The Liebster Awards

Early yesterday morning I got a notification from Neri of Mama Needs Mana about nominating me for a Liebster Award! After spending some time doing a little bit of research I learned that the Liebster Award is given to up and coming bloggers by other up and coming bloggers. This is simply a way of getting to know each other and networking!

It's an honor to be nominated and it feels great to know that people are actually reading my blog :D  And now to answer Neri's questions:

1. What inspired you to start blogging? I used to keep a journal as a kid, and I decided to pick it up again but this time a digital one, so I started a blog, but I found that I wasn't keeping up with it as much as I would like. So after giving it some though I came to the conclusion that I should start by writing about something I love and am totally addicted to: World of Warcraft. I've been able to keep up with it and once in a while I do write about personal things which gives me a place to vent as well.

2. If you won a free ticket to Blizzcon, what panels would you be most excited about seeing?  I would have to say the announcement for an upcoming WoW expansion would be the most thrilling for me. It's always a lot of fun to see what they're coming up with next and what we have to look forward to in the game.

3. How do you balance time in-game with your 'RL' commitments? Very carefully! I could spend all day playing this game, so I make sure to get all my chores out of the way before I sit down to play. I make it a reward for my hard work and as an incentive for doing things I would rather not do. It keeps my house clean and my children fed :P

4. If World of Wardcraft shut down it's servers tomrorow (or you aren't currently playing), what would you be playing instead? I would probably be on the xbox or PS playing games like Borderlands or Tomb Raider.

5. Are there any bloggers out there who you aspire to be like? What is it about them that you love? One particular blogger comes to mind, Zeirah of A if for Azeroth and Z is for Zeirah. She's a very consistent blogger even if she has little to say she still posts something, but what I admire most is that she remembers to take screenshots! Most of the time I end up doing something fun or cool in-game that I would like to share on my blog, but feel horrible that I didn't capture the moment.

6. Are you brave enough to show us your gaming set up? Most definitely!

From left to right, you can tell a lot about me by the things on my desk: my sketchbook and art portfolio, prismacolor markets, 2TB hard drive, some iTunes gift cards, my cute zombie phone horder, prismacolor colorpencil set, current books I'm reading (Game of Thrones and Anne Rice's The Witching Hour), my PS Vita, my red planner which attempts to keep my crazy life in order and my daughters Nook which (I have totally jacked cause she never uses it) I use to lay in bed at night and go through Pinterest. And last but not least my new comp which I didn't get a picture of but you can see the stats here if you're so inclined to.

7. At what age would you let your children start playing video games? Well my 3 year old plays on his Leap Pad which he loves, however, a game like WoW I would wait until he's much older, preferably his teens. It also just depends on the game and the child's maturity level. Console games are much easier to deal with than games like MMOs where I have less control over how they are treated by other people.

8. You have a weekend of interruption free gaming ahead of you. What essential supplies do you stock up on to get you through it? CRUSH! I must have my Crush soda and prob some Combos or Tostito Chips and salsa.

9. If you had to pick any job in the gaming industry, what would it be? I would love to work designing gear. I've been on a huge transmog kick lately, trying to find something in mail that I would like for my shamans to wear but nothing seems to please me.

10. Have you ever done any gaming cosplay? I'm actually a very shy and introverted person so cosplay is definitely something I would leave for others with more nerve.

11. What is the most ridiculous thing you've ever seen done in an MMO or multy-player game? Well, Izzy, my husband, used to keep a knife that his sister got him on one of her trips to Europe on his desk. One night while raiding he dropped the knife and it accidentally fell on his foot mid boss fight and he left it there until the fight was over. He then removed it, cleaned himself up and continued raiding >.< He has a 1 inch scar on the top of his foot where the knife pierced him. That's what I call hardcore raiding lol. I would have ditched the group to go lick my wounds.

Now for my nominations!

• A is for Azeroth and Z is for Zeirah
• Adventures in Skywall
• MMO One Night a Week
• Heals n Heels
• Miss Salvira's Hangout

I would have added a few more, but Neri nominated a lot of blogs that I read and admire as well :) Hopefully some of you reading my blog will go visit the above mentioned, they're some pretty cool people.

Here are my questions to you:

1. What made you decide to start blogging?
2. What advice do you have for those wanting to start a WoW/gaming blog?
3. What's the biggest noob mistake you recall making when you first started playing WoW?
4. Besides WoW, what do you enjoy doing on your spare time?
5. What's your biggest pet peeve in and out of game?
6. How many years have you been playing MMOs and have you ever quit and why?
7. If you could meet any fictional game character who would it be and why?
8. How do you go about picking your character's names?
9. Of all your characters, who's your favorite and why?
10. If you could pick one thing for Blizzard to bring back to the game, what would it be and why?
11. What's the one thing you wish Blizzard would implement in the game that isn't available yet and why?

Hope you guys have fun with this, and I look forward to seeing your answers!

A wicked gift...

A few days ago I got an email from Blizzard:

Izzy got me the new expansion for Diablo 3! And of course, as soon as he got home last night we started playing.

Somewhere in he middle of that and this I started feeling really sick. It got so bad that I ended up taking some NyQuil and 15 minutes later I was scrambling for my bed sheets and fell straight to sleep. I'd like to thank my 1 year old for this cold, she was kind enough to share lol.

I'm hoping to get over this fast so we can play some more tonight! Here's my little Wizard in her new transmog gear!

We're not crazy, hardcore Diablo players, but we do enjoy the game and if anyone is interested in joining us by all means send me a message!

My baby shaman...

The little shaman I made over at Aggramar is now level 43, she finally has Earth Shield, Healing Wave and Earthliving Weapon, making her feel like a true resto shaman! I've played her a total of 1 day and 2 hours now and I'm having a blast. I love leveling up characters and seeing as shamans are my favorite I find any excuse I can to ignore all other toons just to be on her :)

She's got about 1k gold now, I would have had more but I spent some on over priced glyphs :(  I made her a Jewelcrafter/Miner. Since she is the only toon I have on this server I need her to be self sufficent and I'm very capable of making a decent amount of gold with those professions. Once she hits 90, I'll switch the mining to enchanting.

It's difficult to level up professions with all these BoAs, you end up leveling too fast to keep up with them.

So now at level 43 I've had to go back to level 20 zones to catch up on my mining.

In other news, I spent some time yesterday on the Timeless Isle with my lonely DK trying to get her some gear. I did my best to farm some lesser coins and not die to mobs or horde, I did ok against mobs, not so good with the Horde however lol. I did manage to sneak in a few hits at rares while the Horde was attacking them and I was able to acquire a few more timeless pieces that way. I also manage to turn in my coins and go back to Ordos and the Celestials for a roll. Ordos didn't want to give up anything else to me this week, but the Celetials smiled upon me and I received tier gloves! I now have enough gear to do ToT LFR which means that by next week I should be able to do SoO LFR and hopefully join my friends in Aggramar for their Flex group on Friday :)

Anyway, I'm off to do more mining... Hope you're all having a great weekend!

The lonely death knight...

My friends in Uprising over at Aggramar are gearing up and working to put together a raid team, and I give them huge props for doing this towards the end of an expansion, I know what a great undertaking that is. So I was thinking about helping them out with Flex and such but realized that the only alliance character I had left was my lonely DK on Eredar. I decided to finally level her up after leaving her at 87 for almost 8 months.

But now what?!?! Her item level is not even high enough to do the first LFR :(  I had a few timeless pieces laying around which I immediately sent to her and Ordos was good to her gifting her with Remnar's Ruinous Girdle. I'm still 10 item levels short, hopefully a few more heroics and some more timeless pieces will set me up for LFRs in the next couple of days.

So if you're on Aggramar on Alliance side and looking for a social raiding guild then please check them out. They're a great bunch! I've felt nothing but welcomed in their guild, Uprising and if you join them I'm certain you will enjoy their company as much as I have been :)

One day in the life of...me!

A few days ago I was thinking about how crazy my Tuesdays are in WoW, so I decided it may be neat to track everything I do for that one day. I love reading what others do and enjoy in the game, gives me ideas of new things I may want to do with my characters.

First I get on Rhy because I'll usually have sold auctions on her or ore that I may have purchased cheap on the AH that I haven't had a chance to prospect.

So I spend a little bit of time doing that and setting up my auctions, so I can spend the rest of the day making gold on her while I'm working on my other characters. At the end of the day all the money I have over 10k on Rhy goes to Kaliapy and Izzy's priest, Rahdiggah.

Once my bags are full of gems I use the green quality ones to make rings and necklaces. Of those the ones that proc into Rare quality gear go the Auction House, the rest get vendor-ed. There's no point in disenchanting them with how cheap enchanting mats are at the present time.

As you can see I've made about 500g just selling the green rings and necklaces. Then I list the Rare ones in the AH and some sell anywhere between 50g to 450g for the ones with more desirable stats. I also list all the rare quality gems uncut and they sell almost as fast as I put them up.

Once I'm done in Org, I hearth to the Shrine and head over to my farm where I have Noodle Cart mats planted.

I take a few minutes to gather those and replant, then head back to Org to deposit them in the guild bank and cook up some noodles.

Once I'm done there I'll hop over on Kaliapy and head to the farm to grab all the herbs I planned the day before. Then once again back to the Shrine to make my daily deposit of herbs in the guild bank.

As you can see we are in desperate need of Silkweed for our caster flasks and potions lol, which means I'll have to get on my druid at some point before Thursday to farm for those.

Now it's time for Ordos and Celestials and LOTS of them!

First I do Kali cause I'm already on her and because I don't need to farm lesser charms of good fortune, she's probably set from now until the next expansion.

Then whoever else already has coins and leaving those whom I need to farm coins on for last.

You get the idea :P

After all of this I get back on Rhy to check my auctions.

As you can see I've made about 2k gold and I still have some yellow and blue gems plus most of the rings and necklaces to sell still. I usually do this 2 or 3 times a day, depending on the price of ore and how busy I am in real life. At the end of the day I send the gold to Kali so I don't spend it, since these days all I ever do on Kali is raid anyway.

So after all that I get to do it all over again for Izzy and all his characters! >.<

Does everyone else's Tuesday feel as busy as mine do? There isn't enough time, especially if it's a full maintenance day. Makes me glad sometimes to start my raid days on Thursdays instead of Tuesday like most people do. I would go nuts!

New friends in new places...

A few days ago I decided to make a character on Ian's server to reciprocate the one he has on ours. I met Ian some month's back through this blog, and over the weekend I finally got to meet his wife which he's talked to me so much about :) When he heard I had made a baby shaman and join his guild I received an in-game mail which read:

Included in the mail were 4 Netherweave Bags and 500g to help me along. So as soon as baby Rhy hit level 10 she made the long journey to Stormwind where she now resides and has begun the quest in Westfall.

So thank you to my new friends in Aggramar for helping me get started on this new server and making me feel welcome in your guild. I'm looking forward to leveling some toons there and hopefully even running some raids with your team when I can. 

Ding... level 90!?!?

Along with millions of other people Izzy and I pre-ordered our Warlords of Draenor yesterday and couldn't wait to make our instant level 90s together. He decided to lvl an ele shaman since his is still back on Eredar and I decided to lvl a warlock, a class I have never played before >.<

The new 90's came with 22 slot bags, all green ilvl 483 gear, but they forgot the INSTRUCTION MANUAL!!! So last night I banged my head against a target dummy for a few hours trying to figure out how to play a Destro lock because I refuse to jump into an LFR and torture everyone else with my inability to properly play my class. This is what it must feel like to buy an account off ebay :P Once Izzy and I had our bars set up and a rotation down we decided to do some heroic dungeons. Didn't help very much since we went with our guild GM, Snigs, who carried us on his geared pally and killed everything before we even had a chance to get a cast or two off lol. We also tried Ordos and the Celestials which took forever to kill because all other boosted 90s were out there as well trying to add some pretty purple gear to their blizzard green quality set.

Snigs was also kind enough to remind me that I have the BoA staff from Garrosh so I quickly jacked it from Rhyannon and sent it over to the lock for a small dps increase. I'm looking forward to practicing more on her today. It's kind of exciting since I've never leveled anything past 40 that can't heal, except for my DK. Hopefully I'll like and enjoy playing her enough to level her to 100!