WoW Journal - 29-Mar-2005

A long easter weekend lies behind me, and as you can imagine, I played a lot of World of Warcraft. I dinged twice, so I'm level 44 now, and I did a couple of dungeons. But the most significant result of the weekend, which will alter the way I play in the future, was a change in crafting professions. But lets start at the beginning.

The long weekend started badly, with the extended patch on Friday being late for over 4 hours. Fortunately my US account was still active, due to the extra days Blizzard had handed out for previous problems I still had play credit until Sunday. And on the US server the patch had already been done Tuesday, so I was able to test the patch in advance.

Unsurprisingly the result of the test was that the revamped Blizzard user interface clashes with the UI mods, especially with Cosmos. And because the standard WoW now has the features which made me install Cosmos in the first place, I uninstalled Cosmos, and used the additional hotkeys, buff timers, and quest tracker of Blizzard instead. I kept Gatherer, and I installed Telo's InfoBar, SimpleMail, and QuestLevels. (Found all these at Curse Gaming). I checked that everything was running well in this configuration, and then I copied the files into the European WoW directory as well. Worked perfectly, when the European servers finally came up, I already had a working set of UI mods.

I also tried LootLink and Auctioneer on the US server, two UI mods that gather data on all the items you come across, and scan the auction house for average prices. But I decided to not use it on the European servers, because it handles a lot of data, and thus ends up slowing your game down. I am also slightly sceptic of every mod that isn't just modifying the UI, but somehow automates the game. What is the point of writing a macro or mod that effectively plays the game for you? I enjoy "playing" the auction house, I don't want that automated.

Then I mentally said goodbye to my level 41 druid on the US server, and sent all my money to a guild mate. The alchemy stuff I had already given away before. It was probably fate that Waldin the druid thus ended his career in the low 40's. He was named after my Everquest druid, and that one likewise never got past level 42, albeit for different reasons.

Finally the European WoW servers came up on Friday afternoon, and I could start to play my troll warrior, Raslebol. I start gathering materials for the weaponsmith quest: Lots of mithril from Alterac Mountains and Badlands, Black Pearls from the auction house, the other gems I have in stock. Gathering metals is getting less and less pleasant, there is far too much competition, but I manage to do it. The reward for the quest is the title of weaponsmith, and four recipes for rare, "blue", weapons. Hmmm, three of them are two-handed weapons, which I don't use. But the Phantom Blade doesn't look bad, and has slightly better dps than my Sword of Omen. So my next goal is to make one of these.

For making a Phantom Blade I need six Breath of Wind. According to Thottbot these are found as rare drop on Gusting Vortex wind elementals in the Tanaris desert. Which reminds me of another tradeskill quest I have, speak to the cook in Gadgetzan about getting cooking skill past 225. The cooking quest needs Giant Eggs from Tanaris too, plus Zesty Clam Meat and Alterac Swiss cheese. So I head into the desert hunting rocs for eggs and elementals for Breath of Wind. The rocs are okay, there is a hill with huge bones, where fire rocs and hyena gather. But the elementals are highly frustrating. Not only are they rare, but they are also roaming all over the place and are hard to find without tracking skill. And when you find one, he doesn't drop the Breath of Wind. I don't manage to find a single one. And there are none in the auction house either.

The next day I look up the other ingredients for the cooking quest, and find that Alterac Swiss is a cheese which drops either from much higher level monsters, or is sold by several Alliance vendors. That does it, I'm creating an Alliance character on my wife's account and travel with him to Gadgetzan. Using her and mine account and the Gadgetzan neutral auction house I transfer money from my horde character to the alliance character, by buying something worthless from him for lots of money. He then buys the cheese in Theramore, and "auctions" it back to Raslebol. By the same way, and with the help of another Alliance character in Ironforge, I buy 6 Breath of Wind from the Alliance auction house. Their AH is much better stocked, due to them having twice as many players.

I spend some more time gathering more mithril and the other components for the Phantom Blade, and finally smith it. Yeah, the highpoint of my blacksmithing career. I smithed a sword which took me more time and gold to smith, than getting an equivalent sword from a quest or instance would have cost me in effort. And for the next sword I need to wait another couple of levels, and then somehow first get a rare drop recipe, and then probably some even rarer drop monster parts. Did I mention how I hate crafting with rare loot drops? In short, I'm completely disillusioned with the smithing profession, and well fed up with it.

So after long deliberation, I decide that in spite of all the effort and money I already sunk into blacksmithing, it is time to give it up. I look up the recipes for engineering and alchemy, and decide that alchemy is more useful for Raslebol. So I unlearn both mining and smithing, and learn herbalism and alchemy instead. The advantage is that potions are consumables, and I like to use them. They give me abilities my warrior doesn't have, like healing myself, breathing under water, or making myself invisible. And as far as I experienced with my US druid alchemist, potions never need rare loot drop ingredients, they only need herbs, the occasional fish, and rarely a common enough loot drop, like a dragons flame sac.

I start collecting herbs in Tirisfal Glade, and later in the Barrens, and quickly get past skill level 75. There doesn't seem to be much competition for the herbs, at least not for the low level ones. And with the experience I have from my druid, on where to find what herb, and being high enough in level, the herb gathering is easy enough for now.

But WoW isn't all about tradeskills. I did a lot of other things this weekend. Most of them related to my goal of emptying my quest log, before accepting the next batch of quests. Many of the quests I solo, especially the quests that are in my quest log for some time, and are now relatively low level to me. I manage to finish the Stranglethorn hunting quests with a guild mate and some guys who was looking for help for that quest in the looking for group chat channel. And then there are the dungeon quests, which since the patch are actually marked "dungeon", as opposed to quests that involve killing elites, but which are outdoors.

I get one guild group together for Razorfen Downs, with 4 of the 5 group members being the same group which failed to finish that dungeon before. But now we are higher level. We first fight our way towards the end boss, and kill him, thus taking care of that quest. Then, because that went so well, we visit the "rock concert" in that dungeon. That is a huge skeleton boss mob on a mound of bones, and lots of small skeletons before him, all doing the undead "air guitar" dance animation. Looks very stylish, and scary, because there are so many. But the small skeletons aren't elite, and we manage to kill them and their boss after a hard fight. Time for the ultimate challenge of Razorfen Downs, the escort quest. We need to escort a prisoner to a huge oven, which he wants to shut down with magic. But while he does that, for a full five minutes there are waves and waves of monsters coming to try to kill him and us. Surprisingly we manage to keep him alive for 5 minutes, and complete the quest, although we get killed shortly afterwards. A big success all in all.

The other dungeon on my quest list is Uldaman. Over the weekend I go there three times. Not only because on the first time we don't manage to win the final fight, and the second time we are only three people in the group and only do half of the dungeon. I do Uldaman three times, because you *have* to do it at least that often to finish the main quest. It is a quest in multiple steps, where the first part you can finish at the start of the dungeon, the second in the middle, and the third by killing the end boss mob. But between these steps you always have to go back to the quest givers, which is a bit annoying. And the final fight is very hard, on my third Uldaman we only manage on the third try for that combat, and then still only barely manage it with half of the group dead. And that is with two rogues in the group which are higher in level than my 44. But as always, doing dungeon instances with guild groups is a lot of fun. And my quest journal is slimmed down to only 7 unfinished quests, and I'll work on those this week.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:06 AM Permanent Link