WoW Journal - 21-April-2008

I haven't played all that much World of Warcraft this weekend, I'm feeling a bit burned out for the moment. Having problems finding groups for 5-man dungeons, the only thing I did with my level 70 characters was doing a couple of daily quests for the Shattered Sun Offensive with my mage. I reached honored with them, and bought the two enchanting recipes you get from them at that level, one of which is Void Shatter, which transforms one cheap void crystal into two expensive large prismatic shards. But although I could learn that recipe at my 360 skill, when I tried to use it I couldn't. The recipe requires a runed eternium rod, which can only be made at 375 skill. Why on earth does the game have lower skill recipes requiring something you can only achieve with a higher skill?

Fortunately the other recipe was more useful, as it was orange at my skill level, and required "only" about 40 gold worth of materials. So I used that 15 times at a cost of 600 gold in materials (most of which I had in stock) to get to 375 skill in enchanting. And that on the same day where by making my second shadowweave item I also reached 375 tailoring with my mage. Great! Of course then I spend another fortune to make that runed eternium rod, which uses 4 primal mights among other expensive ingredients. All that financial effort certainly wasn't worth it for the Void Shatter, but that wasn't why I did it. Rather I thought that having your tradeskills maxed will be important for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, as you probably can't get the new recipes without having reached the old skill cap.

I spent more time on my other server playing Alliance, but even there my new gnome rogue only made it to level 16 yet. But an extremely well equipped level 16, having run the Deadmines several times with the help of my wife's level 68 rogue. In return I used my level 60 priest, who I moved to that server, to run her level 18 shaman through the Deadmines too. Can you believe that after over 3 years of WoW that was only the second time she saw a dungeon? But as there are quite some nice pieces of leather armor and weapons for rogue and shamans in that dungeon, it was well worth it, and fun. As the wife and me have radically different play styles, we don't play together all that often.

So I'm still doing quests until level 20 in the Draenei starting area. Only that every two levels I have to hearthstone to Shattrath, and teleport to another Alliance city to train my rogue. Exodar, the Draenei city, doesn't have a rogue trainer. And the rogue class quests (I just learned lockpicking) are also in the old cities. I'm keeping my World of Warcraft playing at low activity for the moment, I just don't feel like playing more. But I don't want to play other "old" MMORPGs either. I signed up for the Fileplanet Age of Conan open beta, and pre-ordered that game, just to give it a chance. I don't really have high hopes that this is the game for me, but at least it is new, and I can't judge a game without having played it. I'm a bit nervous about how their release will be, because Age of Conan is made by Funcom, whose previous MMORPG Anarchy Online still holds the record for the worst MMORPG release ever, and I was right in the middle of that one. Here's hoping they learned from their mistakes.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:53 AM Permanent Link