Archive for the ‘Lug’ Category

I’m kind of depressed. It seems that all of the WoW blogs I read have writers in the Cataclysm beta. Alazar is approaching it’s 2nd anniversary and has over 250 posts to date, and yet I sit on the ouside looking in. Alazar’s not big, but it’s been around the block. This is the kind of thing I think about when I read about folks testing and reporting on the beta left and right.

Anyway, here’s a quick pic that I took with Lug riding his Kodo in the Thousand Needles the other day. I thought it was a great pic.

Nice, huh? It was a beautiful morning.

I’m back at last with a non-Cataclysm-related post. I wanted to catch folks up on where my characters are.

Lug and Pig are now level 29. I’m almost to my current goal, level 30! Lug still has those heirloom shoulders so leveling hasn’t been real bad. He’s been in the Hillsbrad Foothills allot lately, taking a break from Thousand Needles. That place is not allot of fun to me.

Gav was in Wintergrasp again today. I did ok, dying twice – once one-on-one to an Orc rogue, which never should have happened except that I was 90% asleep at the time. I had him dead to rights and couldn’t finish him off. Dammit. While running back after that death, WoW froze and crashed. When I logged back in, the battle was down to 45 seconds and everyone was just chilling in the courtyard. WTF happened to the Horde? No one was fighting, and I had been standing in one of the side areas of the fortress when my game froze and came back to find myself alive. Weird.

With the honor I earned in WG, I went to Stormwind and bought a mount I’ve wanted for a long, long time – a Black Battlestrider. I wanted one the first time I saw one but they used to cost Battleground tokens. No more! A mere 50k honor and it’s mine. Gav’s happy now.

This is a self-indulgent new article series where we look back on Gavelier and company’s early days. Some of these pics don’t show me at my best, but they should all be fun to share.

Gavelier as he looked as I created him on March 5th, 2008. This is an actual screen from his creation, and not a reenactment. I didn’t have Burning Crusade yet, and was still really uneducated about WoW in general (you’ll see what I mean in a pic or two). I named him Gavelier by combining cavalier and gavel, which is what I thought his big hammer looked like.

Yay for kobold killing! I was scared of those kobolds at the time, not understanding that they wouldn’t attack on their own. Gav’s wearing  Frayed Pants, which is a dumb thing to put on a paladin. Not as dumb, though, as this.

A robe. A robe!! At the time I thought the robe was very paladin-y. How little I knew about World of Warcraft paladins. Now Gav runs around in huge, heavy, spiked armor, wielding a heavy sword. Oh, how far we have strayed! lol

“Yes, Gavelier, Flimsy Chain Pants are a step in the right direction. Now to just finish the set and stop wearing cloth or leather like some ‘common’ class.” I was happy to see my first mail armor drop, but this wouldn’t be the last time I’d slip into lower-class armor.

While here, I thought I’d share my first-ever WoW screenshot. Yup, that’s Lug. Lug is the only toon I rolled before Gavelier, which makes him special to me. So why is Lug only level 23 while Gav sits at the level cap? I have no answer.

Ok, so it’s note quite a “Catch-22,” in that there’s no catch, but Lug is level 22. He picked up dual-wielding at level 20, as you can see. I hit 22 in Stonetalon Mountains with Pig at my side, but for kicks I went back to the Crossroads and picked up Stridy. You remember him, right? My Tallstrider? Well, I learned that it wasn’t just having not played in a while that made Pig feel like such an improvement; Stridy just sucks. Now I’m at a quandary… do I get rid of Stridy, or hold on to him in hopes that I’ll find a use for him someday? I’ll have to think that one over.

I’ve been doing the Sons of Hodir dailies pretty much, well… daily for quite some time, and it’s paid off finally. Sorta. lol I hit Revered with them yesterday, and was able to pick up the Spaulders of the Giant Lords for Gav. They’re not particularly attractive, but whatever, their stats fit me better then my old Tempered Saronite Shoulders.

In other news, Lug dinged both levels 19 and 20 this morning, as did Pig. Now Lug’s got some new toys to play with, plus he qualifies for his mount when patch 3.2 hits. Pig got his fist talent point, which I spent on Charge. I could have upped his stamina or raised his armor, but I wanted him to better engage enemies. He’s, well… kinda slow. lol This makes him engage enemies much quicker to keep them off of me. Plus, it helps his DPS, which is nice. Lug also leveled up his leatherworking skill to 55 and his skinning to 130, so he made himself some new gloves. It’s been a busy night for the ol’ bull.

This is a quickie post to say that Pig is actually a little hard on my heart. lol Seriously, I can’t count the number of times since getting him I’d be running along and he’d lag behind, falling off-screen. Being a natural paladin, seeing just my avatar is nothing odd to me. What is odd is Pig suddenly catching up with me. At least four times in the last 12 hours I’ve had an “OMG something’s attacking me!… oh, it’s just Pig” moment. I’ve also had several, “Wait!! What the hell happened to Pig? He was just… oh, here he is” moments as well.  *sigh* Why can’t I just remember he’s there and not panic when he disappears and then panic again when he shows up?

Pets. The bane of the average class.

Some of you may remember that, sometime about 65 million years ago, I mentioned that I had a Tauren hunter named Lug. Well, I don’t play Lug a whole lot, sadly, for reasons unknown. I think it’s partially because I like playing Gavelier so much, but it may be also because of my now-ingrained anti-Horde mentality from all of the Horde raids Gav has been witness to in his 75 levels (oops, spoiler!). I do like playing as Lug; I enjoy the hunter style and I like the Tauren race the most out of the Horde’s cast of creeps. I also like Mulgore, the Tauren homeland. Well, I logged back in to night, spurred by an article on WoW Insider on hunter pets. I was inspired to get Lug a new pet; a Tenacity pet. He had a tallstrider named Stridy, but the article suggested that a tenacity pet was more my style, and tallstriders are ferocity pets. What I needed was a pet to tank for me, since I could dish out plenty of damage myself.

I wanted a turtle at first, but I couldn’t find any low enough a level, so I was going to hunt for a crocolisk on the shores of the river between Durator and the Barrens. As I left Ogrimmar, however, I saw a boar. He was kinda dumpy, real pale and only level 9, but he was there. I looked up boars as far as hunters’ pets on Wowhead, and I saw that they ate nearly anything, and were also tenacity pets. I suddenly wanted no other pet; I didn’t really want a crocolisk anyway, and I couldn’t catch a turtle, but it was more then that. This… pig was calling me. I tamed him on the spot and he instantly was made level 10. I took the boar, now named Pig, to the Barrens to level him up. Before long, Pig was level 15 like me, and soon after, he and I hit 16. We were a little wrecking crew across the Barrens. We completed all of the quests in my log, and then some, finally following a quest line back into Mulgore. There, we wrapped up all of the quests I left there, as well. As we frolicked back down a hill, coming from a quest to kill Supervisor Fizsprocket of the Venture Company and get his clipboard, I snapped the above picture. I also hit level 17 while out and about tonight. Lug and Pig; this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

Meet Lug, and his tallstrider, Stridy. I hope that they become my Horde figures of this blog, like Gav represents the Alliance. He’s actually my first toon ever, the only character I made before Gav. He currently sits at level 15, and while his equipment is kinda pathetic (mostly self-made beginner leather worker stuff), he did have one stroke of luck.

While level 11, Stridy and I were doing quests, killing Prairie Wolf Alphas and Flatland Prowlers when I noticed a wolf that was slightly larger then the rest, and colored a pale blueish white. He was the rare Ghost Howl, and as it turned out, he left me a quest when killed that netted me a nice new gun, my first upgrade in that area. I’ve since improved to a Hunter’s Muzzle Loader, but that gun held special significance to me, since it was one of my first nice quest rewards.