Aaaanyway.. Surely you came to this post for the keywords ‘great hosting’ and ‘win a Squishable’. If you haven’t heard of Squishable then where have you been? They are adorable! See?

This is one of many of the adorable (and massive) huggable Squishables you could win if you sign up for Safe Shark Hosting before the 25th of May – next Friday. Interested? Great.

Safe Shark Hosting will host anybody looking for a reliable host for their WordPress hosted blog. Yes gamers, readers, fashionistas, mummiesⁱ.. anybody. There is a free hosting plan, but you must sign up for one of the paid hosting plans to be in with a chance to win one of these adorable Squishables, and honestly guys, looking at the pricings and what you get for them, it’s worth paying for a hosting plan with this wonderful host. I know the guy who provides the plans, and I know many many happy hostees. He’s happy to help with moves, you won’t have to worry about downtime, it’s affordable and reliable, there is great support if you ever need it, and not to mention the onsite blog giving tips and ideas for WordPress bloggers. You won’t regret it. In fact, if I wasn’t already hosted by a friend, I’d definitely jump at the chance.

For all of the details head over here.

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• Thoughts and ponderings
• Do Excuse The Mess..
• What Do You Guys Like Seeing Here?

1. or mommies I guess for you international folk

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Note on Spoilers: I am discussing the upcoming Mists of Pandaria expansion in this post. I will use spoiler tags for any images I link to but if you don’t want to know anything until release, best avoid this post. And rest assured, I will always make sure to keep Jaedia’s Menagerie a spoiler safe zone to the best of my abilities!

So far I have been entirely underwhelmed regarding the Mists of Pandaria expansion. I never really cared much for the Panda folk myself and if Cataclysm taught me anything, it is that I’ve grown a little tired of World of Warcraft. I must admit that Harvest Moon has helped a lot with rekindling my passion for the game, but today the NDA has been lifted and my other half told me a few of the new things and I’m actually really excited about the upcoming expansion now. Going into it not only with a guild I love but also with things to look forward to is going to be great. There is so much information being released today that I can’t go into everything so do check out MMO Champion, though I imagine you already have, but here are a few of my own thoughts. I’ll do a click-through to make sure there’s nothing too spoilery on my main page.

The Female Panda Model

We’d already seen the silhouette of course, but today we finally get to see the finished female Panda model. Honestly? I didn’t care much about seeing it. Female models are usually pretty underwhelming in my honest opinion, and when it’s a humanised animal of some kind… Just tends to creep me out. I’m looking at you, Worgens. But actually I really think I could happily play female Panda! They’re not at all overly sexualised, in fact, they’re pretty teddy bear cute and don’t look utterly ridiculous.

I really like it. What do you think?

Punching Garrosh in the Face

I hate Garrosh. Hate him. When I was told that something would happen between Wrath and Cataclysm’s release to make us like him, I waited with baited breath. I wondered what they could possibly do to make us like this utter douchebag. It never came! I still hate him and I’m a Hordie. I actually think that may even have been part of why I didn’t enjoy Cataclysm that much. Not the main thing, by any means, but hating your main faction leader is pretty uncool to say the least.

But now: The final patch of Mists of Pandaria will be the Siege of Orgrimmar! Both factions lay siege to the city to bring Garrosh down and end his reign of Warchief. (source: MMO Champion) 

Finally! We get to punch Garrosh in his stupid, pompous Orc face! He’s too naïve and hotheaded to be a faction leader and I for one will be glad to see him gone. I can’t frickin’ wait.

The Simple Things

Of course, you might have guessed I’d be most interested in the Pet Battles and we’ve already had a lot of information regarding these and they sound like awesome fun. I’m particularly looking forward to being able to use all of my pets on all characters! I’ve wanted that since The Burning Crusade since I had the Spirit of Competition pet on my Paladin and nobody else. Today we hear: PvP pet battles are going to be fun and causal, only tracking the number of wins and not the number of losses. When fighting another player, you cannot see the other players name or communicate with them. (source: MMO Champion) That’s kind of cool, I guess. But it’s always nice to make friends when taking part in things like this. As long as we’re able to battle against friends and acquaintances though, I’m okay with that.

AOE looting!!! And an 11th character slot! Hoshit guys. As I said, it’s the simple things, but these are two things that World of Warcraft needed. Ever since I came back to WoW from playing Rift I’ve craved AoE looting because it’s such a pain farming old instances and holding everybody up with sparkly clicking. And exactly how long have players been requesting more character slots?

Finally, we’ll see Warlocks changed again. I’ve struggled to play mine in Cataclysm with how over-complicated it became so I’m pretty over the moon about that. I’m really looking forward to seeing how they play once the changes go live.

No new race models are ready to be added yet. (source: MMO Champion) YET! This is promising. There are some really awesome Elven models these days that we can see on NPCs but can’t use ourselves and I would love a much curvier Night Elf.

There is just so much information at once, I can’t possibly comment on everything that had me bouncing around the living room, but rest assured, I am now fully excited for the Mists of Pandaria and I even want to read the pre-Panda book. I want to read how Garrosh makes Jaina snap and everything that happens. I don’t usually enjoy the tie-in books but this sounds like such a fantastic story arc that I’ll have to.

What’s got you guys the most excited?

Related Posts:

• The (Possibly) Beginning of the End
• Thoughts on the Shinies
• More interesting Cataclysm updates

© Jaedia for Jaedia's Menagerie, 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | If you liked this post, leave a comment!

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So I logged in.. was it Friday night? I can’t remember but I decided that rather than reading I’d pop in and play my Hunter. I did one Well of Eternity with a group of douches and remembered why I don’t generally enjoy Hunter since the change to focus. I keep hoping that my dislike of it is just a phase but alas! So as I’d been levelling Soupdragon (now on Ghostlands) to play with the awesome folk of Harvest Moon, I decided to pop on her for a little bit instead and continue with Uldum, maybe do a couple of instances.

As it were, badleeroybrown (aka. Lee) offered to run me through a few dungeons and a couple others joined us (I believe ronee was there for a little bit), and when they had to go, Juice joined us and we got on Mumble and generally had a laugh.

I could ramble on about how we did more instances and I got to 85 and did CoC (mm.. CoC..), but I don’t think there’s any need for that. I’m really enjoying my time in Harvest Moon. Reliq has done an amazing job getting this guild together and I have to say, hats off to him! I know it wasn’t easy but it has some great people. There’s an awesome atmosphere, it’s fun, it’s social, people help each other, there’s no elitism (unless the pug Shaman only manages 800 dps in a heroic in which case: wtf?! Not that that’s elitism because.. really?!) and they’ve somehow convinced me that in fact, yes, I should raid. Bunch of enablers, I tell you! The raiding team may even need a tank and/or a Rogue. Fancy that! *nudge* No Death Knights though. Nope. *cough*

And there may also have been a slight failure of a Sunwell group. We’re clever! Apparently Kalecgos is bugged and only summons the portal once at the moment.. so after a little while spent pole dancing we just hearthed. And yes. There are only 3 of us. But we’re totally sexy.

As for Soupdragon, she has been working on unlocking helm and shoulder enchants as I don’t have any of those unlocked on Ghostlands, and gearing up as best she can. She had the dps helm from End Time taken from her by a well geared tank and disenchanted right in her face (which actually really upset me ), she got the melee trinket from Well of Eternity (yayyyy!), and she helped out Dan with a couple of things as well. I really missed Soup. And I’m really excited to see Softthistle back playing a little as well! That might have been my fault. Silly Scroll of Resurrection.

What do you think of her transmog set at the moment? I squeed and ran to the PvP vendor when I heard that they’d added Brutal Gladiator’s for Death Knights because I always love those sets but I’m still slowly working on it. Shall do a little post about it when I get chance to! I have been meaning to. Hopefully you’ll be hearing a little more of Soup’s antics.

Related Posts:

• I Have 2 Death Knights and I Love Them Equally
• The Joy of a New Alt
• Kalithe and the Two Tribes

© Jaedia for Jaedia's Menagerie, 2012. | Permalink | 4 comments | If you liked this post, leave a comment!

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So, Seithir. She’s not my first character.. my first character would have been much more interesting, actually, considering the race change, but Seithir is definitely my longest running character, and has been my main for the longest amount of time of any character.

TBC

Yeah. I did a lot of Aldor bank afking in TBC.

Oh who left that there?! That’s not me with that Gnome that’s.. err.. yeah okay, me and Imnotshort may have had a short stint. But it really meant something, guys! And don’t tell him but he was, in fact, rather short.

So, the earliest known screenshot I have of Seithir is thus:

This must have been around level 20ish, looking at my gear. RFC robe, shoulders (zomg), and the staff from the end group quest in Ghostlands. What I’m doing in The Barrens remains to be seen but I’m sure I was quite smitten with my new main actually having flesh on her elbows.

And at level 70:

She looked liked that for a large part of TBC until she finally got the full BT/Hyjal set, of which I can’t find a screenshot of her wearing, oddly enough, but I did always like this screenshot of me in my healing gear and Lew (the friend who hosts my blogs) playing around with Holy Nova.

And you really want to see my TBC UI? Are you sure? *cringe* My UI is constantly undergoing change. Even back then. But here’s an action shot from a BT run…

The worst part? I didn’t see what the problem was!! At least my bars had the right spells on them I guess. But why I had 2 raid frames is beyond me. I guess I hadn’t discovered Clique yet.

Wrath

This is the best screenshot from Wrath that I could find of my Priest.. hmm..

But here is my UI:

At least I understood it was messy this time, but I was cool with it! I kind of miss those profile bars. They looked cool.

And just for funsies:

Oh Steve, I miss you.ⁱ

Cata

We all know that I have played WoW a lot less in Cataclysm and calmed down a lot but I’m still going, and looking back on these screenshots has only reminded me of why I loved this game. It has always been the people, and once you remove the people and replace them with people who could quite happily called trade chat their guild.. well it takes all of the fun out of it. So I play a lot more casually these days and here is my Priest currently.

Transmog has changed a lot for me. I’m so much more comfortable playing around with different pieces of gear. As you can see in the picture from TBC, I was a Tailor and that gear was irreplaceable until Tier 6. I didn’t get to run around in Tier 4 because it just wasn’t good and Tier 5 was hard to get, so I’m finally using the Tier 4 I’ve always loved and that gorgeous halo. I do have further ideas for this set, but you shall have to watch this space for that!

And my UI currently.. this is the best in combat screenshot I could find. I wish I had better but apparently I don’t screenshot my UI so much these days. I do use Quartz though and I’ve lessened how much Forte shows once again. I’ve always liked having the information I need in front of me, which is why my action bars are always full.

Well I think we can all agree that not as much love has gone into it as my Wrath UI but I REALLY hate designing my UI. REALLY. Spending the time on it makes me tear my hair out and when it goes wrong I just want to scream. Perhaps it’s reminiscent of how my love for the game has waned, or perhaps it just shows I’d rather put my time into playing. I couldn’t say, but that’s my ‘Then and Now’ for Seithir, who I didn’t play as much in Wrath as I thought I did. But I can assure you that she will always be the character that I am most attached to.

Whether I’m still playing in a year or not is beyond me, I might be, I might not be, but in retrospect, I don’t regret a single one of those days that I was playing. I thought I might when I eventually come to quit, but I’ve had some wonderful memories with this game and if I never played and took a chance, I wouldn’t be with my wonderful fiancé now who I have been with for over 4 years now. World of Warcraft will always mean a lot to me.

Related Posts:

• “Sixth”
• That New Content Feeling
• Through Your Interface: Player Housing

1. Steve is the rhino.

© Jaedia for Jaedia's Menagerie, 2012. | Permalink | 6 comments | If you liked this post, leave a comment!

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Once upon a time, there was a girl who played WoW. For realz. She had played a Shadow Priest for much of her known life and her mana battery ways were loved throughout the guilds. But Ulduar called and her guild worked her hard. Too hard. She had to raid daily for more hours than she could bear and after a while she cried, “Enough!” And she just walked away. The guild were distraught but it had to be done, for she had a calling elsewhere. A Dragon of Soup whom had been recalled by Arthas himself needed her and thus she picked up this purple haired Night Elf and rode into the depths of Hellfire Peninsula whereupon she immediately fell in love. It wasn’t easy. The girl wasn’t much for melee, but she found her calling in Unholy and the commoners cried for her deeps. She played this Soupdragon long and hard and it wasn’t until another guild called for her Huntering ways that she had to put the purple haired Night Elf, who had by now regained some of her former glory, to one side. But she never forgot her, or the little piggy that followed her around. She came back to her every now and then to give her little gifts. A mount. A title. Some shiny new armour.

The months passed. Deathwing broke free and the girl realised that Soupdragon‘s glory could help nobody now and thus she picked up the small white haired Blood Elf, Kalithe, to help her friends. Here she found her calling in Frost and together they swept the bad guys to one side and learned the ropes well. While the girl still had her Shadow Priest and her Hunter to worry about, she knew where her heart really lay, and she rode out with Kalithe whenever she was able, proclaiming that she had two mains! Yes. Two. They worked well together and the girl grew fond of the white haired Blood Elf and her high damaging ways.

However, in a distant land, her friends cried for help, and a Blood Elf just wasn’t going to cut it. All she could do was bring the Dragon of Soup from her slumber to once again own some face. She picked up a large sword and gave her back her Unholy personality, but this time, nobody was being abandoned. The girl had two Death Knights and she didn’t care who knew about it. For Death Knight is clearly the superior class.

Related Posts:

• Soupee Finally Dinged!
• Fantasmical Friday #3
• Fantasmical Friday #2

© Jaedia for Jaedia's Menagerie, 2012. | Permalink | 4 comments | If you liked this post, leave a comment!

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With this feature, the above scenario plays out a bit differently. When there’s too much traffic on one server, your character will be temporarily sent to a different server. Once you’ve reached the front of the queue, you’ll be asked if you want to transfer back to your original server, and voila: home, sweet home. Any progress made on the overflow server will be carried back to the home server, so you can even be productive while you’re waiting in a queue.

Source: Massively.

Related Posts:

• Guild Wars 2 and Hype?
• Why I Don’t Raid: Part 2
• Why I Don’t Raid: Part 1

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Yeah I’m hugely excited for Guild Wars 2 and I guess some of you will see that as me being a part of the so-called “hype”. Sorry, but I’ve been waiting for this game since I quit WoW in February 2011 over a year ago and so yeah, I’m pretty damn excited. And as such you can expect a few posts around here about the game as I’m not limiting myself on the Menagerie to just posts about WoW anymore, I decided that a long time ago I just hadn’t really played anything else recently. If you’re interested in Guild Wars please do follow me. I have signed up for the beta (*touch wood*) and I’m hoping to read the books which I’ll most likely review here rather than my book blog as my book blog readers most likely won’t be interested in those. I’m hoping to blog a little about my thoughts and adventures in the game and I will still be playing WoW as well so there’ll hopefully be a mix. Ideally, I’d like this to be an MMO blog rather than a WoW blog it just depends on time and money constraints as I am primarily a reader and book blogger still.

I’m just trying to work out which race/profession combination to go for. I usually go for a red haired human Magey character, so that would be a Norn Elementalist I believe? But there are so many cool looking races and professions (classes), including Ranger, Mesmer, Necromancer… And will I enjoy the PvP or will I prefer PvE or perhaps a healthy mix of both? Will I have time to play a little Guild Wars before the release with everything else going on? There’s so much to work out and look forward to, I can’t wait.

And if you haven’t heard much about Guild Wars 2, though I imagine by now you will have, here are a couple of videos that initially garnered my interest:

Related Posts:

• No More Queues
• New Map and Mails Animation
• My Dream MMO

© Jaedia for Jaedia's Menagerie, 2012. | Permalink | No comments | If you liked this post, leave a comment!

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• Go into your image folder
• Open the sixth sub-folder and choose the sixth image.
• Publish the image! (and a few words wouldn’t hurt, though I dare say I couln’t stop a blogger from adding a few words of their own).
• Challenge six new bloggers.
• Link to them.

Umm… how did this get there? *shifty eyes*

I ended up in my Burning Crusade folder and this was the sixth image in there! There were many, many better though, I dare say. Ha. This was during a ZA run back in my first guild, Capo, around the time it was dying admittedly but we still had a bit of fun at this point. The dead Blood Elf had “disconnected”. Myself and the cow are apparently voyeurs. *shrug* Go figure!

I challenge.. (and oh GOD it’s hard to pick 6 people)

1. Fulguralis
2. Rades
3. Laeleiweyn
4. Ophelie
5. Ironyca
6. Cynwise

Related Posts:

• Then and Now: Seithir Edition
• Through Your Interface: Player Housing
• Through Your Interface: Favourite Hangout

© Jaedia for Jaedia's Menagerie, 2012. | Permalink | 12 comments | If you liked this post, leave a comment!

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So fess up. Who heard the squeals of glee last night when I got my bear and Dan told me to /mountspecial? And an even louder squeal when he told me to try pressing space bar? Because I was pretty darn gleeful about the fucking DANCING BEAR!

And a close-up.

Who needs a baer druid when your mount dances for you?

Related Posts:

• That New Content Feeling
• Venomhide Ravasaur
• Two Parts

© Jaedia for Jaedia's Menagerie, 2012. | Permalink | 6 comments | If you liked this post, leave a comment!

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Those of you who’ve followed me for any length of time, either on Twitter or through this blog, will know that I’m a bit of an altoholic. Perhaps less so this expansion (would you believe that I’ve only managed to get 3 of my characters to 85 after my seven level 80s in Wrath?) but even so, I do like to mix up my World of Warcraft play time a little bit and trying different classes is a great way to go about that. I even post about them a lot, heck, they have their own category!

So for ages I’ve been missing the blue side of the fence. The red side is great, don’t get me wrong, I do love my Blood Elves and their great and terrifying city and my insane little Goblin folk and the cow people, but I’ve always been a little more blue than I am red. (Is this sounding like some kind of communist vs. capitalist thought chain to anybody else?) My characters on Terenas have pretty much been abandoned because I don’t feel like I have a place there any more. The server itself feels.. off and poor little Soupdragon is left on her own at level 82. So when I mentioned on Twitter that I felt like playing Alliance side one day and Rel popped up all, “Come play with me and Wabby!!” I was like.. well yeah why not? And as weird as I find their overpriced and max-level-epic-lacking auction house, Ghostlands seems like a pretty nice server as far as servers go.

I didn’t take too long to decide that it was time I levelled a Mage. I’ve always been kind of drawn to the class but it’s one of those that I get really into for a few levels then something shiny grabs my attention and it’s left for a while.. rinse and repeat, so this time, I’m going to do it and I’m loving it. She had to be a Draenei. Duh. *waggle* And she had to have my name. As I’m playing her a lot at the moment, she has her own part in the sidebar where you can see what she’s upto and she’s featured in the header because.. well Blood Elves eyes are closed in my version of WoW Model Viewer and that looked stupid so yeah.

I do already have a Mage at 67 on my main server but I.. I don’t like my main server. It’s a PvP server, which I can’t stand, it’s full of the type of people you really don’t enjoy grouping with.. basically, Vashj EU is that server. The one that when you get somebody from the realm in your random dungeon finder groups you can’t help but think, “Oh god, not somebody from that server.” You know the ones I’m sure. But myself and Dan have a bunch of our characters there so you know. Still, I don’t enjoy levelling there very much or playing there so it’s doubtful that Twylite (another reason I don’t really play her) will ever get much further than 67. So Jaedia the.. well I was going to say third but if you count other MMOs I suppose it’s more like Jaedia the 7th, was born.

So anyway, the first order of the day was of course to get the feck out of the Draenei starting zone which by now I hate with a bitter passion and then rustle up enough gold to get by on this new server. Rel had invited my Mage into his guild, Harvest Moon (of which I’m determined to get to level 25 FOR TEH LIONS :3 ..that and I’d love to help get a few more members for the 10 man team and maybe some friendly social folk), and a couple of his lovely friends offered me a little help. I didn’t really want to ask for gold because that’s easy enough but bag space I was struggling with so they sent me a few bags. <3 That was a massive help. And then I went off and sold the Moongraze Tenderloin recipe for 500g, a couple of moths, a few cats and a Moss Agate or two and hey presto I had 800g before I’d made it to level 30. I’m down to 400g now but that was the whole point of making the gold in the first place.

I had to question Twitter on what to spec because I’m now a bit clueless. It was always Frost before and I’ve been semi-absent from the game for so long I just wasn’t sure. The general consensus seems to be that Frost is great for solo play but Arcane is fun as hell especially in a group situation and considering I do use the random dungeon finder a lot while levelling, that’s what I went with. It is pretty damn fun, especially now that I’ve talked myself out of using Arcane Missiles unless very oom and am actually able to keep up on the meters a little now. And the grouping is.. unusual. I’ve had to deal with the very silent, the very bad, the very weird (see: picture of horny guy in Gnomer), and the rare group that’s actually been a little friendly. At 34, nearing 35, I’m getting to the sort of level where you bump into folk who would like to run a few dungeons with the same semi-competent group and I’ve had a couple of those now (even if one of the tanks was called “Battyboy” and the other turned out to be stoned according to his friend).

I’ve also had to look at actually levelling professions as I go. I tend to find it easier to do that than pick them up later on. And instead of taking the easy option of dual-gathering professions and sell the results, I picked up Tailoring and Enchanting. So considering my lack of heirlooms, that’s clearly led to a lot of focus on getting my Robe of Power. I probably didn’t need to, sure, but once I decided I was going for it, I was bloody determined even if it did mean buying a bunch of 20g stacks of Wool and Silk. I mentioned the scary Ghostlands auction house, right? Well I finally completed my robe last night and ran a couple of dungeons and she is totally badass. I’m really enjoying this Mage and her transmog set is going to be fab!

An early idea after playing with MogIt

Related Posts:

• Positive PuG
• Soupee Finally Dinged!
• NICEST Pug

© Jaedia for Jaedia's Menagerie, 2012. | Permalink | 4 comments | If you liked this post, leave a comment!

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