WoW Journal - 1-April-2004

No April fools joke, my World of Warcraft week was relatively quiet, so there isn't much to report. I finished only a few quests, and I did one expedition with a guild group into Scarlet Monastery. That made me ding 45, but unfortunately the shield I had hoped for didn't drop.

The major activity this week was peaceful: picking flowers. Or rather herbs, to increase my herbalism and alchemy skills. Herbalism is up to 150, alchemy to 165. A lot of that progress was achieved by me swimming up and down the Wetlands coast and collecting stranglekelp. There being no water breathing potions on the auction house, I thought I could make a profit by selling them. So I put them up with a minimum price covering what I paid for the oily blackmouth fish component, buyout at twice that. No luck, I didn't even get the minimum bid. Part of the problem is certainly that on the Horde side undead is the most popular race, and undead have a racial skill which allows them to hold their breath much longer. Well, it doesn't matter, I took alchemy more for my own consumption than for profit.

What I noticed was that progress in herbalism and alchemy was both rather fast. Not because these tradeskills are inherently faster, but because I'm already level 45. On the US servers I dived for stranglekelp at some point with a naked dwarf of below level 20. Naked because he kept getting killed and I didn't want to pay too much for the repair bill. But while under level 20 the murlocs had a huge aggro range on me, and gathering the kelp was time-consuming and difficult, at level 45 it is fast and easy. I need to actually collide with a murloc before he considers attacking me, and if he does I whack him in a few seconds. And the same is true for other herbs, the herbs that advance my skill are still to be found in zones where the monsters leave me alone or pose no challenge. So I should quickly rise to a point where my tradeskills are appropriate to my level. Oh, and having leveled herbalism/alchemy with my US server druid already certainly helps, I still remember in which zones to find which herbs.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:32 AM Permanent Link