Over the past week and change I've been taking Exexelle, my Kul Tiran rogue, out for a few hours here and there. After hitting 60, the expansions started opening up-- two at a time. From 60 to 80, you have a choice of leveling in Outlands or Northrend and 80 to 90 is spent in either Pandaria or the assorted Cataclysm zones. Garbed in heirloom gear and using a little rest xp here and there, it's been shocking how fast the levels flew by just questing. I avoided dungeons altogether post-60 because you lose the xp bonus if you select specific dungeons to queue for and if you don't pick specifics, you're stuck with only queueing for one expansion's dungeon and difficulty level. Bad design led to prohibitive queue times and honestly, killing 10 rats a few times over was a more productive waste of time.
There was no prohibition on flight, so I made the most of going hither and yon. Actually, thanks to pathfinder I won't be grounded until I hit Kul Tiras.
60-67 was spent entirely in Hellfire Peninsula, a zone I rather liked enough to 100% it again. I have a fondness for zones that are mostly flat and barren: I can quickly get to objectives and there's little mucking about with weird terrain.
68-73 was Terrokar Forest and Zagamarsh, pretty much just doing quests until I tired of the zone. Replaying these zones underscores just how tedious questing in BC was. Very little innovation and the number of rats to kill per quest is almost always 12-25. Consequently, I moved to Northrend.
74-78 was the entirety of Borean Hills, which moved really quickly.
79-80 was maybe 35% of Icecrown. The Northrend zones still hold up after all of these years, even if the textures are a little dated.
81-81 was most of Jade Forest in Pandaland. Varying quest mechanics keep this region fresh.
85-89 At this point I tried to do Mount Hyjal, but after a few quests, it sent me to Uldum and I decided to stay, because it is everything I really like about Hellfire Peninsula. Finished every quest there.
Finished the last half level to 90 with that Twilight Something Cataclysm Zone.
90-92 Finished the introduction to Warlords of Draenor. I was a little disappointed I was denied my flapping around privileges until ridiculously long expansion intro quest line is completed, but I now have Garrison started and am ready to stab my way through alternate-timeline Outlands.
Otherwise, Strev gets a few minutes of maintenance a day. Since the Darkmoon Faire arrived (and you MUST do the rollercoaster once before you have to wait another month), I was able to cap my Enchanting finally. As an unexpected surprise, this unlocked a crafting questline that apparently got released just a couple of weeks ago. Basically it culminates with "gather a bunch of crap and you can make a new enchanting rod that gives you bonus mats when you disenchant". NEEEEEEEAT! I'm about halfway through material gathering-- it could all be ground out in one night if I weren't so lazy, but I'm just chipping at it when I happen to think about it. The old necklace is level 42 or so; when it gets to 44 I'll actually be able to use all of its powers.
Still haven't done the Jaina LFR fight yet-- been saving that for a run with IRL friends. Should be a blast.
Thursday, April 11, 2019
Monday, January 14, 2019
State of the Newbs Address
(An aside to several friends I run with, informally known as The Spastic Newbs of Azeroth)
My Fellow Azerothians,
This expansion has brought us many challenges. From choosing the correct ferry destination, to ensuring that all ten rats are properly killed with Deanae close enough to receive credit, we face adversity. We come together in times of trouble. We come together in times of adversity. We come together in times of a crisis, but what is important is that we come together.
Now… more than ever, our resolve will be tested by the ongoing shutdown. I refer, of course, to my computer which is now shutting down several times an hour. It is not known exactly when these shutdowns will end or how much they will affect us all, but I bring to you a message of hope.
The state of the Newbs is strong.
Through increased deficit spending, I have authorized investments in infrastructure that will provide a clear path to a brighter future. These will be implemented Soon™. In the days that follow, we will have nothing to fear but fear itself… and possibly someone's ability to control aggro.
My Fellow Azerothians,
This expansion has brought us many challenges. From choosing the correct ferry destination, to ensuring that all ten rats are properly killed with Deanae close enough to receive credit, we face adversity. We come together in times of trouble. We come together in times of adversity. We come together in times of a crisis, but what is important is that we come together.
Now… more than ever, our resolve will be tested by the ongoing shutdown. I refer, of course, to my computer which is now shutting down several times an hour. It is not known exactly when these shutdowns will end or how much they will affect us all, but I bring to you a message of hope.
The state of the Newbs is strong.
Through increased deficit spending, I have authorized investments in infrastructure that will provide a clear path to a brighter future. These will be implemented Soon™. In the days that follow, we will have nothing to fear but fear itself… and possibly someone's ability to control aggro.
Wednesday, January 9, 2019
Desserts, Fish, and Zyrial's Panties
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.
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.
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.
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