What are you doing with Sunsong Ranch, March gold blogging carnival.

Every month Cold from Cold's gold factory creates gold blogging carnival this months topic asked;

Sunsong Ranch. Songbell Sead.

"What Are you Currently doing with your Sunson Ranch / Ranches?"

I currently have six characters at level ninety. I've gotten four of them to exalted with The Tillers which means I have four sixteen slot farms open. After getting to revered with The Tillers you can purchase an item called Grand Commendation of the Tillers from Gina Mudclaw at the Halfhill Market. Clicking on the item in your bag will grant you a 100% bonus reputation account wide buff,  for all characters on that account. These commendations are available for all Pandaria factions. This means that after getting one of your characters to revered, getting the rest there is incredibly fast and easy. By getting to revered Merchant Greenfield will now begin selling special seeds allowing you to plant Motes of harmony, leather, ore etc.

As for me, my characters plant mostly the same thing every day.

Priest (JC/Alch) Hunter (Engi/LW) Mage (Tailor/Alch) plant Enigma Seed - "The enigma seed is named for its mysterious ability to germinate into a random Pandaren herb." 
Neither of these characters have any use left for Spirits of Harmony. The ore and leather seeds don't seem worth planting for me as there is always plenty of ore and leather available on my auction house. One thing I do struggle to get a hold of is herbs so this gives me a constant supply. I get on average four to six Golden lotus per character each day. I use the herbs and Golden Lotus to create flasks as well as potions as I have an alchemist with each specialty which I sell on the auction house.

Paladin (BS/mining) plants Songbell Seed - "The harmony of light and dark bell flowers on this plant has inspired Pandaren song and poetry for millenia."
The recent 5.2 patch added some new items for Blacksmiths to create, in particular some new weapons which reuse some of the models from The Burning Crusade which were otherwise no longer available. Fireguard, reborn is one of those weapons. These new weapons require Living Steel, Spirit of Harmony and Lightning Steel Ingot. I plan on creating a few of these weapons for my own transmogrification use so for the past week or two I've been planting Songbell Seed in order to obtain some Spirits' of Harmony. 

With any character not yet ninety or not yet started on their Tillers reputation I don't pay any attention to their farms. Doing the four is enough for me along with other things I do in game over time I might add in another one or two but for now I'm happy with just the four.

Vanilla battle pets, mounts and achievements!

I've had such a fantastic week in WoW! A friend I mentioned in an earlier post about my favourite WoW memory started playing again! When he logged into game I had to do a double take. He had stopped playing at the beginning of Cataclysm due to starting university I've been leveling my eighty five horde Warrior along side his Rogue. I haven't seen Mists of Pandaria from the Horde perspective yet so I've been really enjoying it.

Patch 5.1 introduced a whole load of changes to the pet battle interface as well as a new pets to collect! Along with the change came twelve new pets which have a chance to drop off of level sixty Vanilla raid bosses in Molten core, Blackwing Lair, Temple of Ahn'Qiraj (AQ40) and Naxxramas. While Naxxramas is a level eighty raid it was originally a Vanilla raid. You can find a list of the pets and their respective bosses on Warcraftpets. Each of the bosses have received some tweaks to make them soloable although some still require a little bit of patience, skill and knowing the tactics.

While in Ahn'Qiraj hunting down the pets I was lucky enough to come across a Red Qiraji Resonating Crystal from some trash mobs. A mount I've tried to farm with no luck on multiple occasions. Obtaining this mount nets you the Feat of Strengh Why? because it's red. I then proceeded to loot another two within a few hours on other Alts. It seems that the drop rate on this mount has been significantly increased whether intentional or not remains to be seen. Now might be a great time to go snag yourself one just in case it's been an accidental change!

Why? Because it's Red.

 I finally hit Exalted with the Golden lotus! I plan on never doing any of those daily quests again for as long as I live. I'm not even sure why I loathe them so much they're not exactly hard quests but I have been putting them off most days. I also hit 60 Exalted reputations! I already know which ten I'm missing and I plan to remedy that as quickly as daily resets allow!

60 Exalted Reputations!

The icing on the cake was finally finishing off my Glory of the Firelands Raider achievement. I had been missing two parts of the Do a Barrel Roll achievement for such a long time. The achievement requires you to kill Alysrazor in the Firelands raid without any members of the raid being hit by several of her abilitys. Thankfully you don't have to do all parts of the achievement in one fight.

By finishing off the achievement I also completed the Meta and was rewarded my Corrupted Fire Hawk which I think might be my favourite flying mount in game!

Corrupted Fire Hawk.

I'm one mount short of hitting 150 mounts. I haven't crafted any of the Jewelcrafting or Engineering mounts yet. Or reached Exalted with Shadow Pan, Anglers or August Celestials which I know all reward mounts.

How has your week been? What's on your to do list for the upcoming week? Have you tried soloing the old Vanilla raids yet for the new pets?

Exalted with The Order of the Cloud Serpents

This week I've been slacking, slacking with a capital SLACKING. Wait, scratch that I've been slacking since Mists of Pandaria was released this week has been no real exception. I'm usually pretty reputation focused but so far I've been neglecting my daily's most days! I got Tillers to Exalted pretty quickly on my main, deciding to work mostly on one faction at a time. I'm slowly working my way though Golden Lotus, Shadow-Pan and August Celestials but only every couple of days. My Paladin and Hunter are both Revered with Tillers and my Hunter is slowly gaining Golden Lotus reputation for Leather working patterns.

During Pilgrim's Bounty if you eat five of each food at the bountiful table outside the capital cities you get a buff called Spirit of Sharing. With this added incentive I decided to finish off my Order of the Cloud Serpent grind. I hadn't been farming eggs or doing the profession quests because I'm super lazy and I hate archeology with a passion but I knuckled down and did all of my quests after handing them in..

Wait... what?

You can't actually be serious? Are you serious? You are aren't you?

So with that wonderful experience behind me I went out egg hunting. Until this point I hadn't bothered looking for the Onyx Eggs but I came across a few and handed them in and finally got my Cloud Serpent! I'm a little sad that you can't ride them on other characters as I bought the other two colours and was hoping to use a different one on my Hunter and Paladin. Oh well, Korla worked for them so I guess it's only fair that she's the only one that gets to use them!

Day Four. WoW Blogging Challenge - Your best WoW memory.

It's been a while since I wrote a post for the Soulbound - 20 days of WoW Blogging challenge - hell it's been a while since I blogged full stop! If you follow me on Twitter then you'll know that I've spent the past few weeks bitching and moaning about toothache in a lot of pain thanks to an abscess in my tooth. Thankfully the pain has gone and everything is getting back to normal. I was unable to play WoW other than logging in to do a few daily quests from time to time because WoW simply couldn't hold my attention though the pain and frustration.

We're onto part four of the challenge - Your best WoW memory. I've been playing WoW for so long, I've met some incredible people and have had such a great time over the years that it's hard to pinpoint one isolated favorite memory. I can say with no uncertainty that Wrath of the Lich King was my favourite expansion for many reasons.

With better knowledge of the game as well as a better understanding of my own class behind me. A better computer than I had previously played on during Vanilla and The Burning Crusade and a bunch of degenerates I called friends I was able to beat what was at the time current content. I was unable to raid anything past Karazhan during BC due to technical issues so I only got to see most of the BC raids during the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

One thing I accomplished during Wrath of the Lich King is certainly one of my most favourited WoW memories, not only because of the act it's self but with whom I accomplished it with. It's also how I got here.

I've always liked reputation grinds but when the feat of strength Insane in the Membrane was released I shied away from it. It seemed like far too much. It literally sounded insane! A really good friend had just returned to WoW after a long break and he knew he wanted to get the title. I offered to help him out in anyway that I could. I started the initial reputation grind with him for Raveholdt which involved killing Syndicate mobs until honoured but I figured two people doing it was faster than him doing it alone. That was my downfall, the beginning.

Over the next couple of weeks I leveled a Rogue of my own as the only way to get additional rep with Ravenholdt is to hand in lockboxes which you pickpocket off of level 60 mobs. As Vad didn't have his own character with Inscription he'd send me herbs every few days to be milled and turned into cards, to be turn into decks for the Darkmoon Faire. At the time there was no other way to gain their reputation. We used one of my guild banks to store all of our cards and already made decks. As each Faire drew closer we'd swap cards between us to finish off any decks we were close to completing.




I really enjoyed the time I spent working on the Insane it taught me a lot. I had to check the Auction house daily, I was hemorrhaging so much gold on herbs that I had to look to other places to make gold to pay for them. I started to learn about my own professions, what to sell, how to sell it and when to sell it. I started reading gold blogs and became involved with some of the members of the gold making community and I'd like to think I've come out of it with a few friends.

I especially enjoyed that I got to complete it with such an amazing friend who helped push me on when I felt like my milling finger was breaking or when I really didn't want to run Dire Maul for goblin reputation even just once more.

Vad doesn't play WoW anymore but thankfully we're still in contact, I look at my title and smile from time to time.

Too badass.

Exalted with The Lorewalkders.

I got exalted with The Lorewalkers tonight, netting myself an awesome mount Disk of the Red Flying Cloud.

Scattered throughout Pandaria are clickable scrolls which have a slight blue hue around them.There are several in each zone. There are achievements for reading all of them. Each time you complete one of the achievements you receive a mail with an item which starts a quest. Handing in the quests will grant you Lorewalkers reputation and Loremaster Cho will then act out a scene for you.

You can find coordinates for each of the scrolls within the first comment on wowhead. Be sure to read them, they're really fun and interesting.

The end of PvP week!

PvP week has thankfully come to an end. While the week should have ended on Thursday I had pretty much given up by Tuesday due to a multitude of reasons.

• We're having pretty hot weather here. I hate heat, I get headaches, I can't sit still. I hate the sun! 
• Holy shit, people in battegrounds are stupid.
• I started playing my Warlock a lot more (who forgot to tell me they were pretty fun?)
• Have you actually been in a battleground recently? I'm pretty sure Blizzard have hidden a secret camera near my computer. Specifically selected as may mouth breathers from my battle group as possible just to laugh at me raging.
• Aside from being angry a lot I was often pretty bored. I'm a defender, a lone wolf protecting a base. Game after game of doing the same gets dull pretty quickly but if I don't protect it I know no one else will.

Wowcrendor sums up my pvping experience pretty well in his How to win at PvP video series. 

All in all the week was a success and as much as I may have complained about it, I did really enjoy some of it. My boyfriend plays a Retribution Paladin and we did a few games of Warsong Gulch together with him carrying the flag (mostly due to no one else bothering) we made a pretty good team with me healing. It's something I know I'm going to have to spend more time on even if that's just doing one battleground a day or trying to devote one day a week to PvP. I got some more honourable kills, I got a new set of PvP gear, I even managed to score a few achievement points along the way! Reputation was my most important part but I'm not even going to look at how much I have or haven't gained because I know how long that grind is actually going to take. 

Slow and steady wins the race!

PvP week!

Reputation and achievement points have always been the driving force behind me doing shit I don't actually want to do. I'm a sucker for them especially rep (I'm sure there's a deep rooted psychological reason for this but we can explore that later).

Looking at my achievement summery it's glaringly obvious which side of the game I neglect. I'd love to get the justicar achievement. There are many others I could get along the way. So I've deemed this week "PvP Week!"  I thought giving it a title (albeit a not very good title) would make it feel more fun and interesting. It technically started on Monday the 14th of May however I've slacked several days only managing to do two or three battlegrounds so I'm starting over - or extending it to two weeks, whatever.

So what is "PvP week!"? I hear you wonder. It's a week (or two) in which I force myself to PvP my face off instead of idling around Stormwind or doing anything else remotely enjoyable in game (I jest I'm just awful at PvP).

"But wait, I thought you hated PvP so much so that you even transferred off of a PvP server?" Well that's not strictly true. I do enjoy controlled, organized PvP (especially with friends and some kind of voice communication). It feels very much like PvE in the sense that my main focus is playing whack-a-mole with Grid much like I would in a raid. Except instead of avoiding fire on the ground I'm trying to line of sight the Mage while also keeping a Rogue off of my back at the same time. I just don't like the "if it's red it's dead" attitude of many players on PvP servers. Preying on lower, lesser geared players. Hurtling after players who have been caught out while doing their daily quests perhaps already low on health and taking advantage of it. That's the part I don't enjoy dishonourable killing. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

The Justicar achievement requires you to gain Exalted with all three of the Alliance forces. My current reputation is as follows.

Silverwing Sentinels        352 / 12000 Honoured
Stormpike Guard             999/999 Exalted
The League of Arathor     5214 / 12000 Honoured

That's actually pretty depressing. I know I'm not going to get all of these to Exalted just by PvPing for an entire week (or two) I'm not that naive. These are pretty harsh grinds to do but I'm up for the challenge! While I'm really doing this for the reputation, to take my focus off of the daunting task ahead of me I've noted down a few achievements which I want to get in the process. I'll head out to obtain those and take any reputation and additional achievements I get as a nice bonus for now.

47,296 Honourable Kills.

Battleground wins need 100 of each.

Alterac Valley  52

Arathi basin  51

Eye of the Storm  21

Warsong Gulch  61

Strand of the Ancients  26

Isle of Conquest  21

Battle for Gilneas  2 (Troll face)

And 8 Tol Barad Wins.  Need 25.

Sporting the PvP recolour of Priest Tier 6 during this en devour just feels right.

Is there a side of the game you particularly avoid due to your own dislike or your lack of time/ability? Are you willing to just grin and bare it to get that achievement or last recipe you need from a reputation grind?

Want to take part in PvP week with me? Or your own version Send me an @ reply on twitter @SocoWow.

We'll meet back here in a weeks time to catch up on how things are going!