Hidden Appearances

I have finally finished! I have collected all three of my mage hidden artifact appearances. This was a little goal that I set for myself, and honestly I thought I'd be done with it a long time before this. That wasn't the case. RNG can be a total block in some cases, and there is nothing you can really do to prevent that except to just keep trying and hoping that someday it will pop up or drop. Since my Ebonchill post is super popular, I thought I would post about getting my hidden appearances as well. Also, some of these require your artifact knowledge to be a certain level, but that isn't really an issue anymore (unless it's your main) due to the Artifact Research Compendium and the ability to send them to alts. I still decided to include the required AK as well just in case.

The Woolmancer's Charge (Requires AK 6)

I am a frost mage, and if I'm not playing frost, I'll be playing fire. Arcane is a spec that I can't seem to ever full enjoy so I'm rarely play it. Of course this would be the first hidden appearance I acquire. To start the "event" for a chance to get The Woolmancer's Charge, you need to travel to each Broken Isle zone and polymorph specific mobs. I won't go into detail here on the specific mobs as they can be found on the Woolmancer's page.

Next is the waiting part. You must wait until a volatile sheep spawns in your class hall. I believe a toast window will pop up to get your attention though one didn't for me. If this doesn't happen, don't worry. The sheep will be following you so it's not hard to miss. Right click on this sheep a few times and BAM, it will explode!

Now fly yourself over to Stormheim and look for an Extremely Volatile Sheep. Once you find this little guy, you're going to want to click on it like you did in your order hall to make it explode. I found making a macro to locate this one worked best. You can even use this to find the specific mobs to polymorph like I explained earlier:

/tar Extremely Volatile Stormheim Sheep

/script SetRaidTarget("target",8);

After this, head to the Tower of Azora in Elwynn Forest and complete the little event for your appearance. I personally find that this is by far one of the silliest and funniest hidden appearances. Plus the staff will sometimes let out this ridiculous scream on polymorph. It's too good!

Everburning Crystal (Requires AK 4)

This is the appearance I wanted the most, and I started working toward it as soon as I could unlock the Teleportation Nexus order hall perk. This perk puts portals in your class hall that leads to each zone on the Broken Isle. When the event for this hidden appearance is triggered, you will see the emote "You hear a strange crackling sound from the portals downstairs." pop up in your chat box when you are in your order hall. From there, take any one of the portals to be ported to this sub-zone of Frostfire Ridge.

 

Once there you will see two elementals. The larger of the two, Asher, will be the one who will give you the Everburning Crystal to unlock this appearance. This is another little macro that may help you check for the daily roll of the arcane and frost artifact. While it didn't work well for me (my frost one was always saying yes) others have had success with using it:

/run f="\124cffffff00\124Hquest:%s:0\124h[%s]\124h\124r: \124cff%s\124r";for k,v in pairs({[44384]="Daily Portal Event Roll",[43828]="Sheep Summon Daily Roll"})do print(format(f,k,v,IsQuestFlaggedCompleted(k)and"00ff00Yes"or"ff0000No"))end

The Stars Design (Requires AK 5)

I really wish I had been prepared when this actually dropped. The truth was that I wasn't even farming for it at the time. I was out in the world questing. This hidden appearance has a chance to drop off of basically any mob in Suramar. I know a lot of people love to farm around Moonguard Stronghold since there are lots of mob packs that respawn pretty fast. I was actually in the dangerous part of the city (yea, that part!), but I have no idea which exact mob it dropped from. While I wasn't actively seeking it at the time, I'm glad to finally have it. The Stars Design is a really gorgeous skin and definitely reminds me of a lot of weapons from Ulduar.

Of course each of these hidden appearances also have separate colors to obtain by doing dungeons, PvP, and world quests. I may just have to save those to talk about another time, lol. If you read through all of that, props to you. I know it was a very lengthy post. I don't care though because if it helps one mage out there, my job has been done!

That Look is so Burning Crusade

Legion has been full of throwbacks to Burning Crusade. As someone who started during that era, I have been loving this. With patch 7.2 slowly creeping closer and closer to release, we've been getting more and more information on different things being released. This patch will bring the Tomb of Sargeras raid along with a new tier set to collect - Tier 20. I'm normally excited for new tier sets, but these leave more to be desired.

Continuing on the BC nostalgia train, Tier 20 is an upgrade of the Tier 6 sets. I know many people have been asking for high resolution versions of older gear, and Blizzard delivered. Among some of my favorites are the warrior, paladin, and priest. Even the new demon hunter set looks good. Sadly, I think a few of these missed the mark. When I look at some of the colors for the mage set, all I see is a mess. To me, the blue, green (definitely this one), and mythic yellow recolors look like they were altered using a color slider in a photo program and not fully balanced giving it a very strange look when put all together.

Hmm, I'm not sure.

Maybe it was just me being a little too nit picky, so I went on Twitter to poke around and see what other people think. A few weeks ago I asked everyone how they felt about the sets. Most people were underwhelmed and most seemed to prefer new sets inspired by older tier instead of a complete update of an older one. I have to agree. I love trying to collect the new sets because they are new. I like to see what the team comes up with using the expansion aesthetics to build a set. Honestly I feel like this fell short on all ends as the original death knight and monk sets that were created look very strange as well.

I know some of my followers don't speak for the entire community, so if you're reading this and have a differing opinion, I'd love to hear it. Do you like the HD remake or would have preferred an original set? Do you really like one of the sets that others have talked badly about? Let me know in a comment below.

Brawls For All

So if you follow me on Twitter, then you know last week and this week was filled with me venting my frustrations about Brawler's Guild. I was finally able to complete it this week after banging my head over and over into the different fight. So as I sit around on the Skybag and look down below on the people fighting through the ranks, I can't help but smile.

I don't really view myself as a good player, and I've never been really good at moving my character around while maintaining a constant rotation. I have to say that Brawler's Guild has definitely helped me in this sense. This was a personal goal I had set for myself to complete, and I couldn't be more proud. In this post I would like to talk about what bosses gave me the most trouble so that maybe some others who are struggling may be able to beat them. I've taken these suggestions from a bunch of different sites. I'm in no way claiming to be an expert on anything, and these are just things that worked for me.

The first fight that I seriously never thought I would get pass was G.G Engineering. I kept taking massive amounts of damage due to the fact that I kept getting hit with the rockets that get thrown out by Max Megablast. I ended up going frost spec for this fight so I had a little more survivability, and I didn't stand on top of Bo Bobble the entire time like I kept reading others doing. Instead, when I would see that Goblin Rocket Barrage was starting, then I would make an effort to be close to Bo so they would have a chance to hit him. When I beat them, I think it was just because I was pulling high dps.

My next challenge, like many people, was Hexos. The BEST piece of information I found was don't guide yourself through the maze, guide Hexos instead. This worked perfectly since our ISP isn't really the best, and I'm usually around 80 latency on a good night. I went fire for this fight, and I kept my ratation pretty simple - no more than 5 or so moves not including cooldowns. I thought I would be stuck on this fight for a long time, but I was wrong. I beat him the second day I got to him. Not too shabby!

Nibbleh was a pain! I was fire spec again for this fight and used all my instant cast moves. I used the "show move pad" option which allowed me to toggle a backwards walk. I also used the RP walk so I was going slower that usual. I was walking him around fine, but for some reason I would get hung up on the corners. Sometimes he would stop, and it would cause him to get stacks of his poison. I read a comment that said to prevent this from happening, make a curved edge rather than a 90° angle. This ended up working perfectly, and after an afternoon of fighting him, he was done.

Of course Blizzard couldn't have just been like, "Good job, you made it this far! Here is your mount!" Nope! Ahoo'ru stands in the way of that, and to make matters worse he's judging you, ugh. I tried and I tried, and I just couldn't do it. I ended up getting frustrated on two different nights, logged off and cried. The night before I beat him I actually killed him but died to the rain of fire. I was devastated. The next day I poked my head around and reevaluated the fight. What helped me a ton was the use of the Pi'jiu Brews that drop off the ghost in the Pi'jiu Village on the Timeless Isle. There are 3 different kinds, and you can use each one during the fight. I farmed 10 of each, and I didn't even need to use them all. I also made myself Drums of the Forgotten Kings as I was usually alone with no one else to buff me. On Wednesday I finally got the perfect Angel spawns complete with perfect DPS to be able to defeat him well before rain of fire began.

So with a sigh of relief, it was all over. I bought my mount, and I left! Was it tough? Towards the end, yes. Was it fun? As much as I complained, yes it was fun, and I'm looking forward to the new bosses in Warlords. Do I have some advice? Make your buff food, buy good flasks, pre-pot, mess with your spec, try out different things. Keep bashing your head into it over and over. I found every attempt I would put in would make me get closer and closer to winning. So don't give up, keep going, if I can do it then you can definitely do it!

A Glimpse of the Past

I dreamed about it last night, the plague. It doesn't really bother me, and I rarely ever dwell back to my past life. It seems like such a distant memory that in fact it feels like I never was quite fully alive. However, I was born and raised in Lordaeron. I lived on a little farm, raised chickens, sheep, and a few horses. I look back on that time quite fondly. I had friends. We would gather at the tavern some nights to dance, drink, and sing until late in the evening.

I remember becoming interested in magic, and eventually I wanted to study in Dalaran. A few friends and myself would travel to the Hillsbrad Foothills once or twice a month when we could spare. We loved the town of Southshore. Life on the coast was much different from our farm lives, and many people from Dalaran would often frequent the shops and tavern there. I also met an extremely good friend there. It has been so many years that he doesn't even seem like he was ever a real person. He was the first boy to have a special place in my heart. His hair was much fairer than mine, and he had eyes that were darker than the darkest nights. We would ride horses, go swimming in the cool lakes, and even spend nights out under the stars. I would always look forward to seeing him and his family when I visited Southshore.

Eventually I was able to start visiting Dalaran and borrowing some of the magical books to take home with me to look over. I was definitely looking forward to eventually moving away from my little farm life, and begin my training as a mage. I was also looking forward to being able to see my friend a lot more. We even talked about eventually starting a life of our own together someday. Sadly, I never got the opportunity to do any of that as the plague struck not too long after. I lost my family, my friends, and my love. It's painful to think about it, and that's possibly why I never wrote about it before.

I wasn't able to gather many items from my past, but I do have some things. I have a few photos, trinkets, and random items that I keep in a box in my bank. I decided to pour over some of them today. These were some of the last photos taken of myself in Southshore. He took them, and I don't think I've ever looked happier.

*Scribbled on the back*
V my love,
I can't wait until you move to Hillsbrad, and we can be together more. I'm so proud of your studies, and I know you will become a powerful mage someday.

Journey to Tier 3

Sadly, I was not around to raid original Naxx. If you've read previous entries, you should know how I feel about the gear that dropped there... some of my favorites. While I am happy that most of the original weapons made an appearance back into the WotLK version of Naxx, I am still not happy about the lack of some of the beautiful robes from there. However, I do feel that the Frostfire Regalia is one of the most beautiful mage sets ever made!

from WoWwiki

I know it's not fair to those who legitimately raided to get their Tier 3, but I don't think being able to buy it off the BMAH devalues your set in any way. You still have your memories and hopefully screenshots to remember your wipes and kills by. I respect that 100%, and I admire you for being a pack-rat like me and keeping your tier!

I really didn't always play fair with the bidding either. I was outbid a good bit of the time, but then an Ally mage made a mistake by showing me how bad they wanted a few pieces, so I made them pay quite a bit more than what it usually goes for on my server. I ended up purposely bidding up pieces - it was great. If you want it that bad, you will pay the higher price.

Here is my journey to getting my Tier 3 and how much it has cost me, and how long it took to get there. *huge breath*

Frostfire Gloves - Bought on 3.30.13 for 10k
Frostfire Belt - Bought on 6.23.13 for 11k
Frostfire Sandals - Bought on 7.22.13 for 10k
Frostfire Shoulderpads - Bought on 8.24.13 for 30k
Frostfire Circlet - Bought on 8.31.13 for 30k
Frostfire Bindings - Bought 10.5.13 for 10k
Frostfire Leggings - Bought 10.14.13 for 10k
Frostfire Robe - Bought 12.25.13 for 50k

TOTAL: 161k

If you want a similar look without having to break your bank, you can always opt for collecting the Heroes' Frostfire Garb from the 10 man Naxx raid, or the Valorous Frostfire Garb from the 25 man Naxx raid. Both are very pretty, and I wore the brown set for quite a long time.

So after 9 months of collecting, I really have nothing else to say about it except that I am extremely happy with my purchase and the last piece couldn't have come at a better time! I will definitely be wearing this transmog for a LOOOONG time to come!