WoW Journal - 8-May-2006

The Darkmoon Faire opened this morning in Mulgore. And my level 30 dwarven paladin was there, far from home, but with bags full of whirring bronze gizmo, green fireworks, and vibrant plumes. The former two I made with engineering, the latter I found by chance going cheap on the auction house. And I must say at level 30 the trip to the fair is well worth it. The engineering stuff was worth 52 tickets, of which I spent 50 tickets for a unique 14-slot Darkmoon Storage Box. Always useful, it will be quite some time before I get hold of any bigger bag. Each 5 vibrant plumes got me 12 tickets for a random green item with minimum level 30. The quality of these items varied widely, I got an Aquamarine and two rather common green leatherworking recipes for skill below 200, not worth much. But I also got one pack with two 12-slot bags, some good level 34 mail boots, and even a level 40 pair of plate bracers.

But other than doing some engineering and parking my pally at the faire location, I didn't play him much this weekend. Instead I discovered the joys of questing at level 60 with my warrior and priest. Raslebol, the warrior, found a guild group to finish the Fallen Hero of the Horde quest series, step 19 and 20. The final demon was tough, but we had read how you need to pull him down one step of the mountain and fight him with your back to the wall, so he doesn't punt you off the cliff, and that worked very well and on the first attempt. The rewards were green items, but actually not that bad. An amulet with +10 resistance to fire and fronst, a trinket with +3 defense and faster health regeneration, and a 16-slot bag. And you don't have to choose, you get all three.

Kyroc, my priest, did the Test of Skulls with another guild group, killing 4 dragons. Then he got lucky finding Rexxar the minute he entered Desolace, and now I just need Drakki's blood to have a second character with Onyxia key. I didn't join my guilds Onyxia raid this weekend, because only Raslebol had the key, and he hadn't been all that useful during the last raid. My fire resistance is low, my ranged damage output is pitiful, and being defensive specced but not the raid's main tank my melee damage isn't something to write home about either. A priest would be a lot more useful, for dots in phase 2 and healing. I'll try to get the blood this week, so I'm ready for the next Onyxia raid.

Kyroc also did a lot of soloing in Silithus. I wanted to see how easy or hard it is to gain Cenarion Circle faction. Ideally I want one day to be revered with them, to be able to tailor 24-slot herb bags, which are nearly impossible to find on my server. But as a first step I wanted to get to friendly, which gives the 20-slot herb bags, and the +15 fire resistance cloak enchantment. I did all the normal quests I could find, abandoning those that told me to bring the head of a boss in Blackwing Lair or venom from bosses in AQ and ZG. This didn't get me to friendly, and so I started doing field duty quests, as those are repeatable.

The good news was that as priest you can solo the first step of the field duty, getting your papers signed. For this you need to start an event where a group of soldiers from your faction kills a huge insect boss mob from one of the Silithus hives. You need to help so that your side wins, and the leader of the soldiers survives. With a priest it is relatively easy to keep him healed, while keeping yourself shielded up, and using a lightwell for self-healing. With the signed papers you then get the choice between a tactical assignment, a combat assignment, and a logistics assignment.

Every time you finish an assignment, you get 50 reputation points, a signet, and a new assignment of the same type. I quickly found out that combat assignments were impossible to solo, as they would need me killing 30 elite mobs of level 58+ in a densely populated hive, which isn't really a good task for a holy priest. The logistics assignments require you to hand in items made with different crafting skills, usually of the expensive kind. I got lucky and got the cheapest one, 30 heavy bandages in runecloth, mageweave, and silk, but buying 3 stacks each of theses cloths cost me nearly 10 gold, and I decided that this wasn't worth it. So I ended up grinding tactical assignments, of which there are two kinds. One requires you to summon templars from the windstones, for which you need a group, so I just abandoned those. The other type is visiting a scout in one of the hives, and I found that I could solo those quests. Using my shield and psychic scream I can sometimes get to the scout in one run, sometimes I die on the way, come back as ghost and reach the scout on the second try. Same thing for the way back, although there I rezzed at the graveyard when killed. Fortunately repairing cloth items isn't all that expensive, although I could have removed the more expensive ones and run naked.

So I got to friendly with Cenarion Circle that way, and decided to stop there. The +15 fire resistance enchantment turns out to need 3 nexus crystals plus 8 large brilliant shards and 4 essence of fire, which adds up to something around 200 gold cost of materials. The worst thing with enchanting is that the one character I can't enchant is my warrior, because there is no way to pass the enchantments for the bind on pickup items between characters on the same account.

Getting to friendly needed 3000 points, and that was doable. Revered would need another 18000 points, for a total of 21000 points, or 420 field duty quests. Or I could kill 21000 twilight cultists for 1 reputation point each. Numbers like these trigger my in-built casual players "treadmill grind warning alarm", and make me reconsider the idea. Do I really want to spend over 100 hours to get to revered faction? I don't think so. Especially since if I wanted to get other recipes than tailoring and enchanting from the Cenarion Circle, I would need to do the faction grind all over again with another character.

The field duty quests are also supposed to get you gear. If you do 7 tactical quests, 5 combat quests, and 3 logistics quests, plus friendly reputation, you can hand in the signets and chose one of 3 possible items. Unfortunately the items you can get at friendly are very bad, the honored items still not useful, and for the first half useful stuff you need to be revered, and of course hand in lots more signets. I did have the tactical signets and the friendly reputation, but comparing the effort to get the combat and logistic signets with the quality of the items I could get made me destroy all the signets and remaining assignments, and forget about it. Three different signet stacks and half a dozen different assignments just take too many slots in my inventory or bank, which was the limiting factor in this case, I just couldn't block all these spaces for an extended time, and I didn't want to grind field duty stuff repeatedly to the exclusion of everything else for the coming weeks.

Blizzard is trying to invent more content for level 60 casual players, and the Silithus field duty quests were one attempt to do so, but not a very good one. Fortunately since patch 1.10 there is a much better solution to keep your level 60 player occupied on a casual play schedule: Quests. Since the quest xp reward at level 60 is now transformed into gold, it has become interesting again to go questing at 60. For example killing the 4 dragons for the 4 Test of Skulls quests in the Onyxia key quest chain netted me 4 gold per dragon, 16 gold in total. The Fallen Hero of the Horde quests gave up to 8 gold for one quest step in a 20-step series. That means that basically you can continue playing at 60 the same way as you played from 1 to 59, doing quests solo and in small groups, and the monetary rewards are pretty much equivalent to what you would earn from a much more boring money farming play style, even if the quests don't give you any useful items. Add in the occasional 5-man dungeon expedition, and you get a varied mixture of content with decent rewards all around. Sure, the "very best" rewards, epic items, are still reserved for raiders, but I don't mind them getting those, and I don't desire these items so much that I would be willing play in the much more time-consuming and focused way that would be necessary to earn them. As long as there is something useful for me to do, I'm happy.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:04 AM Permanent Link