Grummles!

If we could make Grummle characters (and we so totally should) I would name mine Yaksplat and Bellybutton Lint. Because Grummles, that’s why!

Dinosaurs!

I have been woefully absent from the game lately. I got sucked into Skyrim; my bad!

But I did get a chance to check out the new patch content. I finished grinding to exalted with my remaining Pandaria factions (August Celestials, Shieldwall, and Shado-Pan), which earned me the Pandaren kite mount and the 55 exalted reputations achievement. That felt good. I really do dislike the emphasis on daily quests so far in this expansion, but I thought the way Shieldwall and Dominance Offensive handled daily progression was well done. I hope this becomes the norm, with dailies giving way to storyline quests at certain reputation intervals.

I also liked the changes to reputation gains this patch. The work orders at the farm and the reputation gains for daily dungeons and scenarios was a welcomed change from simply doing a truckload of dailies every day. I wish I could just slap on a tabard and run dungeons to my heart’s content (the lack of rep gains has been a primary factor in my lack of interest in dungeon running this expansion) but this is a step in the right direction.

I ran a bunch of scenarios on Saturday with the ret paladin and got the Scenaturday achievement. We ran really close to running out of time, but we squeaked by and now we have an awkward title to show for it. Speaking of titles, I earned “the Relic Hunter” a week or two ago for finding 20 rare treasures in Pandaria. That was a lot of fun. It netted me a lot of BoA weapons to ferry between my alts, too, so that is a bonus. Next title on the list is “the Seeker of Knowledge”…whenever I get back into archaeology. I’m about half way through the achievement.

I made my first trip to the Isle of Giants this morning. I went on my hunter, who is poorly geared, because while my druid is decently geared he has no real damage output and I anticipated it would make killing elite dinosaurs a long, tedious pain in the ass. Even on my hunter, who does acceptable damage for her ilevel, killing a dinosaur is a matter of popping every cool down twice, spamming mend pet, and praying. Also some swearing.

I will have to find a group later, I think, and take the island by storm. Doing it alone is slow and not very exciting, and given my timidity I haven’t seen anything beyond the beaches of the island. I heard that the drop rate of the little raptor pets was very high, but it was hotfixed and I have no idea how hard they nerfed it. I killed maybe 10 dinosaurs and saw nothing but bones. No pets, no eggs. Sadness.

I tried running around on the Isle of Thunder killing rares for pets, but had no luck there either. In fact, thanks to a wonderful bug, I was unable to loot all but two rares I killed out of a total of, again, around 10. How a bug like that got past the PTR and onto live realms amazes me. Sometimes I wonder if quality control is a concept at Blizzard. It’s been fixed though (a week later…) so I may go back and resume my rampage. Running amok with fifty other people swarming rares is pretty fun. Not having to deal with CRZ is also a nice change, since I find the island crowded enough as it is with just my server to contend with.

For now, I think I will take a break from Azeroth and go outside. It’s a beautiful sunny day and there’s no excuse for wasting it. Enjoy the patch folks 🙂