When WoW first announced that they were adding Transmog, I was over the moon. I don’t show my girly side often, but I absolutely love playing dress-up with my characters. My husband will attest to the fact that I have spent hours in the character generators of various games, dressing up my characters. I mean, there’s only two reasons to play The Sims: create characters and build houses.

As with many features that have been added to WoW over the years, Transmog exceeded my expectations. While I admit that some of the limitations have frustrated me, they’ve also made me a bit more creative in how I dress up my characters. Fortunately, some wonderful person out there made an add-on called MogIt, which basically allows me to view every armor and weapon model in the game and mix and match them on my character to find the perfect fit. It is an invaluable tool, and one that my best friend and I use frequently.

So, what kind of Transmog sets do I use? So glad you asked! I have two characters right now that I do serious transmogging on – my night elf hunter, Ainyan, and my blood elf priest, Karael.

Ainyan’s sets:

The first is her current transmog, the second is one I’m working on (Stupid Felmyst, drop my pants!), and the third is her old black dragon transmog that I still love. Ainyan as a character is a bit of a ditz and quite the dragon-lover – hence the heavy dragon theme in all of her gear. She does have the T2 Dragonstalker set, but I have yet to use it as a serious transmog set, since I see so many other hunters wearing it.

Karael’s Sets:

Karael, as you can see, favors a priestly theme. The first set, her Angelic set, is based off of the Priest T5 – but the robe itself was much too dark for her tastes, so she went with something she felt was much more appropriate. When she goes shadow, she has a similar set, only in the Priest S3, which is the black version of the T5. The second set is also an angelic set, but with a bit more color – after all, she has to compete with her twin sister Ashiel, and Ash always has a lot of color in her gear. The third set is quite a bit more racy – but Karael has always been proud of her body – or rather, of what her body can do for her. Karael, after all, is nothing if not an opportunist.

While I have many other characters, these two are my “mains”, and thus the ones I spend the most time transmogging. It’s always fun to spend some time in MogIt looking for the next Transmog set. What kind of sets do you favor?

I recently answered a challenge by Ambermist on the pitfalls of being a collector. Well, with MoP around the corner, I realized I really needed to clean up my bank.

Yeah. Would you like to see the result of that?

I fail. -_-

Despite the overwhelming WoW theme of this blog, it’s not actually a solely WoW-themed blog. I do, after all, play other games, and will occasionally wish to talk about them. It’s not blasphemy if you ask forgiveness first.

This particular post is about Mass Effect – in particular, Kaidan Alenko from Mass Effect. In more particular, Raphael Sbarge, who voices Kaidan Alenko from Mass Effect. You see, this past weekend was Dragon*Con, where Mr. Sbarge was a guest. I go to Dragon*Con every year. I am a Kaidan Alenko fangirl. Can you see where this is going?

Or it would have gone, if I hadn’t been dog sick?

I ended up staying home Sunday from the con because, well, I was at the snot-monster stage of my cold, and I didn’t fancy hanging out with 50k odd people in Downtown Atlanta with gooey crap pouring from my nose. So I bundled my husband out of the door with an admonition that he could do whatever he pleased – as long as he took time to go to the Walk of Fame and get me a signed Kaidan picture if Mr. Sbarge had them available.

And of course, my husband being my husband, he had to be inadvertently perfect.

About 4-5:00pm, I get a phone call from my husband:

“Hey babe.”

“Hey, honey? Hold on a sec. You might want to turn that [Dragon Age 2] down.”

“O- kaay..”

“Hello,” says sexy Kaidan voice.

“Oh, oh wow,” squeaks an Ainyan.

Cue sexy Kaidan laughter.

Yes. My husband walked up to Raphael Sbarge and said, “My wife is home sick. She’s a huge fan. If I call her, will you say hello to her?”, and Mr. Sbarge, being an absolutely awesome human being, said, “Why certainly!” and proceeded to tell me that he hoped I felt better soon, and that it was a shame we couldn’t meet this time, but perhaps our paths would cross later. And me, being the silly git that I am, stammered out a few squeaky phrases and undoubtedly sounded like the world’s biggest dork.

At least I didn’t gush.

It was, needless to say, incredibly sweet of both my husband and Mr. Sbarge to indulge my fangirlishness and try and make a disappointing day a little less disappointing. They succeeded in spades. I’m still floating on cloud nine. I know he was just being the sweet guy that he is, but in the back of my mind, Ainyan Shepard is doing a little dance with her Black Widow going, “Kaidan talked to me!”.

Also, hubby brought home this:

I has the best hubby ever.

So. Patch 5.0.4 released, and I’ve been taking some time to familiarize myself with the changes to some of my 85s. Not all of them… but some.

(Stay tuned for Part 2 to cover some of the non-character related changes.)

Hunter

While there isn’t as much change to this class as there was going into Cataclysm (hello, resource overhaul!), there’s still a definite shift in playstyle. For one thing, right now Beast Mastery is simming as the highest damage. Well… everyone said they missed TBC, right? Though, to be fair, I still find myself preferring Survival – as fun as it is to be able to drag out my menagerie of exotic pets, I still feel Kill Command is a clunky attack and I’m still very leery of having to depend on my pet as the main source of my damage. The game’s pet AI still isn’t solid enough to trust the bulk of my DPS to a creature that might decide to path halfway through the instance at a moment’s notice.

I haven’t had a whole lot of chance to play with the ‘no minimum range’ change – mostly because anything I’ve been attacking dies in one or two shots. Still, I found it to be deliciously delightful on beta, and I doubt that will change now. The switch to expertise wasn’t as painful as I feared, mostly because stats seem to have been weighted for 90 now, so I could afford the loss of crit/haste/mastery to reforge into expertise. Even capped at 7.5% hit/expertise, I still have about 40% crit, 22% mastery, and 11% haste – solid numbers.

Hunter still remains my favorite class. Ainyan can breathe easy – she’s not being replaced any time soon.

Paladin

Holy paladin is a bit of a change from what it was pre-patch. For one, the cap on mana is a touch on the annoying side. I went into 5.0.4 with 125k mana, and came out of it with 102k mana. Doesn’t seem like it should be such a big difference – but I definitely notice that I am running out of mana a lot faster now. I’m also not 100% certain I like the change to Holy Radiance. Yes, the fact that it’s a straight up heal is kind of nice – but I really liked the HoT component, I felt it was more efficient against extended periods of raid damage than having to spam HR over and over to deal with the same problem. At least the Light of Dawn change is 100% positive – especially considering as a human, my cone went off at a 45-degree angle from wherever I was facing, making it difficult to properly position it in a hurry. Now that it’s a 360-degree effect, it is 100% more efficient.

I like the fact that Holy Power now stacks up to 5 – makes it less frustrating to have to save HP for a time when LoD/WoG is actually useful and end up wasting all those HP stacks. Now I can afford two more HRs or HSes before I have to seriously think about wasting an LoD/WoG – and if I do have to waste one, I still have two stacks of HP to make up for the three wasted.

Also, Sacred Shield is back! Yay! Except I’m not convinced it’s as useful to Holy as it used to be. Maybe as a nice stop-gap against incoming damage on a low-health DPS… I can definitely see how it would be an awesome ability for a Protadin to take, however – and I did take it on my prot spec. I just haven’t tanked yet to test it out. However! Beacon of Light no longer has a duration! Stick it on the tank and forget it. YAY!

Holy Paladin remains my go-to healer. This may change once I figure out how to Resto Druid or Disc Priest (not even going to bother with Resto Shaman), but Zyriene likely will remain my top healy toon.

Shaman

Frustration. That’s what I’m feeling with Jujubee right now. As an Elemental Shaman, I remember my DPS on beta being pretty strong. On Live? Not so much. I know my rotation, I’m being very careful with it – but I’m constantly hovering in the middle of the pack, DPS-wise, instead of being on top like I was pre-5.0.4. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong – and I can’t see if I /am/ doing anything wrong because there don’t seem to be any other Elemental Shamans out there. In fact, I’ve only seen one or two Resto shamans and no Enhancement shamans. This does not bode well.

The change to Lava Surge is delicious – instead of being just a mana-free Lava Bolt, it’s now a mana-free, cast-time-free Lava Bolt – a definite improvement. However, I HATE the totem change. Totems were such a huge part of what made a Shaman a Shaman. Now that 99% of them are cooldowns, it no longer feels like ‘I am Shaman’, but rather ‘I am nature Mage’. I loved dropping four totems – I loved keeping track of them – I loved benefiting the raid based on my totem choice. I really, really hate only dropping one or two totems per fight. It changes the dynamic of the class for the worse, and I’m not sure it’s a hump I’ll be able to get over. I understand the limiting buffs and homogenization crap that Blizzard is trying for – but totems were what the Shaman class was all about. With those nerfed into the ground, I’m just not enjoying myself.

Poor Jujubee. I hope I find some way to enjoy her soon or she’s just going to end up being my Jewelcrafting bish.

Others

I haven’t really touched my Warlock, Druid, Priest, Death Knight, Warrior, Rogue, or Mage – and I don’t know if I intend to right now. My warlocks are on my second account, and I may be shutting that one down for a while come October, once I start getting charged for my main account once more. I never really enjoyed Mage – I just leveled one because I intend to have one of every class at max level. Same goes for Death Knight and Warrior.

Druid and Priest… I really, really want to learn how to play a Druid successfully. It doesn’t help poor Naynia that her gear is absolute trash right now – but I really suck at Balance, so it’s really hard to get up the gumption to run instances on her. And as badly as I want to try out Resto, well – undergeared healers make me cry. I really should sit down with Ambermist or Mhairwen at some point and have one of those fine ladies walk me through what it takes to be a successful Balance/Resto druid.

As for Priest, well… I did some messing around with the new Shadow stuff on the dummies, and I might take Cherie out to play around in a raid. I know Trind was crying about the changes, but they didn’t seem  that bad to me and she was putting out pretty nice numbers against the dummy. I do agree that it’s a shame to see so many of the dots no longer, well… dots. It does take away from the class. But I still enjoy Priest and would like to give it a shot. Maybe I should sit down with Puntypriest while I’m at it and see if he can teach me how to heal in a Priestly manner.

Rogue. Ah, Ciprys. I haven’t played her only because she’s too well-geared to need LFR. Come MoP, it will be a different story. For now, she, and her legendaries, are going to have a nice, well-deserved rest.

Ambermist posted this challenge: August Challenge: I’m a Collector and rightly pointed out that it would probably be the best way to start off my new blog.

Now, I’ve never really considered myself much of a packrat, but I have to be honest. If there was a WoW version of Hoarders, I would probably be one of the first people featured. As you may notice from my Character page, I like to collect things. In the case of WoW, it seems to be hunters and paladins. And armor sets, and crafting materials, and random epics that are just too shiny for me to throw away…

(Blizzard, y u no gief me more Void Storage?)

I currently have not one, not two, but three full guild banks – one with six slots, and two with four, crammed with everything from ore to flowers to random greens and blues that I might, someday, in the near distant future, use for an alt. Of course, having every full set of heirloom, several of the trinkets, and all of the weapons makes most of these  blues and greens, well… pointless. But still I hang on to them, JUST IN CASE. I spend  a lot of time justifying my acquisitions to myself with those three words.

And, hey, it’s not just those pretty purple robes with gold trim or shiny swords that I collect, either.

Ainyan is currently sitting on 187 pets and 117 mounts – and I have been frantically trying to collect the last non-TCG/CE/Expo pet in the game that I am lacking – the Crawling Claw. I love my pets. I adore my pets. I have several addons dedicated to my absolute delight in pet collecting. The most exciting thing in MoP for me? Is it LFR and the new loot system? Nah. Another slot for another alt? Well… sweet, but… PET BATTLES. Hundreds of pets out there for me to snag up and cuddle and luuuuff on! Now, to hope that Pokedex is fixed to work with 5.0.4 so that I can have my random pets.

And it’s not just WoW, either. My SWTOR banks were full to the brim with things I probably never had any use for. I cringe every time I have to sell or salvage a magic or rare item in Diablo 3 – and I have three bank characters with inventories full of things I will probably neither use nor sell. Skyrim is littered with chests where I have stashed items in order to, well, stash items – and I’m not even sure where half of them are. Any game I play, the minute I pick up something that might possibly have a use, into storage it goes.

What’s that? A grey rock? Surely there must be some use for it! I will put it over here!

Someday, someone is going to come up with a game that is all about collecting things, and it will become my new obsession.

Oh, right. I already play Pokemon.

I’ve never thought of myself as a blogger – and yet, I’ve found myself batting around the concept of a blog for quite a while now. This has not been helped by the fact that one of my good friends - Ambermist@WoW – is a blogger herself and has been making all sorts of interesting, and thought provoking, posts.

So, you have her to blame for this latest addition to the world of blogging.