Cooking Travels

So today's rant springs forth from my epic quest to level my cooking skill.

What. The. Fuck.

Okay, so firstly, I discover that everything trainable or even easily purchasable goes green at around 225 cooking skill. Which means that I'm going to have to buy recipes at the far ends of Azeroth, a nuisance in itself given that I've been Horde for this huge old chunk of playtime, and I have no idea how to get from Point A to Point B as Alliance - the problem being exacerbated by the whole problem caused by The Shattering.

Hello, wowhead. So my first excursion into purchasable cooking patterns reveals the other problem caused by The Shattering, which is to say removed NPCs and patterns.

What.

Well, apparently the things that made leveling this skill tolerable from 225-300 were utterly removed with the loss of the one NPC in the game who sells them. Namely, say, Nightfin Soup and Poached Sunscale Salmon.

And the NPC who sells those patterns also sells a few others, and all of them helped to get over a rough, awful patch of cooking levels. Why should these be removed? Because Blizzard saw fit to kill off a few NPCs just to drive home how inconvenient the end of the world is. That's all well and good, but I'm sure the knowledge they alone possessed has been spread about somewhat by the recipes they sold all that time!

So, I went to Tanaris for an NPC who is dead. Well, that's awesome.

This leaves Fishing as my only source of cookable materials - even the Auction House has nothing for me fully half the time.

So I go to learn Fishing, and that's annoying enough.

I discover that those removed patterns are the only use for half of the fish I'm catching. Fully half of them. Then there's the Plated Armorfish, which isn't even useful for obsolete cooking quests: it's an item for a removed Argent Dawn quest. Hooray.

And the one fish I've caught that's still useful for cooking has the lowest drop rate of all the fish in the game, as far as I can tell.

Well done, Blizzard.

Well done.

The Ghost of Winter Veil

Seasonally-Appropriate Greetings to you!

So, now that Christmas is officially more or less done with, back to the grindstone!

Christmas was pretty good for me, over all, and I've even got a rather amusing anecdote from mucking around yesterday. Since I've got an anecdote, time to share an anecdote!

On my way to finishing out [Merrymaker], I had to do [Let it Snow] - which I, personally, finished up in the Trade District in Stormwind, as a Blood Elf Death Knight. I lived exactly the length of the snowflake cast timer for my last requirement, which was a Draenei Priest. Thanks again to all the friends who laughed, loved on my corpse, or rolled baby gnomes to assist in my quest.

[Let it Snow] has been done for a few days, for me, but it brings me to what happened yesterday.

'Twas the morning of Christmas and all through Orgrimmar, all the 1337 kiddies were whining because Greatfather Winter apparently had yet to put out the presents for the Horde (Alliance got theirs early.)

It was 8AM, and I still hadn't gone to sleep yet.

"Well," says I. "I could stay in Orgrimmar and whine until Blizzard (who've all gone home for the holidays) fixes this, or I could go on an adventure." Being the intrepid young level 80 Death Knight that I am, on this particular character, I decide to go on the adventure. I mount up my dragon, turn her into a reindeer, and catch the zeppelin to Undercity. From there, I'm on my way to Ironforge.

In Ironforge, the presents are already laid out, while in /Trade the Horde players are still whining a bit about their lack of gifts. I can see the exclamation marks of receivable quests! Hooray!

And then I die, horribly, because the guards are level 85 and there's a mass of Alliance players camping the presents, too.

So I run my scrawny ghost up the streets of Kharanos and into Ironforge again, making sure to resurrect myself behind the pile of presents. Maybe if I use the ticking one as a gaily-wrapped shield I'll survive long enough to open them, I think.

I did, and I did. Three achievements received in Ironforge, and the fourth, [Breaking the Sound Barrier], when I ate the resurrection sickness and hearthstone'd home.

The only sad part of my trip?

When I got home to Orgrimmar, the presents had finally been laid out.

World of Worgen

Okay, so we've established I'm a huge World of Warcraft nerd.

One of the huge changes I've been excited for since basically forever has been the addition of worgen. I actually was one of those people who roleplayed a worgen long before it was ever announced as a playable race.

So I'm giddy for this, and I mean, I play Horde. All of my mains are Horde. For the bloody Horde. I've picked spider eggs off of living-ish bears against my better judgment and in the face of extreme nausea for the Horde.

Despite this, World of Warcraft delivered on my admittedly high hopes.

The worgen starting zone is epic, and I say that in the most literal way possible. It starts with you, as a human, desperately trying to fight off the worgen incursion, progressing through to you as a worgen trying to fight off the Forsaken onslaught. Anything more than that would be spoilers (hint: they join the Alliance), but with a phased world that actually seems to respond to your presence that spans easily at least your first fourteen levels (with heirlooms), Gilneas truly writes an epic tale, as far as MMO standards go, even making me curious exactly what happens in the goblin starting zone that could even begin to compare, though I've heard both compared favorably.

Now if only they weren't Alliance ....