Destroyer

This action series was brought to you by Deathwing, <Aspect of Death>.

Apologies for the image-heavy post.

Colossal

Click the image for a 1600 by 900px wallpaper image.

Twin Colossals, Feralas

Want to see more pretty pictures? Visit R&R's Gallery Page.

Lunar Festival: New locations in Kalimdor

Due to the Cataclysm, some of the Elders' locations have changed.

I took Aefa for a run around Kalimdor tonight, and I must say things are made much easier by the ability to fly from place to place rather than taking taxis and riding.

I used the Horde guide on Wow-Pro as a basic guide. All Kalimdor locations are still correct, apart from the following:

• Orgrimmar - no longer in the Valley of Wisdom, but up near the zeppelin towers.
• Darkshore - the Elder from Auberdine has moved north to Lor'danel, coords 50,19.
• Barrens - the Elder from Camp Taurajo has moved slightly north to Vendetta Point.
• Thousand Needles - the Elder at the Mirage Speedway is now on the Speedbarge, at 77,75

I haven't visited all the Eastern Kingdoms locations, but most seem to be in areas that weren't badly affected by the Shattering so I would assume they are still accurate.  Please comment if they aren't!

Reminder: Lunar Festival

The Lunar Festival begins today!

This festival is a favourite of Druids of all types as the centre of festivities is Moonglade, but there will be Elders all over the world in towns and cities for you to honour.

You can find more information about the achievements associated with the festival at Wowhead.

Getting around to the Elders
NOTE:  Visiting the Elders is now purely an activity for achievement chasers or costume collectors.  In previous years, the Elders awarded experience or money for max level toons - now sadly, those rewards have been removed.

But there are still plenty of achievements to complete and if your toon is high enough, you can also earn the title of Elder. Last year there was an Elder in Heroic Gundrak so level 80 was required to complete all the achievements.

Due to the changes to Horde and Alliance towns all over Azeroth, there are likely to be some changes to the locations and optimal routes for visiting Elders. Keep an eye on the Wowhead guide and on Wowpedia for the updated information.

Just remember, while you're out and about visiting the Elders - be respectful.

Sand Drift

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Orsis, Uldum

Want to see more pretty pictures? Visit R&R's Gallery Page.

Intermission

You may have noticed things are a little quieter around here than usual. That's not just from the floods or because we lost power for a few days either.

There will be a bit of a lull in my Druid-related posting for a little while. I haven't been actually playing Wow all that much - I've been logging in, but pottering around doing Archeology and random other stuff, rather than actively gearing up or pushing my guildies to do so.

It's a little burn out, and some stress. I only have six weeks of work left now before I go on maternity leave, so things are pretty hectic there. Add to that natural disasters plus the drama of getting everything ready for a baby and you have one rather stressed Tauren. So, I'm cutting back with the Druidy posting to encourage myself to calm down and get on with things.  Do please forgive me.

I'll still be around, but it might just be wallpaper posts for a little while ;)

<3

Submerged City

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Ruins of Vashj'ir, Shimmering Expanse.

This shot is in honour of my own city, which is suffering some watery destruction of its own right now. We are reasonably close to the action with the nearest flooding to us about 400m away, but I am happy to report that Mr Ang and I and our families are all high, dry and safe.  Others... are not so lucky.

Want to see more pretty pictures? Visit R&R's Gallery Page.

Lifebloom and Grid

Now that Lifebloom is one of a Druid's main healing spells again, its important that we are able to keep track of it. There was a post on Murloc Parliament the other day detailing a few different ways to do it and today I'd like to share how I've set mine up.

We can only have Lifebloom on one person at a time, and we are trying to keep three stacks rolling using Nourish, Healing Touch or just by refreshing with Lifebloom. For this reason, I needed to know the following things in my Grid:

• Who has Lifebloom?
• How many stacks?
• Duration remaining

Happily, this is fairly straightforward in Grid. You don't even need any extra Grid addons.

Firstly, I set the centre icon to show Lifebloom stacks.

In the Status tab, select Buff: Lifebloom in the menu then make sure that "Show if mine" and "Show duration" are selected.

When I started using this in dungeons, I realised that poison, curse, magic and disease icons also appear in the centre of Grid squares, covering the Lifebloom icon. I use decursive for my debuff removal, so I just went back into the Indicators tab for Grid, switched off the debuffs for the "Center Icon" and stuck them on the "Bottom Side" location as little dots (you need GridSideIndicators to do this). Now they still show up in Grid, but they don't overlap my Lifebloom indicator.

To help me notice when Lifebloom is close to bloom, I'm trying out a Power Aura showing the icon and a timer when the duration is less than four seconds. Once I get a better feel for the timing I'll probably turn it off, and if I'm managing to roll on more than one target it will screw up a bit, but until I'm used to healing again it's helping me out.

If you'd like to use it, you can import this string directly into your Power Auras:

Version:4.9; InvertAuraBelow:4; icon:INV_Misc_Herb_Felblossom; buffname:Lifebloom; owntex:true; isResting:0; mine:true; groupOrSelf:true; size:0.27; y:116; timer.h:1.45; timer.enabled:true; timer.y:114; timer.x:-9

How do you track Lifebloom?  I'm interested in hearing other people's methods!

Further Information

• For great help with setting up Grid, Murloc Parliament has loads of information.
• More Power Auras for Healing

Moonkin Power Auras updated

Just a quickie today to let you know that I've updated my Power Auras for Moonkin page.

I've added a couple of extras and changed the way the Eclipse auras work slightly. I'm still working on the healing auras - watch this space.

Guardians

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Guardians in Uldum.

Want to see more pretty pictures? Visit R&R's Gallery Page.

Drought and Flooding Rains

Photo from http://www.couriermail.com.au/

I apologise for the non-WoW material today, but I just wanted to get this out there.

If you read this blog there's a good chance you also read Tree Bark Jacket, so you may have already read Keeva's post about the floods in Queensland or seen it on the news.

I'd like to thank those of you who have expressed concern. Mr Ang and I and our families live in Brisbane where thankfully, while we have had plenty of drenching rain, we haven't seen flooding at all yet. For our house to be flooded, a huge number of other houses would be completely under.  The only immediate effects we are personally seeing at the moment are higher food prices and cancelled holidays.

But yes, much of the state is or has been underwater. Parts of north western New South Wales are also flooded.  I have heard several comparisons - the area that has been underwater at some point during the last two weeks is larger than the area of France and Germany combined, larger than Texas, of "biblical proportions". This week, more rain and thunderstorms are predicted in Central and South East Queensland.

Keep in mind that much of Central Queensland is farms and bushland and fairly sparsely populated. Even so, there have been 22 cities and towns and an estimated that have faced isolation, evacuations and inundation over the Christmas and New Year period, with the estimated damage bill tipped to be into the billions of Aussie dollars. Farmers have had to evacuate, leaving their animals behind, not knowing when they will be able to return.

In some towns, such as Bundaberg and Emerald, the waters have already dropped and residents have been able to return to begin the huge clean up task.

Others are still in danger. In the city of Rockhampton, the flood waters were due to peak today at some 9.4 metres, flooding 400 homes and forcing the evacuation of many more of the 75 000 residents. In Rocky and in many more towns, people will remain homeless for weeks, perhaps months as the clean up continues.

How can I help?
If you are able to and would like to help, the Premier of Queensland has an emergency fund that you can donate to at http://www.qld.gov.au/floods/donate.html. If you're unable to or don't want to use your credit card on an overseas site, that's fine too.

Before anyone gets too worried about climate change and so on - this sort of thing does happen from time to time here. Yes, this flood has been record breaking in several ways and has probably been worsened by this year's La Niña effect, but monsoonal flooding happens now and then.  The devastation comes from the number of people that have been affected by this flood across the state, with more likely to be affected as the water moves to the coast and down rivers into the south of Australia.

Thanks for reading. WoW-related material will resume soon.

More Information

• The Courier-Mail has the latest information
• Bureau of Meteorology Flood Warning Centre
• A map of Central and South East Queensland showing affected towns (abc.net.au)

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of drought and flooding rains,

I love her far horizons,

I love her jewel sea,

Her beauty and her terror -

The wide brown land for me.

Excerpt from "My Country" by Dorothea McKellar

Making Merry

Happy New Year to you all!

I've had a great lazy week, this week. I had the whole week off work and in between our social commitments, I've just been mucking around in-game - A few dailies here, a normal dungeon there, leveling my Mage here, leveling Leesah's archaeology there.

I did try to Moonkin a LFD heroic at one point since Leesah's gear is just good enough, but the group wiped at the first boss and everyone left. I was a bit disheartened after that - after all the queues on my server are between 30-45 minutes for DPS.

In general I am just pottering around and enjoying the new things. I have lots of guildies who are 85 now but we haven't had enough heroic-ready people on at the same time to try one out. We've all been busy over the holidays so hopefully in the next few weeks people will be back on at normal times and we can start with the gearing up. Raiding still looks a way off at this stage, but we'll get there.

Making Merry
In the meantime, I got on with some Merrymaking on Leesah! I wasn't going to bother with it since we were going to be pretty busy this week, but after I went into a Tol Barad as a Gnome and got the achievement in one go, I figured the rest of it couldn't be too hard, right?

I managed to pick up the Red Winter Hat in a normal Stonecore, and borrowed the boots off a guildie (top tip - they're not soulbound). The two remaining that were the work of several days, off and on, were [A Frosty Shake] and [Let It Snow]. There just really aren't many people in Dalaran these days, and those who are are level 70-ish alts who aren't likely to be there for snowmannish purposes. I was actually hanging around looking for Allies for the Let It Snow achievement, when lo and behold, there was a snowman before me! Thanks Deenah of Nagrand, you made my day!

/dance

Alliance?  Where Art Thou?
The first problem with [Let It Snow] was getting the snowflakes in the first place.  You get them by blowing kisses to Winter Revelers in the inns of any city or town, but my bags were heavily laden with holly and mistletoe before I got any snowflakes at all!

My first five handfuls were quickly used on the Horde classes around Orgrimmar, but now that we don't have a central location for Horde and Alliance to mingle, the Alliance races proved more tricky.  I picked up a couple of them around Dalaran, but the place was pretty much a ghost town so I decided to try my luck in the non-battle part of Tol Barad. After a few circuits I had only a Gnome Mage remaining.

The problem with Gnomes, is that they are small. By the time I realised a character was a gnome and determined their class, they had usually ridden off into the distance and in any case, the only gnomes I found were Warlocks for some reason. I went through two Tol Barad battles and a Wintergrasp, but PvP battles are just so furious and Gnomes are kind of lost in the spell effects.

After the second Tol Barad battle, I was riding back out across the bridge for another loop around the Peninsula when I spied a Gnome, riding in the other direction! A Gnome Mage, in fact! I gave chase while I found the snowflakes in my bag, and must have just managed to hit him with it before he rode out of range.

Have you got a favourite place for finding the opposite faction now that Dalaran is no longer populated?  Do share!