Token Female Gamer

This review, like most of them, is long overdue. The delay is mostly owing to my abandoning the game quite early on and thinking I would come back to it. Well, to be honest, requiring myself to come back, since I didn’t feel I had played enough to give it a fair review.

But it’s become quite obvious that I am not going to return and the review will have to happen regardless. Any guilt I had, has been assuaged by the eight months of subscription I have paid for a completely inactive account – its time to be done.

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While I was checking my armory I noticed that my entire pet collection is viable online.

Here it is for anyone who would like to see how I waste my time. =P

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/hyjal/Sindel/pet#status=is-collected

As of today I have collected 301 unique pets. Considering that, when I began this quest to catch them all, I had a mere thirty, I’m quite pleased by my progress. Along with collecting, I have also been leveling my original team up and they finally reached max level, 25. My next goal is to level one of each type to max level.

Behold, the three pets who have gotten me where I am today. Spider was awesome against critters and capturing new pets, Mini Thor was anti beasts, and Onyxian Whelpling was basically good against anything else.

And for those of you who are wondering if I am doing anything to get raid ready, my Warlock’s iLevel is 451 and I have broken down and started doing Daily Quests that will actually result in good gear. So LFR is in my future and I will be ready to raid. If topping the DPS meter wasn’t a big enough incentive, then getting my warlock epic certainly is. Need lots of raids to finish it. =(

In other, uhmm, less consequential news, my Warlock finally made level 90. Motivated by the SF Giants World Series win,  my husband and I persevered and leveled both our characters. (Stayed up a bit late, but oh well.) Thus, I dedicate my somewhat lackluster achievement to the Giants.

Now I have to figure out how to play my damn class. As a Demonology Warlock, leveling is the ultimate in ease. It turns out that being effective DPS requires vastly different skills. Ah well. Back to the grind stone.

Or I could just go collect more battle pets. =D

It seems like forever since I wrote or posted anything. The fault lies completely with WoW. I am merely a victim of a rediscovered fascination that prevents me from doing anything else. Down the Mists of Pandaria Rabbit hole have I fallen and been consumed by the world of battle pets; and am finding myself quite unwilling to leave.

But I thought I would at least share what my team looks like currently. The irony here is that it took me so long to finish even this small blurb that I had to update my battle pets image three time to remain current. A true testament to how my obsession with pets is causing some (totally minor) procrastination in the rest of my life.

Anyway here is my most current team:

I am really liking the Thor and Spider combo for leveling. Most of the low level wild pets are Critters or Beasts, which these two are good against. Onyxian Whelpling is there to battle anything else. =)

Oh and Battle Pets turns out to be a rampant achievement gain. Bonus is that since I have to travel around the entire world to find pets, I can finally complete the World Explorer achievement. I always did feel like World Explorer should be a by product of doing something useful, or more useful anyway. =P

Here are a few of my recent Pet achievements:

I will add that I am leveling my Warlock, its just slow going. This is mainly because leveling in Pandaria isn’t terribly exciting. Actually much of the rest of the game is very much of the same old. Thus much of my motivation for leveling to 90 is pets related. Pandarian flying will make pet collecting much easier, once I finally get my pets leveled up enough to go hunt on the Island of Pandaria.

Now back to my rabbit hole! <3

While I have certainly harbored doubt about this latest expansion, battling companion pets topped my list of silly additions to World of Warcraft. But I had to try it out, you know, to make sure it was as ridiculous as I expected it to be. Well its not.

I took some time today and played through the first few quests, with the honest intent to then go on and level. Three hours later I finally realized that collecting pets had taken over World of Warcraft. I no longer felt the need to level a character, just my awesome pets!

Hindsight of course tells me that I should not have been surprised about my sudden devotion to pet battles as I was (am) a rabid Pokemon fan. Its like a donut enthusiast thinking they will not like donut holes.

The system is a simplified version of Pokemon. There are a ton of pets you collect throughout the land. Each has a different type, with certain types being effective against others. Only three pets are up for battle at a time and they each only 3 skills for battle. So far the pets can’t hold items, but the captured ones have a chance of being rare, uncommon, common and poor. Capturing is done in battle just like Pokemon, only in WoW we get an infinite amount of crates. No Pokeballs to carry around.

Anyway I’m totally hooked and must go collect every battle pet ever, now.

My very awesome battle team!

Mists of Pandaria is live today! Go panda party. Okay for me its going to be a level to 90 party. Same thing. =P

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In the grand tradition of all things Guild Wars 2, skills are rather complicated. There are three different skill types: weapons skills, slot skills, and traits. These are all found in the same skills and traits tab in the hero menu.

I know it seems a bit excessive, but it really helped me to think of the three categories as actively learned skills, points spending skills, and passive bonuses.

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Guild Wars 2 has proven to be a rather difficult game to get acquainted with. It has not really felt intuitive nor has information seem very accessible. Leveling in particular caused me quite a bit of confusion as I consistently found myself under leveled for the only quests I hadn’t completed. Turns out that there are far more ways to get experience in GW2 then simply questing, and the game really expects players to utilize all avenues of experience mining.

Here are some tips that really helped me with leveling.

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Before the release of Diablo 3, I decided to dust off my old copy of Diablo 2. Seemed like a good way to get ready, plus it is one of my favorite games. After installing and patching, I played a few different characters, that quite promptly got deleted. (On Bnet any character that hasn’t been played for more then two hours gets deleted after ten days.)

Finally got wise and leveled a Necromancer past the cut off. This way I can boot it up to run through a level every now and then (my necromancer is level 11).

Last night while I was waiting for the husband to log in and play D2 with me, I looked in on the chat room. While there wasn’t anything interesting being said, it does give this very handy Bnet update.

I was shocked at how many people were playing Diablo 2. This game is OLD and it still has over 16,000 concurrent users. That just blows my mind.

Makes me wonder if there are other “old” games that a ton of people still play.