 After several years of sharing my WoW account with my kids I finally decided to set them up with their own account. You would think this was easy yes? You’d be wrong! I decided to go the route of Recruit A Friend. This involves several stages, send an invite and set up a trial account. Then you upgrade to a regular account, just enter your payment details. Then you have to pay for the two expansions. Click the link for The Burning Crusade and enter your payment details again. So far, so good. Then I tried to upgrade to WotLK. Follow the link, enter my payment details again (this is getting very tedious), click the button and get a message telling you that you have tried to enter your payment details 3 times and are now locked out for 24 hours!!! |
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 …but last night I got my World Explorer achivement on Winífred.  Winífred the Explorer 2 seconds after that screenshot was taken Winífred was dead! I was so excited at getting the achievement I wanted to tell my friends; we all hang out on a custom channel which, on my PC, is channel #5. I hit 5, cast Arcane Brilliance on myself and hurtled to me death. I use Slow Fall so rarely I didn’t have time to look which key it was on before I hit the ground and went SPLAT!! |
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I finally got my PC sorted out. After installing my new graphics card I had an odd problem where I couldn’t switch my PC on without powering off the PSU at the back first; I was also getting warnings on boot-up that my CPU fan was running slow. The obvious culprit was the PSU but possibly the motherboard. Not wanting to throw away money without being sure what was causing it I booked it in at my local PC shop. They checked it over and said it was definitely the PSU so I ordered a new one, a very good one that gives me a lot of scope to upgrade in the future. I got the PC home plugged it in and off we went. The next morning I pressed the power switch at the front and….nothing! Great! I’d spent £115 on a new PSU to have exactly the same problems. |
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  Dimity has finally recovered from the shame of her tanking trews and, after months of hiding upstairs at the Honor Hold Inn, has decided to show her face again…but not her arse; I took pity on her and got her some new ones. I had barely played her since I wrote that post back in July and only logged into her to disenchant things. She had no talents or anything so when I filled in her talent tree and went to visit the trainer it was a bit of a shock. |
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 Here is my contribution to the screenshot meme currently doing the rounds. I started playing in April 2005 and don’t have those early screenshot because I replaced my PC in September 2006 and didn’t copy across the screenshots from my old PC but I do have screenshots going back to when I started playing on this PC….I never get rid of anything, you never know when it will come in useful! This screenshot is dated 18/09/06 and it shows Hulan in her previous incarnation as a hunter. She must be in her late 50s, she is in the Burning Steppes and has just completed the quest to kill the leader of the ogres and put his head on a stake to put the wind up the other ogres; it’s quite a funny quest. I remember that armour Hulan is wearing, I was quite pleased that she had pieces that matched and looked like a set and weren’t too ugly. She was a member of The Keepers of the Light, one of the oldest RP guilds on Moonglade, sadly now disbanded.
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I’m going a slight WoW withdrawal at the moment as my PC is poorly. After my last lot of night shifts I dragged my sleepy arse out of bed at midday, made myself a bucket of coffee and slumped bleary-eyed over my keyboard and logged into WoW. My Mage promptly stumbled over a nearby mob which tried to take a chunk out of her so, chugging coffee like a good’un I started to cast a frostbolt. At that point everything hung and then my graphics went haywire and WoW died (or maybe I killed it, it’s a bit hazy now). Anyway I decided to reboot the PC and then logged back into WoW. Whilst I was just running around all was well but as soon as I tried to cast, WoW hung again…and then my monitor went black. Cursing roundly I rebooted again but the monitor stayed black. After a lot of faffing about I bit the bullet a couple of days later and bought a new graphics card. I installed the new card and TA-DA I could see things on my monitor when I wasn’t in safe mode. Of course I logged straight into WoW and res’d my mage who had been waiting impatiently at the Spirit healer for several days. I’m slightly ashamed to admit I felt quite guilty about that ^^ |
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 There’s a great post at Kestrel’s Aerie, DPS: How to Earn Your Healer’s Love. That’s a great list and I don’t have much to add to it. One of my pet hates at the moment is melee DPS who don’t have the nouse to run out of the whirlwind/black/red/purple stuff! Another is how few of them seem to carry any food with them. When we’ve wiped and are running back in, if they’re in range I will pop a renew on them (and myself). Usually by the time we’re back at the point we died everyone who was in range on the run back is at full health. Except that there always seems to be one who got ahead, or was always just around a corner that I couldn’t heal. Having arrived before me (sometimes well before me), do they sit and eat to get their hp backup? Nope, 95% of them do not; they stand around waiting for me to get back and start healing them up. A fairly minor niggle but one that usually gets me grinding my teeth if we’re wiping a lot. |
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Hulan is finally 80. I had planned to level from 70 to 80 as Shadow, and did actually respec and do half of level 70 as a Shadow Priest, but then one of the priests in my guild suggested levelling as Discipline. She said it offered good enough damage to make levelling a less painful experience but would hold its own as a healing spec in instances. I hadn’t taken a lot of notice of priest changes in the run up to WotLK, but as she is a very experienced and knowledgable priest I was prepared to take her word for it. I will probably remain eternally grateful to her for the suggestion as I am deeply smitten with Disc! |
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  That’s characters to level to 80. Nithu has dinged 80, now I just have to level Hulan, Ravenwynd, Élen, Winífred and Primróse! Overall I have to say I’ve enjoyed questing in Northrend, the only zone I don’t like very much is Icecrown. At first I put this down to having a normal speed flying mount but having attained the epic flying skill, I still hate this zone - it’s dark and depressing. For now I have moved to The Storm Peaks and am enjoying myself again. There was much hilarity there this afternoon as I tried to retrieve the toolbox from the middle of the minefield. I was beginning to despair of ever getting it! In the process I earned the Mine Sweeper achievement, a rather dubious honour I suspect, however the upside was that I blew up so many mines as I bounced around the minefield I ended up very close to the toolbox and was able to pick it up and complete the quest. |
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I had a mammoth levelling session yesterday and levelled Nithu from 68 to 71! I dinged 70 in Blades Edge and headed straight for Ebon Hold to train and then took a ship to the Borean Tundra. Whilst the arrival isn’t as majestic as Howling Fjord it’s still a pretty nice zone and not particularly crowded having missed the initial rush. It is a skinner’s paradise but herbs seem pretty thin on the ground. I’m not sure if this is because so many people are gathering the new herbs or whether there just aren’t many herbs here. Fow now my plan is to level Nithu and Hulan. Nithu can supply Hulan with herbs (if she ever finds any!) and she can supply Ravenwynd with leather so she can get on with her leatherworking and, hopefully, herbs for her inscription. Hulan can get on level her tailoring, hopefully there will be cloth coming in from both characters. For now I’m holding back on ditching Winifred’s tailoring and Elen’s leatherworking, I don’t want to find that come the next patch there are different strands of tailoring and leatherworking, as there are now. |
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