Tobold's Blog
Thursday, July 09, 2015
 
Oil crisis

At the start of Warlords of Draenor I leveled up 4 characters to 100 and then went into a routine where I logged on all of them every day to do garrison stuff like follower missions and work orders. Most days I didn't have time for much else. Patch 6.2 started with me actually playing those 4 characters again, doing quests in the Tanaan Jungle to unlock stuff for the shipyard. And then I thought I could go back to my previous regime of maintenance mode.

Turns out that I was wrong. I can't just log on a character and do naval missions every day. Those missions cost oil, and the oil you can get from followers missions doesn't cover the requirements. In order to keep naval missions running, I need to do at the very least the daily apexis quest, which gives 600 or 750 oil. When I'm short on oil I also need to farm the 4 Hellbane rares, because besides a chance for a medallion or a mount they always drop 100 oil.

The situation should improve slightly once I am revered with the main faction in Tanaan Jungle on all characters, because that unlocks the oil rig naval missions which give 400 oil. But I doubt that will be sufficient. Naval missions, unlike follower missions, appear to be designed to be not really viable for an alt who is just doing that without going adventuring. And while going adventuring with one character is okay, it gets too much if you want to do it with 4 characters.

While that is somewhat annoying, it doesn't mean that WoD has become less alt-friendly. In spite of various nerfs a level 100 alt with a level 3 garrison is still making a rather large passive income with very little effort. Four characters pay for a subscription in WoW tokens twice over with no problem. The problem is that if they don't do the new naval missions, they are stuck in the pre-patch routine, which already got rather boring.

So I think that after the holidays I'll do some other projects in World of Warcraft. I still have that level 34 hunter visiting all zones of the game and collecting all the pets. And then I was thinking of trying out a few other character classes and find which ones are fun to play in the current conditions. Right now I have two fun characters, the fury warrior and the frost mage, and two that are much less fun to play, the shadow priest and the demonology warlock. The priest is underpowered, while the warlock is strong, but boring, having too slow basic spells.

Comments:
Exactly!!!! Most commenters say "I have plenty of oil" and my Pathfinder main has 10,000 oil. But alts are very definitely oil bound.

Which I think is the problem with SY. If you did not like garrisons, you still won't like SY. If you did like garrisons and have alts, SY is far less appealing. It's like they took garrisons and tried to make them worse. How many people like SY but not garrisons?

I just don't see getting more than a couple of alts revered for the rig. With just one crew buff it is 9 hours, so not too onerous to get 800 oil per day which allows a few missions.


 
Oil on alts is indeed in short supply. There are some things I would like to get from the shipyard such as the BOA ring to complement the one I got from the fishing tournament in Booty Bay, a black market auctioneer NPC for my garrison (it was recently mentioned by Blizzard), some rare pets, rare mounts and definitely the Hellfire Citadel cache with gear.

But now I understand that getting all the alts into Tanaan Jungle and killing Supreme Lord Kazzak would be more fun. Apart from gear the boss drops from four to 15 felblights (in my experience) so with my number of alts I could be quite rich.

I've come to recognize this easy way to get felblight rather late. Can you imagine I've levelled a worgen hunter specifically for the sake of skinning and mining in Tanaan to get felblight? And those sources are not exactly effective. Killing Kazzak is way easier. Although there is one fun fact: while Blizzard claims the drop rate of felblight from gathering does not depend on your profession skill level, at top levels I managed to get five felblights from one node. Only once so far. But I didn't play with top mining skill for a long time.

As for oil getting the rig and new followers with a buff to oil gained from follower missions (the inn and one of the vendors in Tanaan) should cover it. Cover it for basic, relaxed shipyard gameplay.
 
Tobold, why are you playing the shipyard minigame? From what I've seen it's required for the legendary ring questline, but are you after that ring? Apart from it, everything else doesn't seem very worty, considering the effort and the costs (I am referring to garrison resources, ship costs, ...).


 
Alting = boring since it's repeating content you've already done. There is no (and never was) point in having alts in any game besides supporting the main. Which is a boring grind.
 
You may want to review shadow priest guide (e.g. http://www.icy-veins.com/wow/shadow-priest-pve-dps-guide), for level 100 shadowpriests have very different playstyle from levelling shadow priests. Level 100 talent choice, in fact, leads to 3 different playstyles, one of them almost entirely dotless and does not require ramp-up. Shadow priests are not weak. Of course, having Illona with you helps, especially in AoE situations.

There are garrison follower missions which reward oil, I ususally get at least 2 daily. At honored with Hand of Prophet you can get a cute gnome follower which doubles oil reward from garrison missions. (You can also get level 90 follower with this trait from inn for free, but you'd have to level it to 100).
 
I maintain that the Shipyard is not a sustainable minigame, rather it's entire intent is to act as a time and resource gate for the 6 legendary ring ship missions. Treat it as such. There is no reason to do more than a few missions a day once you realize you don't have to level ships up. Build a ship a day, do a couple missions to get to the 25 treasure missions (You need a Carrier for the last mission.) and call it for that day.

You still need to get oil from Tanaan, but you're not a slave to it.

Don't go all OCD on the Shipyard like it's a game you must "complete" by doing all the missions.
 
... 5 legendary ring quests. Come on, Coffee maker! The master needs coffee!
 
I didn't understand a single thing in this post. Which means maybe there's enough new content out there to spend another 2-3 months playing through all of wow again. I think I'll go alliance! I haven't seen the alliance side of things since wotlk. Maybe a shammy? Are those any good? It's the heal class I have the least experience with. I always liked azuremyst, it's not as good as the blood elf starting areas, but it's fun times.

I'm going to start all over from scratch, new server new faction, and loremaster everything!

I think it's time for a nostalgic vacation. :o

I bet I can squeeze it all in before fallout's release.
 
@Smokeman, mount and pet collectors will do the naval missions just to have chance to spawn pet- and mount-rewarding ones. Also: baleful BoAs for your alts if you are already sick with the Jungle and don't want to repeat it all on alts.
 
Back when I played I had a shaman alt and he was quite fun to play. Levelling you would generally play enhancement, but although you're a fighter your healing abilities helped you take in relatively high level mobs. You could DPS tank a bit in lower level instances too if you wanted.
 
I've just checked that bonus objective areas often award 600 oil on completion and get reset immediately or at least soon after leaving it (or maybe after completing a different bonus objective area?)
It may be suitable for alts to get oil this way.
 
One of the issues with garrison missions was that you could just rotate through all your characters and pick up a wad of no-effort gold each day. I suspect that the lack of passive oil generation is to prevent the same happening with the shipyard missions.
 
I got exalted on my main by just buying the rep drops. I then quit doing dailies. I do not lack oil. What is my secret? I have a good arsenal of followers who get garrison resources and oil as extra, and since 6.2 also one follower who doubles my oil gain. Besides that I have a mage tower. I do the oil mission which costs 5 oil and yields 400 oil. I then complete the mission instantly with a mage tower reagent, and do the mission again (it doesn't expire).
 
Naval missions are over-rated anyway. Most only give you xp -- even when all your ships are epic.
 
Post a Comment

<< Home
Newer›  ‹Older

  Powered by Blogger   Free Page Rank Tool