So Tired…

Apache and I kicked ass at this horse show this weekend. I am too beat to go into details at the moment. I will blog all about it tomorrow. For those of you that can’t wait to get the high level results, I have attached a few pictures that should serve as a reasonable summary.

Up in the Sky…

I got my flying mount, sooner than I expected. I didn’t want to wait another 6 months for the money to get an epic one, so I just went for the standard. While flying is incredibly cool and gives a whole new perspective on a two year old game, as well as access to areas you cannot otherwise reach, it is painful to travel so slowly when I’m used to my swifter wolf. : \  Still, I can’t complain. Overall, it was well worth it.

Ding!

I got 70 last night. Only took me, what, around 9 months. Also, I had abandoned my Rip-Blade Ravager a while ago because I just hated the look of the thing. Yes, I’m a girl, I care if my pet is pretty. That left me with my level 60 cat, Rak’shiri, whom I had renamed Cringer, and my level 63 serpent, Son of Hakkar, whom I renamed Ramjet. I was switching between them, but with me being level 67 when I got rid of the ravager, my pets weren’t getting any experience and were leveling really slowly. I never leveled Ramjet any further and I only managed to get Cringer to 62. So, once I hit level 70 last night, I decided the next course of action was to get myself a nice level 70 cat, a Blackwind Sabercat. They look similar to Rak’shiri with the glowing quality to the eyes and coat, and the unnatural colors for the coat and stripe color combination, so I was rather happy with this option for a new pet. The catch is that they are in an area you can only get into with a flying mount. However, I am still 200 gold shy of getting my flying mount. Getting that 200g is going to be a lot harder with a crappy low level pet that can’t hold threat for me.

So, I was looking around online and found a solution in a lovely little trick that someone posted. Anyone who has played Wow for a while is familiar with the phenomenon where if you are in an area that is bordered by mountains, and you run up into the mountains as far as you can before the grade gets to steep to proceed, sometimes the game switches you to the zone on the other side of the mountain as far as what it registers as your location. Someone had posted some coordinates in Terrokar Forest where you can use this trick and have the game think you are in Skettis Mountains. He also mentioned that if you die while in this zone, there is a graveyard there at which you will resurrect. The coordinates in Terrokar are conveniently located behind the elite spider Terokkarantula. So, I ran over there, ran behind the spider, ran up into the mountains until I saw the zone switch to Skettis Mountains and just keep running up against the grade in place while the spider killed me.

Sure enough, when I resurrected, I was in Skettis Mountains. I revived in the graveyard and took the resurrection sickness hit. Then I hopped on my mount, loped over to where the cats are, managing to only pull one or two mobs that I easily outran along the way. I found the cats, snuck amongst them until I found an isolated level 70 one, and tamed him in a freezing trap. I then hoped on my mount and descended down the mountain side into Shadowmoon Valley, taking some damage, but not enough to die.

Yay! Voila! New level 70 kitty! Cringer is reborn as a useful pet! The downside is that I also read that the loyalty grind on a level 70 pet is looooong. One poster said that a GM had this to say about it in a private conversation they once had on the topic: “While I cannot get into the exact mechanics of pet loyalty, I assure you that the mechanics are working for the pet you have chosen. Please note that pets at higher levels are more stubborn than lower level pets.” Good thing I have to grind for 200g anyway! Once I get him to loyalty level 6, it will be fun to PVP again with a strong pet.

So Close

< 5 bars to 70. Should have it by week’s end.

Ridiculous

I had the most awesome BF2 game of my career last week. The usual server I play on, the ORST server, was empty. Another clan, IMA, has some pretty decent servers, so I decided to play on their 64 player infantry only city maps server. I had three pretty good games, but I don’t recall the maps. Then, Karkand came up. The first Karkand game was pretty quick and I did okay. The second Karkand game went on for about an hour and I was totally bustin’ it up. I was on MEC and the US team only took a flag a few times. So very few of the points I amassed were flag capture points. When the game ended, I had 173 points. Second place had 85. My KDR was 46: 25. I ended up getting the expert medic badge for that performance. Note that 46 kills only gets me 92 pts. Since I had hardly any flag capture points, that means I had almost as many revive points as kill points. It was an insane game! I was rockin’ out. Repeatedly, there would be a skirmish between 4 MEC and 4 US troops. All my guys would fall and only one of the US guys would fall, leaving me to finish off 3 myself. I would kill all 3, then revive my 3, and then there’d be more US guys on us again. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. It was super fun. The down side is that apparently the server isn’t ranked because it’s infantry only. It says it is ranked in the server browser, but the stats and the badge never showed up on BF2S.com and I’m pretty sure infantry only can’t be ranked. Oh well, it is captured here for posterity. : )