StarCraft 2 Beta.

While I am on a brief hiatus from WoW, I have been really enjoying StarCraft 2. Speaking of the StarCraft 2 beta. I have received an additional SC2 invite. Anybody have any ideas on how I should give this away?

StarCraft 2 Beta is in the house!

Today I received an email from Blizzard stating I had received an invite to the Star Craft 2 Beta. Needless to say I was very skeptical, and by very I was totally F*ing skeptical. So when I got home from work today, I copied the beta code from the email, and went to log on to my battle.net account. When I pasted the beta key into the field, I was prepared to get a rejection. But guess what. I now have SC2 listed in my battle.net account!

Downloading now, will let you all know in the next few days what I think!

Quick Update: According to the ToS I can't give any info on the game yet. Soon as I can I will let you know what I got on my hands. Short answer though: Awesome. Although all the games I have played so far I have had my ass handed to me pretty thoroughly.

Feeling a little Blue

So like so many others I'm feeling a little burnt out. It doesn't help that I have not been able to raid since before ICC was released. I am feeling a little blue. I am having the to wrestle with what I want from WoW. I think the biggest problem is I really love my guild, but due to changes in real life I am unable to make raid times. I really want to raid. So I have two choices. Suck it up and just play the solo game I have been playing or nut up and transfer servers to something on the pacific time zone, and find a guild that raids after 7:00 pm.

Every day I get a little closer to diving into the guild recruitment forums on worldofwarcraft.com. The thought of sifting through all the crap there kind of makes me ill to think about.

So I guess I will do the cheap thing, and ask you folks, all my 10's of readers. Any body have a guild that needs a resto shaman, and a barley geared prot warrior? I prefer horde, but if the guild is right I may faction change. (after I complete my rep grinds with UC and Silvermoon)

To Honor One's Elders

If you, like me are trying to play catch up to get the achievement What a Long Strange Trip it Has Been. You have spent the last 2 weeks grinding achievements. I spent the last two days casually grinding the Lunar Holiday achievement. This is probably the easiest holiday to complete, because it does not require the RNG or grinding or kills or anything like that. But it does take an incredible amount of time. There are a whopping 74 elders to visit! But the great thing is all the Elders provide 75 faction rep, for a total of 5500 rep for the holiday. After completing I have gotten Exalted with Thunderbluff, 1000 rep from Exalted with Undercity and 1/2 way through with Silvermoon. Some time in the next 30 days I should be exalted with everyone!

So now I just need to complete the mid-summer fire festival and I will complete the achievement and have my 310% mount and will put all this stupid holiday grinding behind me.

Love is in the Air!

When I sat down to write this how to, I had planned on writing a in depth how too of every step of the achievement. When I actually got to writing it I found that this holiday was redesigned so much that a guide is not really necessary. I will clarify some of the less obvious steps, but there is really only one thing you need to do to complete this achievement. Collect lots and lots of Charm bracelets!

I found the easiest way to farm these charms, for a max level character anyway is to goin to Ulduar, get into a demolisher and agro at least 2 towers. The endless stream of dwarfs will net you over 60 complete bracelets per hour. If you do not have a friend that wants to farm with you you can form a raid with a alt, with a few minutes help from a guildie.

Log on an alt, form a group, convert that to a raid. Promote your friend to leader and log off your alt. Re-log your character you want to farm with, join the raid, and take lead back. Your friend drops group and bobs your uncle you have a 1 man raid.

What do I do with all those charm bracelets I just farmed? First off visit all your factions capitol cities, and do the little quest for your nation of adoration achievement. This takes 4 charm bracelets and about 20 minutes of travel between cities.

Then do your holiday dailies, you want to get as many love tokens as possible to cut the farming time and the dailys and the quest chain all net you 5 tokens. When I was done with the first days quests I had almost 50 tokens. I farmed another 60 bracelets in Ulduar and was able to buy everything I needed to complete my partially completed meta yesterday, as well as buy my own Romantic Picnic Basket and Truesilver Shafted Arrow pets.

I had a lot of people ask me how do I Pity the Fool? Love Fools cost 10 Love Tokens, you will need 50 Love tokens, unless you are amazing lucky and find someone dropped a Love Fool in the 15 seconds before you arrived at the spot. You simply buy a love fool, visit the required zone drop a fool and /pity. You can do it anywhere in the required zone, except Arathi Basin. You have to be at the Black Smith to get credit. I hear people say you do not need to be in Naxx, simply in the Necropolis by the zone entrance, but if you are still in your raid from farming bracelets just enter the zone to be safe, kill Mr. Bigglesworth while you are there too...that cat has attitude.

You can lower the amount of tokens required if you use someone elses Picnic Basket in Dalaran for the Lonely achievement, but really with the ease of farming bracelets, just get your basket for fun while waiting for raids to start. If you use a basket found in Dalaran and you do not want the pet it is going to cost you 98 tokens, with the basket and the pet it is 148 baskets. Just under 2 hours of farming in Ulduar, and some luck finding the race/class combos for the pelting with flowers achievement. I found the easiest way to complete this part is in a BG or Wintergrasp. You will find every race/class combo needed in a PvP setting. Just try to pelt them before they kill you.

I must say as a Orc Shaman, I really do not look forward to spending the next 3 weeks with flower petals falling around my head every time I am in a city.

The hardest part of the meta this year, and the only one that falls victim to the dreaded RNG monster is My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose. The roses have a 100% drop rate from the following bosses: Maiden of Grief (Halls of Stone), Prince Keleseth (Utgarde Keep), Prince Taldaram (Ahn'kahet: The Old Kingdom). Both normal and Heroic. You just need to win the roll and you get the achievement. If you use the dungeon finder, roll need, because I guarantee someone else will.

If you are just starting the Fool for Love meta this year I recommend breaking it down to 2 or 3 days, as grinding is boring. But this year it is much more doable than last year. Good luck!

Productive Weekend

Last night was my son's Boy Scout Troops annual cab feed. The crab feed is our major fund raiser for the year, and procedes are used to pay for summer camp. The crab feed pays for more than half the cost for each scout to attend camp. It also pays for the less privileged scouts outright. We have 100% attendance for our troop at camp. It is awesome. Last night I was in charge of the raffle ticket sales and live desert auction. I took in just over $2000. It looks like a good year for the scouts bank account, economy be damned! I want to thank all the folks that made last night such a success. We took in just under $10,000 for the whole night, but our expenses were just under 1/2 of that.

On to WoW!

Managed to complete my "Fool for Love" meta in just a few hours today. All I needed was the nations of adoration, 3 race/class combos to pelt with flowers and a few /pity's on love fools. I also managed a bevy of achievements today, including FINALLY finishing the Lil' Game Hunter achievement, I now have my fawn.

Tomorrow, I will post hos to gather up to 60 Lovely Charm Bracelets and hour, so you too can complete your meta, and buy all the holiday goods you want.

Beer Snob? Yeah kinda

So I am so ashamed to admit it, but I am a huge fan of TJ's monthly summary of Cosmo. After reading/commenting on the post, and comments I feel it is my duty to bring up something in the comments.

Yes I am a bit of a beer snob. I will not drink beer from a can, I do sometimes drink bottled beer, but only out of a mug, or pilsner glass, or a wheat beer glass you know whatever the particular brew calls for. Just like the wine snobs we love to make fun of, beer tastes better when drank from the proper glassware.

The other thing I am ashamed to admit is I read Maxim. Really I am not that guy. (lol bewbies he he) But Maxim has a few articles I enjoy, and their tech gadget coverage is better than most anyplace else.

This month they had a article about the 25 best new beers. I do not really understand what their criteria for "New" is as some of them are quite old. It is pretty informative for those of us who enjoy beer, but do not really know where to go after venturing from Bud, or Coors to something more exotic like Sierra Nevada. This list has a pretty good selection of beers, and they tell you what it tastes like using terms you can throw around to impress your friends.

The problem is the article looses all of its credibility when they recommend Bud Light Wheat. Really? When I read that it sent me into such a nerd rage I scared the cat. There has to be 1000 easily available good Hefeweizens on the market. It appalls me that they would recommend what might be the worst wheat beer available in the United States. I feel I can criticize them both as a beer snob, and due to the fact that I live less than 5 miles from their California brewery.

On to happier subjects, from my personal brewery in the backyard I have tapped my first ever keg of Heffewizen. I made it with 6 pounds of Bavarian wheat, and 2oz Bavarian hops at boil and another ounce at finish. I am quite proud of the outcome, although it has a strange banana flavor at finish. I need to figure out what I did wrong there and correct it for next time. Also my first ever completely original recipe will be going in the keg tonight and should be ready to drink by mid-February. It is an American Ale. I used 4 pounds of honey and 2 pounds of malt, with an ounce of bitter orange peel at finish. I will let you know how it comes out.