The Darkmoon Faire is in town this week and it gives me an opportunity to explore things new and old. Apparently at some point they added a carousel which grants an hour's worth of +10% rep, some mount races, a flying through fireworks game, and a couple of pet battlers.
The pet battles are probably the most efficient way to get tickets, as beating both trainers gives 15 tickets, which is more than you can earn from all of the other mini-games combined. Plus, once you can beat the trainers once with your team, you can beat them every day with the same team, which is a cool 105 tickets over the course of the week. Enough for a pet or a couple of heirlooms or a tenth of a mount. Yeesh.
Ran a handful of dailies as I'm stupidly close to finishing Exalted with the Turtles and some faction. What's this? One quest right where I need to turn in the daily requires "20 Tiramisu". The reward is an improved cooking recipe I could learn, a bump in the ol' cooking skill, and Turtle faction rep. Well, I'm sitting by the quest guy and a mailbox. I know! I'll have an alt in Stormwind just buy the stupid things off the auction house, mail 'em over, and call it a day.
Enter Zaliza, a level 85 gnome priestess, who is rocking… 5 gold. Terrific. Twenty of these desserts should run about 60 gold so I bop over to a merchant and sell off trash gear that's been sitting around for the better part of a decade. 75 gold. Perfect. So, I hustle to the AH, do a quick search… and see that there's about 400 for sale all by one guy in batches of 5 for 350g each. Wow. Ok. Prepare to be undercut harshly, guy.
Still no reason for this not to be profitable, so I start listing the few things left in my inventory when I see it. "Black Mageweave Leggings" made by some tailor named "Zyrial". JOY! Since all of the transmog stuff was changed years ago, I don't have to keep the item in my inventory and some other character has the skin (literally) already… I was able to auction the scandalous panties guilt-free. They sold in minutes for just over 300g. Muahaha. Admittedly 300g doesn't go anywhere near as far as it used to, it still gave me great delight and renewed my regret in not having a reliable tailoring alt. Ah, well...I had other fish to bake. I logged back on to Strev to do some fishing.
You see, perhaps the most disturbing thing about Kul Tiran cooking is that, aside from vendor mats, every recipe contains fish oil. Every fish caught in BfA can thus be juiced into a vial of oil, so fishing is worth about 8-12 gold per cast. This should spike a bit more in a couple of weeks when new raids drop and people realize they need more feasts, so plan ahead. In 10 minutes I had several dozen fish and was happily turning them into a couple hundred just desserts. My happy little bundles went on the auction house at 300g per 20, which was hideously overpriced, but still undercutting guy by nearly 80%. I'll find out tonight how all of that went.
I set aside enough to turn in my quest and got a little closer to being able to ignore turtles forever.
Wednesday, January 9, 2019
Thursday, January 3, 2019
Gnome for the Holidays
With a week and a half off work and the kids monopolizing the PS4, I settled in for Entirely Too Much WoW. I'd long scraped every last crumb of content out of BfA, so I made a goal to do all the things in the last two expansions I'd missed. When Legion first came out I blazed through the WoD content to get to it, mostly unintentionally-- the levels came fast and there was never much drive to go back to complete it. Then I left Legion before the first major content drop, so I was never able to finish the Suramar plotline or see ANY of the "Invasion" stuff that came in much later.
This led to three major goals running simultaneously:
- Level up Spindizzy
- get flying in Draenor to make Spindizzy's life easier.
- get flying in Legion, because that would be FUN
The first is the simplest to explain-- I wound up skipping Draenor entirely with Spindizzy due to going a bit insane with pet battles. In a week I had leveled her from 90 to 99 solely from battling various critters in Panadalanda, leveling up dozens of pets during the Pet Battle bonus xp event. For clarification the -pets- got 3x experience, not me, but it was still easy enough to take a pet from level 1 to 25 in about 12 fights. Pet battles don't benefit from rested xp, but Spindizzy was still netting 10-11k per fight. At some point my account passed the 1k battle mark and an achievement was made. Ended that noise on a happy note, picking up the "Safari Hat" prize for battling 40 trainers.
Mind you, a LOT of the trainers I beat would take me past 39 out of 40. Turns out the last one is for the opposite faction, so the achievement was technically earned by a level 1 Orc Huntress named "Stupidsafari" who sadly was deleted less than 15 mintues after her birth. Completing this gave a safari hat toy that, when worn, grants another 10% pet xp.
Flying-- yeesh. Where to begin? Each expansion requires you to finish "Pathfinder" meta-achievements, which require things like "doing all of the quests, explore all of the land, grind reputation, and do other things specific to the expansion".
Legion was broken down into 2 parts. Part 1 I would have finished back when the expansion was new except they hadn't released the last line of quests (which lead up to a raid) by the time I quit. That was simple enough to polish off, but part two-- get revered with a new faction, explore a bunch more areas... go. see. do. Long story short, I finished it up early New Year's Eve and can now ride the skies LIKE GOD INTENDED ME TO.
Once you get sick to damn death of BfA (and you will quickly), I REALLY, REALLY recommend going back and finishing Legion. The Nightborne Elves' plotline in Suramar is interesting enough on its own, but the real star of the show is all of the Space Goat Lore. You command a spaceship (sort of) and invade the demon's home planet of Argus all the while learning all the things about the Draenei they really should have told us back in The Burning Crusade. It's the sort of stuff that would make Bruce drown in a pool of his own saliva.
Ran a few transmog raids between quest chains. In doing so, my guild also found that one does not simply faceroll mythic Legion raids. Clearing Nighthold took 8 geared people paying attention to mechanics, which was a pleasant surprise. All in all, it has been as fun as BfA is not.
Now, Draenor.... Draenor, Draenor, Draenor. That has been an absolute -slog-. Flying requires: full explorations, quests, a dozen different garrison missions, revered rep with 3 factions you can't even start earning until you build a shipyard, and finding a hundred or so treasures hidden on the landscape. Yeesh. The Draenor Loremaster held me up for about a week due to the final quest in Nagrand ("And Justice for Thrall!") being bugged. I finally figured out if I stripped down nearly naked to lower my item level a couple hundred points and punch the bad guys to death with my fishing pole I could keep the fights from bugging out. This strategy would serve me well in numerous dungeons where achievements can be missed because one insta-cast arcane explosion does more damage than the Yamato's Wave Motion Gun.
I'm probably in the minority, but I found the garrison stuff really enjoyable, but the whole shipyard/naval missions are utterly worthless unless you like achievements. That's ok-- because who has two thumbs and LOVES ACHIEVEMENTS?!!? The Strev "sidequest" for a while has been "earn at least 30 account achievement points a day". It's getting to the point where there is little low-hanging fruit, but pursuing these has been both fun and scratched an exploration itch, as they've taken me to some pretty interesting places to do some pretty stupid things. The best from this past week was "kick 100 eggs into lava" to get one called [That Was Entirely Unnecessary], which pretty much sums up my playstyle.
Otherwise, every day for the past two weeks about an hour got devoted solely to grinding Draenor reputations, the last thing I needed for flight. It's a pretty set routine: Flap over to Tanaan. Do a few dailies that force you to run all over the zone to complete, get me an inch closer to revered with two different factions. Although I'd been working these for less than two weeks but it felt like months.
It all paid off last night when I got the last points I needed for both reps and "slipped free the surly bonds of Draenor and touched the face of God."
Then I flew around like an idiot for an hour just because I could.
This led to three major goals running simultaneously:
- Level up Spindizzy
- get flying in Draenor to make Spindizzy's life easier.
- get flying in Legion, because that would be FUN
The first is the simplest to explain-- I wound up skipping Draenor entirely with Spindizzy due to going a bit insane with pet battles. In a week I had leveled her from 90 to 99 solely from battling various critters in Panadalanda, leveling up dozens of pets during the Pet Battle bonus xp event. For clarification the -pets- got 3x experience, not me, but it was still easy enough to take a pet from level 1 to 25 in about 12 fights. Pet battles don't benefit from rested xp, but Spindizzy was still netting 10-11k per fight. At some point my account passed the 1k battle mark and an achievement was made. Ended that noise on a happy note, picking up the "Safari Hat" prize for battling 40 trainers.
Mind you, a LOT of the trainers I beat would take me past 39 out of 40. Turns out the last one is for the opposite faction, so the achievement was technically earned by a level 1 Orc Huntress named "Stupidsafari" who sadly was deleted less than 15 mintues after her birth. Completing this gave a safari hat toy that, when worn, grants another 10% pet xp.
Flying-- yeesh. Where to begin? Each expansion requires you to finish "Pathfinder" meta-achievements, which require things like "doing all of the quests, explore all of the land, grind reputation, and do other things specific to the expansion".
Legion was broken down into 2 parts. Part 1 I would have finished back when the expansion was new except they hadn't released the last line of quests (which lead up to a raid) by the time I quit. That was simple enough to polish off, but part two-- get revered with a new faction, explore a bunch more areas... go. see. do. Long story short, I finished it up early New Year's Eve and can now ride the skies LIKE GOD INTENDED ME TO.
Once you get sick to damn death of BfA (and you will quickly), I REALLY, REALLY recommend going back and finishing Legion. The Nightborne Elves' plotline in Suramar is interesting enough on its own, but the real star of the show is all of the Space Goat Lore. You command a spaceship (sort of) and invade the demon's home planet of Argus all the while learning all the things about the Draenei they really should have told us back in The Burning Crusade. It's the sort of stuff that would make Bruce drown in a pool of his own saliva.
Ran a few transmog raids between quest chains. In doing so, my guild also found that one does not simply faceroll mythic Legion raids. Clearing Nighthold took 8 geared people paying attention to mechanics, which was a pleasant surprise. All in all, it has been as fun as BfA is not.
Now, Draenor.... Draenor, Draenor, Draenor. That has been an absolute -slog-. Flying requires: full explorations, quests, a dozen different garrison missions, revered rep with 3 factions you can't even start earning until you build a shipyard, and finding a hundred or so treasures hidden on the landscape. Yeesh. The Draenor Loremaster held me up for about a week due to the final quest in Nagrand ("And Justice for Thrall!") being bugged. I finally figured out if I stripped down nearly naked to lower my item level a couple hundred points and punch the bad guys to death with my fishing pole I could keep the fights from bugging out. This strategy would serve me well in numerous dungeons where achievements can be missed because one insta-cast arcane explosion does more damage than the Yamato's Wave Motion Gun.
I'm probably in the minority, but I found the garrison stuff really enjoyable, but the whole shipyard/naval missions are utterly worthless unless you like achievements. That's ok-- because who has two thumbs and LOVES ACHIEVEMENTS?!!? The Strev "sidequest" for a while has been "earn at least 30 account achievement points a day". It's getting to the point where there is little low-hanging fruit, but pursuing these has been both fun and scratched an exploration itch, as they've taken me to some pretty interesting places to do some pretty stupid things. The best from this past week was "kick 100 eggs into lava" to get one called [That Was Entirely Unnecessary], which pretty much sums up my playstyle.
Otherwise, every day for the past two weeks about an hour got devoted solely to grinding Draenor reputations, the last thing I needed for flight. It's a pretty set routine: Flap over to Tanaan. Do a few dailies that force you to run all over the zone to complete, get me an inch closer to revered with two different factions. Although I'd been working these for less than two weeks but it felt like months.
It all paid off last night when I got the last points I needed for both reps and "slipped free the surly bonds of Draenor and touched the face of God."
Then I flew around like an idiot for an hour just because I could.
Thursday, December 13, 2018
Tides of Veng--wait. we're done again?!
Well, 8.1 dropped and by the next day I'd finished all of the new content (except the pet battle dungeon). Take that as you will. Along with a ton of bug fixes, Blizzard released:
- a new warfront, which was a re-skinned version of the first one. If you already have 340+ gear, once you've played it once, you're just a glutton for punishment.
- two new island adventures
- a continuation of the war storyline…to a point. Only 3 of the four mission series are playable currently and the fourth will be available late next month.
- added new recipes for professions (the initial ones were seriously lacking diversity)
So for now, no new dungeons or a raid until the second half of January. There's supposed to be world incursions to fight, but I haven't seen one in a couple of evenings of playing.
Everything else is them playing with dials to try to improve things. They've increased the rates at which you earn artifact power (azurite) and gold a bit. They've lowered the xp requirements for leveling up characters pre-BFA considerably. They've increased the rewards for letting your Alliance self get ganked over and over again in world pvp from 10% to 30%, but it's all uninspiring.
For excitement, I enabled "war mode" on Strev and found out 3 things:
1. People don't want people with war mode on in their questing groups, even if it is just to kill a world boss
2. I seriously suck at world PvP. (To be fair I knew this one already.)
3. By making them significantly more frustrating, World PvP actually makes finishing world quests more engaging.
Spent a little time on Spindizzy and leveled her up to WoD territory. She's now 91 and going strong. I skipped a lot of WoD content when I started Legion. Consequently, no flight and it is slower going. Still a lot of fun, even if she dies more often than Strev & Anyth-- not having an escape button like invisibility or feign death results in higher repair bills.
I may block out some time with Strev just to go back and earn the "Pathfinder" flight rewards for the place.
- a new warfront, which was a re-skinned version of the first one. If you already have 340+ gear, once you've played it once, you're just a glutton for punishment.
- two new island adventures
- a continuation of the war storyline…to a point. Only 3 of the four mission series are playable currently and the fourth will be available late next month.
- added new recipes for professions (the initial ones were seriously lacking diversity)
So for now, no new dungeons or a raid until the second half of January. There's supposed to be world incursions to fight, but I haven't seen one in a couple of evenings of playing.
Everything else is them playing with dials to try to improve things. They've increased the rates at which you earn artifact power (azurite) and gold a bit. They've lowered the xp requirements for leveling up characters pre-BFA considerably. They've increased the rewards for letting your Alliance self get ganked over and over again in world pvp from 10% to 30%, but it's all uninspiring.
For excitement, I enabled "war mode" on Strev and found out 3 things:
1. People don't want people with war mode on in their questing groups, even if it is just to kill a world boss
2. I seriously suck at world PvP. (To be fair I knew this one already.)
3. By making them significantly more frustrating, World PvP actually makes finishing world quests more engaging.
Spent a little time on Spindizzy and leveled her up to WoD territory. She's now 91 and going strong. I skipped a lot of WoD content when I started Legion. Consequently, no flight and it is slower going. Still a lot of fun, even if she dies more often than Strev & Anyth-- not having an escape button like invisibility or feign death results in higher repair bills.
I may block out some time with Strev just to go back and earn the "Pathfinder" flight rewards for the place.
Sunday, November 25, 2018
and...that was BfA
Called it. So the bloom fell off the rose when I discovered that the very final Jaina mission, the Siege of Boralus, was a mythic-only dungeon you can't queue for. SERIOUSLY, BLIZZARD? Gating story content behind MYTHIC dungeons---whargarbl. Fine. I figured "How bad could it be?" and spent about 30 minutes in LFG finding other kindred souls who just wanted the stupid thing done for the story.
The long and the short of it was we wound up with a skilled healer, an incredible tank who took the time to explain what he was doing and why, and a couple of other DPS who .. well, tried really hard and were nice people who cared enough to watch strat videos on the fights beforehand.
All things being equal, the boss fights were actually quite enjoyable and the map was really fun. I took one death because of not fully understanding the first boss' fight mechanics, but after a battle rez, I quickly clued in on what to do (drag boss into bombs when he fixates on you) and how to do it (run to the other side of the bomb, not through it). To our credit, although we lost people in every fight, we never wiped. I tell you, I have never seen people gush at the end of a dungeon run like that. Best of all, I got to put the Jaina plot to rest.
I'm now revered with all of the factions except the Tortilla Seekers (yes, I know that's not the turtle faction's actual name but now it is the only thing I see), which allowed me to finish off the artifact necklace upgrades (which itself is now level 30) and finish the rest of the "war campaign" story… which wrapped up all of the current available content, sort of. Technically I still need revered with that last faction for the Pathfinder achievement and getting exalted with 7th Legion gives me access to another race of dwarves I will never play. As an aside, I wish I had known about the Contracts a few days earlier-- Inscriptionists can make "Contracts" that give a week-long buff that gives a bonus 10 rep for a specific faction per world quest completed. You can get them on the AH for under 100g, so that's nice.
I dropped inscription, which I had just picked up for Legion, and went back to my old reliable skinning. A few minutes yields hundreds of gold worth of materials and that gets me by. All told, after wasting about 30k on very short-term gear upgrades and another 6k on pets, I have a bank full of enchanting materials and have broken even on gold.
So, with BfA effectively "done", I can say that they seriously phoned it in this expansion. I enjoyed the ride, but there's nothing they didn't do better in previous expansions and certain changes with professions just seem petty. Example: They removed First Aid skill from the game, although tailors can still make bandages. Fishing goes from 1-150, but there's no difference between any of it. No related achievements; the fish from pools can be caught consistently without pools. There's no real 'trash fish' and even if you catch gray junk it is 3+ gold a cast. I'm just disappointed, really, at the total lack of effort.
Looking at the 8.1 preview, I'm hopeful. Well, not for fishing, of course, but I'm looking to see where they go with the story. In the meantime I have two months left on the sub, so I'm achievement hunting and solo clearing old 25-man heroic raids for transmog skins.
Skimming over some of my older posts, here's a couple of things I got wrong:
- The amazing world quest map layouts and buttons to auto-join groups isn't part of the base game. It's an AddOn called "World Quest Tracker" and I highly recommend it.
- With Warfronts doesn't matter who wins...it may be like a pve tol barad, but it will ALWAYS switch sides. If your side holds the zone, you get to farm it for stuff for a week. After a few days, the other side contributes enough raw materials to "fight for it", where they can play the mini-game for a few days then control it for a week.
Quite finally, I broke down and joined a guild just because I liked their name: "Heathens Aplenty". They are doing heroic raiding-- maybe I'll see about tagging along for one of those rides.
The long and the short of it was we wound up with a skilled healer, an incredible tank who took the time to explain what he was doing and why, and a couple of other DPS who .. well, tried really hard and were nice people who cared enough to watch strat videos on the fights beforehand.
All things being equal, the boss fights were actually quite enjoyable and the map was really fun. I took one death because of not fully understanding the first boss' fight mechanics, but after a battle rez, I quickly clued in on what to do (drag boss into bombs when he fixates on you) and how to do it (run to the other side of the bomb, not through it). To our credit, although we lost people in every fight, we never wiped. I tell you, I have never seen people gush at the end of a dungeon run like that. Best of all, I got to put the Jaina plot to rest.
I'm now revered with all of the factions except the Tortilla Seekers (yes, I know that's not the turtle faction's actual name but now it is the only thing I see), which allowed me to finish off the artifact necklace upgrades (which itself is now level 30) and finish the rest of the "war campaign" story… which wrapped up all of the current available content, sort of. Technically I still need revered with that last faction for the Pathfinder achievement and getting exalted with 7th Legion gives me access to another race of dwarves I will never play. As an aside, I wish I had known about the Contracts a few days earlier-- Inscriptionists can make "Contracts" that give a week-long buff that gives a bonus 10 rep for a specific faction per world quest completed. You can get them on the AH for under 100g, so that's nice.
I dropped inscription, which I had just picked up for Legion, and went back to my old reliable skinning. A few minutes yields hundreds of gold worth of materials and that gets me by. All told, after wasting about 30k on very short-term gear upgrades and another 6k on pets, I have a bank full of enchanting materials and have broken even on gold.
So, with BfA effectively "done", I can say that they seriously phoned it in this expansion. I enjoyed the ride, but there's nothing they didn't do better in previous expansions and certain changes with professions just seem petty. Example: They removed First Aid skill from the game, although tailors can still make bandages. Fishing goes from 1-150, but there's no difference between any of it. No related achievements; the fish from pools can be caught consistently without pools. There's no real 'trash fish' and even if you catch gray junk it is 3+ gold a cast. I'm just disappointed, really, at the total lack of effort.
Looking at the 8.1 preview, I'm hopeful. Well, not for fishing, of course, but I'm looking to see where they go with the story. In the meantime I have two months left on the sub, so I'm achievement hunting and solo clearing old 25-man heroic raids for transmog skins.
Skimming over some of my older posts, here's a couple of things I got wrong:
- The amazing world quest map layouts and buttons to auto-join groups isn't part of the base game. It's an AddOn called "World Quest Tracker" and I highly recommend it.
- With Warfronts doesn't matter who wins...it may be like a pve tol barad, but it will ALWAYS switch sides. If your side holds the zone, you get to farm it for stuff for a week. After a few days, the other side contributes enough raw materials to "fight for it", where they can play the mini-game for a few days then control it for a week.
Quite finally, I broke down and joined a guild just because I liked their name: "Heathens Aplenty". They are doing heroic raiding-- maybe I'll see about tagging along for one of those rides.
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