BIG RED KITTY

Our friend and mentor, Daniel "Big Red Kitty" has decided to step away from WoW for awhile so he can dedicate himself to his family.
/applaud!
Please join this thread to convince Blizzard to acknowledge our friend in game.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=16019894052&sid=1

We'll miss you Daniel but we will be here when you want to return!

xoxo,
Chaaron and Matty

Naxx and The Spirit Beast

We maintained a steady third place on the deeps chart. I'd have loved to be number one but a solid third is just fine for us casual raiders.
Matty kicked some ass and did dps I was proud of.

We took out Maexxna, even though the Torn Web Wrapping we wanted did not drop.



We moved on to The Military Quarter and wrapped up the evening with Patchwerk.




We tried unsuccessfully to take down Gluth. It was my and Matty's first time and we just couldn't get the hang of trying to kite the Zombie Chows around and keeping them away from Gluth. Maybe next time.

Thanks to our guildmates for the invite to Naxx, hope to try again one night soon!

Kill Shot Crit for 9151

I'm still a bit new with understanding crit numbers and trying to get the highest crit and highest hit rating possible. I refuse to respec or dual spec and will always have Loque'nahak as my pet.
I think a Kill Shot crttting for 9151 is pretty damn good though !

Tiriana is a Whelp

I felt a bit guilty as I offered my dear friend Tiriana a piece of Magic Eater. I knew something would happen to her as she took it without question and sat down and nommed it.
She was so trusting, so innocent - and then *poof* she was an Emerald Whelpling!
She gleefully glided around, spun in circles and darted about. I cackled like an undead knowing it was temporary and no harm would actually befall my friend.
She was a whelpling for 30 seconds but the memory will last much longer!
We love you Tir !!!

When Fantasy Meets Reality

March 17 is my IRL wedding anniversary.
My beloved decided to say this in a guild raid (orange text)
And then we posed for some in game wedding pictures-



Happy 5th Anniversary to my beloved bear butt!

Matty and I love you baby

Mount Farming

Matty helps to down Anzu every single day

My new ride

We downed the Infinite Corruptor with less than a minute to spare! It was an incredible run.

Game Etiquette

Whatever happened to manners? I'm sure I'm not the only one who experiences in-game rudeness. Rude behavior may be a bit harsh, perhaps it is best to state that sometimes other players just don't think before they act.

How about we establish some general in game rules of etiquette to follow? It's pretty basic stuff but here is what would make me a lot happier and a lot less stressed-

• If you want to whisper hello in game, that's fine, I love when my friends come on line and greet me.
• If you want to ask me some long winded question, please check to see if I am in a dungeon, raid or otherwise concentration required situation.
• If I am in a raid, please do not whisper me 4 sentences and expect a reply. A quick, "Have question, reply when you can." will do just fine.

By "random player" I am referring to someone who is not in my guild, not on my friends list and never have played with before:

• If you're a random player, please do not whisper me with a "What's your dps?"
• If you're someone I do not know, I'm not sharing my stats with you. Go to the Armory and look it up if you have to know.
• If you're a random player, please do not whisper me insults about my pet. I chose him, I play with him, I pay for my Warcraft account therefore I can play the game however I want to.
• Please do not whisper me and ask me for gold. I earned mine, go earn yours.

I had a lvl 66 recently come up to me on the zeppelin platform and demand I help him quest in Northland (yes, he said Northland) because he needed gear, money and experience and I was headed there also.

Whatever happened to people being polite and gracious? Just because this is a game which allows one to hide behind a computer does not mean basic etiquette no longer applies.

We Had A Great Night!

Matty and I kicked some ass in Wintergrasp, winning for the Horde.
Then we ran heroic Violet Hold with our guild.
Then heroic Gun Drak, then Utgarde Pinnacle and then finished the night off with a timed run through the Culling of Strat which resulted in ME getting a bronze drake mount :)
Thank you to my guildmates, I love you guys and thank you to my beautiful pet for always doing his best.

A Story From My Archives

Back in December I'd been camping Loque with no luck. I'd chosen one spawn point and I'd stay there.

I was on my fourth hour of standing on the same rock overlooking Hardknuckles when an Alliance NE hunter dropped by and stood directly on top of my Horde hunter. I'd encountered plenty of hunters in my camping hours, one in particular is always friendly and we play emote games together. Others, not so much.

This NE hunter, named Princofegypt played a cruel but clever trick on me. I was minding my own business spamming my /tar Loque when it picked something up. I squinted at the portrait on my screen and thought "What the heck is THAT?"

This NE hunter actually changed the name of his tamed hound to "Loquenahak" while he was standing on top of me then ran out to the collection of non aggressive Hardknuckles, put the pet on "stay" and ran back to stand on top of me again.

My macro picked up his pet every time and when I tried to mouse over the yellow dots on my mini map, once again, picked up his hound.

I think we should just play fair and not be douchebags to each other. Was it really necessary to do this?

As a side note, a few weeks later, when I was successful in taming the elusive Spirit Beast, the above mentioned player was the first on the scene, landing in just enough time to watch me complete my tame and earn my new pet.

He then switched over to his Horde hunter to talk to me in whispers. After I berated him with a round of "karma is a bitch" type responses, I was kind enough to answer his questions.

After all, karma IS a bitch!

Who Is Loque'nahak? He is NOT a cat, he is a Spirit Beast

Loque'nahak is an extremely rare level 76 elite spirit beast found in the Sholazar Basin. He requires the 51 point Beast Mastery talent in order to tame, and is the only tameable creature of its kind. He is the mate of Har'koa

Har'koa is one of the Loa goddesses of the Drakkari, taking the form of a great Snow leopard.
Her children were twisted against her and became the Cursed Offspring of Har'koa. She swears revenge on her captors. Her mate is Loque'nahak, who wanders far from home.

Spirit beasts are the embodied spirits of the natural world. Spirit beasts appear like regular animals, but bear glowing auras.

Waiting. . .

Here we are sitting and waiting for a creature that may or may not appear

the PTR

The patch took 59:12 to download.
Upon entering for the first time I received a message that my name was flagged and needed to be changed! Hmmm, well okay. Changed my name to well, my name and arrived in Dalaran. With no pet. I whistled for Matty and was told "You cannot possess an exotic creature" WHAAAAAAAA !!!
Oh yeah, I had to respec my points. I put my points where they belonged and whistled for Matty.
He came trotting to my side.
I explained to him I was going to look for a friend of his and he had to stay in the stable. He was not pleased.
We ran to the stablemaster where Matty begrudgingly got in and Tecumseh (Bag'thera) happily jumped out to accompnay me on my journey.
I flew to the coords BRK specified and sat. Another hunter came along and we briefly chatted. I grew bored quickly.
This isn't the same as the hunt for Loque. Loque is so much cooler than Gondria and Loque was the first Spirit Beast.
I may swing by now and then to see if this new creature appears but my heart belongs to Matty.

Waiting for our turn

Loque and I are patiently waiting for our turn on the PTR. We've spent about 90 minutes so far downloading all the necessary applications and patches for the PTR.

We'll let you know how it goes......

GONDRIA

A New Spirit Beast Family Member !

As reported on BRK and the wow forums

http://www.wowhead.com/?forums&topic=81280&p=870100

Reprint of a Great Story

As told to WoW Insider -
When AFK attacks

by Matthew Rossi

Feb 8th, 2009

My wife is a hunter. I don't say plays a hunter because that might give you the idea that she's playing and oh heck no. She's not playing. She's very very serious about taming rare or unique skins of pets, to the point where I find myself leveling a second shaman for the express purpose of using heroism to tame a spectral lupine.

The other day, she completed her most recent mission, which was to tame the attractive fellow in the picture. As you might expect, there were other hunters trying to accomplish it, so we ended up with a two day marathon of sleeplessness, calls from work asking me to check the zone to make sure he hadn't spawned, a mix-up with a hunter who followed her around dropping flares at her feet while she wasn't shadowmelded, and other exciting (and not so exciting) adventures.

The other day while I was gleefully stealing baby wolvar from the still-cooling embrace of their mothers because a walrus paid me to, I heard a strangled gasp from my wife over at her computer. Somewhat distracted by wrangling bereaved pups, I at first didn't process what "I got the spirit beast" meant, especially since she gasped it out as one word. Eventually, of course, the congratulations started (in my happiness that I wouldn't have to camp Shol... er, I mean for her, yes, of course I mean for her success) and then I saw on her screen that orc hunter she'd mentioned before.

He was AFK.

In fact, my wife said, she'd actually tamed the mob out from under him. He had landed, done his usual drop a flare at her feet routine, then after a while (she was busily killing all the mobs in the area around the spawn point, as is her way) he went AFK.

Five minutes later Loque'nahak spawned inside his body. One second there was a hunter sitting there, the next second she couldn't even see him anymore, just Loque. A frenzied execution of key strokes later, Loque was tagged (you want to tag him so that someone doesn't come along and decide to kill him for the achievement) and lured into a trap for proper taming.

This entire time, the AFK hunter remained AFK. He was still AFK, in fact, when I arrived on the scene to examine the pet who had been the source of all this effort. As you might expect by the fact that I don't play a hunter and can't get one past 31, I'm usually more baffled than anything by pets, but I have to give Loque credit for having one heck of an impressive skin. He sounds like the Darth Vader of cats when he attacks, too. As we were standing around discussing what to name it (I still say Pellinore is a good name for a beast she spent this much time looking for) the orc hunter finally came back from being AFK, and was presented with the sight of the NE hunter he'd been dropping flares at for two days... the one he knew didn't have a pet when he left... standing there with Loque. The fact that the pet didn't have a name probably would have clued him in too.

To his credit he wasn't the kind of unpleasant you can so often see in these situations. He didn't /spit or any of that, he mostly just walked around Loque and made gestures that Blizzard has rendered unintelligible. We understood why he might have been upset, after all, but it wasn't like either of us went to his house and made him go get a sandwich either. My wife then proceeded to cycle between extreme glee at having finally tamed the spirit beast, and extreme guilt at having tamed it while that other hunter was AFK. Again, I'm fairly certain I don't have telepathic "You gotta have a sandwich" powers but if I do, sorry about that.

So now I come to you, gentle readers. What would you have done? Waited for the other guy to come back from AFK and get the thing you spent multiple days farming for? Or tame and be damned? You can extend this out to nodes or quest mobs if you like. I assume an AFK player is essentially in a 'you snooze, you lose' penalty box, myself. Sometimes if I see one getting beaten on I'll pull the mobs off to be nice, but that's basically it. Am I callous? Heartless? Or is it just common sense?

Pet Emotes !

PetEmote 1.6.1 is out now and brings about a whole bunch of random Spirit Beast emotes. Expectantly it took longer than I announced.

• Emotes for Spirit Beasts have been added. Actually these are just a copy of cat emotes, but I threw some of them out. So spirit beasts are cats which are not so… cute.
• PetEmote now also works with the Death Knight’s Ghouls, even though there are no random emotes for ghouls at the moment. Please keep in mind, that ghouls are not real pets as long as you don’t push their futile life with the talent Master of Ghouls. Otherwise, PetEmote will not detect your ghoul.
  
• The random emote frequency has been slightly reduced.
• The combat emote frequency has been considerably increased.
• A bug has been fixed which triggered random emotes directly after dismounting or summoning the pet.
• The Editor’s menu has been changed perspicuously. I hope it will be much easier to understand and give a clearer view over a huge amount of configurations.
• Using the Editor, you can now create configurations for ghouls and spirit beasts.

Vault

If you must see the numbers . . . . . .

How's his dps ?

Well, if you must know, we came in sixth in vault.
I'll take sixth and be proud of it!

Black Temple

He's downed Illidan also

The Amphitheater

Matty is victorious!

Taming the Spirit Beast

I've spent every day since the first week of December standing in the same spot in Sholazar Basin. I saw Loque dead once, skinned him and received the cloak. Nice trophy but I'd rather have the pet!

I've spent up to 6 hours at a time in the same spot over the past several weeks. I log out every night in SB, in the same spot.

Jan 29 was my lucky day! I was running some errands around town and swung by Baja Fresh for some lunch. Got home, unwrapped my burrito, took a big bite and logged in to the game.

As I was logging in, my husband was trying to reach me via voice chat.

I logged in at 4:58 pm. I noticed my mini map first and a yellow dot where there isn't normally a yellow dot. I knew it was Loque. I didn't see him though! I hit my macro and sure enough, Loque was targeted! I actually tossed the burrito I was holding onto the table, scattering black beans and tried to stay calm. Loque was walking underneath me as I stood on a small hill (71,72).

I started yelling at my computer, "Not now, husband, not now!"

I was so excited I forgot what to do! Oh yeah.... abandon pet, abandon pet! I hit Loque with an ice trap and a gorilla started beating on me. I abandoned my tiger as Loque broke free of his ice trap. He too started hitting me but I had a tame on him. I watched my health drop as my tame wound down. Oh dear, was it all about to go horribly wrong?

And then a Death Knight came down from the skies. Was he going to kill my treasure? Then an Ally hunter swooped down, the same Ally hunter whom had been harassing me for days with his antics but it was all over. Loque was mine ! First thing I did was send him after that Hardknuckle! Next I spammed my guild with an all caps "LOQUE IS MINE"!

I answered my husband's chat request and just started yelling at him, "Come to Sholazar, come to Sholazar!" He of course thought I was nuts, thought something was wrong that was causing me to holler, then he realized what had happened and soon was by my side in his Swift Flight Form admiring my new pet!

I fed the Beast, posed for pictures and then renamed him, "Loki". I thought I had a solid plan, knew exactly what steps to take when I finally spotted the Beast - let me tell you I didn't remember not one step of my plan! It happened so fast and my heart was pounding so hard!

I renamed him soon after, I felt he deserved a strong name with meaning. He is now named "Matthiessen" in honor of Peter Matthiessen, the author who spent two months tracking the elusive Snow Leopard in the Himalayas.

My advice for hunters still hoping - it WILL happen to you also, pick one spawn point and stay there. This was the third time Loque was sighted at this spot at around 5:00 pm. Be patient and you shall be rewarded!

I am a believer in karma so now whenever I attempt to obtain a rare item (such as the reins of the ravenlord mount) I go to Baja Fresh for lunch! It hasn't worked again but no harm in trying!