My number ten mount is: Turbostrider

I wanted this mount mainly because it looked cool with my PvP gear. Then while I was riding around with it, I noticed something. It has bitch’n decals on it!

Everyone knows adding Flame decals to your vehicle adds extra horse-power. Plus it’s faster than any land mount. Why? Because It’s Red!

Whenever I had a good amount of gold, I would blow it all on non-combat pets, or 22 Slot Bags. I don’t have any alts really, and I don’t have a gathering profession. My only income really was just from raiding, heroics, and transmuting epic gems everyday. This was enough to get me by, but not enough to let me start buying mounts yet.

Now thanks to the new Dungeon Finder system, Gold- as well as enchanting mats, and emblems, were rolling in at a steady pace. I now had extra money to spend!

Halaa mounts- check! Netherwing mounts- check! Faction ground mounts- check! Old flying mounts- check! Skyguard mounts- check! So pretty much all the 10g – 200g mounts that I can purchase, I got. Now to start saving up for the more higher cost mounts.

The mounts that I have in my possession are listed HERE, from WarcraftMounts.com, and I’ve narrowed the remaining 15 that I need, to 21 possible mounts:

Easily Obtainable

• [Reins of the Black War Tiger]
• [Reins of the Dark War Talbuk]
• [Great Red Elekk]
• [Swift Gray Steed]
• [Swift Moonsaber]
• [Swift Violet Ram]
• [Turbostrider]

These mounts will take a little bit more of farming, or will cost me around 500g to obtain. War Tiger is the last PvP mount I need left, and all I need is AB tokens to farm. The Dark War Talbuk, I just need to farm a bit more [Halaa Research Token].

Needs More Crusader Dailies

• [Argent Hippogryph]
• [Argent Warhorse]
• [Quel'dorei Steed]
• [Darnassian Nightsaber]
• [Exodar Elekk]
• [Gnomeregan Mechanostrider]
• [Ironforge Ram]
• [Stormwind Steed]

This means I will need to stop being so lazy and start doing these dailies again. Plus the gold will come in handy for the previous list. I just wished they stop giving me the quests which makes me have to fly all the way to Storm Peaks, and just keep giving me the Shark quest instead.

Needs More Gold

• [Reins of the Ice Mammoth]
• [Reins of the Armored Brown Bear]
• [Armored Snowy Gryphon]
• [Reins of the Red Drake]

These mounts are around 1000g each, so I won’t be getting these until towards the end. Or unless I hit some WoW lottery.

Needs More Luck

• [Deathcharger's Reins]
• [Sea Turtle]

One of these mounts will HAVE to be my 100th Mount. I don’t care how long it takes, I will have them!

I am almost there… just 15 more to go! So close, yet so far away…

I finally got my [Sinister Squashling] pet to drop, and completed my “Hallowed Be Thy Name” achievement. Also with that achievement out of the way, I completed the “What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been” achievement, which then rewarded me with my Violet Proto-Drake!

Even though it says the mount is a “Very Fast” mount, it is actually 310% Flying Speed- which now (sadly) replaces my Headless Horseman mount as “The” flying mount of choice. I wish Blizzard would make it so that when you obtain a mount of a certain speed, you can apply that speed to any mount of your choice.

Also, I’ve trying to get my Achievement points up so I could get the new “It’s Over Nine Thousand!” achievement. Why? So I have an excuse to make another “Over Nine Thousand!” post! I’m currently closing up on 8000. Almost there…

Step 1: Check “At War”

Go into your Reputation tab, and look for the Steamwheedle Cartel. Go to each Goblin faction and check off, “At War”. This will allow you to attack the Goblins, and start gaining rep with the Bloodsail Buccaneers.

Make sure you have done all you want to do quest-wise with Booty Bay, Gadgetzan, Ratchet, and Everlook- because once you’re hated with these factions, you won’t be able to step foot in any of these towns without putting up a fight. This includes taking Flight Paths into the town.

Step 2: Slaughter the Goblins

I recommend going to Booty Bay. There is more Goblins to kill, and plenty of PvP action if you are up to it. Again, bring a friend who is willing to rep with you. It makes things a whole lot easier, and less boring. Kill every NPC in sight.

Start from the entrance into Booty Bay. Make your way through the tunnel killing all the guards you see. Once you hit the first fork in the road, make a left turn towards the Blacksmith NPC. Kill him too. Each Guard will award you 25 Bloodsail Rep, while every other NPC will award you with 5 Rep. Just kill all NPCs you find. It adds up.

Once you make it pass the Blacksmith house, keep taking that path until you see the Engineering NPC standing in his house. Kill all the Guards and NPCs around this house, then jump down to the bottom floor. Start clearing your way towards the docks where the boats come in.

On your way to the boat, make sure you stop by the house on the right. The house is full of NPCs and will draw the attention of a few Guards. Once this room is cleared out, clear out all the NPCs at the docks.

Once the docks are cleared, go back towards the entrance. The NPCs near the entrance and the Blacksmith area should already have respawned. Make your way through the town again.

My description might be hard to follow, so I’ll try to get pictures of the route I took sometime soon.

Step 3: Yaaarr!

There are three quests you can pick up once you hit Friendly with the Bloodsail Buccaneers.

• Avast Ye, Scallywag
• Dressing the Part
• Avast Ye, Admiral!(hated with all Goblin Factions)

You should be Honored or close to Honored, with the Bloodsail Buccaneers by the time you turn in all these quests.

You will also now have all the clothing to dress the part of a Bloodsail Pirate, including an Admiral’s Hat which you can use to summon your very own Pirate!

Not only that, you’ll have completed the Avast Ye, Admiral Achievement, and got yourself a new title! I am now Bloodsail Admiral Utada.

Next step, repairing my reputation with the Steamwheedle Cartel without hurting my new found Bloodsail Buccaneer rep.

Image from Blizzard’s Fanart Section

I already have the Exalted Achievement done, so reping with a few more factions shouldn’t be a problem right? Wrong. This is much much worst…

Here is the list of factions I now need rep for:

• Honored with Bloodsail Buccaneers
• Exalted with Everlook
• Exalted with Ratchet
• Exalted with Ravenholdt
• Exalted with Booty Bay
• Exalted with Gadgetzan
• Exalted with Darkmoon Faire
• Exalted with Shen’dralar

Bloodsail Buccaneers

I’ve always wanted to get the achievement for aligning myself with the Bloodsail Pirates for the outfit and title (Bloodsail Admiral), but now I have extra motivation to do it! Only problem is, the Steamwheedle Cartel won’t be too happy with me.

This should be the easiest faction to grind. Just kill Goblins. Perfect time to do it too since Blizzard just recently announced that Goblins will be the Horde’s new race. For the Alliance!

Steamwheedle Cartel

The next step I will be taking is to rep up with the four Goblin Cities. To do that, I would need to kill pirates without lowering my Bloodsail Rep, since the achievement is to have all these faction rep AT THE SAME TIME.

So reading up on WoWHead, I found some pirates I could farm in Tanaris that won’t lower my Bloodsail rep. Another way to rep up with all the Goblin Cities is to enter Dire Maul and to free a Goblin named Knot.

Going into Dire Maul will also help me with the next faction I’ll be grinding.

Shen’dralar

The next faction will be pretty tough to grind. Only way I can rep up with them is by turning in Librams for 500 rep a turn in. Librams are a rare drop in Dire Maul, or can be found on the AH ranging from 5g to 50g. I’ve been dropping by the AH everyday to pick up any cheap Librams I can find.

The most expensive item during the rep process however, is the [Pristine Black Diamond], which is needed for every Libram turn in.

Ravenholdt

This Rogue faction will be tough since I don’t have a Rogue alt to help me farm [Heavy Junkboxes]. From Neutral to Revered, I will just need to kill Syndicate NPCs. That should be really easy as a Mage.

For the rest, I am going to need 1790 total Heavy Junkboxes to go from Revered to Exalted. If you’re a bored Rogue on Ner’zhul, hook it up!

Darkmoon Faire

The last faction will be very very expensive. I will need to farm/purchase a few items to turn in, until I hit Honored. From Honored to Exalted, I will have to turn in Decks. Being an Inscriptionist will help, but it will still be an expensive faction grind.

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I have a long road ahead of me, so wish me luck! And I wish anyone else who is crazy enough to go after this achievement the best of luck too!

Do what I do, sucker a buddy to follow you on your quest to waste time in Azeroth.

Where to find one?

Find someone whom you already spend a majority of your time on WoW playing with. Leveling buddy? Questing buddy? Instance buddy? Any of those will do.

For me, it was my friend whom I did dailies with. We’d sign on, do all the Argent Tournament dailies, fishing dailies, cooking dailies, Oracle/Wolvar dailies, and maybe heroic/regular dungeon dailies.

At first we’d do dailies pretty much everyday, but it did get boring pretty fast. Once you reach a certain part in some of the dailies, you start skipping out on a few. Once we got our 100 x [Dalaran Cooking Award] and bought our [Chef's Hat], we pretty much stop doing cooking dailies. Once we got Exalted with BOTH Wolvar AND Oracle, we only stop by once every 7 days for the [Mysterious Egg].

The only thing keeping me from not doing the Argent Tournament are the mounts and pets I still want to get. Once I get them, chances are I would probably stop doing them too- even though I’m always low on gold.

How to trick them?

If they are already an Achievement addict, it will be as simple as just asking. Not addict yet, give them a taste. After a long day of questing/dailies/leveling, ask them to help you with an achievement. Or ask them to do a quick achievement together. After a few “achievement gong!” sounds, they’ll be hooked in no time.

For me, laziness actually helped me get an achievement partner. Pretty much everyday, a question is ask, “You wanna do dailies?”. I know that every time I ask it, I’m half hoping that she would say, “Nah” so I won’t have to. I’m pretty sure when she asks me, shes thinking the same thing. We’re both lazy like that.

I already knew she was an Achievement addict so I knew this wasn’t going to be hard. She’s crazy enough to get the Higher Learning achievement on like 4 of her alts. FOUR!!!

So I came up with the idea of, “Everyday we do dailies OR at least one achievement”. Hmm… 2-3hrs of dailies or less than an hour to do an achievement? Easy choice. Snagged me an Achievement partner.

What achievements to aim for?

For easy ones, you could to the Exploration achievements, or the Classic Dungeons achievements if you want something quicker.

For harder ones, depending on your class, and your partner’s class, you could tackle the Outland Dungeons. With me on my Mage, and my partner as a Mage, we were able to do most of the regular Outland instances without a tank. If you were a tank/healer combo, I’m sure you won’t have any problem with any of the instances.

Just pace yourself, or you’ll run out of easy achievements like us. I think we just started down a really insane achievement which I don’t think we should have started now… more on that later.

This year I even got the third and last pet, and got my “Veteran Nanny” Achievement! It so happens that Achievements is also the main cause for my new found hatred for this holiday event.

Luckily for us Mages, we don’t have any problems at all doing any of the Children’s Week quests. Go to Darnasus Bank? 10 second cast. Wanna go see Jaina Proudmore? 10 second cast. Oh you wanna come along too? That will be 10g.

Bad Example

This achievement wouldn’t be too bad if it weren’t for the inflation of the cost of some low level items. The price of [Small Egg] on my server? 65g for 8 of them. [Mageroyal]? 10g… a piece!

Well if you can’t beat’em, join’em! I went to Westfall and farmed some eggs for about 10 minutes, and made out with 16 of them. I made my [Delicious Chocolate Cake] with 8 of them, and sold the rest of the eggs for 60g.

See what you have made me become Blizzard!?

School of Hard Knocks

This achievement is the most hated achievement for this event by pretty much every player. Not only did this make most battleground games a joke, it made many players frustrated.

WSG games ended up with 10 players staying in their own base, waiting for the opposing team to come pick up the flag so they could return it. AB games started with everyone running to Stables/Farm when the gates open, then queuing out if they didn’t get the capture. EotS games had everyone ignoring towers, and camping the middle flag area.

Also you gotta love the idea around this achievement. Hey little kid, see me kill that guy to return the flag he stolen? That’s probably how you became an orphan! That guy’s kid is probably an orphan like you now! Yay you’ll have new friends!

Thank you Blizzard!

Winter Veil has begun in the World of Warcraft, and this opens up an opportunity to unlock more achievements. Over at /hug there is an excellent guide to all the achievements of Winter Veil. Be sure to check that out if you need a point in the right direction on where to start.

Now there are a few achievements which you have to rely on a bit of chance to do, much like the “A Mask for all Occasions” achievement during Hallow’s End. They are:

• Let it Snow
• Bros. Before Ho Ho Ho’s (Alliance/Horde)

To get the [Handful of Snowflakes] and [Mistletoe], you need to /kiss a Winter Reveler located at any Inn. The only problem is you may only kiss once per hour, and you may get [Fresh Holly] instead.

You only need 10 x Handful of Snowflakes for the first achievement, and 9 x Mistletoe (3 if you’re Horde) for the second achievement. So you have plenty of time to complete them before the end of the event, since you get 5 of the item if you do happen to get them.

But for those of you who happen to miss most of the event and only have a few days left, or just want to get them out of the way as soon as possible, there is a macro you can use that allows you to kiss the Winter Reveler twice, giving you twice the chance to get the item you need.

Double Kiss Trick

First you make the following macro:

/kiss
/targetlasttarget
/kiss

Go to any Inn where you will find two Winter Reveler (one male, one female). Target one of the Revelers, then target the other Reveler. Use the macro. You will receive two debuffs as well as two items.

Thanks to the person who emailed me this trick and wishes to remain anonymous. I tried it out myself and it worked fine for me. But with any WoW trick, it shouldn’t be abused just in case big brother is watching. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. I only did it once and was able to get the last batch of snowflakes and mistletoe I needed to complete my achievements.

Also note that the [Handful of Snowflakes] are not soulbound, and my be traded or mailed to any player. You can use your alts to send you some if you need, or you can help out a guildie if you are done and have extras.

There is a cooking recipe which makes [Critter Bites], which allows you to have any critter you come across become your minion for 3 minutes. While as your minion, they act as any normal non-combat pet, and will follow you around. The best thing is, that you can have as many out as you can.

To obtain this cooking recipe, you must do a few of the Dalaran cooking dailies to obtain [Dalaran Cooking Award]. You can then turn in three of the awards for the [Recipe: Critter Bites]. If you are not a cook, go steal some from your cooking friends, or find them on the Auction House.

You will also get the Critter Gitter Achievement for using the Critter Bites to attract 10 critters in under 3 minutes. The place I found to be a very easy location to obtain this achievement was at the house of the Crazy Cat Lady. Right around the inside and outside her house, she has eight cats running around, as well as two cows in her backyard. Target each critter and use the Critter Bites on them. Next thing you do is ride back into Stormwind to show off your new entourage, and show them Hunters how to really tame pets.

Of course this is only for the Alliance, unless a few of you Hordes out there are filling a little adventurous. Another location I can think of is inside the Tram area that goes between Stormwind and Ironforge. There are many rats running around for you to tame. I’m not too sure where you can go for the Horde side to grab this achievement as easily as the Alliance. If you got a location, let us know!

I got my achievement for obtaining 50 different non-combat pets the other day. This wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought, and now that these pets no longer take up my precious bag space, I went and hunted some down.

First off, WarcraftPets will be your bible for this achievement. It is an excellent resource for all things, everything to do with non-combat pets. Read it, loved it, bookmarked it!

For me, I only had to hunt down the remaining 20 or so pets I needed to reach 50. The first thing I did was teleport to each Major City except Ironforge. In Darnassus and Exodar, there was a pet vendor. Darnassus has a Owl Vendor, Exodar has a Moth Vendor. Two to three of each kind. For Stormwind, there is a small little cottage right outside the capital where the Crazy Cat Lady lives. She sold me four different types of cats. For my last few, I went to Stormspire and bought some pets off of Dealer Rashaad. He sells eight different types of pets.

That is a good start for anyone looking to go after the achievement. That is 17 pets out of the way before thinking of going to a neutral Auction House. Plus there is the Parrot vendor at Booty Bay.

After obtaining 50 pets, you will receive a package in the mail. Your very own pet Skunk! He even has an aura of stink surrounding him.

Next order of business: Mr. Death Knight

So there I was at level 71, riding around Howling Fjord, minding my own business when out of nowhere I get Death Gripped and dismounted. It was a level 73 Death Knight trying to gank me. He was probably thinking, “Hehe slow leveling Mage, easy kill”. Wrong.

Frost Nova -> Icy Veins/Trinket -> Deep Freeze -> Frostbolt -> Ice Lance x 2

Frostbolt crits for 5.7k, Ice Lance crits for 2.7k, Ice Lance crits for 2.8k. Mr. Death Knight has died. He got off an Icy Touch, and maybe a melee swing in.

I dunno why, but I wasn’t satisfied with just killing him once. Probably because he was Death Knight that was higher level than me, so I camped him for the next half an hour until he stopped spawning or logged off. I killed him about seven or eight more times by then.

See Mr. Death Knight, you may have out leveled me in over 3 days, but that is all the experience you have, and you won’t be that geared as well. I have over 3 years on my Mage. Seeing how you probably spent all your time leveling your Death Knight, you didn’t have a “high level main” to log on to prevent me from camping. Seeing you without a Guild tag means you didn’t have help on the way either. Trust me, general chat isn’t gonna help either. You will either see Chuck Norris jokes, or be told that, “the PvE Server is that way —>”.

This is a PvP server, you should have taken this time (usually a week or two when new content is released) where the Horde and Alliance normally ignore each other to prevent any interference to each others questing and leveling. Hope you have learned your lesson. Oh and thanks for the achievement.

Love, Tuna