Tobold's Blog
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
 
WoW Journal - 10-April-2007

I'm still determined to start playing Lord of the Rings Online next weekend, when the European pre-order access starts. Captivating as MMORPGs are, it is likely that this will lead to me taking a break from World of Warcraft. And I have no idea how long that break will be. I might be back at WoW after a month, or I might put it on hold until the next expansion. So I was thinking what I still wanted to achieve in World of Warcraft before the break, and getting my second character up to level 70 was on top of the list. This weekend I hit that goal, and my warrior dinged 70, and bought his (normal) flying mount.

I wanted to get to level 70 not because of some sort of status, but because I reached level 70 with my first character without doing the quests of Nagrand, Blade's Edge, Shadowmoon Valley, or Netherstorm. So with this second character I managed to complete all, or nearly all, the quests of Nagrand and Blade's Edge, plus more than half of the Shadowmoon Valley quests. Still more than one zone worth of quests missing, but I might just do those remaining quests with my level 70s. Not quite as much fun as leveling up, but at least you gain gold and reputation.

With both characters I had the feeling that I was leveling too fast in the Burning Crusade, especially in the second half from level 66 to 70. Of course as I played my warrior not every day, he always was on double xp bonus, which added to the speed. But the impressive looking 750,000 xp you need for the last levels are not that huge once you notice that you easily make 75,000 xp per hour just doing solo quests. Just 10 hours to level up is a bit short in my opinion for the highest levels. I had the impression that the time per level was actually getting shorter.

Now that I'm 70 with my warrior, who is also alchemist, I should go for some alchemy specialization. There are now potion mastery, elixir mastery, and transmutation mastery, of which you can choose only one, and have to do a quest to reach it. The transmutation mastery quest is the easiest, requiring you just to hand in 4 Primal Mights, but of course that is rather expensive. The elixir mastery quest is the hardest, you need to farm Black Morass for 10 items, and apparently the drop rate is low. Potion mastery requires you to get a book from a boss in Botanica, plus some potions. I don't think I'd want to do elixir mastery, but I can't really decide between transmutation and potion mastery. You can only transmute once a day, or once every couple of days, depending on the cooldown. But of course if you ever got your transmutation mastery to proc on a Primal Might transmute, you'd make a big profit. Potion mastery would be nice for all the healing and mana potions you regularly drink. But frankly I'm not excited by any of these masteries. Other tradeskills get new recipes on specialization, alchemy just gets a chance to produce several potions instead of just one.

While soloing with my warrior, I used a lot of elixirs. But that is because when soloing I don't die very often, so each elixir lasts a full hour. In a pickup group you tend to die a lot more often, and quickly stop wasting those expensive potions that only last until the next wipe. I raids you also wipe a lot, but you are still expected to use potions, which makes raiding a rather expensive hobby. Fortunately I don't raid any more, because all I see the raiders in my guild doing is either raiding or farming for raids. And Blizzard is planning changes to the way elixirs work, making them stack with other buffs, so you'll be expected to drink even more elixirs for every wipe.

In the Burning Crusade Blizzard introduced dynamic spawning for mobs. The more people there are killing mobs in a location in Outland, the faster the mobs spawn there, thus making sure that there is a constant supply. But that isn't true for all spawns. For example the elementals that drop motes, needed for various primals in crafting recipes, don't spawn faster when overcamped, and nowadays they are always overcamped. And herb and ore nodes also don't have dynamic spawning, the more people are after these resources, the harder they are to get. I know several raiders who dropped whatever tradeskills they had to take up herbalism, because that is nearly a required skill nowadays for raiding.

And there is the big flaw in the World of Warcraft crafting system: the resource gathering is the limiting factor. Alchemy is not a money maker, many potions sell for less than the price of the herbs on the auction house. That is because performing alchemy is fast, and everyone has mostly the same recipes, so alchemists are interchangeable. To be special as alchemist you need to get hold of some rare recipe. A few of them you can try to farm, but those that drop from a specific type of mob often have drop rates of around 0.2%, which means you'll need to kill 500 mobs on average to get such a recipe. Many more recipes you just can't do anything to hunt for them, you either would need to be extremely lucky with a world drop, or buy them from the auction house for crazy prices. Or you'd need to be extremely lucky receiving a random discovery recipe after making thousands of potions.

What Blizzard should do is to make resource spawns dynamic, so the more people gather ore or herbs, the faster they respawn. And they should make it more viable to hunt after recipes, by having more recipes drop from specific bosses in specific 5-man dungeons, instead of being random world drops. Ideally the crafting process itself would take some skill, but that is probably asking too much from a game like World of Warcraft.
Comments:
Two gathering trades is the way to go these days; all other trades are a horrendous time and money sink.
My tailoring finally hit 340 this weekend and I can start making stuff again, but have had to produce 40 odd bolts of imbued Netherweave to do it - that's pushing on 700+ Netherweave plus 80 Arcane Dust; I can make some 18 slot bags and not a lot else at the moment.
Compare to my Herbalism of 375 - I can sell stacks of plants for 20+ gold a time, I don't need to consume any materials or buy/find Recipes/Patterns either.
I only wish I had taken up mining from the word go as well.
 
The crafted tailoring sets are better than any other items currently available in the game. Spellstrike + Spellfire has better set bonuses AND better stats than tier 5.

Add in things like girdle of ruination, and crafting the BoE recepies, and you can make literally thousands of gold.
 
"What Blizzard should do is to make resource spawns dynamic, so the more people gather ore or herbs, the faster they respawn. And they should make it more viable to hunt after recipes, by having more recipes drop from specific bosses in specific 5-man dungeons, instead of being random world drops. Ideally the crafting process itself would take some skill, but that is probably asking too much from a game like World of Warcraft."

When I first heard about farming in LotRO I was hoping you'd be able to have plots of land for farming of your very own. Or that mining would be in mines in the mountains only where nodes didn't despawn every use, and that the woodcutting involved chopping down trees (of which there are tons) that respawned often enough.

I was sad to find that it was just similar to WoW's node spawning idea. Simple and effective as it is, it creates too much disdain among players.

I'm looking forward to PotBS and its land-lot crew-based crafting system.

Maybe housing in LotRO will introduce private farming plots. :)
 
Well, farming plots in LotRO aren't private, but at least they are endless and unlimited. You don't need to wait for a random farm plot spawn. The field is there all the time, and a few seconds after sowing the seeds you'll be able to harvest.

I agree that having a private farming plot, where growing plants would take several days, would be kind of cool. FFXI had something like that with potted plants in your house. But at least there is no risk in LotRO that you can't farm because all the nodes have been taken.
 
Dear God, do NOT take Transmutation Mastery. It is a complete waste of a very valuable resource. We have done the math every angle possible and no matter who you ask or what they are transmuting, this simply does not proc enough to make any difference for you financially. It was the biggest mistake I have ever made in WoW.

Go Elixir following the alchemy changes in 2.01. Especially as a warrior, you'll be stacking 2 elixirs on every serious fight.
 
this simply does not proc enough to make any difference for you financially

Sigh. Some of the tradeskills require you to lose money on anything you craft just to skill up, and have quite literally no high end gold making capability. You receive free items through your specialty that can easily sell on the Auction House. Gold for no effort.

I'm honestly stunned at the amount of moaning I hear from Alchemists. Alchemy is in better shape than just about any of the other professions (only tailoring seems to be as healthy right now) and yet from listening to Alchemists you'd think the sky was falling.
 
I have one guildmate who has gotten 3 primals every other transmute for weeks. She has so many at this point that she gives them out to guildmates who say they need one.
 
The real moneymaking in alchemy is in the herbs you gather and sell, which is pretty easy to do once you have a flying mount. Potions, elixirs and primal mights sell for much less than their component costs.

The elixir changes I've read will actually mean you're able to stack less elixirs than now. If you're a healer class I'd say go for potion mastery, mana potions are always good to have around, if you're another class take whatever spec you like but don't expect to be overwhelmed by the procrate if you happen to take transmute.
 
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