Maps and Musings

I’m hoping that unlike the other five posts sitting in draft status that this one will actually get published. Yes, I still exist. I didn’t mean to disappear, but intentions mean very little.

My WOW schedule has been fairly minimal. I log in for raids, and the rest depends on the week. My priest is now 85 and barely geared for heroics, but I have yet to run one on her. I’ve dabbled a bit with Midsummer, and spent a little time on my baby druid. Nothing really all that noteworthy.

I will have a post eventually on some new UI stuff in the works, but posts like that take actual work… and I don’t feel up to it. I’m suffering from work burnout as well as WOW burnout, and have been throwing myself into decorating my house.

I did do one home-related project which has some WOW relevancy. We turned the formal dining room of our house into a library, and I had a fun idea to use maps from my favorite fantasy worlds as art. This of course turned into a long drawn-out process of choosing which worlds, and finding high-quality prints of them.

We had room for maybe 5 prints. On one wall I chose these three:

Four Corners from Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles (signed by Rothfuss!)

Westeros from the Game of Thrones HBO series (George RR.  Martin’s a Song of Fire and Ice)

Middle Earth from Lord of the Rings (hope I didn’t need to spell that out, but you never know)

I love the way they look grouped together and framed. Don’t mind the blurry image – I fail at photographing things behind glass.

So I had these lovely fantasy maps, but there was an obvious one missing. Azeroth. It’s a huge part of our lives and it felt remiss to not include it.  The problem was, I simply could not find a nice looking map to purchase. I saw one once on the wall of our local comic shop, but alas that was only available back in Vanilla times (did it come with the original CE?). There were a few huge posters on Ebay but none of them really appealed to me. What I wanted was something like Blizzard’s in-game full map – something that would go well with the other prints I’d already purchased. Unfortunately, just taking a screen shot and printing it wouldn’t result in something very high quality.

Surprisingly with the huge fan art community out, there are very few fan-renditions of the map. This one on Deviant Art is pretty cool, but still not quite what I was going for.

I eventually just gave up and made my own.

The full high-res file is here (very large!)

I basically just traced Blizzard’s map and added some texture and color. I used a few brushes I found online as well: Sketchy Cartography Brushes, Hand-drawn map elements

Complete accuracy was not a priority, so keep your comments about, “but X is in the wrong spot” to yourself. I just wanted a fun piece of art to hang on my wall and remind me of WOW.

4.2 is just on the horizon and I am looking forward to it like everyone else. We haven’t finished Tier 11 content yet, but at least this will give us a boost to overcome the attendance boss.

The new quests have the potential to be quite fun – I just hope they don’t end up feeling like the Argent Tournament. The dungeon journal looks like a great addition to making the game more friendly, without dumbing it down too much. New pet achievements are very welcome! And so on… the 4.2 changes are coming soon and I’m glad of that. I just don’t have anything to say that hasn’t already been said more eloquently by other more timely bloggers.

For shaman 4.2 info ,check out Life in Group 5, and Totem Forest.

Make sure you spend your Valor or Justice points so they sum up to 4000 or less, or you will lose some. Same with Conquest and Honor points.

If you haven’t quested at all in Hyjal, you will need to have completed up the quest Aessina’s Miracles in order to have access to the new dailies. When 4.2 hits, a quest will appear on the Heroes Call boards leading you to the first daily hub. Wowhead has a fantastic guide detailing the new quests and rewards.

Last thing? Go watch the 4.2 trailer again to get yourself pumped up.