WoW Journal - 22-Jun-2006

So I come back from work and look forward to experience how the new Blizzard patcher with the preloaded patch is working. Turns out it isn't working. Sure, 127 MB of the 150 MB patch are already preloaded on my computer, but the rest just doesn't want to come. After 15 minutes I have only 128 kbyte of patch downloaded and give up. I head over to WoWWiki's excellent list of patch mirrors, and download the patch from there, the complete 150 MB in 10 minutes. As the patch system has changed, I now need to unpack the patch into a different directory, and then manually run the BlizzardUpdater.exe to apply the patch.

First character I log on is my level 60 troll warrior, because his inventory is always full, and I want to see how many slots I gain with the new keyring. I find the keyring button next to the bag slots, and pressing it opens a 12-slot bag for keys. Unfortunately it turns out that I can only put 5 keys in there. There are only 8 keys in the game which would fit in the bag, of which one is for Alliance only. And the prison key for BRD and workshop key for Gnomeregan I've thrown away long ago, being no essential. Okay, 5 free slots more, better than nothing. I was a bit disappointed that the "keys" to Onyxia and UBRS wouldn't fit in the bag. Neither do key items like the sceptre for Maraudon or the mallet for Zul'Farrak. Guess there will be more keys in the future, if the keyring already has 12 slots and only 8 possible keys to put in.

Being herbalist and alchemist, I didn't gain anything from the bigger stack sizes, which are reserved for leatherworkers, enchanters, and rogues. But in general I can only applaud bigger stack sizes. Although the line in the patch notes telling you that "Encrypted Twilight Texts now stack to 250" seemed to indicate a very grinding-oriented mindset of the developers.

After my keys were sorted, I took the next bat to Light's Hope Chapel to have a look at the world even and quests there. The place was crowded, which resulted in some lag, but it was still playable. But seeing how overcamped the invasion circles were, I decided to try this another day.

So I switched to my level 18 priest and checked what the Scourge invasion did for low level players. Not much, is the answer. I got a quest to have a look at the invasion circles in front of the city, killed a few level 6 mobs to get 3 dim necrotic stones, and handed in the quest. 40 xp and 1 silver, and no follow-up. Guess the event isn't really meant to be doing much for people below level 60.

So I headed to Westfall and found a corner with level 18 gnolls in the southeast of the zone which wasn't camped at all. I also visited the southwest of the zone, and finished two murloc hunting quests for the ghost at the lighthouse, dinging level 19 in the process. Near the coast I found a midsummer festival fire. Touching the fire erases all your buffs and debuffs. And there is a ribbon pole, where if you can get several players to use it at the same time you can gain some fire resistance buff. Unfortunately there was no other player, and I wasn't really interested in fire resistance at level 19. I've read there are some other midsummer festival quests, but I didn't see them. Please drop a line in the comments if you know where to get them.

Then I finally found a good pickup group for the Deadmines. Two warriors, both of which wanted to tank, a feral druid dealing insane damage in cat form, and a hunter who was 5 level higher than the rest of us, which sure helps. We just cruised through the place in record time, without a single death, and we killed Van Cleef without problems. I won a roll on a blue ring with +2 Agi and +6 Int (yeah, I know, Agi is not for priests, but +6 Int is nice at that level). And for Van Cleef's head I got the Staff of Westfall, another blue item with good stats.

I think I'll head over to Ratchet next, to get the new flightpoint there, even if that one is apparently only connected to Theramore. Makes you wonder what happens if you want to fly to Auberdine from Ratchet, will you first fly all the way south and then turn around? There are some Ratchet quests Alliance can do, and then I could head over to Stonetalon Mountains. I remember a very nice "James Bond" parody of a quest against the Venture Mining Co. for Alliance in Stonetalon, where you blow up a wagon with explosives to distract them and then steal some secret documents from their place. And then next stop is Redridge Mountain. So I'm currently full of plans of things to do, lots of fun ahead of me. Just that my plans don't really involve the patch 1.11 added content, which failed to really excite me.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:47 AM Permanent Link