Elkagorasa the Casual

Last night, I finally completed 2 achievements that I had been working on for months (edit: since last October). World Explorer - This one meant exploring every nook and cranny of all 4 continents in the game. Shop Smart, Shop Pet ... Smart - this one involved finding, buying and getting 50 'vanity' pets. This comes quickly on the heels of finishing off the Midsummer fire festival achievements, a quick, successful 10-man run through Obsidian Sanctum , and completing the " For the Horde! ". In the last two weeks, I've gotten two vanity pets ( Stinker and Spirit of Summer ), one mount and 2 nifty titles (" Flame Keeper Elkagorasa" and "Elkagorasa the Explorer ").

Recently the Carbonite add-on for World of Warcraft has gone from a subscription based app, to a shareware/freeware based model. This means that I am now willing to install it! With that said, I can see that I ALMOST completed with the " Exploration " achievement on Warcraft. I was using Cartographer as a map replacement. It has a great feature to show the unexplored areas in a different color (than the default "fog". This means I could view my map and look for the bright-blue map areas to find where I hadn't explored. When I switched to Carbonite, replacing Cartographer and Questhelper , I thought I lost this unexplored areas quirk. Last night, while trying to finish off the Midsummer achievements, I ran around the Draneii starting areas. While there I happend to right-click on the Carbonite map and got a popup menu. On this menu, select Show, and uncheck "Hide the unexplored areas." Now my unexplored areas show in the map and I can immediately pick...

Last night while helping some guildies level their alts in Outlands - Hellfire Peninsula, I found that I had some unfinished instances and related quests. Namely, Hellfire Ramparts . I read somewhere that it is rather easy for a level 80 Warlock to solo Ramparts, but last time I tried I failed miserably. Now, with a new Destruction build, and a few equipment upgrades the Ramparts were manageable. With voidy tanking, I could easily handle the groups of three warriors. The bosses all dropped rather quickly, in fact the second boss ( Nazan and Vazruden ) never moved to phase 2. In fact, I only died once, and that was right at the entrance when I aggro'd 2 parties of three mobs and a patrol. After completing Ramparts, another guildie wanted to run Shattered Halls . This level 70 instance was a bit harder. I died three times in this instance, twice due to bad pulls on my part. "Hey! voidy did well in Ramparts, he can manage 5 mobs... oh my, I just aggro'd all of them." It ...