Video - WoW Shark Attack

I got in the mood to do this quest again, and I happened to have a druid I was leveling at the time. Once Kaynine got to the lower level 70's area, I took her to Dragonblight and started questing there. The Tuskar ask you to help them collect some lobsters from traps on the sea floor and you find one trap was destroyed. Turns out a very big, very hungry shark has returned to these waters. So you get some meat and stick it on a big hook, and then the big bad shark comes around and you get to kill it.

Well as I did this quest, I couldn't really get the theme from Jaws out of my head, so I found an MP3 for it, and edited the video to fit with it. I did recall at the start of the first Jaws movie during the opening credits they filmed the sea floor as though you were the shark swimming through kelp and such, searching for food. I tried to mimic that at one point, then went right on ahead to the quest itself.

And yeah, the fight itself kinda sucked because the shark's head seemed to go through the camera so you're seeing the inside of the shark... But then the shark always looks fake. ^_^

New Blog Background

Yarp. I take several screenshots when the thought strikes me. I've been meaning to do this for a while. I wanted to make the blog more unique, more like my own, so I decided to finally go ahead and make this image, which is a mixture of screenshots I selected.

Each image I used I clipped and changed the opacity from 100% to 75% so they're somewhat see-though, and then I used a tool on each and every one of these images to smear the edges. I turned off the visibility of each layer as I finished it, then I made them all visible again and saw this - the end result. It looks like I had clipped out screen shots and got the edges of the papers wet so they got warped. You can blame Deathwing if you want... I like it anyway.

SO! Starting from the top, there's Owl in boomkin form casting her Wrath spell while in the firelands with her phoenix hatchling in front of her... HEY! Get outta the way you little birdie! Going clokcwise from there, in the top center is Kaynine, a worgen druid of mine, dancing with two other moonkins. Amazingly in this screenshot alone, all three moonkins are different sizes. One had a vrykul artifact that makes you bigger, and the other had used a potion that makes you shrink (hey, it worked in Alice in Wonderland didn't it?). The smaller moonkin is casting hurricane, and you can see a lightning bolt off to the right... The next picture, top right corner is of Owl in her swift storm crow form with a Lil' Deathwing flying next to her.

Middle right we have Owl on her Cenarion War Hippogriff with the hatchling next to her. Below that in the lower right corner we have Owl in Blackwing Decent... cowering before the almighty Mister Pinchy.

Lower center is Owl in caster form, a rare sight indeed, in mostly troll gear with the voodoo doll pet to the left... And then next to that in the lower left hand corner is a screenshot I took a week or so ago as of this posting, and this has a story of it's own.

See, during Wrath of the Lich King, us alliance folks had to go befriend these hunters that lived and worked in the Grizzly Hills, a place that had pine trees and fair game. So while you do these tasks, well, you start to get suspicious, especially when someone claims to be allergic to Wolfsbane and asks you to destroy the plants that are growing around their compound. At one point you rescue an alliance official, a human who asks you, "Were you bitten? ANSWER ME! WERE YOU BITTEN!? You don't know do you..." Turns out the trappers you've been helping are really Worgen, werewolf type creatures that love hunting and killing, and they were trying to get you to join them. So you and the human grab a horse and gallop away only to see packs of feral worgen chasing you and trying to eat you, and maybe even skin you... YIKES! So you throw lamp oil and set them on fire and urge your horse through the dangerous woods... I know an easier way... just fly outta there... But no... have to ride the horse for the quest chain, oh well. Shrug your shoulders and get on with it.

Well after the Cataclysm, the Greymane wall that separated Gilneas from the rest of the nation was broken at last, and the Gilnean citizens that had been walled up in there have finally emerged with a dark and terrible... well it's no secret anymore... They're all cursed as Worgen, but thanks to an elixir, some of them managed to regain their human minds and were able to save themselves from the effects of the cataclysm and their battles against the Forsaken. When their city falls, however, they turn to the Alliance and are welcomed, even if they are cursed.

So several months later, I'm leveling a worgen druid (or harvest witch as they're sometimes called) and I decided to do this quest chain, and when this part came up, I activated the chat bubbles feature and took a screenshot so it looked like a comic.

The Alliance guy says, "Were you bitten?" And Kaynine says, "Umm... I dunno how to tell you this... But..."

So yeah... a Worgen saving a human who asks if she was bitten by a worgen yet? Hello! This character was bitten ages ago... Isn't it obvious! HAH!

But I digress. In the center left there are two photos, one of Owl flying (which I blurred to make it look nicer, seems to have worked), and the other isn't any character I have actually, but rather of a nice picture of a winterspring cub attacking one of it's own first prey - a rabbit. If you thought the monster guarding the cave in Monty Python's Holy Grail movie was bad... "Look at the bones! I'm warning you!!!"

In the very center are actually two photos, but one of which stands out very prominently. How often are you ever going to see a cat chewing bubblegum I wonder? Underneath this image is one of Owl sitting on her new raptor mount.

And then, the entire background image under all this stuff... it's a photo from Stormwind of me in cheetah form kiting two dozen paper zeppelins. :P

Hope you liked it, this is the new background for my blogsite until further notice or non-notice. Hope you enjoy it.

--Owl

Raptor Mount!!! YES!!!

Owlaf won the Armored Raptor Mount from a loot roll in Zul'Gurub!

It was a fairly casual experience... just four guildies from Insomniatic Tendencies and a healer we pugged. Back before Cataclysm, me and a friend of mine would form a raid together, just us two level 80's, and we went prowling past mobs and killing certain bosses in the hopes of getting a raptor or tiger mount.

Being alliance players, getting the raptor mount was a must because the Horde get raptors while the Alliance gets cats, depending on specific faction reputations that is... Trolls have raptors, so if an Orc or a Bloodelf or any other horde race wants a Raptor then they have to be exaulted with the Trolls of Darkspear. Likewise, any player that is not a Night Elf would have to raise their reputation to exaulted with the Night Elves in order to be able to ride on the panthers and tigers. So the tiger mount from the Zul'Gurub instance is as coveted to the Horde as the Raptor is for the Alliance. A definite rare for certain factions to be sure.

Anyway, the two of us would kill two bosses on a weekly basis... well, once we were exaulted with the Zandalar Tribe, which is now no longer possible to obtain. Before we were exaulted with this particular faction of trolls, we'd clear the whole instance and try our best to collect as many faction reputation items we could... But our bags were constantly being filled with junk. Once we hit exaulted, collecting these items was no longer as important - just two bosses were... for the mounts.

Nowadays, ever since the zone was revamped and transformed into a heroic instance, we had a new choice, to run through it like a regular dungeon with a full group, but with a new catch... since it was no longer a raid, we didn't have to wait a whole week (or less) for it to reset. In fact, with the "random Dungeon Finder" it was possible to do this heroic more than once a day! So with a really good group with nothing better to do, you could attempt to farm it 24/7.

But this day, it was just pure luck and the blessing of the random number generator, yes, our good friend the RNG.

After we killed the boss and sighed with relief in knowing we didn't have to wait for anyone to rez, I clicked on the corpse to loot it. For a moment, nobody did a thing... We were all thinking the same thing.

Two items? Why are there two items? Okay, one is this caster cape I think, yes that's it, so what's this... mouseover... O....M....G!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That is probably what we were all thinking.
 Nobody even rolled for a long time... we were all waiting for the idiot sucker to roll greed so the rest of us could roll need. But being the party leader I put it in chat.

"WOW! Okay guys, we have a mount here. If you don't have it yet, roll need on it!!! Good luck!"

Okay, so they might not be my words exactly, not to mention spelled properly, but still, in our excitement, I only have time to type, "Roll NEED" and "YES!" So the chat really looked more like this:

player1- OMG!
me - Roll NEED!!!
player2- So we roll need?
me- YES!
player2- Okay

And then the rolls came... and I WON! I was ecstatic. It was like winning the lottery. A definite plus to the day.
The tiger mount did not drop, but that wasn't so disappointing.

But it makes me wonder how many people on our server got these ubber-rare mounts from Zul-Gurub... I don't count the bear from Zul'Aman because that is guaranteed to drop if you can beat the timer... so if anyone got the Raptor or Tiger mounts... =) Curious!

-PEACE!!