Tobold's Blog
Monday, March 26, 2007
 
WoW Journal - 26-March-2007

I didn't play all that much World of Warcraft this weekend. But between trying the LotRO monster play and watching a couple of episodes of the second season of NYPD Blue (much better after Caruso left), I still got a couple of hours of WoW in. That mostly consisted of my priest joining different dungeon groups, and my warrior doing quests in Nagrand.

My warrior is level 67, and I can't help the feeling that he levels faster than he can do all the quests in Burning Crusade. By the time I finish Nagrand I'll be 68 or very close to it, and I haven't even touched Blade's Edge, Shadowmoon Valley and Netherstorm yet. I lost interest in quests once I hit level 70 with my priest, and I wonder if I'll continue questing with my warrior after hitting the level cap. Quests earn you good money, but the items are usually worse than what you could get out of dungeons, except for the rewards of the hardest elite quests, for which you'll need a group as well. So not much interest in soloing at 70.

But for the moment I do like questing in Nagrand. I did a lot of quests for the Mag'thar orcs, so now I arrived at an interesting looking quest where I'll have to collect herbs in different Outland regions for the grandmother, for summoning some ancestor spirit who is supposed to kick some sense into her depressed grandson, the weak leader of the orc tribe. Up to now most Nagrand quest were of the "go to this place and kill anything that moves" type. Fortunately as a protection spec warrior handling several enemies at once is not so much of a problem, even if killing them isn't very fast. That made storming the various ogre, blood elf, and murkblood camps easy enough.

My priest was mainly logging on to do 5-man dungeon groups. Currently I'm trying to improve my reputation with several Outland factions. By going to mana tombs and doing a repeatable Netherstorm quest I managed to hit honored with the Consortium, which gave me four new jewelcrafting recipes. Then I turned towards Thrallmar reputation, and did two runs into Shattered Halls. Tough place, but we cleared it out in both cases. Unfortunately the end boss refused to drop my dungeon set 3 gloves.

After the second run I was just 19 reputation points away from revered with Thrallmar. Getting a group together to just kill 2 mobs in Shattered Halls seemed a bit silly, so I thought about other ways to gain reputation. Already having done all Thrallmar quests, I turned towards the repeatable PvP quest to capture the three PvP structures in Hellfire Peninsula. That turned out to be harder than I thought. Sunday evening I managed to do the quest once, but it gave only 10 reputation points, and I need another repetition to get to revered. Unfortunately there are lots of bored level 70 Alliance around, and when you just switch a structure from alliance controlled to neutral, you'll get killed by several invisible level 70 rogues before you can flag the structure for the Horde. So this morning I tried something else, logging on very early before going to work and taking the structures when nobody was looking. Good idea, but I wasn't the first one to have it, the structures were all already Horde flagged, and I couldn't do anything. I'll try again tonight, sooner or later it should be possible to get this stupid quest done and reach revered for the heroic mode key. Overland PvP in Burning Crusade sucks, unless you can make yourself invisible. A PvP spec rogue can perma-stun and kill me without me even getting the chance to hit the fear button once. And with Alliance outnumber Horde 2:1 on my server, I can't even count on finding more people to help me than the other side can muster.
Comments:
all i can say is.. the quest rewards at the end of the chains in netherstorm and shadowmoon are some of the best blues, even comparable to alot of epics. it's well worth doing them.
 
I miss NYPD Blue :(
 
I agree with poster #1. The quest rewards are very well worth it ANd you gain reputation in the most important factions anyway with your factions. If you are after rep with the consortium you can do their Netherstorm quest series (serveral quest hubs there) and gain them plus gold plus blues.

Example: The Weapons you get for the Consortium final quest is on par with the high end 5 man ini drops, only guranteed.
 
And, a lot of the quests are fun. After getting both my lock and priest to 70, and not even having finished all the quests in Nagrand, I figured I'd be bored. However, there's always another instance to be in.

Two weeks ago I started doing the zone quests again, finishing off Nagrand, and spending about a week to do Netherstorm's. This is on my priest, who basically sold most of the rewards, and he made ~1900g profit. Now in Blade's Edge and screaming through those quests (most mobs are green, or yellow 68 at best) and made about 500g fairly quickly. I still have all the cenarion quests to do there (over 2k faction from the first few easy ones!) and possibly some other areas beofre moving on to Shadowmoon. According to a guild warrior who did this before, I should expect 4K gold or so.

And doing the quests are fun, with a few rewards I really could use (an easy quest got me a great pair of pants for my healing set). Honestly, the more horde quests I do, the more I see them as the good guys. So much to do with spirits being put to rest and whatnot. I don't recall anything like this on alliance. But that's a side issue.
 
Oh, and in Blade's Edge, there's a quest mob you have to kill that is 100% immune to shadow damage. Dies quickly to holy damage though. So you can out solo a lock on this one =)
 
You definitely ding 70 before finishing the quests. I had 1/2 of Blade's Edge, and all of Shadowmoon and Netherstorm quests still waiting for me after I hit 70, but I was also determined to try all the new quests out. I currently have about 15 left on my quest log, and all of them are either (Dungeon) or 5 man (Group). I've finished a few of the group and dungeon quests but have been waiting for a time when my friends and I are on at the same time to knock out the remainder.

Since I'm trying to take things more casually this time around, I thought it was important to try out all of the quests even if I was already 70. Once I finished my questing I found I had about 4500 gold banked and the "grind" to the epic flying mount was no more than a week or so.

Some of the quests and quest chains are so much fun that skipping them seems a real waste (especially with the tangible rewards some offer). There have been a few times that I was swearing at my screen regarding drop rates, but there were a lot more times that I was just having genuine fun with a fairly unique quest and/or Blizzard's warped sense of humor.
 
One of the reasons I bailed on WoW was the lack of experienced players that would help you learn how to do instances. PUGs were rarely fulfilling. I found that as I leveled up the game became more group-centered, and I really was a solo player. I tried guilds but I didn't ever seem to play often enough to stay in good favor.

As a casual player, I loved the idea Guild Wars started with the NPCs that are able to join a group. It is too bad that there isn't an equivalent in a better game (GW is okay though, just not engrossing).

Lastly I am hopeful that LOTRO is truly as wonderful as advertised. I had a lot of fun solo in closed beta, and it would be nice to be able to have a fulfilling experience without having to group... grouping is a blast but for us casual dudes, it rarely occurs.
 
Post a Comment

<< Home
Newer›  ‹Older

  Powered by Blogger   Free Page Rank Tool