Wow – Water Strider Mount

Posing with the Last Fish
Turning in the Last Quest
Hurray
Water Strider Near Anglers
Close up view
Super Walking on Water

Hurray! I started Fishing on 18 September and I finally have my Water Strider mount. If you do this, be sure and buy the enhancement from Nat Pagel at Revered that boosts your rep gain by 100%. Makes the last climb take 1/2 as long.

That last fish was a doozie. I suggest you wait until you are 90 and can fly in Pandaria to do this grind. Makes flying around the area each day much easier. And it makes it easier to clobber that big fish too. When you get the quest to Jump the Shark, be sure and look up the quest on wowhead to see how to do it. The good news is that I put two levels on this character while I did this grind. So I’m 92 now and ready to go to Draenor. Should be easy. Although I’ve taken a hunter into Draenor at 90 and it was fine.

Cheers, and good luck with your fishing.

:ww

AMD Ryzen 1800 System

Seems that I can never go too long without building a system. Now that Intel has been duly embarrassed by AMD bringing out some awesome mega-core systems, I just had to support AMD by building one. Intel rushed to build their Core i-9 Processors, but they are way expensive compared with the AMD alternatives.

I first considered an AMD Threadripper 1900x processor  but after asking for advice from the Overclockers forum, it became clear that the 8 core 1900x was not more powerful than the earlier AMD Ryzen 1800X, and this one was on sale for about $100 off.

As you can see, I got a fancy glass case, and water cooler from Corsair, and those fancy carnival lights RAM from G.Skill. Those things are blinking away as we speak.

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Sharing with Linux Mint 18.2 and Windows

I have an “Equal Opportunity” network. A few Windows 10 systems and a lot of Linux Mint systems. And I obviously want to share files among my systems.

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Over the years and versions, Linux Mint has gotten more friendly when sharing files with Windows systems. Samba has always been a thing, but in recent versions, Linux Mint has made it easier to get it going.

Back when I was using Ubuntu – which Linux Mint is based on – in 2008, it was a pain to get Samba going. But things are better now. Now with Linux Mint 18.2 the dialog above is what you get if you navigate to Home and then try to share your personal folder, presumably for read-only, to the rest of the network. That’s a start. Look even an install button.

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Wow – Class Order Hall / Garrisons

So, Class Halls and Garrisons. Different, Right? Actually not so much.

And that’s the odd thing. Class Halls really don’t make much sense as you think about it. By the way, are these Order Halls or Class Halls?

I started to get curious when I was declared the “Leader of the Illidan Forces” in the region. You know, like I was the best Demon Hunter on the Broken Isles at the time.

And then I really got wise when I upgraded my OH so I could make Champion Armaments and saw that I had placed a work order just like back in Draenor.

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Wow Legion – Ok. It’s Fun.

So I just found out about a feature that fixes the problems I was having with playing Legion. I was being overpowered while trying to quest in the Broken Isles. But the Combat Ally feature fixes that.

You can assign one of your “Followers” to be a Combat Ally who follows you around and fights with you. Apparently the first one you get, after a Class Hall mission is Shade of Akama. I’ve only played Demon Hunter, so your mileage on other classes may vary. But this fellow makes progress in the Broken Isles easy rather than frustrating.

Continue reading “Wow Legion – Ok. It’s Fun.”

Singularity – Wait. Not that Simple.

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Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrum and others have been warning of “The Singularity” for some time now.

In their scenario, an AI wakes up one day and is suddenly smarter than any human, and alone, or by coercing humans to help it, this single AI either takes over the world, or helps we poor dumb humans out of all of our problems in a flash of intelligent light.

On the other hand, Daniel Dennett talks at length on youtube and in his books about the power of culture, the power of memes and “Intuition Pumps” and other tools for thinking. It seems to me that the Singularity Folks have it wrong and Dennett is a lot closer to the truth.

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Wow – Fishing Is Not That Hard

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Fishing in Krasarang Wilds

If you want the Azure Water Strider mount, maybe because you’ve heard that the Broken Isles has lots of ponds and streams, you’ll need to get Exalted with the Anglers. I tried to read the guide on WowHead, and got more confused the more I read. It’s a cute, but pretty much useless treatise on the glory of fishing rather than a guide about what to do to get the mount.

Well it’s not that hard to get started from zero in fishing to making progress toward the mount. The guide makes it sound like you need to go back to the starting areas and level your fishing, but you don’t. I started from Fishing = 1 next to Nat and with the basic rod. You don’t need to level your fishing first.

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Wow – Hurray! Draenor Pathfinder!

 

Wow_2017_09_11_21_45_15_784x.jpgHurray! Draenor Pathfinder! Flight for everyone in Draenor.

But, Well. I must confess. I used a shortcut.

It turns out that there is this item called Medallion of the Legion that gives 1000 rep for all the factions in Draenor. Super short cut.

These are dropped at a low rate from some bosses on Draenor, but they appear on the Auction House. When I first looked they were going for about 16KG each, but later I found them for 6.5KG each. But in a few hours I had enough Medallions.

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Wow – 110 Hurray, but Still No Fun

Wow_2017_09_11_06_58_09_533x.jpgWhoopee.. Reached 110. I ground some dungeons, completed a quest I had hanging around and voila. 110. It took about a dozen dungeons, which is a lot really, to get from 108 to 110. And it’s a long wait for a Legion Dungeon – 25 or 30 minutes on average. At lower levels wait times are more like 10-15 minutes. I remember back in the 40’s when I could get two levels from a single dungeon and back in the 60’s when I would get at least a level from running Hellfire Citadel. Oh well. But I had an Azsuna quest sitting in my quest log for one of the Titan Relics and the last dungeon was apparently the Eye of Azshara. Here are some pictures from that last fight.

So far so good. But something strange happened.

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Wow – Legion Gripes

 

Wow_2017_09_02_18_27_53_823.jpgOk. I’ve been playing Legion for a week or so. Time for some gripes.

It’s too hard. My fingers are bleeding here. Let’s look at some history. I first joined Wow back in Cataclysm days and being an Altaholic, I had a few toons up through the 80’s through Vashj’ir and Deepholm. I wasn’t into dungeons much, so I was wearing mostly quest gear and some crafted pieces. I was doing fine. The game was fun.

Then came Pandaria, and I got trashed. Why was that? There was a sudden item level jump between the quest gear of Cata and Pandy. And the gear they gave you on the Pandy Intro quests looked way better than Cata quest gear, but it was really just trash. So you step off the boat and get trashed by the 3 Hosen that jump you. I couldn’t move out of the outposts. Pandaria was just NO FUN. I never found out whether I should have ground up some dungeons for gear or whether I had to be a serious raider – never had done one back then – to get reasonable gear for Pandaria.

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