One of Strev’s daily routines is scanning through page after page of listings hoping to snag a good deal on items to resale for a tidy profit. I’ve found that I tend to make a lot more overall from these ventures when I target a large number of “little things” instead of dipping a toe into the waters of speculating on blue and purple gear—it’s too easy to take a bath as the prices plummet. Although this basic strategy isn’t without some risk (Anybody need a few dozen stacks of Cobalt Ore?), I’ve been fairly successful wealth generation overall.
Where does the money go? Since Cataclysm released, I’ve dropped about 9k on various flight speed increases, 23k on leveling trade skills, 2k on a few items to stockpile for resale in a few months and about 6k on various enchantments, enhancements, gems, and frippery… and still have about 21k banked at the moment. For the “big players”, this is a trivial amount I know, but it’s very comfortable for me.
By and large, people with disposable coin tend to drop it on one of four things: vanity pets, vanity steeds, leveling professions and item upgrades. Frankly, I don’t really care too much about pets and mounts. Some of them are ‘nifty’, but not so much that I can justify blowing thousands of gold on one. The professions I want to have I have and at maximum level—maybe. I’ve considered playing around with tailoring or jewelcrafting but neither appeal enough to make a time and coin investment…yet.
That leaves gear. Evening time restrictions have left me unable to dungeon run with the guild as of late and I simply refuse to pug in Cataclysm. This means gear has to come from AH Bind-on-Equips or reputation rewards. As I was browsing the AH, I found a nice set of pants. Stupidly nice pants. 11850 gold nice. Breeches of Mended Nightmares (+512 stamina, +321 intellect, crit and haste and a red gem slot for good measure). Maxdps.com confirmed there’s only a couple of better options for the slot.
For a disturbingly long period of time I stared at the pants and contemplated my options. Should I burn over half of my nest egg on pants? What else is the money good for? I clicked the ‘buy option’. The auctioneer asked for confirmation. I chickened out.
In the end I decided to give it a week and see if the price drops. If it doesn’t, a week or two from now I may deem the money is trivial enough that I can just buy without feeling immediate buyer’s remorse. For now, though… let’s see how I can make that extra capital work for me.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Miner Diversions
Anyth is my hunter that mostly lives amongst mothballs. I take her out of storage generally once a week to run with “Team Lowbie”, although now that they’re pushing through the mid-70s, it seems a somewhat ill-fitting term. She’s mediocre at best, suffering from a horrid lack of decent gear and a recent talent change has left her on the “Power Underwhelming” side of the DPS charts, but at least she isn’t stealing aggro from the tank anymore. Time to make her earn her keep. Although I’ve been very, very successful with making gold with Strev, I’d been pondering a way to diversify my holdings, as it were, and make a little extra scratch with Anyth when I don’t feel like tooling around with Strev.
I’d considered getting her herbalism, but I scratched that plan when I remembered both Myrial and Michaelle have that skill and the last thing they needed was another teammate fighting over nodes. How about mining? As I recollected, mining was a decent enough income producer, so I plunked down a few copper and flew around Elwynn Forest looking for ore.
After ten minutes and six nodes I realized it was going to take a long time to get anywhere productive, so I looked up mining on wow-professions.com and discovered to my joy, I could buy my way into the upper tiers by smelting ores from the AH into bars. With a new-found mission and a thousand gold ‘loan’ from Strev, Anyth shopped her heart out and smelted her way…to about 350. At that point all of her smelting recipes were gray and she’d actually have to mine to increase her mining skill. Heh.
Fortunately, this meant she was “Northrend” ready for ore. I installed the “Gatherer” addon and flew over to Sholazar Basin and went to town. If you’ve never played with this addon, it is godly. It marks on your map places where nodes spawn that you or your guildmates discover. It also can display a transparent overlay on your screen nearby potential nodes and maintains a ‘trail’ of where you’ve just traveled. By the time you’ve made a few circuits of a zone, you have a fairly good map and path to take to hit as many nodes as possible.
I quickly learned than flying at slow speed was going to be a serious pain, so I hit up the Bank of Strev for another 4.5k for Artisan flight. This was a solid investment and I have no buyer’s remorse for once.
Anyth flew around ‘mapping’ out the Basin’s nodes. Each one yielded in addition to ‘stuff’ a little over 3k xp. It was actually possible (if not practical) to level through mining. After a time, I had a pack full of cobalt and saronite and was ready to graduate to Obsidium, one of three new ores from Cataclysm. After making my way to Uldum, I discovered vast and plentiful areas of Elementium, which were far above my skill level to acquire, and instead flew across the length of the continent to Mount Hyjal to find a depressing number of fellow miners scooping up the few nodes I could find. It’ll take a few days to cross that Elementium barrier (particularly since Anyth isn’t an everyday character), but hints of Uldum’s treasures haunt my dreams.
(Note: In 24 hours Anyth’s mining revenues paid back the initial 1k loan. It’ll be a while on the flight money.)
I’d considered getting her herbalism, but I scratched that plan when I remembered both Myrial and Michaelle have that skill and the last thing they needed was another teammate fighting over nodes. How about mining? As I recollected, mining was a decent enough income producer, so I plunked down a few copper and flew around Elwynn Forest looking for ore.
After ten minutes and six nodes I realized it was going to take a long time to get anywhere productive, so I looked up mining on wow-professions.com and discovered to my joy, I could buy my way into the upper tiers by smelting ores from the AH into bars. With a new-found mission and a thousand gold ‘loan’ from Strev, Anyth shopped her heart out and smelted her way…to about 350. At that point all of her smelting recipes were gray and she’d actually have to mine to increase her mining skill. Heh.
Fortunately, this meant she was “Northrend” ready for ore. I installed the “Gatherer” addon and flew over to Sholazar Basin and went to town. If you’ve never played with this addon, it is godly. It marks on your map places where nodes spawn that you or your guildmates discover. It also can display a transparent overlay on your screen nearby potential nodes and maintains a ‘trail’ of where you’ve just traveled. By the time you’ve made a few circuits of a zone, you have a fairly good map and path to take to hit as many nodes as possible.
I quickly learned than flying at slow speed was going to be a serious pain, so I hit up the Bank of Strev for another 4.5k for Artisan flight. This was a solid investment and I have no buyer’s remorse for once.
Anyth flew around ‘mapping’ out the Basin’s nodes. Each one yielded in addition to ‘stuff’ a little over 3k xp. It was actually possible (if not practical) to level through mining. After a time, I had a pack full of cobalt and saronite and was ready to graduate to Obsidium, one of three new ores from Cataclysm. After making my way to Uldum, I discovered vast and plentiful areas of Elementium, which were far above my skill level to acquire, and instead flew across the length of the continent to Mount Hyjal to find a depressing number of fellow miners scooping up the few nodes I could find. It’ll take a few days to cross that Elementium barrier (particularly since Anyth isn’t an everyday character), but hints of Uldum’s treasures haunt my dreams.
(Note: In 24 hours Anyth’s mining revenues paid back the initial 1k loan. It’ll be a while on the flight money.)
Monday, December 27, 2010
Blackrock Caverns Strategy
Ok, I’ve put this off long enough. Today we delve inside Blackrock Caverns (BRC), which is so pleasantly oldschool I thought it was a revamped classic dungeon I’d missed somehow. The dungeon itself is a new wing of Blackrock Mountain and is conveniently located near the northern entrance. For those of you who just wiped, Googled, and found this: from the spirit go up, across the chain, hop down just before you get to the end, run a little east, take the north passage by the summon stone and it’s the first passage to the east. Inside is a network of caves and tunnels mixing with dwarven architecture, lending the whole a very ‘dungeon dive’ atmosphere.
The population is mostly orcs, ogres, twilight hammer, with elementals thrown in for flavor. Mages: nearly everything here has at least one sheepable target in a trash pull and there are plenty of corners to duck around if you need to save that invis cooldown.
Very close to the entrance you’ll find the first boss—a huge ass ogre named Rom’ogg Bonecrusher, who has been responsible for more wipes for me in this dungeon than any other (so far). He’s a tank and spank that summons a constant stream of adds that must be gunned down and he has two “gotchas”. The first is a ‘quake’ attack that does massive damage to people who don’t get out of the fire fast enough. The second is the one that wipes groups: he pulls the entire group next to him with “chains of woe” as he begins casting a point-blank-area-of-effect “I kill you” spell. You must target the chains, kill them, and get the hell out of dodge before the spell completes. This can be very difficult with a large number of adds still up and I highly recommend having people make targeting macros (/target chain) beforehand.
The next boss is Corla, some evil twilight sorceress chick, who would probably die for her master a thousand times. Fortunately, once is enough for me. This one requires a little team coordination. In front of her are three servants being smacked with beams of EVIL energy. The three beams must be blocked (usually by your DPS group) while the tank tanks. Players standing in the beam get a fast and constantly ticking counter. If it reaches 100, you get mind-controlled and the party wipes. If you don’t stand in the beam, the servants evolve into OMGITSKILLINGME nightmares from beyond and the party wipes. Also, Corla will cast a number of spells that should be countered at every opportunity. The proper way to handle the beams is to block them until your debuff stack reaches “80”, step out of the beam until the debuff expires, then hustle back into the beam to repeat the cycle. With her spells countered and nothing evolving this becomes an easy encounter.
Karsh Steelbender is a fairly interesting fight with a golemy-elementally-type thing. It takes place on a large bullseye with a pillar of flame in the middle, a “safe” ring, a grated ring that can spout giant gouts of flame, and the rest of the room. After clearing all of the trash in the room, the tank will run in to engage the construct. Karsh starts out practically immune to damage but as he’s dragged through the pillar in the middle he gains a stackable large buff to damage and debuff to defense. In a way, this fight isn’t so much a DPS race as it is a balancing act for the tank.
The next boss is entirely optional: it’s a huge ass corehound named “Beauty” and has three miniboss pups that join the fight. Do not under any circumstances kill ‘Runty’ as it will send Beauty into an enrage frenzy. Otherwise, treat this like a dragon fight: tank should turn things away from the party and everyone should stay out of the fire. Kill the adds first.
Finally, there’s Lord Obsidius. This fight is vaguely reminiscent of the Blood Council in ICC. The boss has two ‘shadows’ that can’t be killed or CC’d (except slowing effects), but can certainly dish out damage. They must be kited away from the tank by two DPSers while working on the boss. Periodically the boss will ‘trade places’ with one of the shadows and that shadow’s kiter needs to pick up the tank’s previous target.
All in all, it’s a great dungeon to cut teeth on. The non-heroic version targets levels 78-82 or so and drops level 308 (I think) blue gear—a nice way to start upgrading from LK purples.
The population is mostly orcs, ogres, twilight hammer, with elementals thrown in for flavor. Mages: nearly everything here has at least one sheepable target in a trash pull and there are plenty of corners to duck around if you need to save that invis cooldown.
Very close to the entrance you’ll find the first boss—a huge ass ogre named Rom’ogg Bonecrusher, who has been responsible for more wipes for me in this dungeon than any other (so far). He’s a tank and spank that summons a constant stream of adds that must be gunned down and he has two “gotchas”. The first is a ‘quake’ attack that does massive damage to people who don’t get out of the fire fast enough. The second is the one that wipes groups: he pulls the entire group next to him with “chains of woe” as he begins casting a point-blank-area-of-effect “I kill you” spell. You must target the chains, kill them, and get the hell out of dodge before the spell completes. This can be very difficult with a large number of adds still up and I highly recommend having people make targeting macros (/target chain) beforehand.
The next boss is Corla, some evil twilight sorceress chick, who would probably die for her master a thousand times. Fortunately, once is enough for me. This one requires a little team coordination. In front of her are three servants being smacked with beams of EVIL energy. The three beams must be blocked (usually by your DPS group) while the tank tanks. Players standing in the beam get a fast and constantly ticking counter. If it reaches 100, you get mind-controlled and the party wipes. If you don’t stand in the beam, the servants evolve into OMGITSKILLINGME nightmares from beyond and the party wipes. Also, Corla will cast a number of spells that should be countered at every opportunity. The proper way to handle the beams is to block them until your debuff stack reaches “80”, step out of the beam until the debuff expires, then hustle back into the beam to repeat the cycle. With her spells countered and nothing evolving this becomes an easy encounter.
Karsh Steelbender is a fairly interesting fight with a golemy-elementally-type thing. It takes place on a large bullseye with a pillar of flame in the middle, a “safe” ring, a grated ring that can spout giant gouts of flame, and the rest of the room. After clearing all of the trash in the room, the tank will run in to engage the construct. Karsh starts out practically immune to damage but as he’s dragged through the pillar in the middle he gains a stackable large buff to damage and debuff to defense. In a way, this fight isn’t so much a DPS race as it is a balancing act for the tank.
The next boss is entirely optional: it’s a huge ass corehound named “Beauty” and has three miniboss pups that join the fight. Do not under any circumstances kill ‘Runty’ as it will send Beauty into an enrage frenzy. Otherwise, treat this like a dragon fight: tank should turn things away from the party and everyone should stay out of the fire. Kill the adds first.
Finally, there’s Lord Obsidius. This fight is vaguely reminiscent of the Blood Council in ICC. The boss has two ‘shadows’ that can’t be killed or CC’d (except slowing effects), but can certainly dish out damage. They must be kited away from the tank by two DPSers while working on the boss. Periodically the boss will ‘trade places’ with one of the shadows and that shadow’s kiter needs to pick up the tank’s previous target.
All in all, it’s a great dungeon to cut teeth on. The non-heroic version targets levels 78-82 or so and drops level 308 (I think) blue gear—a nice way to start upgrading from LK purples.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Worgen in a Winter Wonderland
As snow fell outside on Christmas for the first time in Atlanta since the 1800s, I sat around idly sipping something warm and wondering what to do. I’d completed my dailies and there was time to kill, so I bit the silver bullet and rolled up a worgen. In moments, Onsunshine stood in the streets of Gilnaes, ready to lend a paw in the battle to save the city.
Over the course of a few hours I slogged through the starter zone. For me the zone was very much “Aliens Vs. Predator”…. 15 minutes of awesome surrounded by two and a half hours of suck.
I’ll give full credit where it’s due: some of the quests were downright engaging and entertaining. “Grandma’s House” was decorated amusingly with portraits of presumably grandchildren on the mantle. Gazing upon the aftermath of Deathwing’s assault brought a long and thoughtful look. The atmosphere was sound and the story of a quasi-Victorian city under siege and the plight, fight, and flight of the survivors moved briskly. So why did I hate it?
Ian noted that I disliked the area because it was gloomy and depressing. Although I dismissed the comment out of hand at the time, it likely factored in to a small degree. Although it was appropriate for the setting, I don’t play games to feel depressed. Just sayin’. My biggest gripe has to be the sheer volume of killtenrats quests. Although I’m generally ok with them, I realized that, for the most part, most of my playtime had been devoured just doing one right after the other. Generally, everything that wasn’t a killtenrats was completed in ninety seconds or less (“grab a book from the shed next to me”, “talk to the person standing over there”, and so forth.) so a vastly disproportionate period of time was spent doing the ‘non-fun’ grind. To top things off, the quest line is so linear it may as well be on a railroad track. Not only should you kill the ten rats, you MUST to do anything else on the island and since you’re walled off from the ‘real’ world in a starter instance, you don’t have the option of doing anything else.
When I finally left the isle, Onsunshine was level 13 and I’m enjoying the druid mechanics immensely.
Over the course of a few hours I slogged through the starter zone. For me the zone was very much “Aliens Vs. Predator”…. 15 minutes of awesome surrounded by two and a half hours of suck.
I’ll give full credit where it’s due: some of the quests were downright engaging and entertaining. “Grandma’s House” was decorated amusingly with portraits of presumably grandchildren on the mantle. Gazing upon the aftermath of Deathwing’s assault brought a long and thoughtful look. The atmosphere was sound and the story of a quasi-Victorian city under siege and the plight, fight, and flight of the survivors moved briskly. So why did I hate it?
Ian noted that I disliked the area because it was gloomy and depressing. Although I dismissed the comment out of hand at the time, it likely factored in to a small degree. Although it was appropriate for the setting, I don’t play games to feel depressed. Just sayin’. My biggest gripe has to be the sheer volume of killtenrats quests. Although I’m generally ok with them, I realized that, for the most part, most of my playtime had been devoured just doing one right after the other. Generally, everything that wasn’t a killtenrats was completed in ninety seconds or less (“grab a book from the shed next to me”, “talk to the person standing over there”, and so forth.) so a vastly disproportionate period of time was spent doing the ‘non-fun’ grind. To top things off, the quest line is so linear it may as well be on a railroad track. Not only should you kill the ten rats, you MUST to do anything else on the island and since you’re walled off from the ‘real’ world in a starter instance, you don’t have the option of doing anything else.
When I finally left the isle, Onsunshine was level 13 and I’m enjoying the druid mechanics immensely.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Grim Batol, revisited
A couple of days after my epic failure to secure epics, the opportunity presented itself to run a random with one of our guild tanks. I gamely joined in, as did one of our resident hunters and the rolling random die put us in Grim Batol. I'd been itching to get some of my own back so it was with glee that I delved once more into the depths...
Grim Batol is an ancient dwarven fortress, now gone to ruin. It is home to numerous dark iron dwarves, minions of the Twilight Hammer, and dragonkin a-plenty. The bridges connecting areas have crumbled and rubble blocks other passageways. Visually, it's an incredibly interesting zone.
After clearing the first few groups of trash, you encounter a number of red dragons that have been netted. Free them and you get to play a mini-game of "make the next hour of your life easier". Seriously, you fly on the dragon as it takes you on an aerial path all the way to the end boss and back. While airborne, you can (and should) use the dragon's flame breath liberally to soften up as many groups of foes as you can. Killing them outright is a bonus, but will take several strikes. You only get once chance at this, so make those shots count. The mobs that have been wounded by the party's initial assault will not heal those wounds.
Upon dropping you back off, the fun begins in earnest and having a mage (even a short, ill-tempered one with a penchant for fishing and puns) is very helpful for sheep pulling and general control. Although mages can't sheep the dragonkin, almost all of the trash packs contain at least one humanoid caster.
The first boss encountered is General Umbriss and, for ranged, he isn't that complex. Shoot, shoot, shoot...when it looks like he's going to charge you, get the hell out of the way. Veterans of Trial of the Crusader will recognize the "charge mechanic" from Icehowl. Otherwise the tank is the one taking the brunt of this one, with a heavy bleed stack and a mana-intensive healer fight. Who am I kidding-- ALL of the bosses are mana-intensive fights! :)
You'll work your way through the 'streets', which are reminiscent of Ironforge cleaning trash until you get to the next challenge: the Forgemaster. This guy sucks.
He's a huge ettin that causes cave-ins that need to be avoided ("get out of the fire, get out of the fire") and will periodically choose a weapon and get powers and abilities that tie in. Swords = tank had better blow cooldowns, because he's about to get barraged with OMG damage, Mace = slow but needs to be kited and he'll impale a party member and carry him around a bit (as the victim takes 9k damage a second), and a Shield. My first encounter with him was on heroic, where the strategy guides simply said "If he grabs his shield first", just reset the encounter and try again. Shield gives him effectively invulnerability from the front...which isn't so bad. On heroic, it ALSO comes with a 180 degree frontal cone of fire doing 18k damage a second that reaches the ranged party members. Suffice it to say there's an awful lot of running. Fortunately, when you wipe on this guy, those dragons at the start of the instance will drop you off very close to him for the next try.
We had the utter misfortune of getting a bad healer in our regular run and had, by this point, wiped a couple of times to the first boss and a couple of times before the forgemaster fell. Heck, when we finally killed the guy, the only ones still standing were myself and another DPS. When we wiped against an easy trash pull, the healer dropped in shame seconds before the tank called him out on it. Fortunately, we were able to pick up a guild healer quickly and after Giggitygoo joined us, things ran a -lot- smoother.
The next boss is optional as you can scootch around him without drawing aggro if you're in a hurry just to finish, but we weren't in the mood to pass up on more loot.
With a quarter of the health of the other bosses, Drahga Shadowburner looks like a wimp. Nothing could be further from the truth. Throughout the fight, he summons fire elemental adds that 'lock' onto a random player if the add gets to the player, there is a massive aoe explosion. (On the heroic run, I got nailed by one for 150k damage.) It is imperative these guys go down fast. When the boss gets low on health, he jumps off a ledge, only to be caught by his dragon ally and from the dragon's back he continues his assault. Now you've got to burn down the dragon's health.
Mr. Dragon is a little different from most dragons: he has a 180 degree cone attack, drops patches of BAD on the floor, but doesn't get a tail swipe. To top it off, Drahga continues to summon his bomb minions throughout this phase. Once the dragon is down, you have to finish off Drahga's last few health before claiming victory.
Only a little trash remains before reaching the big bad: Erudax. This guy is definitely raid-worthy. His main 'specials' include 'Shadow Gale' which roots one person and makes the entire floor except for one small spot around the rooted person a Death Trap. He'll knock the tank around for 60k, then slap a debuff on him to increase damage horrifically, so the tank must kite while the healer run heals with him. On top of this, there are adds to contend with that MUST be taken down when they appear. Otherwise, they hatch black dragon eggs that litter the room and the party goes into a world of hurt quickly.
When Erudax fell, I cheered at the monitor. It's good practice for the heroic and I feel a lot more confident about it now.
The RNG hated me for the run-- everything that dropped was chain, leather, or plate. Honestly, I wasn't broken up about it. At the time the only things I needed that were level i333 were trinkets and a wand.
Perhaps some other day.
Grim Batol is an ancient dwarven fortress, now gone to ruin. It is home to numerous dark iron dwarves, minions of the Twilight Hammer, and dragonkin a-plenty. The bridges connecting areas have crumbled and rubble blocks other passageways. Visually, it's an incredibly interesting zone.
After clearing the first few groups of trash, you encounter a number of red dragons that have been netted. Free them and you get to play a mini-game of "make the next hour of your life easier". Seriously, you fly on the dragon as it takes you on an aerial path all the way to the end boss and back. While airborne, you can (and should) use the dragon's flame breath liberally to soften up as many groups of foes as you can. Killing them outright is a bonus, but will take several strikes. You only get once chance at this, so make those shots count. The mobs that have been wounded by the party's initial assault will not heal those wounds.
Upon dropping you back off, the fun begins in earnest and having a mage (even a short, ill-tempered one with a penchant for fishing and puns) is very helpful for sheep pulling and general control. Although mages can't sheep the dragonkin, almost all of the trash packs contain at least one humanoid caster.
The first boss encountered is General Umbriss and, for ranged, he isn't that complex. Shoot, shoot, shoot...when it looks like he's going to charge you, get the hell out of the way. Veterans of Trial of the Crusader will recognize the "charge mechanic" from Icehowl. Otherwise the tank is the one taking the brunt of this one, with a heavy bleed stack and a mana-intensive healer fight. Who am I kidding-- ALL of the bosses are mana-intensive fights! :)
You'll work your way through the 'streets', which are reminiscent of Ironforge cleaning trash until you get to the next challenge: the Forgemaster. This guy sucks.
He's a huge ettin that causes cave-ins that need to be avoided ("get out of the fire, get out of the fire") and will periodically choose a weapon and get powers and abilities that tie in. Swords = tank had better blow cooldowns, because he's about to get barraged with OMG damage, Mace = slow but needs to be kited and he'll impale a party member and carry him around a bit (as the victim takes 9k damage a second), and a Shield. My first encounter with him was on heroic, where the strategy guides simply said "If he grabs his shield first", just reset the encounter and try again. Shield gives him effectively invulnerability from the front...which isn't so bad. On heroic, it ALSO comes with a 180 degree frontal cone of fire doing 18k damage a second that reaches the ranged party members. Suffice it to say there's an awful lot of running. Fortunately, when you wipe on this guy, those dragons at the start of the instance will drop you off very close to him for the next try.
We had the utter misfortune of getting a bad healer in our regular run and had, by this point, wiped a couple of times to the first boss and a couple of times before the forgemaster fell. Heck, when we finally killed the guy, the only ones still standing were myself and another DPS. When we wiped against an easy trash pull, the healer dropped in shame seconds before the tank called him out on it. Fortunately, we were able to pick up a guild healer quickly and after Giggitygoo joined us, things ran a -lot- smoother.
The next boss is optional as you can scootch around him without drawing aggro if you're in a hurry just to finish, but we weren't in the mood to pass up on more loot.
With a quarter of the health of the other bosses, Drahga Shadowburner looks like a wimp. Nothing could be further from the truth. Throughout the fight, he summons fire elemental adds that 'lock' onto a random player if the add gets to the player, there is a massive aoe explosion. (On the heroic run, I got nailed by one for 150k damage.) It is imperative these guys go down fast. When the boss gets low on health, he jumps off a ledge, only to be caught by his dragon ally and from the dragon's back he continues his assault. Now you've got to burn down the dragon's health.
Mr. Dragon is a little different from most dragons: he has a 180 degree cone attack, drops patches of BAD on the floor, but doesn't get a tail swipe. To top it off, Drahga continues to summon his bomb minions throughout this phase. Once the dragon is down, you have to finish off Drahga's last few health before claiming victory.
Only a little trash remains before reaching the big bad: Erudax. This guy is definitely raid-worthy. His main 'specials' include 'Shadow Gale' which roots one person and makes the entire floor except for one small spot around the rooted person a Death Trap. He'll knock the tank around for 60k, then slap a debuff on him to increase damage horrifically, so the tank must kite while the healer run heals with him. On top of this, there are adds to contend with that MUST be taken down when they appear. Otherwise, they hatch black dragon eggs that litter the room and the party goes into a world of hurt quickly.
When Erudax fell, I cheered at the monitor. It's good practice for the heroic and I feel a lot more confident about it now.
The RNG hated me for the run-- everything that dropped was chain, leather, or plate. Honestly, I wasn't broken up about it. At the time the only things I needed that were level i333 were trinkets and a wand.
Perhaps some other day.
Monday, December 20, 2010
The Heroic
Over the weekend, I attained a number of personal goals:
- I FINALLY finished Loremaster.
- Brian helped me score a red winter hat after I untterly failed to solo Grand Mage Telestra four times.
- Ground first aid to 525 and fishing to 500
- Bought Master flight because I was sick of flying around to arch digs slower than max.
- Ground faction to Revered w/ a couple of factions for the gear
- Finished ALL of the Winter Veil achieves I can before Christmas
By the time all was said and done, I was sitting smartly at around item level 331 without ever setting foot in a heroic and itching to try them out.
The way Blizzard has laid out loot progression for 'new 85's' is as follows: You must have average item level 329 to queue for heroics. All dungeons except the "last three" (Grim Batol, Halls of Origination, and Lost City of the Tol'vir) give loot that is level 312 or less. To get level 333 loot, you must camp those three dungeons repeatedly, finish a few rare quest lines that reward that level gear, or pick up gear from the various factions' Quartermasters once you have an honored reputation with them.
Beyond that, one must either purchase i346 gear with Justice Points earned from doing regular dungeons, get really good at some tradeskills, OR pick up faction rewards from the various quartermasters. Quartermaster gear is level 346 and 359 for revered and exalted respectively. A couple of factions have no daily quests to earn reputation and those that do have very little to pick from, leading to an extensive reputation grind, that's mitigated at least a little by wearing one of their tabards while fighting... in the same last three dungeons.
At the time, I thought reputation was only gathered in dungeons on Heroic level, since I'd been diligently wearing tabards and earning no rewards for helping guildies through Blackrock Caverns and the Throne of Tides many times. When the guild got a group together for Grim Batol, I jumped at the chance to earn "real gear". Hoo boy.
I'll save the run down of the dungeon for tomorrow's post, but I will say this: I went in with i331 average and it wasn't enough by far. To call these 'Heroics' is a joke, a cruel jape by the designers. These are five-man RAIDS and bringing anything less than a raid attitude to it and five skilled, geared players will result in wipe after wipe. I knew it wasn't going to be WotLK's easy 15-minute speed runs. I was not prepared for a two-and-a-half hour strap-yourself-in-this-will-be-hell run that culminated in no less than 16 party wipes with the last two bosses unfinished.
Mind you, this is with my guild group... on Teamspeak to coordinate... many of whom earned the Kingslayer title before it went into 'easy mode'.
After we disbanded, I studied my gear hard and started to work...
The gear I had was 'decent', but I had prepared for a Heroic... not a raid. It was time to change my mindset and put my game face on. I started by enchanting every single piece of my gear. I'd been lax because mats are pricey and I was rather under the misbegotten impression I wouldn't need enchants on gear I'd be replacing soon. Bwahahaha, joke was on me.
Fortunately, my reputation was really close to revered for a couple of groups, so I ran dailies for a couple of days to push me over the line and picked up a couple of nice gear upgrades. A couple of days later, I did the same with two other factions and repeated the process. I'm now at i336 with about 700 spellpower above that first fateful run and am just about ready to try it again.
I had the pleasure of running Grim Batol on regular mode, so I could see how it was supposed to go down. I'll go over that next time...
- I FINALLY finished Loremaster.
- Brian helped me score a red winter hat after I untterly failed to solo Grand Mage Telestra four times.
- Ground first aid to 525 and fishing to 500
- Bought Master flight because I was sick of flying around to arch digs slower than max.
- Ground faction to Revered w/ a couple of factions for the gear
- Finished ALL of the Winter Veil achieves I can before Christmas
By the time all was said and done, I was sitting smartly at around item level 331 without ever setting foot in a heroic and itching to try them out.
The way Blizzard has laid out loot progression for 'new 85's' is as follows: You must have average item level 329 to queue for heroics. All dungeons except the "last three" (Grim Batol, Halls of Origination, and Lost City of the Tol'vir) give loot that is level 312 or less. To get level 333 loot, you must camp those three dungeons repeatedly, finish a few rare quest lines that reward that level gear, or pick up gear from the various factions' Quartermasters once you have an honored reputation with them.
Beyond that, one must either purchase i346 gear with Justice Points earned from doing regular dungeons, get really good at some tradeskills, OR pick up faction rewards from the various quartermasters. Quartermaster gear is level 346 and 359 for revered and exalted respectively. A couple of factions have no daily quests to earn reputation and those that do have very little to pick from, leading to an extensive reputation grind, that's mitigated at least a little by wearing one of their tabards while fighting... in the same last three dungeons.
At the time, I thought reputation was only gathered in dungeons on Heroic level, since I'd been diligently wearing tabards and earning no rewards for helping guildies through Blackrock Caverns and the Throne of Tides many times. When the guild got a group together for Grim Batol, I jumped at the chance to earn "real gear". Hoo boy.
I'll save the run down of the dungeon for tomorrow's post, but I will say this: I went in with i331 average and it wasn't enough by far. To call these 'Heroics' is a joke, a cruel jape by the designers. These are five-man RAIDS and bringing anything less than a raid attitude to it and five skilled, geared players will result in wipe after wipe. I knew it wasn't going to be WotLK's easy 15-minute speed runs. I was not prepared for a two-and-a-half hour strap-yourself-in-this-will-be-hell run that culminated in no less than 16 party wipes with the last two bosses unfinished.
Mind you, this is with my guild group... on Teamspeak to coordinate... many of whom earned the Kingslayer title before it went into 'easy mode'.
After we disbanded, I studied my gear hard and started to work...
The gear I had was 'decent', but I had prepared for a Heroic... not a raid. It was time to change my mindset and put my game face on. I started by enchanting every single piece of my gear. I'd been lax because mats are pricey and I was rather under the misbegotten impression I wouldn't need enchants on gear I'd be replacing soon. Bwahahaha, joke was on me.
Fortunately, my reputation was really close to revered for a couple of groups, so I ran dailies for a couple of days to push me over the line and picked up a couple of nice gear upgrades. A couple of days later, I did the same with two other factions and repeated the process. I'm now at i336 with about 700 spellpower above that first fateful run and am just about ready to try it again.
I had the pleasure of running Grim Batol on regular mode, so I could see how it was supposed to go down. I'll go over that next time...
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Cataclysm Edition Part 3: Dungeon Diving
One of my earlier priorities in the expansion should have been finding the entrances to all of the new instances to enable queuing for them. Honestly, none of them were terribly hard to find, but general laziness kept me from hitting them up until the second time I had to be summoned to a dungeon for a ‘discovery’.
Due to the increase in complexity and difficulty in the dungeons, I’ve been avoiding PUGs like the plague and have been running with the Guild when possible, which surprisingly isn’t that often. The ‘regular’ versions of the dungeons (for the most part) don’t offer nearly any gear that would be upgrades and I can’t earn any reputation there, so fighting there is either practice for honing my skills or charity for guildies who haven’t hit 85 yet or need the i333 (or under) equipment.
Presently, we have few members that qualify for heroics and I’m exceedingly bad at being available when these runs start. That is changing gradually as more players become “heroic ready” by hitting that magic i329-average level and the opportunities to participate in daily runs increase in the coming weeks.
I’ll touch on each dungeon in these blog posts in the coming days and for today, you get the Throne of Tides, the first dungeon I ran in Cata.
The Throne of Tides is accessed by heading down the giant underwater whirlpool in the abyssal maw, taking you deep (DEEP) within the earth into a secret cavern. The dungeon itself is utterly beautiful with an (very no-surprises-here) aquatic theme and home to Neptulon, the unoriginally named God o’ th’ Sea. It’s an open-air environment, so there’s no swimming involved and plenty of naga, gil-goblins, murlocs, and water-elementals to keep the pace err…fluid.
The dungeon layout is fairly straight-forward and houses a very ‘nifty’ features in addition to several bosses you catch glimpses of throughout your travels in Vashj’ir. There’s a large shimmering elevator to ride, a teleporter that allows you to return to the dungeon entrance a lot faster than waiting for the elevator, and several ‘gauntlet’ hallways that constantly spawn groups of trash mobs until the paths have been cleared.
Trash follows typical Cataclysm-sized groups of five or more, making crowd control necessary for appropriately-leveled parties and the mixture of types favor mages and warlocks both.
Bosses you encounter along the way include Lady Naz’jar—a naga who periodically becomes invulnerable as she summons minions, Commander Ulthok—a fairly straightforward tank’n’spank, and my personal favorite: Erunak and the Mindbender. Erunak starts off as an Earthen Ring-lookin’ dude with a large pulsating head. After you blast him down to half health, it gets awesome. The hat is revealed to be a PSIONICALLY ENDOWED OCTOPUS who runs around alternately possessing people until they are (literally) beaten half to half, blasting the party with beams of inky darkness, and surrounding itself with a shield that heals it when damaging spells are cast.
The final encounter is a ‘defend area’ with you assisting Neptulon as he attempts to “cleanse the waters”. I’m guessing naga have been peeing in the pool. In this encounter, the party deals with waves of cultists and thingies summoned by them until Neptulon’s ritual is complete and the killer octopus who sank your boat shows up. You receive a MASSIVE health and damage buff (Strev was some 30 feet tall and critting for over 700k damage) and you must blast the cephalopod into sushi as it lurks overhead. Completing the encounter allows the party to loot a chest of Neptulon’s treasures.
Overall, I rather enjoy this dungeon. Tune in next time for Blackrock Caverns!
Due to the increase in complexity and difficulty in the dungeons, I’ve been avoiding PUGs like the plague and have been running with the Guild when possible, which surprisingly isn’t that often. The ‘regular’ versions of the dungeons (for the most part) don’t offer nearly any gear that would be upgrades and I can’t earn any reputation there, so fighting there is either practice for honing my skills or charity for guildies who haven’t hit 85 yet or need the i333 (or under) equipment.
Presently, we have few members that qualify for heroics and I’m exceedingly bad at being available when these runs start. That is changing gradually as more players become “heroic ready” by hitting that magic i329-average level and the opportunities to participate in daily runs increase in the coming weeks.
I’ll touch on each dungeon in these blog posts in the coming days and for today, you get the Throne of Tides, the first dungeon I ran in Cata.
The Throne of Tides is accessed by heading down the giant underwater whirlpool in the abyssal maw, taking you deep (DEEP) within the earth into a secret cavern. The dungeon itself is utterly beautiful with an (very no-surprises-here) aquatic theme and home to Neptulon, the unoriginally named God o’ th’ Sea. It’s an open-air environment, so there’s no swimming involved and plenty of naga, gil-goblins, murlocs, and water-elementals to keep the pace err…fluid.
The dungeon layout is fairly straight-forward and houses a very ‘nifty’ features in addition to several bosses you catch glimpses of throughout your travels in Vashj’ir. There’s a large shimmering elevator to ride, a teleporter that allows you to return to the dungeon entrance a lot faster than waiting for the elevator, and several ‘gauntlet’ hallways that constantly spawn groups of trash mobs until the paths have been cleared.
Trash follows typical Cataclysm-sized groups of five or more, making crowd control necessary for appropriately-leveled parties and the mixture of types favor mages and warlocks both.
Bosses you encounter along the way include Lady Naz’jar—a naga who periodically becomes invulnerable as she summons minions, Commander Ulthok—a fairly straightforward tank’n’spank, and my personal favorite: Erunak and the Mindbender. Erunak starts off as an Earthen Ring-lookin’ dude with a large pulsating head. After you blast him down to half health, it gets awesome. The hat is revealed to be a PSIONICALLY ENDOWED OCTOPUS who runs around alternately possessing people until they are (literally) beaten half to half, blasting the party with beams of inky darkness, and surrounding itself with a shield that heals it when damaging spells are cast.
The final encounter is a ‘defend area’ with you assisting Neptulon as he attempts to “cleanse the waters”. I’m guessing naga have been peeing in the pool. In this encounter, the party deals with waves of cultists and thingies summoned by them until Neptulon’s ritual is complete and the killer octopus who sank your boat shows up. You receive a MASSIVE health and damage buff (Strev was some 30 feet tall and critting for over 700k damage) and you must blast the cephalopod into sushi as it lurks overhead. Completing the encounter allows the party to loot a chest of Neptulon’s treasures.
Overall, I rather enjoy this dungeon. Tune in next time for Blackrock Caverns!
Friday, December 17, 2010
For Want of a Hat
Spent a couple of hours running dailies for Wildhammer (yay!) and Tol Barad (boo!), interrupted by an amusing chunk of time where the Guild managed to put together nearly two full 5-man teams for dungeons before realizing that we had no tanks.
I have some time off next week so I intend to knock out a lot of the Christmas (err.. Winter Veil) events then, but I figured since I was out and about, I’d go ahead and get a couple of the easy achievements done. Cooking a few holiday recipes was quickly handled, as was rescuing a kidnapped reindeer. After some brief confusion and some internet searches, I obtained a pocket full of mistletoe and started the “Bros before Ho ho hos”. The Greench was overcamped, so that gets to wait until the server population is down. Since many of the achieves can’t happen before the presents are available on Christmas itself, I contented myself with getting some ‘holiday clothes’ and fruitcake.
The AH had pleasantly overpriced boots for sale and some kind soul had left a wintermas robe in the guild bank, so that was covered. All I needed was a hat. After camping the AH for a bit, I went to look up the requirements to see if it was something Zyrial could make and discovered to my horror it is a bind-on-pickup item. Oh noes! The hat itself is either obtainable as a random world drop or from certain bosses, the easiest of which may be the mage in Nexus. So, alone and tired to the Nexus I flew.
Wowhead noted that the hat doesn’t drop 100% from the ‘regular’ version, it had to be Heroic. Fine. We’d see how I do soloing a LK heroic. I stepped in and the mobs are level 81 elites. Fortunately, the spawns are for the most part not densely packed. I meandered up to the first dragonkin and reduced it to slag. This was promising. I repeated my success and in short order I was by the Hall of Suddenly Mobile Captain America Wannabes. The guide I had read noted they wouldn’t attack if you stayed out of melee range. A patrol consisting of a guy with two dogs and a larger aggro radius than expected approached. Not good. I made my decision and ran as the pack descended on me, weaving as I could to avoid the frozen foes with the intention of turning invisible to drop aggro once I was in the clear. What I had neglected to take into consideration was that the guide was written for the non-heroic version of the dungeon.
As I ran, ice exploded all around me and over a dozen and a half critters took me down fast. Terrific. I returned to the dungeon and opted to take a different path to my quarry and went over a couple of floating platforms taking groups of three on with judicious use of invisibility to sneak past a rather large clump of potential hurt and mirror image against patrols. In short order, I faced Mage What’s-her-Name. She was wearing a hat and—oh, LOOK! Under 225k health? Cake!
Burning my cool downs, I lit into her like a cat aflame and in less than seven seconds I had her at half…and things turned ugly. She “split” into 3 copies and lit up my world. I couldn’t make progress against the boss’ health until the three were burned down, but Time Warp was still active and it helped as I blasted my heart out. Once the three were down, I had a very brief respite to evocate some health and mana back. The boss again presented herself, but I was only given a few seconds to nuke her down to 50k or so before she split again. This time, tired and ragged from the fight I could only best two of the clones before tasting sweet, sweet floor.
I had only a few minutes before turning into a pumpkin, so I tried the dungeon again on ‘normal’ difficulty. Facing level 71 elites were substantially less threatening. This time Miss Thing bit pavement in five seconds flat, but despite her festive appearance, there was no hat to be had. Slightly saddened, I logged out. I’ll try again another time.
I have some time off next week so I intend to knock out a lot of the Christmas (err.. Winter Veil) events then, but I figured since I was out and about, I’d go ahead and get a couple of the easy achievements done. Cooking a few holiday recipes was quickly handled, as was rescuing a kidnapped reindeer. After some brief confusion and some internet searches, I obtained a pocket full of mistletoe and started the “Bros before Ho ho hos”. The Greench was overcamped, so that gets to wait until the server population is down. Since many of the achieves can’t happen before the presents are available on Christmas itself, I contented myself with getting some ‘holiday clothes’ and fruitcake.
The AH had pleasantly overpriced boots for sale and some kind soul had left a wintermas robe in the guild bank, so that was covered. All I needed was a hat. After camping the AH for a bit, I went to look up the requirements to see if it was something Zyrial could make and discovered to my horror it is a bind-on-pickup item. Oh noes! The hat itself is either obtainable as a random world drop or from certain bosses, the easiest of which may be the mage in Nexus. So, alone and tired to the Nexus I flew.
Wowhead noted that the hat doesn’t drop 100% from the ‘regular’ version, it had to be Heroic. Fine. We’d see how I do soloing a LK heroic. I stepped in and the mobs are level 81 elites. Fortunately, the spawns are for the most part not densely packed. I meandered up to the first dragonkin and reduced it to slag. This was promising. I repeated my success and in short order I was by the Hall of Suddenly Mobile Captain America Wannabes. The guide I had read noted they wouldn’t attack if you stayed out of melee range. A patrol consisting of a guy with two dogs and a larger aggro radius than expected approached. Not good. I made my decision and ran as the pack descended on me, weaving as I could to avoid the frozen foes with the intention of turning invisible to drop aggro once I was in the clear. What I had neglected to take into consideration was that the guide was written for the non-heroic version of the dungeon.
As I ran, ice exploded all around me and over a dozen and a half critters took me down fast. Terrific. I returned to the dungeon and opted to take a different path to my quarry and went over a couple of floating platforms taking groups of three on with judicious use of invisibility to sneak past a rather large clump of potential hurt and mirror image against patrols. In short order, I faced Mage What’s-her-Name. She was wearing a hat and—oh, LOOK! Under 225k health? Cake!
Burning my cool downs, I lit into her like a cat aflame and in less than seven seconds I had her at half…and things turned ugly. She “split” into 3 copies and lit up my world. I couldn’t make progress against the boss’ health until the three were burned down, but Time Warp was still active and it helped as I blasted my heart out. Once the three were down, I had a very brief respite to evocate some health and mana back. The boss again presented herself, but I was only given a few seconds to nuke her down to 50k or so before she split again. This time, tired and ragged from the fight I could only best two of the clones before tasting sweet, sweet floor.
I had only a few minutes before turning into a pumpkin, so I tried the dungeon again on ‘normal’ difficulty. Facing level 71 elites were substantially less threatening. This time Miss Thing bit pavement in five seconds flat, but despite her festive appearance, there was no hat to be had. Slightly saddened, I logged out. I’ll try again another time.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Cataclysmic Edition Part 2: The Zone Ranger
After playing around this past week and finishing all of the quests in all of the new cata zones except Vashj’ir, I feel ‘somewhat qualified’ to give my opinion on the highs and lows that are out there. The bottom line is that Blizzard went all out to provide the McDLT of MMOs. Readers who have no idea what a McDLT is should go ask their parents now or more likely just wiki it. Go ahead. I’ll be here when you get back.
For a MMO, it’s a rather curious dichotomy. The hot side (hard core raider EXTREME!) and cool side (the casuals) can both find entertainment in abundance, but there’s a very obvious divider between the two.
On the cool side, there’s thousands of new quests that are all designed to be completed in ten minutes or less. Not much time? That’s ok. Pick it up, play with it, put it down, and walk away. These emphasize ‘fun’ over ‘immersion’ with a large number of quests that are nothing but blatant nods to popular culture. That’s not to say they aren’t good—but there’s an obvious shift from the Vanilla way of thinking that required hours of time invested and trips across the continents to find the Magic McGuffin or collect plot coupons. The only really negative thing I can say about them is that there’s little to no difficulty at all and in a way it cheapens the victory. Gone are the “recommended group size: [3-5]” quests. If a quest has you fighting an elite, there –will- be a way to weaken it to normal levels or there will be NPC intervention to assist. Aside from 2 deaths to Barron Geddon in Hyjal before I “got it” and “swallowed by giant worm” in Deepholm, the only deaths I took exploring the entirity of That Which is Not Tol Barad (see later) were due to random disconnects and server crashes. The only ‘must group for’ quests are some dailies in Tol Barad and the Crucible of Carnage arena fights in Twilight Highlands.
The dungeons are where it starts to get challenging. I’ve been actively avoiding PUGs this expansion due to extensive queue times (up to an hour), but even with guild runs they aren’t a simple blaze through everything, gather half a room and nuke it to death with AoEs. Crowd control is –necessary- and welcome. It isn’t unusual to see ‘sheep pulling’ now, where the mage pulls a group with polymorph and the tank picks up the aggro from the incoming pack as the mage scurries to a corner. This is where the wheat begins being separated from the chaff and communication skills become vital.
On the hot side, you have heroics and raids—mobs hit for quantities that are nothing less than obscene, but the rewards are the highest available pve gear. Not to be left out in the cold, the pvpers now have rated battlegrounds—and good scores there AND arenas are required for top tier pvp gear. The latter has the interesting side effect of making ‘normal’ BGs a smidgeon more friendly to casuals. (but just a smidgeon. You still find a much higher mouthy asshole to skilled player ratio in any BG compared to the rest of the game.) I’ll share the story of the Guild’s First Cataclysm Raid some other time.
Any way you go, something for everyone.
Now, as far as the zones themselves, each zone has an entertaining “introduction” that is a once ever movie and/or phased event that starts the player into the main quest theme. Each zone has one central storyline with several converging story arcs that held my interest to the point where I finished all of a zone’s quests long after I had gotten the loremaster ‘completion’ achieve for each particular zone. They are well-written and very compelling with elaborate cutscenes and movies aplenty.
In deference to players who haven’t blazed through the content, I’ll go against my usual style and keep spoilers to a minimum.
Mount Hyjal — I honestly didn’t think that much of the area at first. It’s mostly a foresty/mountainous (shock!) zone and it is the only place I’d seen that required a player to explore a little to find quest givers. The overall arc introduces the player to the Twilight Hammer (the ‘bad guys’ of the expansion that you face in every zone) and involves the player in rescuing, aiding, and assisting druids in returning the animal gods to Azeroth. I really got into the zone after I came back after doing all of the others. Zone Highlights: the Joust homage, chucking bear cubs from a tree top to a trampoline, and giving a speech to inspire graduating Twilight Cultists.
Vashj’ir — From the moment I was shipwrecked by a giant octopus, I fell in love with this lush and beautiful underwater zone. Within a few quests you’ll get the ability to breathe water and later on you’ll get a seahorse steed so you can finally live out those Aquaman fantasy scenes you’ve harbored your entire life. The biggest highlights are the naga quest lines where you possess the body of an ancient naga battlemaiden and explore the zone’s lore firsthand.
Deepholm — Possibly my least favorite zone. The entire zone is one ginormous cavern which vaguely reminds me of Icecrown in a ‘large, uninteresting’ features sort of way. There’s a plethora of dailies that unlock eventually and the lavascale catfish swim bountifully here, so I keep going back regardless of my distaste. The main plot arc is repairing the “World Pillar” which was broken into three convenient chunks when Deathwing escaped.
Uldum – Far and away, this zone is my favorite. Ever since Vanilla when I saw those massive gates in Tanaris, I wondered what lay past them. Now six years later they have opened into an Egyptian wonderland. Those who followed my previous “Blog in the Desert” know I have an unhealthy love affair with this sub-genre and it pandered to every pore in my body. Camel mounts? Amusing quests? Dozens of quests that involve Harrison Jones, famed archaeologist? Over a dozen movies and cut scenes? The only hate I have here is for some buggy and poorly implemented phasing that will hopefully be fixed within a month. Main plotlines are the Harrison Jones lines (which are exactly as awesome as you expect, constantly upping itself on “epicosity” until one runs out of superlatives) and a war between factions of catlike centaurs and the Twilight Hammer.
Twilight Highlands – I started out disliking this dimly-lit foresty zone, mostly because it starts out in a battlefield a la Borean Tundra, but quickly turned into my second favorite once I met the Wildhammer dwarves. Rife with humor and amusing quests the dwarves kept me going until I quickly became drawn into the Alliance’s last stand against the Twilight Hammer, at one point standing toe to toe with SI:7’s Mathias Shaw as we did what had to be done. Highlight? “The wedding.”
Tol Barad – This zone has a level 85 requirement to enter and it’s necessary. There’s actually two parts to the zone: Tol Barad Peninsula and Tol Barad itself. Each have a number of daily quests and serve up vast amounts of pain. The mobs spawn at ungodly rates and deal massive amounts of damage quickly. Add to that the zones are flight restricted and you have all the makings of mage pancakes. I don’t have an issue with the difficulty of the zone—it’s nice to have a challenge while killing rats, I just wish the respawn rates were a bit more…normalized. The daily quests seem to cycle through a small variety so it isn’t the same ten rats day after day. Also, the quest rewards give ‘commendations’, a zone-wide currency used in conjunction with reputation to acquire nifty epic weaponry and toys.
That’s cata in a nutshell. Join me next time for Cataclysm Edition Part 3: Dungeon Diving
For a MMO, it’s a rather curious dichotomy. The hot side (hard core raider EXTREME!) and cool side (the casuals) can both find entertainment in abundance, but there’s a very obvious divider between the two.
On the cool side, there’s thousands of new quests that are all designed to be completed in ten minutes or less. Not much time? That’s ok. Pick it up, play with it, put it down, and walk away. These emphasize ‘fun’ over ‘immersion’ with a large number of quests that are nothing but blatant nods to popular culture. That’s not to say they aren’t good—but there’s an obvious shift from the Vanilla way of thinking that required hours of time invested and trips across the continents to find the Magic McGuffin or collect plot coupons. The only really negative thing I can say about them is that there’s little to no difficulty at all and in a way it cheapens the victory. Gone are the “recommended group size: [3-5]” quests. If a quest has you fighting an elite, there –will- be a way to weaken it to normal levels or there will be NPC intervention to assist. Aside from 2 deaths to Barron Geddon in Hyjal before I “got it” and “swallowed by giant worm” in Deepholm, the only deaths I took exploring the entirity of That Which is Not Tol Barad (see later) were due to random disconnects and server crashes. The only ‘must group for’ quests are some dailies in Tol Barad and the Crucible of Carnage arena fights in Twilight Highlands.
The dungeons are where it starts to get challenging. I’ve been actively avoiding PUGs this expansion due to extensive queue times (up to an hour), but even with guild runs they aren’t a simple blaze through everything, gather half a room and nuke it to death with AoEs. Crowd control is –necessary- and welcome. It isn’t unusual to see ‘sheep pulling’ now, where the mage pulls a group with polymorph and the tank picks up the aggro from the incoming pack as the mage scurries to a corner. This is where the wheat begins being separated from the chaff and communication skills become vital.
On the hot side, you have heroics and raids—mobs hit for quantities that are nothing less than obscene, but the rewards are the highest available pve gear. Not to be left out in the cold, the pvpers now have rated battlegrounds—and good scores there AND arenas are required for top tier pvp gear. The latter has the interesting side effect of making ‘normal’ BGs a smidgeon more friendly to casuals. (but just a smidgeon. You still find a much higher mouthy asshole to skilled player ratio in any BG compared to the rest of the game.) I’ll share the story of the Guild’s First Cataclysm Raid some other time.
Any way you go, something for everyone.
Now, as far as the zones themselves, each zone has an entertaining “introduction” that is a once ever movie and/or phased event that starts the player into the main quest theme. Each zone has one central storyline with several converging story arcs that held my interest to the point where I finished all of a zone’s quests long after I had gotten the loremaster ‘completion’ achieve for each particular zone. They are well-written and very compelling with elaborate cutscenes and movies aplenty.
In deference to players who haven’t blazed through the content, I’ll go against my usual style and keep spoilers to a minimum.
Mount Hyjal — I honestly didn’t think that much of the area at first. It’s mostly a foresty/mountainous (shock!) zone and it is the only place I’d seen that required a player to explore a little to find quest givers. The overall arc introduces the player to the Twilight Hammer (the ‘bad guys’ of the expansion that you face in every zone) and involves the player in rescuing, aiding, and assisting druids in returning the animal gods to Azeroth. I really got into the zone after I came back after doing all of the others. Zone Highlights: the Joust homage, chucking bear cubs from a tree top to a trampoline, and giving a speech to inspire graduating Twilight Cultists.
Vashj’ir — From the moment I was shipwrecked by a giant octopus, I fell in love with this lush and beautiful underwater zone. Within a few quests you’ll get the ability to breathe water and later on you’ll get a seahorse steed so you can finally live out those Aquaman fantasy scenes you’ve harbored your entire life. The biggest highlights are the naga quest lines where you possess the body of an ancient naga battlemaiden and explore the zone’s lore firsthand.
Deepholm — Possibly my least favorite zone. The entire zone is one ginormous cavern which vaguely reminds me of Icecrown in a ‘large, uninteresting’ features sort of way. There’s a plethora of dailies that unlock eventually and the lavascale catfish swim bountifully here, so I keep going back regardless of my distaste. The main plot arc is repairing the “World Pillar” which was broken into three convenient chunks when Deathwing escaped.
Uldum – Far and away, this zone is my favorite. Ever since Vanilla when I saw those massive gates in Tanaris, I wondered what lay past them. Now six years later they have opened into an Egyptian wonderland. Those who followed my previous “Blog in the Desert” know I have an unhealthy love affair with this sub-genre and it pandered to every pore in my body. Camel mounts? Amusing quests? Dozens of quests that involve Harrison Jones, famed archaeologist? Over a dozen movies and cut scenes? The only hate I have here is for some buggy and poorly implemented phasing that will hopefully be fixed within a month. Main plotlines are the Harrison Jones lines (which are exactly as awesome as you expect, constantly upping itself on “epicosity” until one runs out of superlatives) and a war between factions of catlike centaurs and the Twilight Hammer.
Twilight Highlands – I started out disliking this dimly-lit foresty zone, mostly because it starts out in a battlefield a la Borean Tundra, but quickly turned into my second favorite once I met the Wildhammer dwarves. Rife with humor and amusing quests the dwarves kept me going until I quickly became drawn into the Alliance’s last stand against the Twilight Hammer, at one point standing toe to toe with SI:7’s Mathias Shaw as we did what had to be done. Highlight? “The wedding.”
Tol Barad – This zone has a level 85 requirement to enter and it’s necessary. There’s actually two parts to the zone: Tol Barad Peninsula and Tol Barad itself. Each have a number of daily quests and serve up vast amounts of pain. The mobs spawn at ungodly rates and deal massive amounts of damage quickly. Add to that the zones are flight restricted and you have all the makings of mage pancakes. I don’t have an issue with the difficulty of the zone—it’s nice to have a challenge while killing rats, I just wish the respawn rates were a bit more…normalized. The daily quests seem to cycle through a small variety so it isn’t the same ten rats day after day. Also, the quest rewards give ‘commendations’, a zone-wide currency used in conjunction with reputation to acquire nifty epic weaponry and toys.
That’s cata in a nutshell. Join me next time for Cataclysm Edition Part 3: Dungeon Diving
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Cataclysmic Edition Part 1: It’s the Economy, Stupid
Over the course of the next couple of weeks, I’ll be going over my impressions of the latest expansion pack to hit the shelves. Kick back and enjoy… everything old is new again.
The cataclysm has come and the very bedrock of the world (of warcraft) has been shattered: the economy. In the first day or two after the expansion went live, the auction house was rocked by massive selloffs of Lich King supplies and an absolute feeding frenzy by people rushing to level up crafting professions to new heights or get whatever advantage they could in the Great Race to 85. For months max level players had been stockpiling gold for release and now it all was being spent in an orgy of unbridled consumption.
The second biggest winners were the gatherers who fed the mobs what they wanted at prices that were nothing less than astronomical. ‘New dust’ was trading at up to 100g each and stocks of herb, skins, and enchanting materials disappearing of the shelves as fast as they were posted. The biggest winners? Those with the capital to corner the market on the horrifically overpriced goods and resell them at rates that would make Midas blush with shame. Lacking the initial capital to be a true robber baron, I bought and sold what I could. The free market was a maelstrom I intended to weather.
Starting with 4k coin-- not a trivial amount, I realize, I disenchanted nearly every quest reward I could find and skinned anything with a pulse. The hardest part was resisting the temptation to post ‘the lowest price’ for quick sales. Hour after hour my fortunes grew and within a day I was sitting at four times my starting capital.
It’s now been a week after Cataclysm launched and I’m sitting at a very comfortable 13k in the bank…after spending 22k leveling Enchanting up to max and spending a couple thousand on pets and mounts because I could. All total I beat out the “capped by cata” gold blogger by a smooth 3k. I’d call that a ‘win’.
Material prices will fall in about a week or so, but I’ve liquidated my ‘excess’ materials at this point, so I won’t be left holding the proverbial bag.
So, where to go from here? Time to get my fishing up—there’s still an incredibly large demand for certain fish (lavascale in particular) and most would rather do anything but fish. Combine that with the level of fishing required to succeed anywhere except pools in the new areas and you’ve got profit potential.
Tomorrow: The Zone Ranger
The cataclysm has come and the very bedrock of the world (of warcraft) has been shattered: the economy. In the first day or two after the expansion went live, the auction house was rocked by massive selloffs of Lich King supplies and an absolute feeding frenzy by people rushing to level up crafting professions to new heights or get whatever advantage they could in the Great Race to 85. For months max level players had been stockpiling gold for release and now it all was being spent in an orgy of unbridled consumption.
The second biggest winners were the gatherers who fed the mobs what they wanted at prices that were nothing less than astronomical. ‘New dust’ was trading at up to 100g each and stocks of herb, skins, and enchanting materials disappearing of the shelves as fast as they were posted. The biggest winners? Those with the capital to corner the market on the horrifically overpriced goods and resell them at rates that would make Midas blush with shame. Lacking the initial capital to be a true robber baron, I bought and sold what I could. The free market was a maelstrom I intended to weather.
Starting with 4k coin-- not a trivial amount, I realize, I disenchanted nearly every quest reward I could find and skinned anything with a pulse. The hardest part was resisting the temptation to post ‘the lowest price’ for quick sales. Hour after hour my fortunes grew and within a day I was sitting at four times my starting capital.
It’s now been a week after Cataclysm launched and I’m sitting at a very comfortable 13k in the bank…after spending 22k leveling Enchanting up to max and spending a couple thousand on pets and mounts because I could. All total I beat out the “capped by cata” gold blogger by a smooth 3k. I’d call that a ‘win’.
Material prices will fall in about a week or so, but I’ve liquidated my ‘excess’ materials at this point, so I won’t be left holding the proverbial bag.
So, where to go from here? Time to get my fishing up—there’s still an incredibly large demand for certain fish (lavascale in particular) and most would rather do anything but fish. Combine that with the level of fishing required to succeed anywhere except pools in the new areas and you’ve got profit potential.
Tomorrow: The Zone Ranger
Monday, November 29, 2010
Kalimdor...revisited! (or...Hot for Seeker)
Spent most of the Thanksgiving weekend carving through Kalimdor like a knife through water. The Seeker quest total was, in fact, bugged and I didn’t lose any credit towards the 3k quest completions…although it certainly looked like it for a while. Quite happy to say the balance of what was needed was knocked out before I had finished the second zone.
Determined to acquire Loremaster of Kalimdor, I set forth once again from Theramore, hitting Dustwallow Marsh and getting really disappointed that 80% of the quests there were the same as ones I had done before, just at a slightly different level. From there, I started exploring the Southern Barrens, got sidetracked and wound up in Thousand Needles.
1k Needles is now almost entirely underwater and I was dreading it—swimming is horribly slow, but I wanted to see the new speedbarge floating over the wreckage of the raceway. Wow. Aside from the horrible time I had getting lost in the speedbarge itself, the zone itself was…amazing. There’s quite a lot of travel and underwater activities in the area, but you’ve got plotline tools that make it painless: a river boat of your own (summonable only in 1k Needles), as well as an underwater-breathing apparatus that also greatly increases swim speed to ‘very fast mount’ levels.
I won’t go into details on too many of the quests in the various zones—that’s for another time with another character. As it is, running a level 80+ through this content is really only based on how fast you can get from point a to point b and running lowbie quests in ‘god mode’ doesn’t make for good story. I will, however, note:
The changes to Vanilla are spectacular and the people attempting LM now will be able to have a much easier time of it than in the days of old—I’m not simply talking about “vanilla flight”, which is still over a week away: the whole enchilada is just designed better. I’ve now finished all of the quests in all of the zones in Kali except Stonetalon and none of them send you to other zones halfway around the world and most of the ones that have you leave the zone you’re in is just a breadcrumb quest to get you started in a new hub or adventuring area.
The redesign of the zones is a godsend: there are dozens of additional flight points and the maps have been changed to allow people to EASILY travel to nearby zones without having to find some obscure hidden tunnel on an ill-defined map. (Speaking of, the new maps are brilliant too.)
The quests are well-thought out with a feeling of impact—each zone has an internal cohesive story arc and most have a sense of closure when you have “finished” a zone. Humor is still there, in abundance, and there’s just enough “epic” to keep you wanting more without diluting the experience.
I envy players just starting out—this is what Warcraft should’ve been from the start.
Determined to acquire Loremaster of Kalimdor, I set forth once again from Theramore, hitting Dustwallow Marsh and getting really disappointed that 80% of the quests there were the same as ones I had done before, just at a slightly different level. From there, I started exploring the Southern Barrens, got sidetracked and wound up in Thousand Needles.
1k Needles is now almost entirely underwater and I was dreading it—swimming is horribly slow, but I wanted to see the new speedbarge floating over the wreckage of the raceway. Wow. Aside from the horrible time I had getting lost in the speedbarge itself, the zone itself was…amazing. There’s quite a lot of travel and underwater activities in the area, but you’ve got plotline tools that make it painless: a river boat of your own (summonable only in 1k Needles), as well as an underwater-breathing apparatus that also greatly increases swim speed to ‘very fast mount’ levels.
I won’t go into details on too many of the quests in the various zones—that’s for another time with another character. As it is, running a level 80+ through this content is really only based on how fast you can get from point a to point b and running lowbie quests in ‘god mode’ doesn’t make for good story. I will, however, note:
The changes to Vanilla are spectacular and the people attempting LM now will be able to have a much easier time of it than in the days of old—I’m not simply talking about “vanilla flight”, which is still over a week away: the whole enchilada is just designed better. I’ve now finished all of the quests in all of the zones in Kali except Stonetalon and none of them send you to other zones halfway around the world and most of the ones that have you leave the zone you’re in is just a breadcrumb quest to get you started in a new hub or adventuring area.
The redesign of the zones is a godsend: there are dozens of additional flight points and the maps have been changed to allow people to EASILY travel to nearby zones without having to find some obscure hidden tunnel on an ill-defined map. (Speaking of, the new maps are brilliant too.)
The quests are well-thought out with a feeling of impact—each zone has an internal cohesive story arc and most have a sense of closure when you have “finished” a zone. Humor is still there, in abundance, and there’s just enough “epic” to keep you wanting more without diluting the experience.
I envy players just starting out—this is what Warcraft should’ve been from the start.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
The end of the world as we know it...
Deathwing, which would make a great name for a spicy chicken wing, broke Azeroth yesterday. With the Shattering, our world was sundered and all has changed, for good or ill.
Strev started off in Dalaran, where a massive exodus was taking place—with no transportation portals, people had no reason to stay. Within a week the place will look like Detroit. Wanting to immediately explore the carnage, I teleported to Stormwind—and crashed. Three failures to login later, a new Blizzard merssage appears telling me to run the Launcher directly to force more patches. Yay.
After one last false start, Strev stood in Stormwind’s mage tower, where everything miraculously looked like it did previously. That ended the first step outside. The world was sharper, better defined, laggier, and the city had been redesigned. The auction house was just steps from the bank in a straight path! The park was annihilated and a hundred little things vied for my attention. I hopped on a gryphon and flew to Booty Bay, just so I could see as much devastation from above as I could. I marveled at the new maps—they were more useful by orders of magnitude, then it hit me: I should check my achieves.
My worst fears were confirmed. They had stripped nearly every quest from Vanilla and replaced them—I went from 632 or so completed quests in Kalimdor down to about 95, most of which were in the Exodar-centered starting islands. I retained my EK Loremaster achieve, which was fortunate as all but 50 or so quests were wiped there. The truly surprising setback was losing 1k quests credited toward “the Seeker”, taking me from 2940 or so down to 1916. Ouch. I can understand Loremaster, but cutting my Seeker progress was just… rude and uncalled for.
Ah well, most people are rolling alts for the next couple of weeks, but I decided to go ahead and start working on the new quests. I took a tip from a guildie and headed to the “Dragon’s Mouth” (or something) section of the Badlands. As an aside, we gained dozens of flight paths. Dozens. I met up with some dwarf who wanted me to find another dwarf, which I did—then it turned awesome in seconds. (If you care not for spoilers, stop reading now!)
The dwarf and his two buddies are drinking by the fire, telling tall tales each in turn of how Deathwing devastated the land and how they alone fended off the dragon. For each story, there’s a cutscene and you get to “live out” their tales of derring-do. They included being an angry dwarf that could kill anything and everything with a PUNCH TO THE FACE, a gnome with a world-shrinking gun that lets you explore the zone as only a 600 foot tall gnome can, and a race through a canyon as an orc on a motorcycle with a hot chick you rescue. It was epic and a good sign the vanilla experience was going to be fun. I almost don’t feel bad about re-earning all those quests now.
Almost.
Strev started off in Dalaran, where a massive exodus was taking place—with no transportation portals, people had no reason to stay. Within a week the place will look like Detroit. Wanting to immediately explore the carnage, I teleported to Stormwind—and crashed. Three failures to login later, a new Blizzard merssage appears telling me to run the Launcher directly to force more patches. Yay.
After one last false start, Strev stood in Stormwind’s mage tower, where everything miraculously looked like it did previously. That ended the first step outside. The world was sharper, better defined, laggier, and the city had been redesigned. The auction house was just steps from the bank in a straight path! The park was annihilated and a hundred little things vied for my attention. I hopped on a gryphon and flew to Booty Bay, just so I could see as much devastation from above as I could. I marveled at the new maps—they were more useful by orders of magnitude, then it hit me: I should check my achieves.
My worst fears were confirmed. They had stripped nearly every quest from Vanilla and replaced them—I went from 632 or so completed quests in Kalimdor down to about 95, most of which were in the Exodar-centered starting islands. I retained my EK Loremaster achieve, which was fortunate as all but 50 or so quests were wiped there. The truly surprising setback was losing 1k quests credited toward “the Seeker”, taking me from 2940 or so down to 1916. Ouch. I can understand Loremaster, but cutting my Seeker progress was just… rude and uncalled for.
Ah well, most people are rolling alts for the next couple of weeks, but I decided to go ahead and start working on the new quests. I took a tip from a guildie and headed to the “Dragon’s Mouth” (or something) section of the Badlands. As an aside, we gained dozens of flight paths. Dozens. I met up with some dwarf who wanted me to find another dwarf, which I did—then it turned awesome in seconds. (If you care not for spoilers, stop reading now!)
The dwarf and his two buddies are drinking by the fire, telling tall tales each in turn of how Deathwing devastated the land and how they alone fended off the dragon. For each story, there’s a cutscene and you get to “live out” their tales of derring-do. They included being an angry dwarf that could kill anything and everything with a PUNCH TO THE FACE, a gnome with a world-shrinking gun that lets you explore the zone as only a 600 foot tall gnome can, and a race through a canyon as an orc on a motorcycle with a hot chick you rescue. It was epic and a good sign the vanilla experience was going to be fun. I almost don’t feel bad about re-earning all those quests now.
Almost.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Questing for Lore
Spent most of the time since the last update working on the Loremaster of the Eastern Kingdoms achieve and annoying my friends every few hours with status updates. (“654/700!” “657/700!” and so forth.) I’m very proud to say that as of 11:30 or so last night, I completed the achievement. It has been an incredibly interesting diversion and there was a vast amount of lore I never knew existed, ranging from imprisoned demons to odd portents of the current impending elemental invasion. In my adventures I discovered a flight path I never knew existed in the Burning Steppes, explored nearly every single island on the coastline, and have probably hiked over ever square meter of the mainland…twice. In a way I feel kind of bad for the people that will never see a fraction of the content that’s going to get pulled in a matter of weeks. Not all of it is good, but it adds a depth of immersion to the game that just queuing up for one random dungeon after the next will never provide.
By the time I got to the last dozen or so quests, I had gone past scraping the bottom of the barrel for realistic quests and found myself lost once again in Black Rock Depths to knock out three more tasks for random people. The last six quests, oddly enough, were almost all booze-related.
#6: “Get some holy water from STV to give to the Thunderbrew dwarf in Westfall”. This quest isn’t that bad if you know where the shrine to get the holy water is. It’s the followup quests that are a pain in the tuckus. “Get 3 bags of grain from all over the world.” Yeah. I contented myself with the holy water, which I presume will make a “wholly” delicious booze.
#5: “Collect four different boozes for an innkeeper in Redridge.” Compared to my available quests, this one finally looked really, really pleasant. I had some Thunderbrew Lager that had been aging in the bank for a few months, so it was time to run around Duskwood, Goldshire, and Stormwind to get the other three.
#4: “Kill yet another dude in the Stockades” For reasons unknown to me, it seems just about everybody feels as though locking up criminals isn’t good enough, so for about the seventh time I ventured into the Stockades for a three minute beheading.
#3: “Gather ingredients for some pois—I mean ‘booze’.” This was a quest that Ian had told me about a while back and I had assumed it was Warlock-only, but I was quite wrong. This required a little flight time to not-too-remote regions to hit a couple of sparkly plants and then return back to home base.
#2: “Delive the boo—I mean POISON to a noble in the castle that’s been horkin’ me off.” Right then. I decided to add my own little flair to it. Upon delivering the noxious brew, as my victim guzzled I proclaimed “The Twilight Hammer sends its greetings!” There’s maybe five people in the world that would appreciate that and I’m sure four of them work at Blizzard.
#1: The last quest was found in the same room in which I murdered the nobleman. “Go talk to a woman by that flight point you discovered in Burning Steppes.” Holy crap! A breadcrumb quest?! I missed a BREADCRUMB QUEST? Apparently so. Tickled pink that there was no way I could screw that up, I promptly screwed it up.
I mounted my trusty mechanical emu and rode to the Flightmaster. I hopped on a gryphon for a straight flight path to victory. Along the way, I started clearing out my inventory of useless crap for quests I’m never going to complete and then opened my journal to clear out all the no-longer-needed quests. “Dungeon… dungeon… dungeon… raid… dungeon... dungeon… some painful quest involving trecking to the ends of the earth… another one of those… dungeon…” I then blinked with mute, stunned horror; I had somehow dropped the final freakin’ quest!
I growled at myself until the gryphon landed, ported BACK to Stormwind (I couldn’t imagine doing this achieve as a non-mage), and accepted the quest again. Aha! Although it was a breadcrumb, it was a “raid” quest. After vowing to leave the journal alone, I flapped back to the Burning Steppes, said “O hai!” and knocked out the achievement. I gave the woman a high-five, who seemed perplexed that I didn’t want to accept her quest, rubbed the belly of the dwarf standing next to her (Hey—I earned it! [Other Loremasters will get the joke]), and called it a night.
Next stop: Exodar!
By the time I got to the last dozen or so quests, I had gone past scraping the bottom of the barrel for realistic quests and found myself lost once again in Black Rock Depths to knock out three more tasks for random people. The last six quests, oddly enough, were almost all booze-related.
#6: “Get some holy water from STV to give to the Thunderbrew dwarf in Westfall”. This quest isn’t that bad if you know where the shrine to get the holy water is. It’s the followup quests that are a pain in the tuckus. “Get 3 bags of grain from all over the world.” Yeah. I contented myself with the holy water, which I presume will make a “wholly” delicious booze.
#5: “Collect four different boozes for an innkeeper in Redridge.” Compared to my available quests, this one finally looked really, really pleasant. I had some Thunderbrew Lager that had been aging in the bank for a few months, so it was time to run around Duskwood, Goldshire, and Stormwind to get the other three.
#4: “Kill yet another dude in the Stockades” For reasons unknown to me, it seems just about everybody feels as though locking up criminals isn’t good enough, so for about the seventh time I ventured into the Stockades for a three minute beheading.
#3: “Gather ingredients for some pois—I mean ‘booze’.” This was a quest that Ian had told me about a while back and I had assumed it was Warlock-only, but I was quite wrong. This required a little flight time to not-too-remote regions to hit a couple of sparkly plants and then return back to home base.
#2: “Delive the boo—I mean POISON to a noble in the castle that’s been horkin’ me off.” Right then. I decided to add my own little flair to it. Upon delivering the noxious brew, as my victim guzzled I proclaimed “The Twilight Hammer sends its greetings!” There’s maybe five people in the world that would appreciate that and I’m sure four of them work at Blizzard.
#1: The last quest was found in the same room in which I murdered the nobleman. “Go talk to a woman by that flight point you discovered in Burning Steppes.” Holy crap! A breadcrumb quest?! I missed a BREADCRUMB QUEST? Apparently so. Tickled pink that there was no way I could screw that up, I promptly screwed it up.
I mounted my trusty mechanical emu and rode to the Flightmaster. I hopped on a gryphon for a straight flight path to victory. Along the way, I started clearing out my inventory of useless crap for quests I’m never going to complete and then opened my journal to clear out all the no-longer-needed quests. “Dungeon… dungeon… dungeon… raid… dungeon... dungeon… some painful quest involving trecking to the ends of the earth… another one of those… dungeon…” I then blinked with mute, stunned horror; I had somehow dropped the final freakin’ quest!
I growled at myself until the gryphon landed, ported BACK to Stormwind (I couldn’t imagine doing this achieve as a non-mage), and accepted the quest again. Aha! Although it was a breadcrumb, it was a “raid” quest. After vowing to leave the journal alone, I flapped back to the Burning Steppes, said “O hai!” and knocked out the achievement. I gave the woman a high-five, who seemed perplexed that I didn’t want to accept her quest, rubbed the belly of the dwarf standing next to her (Hey—I earned it! [Other Loremasters will get the joke]), and called it a night.
Next stop: Exodar!
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Separate Lives
Over the past week or so, I’ve been mostly working on Anyth and Strev, each with their own decidedly separate goals.
Anyth has been trying to get Northrend-ready. Now at level 67, I’ve finally gotten a handle on the 4.0.x changes to the skill trees. Her ‘main’ spec is survival with a nice Ferocious pet, Buttons the wolf. This is my preferred spec for grouping as it allows for fairly high, consistent damage, even if it requires a LOT of button-mashing and situational reacting. I’ve been having fun with traps to a point that should probably be considered illegal. I can honestly say I don’t miss volley at all. Multi-shot, thrown explosive, multi-again… and suddenly I’ve stolen all of the aggro from the tank. Counting down the levels until I get misdirection.
Anyth’s offspec is much more solo friendly, but it comes with a terrible, terrible price: about half the DPS of the survival build while soloing. With her tenacious warp stalker “Goes” (Yes…”Anyth and Goes”—I’ll go the extra mile for a cheap pun.), she can mow through most things without having to stop and eat/bandage/repair which is a great perk over the “rest after every fight” she was getting with survival. Another nice thing is through glyphing, mend pet now gives a little happiness. As a result, I don’t think I’ve fed my pets more than once in the past week, particularly since you can overfeed them without penalty and the skill costs no focus and has an insanely fast cooldown.
I’m starting to warm up to the hunter changes, but she still has a long way to go before she sees her full potential. Strev, however, is on the top of his game.
Strev is (finally) at an illustrious 6k gearscore (average item level 264), which will be considered utter crap in a few weeks, but for now allows insane damage output. I’ve been fretting over haste/crit/mastery calculations trying to squeeze out every last point of DPS for the spec, but according to calculations over at elitist jerks, I guessed right. After hit cap, get haste to 20%. After haste, plow everything into mastery and ignore crit, which hath been deemed “really horrible” for arcane specs . Strev’s mastery pulls in another 20% damage at peak mana, so I think he’s where he needs to be until Cata comes out.
There’s been two main things that Strev has been up to lately: working towards the Loremaster achievement and throwing himself into the maw of Anub in the heroic 10-man ToGC.
I’d been lackadaisically pursuing Loremaster up until the end of the Halloween event, earning the Outlands achieve, then a bunch of quests in the Eastern Kingdoms, then I started working on reputations. I kind of liked the title “Strev of Gnomeregan”, so I started working towards it. Halfway through revered, I said to myself “Self—if you do other factions, you can get more gnome rep from bleedover!” and ported my butt to Darnassus. (Basically, if you’re exalted capped on an Alliance race and earn more of that reputation it coverts into a quarter of the reward for each of the other Alliance races.)
I hate the night elf lands. I hate them with a passion that goes to the very core of my soul. It’s all ugly, dismal, dark forest caught in perpetual twilight without sparkly vampires. In a fit of outright masochism, I completed all of the night elf starting quests, then moved into Darkshore, cleared out all of those and kept the rolling ball of questing going as long as I could. I knew if I stopped, I’d realize how godawful it all was and just give up and sit around Dalaran waiting for the world to end like so many others.
By the time I was halfway through…umm “Ashenvale”? (I really can’t remember those freakin’ zone names), I had reached Exalted with Darnassus and realized with horror that there might be drastic changes to Loremaster coming with Cataclysm. A few searches on the internet later, my fears were confirmed: people who had the achieve already was not going to lose it, but people who were halfway through would get screwed pretty hard. Quests that were being removed wold no longer count towards credit and I could expect to see my numbers completed plummet. Terrific. Between Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, I had about half of the needed 1400 quests done. On the bright side, the Cata changes will be along the lines of Outlands and Northrend in a “Complete 60 quests in Duskwood” sort of way. That’ll greatly improve tracking, but now I have to push to complete at least one continent before Cata comes.
Strev’s Kalimdor quest completes was about 150 behind Eastern Kingdoms, so I did the logical thing and wept. Strev put his Gnomer title quest on hold, dropped all of the Night Elf quests and teleported to Stormwind to start clearing out old quests. With only 280 or so to go and no good tracking method, this leaves a LOT of running around looking for exclamation marks. I’d previously “cleared” Elwynn Forest, Westwood, and Redridge. Starting up in Duskwood, I finished all I could find there and in Stranglethorn, finally closing out the last of the Booty Bay quests that didn’t involve trips to the western continent. Moved my base of operations to Nethergard keep, but it looked like I’d already done all of those as well, leaving me in the somewhat depressing Swamp of Sorrows, which was like a normal swamp, but greenlit.
Unfortunately, I was only been able to find a handful of quests here and there and none have led to large chains. I’m certain my destiny lies to the north, so next time, we’ll be revisiting Arathi and Hillsbrad!
Anyth has been trying to get Northrend-ready. Now at level 67, I’ve finally gotten a handle on the 4.0.x changes to the skill trees. Her ‘main’ spec is survival with a nice Ferocious pet, Buttons the wolf. This is my preferred spec for grouping as it allows for fairly high, consistent damage, even if it requires a LOT of button-mashing and situational reacting. I’ve been having fun with traps to a point that should probably be considered illegal. I can honestly say I don’t miss volley at all. Multi-shot, thrown explosive, multi-again… and suddenly I’ve stolen all of the aggro from the tank. Counting down the levels until I get misdirection.
Anyth’s offspec is much more solo friendly, but it comes with a terrible, terrible price: about half the DPS of the survival build while soloing. With her tenacious warp stalker “Goes” (Yes…”Anyth and Goes”—I’ll go the extra mile for a cheap pun.), she can mow through most things without having to stop and eat/bandage/repair which is a great perk over the “rest after every fight” she was getting with survival. Another nice thing is through glyphing, mend pet now gives a little happiness. As a result, I don’t think I’ve fed my pets more than once in the past week, particularly since you can overfeed them without penalty and the skill costs no focus and has an insanely fast cooldown.
I’m starting to warm up to the hunter changes, but she still has a long way to go before she sees her full potential. Strev, however, is on the top of his game.
Strev is (finally) at an illustrious 6k gearscore (average item level 264), which will be considered utter crap in a few weeks, but for now allows insane damage output. I’ve been fretting over haste/crit/mastery calculations trying to squeeze out every last point of DPS for the spec, but according to calculations over at elitist jerks, I guessed right. After hit cap, get haste to 20%. After haste, plow everything into mastery and ignore crit, which hath been deemed “really horrible” for arcane specs . Strev’s mastery pulls in another 20% damage at peak mana, so I think he’s where he needs to be until Cata comes out.
There’s been two main things that Strev has been up to lately: working towards the Loremaster achievement and throwing himself into the maw of Anub in the heroic 10-man ToGC.
I’d been lackadaisically pursuing Loremaster up until the end of the Halloween event, earning the Outlands achieve, then a bunch of quests in the Eastern Kingdoms, then I started working on reputations. I kind of liked the title “Strev of Gnomeregan”, so I started working towards it. Halfway through revered, I said to myself “Self—if you do other factions, you can get more gnome rep from bleedover!” and ported my butt to Darnassus. (Basically, if you’re exalted capped on an Alliance race and earn more of that reputation it coverts into a quarter of the reward for each of the other Alliance races.)
I hate the night elf lands. I hate them with a passion that goes to the very core of my soul. It’s all ugly, dismal, dark forest caught in perpetual twilight without sparkly vampires. In a fit of outright masochism, I completed all of the night elf starting quests, then moved into Darkshore, cleared out all of those and kept the rolling ball of questing going as long as I could. I knew if I stopped, I’d realize how godawful it all was and just give up and sit around Dalaran waiting for the world to end like so many others.
By the time I was halfway through…umm “Ashenvale”? (I really can’t remember those freakin’ zone names), I had reached Exalted with Darnassus and realized with horror that there might be drastic changes to Loremaster coming with Cataclysm. A few searches on the internet later, my fears were confirmed: people who had the achieve already was not going to lose it, but people who were halfway through would get screwed pretty hard. Quests that were being removed wold no longer count towards credit and I could expect to see my numbers completed plummet. Terrific. Between Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, I had about half of the needed 1400 quests done. On the bright side, the Cata changes will be along the lines of Outlands and Northrend in a “Complete 60 quests in Duskwood” sort of way. That’ll greatly improve tracking, but now I have to push to complete at least one continent before Cata comes.
Strev’s Kalimdor quest completes was about 150 behind Eastern Kingdoms, so I did the logical thing and wept. Strev put his Gnomer title quest on hold, dropped all of the Night Elf quests and teleported to Stormwind to start clearing out old quests. With only 280 or so to go and no good tracking method, this leaves a LOT of running around looking for exclamation marks. I’d previously “cleared” Elwynn Forest, Westwood, and Redridge. Starting up in Duskwood, I finished all I could find there and in Stranglethorn, finally closing out the last of the Booty Bay quests that didn’t involve trips to the western continent. Moved my base of operations to Nethergard keep, but it looked like I’d already done all of those as well, leaving me in the somewhat depressing Swamp of Sorrows, which was like a normal swamp, but greenlit.
Unfortunately, I was only been able to find a handful of quests here and there and none have led to large chains. I’m certain my destiny lies to the north, so next time, we’ll be revisiting Arathi and Hillsbrad!
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Hallow's End and Outlandish Things
It's been a couple of weeks since my last post and quite a lot to catch up with. The big thing was, of course, the Halloween event.
The big things to do include smacking the Headless Horseman around daily, put out a few fires, get zapped by a few costume wands, and go hog wild visiting candy buckets in nearly every inn on Azeroth and the Outlands to trick or treat.
By the end of the third or fourth day, I'd managed to get all of the achievements necessary to get the "Hallowed" title and spent the rest of the event fruitlessly trying to collect 20 unique flimsy masks. I ended with only 14 of them, but not for want of trying. If nothing else it leaves something to try for next year, eh? Still, I managed to get a nifty new mount from the experience, so I've no complaints whatsoever.
It wasn't all trick or treats, though. The "other" tiny thing was to earn the Loremaster of Outlands achievement, which required 568 quests spread out over each Outlands zone. It was hell. I should have realized based on my experiences in Northrend that there would be barely enough quests in each zone to earn that zone's achievement and in some cases I spent hours hunting down isolated NPCs for "just one more" quest.
In many cases I was exceptionally grateful that I was doing these at 80th level. I lost count of the number of quests of "Group size: 5" that were required. Most were handled easily, but every now and then I'd get a quest that smacked my arrogant butt back into place. Of particular note was a guy in a crystal prison down in Shadowmoon that summoned about 4-5 waves of elite critters, ending with some particularly vicious guy who reflected spells. I didn't notice it until I ate a 30k arcane blast. Yeah. Oops.
The second nasty thing was the repair bill. Since the 4.0 patch went into effect, cloth wearers get to pay what plate wearers have been paying all along. I have a newfound respect and sympathy for warriors. A single "meh-- I'll just rez here and suck up the 25% equipment damage" moment cost somewhere in the vicinity of 50g. Le ouch.
A curious side effect of my Outlandish pursuits was earning serious chunks of reputation for factions I'll never pursue. Well, I say never now, but I guess it's only a matter of time before I start thinking "You know what would be great? Getting all of those reputation achievements."
The big things to do include smacking the Headless Horseman around daily, put out a few fires, get zapped by a few costume wands, and go hog wild visiting candy buckets in nearly every inn on Azeroth and the Outlands to trick or treat.
By the end of the third or fourth day, I'd managed to get all of the achievements necessary to get the "Hallowed" title and spent the rest of the event fruitlessly trying to collect 20 unique flimsy masks. I ended with only 14 of them, but not for want of trying. If nothing else it leaves something to try for next year, eh? Still, I managed to get a nifty new mount from the experience, so I've no complaints whatsoever.
It wasn't all trick or treats, though. The "other" tiny thing was to earn the Loremaster of Outlands achievement, which required 568 quests spread out over each Outlands zone. It was hell. I should have realized based on my experiences in Northrend that there would be barely enough quests in each zone to earn that zone's achievement and in some cases I spent hours hunting down isolated NPCs for "just one more" quest.
In many cases I was exceptionally grateful that I was doing these at 80th level. I lost count of the number of quests of "Group size: 5" that were required. Most were handled easily, but every now and then I'd get a quest that smacked my arrogant butt back into place. Of particular note was a guy in a crystal prison down in Shadowmoon that summoned about 4-5 waves of elite critters, ending with some particularly vicious guy who reflected spells. I didn't notice it until I ate a 30k arcane blast. Yeah. Oops.
The second nasty thing was the repair bill. Since the 4.0 patch went into effect, cloth wearers get to pay what plate wearers have been paying all along. I have a newfound respect and sympathy for warriors. A single "meh-- I'll just rez here and suck up the 25% equipment damage" moment cost somewhere in the vicinity of 50g. Le ouch.
A curious side effect of my Outlandish pursuits was earning serious chunks of reputation for factions I'll never pursue. Well, I say never now, but I guess it's only a matter of time before I start thinking "You know what would be great? Getting all of those reputation achievements."
Monday, October 18, 2010
Professionally Speaking
Over the weekend, I decided it was past time that I knocked out a few achievements, so Strev worked diligently at upping his First Aid and Cooking to Grandmaster status, earning a few rewards in the process. This was not without its challenges. Money had been running particularly tight since most of his gold got blown on a very nice set of pants earlier in the week and cloth was running at a particularly ruinous price in the AH, so I went forth to farm wool.
Wowhead noted a particularly nice place to farm wool is the Stormwind Stockades. This suited me just fine, since I was all of 30 seconds from it. After a couple of runs through I had more than enough to carry me past the ‘wool hurdle’ and into silk, which was pleasantly cheap. The rest of it all was pretty much a straightforward shop, craft, and train your way to victory.
Cooking’s greatest challenges come in the achievements: prepare a few dozen different recipes you can only buy with ‘Awards’ you receive from doing the daily Dalaran quest, buy a hat for 100 of the same awards, and so forth and so on. The thing is you can only earn two awards a day so it will take months to do them all. I also discovered a bug where in the latest patch you can’t get the achievement for earning your first cooking award. I opened a trouble ticket on it, but haven’t heard anything in a couple of days yet (not surprising with the weekend and other patch woes). I also discovered while trying for a cooking achievement that placing a feast (or mage table, or soulwell) in a BG will result in most people getting locked up and disconnected. Lovely.
As Strev was dangerously close to honor cap, I blew a couple thousand honor on a pvp-mount, a black mechanostrider. Stupidly overpriced, but pretty snazzy.
With the changes to the raid lockouts, Fidelis grouped up our brave 25-man band to storm the ICC with the understanding that the ‘leftover bosses’ would get mopped up by 10-man crews over the weekend. Everyone was fine with this and we once again bravely stormed the citadel. All I can say is ‘wow’. There’s a 30% damage boost in ICC presently for reasons I don’t question and we utterly steamrolled the first few bosses. Strev’s criticals were hitting for over 60k damage and recount says that overall I was hitting in the 12.3k+ DPS range. The guild’s raid pages brought these figures a little closer to earth, but I was inordinately pleased that my little glass cannon was firing well. Heck, Marrowgar never even got through the second “BONESTORM!” before he was exploded. It was going to be a good night.
We mobbed through the battles, frequently without losing a single person. I now –totally- understand the Festergut battle and he was brought down with a minute left on the enrage timer. Either he or his brother dropped some very nice pants…comparable with the ones I had just spent thousands on. Just one person rolled on it and got a ‘26’. For the rest of the evening I wondered if I had spent all of that gold for naught. Later to satiate my curiosity, I rolled just to see. I got a 21 and felt much better.
At long last, I faced my arch-nemesis: Professor Putricide. I had vowed my revenge weeks ago. We prepared, reviewed strategy, and attacked! The professor ran around, summoning his deadly oozes, and eventually started chucking vials of death as the floor became more and more impassable from a thick green glowing death soup. We got him down to about 3% then wiped from the sheer volume of crap on the floor. Undaunted, we identified where we went wrong and tried again. SUCCESS! The good Professor was no more and we all spammed the guild channel with news of our victory over ICC-Plagueworks (25-Man).
The following encounter was too new to too many of us and sadly, we were unable to vanquish The Blood Council. It looks fairly nifty with 3 “Princes” from the old heroics that take turns being damageable while horrible things happen all around. Good times!
Also spent a bit of time working on reputation. It started off innocently enough. I’d been running randoms with guildies as they tested their builds and one was looking to increase her Lower City faction for an achievement. She suggested a BC heroic: Arakkoa Halls (it’s filled with birdmen and flappy things), so I dutifully moseyed over and helped her summon the rest of the team. To my horror, it wouldn’t let me in the front door: I needed a key to enter the heroic version of the dungeon and the key could only be purchased at an ‘honored’ reputation or better. I had –just- gotten friendly with the Lower City, so I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Thankfully, the gang decided to run through the ‘regular’ version twice to help me with reputation and we ended with me halfway to the point.
Later I ran the dungeon solo once and finished up some quests in the area to reach the goal. With key purchased, I tried soloing the level 70 heroic. It was rough. Stupidly rough. In the end, I took two deaths from hard hitting guards, had to invisibility past one boss, but was able to take out the big bad at the end. Yay!
Finally, I reached Exalted with Stormwind by doing EVERY quest in Goldshire, most of the ones in Redridge, and a number of the ones in Stormwind itself. Next stop…Darnassus?
Wowhead noted a particularly nice place to farm wool is the Stormwind Stockades. This suited me just fine, since I was all of 30 seconds from it. After a couple of runs through I had more than enough to carry me past the ‘wool hurdle’ and into silk, which was pleasantly cheap. The rest of it all was pretty much a straightforward shop, craft, and train your way to victory.
Cooking’s greatest challenges come in the achievements: prepare a few dozen different recipes you can only buy with ‘Awards’ you receive from doing the daily Dalaran quest, buy a hat for 100 of the same awards, and so forth and so on. The thing is you can only earn two awards a day so it will take months to do them all. I also discovered a bug where in the latest patch you can’t get the achievement for earning your first cooking award. I opened a trouble ticket on it, but haven’t heard anything in a couple of days yet (not surprising with the weekend and other patch woes). I also discovered while trying for a cooking achievement that placing a feast (or mage table, or soulwell) in a BG will result in most people getting locked up and disconnected. Lovely.
As Strev was dangerously close to honor cap, I blew a couple thousand honor on a pvp-mount, a black mechanostrider. Stupidly overpriced, but pretty snazzy.
With the changes to the raid lockouts, Fidelis grouped up our brave 25-man band to storm the ICC with the understanding that the ‘leftover bosses’ would get mopped up by 10-man crews over the weekend. Everyone was fine with this and we once again bravely stormed the citadel. All I can say is ‘wow’. There’s a 30% damage boost in ICC presently for reasons I don’t question and we utterly steamrolled the first few bosses. Strev’s criticals were hitting for over 60k damage and recount says that overall I was hitting in the 12.3k+ DPS range. The guild’s raid pages brought these figures a little closer to earth, but I was inordinately pleased that my little glass cannon was firing well. Heck, Marrowgar never even got through the second “BONESTORM!” before he was exploded. It was going to be a good night.
We mobbed through the battles, frequently without losing a single person. I now –totally- understand the Festergut battle and he was brought down with a minute left on the enrage timer. Either he or his brother dropped some very nice pants…comparable with the ones I had just spent thousands on. Just one person rolled on it and got a ‘26’. For the rest of the evening I wondered if I had spent all of that gold for naught. Later to satiate my curiosity, I rolled just to see. I got a 21 and felt much better.
At long last, I faced my arch-nemesis: Professor Putricide. I had vowed my revenge weeks ago. We prepared, reviewed strategy, and attacked! The professor ran around, summoning his deadly oozes, and eventually started chucking vials of death as the floor became more and more impassable from a thick green glowing death soup. We got him down to about 3% then wiped from the sheer volume of crap on the floor. Undaunted, we identified where we went wrong and tried again. SUCCESS! The good Professor was no more and we all spammed the guild channel with news of our victory over ICC-Plagueworks (25-Man).
The following encounter was too new to too many of us and sadly, we were unable to vanquish The Blood Council. It looks fairly nifty with 3 “Princes” from the old heroics that take turns being damageable while horrible things happen all around. Good times!
Also spent a bit of time working on reputation. It started off innocently enough. I’d been running randoms with guildies as they tested their builds and one was looking to increase her Lower City faction for an achievement. She suggested a BC heroic: Arakkoa Halls (it’s filled with birdmen and flappy things), so I dutifully moseyed over and helped her summon the rest of the team. To my horror, it wouldn’t let me in the front door: I needed a key to enter the heroic version of the dungeon and the key could only be purchased at an ‘honored’ reputation or better. I had –just- gotten friendly with the Lower City, so I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Thankfully, the gang decided to run through the ‘regular’ version twice to help me with reputation and we ended with me halfway to the point.
Later I ran the dungeon solo once and finished up some quests in the area to reach the goal. With key purchased, I tried soloing the level 70 heroic. It was rough. Stupidly rough. In the end, I took two deaths from hard hitting guards, had to invisibility past one boss, but was able to take out the big bad at the end. Yay!
Finally, I reached Exalted with Stormwind by doing EVERY quest in Goldshire, most of the ones in Redridge, and a number of the ones in Stormwind itself. Next stop…Darnassus?
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Power Overwhelming!
I’ve now spent the last couple of days testing out the changes in 4.0.1 and I’ve got to say… I like most of them. The interfaces are cleaner, the talent trees are greatly improved and streamlined, and for some unknown reason arcane mages can now melt faces by looking at people funny. I’ll break it down by character:
Strev:
After the first rounds of tests against some particularly offensive practice dummies (they must have been public enemy #1: everyone in Ironforge was attacking them!), I became convinced there was some massive bug or there’s going to be a serious beating with a nerf bat soon. The damage output I was seeing was close to double what it was a couple of days ago. More than once I reached >40k crits
For the curious, I’m running a 31/2/3 spec that probably isn’t ‘optimal’, but looked like fun. The cross talents increase critical chance and damage multiplier. Adding those to a new talent that increases damage by 20% for burst, mana gems that provide a significant trinket-like DPS buff, the Mastery skill that increases DPS%, and the Arcane damage boost tied into the blue bar that can get up to another 12% damage added… the build has a lot of synergy.
I took Strev for test drives through WG and WSG for the pvp experience and wow. With an additional 9.5k health and 8k mana and the fact that resiliance gear no longer does squat against critical hits, Strev was routinely hitting other players in excess of 12k a shot with some shots still hitting above 20k each. After taking so much abuse on the field for the past couple of months, it felt nice getting my own back. I may have to try an actual pvp build at some point.
Later, Strev went dungeon diving with a number of guild parties who were also testing. We were sad to see that guild experience and reputation weren’t affected, but I now have a better grasp of how many “justice points” we’d earn during a typical random: about 80. Bears no longer get an AoE taunt and Paladin’s consecration is now on a 30 second cooldown, so they are having a little harder time with aggro control in groups. If my mage experience is “typical”, mages are now generating about double the threat from the sheer DPS output. This led to a LOT of “I’m winning on aggro!” moments, coupled by the baddie dying from the next 20k point hit.
Anyth:
Anyth switched over to Beast Mastery for this go. Since the cost for a dual spec dropped by 90%, I went ahead and picked it up. Once I’ve got a handle on things, I’ll test her with Marksman. So far, I’m fairly unimpressed. She can throw traps now, which is fun, but losing almost all of her AoE abilities was a pretty big hit. Not having to carry ammo is a perk, but it wasn’t that cumbersome to deal with in the first place. I’ll reserve my final judgement until I see how she does teamed up with Zyrial and Pals next week.
Cyandra:
Didn’t do too much with Cyandra other than learn spells, pick new protection talents, and complain bitterly about the new consecration cooldown. Bear in mind, I’ve been leveling her primarily through AoE trash pulls. I’m not eager to see how this change in dynamics plays out, but will bite that bullet over the weekend.
Strev:
After the first rounds of tests against some particularly offensive practice dummies (they must have been public enemy #1: everyone in Ironforge was attacking them!), I became convinced there was some massive bug or there’s going to be a serious beating with a nerf bat soon. The damage output I was seeing was close to double what it was a couple of days ago. More than once I reached >40k crits
For the curious, I’m running a 31/2/3 spec that probably isn’t ‘optimal’, but looked like fun. The cross talents increase critical chance and damage multiplier. Adding those to a new talent that increases damage by 20% for burst, mana gems that provide a significant trinket-like DPS buff, the Mastery skill that increases DPS%, and the Arcane damage boost tied into the blue bar that can get up to another 12% damage added… the build has a lot of synergy.
I took Strev for test drives through WG and WSG for the pvp experience and wow. With an additional 9.5k health and 8k mana and the fact that resiliance gear no longer does squat against critical hits, Strev was routinely hitting other players in excess of 12k a shot with some shots still hitting above 20k each. After taking so much abuse on the field for the past couple of months, it felt nice getting my own back. I may have to try an actual pvp build at some point.
Later, Strev went dungeon diving with a number of guild parties who were also testing. We were sad to see that guild experience and reputation weren’t affected, but I now have a better grasp of how many “justice points” we’d earn during a typical random: about 80. Bears no longer get an AoE taunt and Paladin’s consecration is now on a 30 second cooldown, so they are having a little harder time with aggro control in groups. If my mage experience is “typical”, mages are now generating about double the threat from the sheer DPS output. This led to a LOT of “I’m winning on aggro!” moments, coupled by the baddie dying from the next 20k point hit.
Anyth:
Anyth switched over to Beast Mastery for this go. Since the cost for a dual spec dropped by 90%, I went ahead and picked it up. Once I’ve got a handle on things, I’ll test her with Marksman. So far, I’m fairly unimpressed. She can throw traps now, which is fun, but losing almost all of her AoE abilities was a pretty big hit. Not having to carry ammo is a perk, but it wasn’t that cumbersome to deal with in the first place. I’ll reserve my final judgement until I see how she does teamed up with Zyrial and Pals next week.
Cyandra:
Didn’t do too much with Cyandra other than learn spells, pick new protection talents, and complain bitterly about the new consecration cooldown. Bear in mind, I’ve been leveling her primarily through AoE trash pulls. I’m not eager to see how this change in dynamics plays out, but will bite that bullet over the weekend.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
4.0.1 Cometh
Twas the night before Patch Day and all through Stormwind,
Newbies were crying “When will it begin?”
We told them to STFU and read the patch page,
Which they did and then came back with full on nerd rage.
“My volley! My talents! They nerfed me quite hard!
I’d quit right now, but I’m on a pre-paid time card!”
They cried and they moaned, it just wouldn’t end
While the 80s wondered if emblems would spend.
“Badges and honor, point conversion rates too?
I’m going to lose big and you will all too!”
They split camps down the hoard-or-spend path,
Yet each will light forums with their side’s wrath.
Toons hitting 10 will soon know the freeze
When one talent point will lock in their trees.
The “simplified” combat confused even more,
For how would they now calculate their GearScore?
Everything’s changing to something brand new
Without guides and forums to instruct what to do.
So what to do when nothing’s the same?
Sit down, shut up, and L2P the game.
Newbies were crying “When will it begin?”
We told them to STFU and read the patch page,
Which they did and then came back with full on nerd rage.
“My volley! My talents! They nerfed me quite hard!
I’d quit right now, but I’m on a pre-paid time card!”
They cried and they moaned, it just wouldn’t end
While the 80s wondered if emblems would spend.
“Badges and honor, point conversion rates too?
I’m going to lose big and you will all too!”
They split camps down the hoard-or-spend path,
Yet each will light forums with their side’s wrath.
Toons hitting 10 will soon know the freeze
When one talent point will lock in their trees.
The “simplified” combat confused even more,
For how would they now calculate their GearScore?
Everything’s changing to something brand new
Without guides and forums to instruct what to do.
So what to do when nothing’s the same?
Sit down, shut up, and L2P the game.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Stratholme Alone
I recently retook the infamous Bartle Test, which categorizes gamers based on favorite in-game activities, and Ian totally nailed my personality type as “Explorer (100%), Achiever (60%)”. Regular readers of this blog (both of you) should find this of no surprise.
Continuing my exploration of older dungeons, I journeyed to the Eastern Plaguelands to see what Stratholme had to offer. A nice little city with plenty of lore, it was the site of a major plague outbreak as seen in the Warcraft 3 human campaign and you get to time travel and relive that experience during the Culling of Stratholme “dungeon”. Now I was finally getting to see it “in the now”. My previous experience with this dungeon was thirty seconds of pain months ago when I was trying to find a path to the blood elf starting area and found myself trapped alone in the city with no portal out and everything a dozen levels higher than I. Time to take revenge.
I blew through the thickly guarded city gates and started exploring the city. It looks exactly like what you’d expect in a hopeless city that’s been overrun with undead for years: Detroit. The monsters ranged from ghouls and skeletons to abominations and spider-like crypt-thingies. As I made my way through the city, I occasionally ran afoul of patrols or traps, but nothing that wasn’t overwhelming. It turns out the city itself is divided into two halves: “living” and “undead”, each with a number of bosses.
The western side is a bastion of the Scarlet Crusade and has a castle that must be conquered. It was also where my wandering led first. Once inside the castle, it’s a fairly straightforward path with a few side rooms with extra encounters, bosses, and books to read. That’s the one thing I’ll give the Crusaders: they support literacy. There were very few surprises overall and a nice little boss at the end with a couple of firable cannons for flavor. Presumably the cannons can be used to ward off the waves of additional crusaders that spawn after fighting down the boss, but I found it more expedient to simply blizzard my way to victory.
The eastern side was a bit more complex. The first part included a (presumably fairly elected) undead Magistrar who gave up the Key to the City which opened a backdoor to the “surface” as well as permitted deeper explorations. Once into the streets known as “the Gauntlet”, the undead leader, “Baron Somebody”, yells out he’s going to kill a prisoner in 45 minutes. This sounded like something I should probably care about, so it lent some urgency to my explorations.
A glance at a hastily procured map showed I had to fight my way to The Slaughterhouse, so I made my way through the city clearing the streets as I went. There were a lot more patrols on this side, so it was a bit slower going. One of the buildings looked more heavily guarded than the others and had a “Baroness” at the top of the stairs, so I figured I was on the right track. A few arcane blasts later the doors behind her opened to reveal…a tiny room with a few acolytes. I left them alone and continued on my merry way, annihilating street trash as I went.
By the side of the road I eventually encountered two more similarly guarded buildings and contented myself with nuking the bosses for a few extra blues to disenchant and the occasional auctionable piece of rare or epic gear. The whole place was a bit of a gold mine for that. I simply didn’t have the pack space to loot everything, even disenchanting things as I went. Eventually, I just left dozens of undead lying on the ground, their treasures undisturbed.
Finally I reached the Slaughterhouse—only to find the way blocked by a large, very immobile gate. I looked around for a switch, lever, boss I had missed, or anything, but to no avail. I was out of time (personal, not quest-related), so I’d just have to retry the undead section later in the evening.
An hour or so later I stepped back into Stratholme and began the run again. Unfortunately I had not had to opportunity to offload any of my treasures, so even more unlooted bodies were left by the wayside. As I cleansed the city, I wondered what I had not done. Then it hit me hard. This time when I faced the Baroness, I stepped inside and killed the Acolytes. Sure enough, I was rewarded with a script that said the defenses of the ziggurat were being compromised. Aha! I made my way back through and wiped out the other two dens of boss-defended evil priests to hear the sweet sound of the distant gates tumbling down.
I returned to the Slaughterhouse and it was a small stone building with a sealed door and surrounded by a large courtyard, populated with a couple dozen abominations. I faced them and began the endgame encounters. When all of the abominations were felled, many skeletons poured out of a side gate. When they were dispatched, the building opened and a number of elite undead blizzardbait emerged. When the last died, the Baron himself challenged me to enter and …DIE! I intended to do one of those.
Inside the baron sat upon a horse in the small room, because…I guess that’s just his thing. Smoked him like a salmon and rescued the fair maiden, who seemed content to stand around uselessly until I zoned out.
Next stop…Scholomance maybe?
Continuing my exploration of older dungeons, I journeyed to the Eastern Plaguelands to see what Stratholme had to offer. A nice little city with plenty of lore, it was the site of a major plague outbreak as seen in the Warcraft 3 human campaign and you get to time travel and relive that experience during the Culling of Stratholme “dungeon”. Now I was finally getting to see it “in the now”. My previous experience with this dungeon was thirty seconds of pain months ago when I was trying to find a path to the blood elf starting area and found myself trapped alone in the city with no portal out and everything a dozen levels higher than I. Time to take revenge.
I blew through the thickly guarded city gates and started exploring the city. It looks exactly like what you’d expect in a hopeless city that’s been overrun with undead for years: Detroit. The monsters ranged from ghouls and skeletons to abominations and spider-like crypt-thingies. As I made my way through the city, I occasionally ran afoul of patrols or traps, but nothing that wasn’t overwhelming. It turns out the city itself is divided into two halves: “living” and “undead”, each with a number of bosses.
The western side is a bastion of the Scarlet Crusade and has a castle that must be conquered. It was also where my wandering led first. Once inside the castle, it’s a fairly straightforward path with a few side rooms with extra encounters, bosses, and books to read. That’s the one thing I’ll give the Crusaders: they support literacy. There were very few surprises overall and a nice little boss at the end with a couple of firable cannons for flavor. Presumably the cannons can be used to ward off the waves of additional crusaders that spawn after fighting down the boss, but I found it more expedient to simply blizzard my way to victory.
The eastern side was a bit more complex. The first part included a (presumably fairly elected) undead Magistrar who gave up the Key to the City which opened a backdoor to the “surface” as well as permitted deeper explorations. Once into the streets known as “the Gauntlet”, the undead leader, “Baron Somebody”, yells out he’s going to kill a prisoner in 45 minutes. This sounded like something I should probably care about, so it lent some urgency to my explorations.
A glance at a hastily procured map showed I had to fight my way to The Slaughterhouse, so I made my way through the city clearing the streets as I went. There were a lot more patrols on this side, so it was a bit slower going. One of the buildings looked more heavily guarded than the others and had a “Baroness” at the top of the stairs, so I figured I was on the right track. A few arcane blasts later the doors behind her opened to reveal…a tiny room with a few acolytes. I left them alone and continued on my merry way, annihilating street trash as I went.
By the side of the road I eventually encountered two more similarly guarded buildings and contented myself with nuking the bosses for a few extra blues to disenchant and the occasional auctionable piece of rare or epic gear. The whole place was a bit of a gold mine for that. I simply didn’t have the pack space to loot everything, even disenchanting things as I went. Eventually, I just left dozens of undead lying on the ground, their treasures undisturbed.
Finally I reached the Slaughterhouse—only to find the way blocked by a large, very immobile gate. I looked around for a switch, lever, boss I had missed, or anything, but to no avail. I was out of time (personal, not quest-related), so I’d just have to retry the undead section later in the evening.
An hour or so later I stepped back into Stratholme and began the run again. Unfortunately I had not had to opportunity to offload any of my treasures, so even more unlooted bodies were left by the wayside. As I cleansed the city, I wondered what I had not done. Then it hit me hard. This time when I faced the Baroness, I stepped inside and killed the Acolytes. Sure enough, I was rewarded with a script that said the defenses of the ziggurat were being compromised. Aha! I made my way back through and wiped out the other two dens of boss-defended evil priests to hear the sweet sound of the distant gates tumbling down.
I returned to the Slaughterhouse and it was a small stone building with a sealed door and surrounded by a large courtyard, populated with a couple dozen abominations. I faced them and began the endgame encounters. When all of the abominations were felled, many skeletons poured out of a side gate. When they were dispatched, the building opened and a number of elite undead blizzardbait emerged. When the last died, the Baron himself challenged me to enter and …DIE! I intended to do one of those.
Inside the baron sat upon a horse in the small room, because…I guess that’s just his thing. Smoked him like a salmon and rescued the fair maiden, who seemed content to stand around uselessly until I zoned out.
Next stop…Scholomance maybe?
Monday, October 4, 2010
This and that
With Brewfest finally winding down, I was glad to be able to earn what tokens I could and picked up the pet miniature pink elekk. If all goes according to plan, I’ll even be able to get the glasses on Tuesday. By a happy chance, one of the Corin Direbrew bags gave the ‘Brew-fast’ ram mount. It’s been a good holiday, but I won’t be missing the ram races anytime soon. I honestly have no idea how people do this on multiple characters each day.
The current guild raid schedule horribly conflicts with my personal life, so there isn’t much I can sign up for beyond the Wednesday fun runs when they manifest. Sadness, but these things tend to be temporary. Even still, I managed to get a fair share of raiding done over the weekend, even if it was just with pugs.
I don’t quite have the stomach for ICC pugs, which is a pity since they are pretty much the only place I’ll be getting gear upgrades at this point, but in ‘lesser dungeons’ there’s still achievements to be had and the experiences themselves.
Ran both 10-man and 25-man VoA for the sole purpose of collecting a few more frosties to add to my stockpile. I’m just a handful shy of new robes and I’m eager to finish. The 10-man went flawlessly. The 25-man. not so much. With over two dozen players, the enemies are drastically scaled upwards and there isn’t much room for stupid. People simply have to know their roles.
In VoA, the big thing is that ranged must switch from battling Toravon the Ice Lord to spinning frozen orbs he summons or they will wipe the party. Healers must be able to dance, avoiding orbs while keeping everyone up. Rogues must not run forward before everyone is rezzed, pull the boss back to the raid before fading and dropping the party. To our credit, we did two of those things right. “Wewillkill”, I’m looking at YOU. After the initial debacle and the people who inevitably drop after a single setback have been replaced, we charged forward and did it the right way.
An hour later I joined an Onyxia-25 group after a couple of guildies advertised for more help. I’d wanted to see the fight again with the graphic pumped up. Since we wouldn’t be doing the whelps, I was fairly certain my system could handle it without disconnecting. The group had challenges. The leader, the ironically named ‘Dragonmaster’, may have been the most insecure raid leader I’ve met. With encouraging messages like “If anyone wants to drop out of the raid now, I won’t think any less of you” and no less than five ready checks before pulling the SINGLE boss we have to fight. Still, he was trying his best, so I won’t fault him. It takes a brave man to put together a raid and everyone starts somewhere, right?
As luck would have it, our party included a decent guy from the VoA-25 I’d just run by the name of “Junkmonkey”. He noted “Where have I seen your name before, Wewillkill?” Oh, crap. I called the rogue out on the VoA disaster and he protested that he had lagged horribly into the fight, then dropped to avoid accusations. Others pointed out that dropping instead of explaining didn’t really help his case, but I was curious to see how it would go down. In the end, Wewillkill stuck around and didn’t do anything untoward. I’m happy to say we were massacred legitimately…twice.
It turned out they –were- attempting the “Many Whelps! Handle it!” achieve and that led to much hilarity the first time. In the end we needed “more dots!” and failed what should’ve been an easy run. After eleven minutes, we wiped in phase 2 with Ony still around 40%. I wasn’t torn up about it, aside from the armor repair bill.
Tagged along in an ToC 10-man and I can now say I’ve done that. Previously, I’d only experienced the raid up to the slaying of a demon lord summoned by a rather self-important gnome. This time I got to see it through to the end. Battles included a ‘pvp-style’ team we had to best, a pair of Val’kyr with very curious light/dark attunement mechanics I won’t go into here, and a rather interesting surprise.
After defeating the Val’kyr, the Lich King shows up, monologues a bit, and shatters the floor of the arena, sending us all falling down into a cavern where the reanimated crypt lord, Anub’arak (last seen in Azjol-nerub), awaited. It was a ferocious fight, but we fared better against it than we did the Val’kyr, and were named Champions of the Crusade.
The final little feather was a battle in Warsong Gulch that we completely dominated, earning both “Warsong Gulch Perfection!” (3-0 victory) and “Warsong Expedience” (victory in under 7 minutes). Considering that WSG is probably my second most-hated battleground (behind Arathi Basin), I was tickled as pink as my elekk.
The current guild raid schedule horribly conflicts with my personal life, so there isn’t much I can sign up for beyond the Wednesday fun runs when they manifest. Sadness, but these things tend to be temporary. Even still, I managed to get a fair share of raiding done over the weekend, even if it was just with pugs.
I don’t quite have the stomach for ICC pugs, which is a pity since they are pretty much the only place I’ll be getting gear upgrades at this point, but in ‘lesser dungeons’ there’s still achievements to be had and the experiences themselves.
Ran both 10-man and 25-man VoA for the sole purpose of collecting a few more frosties to add to my stockpile. I’m just a handful shy of new robes and I’m eager to finish. The 10-man went flawlessly. The 25-man. not so much. With over two dozen players, the enemies are drastically scaled upwards and there isn’t much room for stupid. People simply have to know their roles.
In VoA, the big thing is that ranged must switch from battling Toravon the Ice Lord to spinning frozen orbs he summons or they will wipe the party. Healers must be able to dance, avoiding orbs while keeping everyone up. Rogues must not run forward before everyone is rezzed, pull the boss back to the raid before fading and dropping the party. To our credit, we did two of those things right. “Wewillkill”, I’m looking at YOU. After the initial debacle and the people who inevitably drop after a single setback have been replaced, we charged forward and did it the right way.
An hour later I joined an Onyxia-25 group after a couple of guildies advertised for more help. I’d wanted to see the fight again with the graphic pumped up. Since we wouldn’t be doing the whelps, I was fairly certain my system could handle it without disconnecting. The group had challenges. The leader, the ironically named ‘Dragonmaster’, may have been the most insecure raid leader I’ve met. With encouraging messages like “If anyone wants to drop out of the raid now, I won’t think any less of you” and no less than five ready checks before pulling the SINGLE boss we have to fight. Still, he was trying his best, so I won’t fault him. It takes a brave man to put together a raid and everyone starts somewhere, right?
As luck would have it, our party included a decent guy from the VoA-25 I’d just run by the name of “Junkmonkey”. He noted “Where have I seen your name before, Wewillkill?” Oh, crap. I called the rogue out on the VoA disaster and he protested that he had lagged horribly into the fight, then dropped to avoid accusations. Others pointed out that dropping instead of explaining didn’t really help his case, but I was curious to see how it would go down. In the end, Wewillkill stuck around and didn’t do anything untoward. I’m happy to say we were massacred legitimately…twice.
It turned out they –were- attempting the “Many Whelps! Handle it!” achieve and that led to much hilarity the first time. In the end we needed “more dots!” and failed what should’ve been an easy run. After eleven minutes, we wiped in phase 2 with Ony still around 40%. I wasn’t torn up about it, aside from the armor repair bill.
Tagged along in an ToC 10-man and I can now say I’ve done that. Previously, I’d only experienced the raid up to the slaying of a demon lord summoned by a rather self-important gnome. This time I got to see it through to the end. Battles included a ‘pvp-style’ team we had to best, a pair of Val’kyr with very curious light/dark attunement mechanics I won’t go into here, and a rather interesting surprise.
After defeating the Val’kyr, the Lich King shows up, monologues a bit, and shatters the floor of the arena, sending us all falling down into a cavern where the reanimated crypt lord, Anub’arak (last seen in Azjol-nerub), awaited. It was a ferocious fight, but we fared better against it than we did the Val’kyr, and were named Champions of the Crusade.
The final little feather was a battle in Warsong Gulch that we completely dominated, earning both “Warsong Gulch Perfection!” (3-0 victory) and “Warsong Expedience” (victory in under 7 minutes). Considering that WSG is probably my second most-hated battleground (behind Arathi Basin), I was tickled as pink as my elekk.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Dragon's Lair
Running the Brewfest dailies may not have gotten me any closer to server domination, but it did get me a nifty pair of boots to go with my costume. Tonight or tomorrow I should get the cap (I like saving the cheapest thing for last) and that will nail down the last of the Brewfest achievements. I’ll still play along through the end of the holiday for the pet Elekk, but it isn’t a pressing need.
Much later I was chillaxing in Ironforge and waiting for the daily queue, when I get a whisper from a guildie. She’s in an Onyxia 10-man raid group that’s only half full. Would I want in? I glanced at my queue-counter. Fourteen minutes in and a dungeon should pop any second. I was glad she caught me when she did. I dropped queue, replied that I would, and in a minute I was chillaxing in Ironforge and waiting for the raid to fill.
For the uninitiated, the dragon Onyxia was one of the true end-game encounters back in Vanilla. Videos on YouTube abound including a rather famous (in some circles) animated one with a spastic raid leader utterly nutting up throughout the proceedings, which culminates in an epithet-spewing tirade when they wipe. That particular video is the source of the names of two achievements “Many whelps! Handle it!” and “More dots!” and is four minutes of Totally Worth It.
When Lich King came out, the classic raid was yanked, buffed up, and slapped back in as 10/25-man level 80 content. The raid itself is one of the easier ones, which isn’t surprising given that, as a developer, you want the new content to be more challenging and rewarding than the things players have seen for years.
We ventured forth to some remote spot in Kalimdor. (Well, truth be told, a couple of people ventured forth to a remote spot in Kalimdor. My happy butt stayed parked in Ironforge until summoned.) We delved into the dragon’s cave and explored the tunnels within which was, unsurprisingly, guarded by a number of various draconian adversaries. After a remarkably short distance, we stood at the doorway into a large cavern and Onyxia lay sprawled out dozing. Someone commented on how peaceful she looked sleeping.
We had a secondary mission: attain the “Many Whelps! Handle it!” achievement, if at all possible. This cranks the difficulty of the raid to 11. Don’t worry, dear reader. I’ll explain. Phase one of Onyxia is strictly tank and spank. The tank points the mouth of The Very Angry Dragon away from the raid and we wail on it until she hits phase 2. At the beginning of phase 2, she walks around and then takes to the air. When she does, players nears the sides of the cave will spawn up to a hundred dragon whelps. That is not an exaggeration. Around fifty whelps spawn on each side. Meanwhile, Onyxia will start blasting the raid from above, safely out of melee range. The achieve requires spawning more than 50 whelps within ten seconds of Ony taking to the air and then killing her.
The whelps hurt. A lot. They are fairly crunchy, but there’s a crapton of them. From personal experience, I can attest they each do about 1-2k damage per hit against cloth wearers who might be trying to blizzard them to death. Interestingly enough, the main danger the whelps pose isn’t from their teeth, but the sheer volume of them will cause many people to lose connection. This can be mitigated by lowering one’s graphic settings from ultra to ‘catass’, but even still, our first attempt saw two people drop. Given that one was a tank, this boded ill and in seconds we wiped from the Swarm.
We returned a couple of times, but each time the whelp swarm caused party members to disconnect and those that didn’t were quickly nommed to death. After the third time, we decided to play it straight and see how that went. (spoiler: better
The tank engaged and we streamed forward, guns a-blazin’. We entered phase 2 and I was shocked to see whelps—it turned out that Onyxia spawns a number of her own. My guildie friend died horribly, as did one other, but we pressed on. Avoiding fireballs and ‘deep breaths’ (read: horrific gouts of flame), I positioned myself underneath the dragon and blasted as I could at an awkward angle as the tanks scooped up rogue whelps and a couple of elite dragonkin that had spawned. After some time, she landed and phase 3 began.
This time, Onyxia’s normal attacks and wing buffet were supplemented by an area-of-effect fear and lava bursts around the room. It definitely made for an interesting fight. In the end, justice was served by murderous humanoids with sharp pointy things and the dragon lay dead before us and three achievements were attained at once: Onyxia 10-man, More Dots! (kill her in x time), and She Deep Breaths More (kill her without anybody getting nailed by the ‘deep breath’ weapon). This had turned out much better than I had hoped for.
There was a nice assortment of loot, including the dragon’s head (which was won by my guildie) and a 22-slot bag, among other nifties. Per usual, I lost all of the rolls and summoned the obligatory portal to Dalaran. I was then surprised by a trade offer: my guildie gave me the head! She noted that the trinket reward wasn’t needed, so I happily returned to Stormwind carrying my severed prize. The reward ring was actually a little worse than what I currently had, but the souvenir of my adventure earned a spot in my bank vault.
Much later I was chillaxing in Ironforge and waiting for the daily queue, when I get a whisper from a guildie. She’s in an Onyxia 10-man raid group that’s only half full. Would I want in? I glanced at my queue-counter. Fourteen minutes in and a dungeon should pop any second. I was glad she caught me when she did. I dropped queue, replied that I would, and in a minute I was chillaxing in Ironforge and waiting for the raid to fill.
For the uninitiated, the dragon Onyxia was one of the true end-game encounters back in Vanilla. Videos on YouTube abound including a rather famous (in some circles) animated one with a spastic raid leader utterly nutting up throughout the proceedings, which culminates in an epithet-spewing tirade when they wipe. That particular video is the source of the names of two achievements “Many whelps! Handle it!” and “More dots!” and is four minutes of Totally Worth It.
When Lich King came out, the classic raid was yanked, buffed up, and slapped back in as 10/25-man level 80 content. The raid itself is one of the easier ones, which isn’t surprising given that, as a developer, you want the new content to be more challenging and rewarding than the things players have seen for years.
We ventured forth to some remote spot in Kalimdor. (Well, truth be told, a couple of people ventured forth to a remote spot in Kalimdor. My happy butt stayed parked in Ironforge until summoned.) We delved into the dragon’s cave and explored the tunnels within which was, unsurprisingly, guarded by a number of various draconian adversaries. After a remarkably short distance, we stood at the doorway into a large cavern and Onyxia lay sprawled out dozing. Someone commented on how peaceful she looked sleeping.
We had a secondary mission: attain the “Many Whelps! Handle it!” achievement, if at all possible. This cranks the difficulty of the raid to 11. Don’t worry, dear reader. I’ll explain. Phase one of Onyxia is strictly tank and spank. The tank points the mouth of The Very Angry Dragon away from the raid and we wail on it until she hits phase 2. At the beginning of phase 2, she walks around and then takes to the air. When she does, players nears the sides of the cave will spawn up to a hundred dragon whelps. That is not an exaggeration. Around fifty whelps spawn on each side. Meanwhile, Onyxia will start blasting the raid from above, safely out of melee range. The achieve requires spawning more than 50 whelps within ten seconds of Ony taking to the air and then killing her.
The whelps hurt. A lot. They are fairly crunchy, but there’s a crapton of them. From personal experience, I can attest they each do about 1-2k damage per hit against cloth wearers who might be trying to blizzard them to death. Interestingly enough, the main danger the whelps pose isn’t from their teeth, but the sheer volume of them will cause many people to lose connection. This can be mitigated by lowering one’s graphic settings from ultra to ‘catass’, but even still, our first attempt saw two people drop. Given that one was a tank, this boded ill and in seconds we wiped from the Swarm.
We returned a couple of times, but each time the whelp swarm caused party members to disconnect and those that didn’t were quickly nommed to death. After the third time, we decided to play it straight and see how that went. (spoiler: better
The tank engaged and we streamed forward, guns a-blazin’. We entered phase 2 and I was shocked to see whelps—it turned out that Onyxia spawns a number of her own. My guildie friend died horribly, as did one other, but we pressed on. Avoiding fireballs and ‘deep breaths’ (read: horrific gouts of flame), I positioned myself underneath the dragon and blasted as I could at an awkward angle as the tanks scooped up rogue whelps and a couple of elite dragonkin that had spawned. After some time, she landed and phase 3 began.
This time, Onyxia’s normal attacks and wing buffet were supplemented by an area-of-effect fear and lava bursts around the room. It definitely made for an interesting fight. In the end, justice was served by murderous humanoids with sharp pointy things and the dragon lay dead before us and three achievements were attained at once: Onyxia 10-man, More Dots! (kill her in x time), and She Deep Breaths More (kill her without anybody getting nailed by the ‘deep breath’ weapon). This had turned out much better than I had hoped for.
There was a nice assortment of loot, including the dragon’s head (which was won by my guildie) and a 22-slot bag, among other nifties. Per usual, I lost all of the rolls and summoned the obligatory portal to Dalaran. I was then surprised by a trade offer: my guildie gave me the head! She noted that the trinket reward wasn’t needed, so I happily returned to Stormwind carrying my severed prize. The reward ring was actually a little worse than what I currently had, but the souvenir of my adventure earned a spot in my bank vault.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Control Freak
Began the evening with the Brewfest dailies and totally botched the ram run, only delivering nine kegs of precious booze to the festival. My runs typically follow a ‘banana-shaped’ path allowing me to catch the two apple barrels along the path and, if things go horribly wrong I can usually tag the barrel by the keg-giver. This time, I managed to:
· Get stuck on a fence for a few seconds
· Not get credit for an apple barrel
· Hit 100 exhaustion while in the process of leaping over a barrel, giving me the 15 second debuff but with no exhaustion counter
· Annoy the keg-provider to the point where he won’t give me another barrel until I run off and come back
· Fall off a hillside.
In retrospect, it was a miracle I got as many delivered as I did.
Afterward, I grabbed a random party to slay Corin Direbrew for the billionth time and after he defeated 20 seconds later, I decided to stick around and explore the rest of the dungeon. It was amazingly fun.
It turns out I –had- seen the end of the dungeon years before, I was just pretty clueless at the time as far as what was going on. After navigating a few tunnels I made my way through the inky depths, fought seven spectral dwarven ghosts and discovered I –needed- that damn Shadowforge Key at some point. Further in, I obliterated a room with a thousand dwarves in it to grab a couple of torches to light braziers to open the final door (this is when I realized I’d been here before—my first run was very traumatic) and stood in the throne room with the dark iron King and his court.
Being the tactical equivalent of Conan, I went straight for the throne and attacked. Every single dwarf began rushing to the King’s defense as he started lighting me up. For the most part I ignored the throngs as I focused on the King. Once he was down to a fraction of his health, he became immune to my assaults and continued wailing on me. At this point I noticed I was nearly dead. I hastily shifted from “God mode” to “OMG! OMG! OMG! mode” and dashed around exploding everything I could while quaffing a potion and using trinkets.
In the end, the broken bodies of the dwarven consul littered the floor like dark iron scraps and I sat upon the throne proudly. Afterward I climbed down and back tracked a bit until I found the molten core entrance and broke off a fragment to attune myself. That’ll be an adventure for another day.
Back in Ironforge, I realized that I’d miss Thursday’s guild run for the weekly raid due to wifely commitments. Instructor Razuvious needed killing again and I really wanted the rewards, so I when I saw the opportunity to join a pug, I did so.
We met up in Naxx and it was a bit dicey—our tank was squishy and half of us died on trash before someone swapped out for a warrior. As we went along, we discovered there was only one person who had ever used the control orbs before. I was low man on the DPS totem pole (it happens), so I was volunteered to take the other. I reluctantly agreed, but assumed no responsibility for any fatalities incurred. They laughed and agreed. Silly pug.
After we made our way to the Instructor, I diligently positioned myself near the control orb and waited for the signal. When it came, I grabbed it and my consciousness was transferred into a death knight chained to something. With a odd array of icons now inhabiting my spell bar, I desperately started clicking things to see what would happen.
In seconds, the Instructor was charging the party and I was fighting hard to get control of the fight. Cyandra aside, I’m REALLY used to fighting from a distance and having to chase the Instructor down as it was wailing into the party was a bit embarrassing. The alternate tank started tanking and started screaming after a few seconds to pass off aggro. I grabbed the instructor, but my bone shield was still on cooldown. This would end poorly.
My controllee was slain and I flipped into my much more comfortable DPS role as the alt tank got the stuffing beaten out of him. Fortunately for all concerned, the Instructor was down to a sliver when we lost the second Death Knight and we polished him off without loss of life. I apologized and summoned a portal to Dalaran so people could turn in the quest.
It was a learning experience. The little pug learned never to let Strev near the control orbs.
Afterward, I ran my daily in Occulus (note to self: repair armor first thing today) and fished in the coin fountain until I achieved the Grandmaster Fisherman title.
· Get stuck on a fence for a few seconds
· Not get credit for an apple barrel
· Hit 100 exhaustion while in the process of leaping over a barrel, giving me the 15 second debuff but with no exhaustion counter
· Annoy the keg-provider to the point where he won’t give me another barrel until I run off and come back
· Fall off a hillside.
In retrospect, it was a miracle I got as many delivered as I did.
Afterward, I grabbed a random party to slay Corin Direbrew for the billionth time and after he defeated 20 seconds later, I decided to stick around and explore the rest of the dungeon. It was amazingly fun.
It turns out I –had- seen the end of the dungeon years before, I was just pretty clueless at the time as far as what was going on. After navigating a few tunnels I made my way through the inky depths, fought seven spectral dwarven ghosts and discovered I –needed- that damn Shadowforge Key at some point. Further in, I obliterated a room with a thousand dwarves in it to grab a couple of torches to light braziers to open the final door (this is when I realized I’d been here before—my first run was very traumatic) and stood in the throne room with the dark iron King and his court.
Being the tactical equivalent of Conan, I went straight for the throne and attacked. Every single dwarf began rushing to the King’s defense as he started lighting me up. For the most part I ignored the throngs as I focused on the King. Once he was down to a fraction of his health, he became immune to my assaults and continued wailing on me. At this point I noticed I was nearly dead. I hastily shifted from “God mode” to “OMG! OMG! OMG! mode” and dashed around exploding everything I could while quaffing a potion and using trinkets.
In the end, the broken bodies of the dwarven consul littered the floor like dark iron scraps and I sat upon the throne proudly. Afterward I climbed down and back tracked a bit until I found the molten core entrance and broke off a fragment to attune myself. That’ll be an adventure for another day.
Back in Ironforge, I realized that I’d miss Thursday’s guild run for the weekly raid due to wifely commitments. Instructor Razuvious needed killing again and I really wanted the rewards, so I when I saw the opportunity to join a pug, I did so.
We met up in Naxx and it was a bit dicey—our tank was squishy and half of us died on trash before someone swapped out for a warrior. As we went along, we discovered there was only one person who had ever used the control orbs before. I was low man on the DPS totem pole (it happens), so I was volunteered to take the other. I reluctantly agreed, but assumed no responsibility for any fatalities incurred. They laughed and agreed. Silly pug.
After we made our way to the Instructor, I diligently positioned myself near the control orb and waited for the signal. When it came, I grabbed it and my consciousness was transferred into a death knight chained to something. With a odd array of icons now inhabiting my spell bar, I desperately started clicking things to see what would happen.
In seconds, the Instructor was charging the party and I was fighting hard to get control of the fight. Cyandra aside, I’m REALLY used to fighting from a distance and having to chase the Instructor down as it was wailing into the party was a bit embarrassing. The alternate tank started tanking and started screaming after a few seconds to pass off aggro. I grabbed the instructor, but my bone shield was still on cooldown. This would end poorly.
My controllee was slain and I flipped into my much more comfortable DPS role as the alt tank got the stuffing beaten out of him. Fortunately for all concerned, the Instructor was down to a sliver when we lost the second Death Knight and we polished him off without loss of life. I apologized and summoned a portal to Dalaran so people could turn in the quest.
It was a learning experience. The little pug learned never to let Strev near the control orbs.
Afterward, I ran my daily in Occulus (note to self: repair armor first thing today) and fished in the coin fountain until I achieved the Grandmaster Fisherman title.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Into the Depths, an Anyth Tale
Monday saw the exploration of the Sunken Temple with Karthex, Zyrial, Myrial, and Some Shaman named Sinfulcrit. This was my first time in the Temple and I was vaguely impressed by the layout for the first thirty seconds. Afterward, it was all pretty much reduced to “staircase up, staircase down, staircase up, staircase down” as we went on a wild hunt for various scaly mini-bosses that were little more than reptilian speed bumps for our Ball o’ Hurt. I honestly can’t recollect any part where we were in any real danger.
The real fun of it came after we slew enough tiny draconian menaces and got to face down some proper dragons, complete with asparagus-shaped tails. The final boss was a transparent dragon a bit larger than the rest, but was a straightforward tank-and-spank kill. Given the complex boss fights I’m used to at this point, I left feeling a little disappointed.
Our second adventure saw the replacement of the shaman with the hunter Shotgut, played by our good friend Brian. We not-so-randomly selected the Black Rock Depths and teleported straight to the depths. After Strev’s adventures the previous week, I was fairly confident I knew how this should play out. I realized just after entering that none of us would have the Shadowforge Key quest, which makes deeper exploration much easier. Stepping back out would send us back to our origin point, so I silently hoped someone would die. As it turned out, within minutes I’d have just two wishes left.
BRD is a huge sprawling complex that I won’t describe again (see previous posts), but in the first room we somehow picked up a couple of extra packs of dwarves and ravenous dogs. Before we knew it, Zyrial had been reduced to kibble and his angel loomed over us, granting a few extra seconds of reprieve. Unfortunately, this meant that Zyrial was now at a graveyard halfway across a zone he’d probably never seen before and had no idea of how to navigate the mountain’s interior. Terrific.
I opted to play ‘Spirit Guide’ and told the party to wait as I led him back. I charged down a hallway and aggro’d most of it. As the critters happily nommed and seared Anyth, Zyrial calls out that “It’s cool—I’m following someone.” Terrific. I’m already committed to the plan, so I finish dying properly and jog back. I had asked Zyrial to pick up the Shadowforge quest on the way back and at some point he’s back and announces he’s sharing it. I don’t get a message pop, so I figured it was due to my “Dead Status”. I stopped along the way at the Tomb, started the quest, then took a lava bath to get back to the party quicker.
Once inside the tomb, things proceeded fairly well through the prison section. We clear the Ring of Law, wipe out a ton of hounds, and the party is a little confused on where to go next. Anyth to the rescue! I lead the party with mostly correct directions through the bowels of the dwarven city until we get to the Hall of Crafters. Until this point it was a pretty good run. A little dicey at times and we did lose Zyrial a second time, but otherwise the challenges were met and dealt with accordingly.
We killed the Key Boss and I instructed the party to loot Ironfel, needed for the key. The very next pull, it all went to hell. The tiny dwarves are hard to see under the large golems and we overpulled harshly. The golems are heavy hitters and took most of the party down before we could regain control of the fight. Party wipe!
At this point, there’s some dissension in the ranks. A couple note that we’ve “gone way too deep” for the Prison bosses. This was fine by me, since I was under the impression we were exploring what we could. After a minute or so of guiding Myrial back to the entrance (There was a lava incident), we delved into the depths again for the sole purpose of getting the Key.
Fortunately, there were no respawns and I quickly headed back to the short hallway with the key-dispenser at the end. We splattered the guardians and … found out that only Zyrial and I had the quest. D’OH! We got our keys and an insane amount of xp for doing so.
It’s a very rewarding dungeon and I’m hoping that we’ll be able to revisit it a couple more times and do the actual quests for the place. Time to do some research!
The real fun of it came after we slew enough tiny draconian menaces and got to face down some proper dragons, complete with asparagus-shaped tails. The final boss was a transparent dragon a bit larger than the rest, but was a straightforward tank-and-spank kill. Given the complex boss fights I’m used to at this point, I left feeling a little disappointed.
Our second adventure saw the replacement of the shaman with the hunter Shotgut, played by our good friend Brian. We not-so-randomly selected the Black Rock Depths and teleported straight to the depths. After Strev’s adventures the previous week, I was fairly confident I knew how this should play out. I realized just after entering that none of us would have the Shadowforge Key quest, which makes deeper exploration much easier. Stepping back out would send us back to our origin point, so I silently hoped someone would die. As it turned out, within minutes I’d have just two wishes left.
BRD is a huge sprawling complex that I won’t describe again (see previous posts), but in the first room we somehow picked up a couple of extra packs of dwarves and ravenous dogs. Before we knew it, Zyrial had been reduced to kibble and his angel loomed over us, granting a few extra seconds of reprieve. Unfortunately, this meant that Zyrial was now at a graveyard halfway across a zone he’d probably never seen before and had no idea of how to navigate the mountain’s interior. Terrific.
I opted to play ‘Spirit Guide’ and told the party to wait as I led him back. I charged down a hallway and aggro’d most of it. As the critters happily nommed and seared Anyth, Zyrial calls out that “It’s cool—I’m following someone.” Terrific. I’m already committed to the plan, so I finish dying properly and jog back. I had asked Zyrial to pick up the Shadowforge quest on the way back and at some point he’s back and announces he’s sharing it. I don’t get a message pop, so I figured it was due to my “Dead Status”. I stopped along the way at the Tomb, started the quest, then took a lava bath to get back to the party quicker.
Once inside the tomb, things proceeded fairly well through the prison section. We clear the Ring of Law, wipe out a ton of hounds, and the party is a little confused on where to go next. Anyth to the rescue! I lead the party with mostly correct directions through the bowels of the dwarven city until we get to the Hall of Crafters. Until this point it was a pretty good run. A little dicey at times and we did lose Zyrial a second time, but otherwise the challenges were met and dealt with accordingly.
We killed the Key Boss and I instructed the party to loot Ironfel, needed for the key. The very next pull, it all went to hell. The tiny dwarves are hard to see under the large golems and we overpulled harshly. The golems are heavy hitters and took most of the party down before we could regain control of the fight. Party wipe!
At this point, there’s some dissension in the ranks. A couple note that we’ve “gone way too deep” for the Prison bosses. This was fine by me, since I was under the impression we were exploring what we could. After a minute or so of guiding Myrial back to the entrance (There was a lava incident), we delved into the depths again for the sole purpose of getting the Key.
Fortunately, there were no respawns and I quickly headed back to the short hallway with the key-dispenser at the end. We splattered the guardians and … found out that only Zyrial and I had the quest. D’OH! We got our keys and an insane amount of xp for doing so.
It’s a very rewarding dungeon and I’m hoping that we’ll be able to revisit it a couple more times and do the actual quests for the place. Time to do some research!
Monday, September 27, 2010
Pug Runners
The weekend was a fun little eclectic mess. Everything from Wintergrasp to Ice Crown Citadel with booze in-between.
Friday evening included Strev running couple of random dungeons with the guild and quite a lot of working on Cyandra. I had a self-imposed goal to get her to 60 before the end of the weekend and there were a few hundred buzzards between her and that. I wound up falling a few birds shy of my goal (though I hit it this morning out of spite).
Cyandra’s main issue has been damage output. This is hardly a shock, as she’s not retribution-specialized. I thus put “heirloom weapon” on Strev’s shopping list. Per usual, I had a choice between grinding tons of dungeons or doing a bit more PvP in Wintergrasp to collect stone shards. I wasn’t actually doing anything else with Triumph badges, so my thought process went something like this: I can get the PvP weapon, which provides a nice little stamina boost and a major jump in Cyandra’s spellpower AND get a PvE breastplate with badges in a week or so. That’s when someone in guild chat through a Cataclysm curve ball.
When patch 4.0.1 goes live (it is on public test at the time of this writing), there’s some pretty big changes to the badge/emblem system. Badges and Emblems that are less than Triumph will be converted to gold and gold will be used to purchase all rewards that could have been gotten with those types of badges. By that definition, it includes heirloom gear. Triumphs and Frosties will be converted to ‘Justice points’ AT EQUAL VALUE and used to purchase the same gear they used to. This is a serious “wow”, but it all hinges on whether or not the 4.0.1 patch goes live before Cataclysm is released. When Cata hits, the Justice points are pretty much worthless unless you need a particular trinket. So, I think I’m going to hedge my bets by hanging onto Triumphs for another week, spend Frosties if I can get to a nice piece of armor, and burn stone shards like the trash they are.
Earned enough Brewfest tokens to join the Brew of the Month Club, which granted Strev the Brewmaster title. I’ll still need to ride the rams daily to earn enough points for the Brewfest costume, but with more practice, I should be able to snag all three pieces before the holiday ends. My record so far is 13 keg deliveries in the allotted time. I’ve heard of some people getting 23, but I have no idea how.
Fidelis grew in a most unexpected way late Friday night. I’m up a bit later than normal and I get the message that new member has joined the guild. This is always a happy thing and I offer my welcomes. A minute later another person joins…and another. They weren’t announced as alts—maybe a few close friends? I’m given a two word explanation: Pug runners. Confused, I guess they meant these were unguilded people in a pug they just ran More welcomes sent. I’m halfway through typing a message telling the 2nd person that ‘Good news—he’s no longer the new guy.’ when three more people join up. I’m now perplexed and a couple of us are wondering if an Officer has gone on an insane recruiting spree through Ironforge. The flood gates open with new members and I get a more detailed explanation.
Pug Runners was a guild whose people often padded our raids when we were a few short. Likable and friendly, some of them were even former members of Fidelis. For reasons unknown, The Runners decided to disband and merge their guild with ours to make a larger and stronger team. This works out well for everybody and I’m glad to have them on board; it was pleasantly stunning to see 28 people in guild chat without a raid going on.
Saturday night, we took the combined forces into ICC again. I now had a good idea of how these fights worked and was eager to test my mettle. We blew through the first few bosses with little effort and although I blew the roll on a staff I really, really needed (“Strev: I got a one!” “Looter: I guess you REALLY didn’t want that staff.”), I wound up getting some incredibly good gloves instead so I’m not heartbroken.
The Plagueworks was where it got rough again. We barely missed the enrage timer on Festergut (again) but downed him through the power of DoTs and thus avoided a raidwipe. Rotface chewed half the party, but we brought the abomination to the floor. At last, we were face to face with my arch-nemesis, Professor Putricide.
I had promised this bastard a rematch a while back and I was finally going to have my revenge. We reviewed the strategy and the tank pulled. In seconds I was dead from having stood in the fire like a newb; I couldn’t make it out of the ooze that was ticking off 5k a second. Sigh. Battle-rezzed and killed again in seconds. Sigh. I wasn’t the only one having issues by far, so we regrouped to try again.
This time, I easily dodged the plague splotches and when the oozes erupted from the floor, I flawlessly shifted from target to target to save the pursued. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, someone exploded an ooze in the middle of the raid and wiped most of us in a single fell blast. Time was running short, so we opted to pass on a third attempt and instead fought something…Norse… for an easy frostie.
By Sunday evening, I had nearly enough stonekeeper shards to get Cyandra’s mace, so I hit Wintergrasp to work the weekly quests I had missed. By the time the battle started, I was 5 shards shy and had one quest remaining: destroy three siege engines. This is utterly cake, since normally the Horde sends many tanks against our fortress and I’m very diligent about blasting them to pieces. This time, the Horde had other plans.
In WG if a side is outmatched or their opponents have held the keep for a couple of goes, they get a stackable buff called ‘tenacity’. It grants extra health, damage, and probably keeps their teeth sparkly clean. When the other side’s tenacity score exceeds ‘6’, we’re in for a rough ride. This time they had 20. With an amazing buff of 20 tenacity, the Horde players had something like triple health and damage, yet they just could not get it together.
The Alliance utterly steamrolled them. We controlled all of the vehicle production sites and within ten minutes kept them locked down to their graveyard spawn point. Amusing, but it kept me from getting the mace. It wouldn’t be until nearly midnight that I’d be able to complete the quest, but it was a good feeling to mail the shiny heirloom to Cyandra just before going to bed.
Friday evening included Strev running couple of random dungeons with the guild and quite a lot of working on Cyandra. I had a self-imposed goal to get her to 60 before the end of the weekend and there were a few hundred buzzards between her and that. I wound up falling a few birds shy of my goal (though I hit it this morning out of spite).
Cyandra’s main issue has been damage output. This is hardly a shock, as she’s not retribution-specialized. I thus put “heirloom weapon” on Strev’s shopping list. Per usual, I had a choice between grinding tons of dungeons or doing a bit more PvP in Wintergrasp to collect stone shards. I wasn’t actually doing anything else with Triumph badges, so my thought process went something like this: I can get the PvP weapon, which provides a nice little stamina boost and a major jump in Cyandra’s spellpower AND get a PvE breastplate with badges in a week or so. That’s when someone in guild chat through a Cataclysm curve ball.
When patch 4.0.1 goes live (it is on public test at the time of this writing), there’s some pretty big changes to the badge/emblem system. Badges and Emblems that are less than Triumph will be converted to gold and gold will be used to purchase all rewards that could have been gotten with those types of badges. By that definition, it includes heirloom gear. Triumphs and Frosties will be converted to ‘Justice points’ AT EQUAL VALUE and used to purchase the same gear they used to. This is a serious “wow”, but it all hinges on whether or not the 4.0.1 patch goes live before Cataclysm is released. When Cata hits, the Justice points are pretty much worthless unless you need a particular trinket. So, I think I’m going to hedge my bets by hanging onto Triumphs for another week, spend Frosties if I can get to a nice piece of armor, and burn stone shards like the trash they are.
Earned enough Brewfest tokens to join the Brew of the Month Club, which granted Strev the Brewmaster title. I’ll still need to ride the rams daily to earn enough points for the Brewfest costume, but with more practice, I should be able to snag all three pieces before the holiday ends. My record so far is 13 keg deliveries in the allotted time. I’ve heard of some people getting 23, but I have no idea how.
Fidelis grew in a most unexpected way late Friday night. I’m up a bit later than normal and I get the message that new member has joined the guild. This is always a happy thing and I offer my welcomes. A minute later another person joins…and another. They weren’t announced as alts—maybe a few close friends? I’m given a two word explanation: Pug runners. Confused, I guess they meant these were unguilded people in a pug they just ran More welcomes sent. I’m halfway through typing a message telling the 2nd person that ‘Good news—he’s no longer the new guy.’ when three more people join up. I’m now perplexed and a couple of us are wondering if an Officer has gone on an insane recruiting spree through Ironforge. The flood gates open with new members and I get a more detailed explanation.
Pug Runners was a guild whose people often padded our raids when we were a few short. Likable and friendly, some of them were even former members of Fidelis. For reasons unknown, The Runners decided to disband and merge their guild with ours to make a larger and stronger team. This works out well for everybody and I’m glad to have them on board; it was pleasantly stunning to see 28 people in guild chat without a raid going on.
Saturday night, we took the combined forces into ICC again. I now had a good idea of how these fights worked and was eager to test my mettle. We blew through the first few bosses with little effort and although I blew the roll on a staff I really, really needed (“Strev: I got a one!” “Looter: I guess you REALLY didn’t want that staff.”), I wound up getting some incredibly good gloves instead so I’m not heartbroken.
The Plagueworks was where it got rough again. We barely missed the enrage timer on Festergut (again) but downed him through the power of DoTs and thus avoided a raidwipe. Rotface chewed half the party, but we brought the abomination to the floor. At last, we were face to face with my arch-nemesis, Professor Putricide.
I had promised this bastard a rematch a while back and I was finally going to have my revenge. We reviewed the strategy and the tank pulled. In seconds I was dead from having stood in the fire like a newb; I couldn’t make it out of the ooze that was ticking off 5k a second. Sigh. Battle-rezzed and killed again in seconds. Sigh. I wasn’t the only one having issues by far, so we regrouped to try again.
This time, I easily dodged the plague splotches and when the oozes erupted from the floor, I flawlessly shifted from target to target to save the pursued. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, someone exploded an ooze in the middle of the raid and wiped most of us in a single fell blast. Time was running short, so we opted to pass on a third attempt and instead fought something…Norse… for an easy frostie.
By Sunday evening, I had nearly enough stonekeeper shards to get Cyandra’s mace, so I hit Wintergrasp to work the weekly quests I had missed. By the time the battle started, I was 5 shards shy and had one quest remaining: destroy three siege engines. This is utterly cake, since normally the Horde sends many tanks against our fortress and I’m very diligent about blasting them to pieces. This time, the Horde had other plans.
In WG if a side is outmatched or their opponents have held the keep for a couple of goes, they get a stackable buff called ‘tenacity’. It grants extra health, damage, and probably keeps their teeth sparkly clean. When the other side’s tenacity score exceeds ‘6’, we’re in for a rough ride. This time they had 20. With an amazing buff of 20 tenacity, the Horde players had something like triple health and damage, yet they just could not get it together.
The Alliance utterly steamrolled them. We controlled all of the vehicle production sites and within ten minutes kept them locked down to their graveyard spawn point. Amusing, but it kept me from getting the mace. It wouldn’t be until nearly midnight that I’d be able to complete the quest, but it was a good feeling to mail the shiny heirloom to Cyandra just before going to bed.
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