For those with a penchant for humanitarian causes or just plain pet collecting, there’s a new purchasable Cenarion hatchling non-combat pet, decorated in Japanese festival style. Blizzard is absorbing all transaction costs.
I saw that. (How could I not, since it’s the big panel in the launcher?)
I haven’t bought a vanity pet yet, from the Blizz store anyways. For a while WoW TCG cards were my crack addiction I mean lottery ticket equivalent, and I’ve gotten a little companion or two from the loot cards (the Rocket Chicken is beyond epic)… but this is making me consider it quite seriously. Being Japanese-American is a big factor, and I am still gonna donate through more conventional channels, but a little hippogryph?
I normally don’t do this, but SQUEEE!!.
The cynic in me wants to hate Blizz for cashing in on a disaster, although their keeping none of the proceeds goes a long ways to mitigate that. The only overt benefit to them is PR, and I guess that’s OK.
I reluctantly queued for a random new dungeon on my healer. This would be only my 2nd attempt (tried it as dps) since the patch.
Zul’Aman - and 2 others in the group were from my realm, which means their little grouping scheme seems to work.
Overall it was a very easy run. I heard a lot of people having problems, so I must have lucked out with a good group. I thought most of the boss fights were pretty sad challenge-wise. I got a little worried on Draak, we wiped once. He did some clawing ability that took off a ton of hp really quick, which caught me off guard the first time. I think Draakari, and the boss that has his eagle buddies try to fly off with your group mates were the only ones I had to even use a major CD for. So, I’m glad I lucked out!
A bonus was the two that were from my realm whispered me after we disbanded and asked if I wanted to heal another one, and anytime I want I could run with them.
As a side note - is it normal for so many epic items to drop off of trash? We had 4 purples drop throughout the run just on trash. I won a pair of 353 tank bracers which will wind up on the AH shortly.
It’s Children’s Week. Which means that I have to go for the one achievement I need for the Violet Proto Drake.
Unfortunately, it’s the PvP one. I’m not really looking forward to it. I’ve done some light arena, and I’ve played a good bit of Arathi Basin, but I’ve only ever played AV and WSG once, and haven’t played EotS at all. Also, I’m a clothie, though thankfully for this, I’m not a priest, so I’m not a healer. I’ve got some okay-ish PvP gear, but nothing epic. I might be able to get another piece after converting Justice to Honor, if they actually put that into effect. I haven’t been able to check yet, because I only just realized it’s Children’s Week, and Eitrigg is still down.
Hopefully, I’ll have some help from my friends (even though they’ve not been as into WoW lately). Otherwise. . .well, I guess I know what I’m doing the next few days. On the plus side, I’m PMSing, so I might actually enjoy the PvP itself anyway.
Ah, the Children’s Week PvP achievement - the source of much joy and much sorrow.
I have to admit that it was a lot of fun going 6-0 in WSG last night mowing down Alliance toon after toon that was camping their flag room hoping for a miracle return. It’s amazing how fast a zero-resilience toon will go down to a string of Obliterates… 
I might have some mercy towards the end of the week and do a few where I run in and drop the flag so some poor Alliance can return it… but probably not. It’s just too much fun to kill them (or even freeze the whole damn mess with Hungering Cold while my Rogue buddy grabs the flag, sprints out, hits his boots and runs halfway across the field while they all just sit there frozen - did that 3 times in one match and they never did catch on…).
I was nice enough to refrain from returning too many flags after I killed the enemy flag carrier - although after the guy that kept complaining “LET ME RETURN!!!1!” missed three straight (with the Alliance grabbing them each time) I decided to just start clicking them myself.
I sincerely wish you luck. The year I closed out the Purple Dragon meta, I lucked out extra hard, and it was the Children’s Week PvP achievement that closed out the book.
I distinctly remember being in nothing but losing battlegrounds that weekend, but scoring two of the four criteria on each successive night. If I recall correctly, I dinged the meta on the EOTS flag cap component. As might be predicted, we were losing the BG on a 1-3 tower disadvantage, but the Alliance were hanging back and letting us have one tower and all the flags we could take, as long as were were willing to at least put up a fight at the center. So that worked out. Since hunters particularly specialize in running away, it went very well for me.
Worthless weekend for honor, but having Big Violet (and 310% flight) waiting in the mailbox was absolutely worth it.
ETA: did you notice they added some pets? I’ve had max pets for the Vanilla and BC orphan quest chains, so I figured I’d skip them, but there’s a new snail pet in vanilla-land and a teensy bogstrider in the TBC reward list. That, and since this is the second time the Wrath orphan quest chain is available, you can do the other chain compared to the one you did the first time and get the other pet reward there too.
It’s been a pretty good week for pet gathering.
;_; You are the people that make me sad. All I want are the achieves. I don’t even hang around afterwards, I eat the Deserter debuff so you have a chance at an actual PvPer!
I don’t see why people can’t be nice for one week. It’s one thing to be trying to play the battlegrounds normally during this week and another to deliberately sabotage people. I can’t grind out a set of top tier PvP gear and change my game in one week to be able to play on par with lvl 85 PvP vets, so the ‘get better and come play for real’ is irrelevant.
Being a jerkface is why Blizzard made PvP servers.
/carebear doesn’t care about PvP QQ
Yeah. I hate PvP myself. (So I’m a dummy for keeping my toons on a PvP server. Sue me.) I had to grit my teeth and plunge in to get the achievements, but success vindicates the misery. It’s one of those “someday we’ll look back on this fondly” things.
And FWIW, the torrent of non-PvPers screwing up perfectly good battlegrounds seems to be a pretty strong common thread of QQ’age among the actual PvPers at this “time of year”. If you actually care about the outcome of a battleground, you have to admit that the all the newbs flooding your team who want to score some random strategically-worthless achievement would be your worst nightmare.
Yeah, the PVP holiday achieves are pretty dumb, or at least making them part of the meta is. Nobody likes them; the PVE players don’t like having to PVP to get their toys, and the PVP players resent the flood of PVE players who don’t even want to be there in the first place.
. . .see, I don’t like the idea of getting glee out of attacking players that really, honestly, probably don’t even want to be there. I’d much rather not have to do this achievement, even though I’m not an utter PvP noob (see above re: much presence in AB normally, and having a set with north of 2K resil; half-decent, but not awesome). It seems kind of jerkish to enjoy inflicting frustration.
I can also sympathize with being annoyed with the BGs being filled with people who can’t play. If you have a bunch of idiots running around, you’re kind of screwed in terms of winning. This really shouldn’t be part of the meta; it’s ruining everyone’s good time. And it’s not fair to the people who want to run BGs for real.
But, dammit, I want a pretty drake!
I totally understand why the PvPers are upset, but it’s 1 week out of 52 and it counts towards an awesome reward. It won’t ruin your WoW life. I’m pretty sure if a PvPer was trying to do the Children’s Week egg gathering quest and was hounded by a group of people that continuously followed him just to grab eggs before he could he’d QQ too and ask for a week of mercy.
Well, what does “be nice” mean in this context? I play for my team to win the game. Should I intentionally drop the flag so the other team can get a return? Should I let the flag carrier go in EotS?
I even mentioned that I attempted to let other people return flags in the WSG after they asked, but they failed to do so multiple times so I finally returned it myself (he did eventually get the return during that match - and his Violet).
Certainly you can’t mean that I should not kill the other team…
I don’t yell at anyone (although lots of other people are - especially in EotS when there are 10 out of 15 players standing in mid while the flag isn’t anywhere to be found), I just go about my business of winning the game.
Eh, I guess.
Perhaps my tone came across a bit more “gleeful” than I intended - my point was that I went from “extremely frustrated by the stupidity that this achievement inflicted on BGs” to “kinda enjoying killing undergeared toons and coming up with alternative strategies to coordinate getting the flag out of a flag room full of the entire Alliance team”. Lemonade from lemons and whatnot.
I think it’s pretty much exactly the equivalent of people in PvP gear queueing up for random heroics. It happens all the damn time. At least there they can get vote-kicked.
ETA: I should perhaps add that I’ve also helped at least a half-dozen randoms and guild-mates get the achievement by killing flag carriers and letting them get the return, or escorting people to nodes in AB or AV.
I don’t think that rationally, anyone is expecting anyone to throw a game. I’d say it’s just grumpiness. And let’s face it, there is some low-grade griefage. The most obvious case was the Winter Veil PvP achievement. Anyone in gnome disguise was KoS, regardless of tactical value. (Which worked strategically against 'em in once case. I got in on an AV win because we got some quick tower caps while the Alliance was dicking around hunting down Winter Helper hordies.)
My limited experience? Sometimes it helps to ignore the achievement and play your best to win. My WSG Children’s Week achievement component came through when I decided to play WSG rather than “score my achievement and leave.” I chased down a rogue flag carrier and hurt him bad. He came back after me… probably a good decision, since there’s no other way he was gonna get help soon, and I was gonna kill him shortly anyway. He shadowstepped me… onto a snaketrap I’d accidentally dropped (misclick) and run past. Made me look like a freaking mindreader, but it was stupid luck. I got the kill (he was in very bad shape and caught by surprise there) and the flag return (being the only one standing within 50 yards), which cleared that step of the achievement. And later, a win, so I was pretty over the moon with that BG.
Actually, there’s counts 4 holidays with a PVP achievement. The Children’s Week one is by far the most annoying to get, but all of them see spikes in PVE players getting into PVP even if they don’t want to.
If there was one week a year where there was an achievement for killing a boss in a random while wearing PvP gear, I would happily help people run it, because I consider myself to be a nice person. It’s one week a year.
Got Arathi Basin; that took about seven seconds. Just have to get the other three. I tried doing WSG, but there was no gentlemanly trading, and, since I haven’t played in about three weeks, I kept on messing up my keybinds. Though I did forget how much fun Shadowfury + Howl of Terror + Fear is when done correctly, so there is that.
Reading all these complaints about the PvP requirements for the holiday meta made me glad I got mine done a long long time ago (the first year it was available) and I made the decision right then that I’d never do it again on another toon! And I kind of like PvP, but since I was a healer some of those achievements would have been impossible without guild help.
Got the achievement today. I had help from my favorite pally healer on EotS, and did the rest of them myself. WSG and AV had people trading off, which was nice. And now I can fly really super fast, yay!
I still think the achievement is a dumb one to have for the meta, though; it ruins a facet of the game for an entire week. I can’t really blame people for getting annoyed.
Congrats!
No more BGs, although we did do a clear of BWD last night (except Nef - stupid 1% wipe right before it got too late for me to see straight).
So much loot getting sharded - I think after a week of this we’ll either bring in alts or maybe I’ll just take a break until Firelands. I have no interest in hard-modes at this point in time, and raiding just for the one useful drop per week doesn’t sound very appealing either… I considered gearing up for tanking and then remembered I don’t really want to tank… maybe the game is telling me something…