Jomotei revved the engine and felt a slight chill run up her spine. She couldn’t quite decide if the exhileration she felt was due to the powerful rumble of the engine beneath her or the fact that she was putting her trust in a machine cobbled together by a crazy, undead engineer. Well, if it did explode, she’d go out with a bang at least. Literally.

After finally managing to drag my farmbot druid with herbalism, mining and epic flight form to level 77 for Cold-Weather Flying a little while back, I counted my gold yesterday and found I’d scrounged up enough gold to buy the Mechano-Hog I’d had my eye on. I was fortunate enough to know an engineer I’d trust with 12.500 gold + a bunch of expensive mats in Jinjiro and he crafted the bike in a matter of minutes. That’s either evidence of great skill and efficiency or he’s as crazy as a bat and doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing and I’ll probably die in a blaze of glory soon.

At any rate, the two of us had some awesome fun just tearing around Dalaran on my new bike. I’ve already had a Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth since I dinged level 74, and while the hog can’t advertise the usefulness of vendors, I have to say that it’s a more fun mount when it comes to pure riding.

I decided to make a blog post about the fun we had and frapsed us driving around like maniacs and jumping off Dalaran. While I was putting the video together I had the idea to turn it into an advertisement for Jinjiro’s services as a little thank you for his help. If it could send some customers his way and help him make enough gold to one day craft a hog for his own use, that’d be really awesome.

Hope you enjoy the clip, I had great fun making it. I recommend downloading it (27.5MB) as the text bubbles at the end are hard to make out when watching the stream.

Download movie in better quality (27.5MB) *recommended*

It was another afternoon in Dalaran. Everywhere you looked, bank alts were bustling to and from mailboxes, oblivious to the world around them. If you listened closely as they passed by you could hear them muttering to themselves as they tried to recall recipe requirements or add up all the gold coins jingling in their bags and pouches. Unfortunately, we were on our level 80 mains and bored out of our skulls.

“Hey,” someone suggested, “let’s go kill Sartharion.” As good a plan as any when you’ve got little better to do and your guild has stopped scheduling 10-man outings in favour of 25-man raids. There was just one small problem. There weren’t 10 of us.

A quick head count revealed we had 8 people and so we figured we might as well go with that for the Less is More achievement. But now another small problem reared its head; the group was a merry band of misfits. Our maintank had joined with his undergeared warlock alt. Instead, our group’s tank would be a death knight who usually fills a dps role. One of our dpsers was a pvp rogue, a friend of the guild. Most ominously of all, we had only one healer.

We blew caution to the wind, rolled up our sleeves and set off. I recorded the adventure that followed and decided to upload a video of the Sartharion encounter because I thought it was pretty impressive that our shaman, Argha, was able to solo-heal the instance.

Download in better quality (62MB)

I’d like to note that Sartharion himself was surprisingly easy, even with our silly setup. The trash was in fact more challenging as there was much more damage for the healer to handle. Given that it can be solo-healed, you can probably do Sartharion himself with a lot fewer than 8 if you had a well-balanced group of top geared and properly spec’d characters. Maybe something to try in the future. 5-man Sartharion, anyone?

Well, sort of.*

I recently had some time between raid days and decided to spec BM and take Sinh, my favorite pet, out for a walk. Poor thing’s been locked up in the stables for ages, so I thought I’d let him have some fun and headed down to Dustwallow Marsh to venture into the lair of Onyxia, broodmother of the Black Dragonflight.

Soloing Onyxia is kind of old hat at this point, but I figured doing it with a ferocity pet like the spirit beast, which lacks all the nice tanking talents of a tenacity pet, might make it slightly more challenging. I did spec myself and my pet to give him as much survivability as possible, though, but as it turned out, it was no challenge at all. All hail the mighty Sinh!

It seems Onyxia hits like a wet noodle these days and with 75% of its breath damage mitigated by the Avoidance talent, it turned out that I didn’t even have to use Mend Pet to heal him. He kept himself at full health through Bloodthirsty combined with Spirit Bond and the tier 5 set bonus.

I should mention that I didn’t bother re-glyphing from my MM raiding spec in case anyone is wondering why I don’t use serpent sting much in the video. That said, hope you enjoy it!

Download video (110MB) *recommended*

*The title is obviously a bit of a conceit, but refers to the fact that I was able to solo Onyxia without actively healing my pet. Obviously the tier 5 set bonus passively heals it for a good deal.

Yesterday was a bad day. A terrible day. Generally just a repugnant day of calamity and ill repute. I am of course referring to The Great Hunter Nerf of 2008.

Anyway, feeling like someone had just peed in my bowl of cereal, I decided to pick up my mood by flying out of Dalaran to tame some silly weird creatures and document it for the benefit of future generations.

Now you may know what I’m about to tell you already, but I’m going to tell you anyway, because if I didn’t, there wouldn’t be a blog post here. Alright? Good. So, the thing is, there’s a daily quest for the Oracles in Sholazar Basin named “A Cleansing Song” which makes you go out and summon and defeat the spirits of a hydra, Atha, an ooze, Koosu, and a crocolisk, Ha-Khalan. Pretty mundane stuff, but here’s the blog-worthy part; these three spirits are all tameable.

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Okay, so there we were in Molten Core, right, because Anubelle didn’t want to waste a chance to find those windseeker bindings or whatever and after killing Baron Geddon she was all, like, “anyone up for killing Attumen in Karazhan because it would be kinda cool to ride his horse”, you know, and I was all, like, sure and Argha came along too. Well, we killed Attumen quite quickly but unfortunately we also killed the horse, but oh well, omelets and all that. Anyway, then I was, like, “let’s slap Moroes around too, maybe we can find that Mongoose formula up there” and before we knew it we were deep in Karazhan, trying to clear the whole place of evil. Anyway, we were, like, totally engrossed in this chess match against Medivh’s shadow when suddenly…

Okay, I’m not sure why I’m doing a valley girl impression, Jomo’s not that kind of girl. Really, she’s not! At any rate, the recount of events is pretty accurate. Anubelle, Argha and I ended up 3-manning Karazhan late tonight. We killed Attumen, Moroes, Romulo & Julianne, Curator in one evocation, Illhoof, Shade of Aran and then reached the Chess event. Illhoof was the only time we flirted with a wipe; it was pretty close when Argha got sacrificed and bound in demonic chains. We survived, though.

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Wrath of the Lich King introduced a lot of cool new changes to the hunter’s pet system, including several new pet families. One of the new exotic pet families is called Spirit Beast and there is currently only one beast in the game in this family, a rare elite found in the Sholazar Basin named Loque’nahak. Its long respawn timer combined with its nice appearance makes it a much sought after pet.

It also doesn’t help hunters looking to tame this elusive beast that killing it is part of the Northern Exposure achievement, so other players will be more likely to slay it than to leave it for some lucky hunter to find.

Tracking down Loque’Nahak was one of the things I was most looking forward to in the expansion, so when I hit level 77 and got my Cold Weather Flying skill, I put leveling on the backburner and camped known spawn points in the zone in the hopes of finding it. After about one day, on Saturday, November 15th, I found it and tamed it. I believe I was probably the first hunter on the Defias Brotherhood EU server to tame it given that I was one of the first hunters to hit the level needed to tame it (76). In fact, one week later, I have yet to see another hunter with this pet, although I’m sure there must be some out there.

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The Storm Peaks, 04:47 Tuesday morning. The sun is about to rise on a mountain of dead rhinos and the first grand master chef. There can be only one! Rabble rabble!

So, yeah, I got the realm first cooking thing. I didn’t actually decide to try to get the achievement until Sunday, four days into the expansion. The impetus behind the decision was when I discovered that there were two ways to level from 415 to 450. The “normal” progression would be to buy one of the Dalaran cooking recipes to get from 415 to 425+ and then buy another to go from 425+ to 450. That would require 6 Dalaran Cooking Awards, which would take 3-6 days of doing the daily cooking quest as each completed daily gives 1-2 of the award tokens.

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