Collector’s Bounty and Greedy Emissary

Posted by Peter (Devee) on July 30, 2025
Posted in: Events, Mounts, the war within, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

My backlog of topics to discuss here keeps growing, and the longer it gets, the harder it becomes for me to write about something. So let’s ignore all that and talk about the Collector’s Bounty and Greedy Emissary events that just ended.

Collector’s Bounty made legacy raids drop double loot and increased the drop chance of most raid and dungeon mounts up to 5%.

I managed to earn these mounts:

  1. Drake of the South Wind from Al’akir
  2. Onyxian Drake from Onyxia
  3. Fiery Warhorse from Attumen in the original Karazhan
  4. Pureblood Fire Hawk from Ragnaros
  5. Life-Binder’s Handmaiden from Deathwing
  6. Ashes of Al’ar from Kael’thas
  7. Smoldering Ember Wyrm from Nightbane
  8. Midnight from Attumen in the Return to Karazhan
  9. Abyss Worm from Mistress Sassz’ine
  10. Armored Razzashi Raptor from Mandokir
  11. Flametalon of Alysrazor from Alysrazor

My favorite of the bunch if Ashes of Al’ar, seen at the top of this post. I’m surprised it’s not a newer mount, but this is just so beautiful, and I love the trail it leaves.

The Pureblood Fire Hawk from Ragnaros in Firelands is also really cool.

This is the Life-Binder’s Handmaiden from Deathwing, which looks like Alexstrasza.

The Smoldering Ember Wyrm from Nightbane in Karazhan has a cool, fiery effect inside him

Here’s the Flametalon of Alysrazor, from Alysrazor in the Firelands.

I did 199 total attempts with 11 drops, yielding a 5.53% success rate. If a single boss can drop two mounts, I counted each single boss kill as two attempts.

As for the Greedy Emissary event, killing treasure goblins for loot is pretty straightforward. I got all the new rewards, including all the transmog sets and Inarius’ Charger. That’s my paladin, Costanza, wearing the paladin set on Inarius’ Charger.

For those who like data, I tracked my attempts. Here you can see the number of attempts I did per difficulty. According to wowhead, Gul’dan was not dropping Living Infernal Core or Fiendish Hellfire Core at the increased rate, and neither was Sylvanas dropping Vengeance at the increased rate. Maybe I was wasting my time on those. I also saw that wowhead wasn’t able to track G.M.O.D. or Antoran Charhound correctly, so it’s unknown if those were dropping at the correct rate.

InstanceMountBoss & DifficultyAttemptsDropPercent
Vortex PinnacleDrake of the North WindAltarius (normal)200%
Altarius (heroic)400%
Altarius (combined)600%
Throne of the Four WindsDrake of the South WindAl’akir (heroic)11100%
Eye of EternityAzure DrakeMalygos300%
Utgarde PinnacleBlue Proto-DrakeSkadi (heroic)300%
FirelandsFlametalon of AlysrazorAlysrazor (normal)700%
Alysrazor (heroic)7114.3%
Alysrazor (combined)1417.1%
Pureblood FirehawkRagnaros (normal)200%
Ragnaros (heroic)3133.3%
Ragnaros (combined)5120%
Dragon SoulExperiment 12-BUltraxion (normal)200%
Ultraxion (heroic)400%
Ultraxion (combined)600%
Blazing DrakeDeathwing (normal)200%
Deathwing (heroic)400%
Deathwing (combined)600%
Life-Binder’s HandmaidenDeathwing (heroic)2150%
Sethekk HallsRaven LordAnzu (heroic)700%
Tempest KeepAshes of Al’arKael’thas2150%
StratholmeRivendare’s DeathchargerRivendare100%
KarazhanFiery WarhorseAttumen11100%
Return to KarazhanMidnightAttumen (mythic)2150%
Smoldering Ember WyrmNightbane (mythic)2150%
Zul’GurubSwift Zulian PantherKilnara (heroic)100%
Armored Razzashi RaptorMandokir (heroic)11100%
Hellfire CitadelFelsteel AnnihilatorArchimonde (mythic)500%
Blackrock FoundryIronhoof DestroyerBlackhand (mythic)500%
NightholdGolden Hearthstone Card: Lord JaraxxusGul’dan (LFR)300%
Gul’dan (normal)500%
Gul’dan (heroic)500%
Gul’dan (mythic)500%
Gul’dan (combined)1800%
Living Infernal Core (bugged?)Gul’dan (normal)500%
Gul’dan (heroic)500%
Gul’dan (mythic)500%
Gul’dan (combined)1500%
Fiendish Hellfire Core (bugged?)Gul’dan (mythic)500%
Tomb of SargerasAbyss WormMisstress Sassz’ine (LFR)2150%
Antorus, the Burning ThroneAntoran CharhoundFelhounds of Sargeras (LFR)500%
Felhounds of Sargeras (normal)500%
Felhounds of Sargeras (heroic)500%
Felhounds of Sargeras (mythic)500%
Felhounds of Sargeras (combined)2000%
Battle of Dazar’alorG.M.O.D.Jaina (LFR)1700%
High Tinker Mekkatorque (normal)2300%
High Tinker Mekkatorque (heroic)1300%
High Tinker Mekkatorque (combined)3600%
Jaina (LFR) and High Tinker Mekkatorque (normal, heroic) all combined5300%
King’s RestMummified RaptorDazar, The First King (mythic)200%
The UnderrotUnderrot CrawgUnbound Abomination (mythic)200%
Ny’alotha the Waking CityNy’alotha AllseerN’Zoth the Corruptor (mythic)200%
Necrotic WakeMarrowfangNalthor the Rimebinder (mythic)100%
Tazavesh the Veiled MarketCartel Master’s GeargliderSo’leah (mythic)200%
Sanctum of DominationVengeance (bugged?)Lady Sylvanas Windrunner (mythic)100%
Sepulcher of the First OnesZereth OverseerThe Jailer200%
GRAND TOTAL199115.53%
Grand Total without wowhead confirmed bugged mounts178116.2%

Dragonflight Seasons 3 and 4

Posted by Peter (Devee) on September 4, 2024
Posted in: Achievements, Bulleto, Burninador, Devee, Dragonflight, Dungeons and Scenarios, Gear, Journal, Legendaries, Mists of Pandaria, Mooglepete (Kil'jaeden), Mostymush, Mounts, Progression, Quests, Raiding, Sotiros, Uncategorized, World Events, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Now that The War Within has started, I thought I’d take a few minutes to blog about how the last two seasons of Dragonflight went for me. (And then I’ll forget to publish it for a bit.)

Season 3

Mythic+

I earned Keystone Hero and all ports on the following:

  • Resto shaman (2753)
  • Fury warrior (2740) – previous best was KSM
  • Disc priest (2718) – previous best was KSM
  • Frost mage (2685) – previous best was only KSE1

The “all ports” don’t matter as much now that teleports are finally account-wide, but it was a fun goal.

Raiding

Amirdrassil heroic and Ahead of the Curve on the same four characters – resto shaman, disc priest, fury warrior, and frost mage (first time on mage pushing past LFR).

I also cleared Amirdrassil LFR on every other class while transmog hunting and earned Glory of the Dream Raider.

What else?

I obtained Fyr’alath the Dreamrender, the legendary two-hand axe, on my warrior.

This is the first time I’ve had a legendary weapon when it was current.

I got all the rewards from Azerothian Archives.

In Love Is in the Air, I did the new quests.

I also got all the rewards except X-45 Heartbreaker and the gold donation achievement.

gem got the super rare mount though!

In the Hearthstone’s 10th Anniversary event I earned all rewards and got the bag on 6 toons.

I got the Swift White Hawkstrider from Magister’s Terrace.

I also earned the 400 mounts achievement and the mount that comes with it.

What else did I do during season 3?

  • Earned the emerald bounty, world drop, quest reward, and superbloom transmog sets on all 4 armor types
  • Earned the LFR and normal class sets on every class
  • Earned all four class sets on my warrior, priest, shaman, and mage
  • Completed all the campaign quests
  • Got all classes to 70
  • Earned the 19th anniversary 100% drop mount
  • Earned the Winter Veil 2023 drake armor and Pepe toy
  • Finished Outland Cup and got the transmog set
  • Earned all Emerald Dream seed rewards
  • Earned a lot of Emerald Dream Druid forms – all drops from rares, world boss, and Tindral
  • Lunar Festival – bought all remaining items from past years except new, overpriced drake armor
  • Gorehowl collection – all versions collected (Original Gorehowl, 3 Xal’atoh versions from Siege, updated model from Dawn of the Infinites)
  • Finished collecting Barter Boulder items
  • Noblegarden 2024 – all new rewards including 1% mount
  • Added to my Prismatic Blade collection
    • Quel’Delar versions from Battered Hilt quests already earned
    • Burnished Quel’Serrar from Onyxia
    • Quel’Zaram from Dawn of the Infinites
    • But didn’t buy the Skyborn Blade and Radiant Skyborn Blade from Trading Post’s Arsenal: Skyborn Blades
  • Earned Heritage of the Vulpera
  • Reached max renown in Plunderstorm
  • Earned climbing world quests achievements
  • Finished Badlands as Alliance
  • Finished Burning Steppes as Alliance
  • Obtained all Visage of the Infinite drake customizations from Dawn of the Infinites
  • Earned Glory of the Dragonflight Hero

Season 4

Mythic+

  • Keystone Hero on resto shaman (2557)
  • Keystone Master on fury warrior (2274)
  • Keystone Explorer on preservation evoker (1817)
  • Keystone Explorer on disc priest (652)

Raiding

Finished the three awakened raids (Vault of the Incarnates, Aberrus, and Amirdrassil) on resto shaman, pres evoker, and fury warrior.

Radiant Echoes

I farmed a lot in the Radiant Echoes pre-patch event. I bought every reward and earned all the under level 70 rewards as well. I also reached level 70 on 7 additional characters. With the 13 I already had, that’s 20 max level toons. With the 16 I leveled in Remix, I ended Dragonflight with 36 max level characters:

  • 2 priests
  • 3 mages
  • 3 locks
  • 3 druids
  • 2 rogues
  • 3 monks
  • 2 demon hunters
  • 3 shaman
  • 3 hunters
  • 4 evokers
  • 4 warriors
  • 2 paladins
  • 2 DKs

What else?

I finally got Nasz’uro, the Unbound Legacy (the evoker legendary) to drop. After finishing the quests, I fully upgraded it.

What else did I do during season 4?

  • Earned the Northrend Cup transmog
  • Azerothian Archives – all research done
  • Photography world quests
  • Fully upgraded Fyr’alath the Dreamrender (legendary axe)
  • Got dragon armor from Midsummer Fire Festival boss and all new and remaining rewards
  • Every achievement, every purchasable reward, and a ton of drops in Remix

WoW Remix: Pandaria

Posted by Peter (Devee) on August 25, 2024
Posted in: Dragonflight, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Remix was a game mode that consisted of playing through Mists of Pandaria with the current game system but much faster and overpowered. It was surprisingly fun and a unique way to level alts. I really hope they do remix versions of other achievements in the future.

My first goal in Remix was to buy all the rewards, which I did. I bought every reward on the vendors, did all the quests with an Alliance character (because I played Mists of Pandaria originally as Horde), and earned every achievement.

My Remix main was Wayneknight, a dwarf ret paladin. I maxed his gear, did all the raids, dungeons, and scenarios on highest difficulty with him, and finished all the quests, reputations, and achievements with him.

I also maxed gear on three more characters and did every raid on highest difficulty on them:

  • Orionaquarii, Worgen frost mage
  • Carrieanne, Nightborne windwalker monk
  • Shoverrobot, Mechagnome BM hunter

I played through Remix, hit level cap, and did every raid on normal with every other class. I also used the event to ensure that I had each class at 70 in each faction (before Remix, I had 12 classes maxed as Horde and 1 maxed as Alliance) and a 70 of every race. My other new 70s besides the ones mentioned earlier include these:

  • Firepaw, Pandaren elemental shaman
  • Andpeggy, Highmountain Tauren druid
  • Tahanii, Lightforged Draenei demo warlock
  • Eanasir, Night Elf frost DK
  • Artvandelay, Dark Iron Dwarf enhance shaman
  • Cassius, Human arms warrior
  • Turkleton, Draenei disc priest
  • Drjanitor, Kul Tiran balance druid
  • Kuntina, Void Elf rogue
  • Iammyscars, Night Elf havoc demon hunter (and so edgy)
  • Kyrandia, Dracthyr devastation evoker
  • Moguripete, Gnome demo warlock

Trove Tally

I used the Trove Tally addon to help track rewards. It’s a cool addon that shows sources for event rewards and filters by what’s attainable by your class, spec, or any character. In this case, it tracked only the items that were unique to Remix, not transmog you could obtain in Pandaria in the live game.

I received every drop from all the raids on normal, heroic, or mythic. LFR is a lot harder because you can’t trade drops in LFR, so I stopped as soon as I received every drop that I liked. I also went after every dungeon and scenario drop that I liked but not every single drop. And as for world drops, those weren’t fun to farm, so I didn’t.

I earned 149 of the drops out of 233 total. Not bad.

Noblegarden 2024

Posted by Peter (Devee) on April 6, 2024
Posted in: Dragonflight, Holidays, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a comment

Noblegarden 2024 brought a new mount to the game. When the event started, you had one chance at the mount per day per character, and the drop rate was supposedly 1%. A few days into the event, Blizzard hotfixed the game so the first chance per day per account would drop at an increased rate. No idea why they didn’t do it from the start, but it didn’t matter for me anyways; I got it on day two!

Here’s Bulleto and I as ducks using the new toy introduced this year.

The toy, Duck Disguiser, allows you to select one of the colors of the disguise that you have. Unfortunately, you can unlock one color per year, and it’s per character – no choosing a different color on each character to unlock all of them within a year. Luckily in five years, we’ll have all of them. I’m definitely not a fan of this system. If they had just released a different color each year, I think I’d like that more.

Another toy introduced this year allows your dragonriding mount to carry a basket of eggs in its mouth!

Dragonflight S2 Transmog

Posted by Peter (Devee) on April 4, 2024
Posted in: Burninador, Devee, Dragonflight, Faiella, Feneko, Illuminnae, logrus, Mooglepete (Kil'jaeden), Mostymush, Sotiros, Spritzi, Transmog, Tyyrse, Voidgazer, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Season 3 is about to finish, and I never posted about the season 2 transmog I earned. I know it’s not the most exciting aspect of the game, but I spend a significant amount of time chasing these sets. Let’s take a look

Class sets

Shaman – Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible

I love the red heroic tint. I could use the mythic tint too. The normal is okay, and I don’t think I’d ever use the LFR tint.

Warrior – Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible

None of the four Aberrus tints are bad for warriors. I doubt I’d use the LFR or normal ones after unlocking the heroic and mythic ones, but they’re all cool.

Mage – Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible

These are all fantastic. I like the pink LFR tint a ton! I don’t think I’d use normal much, but I like the peach vibes from heroic too.

Priest – Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible

I don’t like the LFR tint, but I do like the normal and heroic priest tints. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’d ever use them. I just have other sets I like more. If I was going shadow, maybe I’d use heroic!

Hunter – Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible

I got the LFR, normal, and heroic tints of the hunter class set. I think they all look great!

Evoker – Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible

I got the LFR, normal, and heroic tints of the evoker class set. It’s all terrible. That’s all I have to say.

Druid – Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible

These are the LFR and normal tints for the druid set. I think they both look really cool, but surprisingly, I like the LFR best.

Paladin – Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible

Just the LFR tint for the paladin.

Death Knight – Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible

Just the LFR tint for DK as well.

Rogue – Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible

Just LFR on this alt.

Demon Hunter – Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible

And just LFR for Demon Hunter.

Warlock – Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible

Just LFR!

Monk – Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible?

Nothing! I didn’t have a monk at max level in season 2. Hm, maybe in the season 3 post…

Mail gear

These sets are for all mail-wearing classes.

Time Rifts (mail)

These are the two mail sets from the time rift vendors. I’m not sure I’d ever use them.

Cavern Delver’s Gear (mail)

I collected four the Cavern Delver’s Gear tints – time rifts & Dawn of the Infinites (bronze), world quests and world drops, campaign, and Suffusion Camps and PVP. I like the red tint from Suffusion Camps.

Plate gear

These sets are for all plate-wearers.

Season 2 PVP Aspirant (plate)

The aspirant set for plate-wearers is cool.

Time Rifts (plate)

These are the two sets from Time Rifts vendors available to all plate classes.

Cavern Delver’s Gear (plate)

Like the mail versions of this set, I like the red tint from Suffusion Camps best. Unlike mail classes, I didn’t unlock the campaign version of the plate sets.

Leather gear

These sets are for all leather-wearers.

Time Rifts (leather)

I think these are cooler than the other armor types’ Time Rifts gear.

Cavern Delver’s Gear (leather)

Three tints of this leather, and like the previous ones, I prefer the red tint.

Cloth gear

These sets are for all cloth-wearing classes.

Time Rifts (cloth)

Ugly!

Cavern Delver’s Gear (cloth)

This looks much worse than the other ones. Maybe it’s not the cloth but that it doesn’t look good on a troll.

All classes

These sets are useable on all classes.

Racing Cup

These are the Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms Cups transmog on the left and the Outland Cup transmog on the right. I really like these a lot.

Draconic Mortals Attire

I don’t even remember where these are obtained, but I got three tints.

Dragonflight Season 2 activities – Time Rifts, Dreamsurges, and Barter Boulders

Posted by Peter (Devee) on March 19, 2024
Posted in: Dragonflight, Gear, Lore, Mounts, Pets, Quests, Transmog, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Patch 10.1.5 brought Time Rifts and 10.1.7 brought Dreamsurges to Dragonflight. I meant to talk about them a little so here we are, a season late.

Time Rifts

Time Rifts gave us some interesting lore tidbits around what if scenarios without really delving into time travel shenanigans. I thought it was fun addition and recommend seeing each of the different time rifts.

These are the timelines you visit:

  • Azmourne – the Scourge rule Azeroth
  • A.Z.E.R.O.T.H. – King Mechagon has taken over Azeroth and defeated organic life
  • Azmerloth – everyone is Murlocs
  • Azewrath – the Burning Legion won the War of the Ancients
  • Azq’roth – the Black Empire rules Azeroth
  • Warlands – the Horde and Alliance never worked together and continue to fight
  • Ulderoth – the Titans rule Azeroth

Azmerloth might be favorite! During the time rift, you visit Mrrglblight (Dragonblight) during what was the Dragon Soul raid in our universe. Varian Wryngrrlgulgll and Thrallgrulgulgul lead their forces against Deathwingurlugull. If you keep doing the time rift quests, you’ll even meet Alulgultasza de Urgl-Blalul <Queen of the… Murloc… Dragons?>

Here’s the Gill’dan battle pet. Even Gul’dan was a murloc in this timeline!

Poor Bolvar.

In Azmourne, you might come across the Scourge version of yourself.

In the Warlands, the Horde and Alliance continue fighting aerial battles.

This is the Gold-Toed Albatross, one of the mounts you can earn. I farmed the time rifts until I could purchase everything – a variety of mounts, pets, transmog sets, weapons, etc. It was also a useful source of items to put through the catalyst for LFR gear; I like to use world content to collect LFR appearances on classes I don’t play seriously.

Dreamsurges

Dreamsurges were a lot more boring in my opinion with a lot less rewards, but I still did them to buy all the rewards.

This is the Duskwing Ohuna mount.

This mount is actually pretty cool looking – the Renewed Magmammoth. I enjoy all the mammoths this expansion!

Barter Boulders

Lastly, I thought I’d mention that I finished the Barter Boulder grind with the Loamm Niffen!

The final item I needed was the nifty Ponzo’s Scheming Topper. Will I use it much? Probably not. But I have it!

Dragonflight Season 2 m+ recap

Posted by Peter (Devee) on November 18, 2023
Posted in: Achievements, Burninador, Devee, Dragonflight, Dungeons and Scenarios, Feneko, Journal, Mooglepete (Kil'jaeden), Mostymush, Sotiros, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Now that season is over, I thought I’d recap how the second season went for me.

I got Keystone Hero on my main, a resto shaman, with a rating of 2695.0 and earned all the portals. My normal group didn’t really push at the end, so I pug’d to get the portals, which went very smoothly this season. I earned Keystone Master on my fury warrior. Besides them, I played a little on alts; I earned Keystone Conqueror on my frost mage and Keystone Explorer on my hunter, priest, and evoker.

I stopped on my main when I got the portals. For my alts, I was honestly just grinding certain crests to unlock transmog.

ClassSpecRating
ShamanRestoration2695.0
WarriorFury2247.2
MageFrost1520.3
HunterBeast Mastery1439.9
PriestDiscipline1411.9
EvokerDevastation1405.8

Here are character-specific details:

Resto shaman

https://raider.io/characters/us/kiljaeden/Sotiros?season=season-df-2

Fury warrior

https://raider.io/characters/us/kiljaeden/Mostymush?season=season-df-2

Frost mage

https://raider.io/characters/us/kiljaeden/Mooglepete?season=season-df-2

BM hunter

https://raider.io/characters/us/kiljaeden/Feneko?season=season-df-2

Disc priest

https://raider.io/characters/us/kiljaeden/Devee?season=season-df-2

Devastation evoker

https://raider.io/characters/us/kiljaeden/Burninador?season=season-df-2

10.1 activities – Snail Racing, Researchers Under Fire, Sniffenseeking, and Fyrakk Assaults

Posted by Peter (Devee) on November 10, 2023
Posted in: Achievements, Bulleto, Journal, Mounts, Pets, Sotiros, Transmog, Tyyrse, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Let’s look at some of the open world activities from patch 10.1 that I completed.

Snail Racing

Look at this beautiful snail, Big Slick in the City! I love this mount.

This is Bulleto and me on our snails! I short collection of dailies, and the little snail was mine.

Researchers Under Fire

Researchers Under Fire seemed interesting at first but quickly lost its appeal. I think this happens with a lot of the world content that starts at set times. It just became a chore. However, it offered three mounts and two pets. I earned everything. This is my favorite mount from the activity, the Subterranean Magmammoth.

Sniffenseeking

Sniffenseeking is the activity in Zaralek Cavern in which you dig with Myrrit. They were pretty fun little scenarios that offered a change of pace to the standard game. I did all of them and found all the quest items, earning the Sniffenseeker title and the Salverun pet, who whispers things to you.

Fyrakk Assaults

Fyrakk Assaults basically boiled down to showing up and defeating a bunch of enemies, but it had a little bit of complexity by forcing to you to target more powerful enemies. What I liked about the assaults were that there were four transmog sets to collect, one for each armor type. Here’s my druid with the leather set. There were also some drake manuscripts, a toy, and some pets. I collected everything.

Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible recap

Posted by Peter (Devee) on November 7, 2023
Posted in: Achievements, Bulleto, Burninador, Dragonflight, Feneko, Journal, Mostymush, Progression, Raiding, Sotiros, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Aberrus was a really good raid with some fun, varied fights. I earned Ahead of the Curve on my shaman, warrior, and evoker. On my hunter, I finished normal. Other classes did some bosses or LFR only. With 9 bosses in the raid, I only had issues with a couple of them.

The Amalgamation Chamber, The Forgotten Experiments, and Magmorax seemed rather boring. Magmorax was especially trivial, but somehow I disliked The Amalgamation Chamber and The Forgotten Experiments even more, possibly because they were two boring fights in a row.

Opening with Kazzara, the Hellforged was fantastic. I’m glad we started with a dragon.

I also really loved the flow between Assault of the Zaqali and Rashok, the Elder. We stop the Zaqali from infiltrating deeper into Aberrus, yet when we find Rashok, we initially think he got past us before the Echo of Neltharion reveals that the Zaqali were there to free Rashok. I know the idea of us having to defeat innocent or good characters who have gone mad has been done a ton in WoW, but I still have to feel bad for Rashok!

The Echo of Neltharion was a fun penultimate fight, and the reveal that the Echo was actually a Faceless One seems to have been missed by a lot of people.

Sarkareth is a complex fight that was a lot of fun – even though I once dispelled immediately when I wasn’t thinking and immediately caused a wipe. I wish Sarkareth has been built up more. I know his story existed in the Forbidden Reach and tied to the dracthyr, but I didn’t find myself caring all that much about the lore.

This was the first time Bulleto and I defeated Sarkareth I think, which would make this an LFR or normal screenshot.

My Ahead of the Curve kill on my shaman is at the top of this post. It was kind of an odd tier because my raid group did splits, and I wasn’t in the group that was pushing as hard. I still ran with the raid group, but I was ahead through pugging and got my AOTC in a pug group.

Here’s where we earned Glory of the Aberrus Raider. These achievements are interesting; I used to think of them as a challenge to obtain slowly but now it’s just a single run.

Here’s some of the raid group with our Shadowflame Shalewing, the Glory reward, right after we earned it.

And here’s Bulleto and I on them outside of Aberrus.

I think this is from the time Bulleto earned her AOTC.

This is the Highland Drake: Embodiment of the Hellforged customization that drops from Sarkareth. I’m glad I got it, because it’s awesome! It looks like the first boss, Kazzara.

Here’s a closer look at it with Bulleto and I carrying eggs!

Hopefully Amirdrassil, the Dream’s Hope will be just as fun!

Hallow’s End 2023

Posted by Peter (Devee) on November 2, 2023
Posted in: Dragonflight, Holidays, Illuminnae, Journal, Sotiros, Transmog, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Hallow’s End just finished in World of Warcraft, and it was the second holiday to get a “holiday refresh” in Dragonflight. This felt a lot more like a refresh than the Brewfest one did. The biggest change in my opinion was the addition of a quest series about the history of the Headless Horseman, including who he was in life and his wife.

The fight itself is also updated, including a hard more. The hard mode increases the chance of receiving the mount, the drake manuscript, and the Arfus pet (with the drake manuscript and Arfus being new). It’s still not difficult, but you have to actually pay attention and can’t queue as a tank/healer while being dps, which I think was the right thing to do previously to speed up not only queue times but also the fight.

I included a video above of the hard mode fight!

gem and I both got the Hallow’s End armor drake manuscript. It adds a jack-o-lantern to the back of the drake!

Here we are with the Eve’s Ghastly Rider, a broomstick mount from the Trading Post. During Hallow’s End, it’s instant-cast.

This is after the completion of the Headless Horseman fight. There’s little Arfus too!

I’m a flying pumpkin boy!

Here I am in my pumpkin costume after fighting the Headless Horseman. I have my new Bucket of Morbid Treats offhand that looks like a jack-o-lantern!

This is little Arfus, a good little ghost dog pet!

He’s really adorable when he sleeps too!

I dressed up my paladin in plate armor to match The Horseman’s Horrific Hood.

He doesn’t seem to notice that I have his horse.

Here’s my paladin with The Horseman’s Horrific Hood, The Horseman’s Sinister Slicer, and the Bucket of Morbid Treats. You’ll note that I’m taking screenshots and not helping with the fight at all. Oh well.

This is probably my favorite in-game holiday because I love Halloween so much. The refresh wasn’t huge, but I liked it a lot. I’ll leave you with the poems said when the Horseman is summoned!

Horseman rise…
Your time is nigh…
You felt death once…
Now, know demise!

It is over, your search is done. Let fate choose now, the righteous one.

Dragonflight S1 Transmog

Posted by Peter (Devee) on June 6, 2023
Posted in: Journal, Mostymush, Sotiros, Transmog, Tyyrse, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

While my main goals each season are related to pushing content, I do spend too much time collecting transmog sets. Here’s what I got from Dragonflight Season 1.

Tauren shaman

First, let’s look at the transmog on my main, a tauren shaman.

Vault of the Incarnates

The only set I completed from Vault of the Incarnates was the mythic set. Earning the raid/m+ tier on lower color variations is kind of difficult because I want to use my catalyst charges on whatever helps with progression, not whatever helps with transmog. I was one piece away, wrists, from completing heroic and normal. If I had one more week with the catalyst, I would have completed it. Luckily the wrist piece isn’t visible really anyways. You can also see me using the mythic Vault of the Incarnates set in the screenshot at the top.

The mythic appearance goes well with the Raszageth mount!

Primal Elements

I earned the Primal Storms and The Forbidden Reach colors for the Primal Elements set. This was all from farming rares in the Forbidden Reach.

I had some bad RNG with the last piece, but I got it eventually.

This tint goes well with the Elusive Emerald Hawkstrider from the end of last expansion.

Valdrakken Civilian Clothing

I earned the bronze and blue colors of the Valdrakken Civilian Clothing. I chose bronze on my shaman and blue on my warrior. I haven’t bought any additional tints yet.

Centaur Regalia

I like the dungeons variant of the Centaur Regalia, the Centaur Dungeon Harness, a lot. I also earned the aspirant tint from honor gear and the world and world quest tint.

Dracthyr Battlegear

I only earned the one from this set, Crimson Dracthyr Battlegear.

Expedition Gear

Four variations earned on this character, and they’re all ugly.

Trading Post

Can’t forget the Darkmoon Harlequin’s Bells!

Other

I put this one together once I got the treasure chest back from the trading post. I like the gold!

Mag’har orc warrior

Now let’s look at the transmog for my warrior.

Vault of the Incarnates

I couldn’t quite complete a single set of the raid set. I was missing the boots from the mythic set and the head from both the heroic and normal set. If only I had a little more time!

Here’s the mythic set on me in the world. The boots don’t technically match. I’ve saved the set in my transmog as “LIES.”

Primal Elements

I also earned the Primal Storms and Forbidden Reach tints of the Primal Elements set, both from the Forbidden Reach. It was a nice, mindless task to farm these from rares.

This goes well with these swords!

Valdrakken Civilian Clothing

Here are the bronze and blue tints.

Djaradin Battlegear

I just got this one tint of the Djaradin Battlegear. I will never use this.

Expedition Gear

The World Drops tint is bad, but the Primal Storms tint is kind of cool. I don’t think I’m likely to use it, but it could be cool to transmog a simple look.

Trading Post

While I liked this on my tauren shaman, I don’t care for it on my warrior as much!

Other

This is my usual transmog for the warrior. It has nothing to do with Dragonflight, as it came from Castle Nathria last expansion, but I wanted to include it. The weapons are from Sanctum of Domination I think, and I like that they look like shoulder armor when on my back.

It goes well with last expansion’s Fallen Charger, too.

Zandalari druid

Finally, let’s look at my druid. I didn’t play him as much, so he doesn’t have as many sets collected.

Vault of the Incarnates

I earned the heroic and normal tints from the raid set easily using the Forbidden Reach gear. Since I wasn’t doing any real PVE content, I didn’t have any good gear to use with my catalyst charges.

Primal Elements

Just like with the other two characters, I got the two tints of the Primal Elements set from the Forbidden Reach.

I like using the blue set.

Valdrakken Civilian Clothing

Here’s my druid with the bronze and blue tints. The bronze looks much better on him due to the blue skin tone.

Expedition Gear

I only earned this one tint from the Expedition Gear set.

Trading Post

Again, this just doesn’t do it for me like it does on a tauren!

Dragonflight Keystone Master: Season Two

Posted by Peter (Devee) on June 1, 2023
Posted in: Achievements, Bulleto, Dragonflight, Dungeons and Scenarios, Journal, Mounts, Sotiros, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Season 2 KSM came pretty quickly! I like this reward mount, the Inferno Armoredon, a lot more than the Hailstone Armoredon from last season.

Mushkin said Bulleto’s pet was cramping his style so he had to switch sides.

Now we grind to Keystone Hero and try to get heroic Sarkareth down for AOTC.

Dragonflight Season 1

Posted by Peter (Devee) on May 11, 2023
Posted in: Achievements, Dragonflight, Dungeons and Scenarios, Journal, Mostymush, Progression, Raiding, Sotiros, Tyyrse, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Now that season 2 has started, I wanted to look at how I did in season 1. I got Keystone Hero (2500+ rating) on my shaman and Keystone Master (2000+ rating) on my warrior. I got Ahead of the Curve and finished Vault of the Incarnates on both my shaman and warrior. While I’ve played alts a little in the past, this is the first season I’ve earned KSM and AotC on two characters. Awesome! It was one of my goals this season, so I’m glad I succeeded. I also played my druid a tiny bit. While I PVP’d a little, I decided to focus my time elsewhere.

Here’s a look at my rating:

Mythic+RaidPVP
CharacterOverallHealerDPSTankProgressionRank
Sotiros (Shaman)2681.2 (KSH)2681.2674.4 (Ele)N/AAOTC, 8/8H, 1/8MChallenger 1 (1400+)
Mostymush (Warrior)2453.3 (KSM)N/A2453.3 (Fury)549.9AOTC, 8/8H
Tyyrse (Druid)1147.5 (KSE)1017.6407.4 (Balance)N/A

Shaman

Shaman leaderboard:

LeaderboardWorldRegionRealm(H) World(H) Region(H) Realm
All Shaman24,8846,7855516,4854,28449
Shaman Healers11,4923,144257,3791,91320
Shaman DPS122,33645,83549682,17329,921446
Elemental Shaman49,61818,34618432,27411,650161
Restoration Shaman11,4933,145257,3791,91320
All Classes & Roles305,92085,051648198,17552,366565
All Healers61,62817,03613838,58010,085117
All DPS1,566,864580,3615,3591,001,320355,9204,826

Shaman dungeons:

HealerDPS
DungeonFortifiedTyrannicalFortifiedTyrannical
Algeth’ar Academy20*182
Court of Stars20*208**
Halls of Valor1820*
Ruby Life Pools1620*2***
Shadowmoon Burial Grounds21*20*8***
Temple of the Jade Serpent20*209**
The Azure Vault20*18*
The Nokhud Offensive20*18

Warrior

Warrior leaderboard:

LeaderboardWorldRegionRealm(H) World(H) Region(H) Realm
All Warrior56,72416,80012336,48710,209110
Warrior Tanks170,93063,515620109,07538,624548
Warrior DPS30,4059,1436419,2595,48060
Fury Warrior19,3915,9825112,3803,59047
Protection Warrior170,94863,666620108,86538,637548
All Classes & Roles574,802176,0521,517374,871109,2951,338
All Tanks652,808246,1062,339411,721148,6282,114
All DPS353,782108,485940233,56968,266830

Warrior dungeons:

DPSTank
DungeonFortifiedTyrannicalFortifiedTyrannical
Algeth’ar Academy1918
Court of Stars17*20
Halls of Valor17*18*13*
Ruby Life Pools1817**
Shadowmoon Burial Grounds19*17**
Temple of the Jade Serpent181710
The Azure Vault16*185**
The Nokhud Offensive1918*9*

Druid

Druid leaderboard:

LeaderboardWorldRegionRealm(H) World(H) Region(H) Realm
All Druid227,73582,500792135,45446,727682
Druid Healers139,89949,16047381,92227,356405
Druid DPS156,81760,18254592,84233,748465
Balance Druid106,89339,09433564,68722,271282
Restoration Druid139,90349,16747382,03727,359405
All Classes & Roles1,996,607722,0176,7311,272,733442,0026,050
All Tanks499,596182,1851,725311,748109,0671,532
All DPS2,145,083824,4127,7601,355,283499,9666,956

Druid dungeons:

OverallHealerDPS
DungeonFortifiedTyrannicalFortifiedTyrannicalFortifiedTyrannical
Algeth’ar Academy12**12**
Court of Stars5**5**
Halls of Valor13**8***13**
Ruby Life Pools7*12*7*12*
Shadowmoon Burial Grounds11***9***11***9***3***
Temple of the Jade Serpent5**5**
The Azure Vault5***5***3***
The Nokhud Offensive3*3*

Dragonflight Keystone Master: Season One

Posted by Peter (Devee) on January 23, 2023
Posted in: Achievements, Bulleto, Dragonflight, Dungeons and Scenarios, Journal, Sotiros, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , . 1 Comment

Last night we earned Dragonflight Keystone Master: Season One! It’s just in time for the catalyst tomorrow. It feels weird that we can get KSM while still waiting for the Inspiration Catalyst. Right now, only one of us has four piece. That’ll change soon!

First Winterveil of Dragonflight

Posted by Peter (Devee) on January 12, 2023
Posted in: Bulleto, Dragonflight, Holidays, Journal, Mostymush, Sotiros, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

I wanted to share some fun Winterveil screenshot from last months! I’m always excited to put on my holiday transmog and celebrate, even if Bulleto here has that silly grin on his face!

Going for a sled ride through Orgrimmar.

Slow down, Bulleto!

Winterveil in the Ohn’ahran Plains.

Look at all our friends!

Who needs reindeer when you have a friendly bakar?

Taivan is a good, good boy. I loved his storyline. Skip to the next paragraph to avoid spoilers. Taivan doesn’t appear good at anything, but eventually we discover he’s a rescue bakar!

Sled ride!

Weee!

Making a furbolg friend.

I don’t remember what this world quest was exactly, but I liked all the mage tables!

Taking a break for a Winterveil picnic.

Winterveil in the Court of Stars.

I have a lot of holiday spirit!

Raszageth might want to fight the aspects, but she still celebrates Winterveil.

She’s wearing her Winterveil hat and holding a candy cane and wreath.

Even Varimithras has Winterveil spirit!

Dragonflight questing

Posted by Peter (Devee) on December 6, 2022
Posted in: Bulleto, Dragonflight, In Character, Journal, Sotiros, Videos, World Events, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Dragonflight’s pre-patch event provided a nice way to level alts. I had 6 max level characters when the pre-patch released, and on the day of Dragonflight’s release, I had 18 level 60 character! And yet I still don’t have a level 50+ highmountain tauren to unlock their heritage armor.

Please note that I’ll be discussing quests in this post without regards to spoilers.

The expansion release was a mess for me at first. Apparently things were okay the first half hour or so, but by the time I tried to play, Orgrimmar and Durotar were empty, and I kept getting “instance transfer aborted” error messages. On the plus side, I got to ride my rocket indoors!

Eventually I was able to see everyone. Like most people, the zeppelin did not want to show up for me. Eventually I saw a reddit post suggesting you could summon people to a dungeon in the Dragon Isles, and it worked! Thank you to my guildmates for summoning me to the Isles!

The Waking Shores

Once we reach the Dragon Isles, we have to backtrack across the zone from the dungeon to where we should have arrived. Cool zeppelin!

Alexstrasza’s new model is detailed and looks great. I’m looking forward to helping the aspects more!

Bulleto and I are little whelps!

The lava mammoths are amazing enemies. I need to level a hunter because I want one, and I can’t wait to get a mount.

This was from a later zone, but I thought I’d include it here. These were just a temporary buff, but it was fun to ride them!

I don’t know what to think about Sabellian vs Wrathion, and I could write a lot more about them. Wrathion acts like he’s always acting in our best interest, but he’s made a lot of stupid decisions and then didn’t even show up in Legion. Are we supposed to remember that, or was that bad writing? On the other hand, Sabellian hasn’t even been around in years. Who should I hope becomes the new aspect?

Hanging out with Bulleto!

Did… did Bulleto transform into a whelp and take a little lava bath in that cauldron of lava? I think so!

I didn’t think I’d like dragonriding much because my friend and I use two person mounts a lot while questing.

I was quite surprised to see you can enable the ability to let someone ride your dragon with you. They even get to turn into a little whelp! Of course, we now know dragonriding is super awesome and amazingly fast!

Ohn’ahran Plains

I never really cared about the centaur previously, and I still wouldn’t say they’re one of my favorite races. However, their inclusion in Dragonflight just makes the world seem so much more grounded. I like seeing races that were present in classic. And I love the architecture and world around these Maruuk centaur!

Especially cool is Sansok Khan, the tall centaur on the right in this screenshot. She’s the leader of her clan, and she’s deaf. Okir, the centaur next to Sansok Khan, speaks on her behalf, translating Sansok Khan’s sign language. Sansok Khan’s quest text starts with As Sansok Khan signs, Okir vocalizes. The dog next to Sansok Khan is Basran. It appears you can pet him as you can other dogs in World of Warcraft, but when you click him, you get this: You extend a hand to offer Basran pets, but he stays stoically next to his khan. Basran is currently working and you should not pat service dogs on duty. How amazing is that? I really like the representation, and she’s a cool character in general.

This was one of the longest quests I’ve ever experienced – or at least it felt that way. You escort the caravan and listen to the centaurs tell their history. It was a little hard for me to focus, but I still like to soak up all the lore.

I love how green and beautiful the zone is.

Yay, we get to ride him!

I thought the green dragons’ area was pretty too.

The Azure Span

Who knew a powerful mage could control their mirror images independently? Kalecgos knows, apparently.

Seeing Sindragosa, or at least a simulacrum of her, is an amazing moment. We don’t really know how sentient this is, but she sure feels like a character in her own. I hope we interact with her more!

Finally, we get to the tuskarr! This is the best and cutest race in the game, and you better believe I would be a tuskarr if they ever made them an allied race. I can’t believe Blizzard said there are no plans for allied races in Dragonflight, but I’m still hoping.

I really thought the tuskarr for which we were searching was dead, but his feign death tricked me. Bulleto is so upset that he feigns death.

Relaxing with Kalecgos and our new tuskarr friends.

During a quest with some tuskarr and Kalecgos in which we’re battling the decay, the tuskarr Kaqiata dies. Her dying words are “Please, tell my son Rowie in Iskaara that I love him. And I’m sorry.”

We meet her son Rowie later and help him “defeat” this yeti. This was a such a cute quest!

We also helped the tuskarr say good bye to Chieftain Ponoliak and learn about their funeral ceremonies. It’s another sad yet touching quest.

The tuskarr children are just super adorable!

And so is this frog!

Some tuskarr children want to help this abandoned baby gnoll they named Scraps. I thought it was cute, and I’m looking forward to this being referenced again later I’m sure.

This quests tasks us with helping Elder Poa with her stories. Elder Nappa suggests we get Elder Poa a new story – even if we have to make it up! Elder Poa takes the quest answers and spins a story from it.

You can also read it here.

This one is Bulleto’s!

The zone ended with the blue dragonflight coming together to help Kalecgos. It was to be expected from the major story beats of the zone but was exciting nonetheless!

Thaldraszus

Eventually we reached Thaldraszus, the final zone and home of the dragon city Valdrakken. You’d think a city made for dragons would have chairs spaced a little further apart.

Due to some time shenanigans with the bronze and infinite flights, I met my future self here. Why does his armor look worse?

When I get sent back in time, I’m not expecting this. Camp Narache?! (Of course, when my character lived this, it was vanilla and not Cataclysm.)

A timeline where the Horde and Alliance are murlocs has to be one of the coolest things in the game.

Even the map is modified!

Here I am with Bulleto, Varian Wryngrrlgulgll, and Thrallgrulgulgul. Deathwingurlugull is in the background!

Who are those murloc heroes with us? Why, they’re Bulleto and Sotiros the murlocs of course!

We even found Baine Blrrgfin!

Here’s a clip of this awesome quest.

We’re sent even further back in time to before the titans ever came to Azeroth and the Black Empire ruled. Don’t worry, we make it home.

Bulleto and I fit better at this table even if Sumo hogs the camera while Chompsky stands nicely in the back!

Need a break from adventuring? Maybe you could get some cheese from Gorgonzormu.

It would go perfect with some wine from Zinfandormu!

Well, maybe I’m off to have some cheese and wine in Valdrakken. See you on the Dragon Isles!

Shadowlands season 4 m+ and RBGs

Posted by Peter (Devee) on November 25, 2022
Posted in: Achievements, Devee, Dungeons and Scenarios, Journal, Mounts, Progression, PVP, Raiding, Shadowlands, Sotiros, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

With the Dragonflight pre-patch event in full swing and the expansion release in just a few days, I thought I’d talk about how Shadowlands season 4 went. I already blogged about Heroic: Fates of the Shadowlands Raids. Now let’s look at m+ and RBGs

Mythic+

I mainly played Sotiros, my resto shaman again. We didn’t go for Keystone Hero this season, so it was an easier season. I had a 2229 rating, which is mostly the +16 to +18 range.

I barely played Devee, my holy priest. Maybe I’ll play him more in Dragonflight! He had a 1481 rating and was missing a lot of scores.

Rated Battlegrounds

Mooglegem and I earned the Vicious Warstalker mount this season in rated battlegrounds. The win rate was fairly even, and I earned an extra Vicious Saddle too.

  • Rank: Challenger II
  • Highest rating: 1604
  • End rating: 1587
  • Games played: 121
  • Games won: 59
  • Win rate: 49%

New World’s Nightveil Hallow

Posted by Peter (Devee) on October 31, 2022
Posted in: Amazon Games, New World. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Happy Halloween, and to New World players, Happy Nightveil Hallow! The event had a short quest (some dialogue and then defeating the world boss), which is great because the fun is all about battling Baalphazu, shown above! Baalphazu summons three type of minions, including pumpklins – pumpkins he has animated to fight for him. We can use them against him by slaying them and then picking up the pumpklins and throwing them at him!

Do you know what’s more interesting than fighting Baalphazu? Fighting three Baalphazus at the same time! Somehow three were spawned together, which definitely got hectic. You can see the three health bars in the above screenshot.

This clip embedded above is only a minute, and I think it’s pretty cool to give an idea of what fighting three was like, although there was some lag so it was more showing the three than showing me doing much damage back to them.

While I fought the world boss a number of times, I recorded my first battle with Baalphazu in full. It actually took 18 minutes, so I don’t honestly recommend you watch the clip. I do think it’s fun to have it recorded sometimes, so it might be neat to skip through it and see what the boss is like.

The quest tasks you with throwing Baalphazu’s Ichor into the Nightveil Cauldron. It didn’t tell us to get in the cauldron, but we couldn’t resist.

There’s a nice explosion and a magical, floating jack-o-lantern when you throw in the ichor.

Here’s a second show with gem included in which the jack-o-lantern is more visible. Pretty cool! There was an official news article about the event on the New World with more information about the design that you can read here.

New World’s Ghost Ship

Posted by Peter (Devee) on October 17, 2022
Posted in: Amazon Games, New World. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

The ghost ship appeared for me a couple times last month while I was fishing for the Summer Medleyfaire in New World!

This is just outside First Light, where I like to fish. It’s not super common, but if you just park yourself here and get fishing, you’ll see it eventually. It makes a noise when it appears that’s pretty noticeable, but you probably only have about 10 seconds before it fades away again.

This was the exact moment it appeared for the first time for me. Unsurprisingly, I was fishing!

I really like this type of event. It’s infrequent and doesn’t have a gameplay purpose, so it just adds to the mystery and world in the game. I wish there were more things like this!

New World’s Summer Medleyfaire

Posted by Peter (Devee) on October 7, 2022
Posted in: Amazon Games, New World, New World Events. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

New World’s Summer Medleyfaire event ended about a month ago, and I wanted to talk about it briefly. I liked this event because it added some flair without too much of a required timesink or difficulty.

The best part was the music. This is just amazing, and the team really outdid themselves (even if I am biased). I didn’t record it myself, but this video I found is great thanks to LunoLarks on YouTube. Seriously, check it out. I’m leaving the video open in the background while I make this post.

During the quests, you’re given some instruments and taught how to perform. Then you’re tasked with locating maudlinbugs on the map and playing the Maudlinbug Haze, which allowed you to acquire the maudlinbugs. You could play instruments in a party; this shows me and gem.

And here I was alone with the maudlinbugs!

Here’s a little video of me playing the song and then collecting the maudlinbugs.

The maudlinbugs could be used as bait to catch Aeternum Sturgeon. You could “open” the fish to get filets, scales, and bones, and you could also fish up some other special resources during the event.

You could purchase a variety of rewards, including a mounted version of each fish in the game to be used to decorate your house. I bought everything besides the fish – all the other furniture, armor, tools, etc. And then I spent the remainder of my free time fishing and crafting as many mounted fish as I could, although I didn’t display all the fish. Here you can see the orange and blue spotlights, a mounted fish on my table, and most important – a rabbit in a Medleyfaire costume on the right!

Here’s another look at my house!

When you threw the special fish bone resource on the fire, there’s an explosion like this.

Briefly it would glow blue with, I’m assuming, azoth, and you got some event tokens.

There was a short quest series in which you got people to come to the summer Medleyfaire and dance. In one quest, the florist would only come if we helped her with her flowers. I know the screenshot is dark, but you can see the flowers we helped her grow. And speaking of dancing, you could dance at the Medleyfaire for a reputation bonus.

Now it’s just time to wait for the next seasonal event!

Heroic: Fates of the Shadowlands Raids

Posted by Peter (Devee) on October 3, 2022
Posted in: Achievements, Journal, Mooglegem, Mounts, Progression, Raiding, Shadowlands, Sotiros, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment

Back in mid-August I earned Fates of the Shadowlands Raids, and a couple weeks ago I earned the heroic variant. Once we earned our Jigglesworth Sr. slime cat mounts, we promptly jumped off Oribos!

While most people reading this likely understand the fated system, for those of you don’t, this was the first time Blizzard used something like this for a raid season. Rather than using new raids or even just updating an old raid (like Naxxramas and Onyxia’s Lair level 80 versions), this season involved scaled up versions of all three Shadowlands raids. Each week, one raid would be “fated,” scaled to current ilvls and with additional affixes to change things up a bit. Most of these affixes boiled down to being buffs, but some did cause issues on fights that were positionally difficult. The affix on each boss rotates each time the raid is fated as well.

Each boss could have one affix when the season started and later it was changed to two out of a possible four.

  • Chaotic Essence: Someone must interact with it to make it hostile. When it’s hostile, it keeps summoning little adds. Every little add that’s killed grants a stack of a damage, healing, and absorbs buff. The adds do damage, but it never felt like it mattered.
  • Protoform Barrier: This appears as a buff on the boss. When dispelled, it creates an add that’s attackable and shares a big absorb shield with other enemies. When it’s killed, it mirrors the damage done to it to the boss and gives a damage bonus to players. (There’s also a second add that healers can heal to reduce the absorb shield.) This was usually not a problem, but if the group is near a wipe, the boss is almost dead, and then a Protoform Barrier appears, it can cause a wipe.
  • Reconfiguration Emitter: An add casts raid-wide damage and gets a stacking damage buff over time. Once it casts or is interrupted, it’s attackable. When it dies, it increases player stats based on its power level. This never felt like an issue.
  • Creation Spark: Players get debuffs that will create circles on the ground when dispelled or expired. Standing in one gives players a mini lust. Every circle that doesn’t have a player standing in it will explode with raid-wide damage. This can be deadly on heavy movement fights.

Here’s Delillidan (Elias), me, and Mooglegem (gem) on our mounts!

This fated system certainly seems designed to extend the life of the content without heavy development. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and I enjoyed the season. However, the fated rotation adds difficulties. During the first three weeks of the season, my raid group spent the first raid night of the week doing normal and the second doing heroic. On the third week, I had to miss the second raid night. While I earned my normal achievement and the mount, it means I missed heroic fated Sepulcher. In the following weeks, my raid group decided to raid just once per week and stick to heroic. Three weeks after the previously missed Sepulcher, I had to miss raid night once again – which means I once again missed heroic fated Sepulcher. Yes, it’s on me for missing raids. But bad timing with a schedule plus the fated rotation can really hurt things.

I did manage to do some pugging to get my heroic fated Sepulcher of the First ones done. Now I’m Sotiros, Hero of Fate!

gem hit 60 in New World

Posted by Peter (Devee) on September 26, 2022
Posted in: Amazon Games, New World. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

gem recently hit 60 in New World recently! Not the most exciting screenshot, but I’m glad to see the 60 next to her name. As soon as Jonathan gains a couple more levels, we’ll have four of us at max level. I thought I’d share a few other random screenshots too.

Looking out over the ravine.

I thought it was pretty here.

I love the lighting.

gem still hasn’t bought a house but said she’d like this to be her home.

See this bathtub? gem wanted to know why they’d put the bathtub upstairs when there isn’t plumbing and you’d have to carry water to the tub. It’s a good question given that the house is mostly empty anyways and there’s plenty of room downstairs.

A collection of campsites.

Even a marsh can look cool!

Shadowlands Keystone Master: Season Four

Posted by Peter (Devee) on September 21, 2022
Posted in: Dragonflight, Dungeons and Scenarios, Journal, Mooglegem, Mounts, Shadowlands, Sotiros, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 1 Comment

I earned Shadowlands Keystone Master: Season Four about three weeks ago and earned this purple beauty – the Restoration Deathwalker! (And I’m glad they recolored it, because this one is much better.) I enjoyed mixing in the old dungeons to keep things fresh, and I think it was a good test run of how mythic+ dungeon pools will work in Dragonflight. It’ll be a little weird not to be experiencing all the new dungeons in the first Dragonflight season, but I do think it’ll help keep the second season feeling new and exciting. From left to right in the screenshot is Delillidan (Elias), Carmela (Marc), Sotiros (me), Mushkin (Matt), and Mooglegem (gem)!

Descending into the Depths in New World

Posted by Peter (Devee) on September 4, 2022
Posted in: Expeditions, New World. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Last month I descended into the Depths, the third expedition in New World, with three other members of my company. We had a 60 healer, a 51 tank, a 45 caster, and me – a 60 melee. It’s a level 45 expedition, so we figured we’d be good with just four people.

Before venturing inside, gem and I decided to put on a little concert.

Musical instruments had been introduced since the last time Collin and Jonathan had played, so we wanted to show them the new feature.

Here are three of us using our Azoth staves to proceed. Most of the expedition was easy enough, so we weren’t too worried about only being four people.

Here we are before challenging Thorpe. We did wipe on this boss, proving that things weren’t too easy.

But we also defeated him and completed the expedition. It was getting a couple friends back into the game, and I’m excited to try Dynasty Shipyard next!

Shadowlands season 3 results – m+, raiding, and RBGs

Posted by Peter (Devee) on August 4, 2022
Posted in: Achievements, Devee, Dungeons and Scenarios, Journal, Mooglegem, Mounts, Progression, PVP, Raiding, Shadowlands, Sotiros, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Now that we’re a couple days into Shadowlands season 4, I thought I’d talk about how the last season ended. I successfully reached my three goals – 3k m+ rating, Ahead of the Curve, and the Vicious PVP mount.

Mythic+

I definitely spent more time on mythic+ than anything else in Shadowlands season 3. I ended the season at 3017 rating on my shaman.

Here’s the breakdown from raider.io. As we were unlocking portals, I had timed a couple +20 fortified keys but no tyrannical, so I really thought tyrannical was going to be the harder one. Somehow I ended up with a lot more rating from tyrannical than fortified, which I didn’t realize until working on this blog post.

Not the most exciting screenshot, but this is when Shadowlands Keystone Hero: Season Three popped! Like last season two, I main’d restoration shaman. I also earned the rest of the dungeon portals this season that I didn’t get last season, and we made sure everyone in our m+ group got all the portals.

I also played holy priest a little. My goal was just 2500 rating, and I got that done without much stress!

Raiding

I finished Sepulcher of the First Ones heroic on my resto shaman, although the Jailer did give me some trouble. We ended up splitting the raid team into multiple small groups after determining that the fight was easier with smaller groups. I didn’t end up getting my kill until week 19 of the season – 56 days after defeating the previous boss, Rygelon!

This is Carcinized Zerethsteed, the Ahead of the Curve mount! It’s pretty cool.

The Shimmering Aurelid mount was the reward for Glory of the Sepulcher Raider; it’s another awesome mount!

RBGs

My goal in PVP was to get the Vicious War Croaker, which is the cool frog mount that you can see I earned above. I love the frog animation in which the frog shoots its tongue out to eat the glowing fly! I PVP’d on my priest in discipline.

I ended the season at Challenger II – 1691 RBG rating (also my best) with 45 games won out of 95 played. We also tried 2v2 arena a little, although I like battlegrounds significantly more. In 2s, I ended Challenger I with a rating of 1481 and best rating of 1490 with 20 wins out of 37 matches. Mooglegem and I were expecting to do much worse to be honest, so we were happy with how we did. However, you get much less credit toward the mount while doing 2s, and it caused way more stress. We mostly did RBGs, but it was nice trying 2s.

It was a good season! Now it’s time for season four, which will definitely feel a little different for PVE. I hope everyone has a great season!

Executing the Exarch

Posted by Peter (Devee) on July 19, 2022
Posted in: Devee, Journal, Mooglegem, PVP, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Good news for some of us, and bad news for the Exarch – we killed High Exarch Turalyon in Stormwind recently! I completed the For the Horde achievement years ago, which tasks you with defeating the various city leaders. Since then, the Storming Stormwind achievement was changed from Varian to Anduin and then moved to Legacy when Executing the Exarch was added in Shadowlands.

We had to pose on the throne of course.

This wasn’t really our original plan. We only had 8 people and were in Stormwind to screw around and fight NPCs and any Alliance who wanted to stop us. None engaged us, so we decided to try Turalyon. Afterwards we went back to clear out the bank and auction house, then eventually found where all the Alliance players were – there was a raid group outside Goldshire. We saw a few people in the inn there, and then suddenly the raid group phased into existence. We had a nice battle and then hearthed home!

Death Knight Legion class mount

Posted by Peter (Devee) on May 9, 2022
Posted in: Achievements, Classes, death knight, Journal, Legion, logrus, Lore, Mounts, Order Hall, Quests, Videos, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Recently I went back to get my DK class mount from Legion. I had finished the order hall campaign and figured it couldn’t be too much work to get the mount. At one time you had to finish the Legionfall campaign, but it seems that’s no longer the case. I doubt it took me longer than an hour or two to get the mount. Spoilers for the quest series follow.

The quests involve finding the remains for a powerful red dragon and raising it in undeath. One quest has you enter the Ruby Sanctum. Originally, there was a feat of strength you could earn for slaying all the red dragons in the sanctum, but Blizzard removed it because they decided it wasn’t fair to give a reward like that for something you could miss. Since it was removed by the time I tried to do the quest, I took the opposite approach; I got in and out without killing anything.

Here’s a video I edited together of the lore parts of the quest series. Starting at 9:26 you can see the three forms of the mount. I mostly play unholy, but I think it’s the worst variation. I like the frost one!

Rabbit’s Revenge event in New World

Posted by Peter (Devee) on April 21, 2022
Posted in: Amazon Games, New World, New World Events. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

New World introduced a new holiday event recently – Rabbit’s Revenge. Corruption has been spreading to rabbits apparently, and Corrupted Rabbits are spawning all over! They’re larger than normal rabbits and have corruption visual effects, but they die in one hit. They drop up to 3 diamond gypsum per day, 5 Defiled Rabbit’s Foot (luck consumable) per day, and 1 Defiled Storage Chest of the Hare total per player. That chest is the main thing – it’s a very rare drop and adds 1050 storage. Some people got it right away, but it seems like most people had to defeat hundreds of Corrupted Rabbits. Of course, it took some people thousands.

I did finally get my chest! Each Corrupted Rabbit skinned gives 1 game meat, so you can use that to estimate how many you killed. I had 957 game meat. During that time, I got 19 Defiled Rabbit’s Foot, 31 Rabbit’s Foot, and 37 Sumptuous Rabbit. But now I get more storage space plus that cool, corrupted chest visual for my house! I placed it on my balcony with the rabbit from the Winter Convergence on top!

Happy Corrupted Rabbit hunting!

Shadowlands Keystone Master: Season Three

Posted by Peter (Devee) on April 11, 2022
Posted in: Achievements, Dungeons and Scenarios, Journal, Mooglegem, Mounts, Shadowlands, Sotiros, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Last week I earned Keystone Master, and this week the last of my 5-man group earned it too! (He would have had it earlier but he fills multiple roles and splits his time between multiple characters.) As is tradition, we took this screenshot on our mounts on the edge of Oribos. From left to right, we are Mushkin (Matt), Delarm (Elias), Sotiros (me, Peter), Todesfall (Marc), Max (Todesfall’s pet), and Mooglegem (gem).

Jailer down in normal two weeks ago

Posted by Peter (Devee) on April 7, 2022
Posted in: Achievements, Journal, Mooglegem, Progression, Raiding, Shadowlands, Sotiros, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

On 3/26 we defeated the Jailer in Sepulcher of the First Ones normal! I guess I got behind on updating the blog. It’s a fun fight, but Anduin feels like better fight and something closer to a final boss. Maybe that’ll feel different on higher difficulties.

We’ve moved on to heroic progression and are currently 3/11. Hopefully we push further this week!

Shadowlands Season 2 mythic+

Posted by Peter (Devee) on April 6, 2022
Posted in: Achievements, Dungeons and Scenarios, Journal, Shadowlands, Sotiros, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

We’re in the 7th week of the Shadowlands Season 3, but I never discussed how mythic+ season 2 ended for me.

I ended with a 2294.1 rating, almost entirely healing. According to raider.io, globally I was in the top 6% of all characters, 4.9% of healers, 7.2% of shamans, and 7.5% of restoration shamans. I was the 65th best Horde shaman on Kil’jaeden and 48th best resto shaman on Kil’jaeden.

My top key ratings worked out like this (with asterisks indicating key level increase like raider.io’s UI):

DungeonFortifiedTyrannical
De Other Side17*20
Halls of Atonement16*19
Mists of Tirna Scithe20*19*
Plaguefall1918
Sanguine Depths2018**
Spires of Ascension1920*
The Necrotic Wake17**18*
Theater of Pain2120*

I earned Keystone Hero for Theater of Pain, Spires of Ascension, and Mists of Tirna Scithe for completing them on +20 or higher (in this case, +20, haha). While they were far from easy for me, I think others were within reach had I pushed to do them earlier. I didn’t try until the last couple weeks of the season, and our group had to split up to earn them.

Favorite Korthia mounts (plus Mechagon hard mode mount)

Posted by Peter (Devee) on March 7, 2022
Posted in: Achievements, Battle for Azeroth, Covenants, Devee, Journal, logrus, Mounts, Quests, Shadowlands, Sotiros, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Korthia and the covenant assaults in the Maw brought a lot of new mounts to hung back in 9.1. With 9.2 here, I’ve been looking back at my 9.1 goals. I got most of the 9.1 Korthia/Maw mounts except the Hand of Nilganihmaht (putting the rings together), the Fierce Razorwing (Death’s Advance paragon reward), Tamed Mauler (Archivists’ Codex paragon), and Hand of Salaranga (Breaking the Chains, Korthia meta achievement).

This is my favorite mount from the patch and one of my favorite all time mounts – the Fallen Charger! The gold looks awesome!

The Rampaging Mauler from Konthrogz the Obliterator is also pretty.

I don’t use the Mastercraft Gravewing from Stygian Stonecrusher a ton because it’s so big, but I do think it’s really cool.

The Forsworn Aquilon from Wild Worldcracker is really cool. I know Kyrians already had other tints of this, but I like this one!

While not from this expansion at all, my group has been occasionally going back to Mechagon to get Aerial Unit R-21/X from the hard mode. Only one party member can get it per run, and I came in last! But I did get it last patch. Sweet!

Shadowlands Season 1 and 2 transmog progress

Posted by Peter (Devee) on March 2, 2022
Posted in: Devee, Journal, logrus, PVP, Raiding, Shadowlands, Sotiros, Transmog, Tyyrse, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

With the release of 9.2, I wanted to look at the transmog I’ve been collecting this expansion. Here’s what I earned, with more details and screenshots below:

  • Kyrian, cloth – campaign and renown
  • Venthyr, plate – campaign, renown, and Ember Court
  • Night fae, leather – campaign, renown, Queen’s Conservatory, and Winterborn
  • Necrolord, mail – campaign, renown, Abominable Stitching, and Unity
  • Kyrian 9.1 – all four
  • Venthyr 9.1 – five of the eight
  • Night fae 9.1 – all four
  • Necrolord 9.1 – all four
  • Castle Nathria – all four LFR sets
  • Sanctum of Domination – cloth, leather, and plate LFR sets
  • PVP Season 1 – cloth aspirant and gladiator
  • PVP season 2 – cloth aspirant, gladiator, and elite

First, these are my completed Sanctum of Domination sets. I got the LFR sets for leather, plate, and cloth. I actually like the cloth raid finder tint (the last one above), but the other raid finder ones are rather boring. I didn’t try for mail raid finder because I was pushing heroic on my mail character, but I didn’t finish the set. Funny thing is, I don’t think I’d use the cloth LFR tint despite initially liking it because I like the PVP variant much more.

These are the Shadowlands Season 2 PVP sets I collected – all three cloth sets. The aspirant is the same as last season’s aspirant. The gladiator variant is really cool although the elite set has the extra flair.

These are the raid sets I collected from the first tier – all four LFR tints. These are actually all pretty cool in their own way. In order above, those are the mail, plate, cloth, and leather sets. I used the mail set on my shaman for a while.

In season 1 of PVP, I only managed to get the aspirant and gladiator variants. As I mentioned above, the aspirant is the same set in both season 1 and 2. While I prefer my priest in a robe over pants, I think the gladiator tint doesn’t look as nice as the LFR tint.

I got all four of the Aspirant’s Regalia tints, the Kyrian sets from 9.1. I think they fit Kyrian pretty well.

I collected the four Night fae tints from 9.1. They’re cool, but I think I like the 9.0 leather sets better.

I can’t really imagine using any of these even though I did collect all four Necromantic Vestments tints for Necrolords in 9.1.

I’m not sure why, but Venthyr had two different sets each with four tints in 9.1. This is the set with pants, Court Attire. I collected three of the four variants.

And I collected two of the four Inquisitor’s Vestments tints.

My first character this expansion was my Kyrian priest, and I collected two of the cloth Kyrian tints. I didn’t progress much in Path of Ascension so was unable to collect the other tints.

After my Kyrian priest, I played by Venthyr DK. I got three of the plate tints, with the campaign version being the coolest.

I played my Night fae druid third and got all four of the leather tints. I like the one with purple leaves best!

I played a Necrlord shaman last and collected all four mail tints despite not liking any of them. Why did I spend my time doing that?

I’m not sure how many of the ones I missed I plan on getting. I’ll continue pooling my anima to get the missing 9.1 Venthyr tints. I dobut I’m going back to old raids. Doing Path of Ascension for the missing Kyrian cloth tints or the mirrors for the missing Venthyr plate tint isn’t high on my priorities. I like a lot of the Kyrian armor actually, but I absolutely do not want to grind more Grateful Offerings!

While my druid normally uses one of the Night fae ones, my other three toons use different transmog. While not related to collecting Shadowlands sets, let’s finish the post by talking about them.

I love my priest in T10 from Icecrown Citadel, including a weapon from ICC. There is a touch of Shadowlands there – the back piece is Kyrian.

Logrus uses this set, which I love.

Sotiros switched to a green transmog recently.

I had to when I got that backpack!

Shadowlands PVP Season 2

Posted by Peter (Devee) on March 1, 2022
Posted in: Devee, Journal, Mooglegem, Mounts, PVP, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

When we started doing rated battlegrounds, Moogle and I were aiming to get the Vicious War Gorm. As you can see, we got our wish.

Here’s a closer look because I think it’s so cool!

I also wanted to collect the gladiator set, which I thought looked great. I know I usually like my priest in blues and whites, but this just looked awesome, at least for PVP, and appropriate for the expansion.

I wasn’t expecting to collect the elite set! We pushed hard the final week of the season. On 2/10, I was at 32.5% and Moogle was at 25% progress toward our seasonal mounts. We had to win at least 30 games over a week and a half, and luckily we made it. However, I wish we pushed earlier so that we could have pushed higher. We both hit 1954 rating without really hitting a wall. If we had more time, I’d love to see how high we could go!

New World at 60

Posted by Peter (Devee) on February 21, 2022
Posted in: Amazon Games, New World. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

I hit 60 in New World in early January and spent some time experiencing the endgame.

One thing I wanted to do was jump into Outpost Rush, the instanced PVP mode. I found that I died really quickly and couldn’t really kill anyone. OPR uses a scoreboard, and you have to score enough points to get a reward at the end. At first, I was struggling to get enough points. Sometimes I could meet that minimum score, but it was a struggle. Later I bought a bunch of a gear at a higher gear score, and that helped in OPR tremendously. You can also defeat PVE enemies, which contributes to your score. The best way to guarantee rewards if you’re not great at PVP is to defeat some PVE enemies until you get enough points. Now I’ll team fight at the start of the match, and if the match is looking good, I don’t need to focus on PVE. If I’m doing terribly, I’ll go get my points from PVE and then go back to PVP once I guarantee a reward.

Enjoy the video above of the summoned bear who is supposed to help defend us. His butt was too big and he clogged up the doorway!

I was also super excited to try an invasion. Invasions are PVE instanced content in which players defend an outpost from waves of corrupted enemies. It was pretty fun, including the 8 minutes or so we spent crawling in a line around the outpost before it began!

This video shows some my usual obsidian and topaz gypsum routes.

I should take a moment to discuss the gear score and expertise system. In short, gear score is the number that represents the relative power of a particular item. Expertise is max level progression for gear. Max level gear will drop around your expertise, and you need to raise your expertise to get better gear. It’s complicated, so I’ve marked off the section so you can skip it.

This is a summary and simplification. Gear score is per item and is like ilvl in WoW. Expertise is per slot or weapon type. When you get a drop or random reward, the max gear score it can be is slightly over your current expertise in that slot, but if you do get a drop above your current expertise, your expertise is set to that gear score. So if your helm is gear score 510 and your helm slot’s expertise is 500, helms will drop around gear score 500. Traded or bought items don’t increase your expertise, so you have to grind it out. If you want to get gear score 600 helms to drop, there’s no “jumping”. You’ll have to incrementally increase that expertise. There was a recent patch that made it so purchased gear would become the average of their gear score and your expertise, but anything bought before that patch would be the listed gear score. That’s why I bought a bunch of gear before the patch. It might not raise my expertise, but at least I’d have some decent gear.

Gypsum is a system to raise your expertise without just grinding drops (although it still involves grinding). Different types of activities give different types of gypsum. When you get enough gypsum of a particular type (the amount depends on the type), you can craft them into a gypsum orb. The ones I focus on are ruby gypsum from Outpost Rush (2 per orb), topaz from level 55+ enemies while under the effects of an attunement potion (10 per orb), and obsidian from 60+ named enemies (3 per orb). Once you craft an orb, you can use the orb to craft a gypsum cast for a particular armor slot or weapon type, and it gives you a box with a random item of that type that will raise your expertise.

What’s confusing is the timers. Once per day you can craft the topaz attunement potion. There is a 20 hour cooldown on that, and the potion’s buff lasts an hour. Gypsum themselves have an 18 hour CD (or was it 20?) on dropping. Then you craft the gypsum into a gypsum orb – there was a 22 hour CD per gypsum type, but this has been removed. And then you use the gypsum orb on a gypsum cast to raise the expertise of that slot or weapon type, again with a 22 hour CD.

Consider topaz gypsum.

  1. You collect materials for the attunement potion, either farmed yourself or from the trading post.
  2. You craft the attunement potion. There’s a 20 hour CD, tracked by the UI luckily.
  3. You head off to where you will be farming and use the potion. You now have the buff for 1 hour.
  4. Now you hope you collect the 10 topaz gypsum you need from 55+ enemies. You can collect a total of 10 that day and then would have to wait 18 hours from the first drop to get more. But again, for topaz, you don’t have all day – you have as long as you have the attunement buff. Note that if you have multiple potions, you could use another, but you’d have to stockpile them since they have a CD on crafting and are bound on pickup.
  5. Have your 10 topaz gypsum? Great, now you craft them into gypsum orb.
  6. Now if I want to raise my helm expertise, I craft the helm cast to get a box with a new helm that is guaranteed to raise my expertise.

It’s interesting because it lets you control what slot to increase and lets you play in multiple ways. But it can certainly seem complicated at first!

Back from that tangent? Anyways, grinding gypsum was a lot of what I did at level 60. Ruby was easy enough to understand and earn, especially once I bought better gear. When I first went after obsidian from level 60+ named enemies, I asked someone near me who appeared to be working on the same thing if I was in the right place. He explained some things to me and asked if I knew how topaz worked. I said that I thought I did, but I hadn’t farmed mats for the potion yet because I was new to max level and focusing on one thing at a time. He gave me all the mats for my first topaz attunement potion so I could start working on that too! Shout out to Benemyjosh for the help!

Next up, more expeditions when the rest of my group is ready!

Lost Ark’s head start has launched!

Posted by Peter (Devee) on February 8, 2022
Posted in: Amazon Games, Lost Ark. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Happy Lost Ark launch day! Lost Ark is a MMO action RPG originally developed and published by Smilegate in South Korea. Today, it was launched in the West by Amazon Games. I didn’t contribute directly to the game, but I did playtest and give minor, ancillary support

The game is free-to-play and opens fully on the 11th, but people who bought or were gifted the Founder’s Pack get “head start” access starting this morning.

I’ve played a few different classes in tests and decided to go with the deadeye first, an advanced class of the gunner. Full disclosure, it might remind me of Dante from Devil May Cry! This video shows a little gameplay, but it was only about 5 minutes into the game and I was hitting buttons haphazardly. I’m looking forward to playing more!

Winter Convergence in New World

Posted by Peter (Devee) on January 25, 2022
Posted in: Amazon Games, New World. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

The Winter Convergence event was active for most of December and January in New World. It was a total blast! The event includes three main activities – a quest series involving helping the Winter Wanderer and fighting the Winter Warrior, collecting presents found on the ground or floating in the air, and looting Trees of Light in cities as well as completing town project board missions to upgrade them. There are free armor appearances for everyone, weapons and armor you can buy from the event, armor appearances you can earn, and armor appearances you can purchase with real money.

In the screenshot above, I’m wearing some Winter Convergence clothes and standing with gem outside one of the four Winter Villages, which is where you pick up and turn in quests as well as spend the event currency.

Here you can see how some of the cities are decorated!

The Winter Village had this little rabbit with a winding key on its back. The flavor text on one you can purchase points out that it’s a real rabbit wearing a sweater with a winding key to make it look like a wind-up toy. I especially love this considering our company name is Automaton House and a wind-up toy is also known as an automaton toy.

Just look how cute and pettable it is!

Here we are with the Winter Wanderer! He’s a friendly yeti!

Here’s a pile of gifts that you can find along with the northern lights behind me! The collected presents can be turned in at Winter Villages for currency to purchase items. I bought a pet rabbit with the winding key for my house, a gift-giving emote, a back appearance, multiple max level weapons, a full set of max level armor, and a ton of furniture.

You can also find floating gifts that can be shot down. These are worth a lot more than the gifts on the ground.

Speaking of gifts, here’s the /gift emote in action!

The coolest part of the event is gleamite! In the video above, you can watch us as we hear a gleamite meteor. It’s hard to tell where it is, so I spin the camera around looking for it. At this point, I had heard them previously but never managed to see one. It shoots across the sky as a meteorite, then shatters into pieces that fall to Earth. If there are trees around, the trees will be flattened. The video shows a few gleamite meteorites: the first in the recording is the first one I saw (unfortunately it didn’t flatten trees), the second is one I caught very clearly as it went across the sky, the third flattened trees, and the final one was during the last couple hours of the event!

If you didn’t watch the video, here’s one streaking across the sky.

And here’s a meteorite just before it explodes, but I really recommend watching the video!

This is a gleamite chunk on the ground.

Restless Shore settlement even decorates the pirate ship!

This is a Tree of Light in one of the cities. gem is standing in front of the tree.

Here gem is checking my new rabbit friend before I fully redecorated for Winter Convergence. (Because I spent the duration of the event farming the currency to buy the rest of the furniture, it wasn’t decorated until the end.)

Aw, she’s petting the rabbit!

This is my house decorated for the Winter Convergence Festival! I have ice themed furniture and ice sculptures of a stag, boar, and rabbit. You can also see my pets – two dogs and a rabbit! You’ll notice the rabbit changes spots; I couldn’t get the petting animation to work with his original location when I started recording.

Lastly, this video shows the final quest in the Winter Convergence quest series. The quest tasks you with killing two yeti enemies for items used to summon the final yeti, the Winter Warrior. The recording includes picking up the quest and then jumps to us going after the final yeti. We weren’t max level yet, and getting through max level areas was really tough. I included a bit in the recording of us “leapfrogging” camps. A camp is a respawn point, but you have to be bound to it, can only be bound to one at a time, have to unbind before making a new one, and can only respawn if you’re close to it. If you unbind from your previous camp and die trying to make the new one, you’re out of luck. The only way for us to run through the high level zones was for one person to hold aggro while the other put down a camp, ensuring that the person who had aggro could respawn if killed.

This took hours. The final yeti could kill us in one hit. We died many times. We lost our camp and accidentally respawned far away, forcing us to do the whole trek again. We survived fights against the yeti thanks to others being there only to realize we didn’t do enough damage for the kill to count. Eventually we asked if we could group with someone, explaining the issue. MissDemeanor invited us to her group and saved the day! I told her I would sing tales of her greatness, so I had to at least mention her here! She’s also talked with me after this and helped me out more.

I loved snowy areas, fighting yetis, the friendly Winter Wanderer, the ice furniture, and especially the gleamite meteors. I can’t overstate how exciting it is to see it in game when you’re not expecting it! The event was also great because if you didn’t care about collecting things, you didn’t really need to do any grinding. As for me, I did a ton of grinding and had a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to future events!

A Winter Veil sleigh ride

Posted by Peter (Devee) on January 3, 2022
Posted in: Holidays, Journal, Mooglegem, Photo Op, Shadowlands, Sotiros, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

On the last night of Winter Veil, four members of Carpe Flux Capacitor decided to go on a Winter Veil sleigh ride through Orgrimmar together! From left to right, that’s Syravia (Marc), me, Mooglegem (gem), and Mushkin (Matt).

I look especially silly in this one I think, but I’m also blocking Mooglegem unfortunately.

We’re gonna hit the camera!

I also recorded our little ride too.

As an added bonus, can I just say that cutscenes are way more fun when I’m in my Winter Veil transmog?

Hope everyone had wonderful holidays!

Happy Winter Veil!

Posted by Peter (Devee) on December 24, 2021
Posted in: Holidays, Journal, Shadowlands, Sotiros, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a comment

Happy Feast of Winter Veil everyone! Do you like my festive outfit?

The Inky Black Potion makes the lights on the tree pop a little more! I hope everyone on Azeroth and any other planet or plane has a festive holiday!

Legion timewalking’s #1 shaman on the server

Posted by Peter (Devee) on December 23, 2021
Posted in: Dungeons and Scenarios, Journal, Legion, Shadowlands, Sotiros, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

When am I ever going to see a ranking like that again? I ran some Legion timewalking mythic+ and realized that I had a shot at topping the rankings without too much effort. I managed to become the #1 shaman on US Kil’jaeden for Legion timewalking! I expect to fall as more people play, but it was fun to get here for now.

WoW’s 17th Anniversary and looking back

Posted by Peter (Devee) on December 6, 2021
Posted in: Devee, Holidays, Journal, Mooglegem, Petros, Photo Op, Shadowlands, Sotiros, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Happy 17 years to World of Warcraft! It’s crazy that the game is still going and I’m still playing! Here’s my current main, Sotiros, with the anniversary event world boss, Doomwalker. I’m also using the Akama’s Edge weapon transmog that was introduced for the event!

I took a screenshot of my first character, Petros, for this post. He’s level 14 now after the Shadowlands level squish but was 32 previously. I don’t think I broke level 20 with him before I switched mains. In this screenshot, my warrior is wearing mail boots (because I didn’t have anything else), no helm, and no belt!

This is the earliest screenshot I can find of Petros, night elf warrior and my first main, on 11/25/2004. This is only two days after the game was released.

By 12/12/2004, I had switched to Dimitri, a tauren hunter.

At some point soon after that, I made a hunter on a different server. I wanted to switch from a PVE to a PVP server. This is Petros, orc hunter, on 5/15/2005.

I can tell by my screenshots that on 3/18/2007, I hit 20 on Petros, my warrior. I’m not sure if he was back to being my main or if I was bouncing between a few.

By 10/16/2007, I was playing Sotiros, my shaman, as my main. He was level 24 in this screenshot. Crazy that he’s back to being my main today! He’s the same character shown in the screenshot at the top.

When gem started playing, I switched to a priest to help her level until she caught up with my main. I loved playing him so much that I decided to keep him as my main. Here’s the earliest screenshot I can easily find of Devee from 3/25/2008. gem’s character, Mooglegem, is in the background. Devee was my main until the most recent major patch, 9.1, on 6/29/2021. He was my main for over 13 years!

Here’s a good screenshot of Devee with Mooglegem. It’s one of the earliest I can find of the two of us where you can see us both clearly. This is from 4/4/2008!

As an added bonus, here’s a screenshot of Mooglegem with Sylvanas on 4/11/2008. This is during Sylvanas singing Lament of the Highborne upon turn-in of the quest Journey to Undercity. Things sure have changed!

Turkulon, Feathered Avenger of Death

Posted by Peter (Devee) on December 2, 2021
Posted in: Amazon Games, New World. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Turkulon, Feathered Avenger of Death is upon us! This level 66 giant turkey boss has started spawning in the last couple days.

According to reddit, it seems that it has a 2-3 hour respawn timer and can spawn in multiple locations. But I also heard that multiple can be up near each other. So is one always up? Is it rare? I’m not sure, but I wanted to be sure to kill one.

gem and I were running corruption breaches when someone in global asked for help with Turkulon. We immediately ran to a fast travel point, teleported near him, and ran over there.

Turkulon lays eggs that explode and leave a patch of fire behind!

When we pulled, there were four of us, but by the end, there were nine of us total – levels 60×4, 49, 47, 44, 39, and 28.

Remember to watch out for the giant lasers; turkeys are known to shoot lasers!

Down after about 12.5 minutes!

And I got a legendary-quality cooking ingredient, Monstrous Turkey Leg!

This was super fun, and I’m glad gem and I got to it in time. There’s still something fun and unexpected about this type of thing in New World. Check out the video above of our kill. Now I want to eat turkey!

We met Ragnar Volarus!

Posted by Peter (Devee) on November 10, 2021
Posted in: Amazon Games, New World. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

We met Ragnar Volarus in New World! gem noticed him first and got very excited. It took me a few seconds to even process what was happening!

Ragnar is the name of a major character in the Red Rising book series, an excellent science-fiction adventure that explores class, racism, politics, and warfare by examining a solar system-spanning society with genetically-engineered “tiers” of humans, soldier-against-soldier combat, ship-to-ship combat, and iron rains (troops dropping to the surface from orbit).

I never even took a good screenshot of his character! This was the best that I took.

You can take a look at our conversation here:

Corruption all night!

Posted by Peter (Devee) on November 8, 2021
Posted in: Amazon Games, New World. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

Recently gem and I decided to spend the evening running corruption breaches. It’s a good source of XP, especially if you can find a lot in one place. Plus, it allowed us to watch Death Note at the same time!

We were a little surprised to find that we were approaching 100 corruption breaches that night, so we ran a few more to hit that nice goal! And to be honest, I didn’t open those 100 chests for a couple days!

Happy Halloween from me and my New World costume!

Posted by Peter (Devee) on October 31, 2021
Posted in: Amazon Games, Holidays, Journal, Mooglegem, New World, Sotiros, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Happy Halloween! Enjoy these photos of my New World-inspired costume as I harvest a plant and log some wood. It’s still a work-in-progress with a few small things to add soon!

Here’s a spooky look at my New World character, too!

Let’s not forget Hallow’s End fun in WoW! Mooglegem and I took our friend who is new to WoW to kill the Headless Horseman!

Starstone Barrows struck down

Posted by Peter (Devee) on October 22, 2021
Posted in: Expeditions, New World. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a comment

On Wednesday, Automaton House ran New World’s second expedition, Starstone Barrows beneath the Shattered Obelisk. This one had some really neat mechanics, forcing players to avoid deadly beams and using shields to protect the group. We also struggled on the last boss at first until we figured out the strategy.

Here’s our kill video! There’s nothing particularly crazy happening in it, but it might be fun to look back on in the future.

And here’s a video showing the struggles to get a good screenshot.

Sotiros, Eliminator Sotiros, and my dad’s birthday

Posted by Peter (Devee) on October 20, 2021
Posted in: Journal, Photo Op, Shadowlands, Sotiros, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a comment

Today is my dad’s birthday, so I thought I’d share this screenshot. Ever since I was a kid, I primarily used “Petros” as a character name for melee characters and “Sotiros” for casters. This started long before WoW existed. My current main is named Sotiros, a tauren shaman. “Sotiros” is Greek for “Steven,” which is my dad’s name, and I’m Greek-American. In World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, there is a zone called Bastion that’s heavily influenced by Greek mythology. Bastion has a summonable boss named Eliminator Sotiros. To celebrate my dad’s birthday, I wanted to share this screenshot of my Sotiros with Eliminator Sotiros. I took this so I could show him when I take him out to dinner!

I’m a homeowner! …in New World

Posted by Peter (Devee) on October 14, 2021
Posted in: Amazon Games, New World. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

I bought a house in Windsward overlooking the skill areas! I struggled to decide what to do – save up for a bigger first house to take advantage of the discount or buy right away? I decided to buy a tier 1 house because the property taxes would be cheaper, and I wanted to take advantage of the fast travel quickly. The fast travel is such a huge bonus!

Here gem and I are enjoying a conversation at the table. My two dogs are in the corners!

You can look out and see people running through the city below.

After a long day of adventuring, sometimes I want to rest in bed. Too bad there’s a woman standing over me, watching… always watching…

Enjoying the warmth of the fire!

About to write a letter – or maybe have a drink!

Thanks for coming on my home tour!

More corruption breaches!

Posted by Peter (Devee) on October 12, 2021
Posted in: achievements, New World. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

I ran a lot of corruption breaches the other night in New World – 100 breaches down, 4900 to go for the final achievement! I like some mindless activity sometimes, and they’re good experience! :D