But wait, we're not done yet!

After we hit 2k, we decided to stop and bask in our achievement (as well as buy the transmog gear that you can only purchase if you are higher than 2k). We tried to find a 3s partner but were unable to, so we goofed around in a 5v5 group and then my priest partner had to log for the night.

I wasn't quite ready for bed, so I tried to find a group to do Rated Battlegrounds with. I only needed 2 more wins to get to 75 total, which gives you the Vicious Wolf mount and the title, "Veteran of the Horde." I applied to 3 groups, 2 of which were using voice chat and 1 which was not. Of course the one that wasn't using chat invited me, and I admit that I was skeptical about our chances because of it.

The first map we had was Eye of the Storm - not one of my favorites. I have had really bad luck on this map and I thought this might be a one-and-done kind of group. Much to my surprise, we managed to wipe the opposing team in the middle and grab the flag (EotS has 4 bases around the perimeter and a flag in the middle; the amount of points you get for capping the flag is based on how many bases you control. If you're unsure of your ability to repeatedly wipe the opposing team in mid, one strategy is simply to hold the flag until the very end of the game and then cap it, giving you a close win). We capped it, wiped them again, and the game was essentially over. Nice!

It was at that point that I realized 4-5 of the members were from the same server. I'm not sure if they were on voice or not, but that probably helped. The next match was in Arathi Basin. This game was pretty one-sided, and at one point we even held all 5 of the bases (not for long, but still!)! 75 wins, a new title, and a new mount. Woohoo!

Vicious War Wolf

I decided to stick with the group because we had been playing so well. The next map was Warsong Gulch and ... wow. Just total domination. They didn't even get a single kill! At this point both team's MMR was up around 1800 so I was quite surprised how easily we won. This game also happened to get me to exalted with the Warsong faction, giving me a new title of Conqueror (exalted with Alterac Valley, Arathi Basin, and Warsong Gulch)!

No kills for you!

Unfortunately, the group broke up after this. Even more unfortunate is that I was trying to add the leader as a friend, but he left right before I clicked the button ... and now I can't remember his name. Ah well. I finished the week a tidy 7-0 in RBGs, bringing my rating up to 1734!

Editor's note: Wow, you know ... I wrote this before I had uploaded the images to imgur. I had forgotten his name, but then while proofreading this post before publishing it ... I realized it's in the screenshots I took!

Odds and Ends

Over the weekend, I tried to run through Highmaul again to get my weekly allotment of Abrogator Stones. I don't know if I just got lucky last week or unlucky this week or what ... but I must have tried at least 10 groups over 3-4 days before we were able to defeat the second to last boss, Ko'ragh. After spending so much time in the LFR tool, I began to wonder if Normal and Heroic Highmaul were on the same raid ID. I asked in the next group I joined, and they told me that it was possible to do both every week and get loot from them both! Fantastic! I just doubled the amount of potential Stones each week.

So I joined a heroic Highmaul group. The first boss went down pretty easy. I believe the mechanics for most bosses are the same in heroic and normal, but the damage and health are higher in heroic. And, of course, the gear is better. Unfortunately, the first boss was pretty stingy and didn't drop any stones. The second boss is a really easy fight for melee - you just stand around and dps. There's nothing to dodge, the boss only moves occasionally ... easy to put out good dps. In fact, I managed to top the meters again!

Heroic Highmaul

I did learn, later on that weekend, that Recount does not always accurately record DPS, but I don't think that was an issue for this boss. #1 in heroic! Wow. I actually used the bonus roll you see in that screenshot and got exactly what I needed - a good trinket! But again ... no Abrogator Stones. At this point I went to wowhead and checked the comments on the quest; turns out you can only get them from one difficulty each week. Bummer. I stayed in the raid to see if I could get any other upgrades (the iLvL for gear in heroic is 670-675, higher than my PvP gear) but we wiped a couple times on the next boss and then the group broke up. I'm currently 50 stones short which will probably take 3 weeks.

PvP-wise, I needed two more pieces of gear (keeping in mind that one of my rings is the PvE because it has better secondary stats) for a full set. I was going to be 200 conquest short this week, but on my second RBG win of the week I actually got a piece of gear! I went about 4-5 weeks without getting any gear until last week, when I got non-set pants ... which I didn't need. This week's piece of gear though? One of the pieces I needed! I am now fully decked out in PvP gear. We also managed to break into the 1800s in 2s which was pretty exciting.

I did a couple more dungeons with my priest last night, got up to level 85! In one run, we somehow managed to accidentally pull a boss while already engaged with a large pack of mobs. What ensued was chaotic, frantic, and totally awesome. Check out chat!

Take note of my sweet transmog!

And lastly, I know that I mentioned I had hit exalted with 4 of the Pandaria reps, but I'm not sure I ever showed off my new mounts! I'll spare you a picture of every new mount (some of the reps gave 3 mounts), and instead just do one for each rep. Here is the Klaxxi mount:

He is SUPER excited for this picture

The Shado-Pan tiger (1 of 3):

Apparently I got a little carried away with hitting the space bar before the screenshot

Order of the Cloud Serpent:

The lightning is constantly moving on this one!

Golden Lotus (1 of 3):

The animations for this guy are hilarious

Let's back up a smidge

Before my cross-server farming session of War-God Dokah, I finally managed to reach exalted with the Netherwing Faction. I actually remember people farming for Netherwing rep back during TBC and deciding not to do it because I had flight form on my Druid and didn't want to put in the effort to reach exalted.

Let me tell you, that was a great decision. This was not an enjoyable rep grind. I mean, some of the quests were alright - there was one where you just flew around and hit lazy peons with a "Booterang" and that was pretty fun. Well, the first time you did it, at least. It just took forever to finish them, and any of the quests that required you to interact with mobs couldn't be completed while on someone else's server which meant you couldn't do them while waiting for your RBG team to queue. It was also in the middle of nowhere and some of the quests required you to fly all the way across the continent. That took a good 10-15 minutes even with the highest flying speed.

Initially I thought the grind would be pretty quick since there are eggs that spawn that you can hand in for rep outside of just doing the daily quests. The only problem is that everyone is looking for these eggs and flying around looking for them is bloody boring. I checked the spawn points when I got to the quest area and that was it. Nevertheless, I finally got exalted and snatched up all the mounts (they're pretty cheap at this point):

He's yawning because he's tired of all the pictures!

Leading the Cavalry

I reached exalted with the Order of the Cloud Serpent faction last week. This is the faction required to ride any of the flying dragon mounts from Mists of Pandaria. It's a pretty easy rep to get to exalted. Once you hit Revered, you can purchase a token from the vendor that doubles the amount of rep you get. You can also farm the dragons on the Timeless Isle for eggs, which reward 1,000 reputation each turn in. All of this is in addition to the normal daily quests.

Once you hit exalted, you can purchase the remaining two flying serpents if you want to (you get the first for free, since you raised him from a pup and he loves you). Their motion while flying is definitely interesting, an undulating, almost.

Conveniently enough, after getting all three of the serpents from that faction, I had 50 summonable mounts. This awards you the achievement Leading the Cavalry and presents you with a very handsome Albino Drake:

So ... that's a little different.

With news of 6.1 approaching, I had begun saving up the books it usually takes to acquire crafting recipes. You can create 1 a day, the bigger recipes take 5. To be safe, I had saved up 10 of each, just in case they increased the price for this last recipe.

I logged in late last night, planning on making some upgrades, throwing them on the AH, and going to bed. Imagine my surprise when none of the vendors actually had any new recipes. To Google I went, wondering what I was missing.

Turns out that the only way to get the new recipes is from a vendor that randomly shows up in your Garrison's main hall. One profession shows up each day for the entire server - yesterday was Tailoring, today is Leatherworking. But that doesn't mean you're guaranteed to have that vendor! There are other NPCs that offer daily quests that can show up instead. If you don't have the profession vendor, you can join someone else's garrison and get the recipe that way. I guess this is Blizzard's way of making sure people are visiting other people's garrisons? I missed the Tailoring vendor last night so that's unfortunate. But I was able to make two Leatherworking upgrades this morning and put them in the AH - the very first two in there! I way overpriced them ... I will be shocked if they sell.

On a more positive note, Monday I hit 40 wins in Rated Battlegrounds for the season. I was greeted by this mail:

I'm Revered! FEAR ME!

Which, of course meant that it was time for some more selfies!

What a sexy little skeleton horse.

Check those old reps!

Apparently back in TBC I ended up as exalted with Cenarion Expedition. The reward? A sweet hippogryph mount!

Unfortunately that was the only rep I hit exalted with that had a mount as a reward though. Maybe you have some old exalted reps that allow you to purchase a unique mount?

Timeless Isle Mounts ... also known as sometimes you should do a little research first!

I had the day off on Friday so I had plenty of time to play over the weekend. In between bouts of PvP, I continued mount farming. I started off farming for dino bones and quickly got my third Primal Egg. Since Primal Eggs are unique and I know my brother is interested in farming for dino bones, I decided to turn my sights toward some of the flying dragon mounts from Pandaria.

There are two in particular which I think look really awesome. The first is a very rare drop from a rare spawn, Huolon. Huolon spawns every 30-60 minutes and every time I've gone past his spawn point there have been 2-4 people waiting for him to spawn. Fortunately, everyone can tag him regardless of whether or not you are grouped. The mount is a 1% drop and looks like this:

Thundering Onyx Cloud Serpent

Huolon spawns on the Timeless Isle, the same island where you are able to farm Shaohao rep for the Heavenly Golden Cloud Serpent:

These are, in my opinion, the two best looking Cloud Serpent mounts. You need to be exalted with Shaohao and have 100,000 Timeless Coins to get the Golden Serpent. There is only a single daily quest for Shaohao, that provides 250 reputation, but some of the monsters on the island provide reputation when you kill them. The ones that I was killing were about 15-20 a pop. Needless to say, this is a reputation that will seemingly take a looooong time.

One fun twist about this island is that it was designed to foment world PvP. The way they went about doing this is that there is an item called the Censer of Eternal Agony that you can get for just 1,000 Timeless Coins that essentially makes you hostile to every player you see (regardless of faction). If you kill them (they need to be flagged, I believe), you get a Bloody Coin. For 500 Bloody Coins you can purchase the Ashhide Mushan Beast:

He's kind of a fun, goofy looking mount, eh? Of course, while looking at pictures of him on Wowhead I saw a comment stating that for just 100 Timeless Coin (they drop in abundance, the cost is rather immaterial) you can buy Fire-Watchers Oath which allows you to collect Bloody Coins in battlegrounds, not just the Timeless Isle.

Of course, after spending a fair amount of time farming mobs (and players!) on the Timeless Isle, last night I read that in order to ride any wind serpent ... you need to be exalted with Order of the Cloud Serpent. Sigh. Fortunately that grind should be fairly quick. There are multiple dailies and, similar to the questline for the Venomhide Ravasaur mount, you get to pick an egg and then raise your very own Serpent from baby to adult. There are three different mounts you can pick: Jade, Azure, or Golden. The egg you pick corresponds to one of those colors and you get that mount for free. You can purchase the others once you are exalted.

RNG smiled upon me. Again.

Waiting for Rated Battleground groups to form (or your request to join to be responded to) can take some time. During this down time, I like to farm for new mounts. Recently I got the Primal Green Raptor, and then decided that I really would like the Red one as well.

This past Friday I hit Revered with Vol'jin and then decided to do one RBG before I went to bed. While waiting for groups to respond, I headed back to the Isle of Giants to try and find another Primal Egg. Amazingly enough, the very first mob I killed dropped one! Three days later and ... booyah!

Red Primal Raptor - check!

I will likely find myself headed back to the Isle of Giants to get the rest of the bones necessary for the Bone White Raptor at some point, so I might get lucky and complete the trifecta!

While waiting for my egg to hatch, I spent some time Sunday trying to get exalted with the Lorewalkers in order to get my flying nimbus cloud. It took a bit more time than I anticipated at first, but once you get into the swing of things you get a better idea of what you're looking for and it goes pretty quickly. Once you've gotten all the lore objects, you simply turn them in and listen to Cho tell a story. And then, you get this:

Disc of the Red Flying Cloud - check!

I'm not sure if it's apparent from those screenshots, but I also finally got around to transmogging my gear. Laktose was hideous before. I mean seriously, his shoulders look like hunter shoulders and that mask ... that looks like a joke of a Halloween costume!

Now? Now he looks sexy.

I took all the extra honor I was getting (I bought the rest of the PvP mounts first) and checked out the Honor Vendors in Orgrimmar. They sell several seasons worth of old Arena gear that can now be purchased for Honor. Off the top of my head, I think they had at least 6 seasons worth? 1-4 and 10. Here's what the different seasons, 1-10 look like on Druids:

I think 3, 4, and 10 are the coolest looking. There are even guides on several websites about the different transmog options for each class!

A PvP Update

I've been doing a lot of PvP lately and have started to make my way into Rated Battlegrounds. If you don't have a bunch of friends or a guild to do RBGs with, you can find groups for it using the LFG tool, similar to any PvE raid. When you bring the tool up, you'll be able to see the description of the group (generally they say how serious they are, if they're looking for a particular class/spec, and if they require a certain rating to join) and see how many of each role (tank, heal, dps) they already have. It has been a struggle to find good groups as Feral, since Boomkin is the preferred Druid DPS spec. I'm actually considering starting to accumulate Boomkin/Resto gear with honor to help deal with this.

Rated Battlegrounds are great for several reasons; well outside of being really fun. First, you get 400 Conquest Points for a win (Arena wins are worth 180). This means that at lower ratings, you can reach the weekly cap with just 4 wins! Second, your first three wins of the week have a chance to provide 50 extra Conquest Points or get an actual piece of Conquest Gear. The piece of gear that you get is random, and it is possible to get something you already have. I was lucky enough to get gloves, though they were not the Set variety. I think my brother got Bracers. Depending on which piece you get, that's a huge benefit - it could be a whole week's worth of Conquest Points!

The last reason why RBGs are great is because you have a chance to get some really cool mounts. If you get to either 40 rated battleground wins or 100 3v3 arena wins in the current season, you are rewarded with a token that you can exchange for either:

Vicious War Raptor

Vicious Skeletal Warhorse

Vicious War Wolf

Of course, once you hit 75 rated battleground wins (overall, does not need to be in a single season), you automatically get the Wolf ... so it only makes sense to get either the horse or the raptor. It looks like those have been available in previous seasons as well, so eventually you should be able to acquire all three. I am unclear whether you can get a token from both RBGs and 3v3 in the same season.

I got up to 14 RBG wins over the weekend, highest rating of 1606. I've friended a couple of the leaders of good groups I was in, hoping to be able to find good groups more easily in the future. We'll see whether that's good enough or whether I will need to make the switch to Resto/Boomkin.

In addition to RBGs and Arena, I spent several hours in Ashran this weekend in an attempt to reach Revered. Being Revered with Vol'jin Spear allows you to purchase Conquest gear that has Versatility. Versatility, at least for feral druids, is the most important secondary stat for PvP. It increases damage and healing done (or healing received? one of the two), and reduces the amount of damage you take.

There are two ways to earn reputation in Ashran - turning in Artifacts (you get them from killing NPCs and other PCs) which you get ~3-4 rep per and doing events which gets you 500 reputation per win. Friday night while I was in Ashran, there was an entire raid group of horde going around doing the events. It went pretty quickly, I was able to go from Honored to Revered in just 3-4 hours (ish). A lot of time was spent waiting for the next event; had we spent that time killing the elite mobs for more Artifacts, it likely would have gone much quicker.

So you're saying there's a chance!

My primal egg finally hatched, and much to my delight I got the color I wanted!

Of course, now that I have the green one, I kind of really want the red one. Oh what a lovely skinner box, Blizzard!

Meanwhile, the hunt for a triceratops has been looking pretty bleak. Wednesday I only managed to stumble across one of the spawns, and Thursday not a single one. Well, that's not entirely accurate - I just parked myself next to one of the spawn points and checked it every few minutes while getting ready. After about 20 minutes, I actually saw that one had spawned! Success!! And as I went to attack it, some Alliance hunter tagged it right as I hit my opener. Sigh. This morning? No spawns up. Honestly at that point I started to wonder if I should just give up on the rare spawns and focus on the one from rep.

But I figured what the heck, I'd try the sitting around and waiting for a spawn trick again and, lo and behold ... it worked! This time there was no hunter around to steal my spawn, and upon looting him I found this:

The Amber Primordial Direhorn

I hadn't been auto-looting those rare spawns, mostly because it seems rather anti-climatic to not even realize what you got until it's in your backpack. As soon as the loot bag came up, I held my breath; usually there are just 3 things that it drops and nothing scrolls off the screen - this time, there was a scroll bar! Thank goodness it was actually the mount and not just an extra grey item.

While there are two other colors that drop from those same rare spawns, I think I will be taking a break from farming them. There are a lot of other really cool mounts that are much easier (and less frustrating) to get! Up next? The flying saucer!

An alternative way to get a triceratops

Looking back at the picture of the four triceratops from Monday, I was a little puzzled where the red one came from. The other three are the rare drops from the Zandalari, but the Red is not included in their loot table. After some quick googling, I discovered that there is another way to get a triceratops mount - reach exalted with the Sunreaver Onslaught. There are a number of daily quests that can be done on the Isle of Thunder and once you reach exalted you are able to purchase the red triceratops for a paltry sum of gold (~2100). The alliance's version of this mount is actually more of a golden color and looks cooler, in my opinion. I also think the rare drops are better looking, but this one is a guaranteed mount as long as you grind the rep.

Something else I discovered while looking up the Sunreaver Onslaught is a faction called the Lorewalkers. When you reach exalted with them, you can purchase a mount called the Red Flying Cloud:

This is a really unique looking mount. For some reason, I feel like it has a very Dragonball Z feel to it. At any rate, apparently this reputation is really easy to get to exalted. Here is the guide that I watched:

Also I kind of hijacked the fitness post for today. I've been really good about going to the gym and following my diet, so it feels like there's not much to say on the subject. Especially with this new program, my progress is a little slower so it's not like I'm making one rep max gains every week.

So you like dinosaur mounts?

Friday night I participated in some Rated Battlegrounds, and one of the people I was grouped with had a raptor mount I had never seen before - a Primal Green Raptor.

A short time on google/wowhead later, I discovered that there are in fact three Primal Raptors (Red, Black, and Green) and that they drop on the Isle of Giants, the same island where you can get the Bone-White Primal Raptor (collect 9,999 bones from the elites on the island to get this).

The Primal Raptors are gotten from a Primal egg, which has a small chance to drop from any of the elites on the island (and the color you get is random). This island is still pretty busy with people farming, but in just an hour and a half I got 1/5 of the way to the Bone-White raptor and got a Primal Egg.

My time on Wowhead also led me to discover that there is a Triceratops mount! There are several different colors, but these are much harder to get than the raptors:

If memory serves me correctly, they are a 5% drop from the mob Zandalari Warbringer. This mob only spawns in 5 locations, each in a different zone. According to wowhead, the respawn timer is around 30-50 minutes. This map roughly shows their spawn locations in Pandaria:

I say roughly because the Dread Wastes one is a little farther North and the Karasong Wilds one is a little more to the West. Exact coordinates can be gotten from Wowhead. Most of these locations are usually camped, but while waiting for RBG queues yesterday, I was able to fly in between these locations and kill a couple of the spawns. No luck with the drop though. It should be noted that sometimes a Zandalari Warscout will spawn, but that these will not drop the mount (you can kill them anyway, they give rep tokens).