows the unwanted embersilk bags to earn a profit at 585g.

Chaitee will now wait and see what the other bargainers are going to do. She doesn't want a price war to break out. If the sellers are smart, they will slow walk any price drops so we can all benefit. And ideally, the "new" base prices will be much higher than before.

Chaitee is also experimenting with selling bag materials instead of the mats themselves. Just another way to make a few gold when the bags aren't selling. Chaitee recently posted infinite dust at 12.98 each, which is highway robbery, but Chaitee see's prices like that all the time and now wants to see if she can actually sell around that price. She is also now seeing if she can sell embersilk cloth/bolts as well. Generally, the profit from the bags are better than profit from the cloth/bolts simply because one has to be a tailor to use the mats. She's very interested to see how these opportunities play out. PS - Frostweave bags remain under priced and unwanted.

Tailoring Things in the Expansion

The new bags are the Deep Sea Bag (30 slots) and the Embroidered Deep Sea bag (32 slots).
The new crafting cloth requires deep sea satin, tidespray linen, and nylon thread.

Enchanting Cloaks. Spellthread to enchant cloaks come in Descreet, Fearthery, and Resilient.
Tailors can also craft the BoP Champion Equipment  "Rough-hooked Tidespray Linen", which has a chance to yield cloth on successful missions.

First Aid is now part of Tailoring. Details still uncertain.

Small Rant: I am still annoyed that I must BUY an authenticator in order to increase the bag size of the Back Pack. I am coming around to accepting I will have an authenticator. Here is the problem though. When I was in Virginia earlier this year I logged into Warcraft. Well, I tried to login. You know those little groupings of letters and numbers that you have to mirror to ensure you are who you are supposed to be? If you have ever had to do this you know that those letters and numbers are so hard to read it takes several tries to get the right letters - and if you have to make several attempts you will be locked out. That is what happened to me.

Large Rant: My concern about using accepting an authenticator is that I will find myself in that situation here at home and end up with a locked game and hours/days to restore it and leaving me with hours more work to get things back to the way they are supposed to be.

Marking Time Once Again

Marking Time Once Again

Chaitee still plies the Auction House for bargains. Wildshard, Sista and Atkar keep the faith, crafting goods for market. Demon Hunter Mahakeya has been seen more frequently of late. Tiphaine keeps an eye on them all.

This is the "between time" when the current world still has control, but teeters on the brink of a new beginning. The new world dawns at PDT 3pm on August 13th.

Assuming that the coming shift will be similar to other world sized changes, one can count on there being a key questline thread to kick things off. Tiphaine has laid down some rules to follow, but she knows that once the expansion door opens, chaos reigns and all bets are off.

    The Alliance will begin at Kul Tiras. Demon Hunter Keya intends and expects to be at the forefront, leveling as she goes. She is the best geared and has the most experience. Her mount is swift and deadly. She knows and expects that flying will be restricted in the new world (as has been the case since the beginning) and all movement will begin on the ground. At least that is the expectation.
 
Once Keya gets a foothold, Wild and Sista will follow in Keya's wake. Their focus is on learning and collecting the mats required to survive in the new lands. Leveling will occur as they learn. Chaitee, of course, will bring the new mats to market. For her, leveling will have to take a back seat for a time.

This time-worn process has remained intact for centuries and across multiple worlds. Some would even call it boring and repetitive. But the opening of a new world still brings a strong sense of expectation and even a tinge of fear. There are new lands and both friends and enemies beyond the world as it exists now.

Soon. Very soon. All of that will change in an instant.

The Battle For Azeroth

The Battle For Azeroth

When I first got a look at the information coming out with the new expansion, most of it looked very much like the last expansion and expansions before them. Boring.

It was only when Wild started digging into the specifics did things get more interesting. Of course, the first thing Wild wanted to see is the changes in his Professions, Tailoring and Enchanting. And the first thing he learned is that the First Aid profession will be folded into Tailoring. First Aid achievements will become Feats of Strength.

La-de-da, Wild didn't mind adding First Aid to his expertise, but he was greatly interested in what the new bags would be. They are: Deep Sea bags (30 slots),  and Embroidered Deep Sea Bags (32 slots). Yuk, underwater farming? Instead of goaning, Wild smurked. Wild does not like underwater situations. But of course he now has the Underlight Angler, he can breath underwater, and has no worries as long as he has that weapon at hand.

Other tidbits. AP has been mushed into a single item, a new artifact called the Heart of Azeroth Medallion. Basically it draws AP and when you get enough of it, you get a gear upgrade. The process is automatic. Upgrades grant additional properties to gear.

Each expansion now has a separate profession skill bar, with smaller caps for each expansion, instead of one gigantic profession skill bar for all expansions put together: I don't understand how that works, but I guess Wild will figure it our when the time comes.
        Classic goes up to 300
        Outland, Northrend, Catalcysm, Pandaria goes up to 75
        Draenor and Legion goes up to 100
        Kul Tiras and Zandalar goes up to 150

I hoped that the new Alliance continent would favor land combat versus watery slogging, but Kul Tiras is framed by the sea and the things in it. The family will not add a new player to the world of Kul Tiras, and that means no new Alliance added to the family. At least for now.

More interesting is Zandalar, a Horde/Troll dominated territory. Horde Paladin Jocelyne is keen to test this new land and add to her accomplishments. And there is room for a new addition to the Horde ranks, assisted by Plumrosefist and Auctioneer Happyface. Should the decision be made, Happyface intends to change his name. Suggestions are welcome. There is also the opportunity of a new boost, although the jump would be small (only from 100 to 110.)

Finally, a rather crazy thought. Wildshard is now Alliance and he has grown comfortable in that role. But the old days still haunt him. His old Horde guild still exists. He often wishes he could return to his old Horde guild.

What if it were possible to return to the Horde in another version of himself? Wildshard can't get the idea out of his head.

Home at Last

Home at Last

Judi and I (Plus two cats, Jonesie and Jason) came home from our cross country trip yesterday, the 30th of June, 2018, a trek that began 30 days ago.

I don't usually include real life events in the Warcraft blog, but since there hasn't been a warcraft post for the past month, I figured it might be interesting to describe what we did on our sort of vacation. 
We have done cross country trips a least four times that I can remember. One of those trips was in a rented RV when we moved from the east coast to California for the first time. That was the impetus later when we decided to buy our own RV, which we have used several times over the course of the years. Our trusty RV is a 27 footer with no sliders and a 350 cylinder engine that struggles mightily on the steeper grades. But it's ours, and we love it. That didn't disuade us and we've had some great adventures in that RV.

 Now we were planning another cross country trip to South Carolina for a reunion of Judi's family. What made the trip even more special was that we had recently discovered some new family ties that happened to be living nearby here in California. What a coincidence! Our new relatives and us bonded pretty quickly and they decided they would fly out to join the reunion.

On the day we planned to start our RV trip we loaded up the RV and headed for our first stop in Kingman, Arizona, a 6-7 hour journey. Two of our best furry travelers, the boys Jason and Jonesie, were tagged to come with us. It was a blistering 103 degrees outside. About two-thirds of the way to Kingman, our air conditioning unit started to fail. There was absolutely nowhere to stop between us and Kingman. The cabin became increasingly heated and Jason nearly died. We took cold water from our two coolers  to keep him cool and thankfully we made it to Kingman. Jason recovered.

Now we had a decision to make. We could try to get the A/C working, but fixing it might take days or longer. We were stuck. The issue was the heat.  We couldn't go on without a functioning A/C. We had to abort the trip and return home. We made our return trip home in the dead of night while it was cool enough to keep the cats safe.

 That was a hard blow, but we weren't going to give up. The RV was going to be out of action for some time. So we decided to take my car, a buick rendezvous. Imagine the two of us, with our two cats, and a car filled with everything we needed for our cats, including food, toys, litter boxes, etc. And of course our own needs. We crossed the country, staying at hotels that accepted cats. That was quite a challenge, but there are a number hotels and motels that allow cats.  We were fortunate that we had only one motel that was so bad we knew we couldn't stay there and we had find another.

We had a number of other catastrophes with the car. The steering wheel began to pull to the right early during the drive, but it was a mild pull that I only started to notice when Judi saw that I was having to compensate to keep the car on a straight path. That was the start of our next nightmare. We had reached our destination for the days motel stay, but we had not actually gotten to it yet when a man on the interstate attempted suicide not far ahead of us. Every road surrounding the town we were in was locked down. It was literally hours before we were able to get to our motel. With darkness falling we finally got to the motel - and it was the one hotel that was so nasty we couldn't stay there.  Judi did some emergency checking around and we found another hotel that took cats. Finally.

The next day we spent most of the day getting the car straightened out. The shop did a good job getting it fixed. What made us smile is that during the work the car had to be raised and lowered several times and driven around to ensure that everything was working correctly. We asked if the cats had to be taken out and they said no. If we were okay with it then they were. The two cats caused no trouble and even seemed to enjoy it.

 We made it to South Carolina for the reunion and stayed a few days for visiting. We then drove to Virginia to see my Mom and other relatives there. While we were at Mom's house we made several drives (about 30 minutes each) to see other relatives in the area. We took Mom's car for those trips.
Sadly, we also had a death in the family while in Virginia. My uncle Dane, who I dearly love, had been fighting cancer and passed away shortly before we had to leave. I am blessed that we were there to be with him and all our relatives. We will miss him greatly.

So, when all the visiting was over, I took my car to the local Juffy Lube to get an oil change for the drive back. Just an oil change.

 A few days after we got back on the road we started having problems with the car. At first I thought it was a bad tire, but the tires were good and were properly inflated. On the road it felt okay at interstate speed, but at slower speeds it felt like we were driving over bumpy roads. In part I'm sure that some of it was the various state of the roads we drove over, but that couldn't account for all of that. We suspect the Jiffy Lube did more than just do an oil change. The tires had been recently rotated (remember the issues earlier with the veering, and the tires were rotated at that time) and I suspect they were rotated again at the Jiffy Lube, which put them back out of alignment. I think. We couldn't tell.

The car is in the driveway now, but I will be taking it to our own mechanic today to give it a thorough checkup.

The rest of the trip went pretty well. We did some more visiting after leaving Mom's, including trips to friends and relatives in Tennessee. We took some extra time there to visit friends and also to see if we might want to settle there some day. The state is beautiful, but it's not for us.

We still cling to California. For how long, time will tell.