One of the more delightful things about Classic is that some key and pretty core elements of your class may go pretty much unexplained. As a result, I was left wondering why, at level 24, my kitteh still hasn't been able to learn "bite" or "claw"… or anything other than the "growl" I've taught him. After internet research, I discovered I was doing huntering wrong. This should come as no surprise to anyone, really.
What I should have been doing was taming a variety of pets, finding the ones that actually had skills (apparently I managed to get a cat that was brain damaged) and let the pet use those skills until I learned the skill and could then teach it to other pets. Ugh. Still in Duskwood, I bought a slot in the stable for a few silver so I could park ScratchFever, and went out into the world looking for animals to tame. As an aside, there's only two stable slots and the second costs five gold, so that's going to be a while.
The first animal I came across was a majestic cat. Long, lean, the color of night...and slightly lower level. Much prettier than Scratch. I terribly wanted to tame it, so I set a frost trap down and positioned myself just so and reached out my hand, beckoning. The druid wasn't having it, though, so I went off to tame wolves and spiders instead.
After taming and releasing a half dozen random animals, I started to get a little irked. None of them had skills and I was starting to wonder if I had to nurse them up to a certain loyalty level or something to expose. I went back to the internet. So, it turns out one of those optional skills I'd saved silver by not picking up was actually a bit essential for what I was trying to do. "Beast Lore", when cast on an animal, would update its tooltip to show health, armor, damage, whether it could be tamed-- and what skills it knew. DOH! Back to Stormwind.
Fast forward a bit and I'm jogging around, examining animals. I find a wolf with "bite 3" and tame it. It runs around a bit, chewing on other wolves, and I learn the skill! Hooray! I run back, pick up Scratch, teach him How to Make Holes with Teeth, and send Mr. Wolf packing. Since I was in the neighborhood, I went back to the wolves for a little grinding then happen upon a slightly larger wolf-- with 'bite 4' AND 'howl 2'. Holy crap!
I run back to Duskwood, kennel the cat, and dash back to Wolfie 2.0-- only to find him being skinned by a roving pack of murder hobos. Sigh. It takes me another 15 minutes and a couple of respawns to find his long lost brother. Turns out wolves only eat meat and fish don't count. Fortunately, my newfound friend isn't above wanton cannibalism and I was able to keep him satiated while learning his skills.
It was at this point it dawned on me: why in the hell am I learning these skills to teach the retarded cat when I can just. keep. the. wolf? The wolf isn't as loyal (yet), but is slightly higher level and a sleek black. So, "Fluffers" is now my current pet.
Then, I decided to invest in buying the next rank of fishing. I inaccurately stated I'd have to find Nat Pagle for this one-- he's Artisan level. The Expert level is from a book sold in Booty Bay. Stranglethorn would be a Corpse Run from hell and I didn't feel like swimming for half an hour, so I decided to get to Booty Bay the dumbest, most circuitous way possible: Fly to the dwarven lands, run to the Wetlands, take the ship from Menethil Harbor to Theramore, run through the Barrens, and take the boat from Ratchet. Score a bunch of flight paths and WIN!
Yeah. First time, I somehow fell off my taxi into the Burning Lands near the Elwynn Forest border. THAT was fun-- dodging level 40-something drakes then falling off a cliff trying to get back to Stormwind. The second trip attempt fared better. I arrived in Menethil JUST as the boat was leaving-- I hopped on with a split second to spare… only to realize I'd neglected to get the flight path. Sigh. So that became a not-so-quick round trip to correct before I was off on my adventure again.
It was really, REALLY nice tromping through the Barrens again as I remembered it. Lush savannah grasses, wild animals grazing and wandering, a herd of gazelles rushing past. Troll shamans dying horribly to lightning-powered rhinos. Wonderful, really, and worth the mild aggravation. Booty Bay was almost how I remembered it. The only thing missing were the dozens of skeletons; very glad I went with a non-pvp server this time.
I wound up picking up two books, one for me and one for the AH-- I figure I'll save the next guy some trouble for a minor 35% shipping and handling charge.
Showing posts with label ScratchFever. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ScratchFever. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 4, 2019
Friday, August 30, 2019
Westfall Stewing
From a purely "and what did we achieve today, hmm?" standpoint, the answer is "not bloody much", which is the entire point of Classic. I tromped around Westfall killing some wildlife, bemoaning that maybe one out of four goretusks had livers and stumbled across a beach covered in crabs. These are my beloved loot crabs from days long past. They provide a couple of types of meat, which is useful for people leveling cooking and the occasional pearl, which I think is used in making rings? At any rate, they are safe and easy kills and although their meat doesn't fetch much now (because the demand isn't there yet and supply is high), I made a footnote to come back in a few weeks to clean up.
Between collecting assorted boar parts, shooting dozens of crabs for fun, and completing the westfall stew quest, I was able to reach level 12 and thus gained the ability to heal ScratchFever. He himself has made it to level 11 and level 4 loyalty so his appetite, while still unreasonable, is at least manageable. After collecting nearly half a gold, I blew all but a few silver on training and an underpriced 8-slot bag. I have everything trained except a melee movement debuff, but it was either that or a bag and honestly, I value inventory space so much more.
I also created an alt because YES, I AM THAT TYPE OF PERSON. Thus a new human priest was born. I played through the Northshire Abbey and had an insane amount of fun randomly buffing and healing people as we collectively murdered a billion kobolds and wolves. Upon reaching level 5, I made it down to Goldshire and called it a night. This will be a fun character to piddle around with and the knowledge that at some point people will laughingly tell their friends that they teamed up with "Somerando" to heal their Deadmines run gives me such a wicked grin.
Really enjoying Classic. There's no push for dailies/weeklies, no general sense of "OMG! I'm falling behind!" or FOMO, particularly if you mostly solo. It's a leisurely stroll that costs $15 a month.
From a business model standpoint, it's interesting to see two sides of the same coin from the same product over its lifespan, particularly running side-by-side.
Classic is your "gym membership". If you can get lots of people paying to play, but kind of half-assing it, you're winning! The social and exploration aspects are what keep people engaged moreso than a higher ilevel.
Retail is the casino-- you want to keep people present and pulling the slot machine levers for the dopamine fix. Everything must get done and it must get done quickly!
It relies heavily on "sunken cost fallacy" to keep people engaged.
Here I -almost- started writing a treatise on the contributing factors over the years that led to this shift in perspective, (phasing, cross-server grouping, warforging/titanforging, homogenization of loot, simplification of statistics, etc.) but it's enough for me to recognise it's a different draw and that draw is far beyond mere nostalgia.
Between collecting assorted boar parts, shooting dozens of crabs for fun, and completing the westfall stew quest, I was able to reach level 12 and thus gained the ability to heal ScratchFever. He himself has made it to level 11 and level 4 loyalty so his appetite, while still unreasonable, is at least manageable. After collecting nearly half a gold, I blew all but a few silver on training and an underpriced 8-slot bag. I have everything trained except a melee movement debuff, but it was either that or a bag and honestly, I value inventory space so much more.
I also created an alt because YES, I AM THAT TYPE OF PERSON. Thus a new human priest was born. I played through the Northshire Abbey and had an insane amount of fun randomly buffing and healing people as we collectively murdered a billion kobolds and wolves. Upon reaching level 5, I made it down to Goldshire and called it a night. This will be a fun character to piddle around with and the knowledge that at some point people will laughingly tell their friends that they teamed up with "Somerando" to heal their Deadmines run gives me such a wicked grin.
Really enjoying Classic. There's no push for dailies/weeklies, no general sense of "OMG! I'm falling behind!" or FOMO, particularly if you mostly solo. It's a leisurely stroll that costs $15 a month.
From a business model standpoint, it's interesting to see two sides of the same coin from the same product over its lifespan, particularly running side-by-side.
Classic is your "gym membership". If you can get lots of people paying to play, but kind of half-assing it, you're winning! The social and exploration aspects are what keep people engaged moreso than a higher ilevel.
Retail is the casino-- you want to keep people present and pulling the slot machine levers for the dopamine fix. Everything must get done and it must get done quickly!
It relies heavily on "sunken cost fallacy" to keep people engaged.
Here I -almost- started writing a treatise on the contributing factors over the years that led to this shift in perspective, (phasing, cross-server grouping, warforging/titanforging, homogenization of loot, simplification of statistics, etc.) but it's enough for me to recognise it's a different draw and that draw is far beyond mere nostalgia.
Thursday, August 29, 2019
"I take off my robe and Wizard hat…"
I submitted my resignation from the Azeroth Inc. raid team earlier this morning. "It's not you, it's me." has never been more true. Arcane is simply not in a good spot right now and we're up against a tough DPS check. Flawless mechanical execution isn't enough: you also have to be tall enough to ride that ride. Even with really nice gear, I'm falling flat. No one had said anything directly, but we all can see logs. I'd much rather bow out gracefully and do something I enjoy than be a millstone. For the record, I did try out Fire for a few hours, but trying to retrain myself after (literally) thousands of hours as arcane-- that's just not happening. Net result: weekends now free.
Back on Bloodsail, Magrom continues puttering around. After long and careful thought, I dropped my money making professions and replaced them with mining and engineering. (Engineering gives me bullets, bombs, and better guns). I will probably live to regret this decision, but I've made it this far in life making consistently bad calls and I see no reason to stop.
Hunting for copper ore put me on the east side of Elwynn Forest when I hit level 10 and I had to choose between going to learn pet stuff or finish a few quests in the area. Given it was a long ass walk back to Stormwind, I opted to stay in the area, recovering insignias from dead guards, clearing a murloc infestation, and depopulating the woods of prowlers and bears. By the end of it I was about 10.7 and I decided to push eastward into Redridge Mountains for the flight point at Lakeshire. There's no FPs at all in Elwynn Forest proper. There's generally one point per zone and the Elwynn Forest one is in Stormwind itself. If nothing else, it would save me 20 minutes of jogging later running all the way there and then back.
Once in Redridge, I find a copper node and happily set to it. There's a few spider corpses nearby, so a few murder hobos are probably in the area. Then I notice the corpses are level 16 and were vanishing in preparation to respawn. Oh dear. Fortunately, I was able to hi-ho myself out of there in the nick of time and I was able to pick up the flight point unmolested. I was hoping to be able to score huge experience from a couple of easy quests in the area, but I wasn't quite buff enough to be trusted by a little girl to retrieve a necklace from the bottom on the lake. Such is life.
With a fast path back to the east secured, I returned to Stormwind to train my level 10 skills-- and find I need to go back to the Dwarven homelands to learn to tame animals. Ok! One tram ride later and a brisk jog to Kharanos later, I'm tasked with training a variety of pets to see how they feel. This provided an unexpected challenge. The roving packs of murder hobos weren't leaving ice bears, snow leopards, and wolves to some random hunter to stumble across-- just acre after acre of dead animals I could no longer skin. *facepalm*
Eventually I was able to run through the entire series and dinged level 11 in the process, before settling on a snow leopard I named "ScratchFever" in honor of "You Awaken in Razor Hill". The cat gets random cheers and applause wherever I go. It is also, however, clearing out all of the meat I'm able to stuff into my bags. I picked "cat" because it comes with a healthy DPS buff (10%) and doesn't sacrifice too much health as a trade-off, but it eats like nobody's business. There's 6 levels of "loyalty" and pets gain xp, levels, and skill points independently of the hunter. The lower the loyalty level, the faster they get hungry. Freshly tamed pets are at "teenage boy" levels, so I watched my "I'll use these when I learn cooking!" stockpile diminish steadily as I adventured.
I returned to Elwynn, but this time I headed in the opposite direction to Westfall. I poked around and progressed on a couple of random quests. There's some challenges here. ScratchFever is keeping the heat off me initially, but he's dropping like a sick beat in half of one. That means additional recovery time for re-summoning and re-feeding, since pets generally become unhappy at dying to Harvest Golems, vultures, coyotes, and everything else. The fact Scratch is also woefully underleveled (just dinged 9!) isn't helping a bit. Then there's the inventory factor. I have a grand total of 28 inventory slots (not counting the ammo pouch) and westfall is bad about everything being used in quests. Space is already tight between bombs, crafting mats, food for me and the bottomless cat, emergency healing potions, and such. I can realistically get another 6 slots by picking up a cheap(ish) linen bag now that I can afford it and I'll need to prioritize that.
Tonight is my eldest daughter's 18th birthday, but afterwards I shall dine on Westfall stew!
Back on Bloodsail, Magrom continues puttering around. After long and careful thought, I dropped my money making professions and replaced them with mining and engineering. (Engineering gives me bullets, bombs, and better guns). I will probably live to regret this decision, but I've made it this far in life making consistently bad calls and I see no reason to stop.
Hunting for copper ore put me on the east side of Elwynn Forest when I hit level 10 and I had to choose between going to learn pet stuff or finish a few quests in the area. Given it was a long ass walk back to Stormwind, I opted to stay in the area, recovering insignias from dead guards, clearing a murloc infestation, and depopulating the woods of prowlers and bears. By the end of it I was about 10.7 and I decided to push eastward into Redridge Mountains for the flight point at Lakeshire. There's no FPs at all in Elwynn Forest proper. There's generally one point per zone and the Elwynn Forest one is in Stormwind itself. If nothing else, it would save me 20 minutes of jogging later running all the way there and then back.
Once in Redridge, I find a copper node and happily set to it. There's a few spider corpses nearby, so a few murder hobos are probably in the area. Then I notice the corpses are level 16 and were vanishing in preparation to respawn. Oh dear. Fortunately, I was able to hi-ho myself out of there in the nick of time and I was able to pick up the flight point unmolested. I was hoping to be able to score huge experience from a couple of easy quests in the area, but I wasn't quite buff enough to be trusted by a little girl to retrieve a necklace from the bottom on the lake. Such is life.
With a fast path back to the east secured, I returned to Stormwind to train my level 10 skills-- and find I need to go back to the Dwarven homelands to learn to tame animals. Ok! One tram ride later and a brisk jog to Kharanos later, I'm tasked with training a variety of pets to see how they feel. This provided an unexpected challenge. The roving packs of murder hobos weren't leaving ice bears, snow leopards, and wolves to some random hunter to stumble across-- just acre after acre of dead animals I could no longer skin. *facepalm*
Eventually I was able to run through the entire series and dinged level 11 in the process, before settling on a snow leopard I named "ScratchFever" in honor of "You Awaken in Razor Hill". The cat gets random cheers and applause wherever I go. It is also, however, clearing out all of the meat I'm able to stuff into my bags. I picked "cat" because it comes with a healthy DPS buff (10%) and doesn't sacrifice too much health as a trade-off, but it eats like nobody's business. There's 6 levels of "loyalty" and pets gain xp, levels, and skill points independently of the hunter. The lower the loyalty level, the faster they get hungry. Freshly tamed pets are at "teenage boy" levels, so I watched my "I'll use these when I learn cooking!" stockpile diminish steadily as I adventured.
I returned to Elwynn, but this time I headed in the opposite direction to Westfall. I poked around and progressed on a couple of random quests. There's some challenges here. ScratchFever is keeping the heat off me initially, but he's dropping like a sick beat in half of one. That means additional recovery time for re-summoning and re-feeding, since pets generally become unhappy at dying to Harvest Golems, vultures, coyotes, and everything else. The fact Scratch is also woefully underleveled (just dinged 9!) isn't helping a bit. Then there's the inventory factor. I have a grand total of 28 inventory slots (not counting the ammo pouch) and westfall is bad about everything being used in quests. Space is already tight between bombs, crafting mats, food for me and the bottomless cat, emergency healing potions, and such. I can realistically get another 6 slots by picking up a cheap(ish) linen bag now that I can afford it and I'll need to prioritize that.
Tonight is my eldest daughter's 18th birthday, but afterwards I shall dine on Westfall stew!
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