WoW Journal - 26-June-2006

The journal for this weekend is a tale of two priests, one high level and one low level. I like playing both, for maximum variety, but somehow this weekend I had a lot more fun with the low level one.

My level 60 priest started the weekend by checking out the new Scourge invasion related quests in Light Hope's Chapel. Best summary I found was, as usual, on WoWwiki. But basically the quests are based on a looooong grind. You need to either hand in expensive crafted items or monster body parts to get insignia, and then you can exchange the insignia for rare or epic items. The better your Argent Dawn reputation is, the less insignia you need for the hand-in. So you shouldn't even think of trying this unless you are at least revered with Argent Dawn. But even at revered, to get an epic item will require you to kill several *thousands* of monsters (estimates range between 5,000 and 10,000 kills per epic). So I decided to drop that idea and just ignore the quests.

I can fully understand why you can't hand out epic items for killing 10 foozles (foozle = some generic monster in a MMO). But I find killing 10,000 foozles for that epic is too much. To get one epic for every member of a raid group, you need to clear out Molten Core twice, Ragnaros not included. That you can do in two weekends, in less than 20 hours. Killing 10,000 foozles at a rate of one foozle per minute will take you nearly 200 hours, and then most foozle spawns will be contested, because many other players are on the same quest. I think Blizzard is making gaining epics by players who can't spend several hours in a block in a raid group too hard, there is too much of a "grouping bonus" for raids.

Well, as the Scourge invasion turned out not to be an interesting way to advance my character, I returned to my "normal" weekend program of raiding. I missed the first MC of the weekend due to Real Life ®, but was able to participate in one Onyxia raid and one raid of the second half of Molten Core. Unfortunately neither were particularly successful.

On Onyxia we wiped three times, before the dreaded Real Life ® struck again and I had to leave. No success, although we got her down to 15% or so. Not bad for less than 30 people. If enough players would have had the Onyxia key, we would surely have beaten her. As a priest this encounter is a lot more interesting than with my non-MT warrior. Besides the healing to be done, I also participate in putting dots and wand damage on Onyxia during the second phase. On all three attempts I only died in phase three, surviving several hits of Onyxia's deep breath in phase two with the help of Greater Fire Protection potions.

In Molten Core we found that Sulfuron had been made considerably tougher. Our previous strategy of killing his four healers by bundling them up and killing them with AoE spells simply didn't work any more. We tried another strategy, but didn't come up with anything working, and decided to try it another day. It isn't quite clear on the comments I read on different boards whether that change was intentional, or whether that encounter is bugged and will be fixed later. We did manage to kill Golemagg. No epics for me, but that was to be expected when only one boss dies.

When not raiding with my level 60, I was leveling my low level priest on the new server, who has now reached level 24. I did one pickup group to Shadowfang Keep, which was just brilliant. All good players who knew the place well, no wipe at all, even Arugal posed no problem. And I won both a blue pair of caster leggings, and Arugal's belt. Besides that group I mainly did quests, in Ratchet, Stonetalon, and Redridge. Mostly soloing, except for two groups killing elite orcs in Stonewatch Keep. I'll need to go back there when I'm 2 levels higher, the final boss is level 26 elite and has too many other orcs in his castle.

I got my tailoring past 150 and learned how to make 10-slot silk bags. I checked the auction house and the only silk bags on offer were totally overpriced at 1 gold. But silk cloth was reasonably priced, so I bought silk cloth and made a lot of bags. I put them up for 30 silver bid, 40 silver buyout, which would just get me 5 silver profit when bought out, but of course I skilled up tailoring that way. This went well for a while, but Sunday evening other tailors were starting to undercut me, offering silk bags at 30 to 35 silver buyout. The annoying thing is that I'll probably lose the 12 silver auction house fee on the bags that I still have for sale, because there is no way to lower your price afterwards. That is the problem with crafting that some people will always be willing to craft and sell items at a loss, just for the skill-ups, thus making it hard to make a profit from crafting.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:57 AM Permanent Link