Things have been a bit slow from me lately. In part due to "irl" issues getting in the way of posting. And partly because the fact that the new World of Warcraft expansion coming up fast has made me shift into high gear to resolve some of the things that I wanted to wrap up in the current Cataclysm expansion before Mists of Pandaria hits in September.

I don't imagine many people will care, but this would hardly be the first time I've written about my MMO adventures, so I'm going to do what I want. I still don't have much feedback for this blog to go on -- so truthfully I don't know what anyone is liking or not liking here so far.

Anyways. Folks who know me well know that I'm a huge fan of mount collection in WoW. It's "my thing" and while I'm not a world-class master of it, it is the root of my enjoyment within the game. And with most mounts going account-wide next expansion, it seemed time to really buckle down and try to expand on my collection.

So with mounts becoming account-wide I can try once per week on each capable character I have to get the drop. The drop chance is, of course, abysmal. But I've always been of the mindset that "Luck needs only to play in your favor once" so any week could be the winning try. Lots and lots of disappointment eventually (hopefully) leads to success.

In this case it finally did.

The character I was playing isn't even level capped and couldn't kill the boss alone. My girlfriend was nice enough to slaughter everything for me. To our total shock, the mount finally dropped after all these years and she passed it to me. I help her farm up other mounts each week, so I guess it balances out. But I'm still super thankful and this makes the horse all the more special. I can't wait until the coming update flags this one as account-wide so that I can ride it around on my main character.

Of course we have other targets we go after on a weekly basis, as I said. We return to Wrath of the Lich King content to kill Malygos and Onyxia (because who doesn't love killing internet dragons?). I've seen Onyxia's mount drop but never won it. And while I own the Blue Drake from Malygos, the Azure Drake escaped me. My girlfriend and I had agreed that if Blue drops, she gets it. If Azure drops, I get it. And we've been farming him for quite some time without any luck.

In the wee hours of the morning I posted on the mount collector's thread on the official forums (lots of cool people there who provide emotional support and share stories of triumphs and failure. Great little community for our niche) and one of the other regular posters (who goes by Dakall) offered to help my crappily geared Death Knight take down Malygos so I would get a bonus drop chance for the week.

Mind you, this person doesn't know me outside the forum and doesn't even play on my server. Heck, her main is Horde and mine is Alliance. But she still went well out of her way just to help me. Some people are just awesome like that.

So my very badly geared DK tank and Dakall's Feral Druid alt spend forever fighting Malygos. It was much more rough than it usually is on my Hunter. But Dakall pulled through and brought us a win. I technically helped; but my damage was terrible so aside from providing some minor healing and DPS I wasn't ultra useful. So, to my utter shock:

Another case of the kindness of others helping me succeed where I otherwise could not have. I told Dakall that I owed her a favor and when she couldn't think of anything immediately that I could help with in exchange, I said that surely at some point during the next expansion I'd be able to find some way to lend a hand. At the very least, I hope that helping me out like this led to lots of good karma on her own mount collecting efforts.

Not everything is about mounts, though. As I may have mentioned before, I was once a part of WoW-Achievements.com back before the site was run into the gutter. And I was there primarily to talk about collectible mini-pets. I love me some vanity pets. And this is my most recent addition:

My guild officially stopped raiding until Mists of Pandaria launches. While I don't claim to be an amazing raider, I do get bored when I don't have things to shoot at. It especially irks me to feel geared up and not have places to use my acquired equipment. So I started looking for things to occupy myself with on OpenRaid -- a website made for people like me who want to raid but can't find a group to run with. With them I was able to find a great raid leader on another server and cross-server raid with them. Yeah, you can do that now.

It took a few nights but under the excellent leadership of a guy who goes by "Hairformen" I managed to wrap up all the achievements necessary to obtain the Drake of the East Wind. Which involved doing a ton of the entry level Cataclysm raid content that no one on my server wanted to do. So thanks a ton to OpenRaid for giving me the chance to do fights that I couldn't have done otherwise. Going back and fighting a bunch of the bosses that I missed the first time around felt like a great way to say farewell to the expansion. And the mount is a rather beautiful memento of good times with new friends from other servers.

Further challenges await but I don't think I'll be able to achievement my goals. I don't have the mounts from the high tier Cataclysm raid bosses. Namely, Ragnaros and Deathwing's Heroic mount drops. I don't anticipate ever getting them. But that doesn't stop me from trying. Sadly, I can't cross-server raid Deathwing's instance because Blizzard doesn't allow that. I can raid Ragnaros but it's very hard to get a group willing to bring me since I have yet to kill him (and thus, can't prove to raid leaders that I'm capable of killing him). It kind of drives me up the wall because I've been 2% of his HP bar away from a kill.

The drop rates for those two specific mounts will likely be severely altered in the near future. So time is running out. I won't give up hope on H Rag's mount but prospects look grim. But who knows. If I've learned anything from my recent adventures it's that there are wonderful, helpful people out there willing to give me a chance. So it isn't beyond the realm of possibility that I'll find a way to get that last mount I have my eye on.

And that is more or less what I've been doing recently. I know this post will likely only appeal to other WoW players, and even then they might not even care. But that is what I've been up to lately, so it seemed worth sharing my story.

I'll see you guys with something a bit more traditional next time. Oh, and don't forget about that Terraria contest!

~PuppetShowJustice