An Evening of Upgrade

Good haul tonight.

Hopped on early in the evening, knocked out a quick fishing daily and found a [Weather-Beaten Fishing Hat] in my Bag of Fishing Treasures. Not the crocolisk pet, but very cool just the same.

Our guild then ran two back-to-back groups into Karazhan to take on the special Scourge invasion boss, Tenris Mirkblood. We wiped a twice before we managed to take him down, but it was a fun fight. And he dropped the [Arcanite Ripper], which I won! It's a competitive choice between that or [Legacy], but I love it anyway because 1. It looks badass, 2. It has some nice stats and 3. It's a fucking metal guitar trinket.This puppy transforms me into Bergrisst from Level 80 Elite Tauren Chieftain, blasts off a sweet AoE fire effect and rips a butt-rockin' metal riff for about ten seconds. Tight.

After the Kara runs, three or four of us headed up to Winterspring and Azshara to farm Necrotic Runes and random Scourge elites. The Warrior would roll through huge packs of mobs and bring them all in for some awesome AoE action. I love misdirection and volley.Interestingly, if the tank pulled too many mobs, as in2/3 or more of the typical Scourge spawning location, he'd group them all together, I'd volley and the whole pack would evade and run back to their original positions. Wonder if that was a mechanic set in place to deter heavy AoE farming. We had no trouble at all with our groups. We eventually found a Scourge invasion point in Winterspring and had it all to ourselves for the duration. Not bad at all. I ended the night with over 200 Necrotic Runes and a fancy new chest piece - [Blessed Hauberk of Undead Slaying].

So yeah, busy night, and didn't leave any time for Mission: Ambassador. I did, however, drop by Thunder Bluff to turn in about four completed quests for Wailing Caverns. Know how much TB rep that earned me? Ziiiillch. Nada. Ah well, at least I got the WC achievement. :D

Mission: Ambassador updates

So the rep experiment is a lot less structured than it sounds.

I'm basically working through each of the Horde starting areas, one at a time, and moving on up to the intermediary newbie zones and on through the inter-mixed level 30 to 40-ish areas.

Here are my numbers as I took a break after midnight on Friday:
Oct. 25 - 12:54 am
Darkspear Trolls - Honored: 9848/12000
Orgrimmar - Honored - 11255/12000
Silvermoon City - Revered - 11903/21000
Thunder Bluff - Honored - 8438/12000
Undercity - Revered - 8888/21000

And here we are a few hours later as I logged off in a bleary haze:
Oct. 25 - 3:57am
Darkspear Trolls - Honored - 10708/12000
Orgrimmar - Revered - 115/21000
Silvermoon City - Revered - 12763/21000
Thunder Bluff - Honored - 9298/12000
Undercity - Revered - 14103/21000

Out of laziness or lack of forethought, I did not record my progress over the rest of Saturday or Sunday.

But here we are as I type this on Monday night:
Oct. 27 - 11:18pm
Darkspear Trolls - Revered - 10726/21000
Orgrimmar - Revered - 17470/21000
Silvermoon City - Revered - 19268/21000
Thunder Bluff - Revered - 8175/21000
Undercity - Exalted - 999/1000

Other news: Spent an hour or so farming Scourge mobs in The Burning Steppes and Blasted Lands for a few Necrotic Runes and one [Blessed Greaves of Undead Slaying]. Also picked up my Tabard of the Argent Dawn for kicks.

The new epic leggings are pretty badass. Not a massive upgrade from my [Mag'hari Huntsman's Leggings], but it's slight raise in DPS, as well as a nice new look. I've never seen skirt-style leggings for a hunter. I'm sure a few hunters with male avatars must be a pissed, but I kinda like 'em on Paquita.

Mission: Ambassador vs. Invasion: Zombie

Love that Lich King with his awesome scourge-y plague crates.

Like many, I’m sure, I find this new Scourge invasion both exciting and annoying as fuck.

Exciting in that wow, what a way to foreshadow the next expansion – dropping a new invasion on the gameworld and having it directly impact the players and their game lives. Last time, we had to actively seek out and engage the invaders near the major cities. This time it started in a wonderfully organic manner – a far-off rumor of some crates in Booty Bay. Then an undead zombie ported to a major city and began infecting people. The guards took it down, but a few were infected in the process. The next day some crates were found in the portal cave under Thunder Bluff. Reports flooded in of plague deaths across the Barrens. Crossroads, Dustwallow, Gadgetzan, Ashenvale.

I love this stuff. Might sound morbid, but mass plague and zombie stories are some of the most compelling fiction around in my opinion. I thinking 28 Days Later, Dawn of the Dead and The Stand.

Shattrath was a mess of skeletons last night. Argent healers and Dawn soldiers appear to be everywhere, trying to protect people from what they always suspected was coming.

On the shit side of things, zombies fucking suck.

I must have picked the worst possible time to grind my Horde faction rep. With the plague spreading and zombie NPCs and players lurching around everywhere, it’s very difficult to reach lower-level quest hubs and turn in or pick up quests. Either your quest giver is dead or you’re not paying attention and get whacked by a zombie while you’re reading new quest text.

That said, I made some great progress with the rep. I hit Exalted with Undercity on Saturday and got well into Revered with Darkspear Trolls, Orgrimmar and Thunder Bluff. I remain kiss-close to Exalted with Silvermoon, but as I spent much of Paquita’s youth in Eversong Woods and The Ghostlands, I think I’ve fairly dried up any further Silvermoon rep and must rely on sympathetic points to push it into Exalted. I’m not worried, though. Thunder Bluff was on the low end of Honored when I started this project, and that reputation rose to Revered completely on spillover from Undercity and Orgrimmar.

I finished all available quests in Deathknell, Brill and The Sepulcher. Polished off a few more forgotten tasks in Tarren Mill and Hammerfall, in Arathi Highlands. Then I made my way over to the Orc/Troll newbie zone and rolled through those quests. It was on the way to Sen’jin Village in Southern Durotar that I started hitting zombie resistance. The whole village was undead, save a couple of neutral NPCs. I killed as many as I could, but eventually turned into a zombie myself.

That’s when it got interesting. When I turn into a zombie, my priorities change. Yes, I could just let myself die and respawn and wait for the whole thing to be over with, but that takes time. I figure I may as well have fun while I’m zombiefied.

Example: I rode into Orgrimmar last night around 11:00pm server time. Noticed that the front gates looked very eerie without guards. That was my first indication that something was wrong (fucking brilliant staple of any zombie movie, and it’s an organic event in a goddamn MMO :D). Inside the city, death was everywhere in a cloud of plague. Diseased NPCs were faltering amidst packs of NPC and player zombies. I took down quite a few before I got hit myself and promptly joined in on the zombie action. I infected several players and ran into the auction house for more fun. Probably pissed a few people off, but what the hell – you’re supposed to spread the infection. It’s part of the event.

So yes, zombies suck while you’re questing or leveling or simply just standing in the auction house checking prices. But I realized last night that it’s supposed to suck. You’re supposed to get angry. From a game perspective, those who die are your friends, your neighbors and your enemies. When you turn into a zombie, you’re essentially playing out the final moments of the Azerothian Everyman who falls to the Scourge in this most vile recent attack.

All of this bullshit is happening so that when you step foot off the boat in Northrend, you remember all those who died – and who is responsible. When I think about that, and how the player population at large had no idea this was going to happen, it’s clear that this was a fantastic moment in World of Warcraft, and a brilliant precursor to Wrath of the Lich King.

And if my little peeks at some spoilery spoils for Wrath are any indication, all of this is going to lock together in an INSANELY cool way for a major part of the WotLK storyline. Cannot freaking wait.

Mission: Ambassador - Day 1

Only had a couple of hours to spare yesterday, so I rushed through my fishing and cooking dailies (still no baby croc pet!) and whacked the Headless Horseman a few times before abandoning most of my non-essential level 70 quests and riding over to the Undead starting area, Deathknell.

One quick aside - joined a PUG for the Horseman and killed him twice before the Sinister Squashling dropped. Everyone passed except for myself and the warrior. He rolled need. I said was going to need too. He asked why. I told him I needed it, of course. Well, he needed it too...he had the Hallowed Helm and only needed the squashling to get the achievement. Exact same situation for me, I said. I announced again that I was needing. He emotes "bites lip." I emote "*cringe*." I beat his roll. He's out. He up and quits the group, even though I won by complete chance and we still had like 4 summons to go. Crazy people.

But hey, I got my [Sinister Calling] completed. And the squashling pet is wicked awesome.

Anyway, on to Deathknell. Now, I did not get a baseline for all my Horde rep before trying this yesterday. This all was mostly on a whim, and I was under time constaints. I know that my UC rep was Revered, somewhere around 3,000/21000, ballpark. I completed perhaps 20 quests between Deathknell, random road NPCs and Brill, pushing UC rep to around 7 or 8k. And that was about 45 minutes of effort.

Also, the issue of finding low-level quests has been resolved! They now have a "find low-level quests" tab in your map locator, right in there with "find minerals" or "find fish." Niiiice.

I'm almost wondering if I'm actually taking a loss in profit by wasting Adamantite Arrows on these tiny mobs. I'm one-shotting them, of course, in like 2k crits. Maybe I should go unarmed in an attempt to boost my skill for that achievement.

Achievement System, I hereby declare thee Achievenor the Corrupting, tainter of all that is holy in the land of Azeroth.

Of course, I had to log pretty quickly last night, and I had about eight more completed quests in the bank waiting to be turned in. I'll start keeping track of my Horde faction rep tonight before I resume, so I can measure my progress.

Will probably look something like this:

Darkspear Trolls - Honored (0000/00000)
Orgrimmar - Honored (0000/00000)
Thunder Bluff - Honored (0000/00000)
Undercity - Revered (0000/00000)
Silvermoon - Revered (0000/00000)

(Unless I can take a screen shot of my window, which would be much easier.)

New goals

There are a number of kickass achievements included WoW these days and I've decided that the most realistic one I want is [Ambassador of the Horde]. All this requires is Exalted status with the five Horde factions - Silvermoon, Undercity, Orgrimmar, Thunder Bluff and the Darkspear Trolls.

I'm of course Revered already with my home faction, Silvermoon, and have sympathetic rep through Honored with the remaining four groups. So I wonder how much I can boost the rep with each of these factions, both directly and sympathetically, if I went back and started from the newbie zones with each and every one?

This tactic worked when I wanted a Stormwind horse for my gnome, so why not here, with my level 70 hunter? Might be time-consuming, but theoretically it should go much faster with the higher level and an epic mount. Even if I don't get a specific faction to Exalted with their specific 1-20 newbie quests, I should definitely continue gaining sympathetic Horde rep to that faction through other major quests. And I'm pretty sure I skipped a LOT of content / quests on Paquita in leveling her so fast.

The Big Issue will be having to mouse over every NPC to see if they have a quest for me, as opposed to automatically seeing an exclamation point for quests of my own level.

There are quite a few benefits to this plan - 1. Ambassador title, 2. at least 4 more mounts, 3. the achievement for gaining Exalted status with at least five factions, 4. achievements for numbers of quests completed in various continents of Azeroth, as well as the general 1500 quest achievement, 5. The many possible achievements for completing old world dungeons while following the lower level questlines, and 6. the opportunity for exploration achievements.

OK, so this idea is COMPLETELY based on opportunities within the achievement system. :D

But it sounds fun, no?

Shiny new hooves.

Damn.
Only took 3 hours to earn 12,286 reputation points with the Mag'har clan in Nagrand.

I'm now Exalted. :D

Not a bad looking mount...possibly even cooler than my Brewfest Ram.

Bonus round! (Additional Thoughts, some six hours later, 7am Thurs):
Note to self - try to avoid making posts when you are clearly too tired to make the word thingies.
Brevity was triumphant last night, apparently. So, since I obviously neglected to mention it, that's Paquita up there with her new White War Talbuk after grinding Nagrand Ogres for a few hours. That's 10 Mag'har rep per Ogre, and 500 rep for every 10 Obsidian War Beads I loot and turn in to the Mag'har.

I think this little push just rose out of a white Talbuk catching my eye in Shattrath the other day. For some reason, the white ones just pop visually. I think it may be the pink-purple horns. Really goes with my purple guild tabard and general pink-purple ensemble. Amazing how color schemes factor into a character's look once you're used to a certain style.

Anyway, I saw it and casually checked out my rep with the Mag'har - 8714/21000. I was already well into revered with the faction after completing the Great Mother Geyah quest chain. Plus, I can always use another mount.

It really wasn't all that difficult. I just grinded Ogres along the three camps across the northern and western mountains of Nagrand, rounding up groups of 3-4 and sometimes even 5 or 6 Ogres at once with Kriegaffe the Gorilladin and volleying/multi-shotting them down. Kriegaffe gained three levels throughout the experience, and is now level 70. I created a macro to cast Misdrection onto Kriegaffe as well, so that saved some precious seconds and mouse manuevering. Just have to remember to switch that button out for the real Misdirection when I'm in a party or raid. :D

Elephants in the room

This is surprising.

So Tobold has decided to quit Warhammer Online.

He notes that he never expected to play it much when WotLK hit, but given the amount of coverage he posted on WAR, and the level of intereste he showed, I didn't expect him to quit so soon.

It's a bit comforting though, seeing as how I was feeling guilty myself over not having logged into WAR in nearly two weeks. My account is active, but with the fun I've been having in WoW and all the tasty 3.0.2 goodies released last week, it's just been no contest.

WAR is a fun game. I like the character selection process, the opening quests, the emotes, the public quest system, the RvR scenarios and much of the game design. But it lacks the polish, familiarity and social connections that WoW holds and continually sharpens for me.

When WAR hit, my WoW guild created new sub-forums specifically for a WAR extension of the guild. Our guild leader removed those threads over the weekend.

I'll be cancelling my account, but I would actually like to return someday. WAR devs are saying they're in it for the long haul, so perhaps in four years we could have a WAR version of what WoW offers now. But for the time being, I'll sit in Durotar and gaze longingly at the new Zepplin tower, waiting for the first trip north.

And possibly maybe continue my career as an achievement harlot.

A few fun screens from the last few weeks:

C'mon...a little puke never hurt nothin'. Al'ar tempts us. Al'ar would obliviate us. We do not touch Al'ar.
Paquita 3.0, now with short dark hair and Kriegaffe the Faithful Gorilladin at her side.
Male Tauren riding a reindeer into the Dark Portal? Throw in a Dimensional Ripper and some Preserved Holly and it makes a little more sense. Just seemed like an absurd image to me. :D

Achieve or die.

It’s a sickness. Gotta be.

Why the fuck am I more motivated to get the little flashy Achievement animation and the heroic Ding! music than I am to grind dailies and hoard gold?

Oh yeah, because grinding dailies sucks. Unless it’s for the [A Simple Re-Quest]. Then it’s all good. ‘Cause you’re achieving something.

It’s so strange. I love this new addition to WoW, but at the same time it feels dangerously distracting. Like I should be working on other goals than boosting my total achievement points. Not sure what other goals those could be. Sure, I probably don’t have as much gold as others in anticipation of WotLK. A little over 600 right now. Actually less, since I bought a Swift Green Hawkstrider to boost my mount count. Sonuvabitch.

It’s like I’ve made a new best friend and an eternal nemesis at the same time.

Ah, well. I did make a little over 150g this weekend just by visiting all the candy buckets in Eastern Kingdoms, Kalimdor and Outland for [Tricks and Treats of Azeroth]. I really want to close out all these Hallow’s End achievements before the festival ends. Be pretty cool to get “The Hallowed” title after my name.

Got a lot of the easy ones finished this weekend, and now it’s a game of getting transformed by a few more wands and collecting the flimsy masks (these will be the hardest, I think). The PvP quests should be relatively easy. Oh, and I’ll have to stay on top of the Headless Horseman for the Hallowed Helm and Sinister Squashling.

Downed him multiple times yesterday. I’d wondered how they were going to handle his loot, since we’d already gotten such awesome trinkets from Coren Direbrew. I picked up the +attack power and stam ring, but it’s not that much of an upgrade for me. Still a fun fight though, if fairly easy.

Still no Old Ironjaw or Old Crafty. I got my [250] and [500] catch-a-fish dings though. Spent easily 3-4 hours late Saturday into the dawn hours of Sunday fishing for Old Crafty in Orgrimmar. Nuthin’. And if there’s no luck there with that amount of time spent, I can’t even imagine how painful it’s going to be when I resume my Ironforge intrusions for Old Ironjaw. There’s no place to fish discreetly in IF. At least in Orgrimmar Allies can hide in the little rock formation at the base of the waterfall.

Also casually crossing off the lower instance achievements. Dropped into Ragefire Chasm for less than five minutes to kill that boss. Then, as I was riding through Silverpine Forest toward Southshore last night, a little mage /whispered me and offered 5g for a run through Shadowfang Keep. Figured what the fuck, and ran him through for free. I got an achievement out of it, so I was all good.

It was funny, I told him I’d do it, and he was like “what? really?! like right now??”

Haha. I guess he must have been asking people for a while.

Too much good stuff.

Oh, the insanity.

There’s got to be some law of illustrating the frequency of blog posts in relation to how much fun one is having in WoW. One would imagine that the more fun he has, the more entries he would post. That’s not been the case with me lately. I’m having a blast in WoW, taking taking screens for the blog, but I’ve just been having too much fun to get in there and post.

I’m a classic procrastinator, and this evidently has transferred into the blog as well. :D

Let’s go chronologically, since so much shit has happened since the last post.

Well, let’s see. I pushed my old Warlock past his 225 fishing and cooking quests early last week, so that was fun. It’ll be good to have another character for these quests, if I get him up to the appropriate level. I was able to do the Shrimpin’ Ain’t Easy daily in Zangarmarsh, but all of the other fishing dailies have been in zones out of his level range, even with the +100 lures.

My Hunter hit 375 in fishing last week, though, making an even cap across all of her tradeskills and professions. First time I’ve accomplished that with any character. Of course, I announced this with appropriate glee in guild chat, which prompted a particularly snide guildie to reply, “I’m sorry.” Haha. Dick. It’s cool, though, we talked about the merits of fishing, and as always it just comes down to personal preference. I used to hate fishing. Never understood the draw. But that was because until patch 2.4, and until I got my skill high enough for the dailies, there was no viable reward in the skill for me. Now I do my fishing daily in hopes for the non-combat gator pet, or the hat. I already picked up the booze recipe. Plus it’s a very, very easy 7 gold, with some occasionally interesting junk and free lures. More on fishing later though.

I got into another run of Karazhan’s first half last Wednesday, and we again cleared up through Curator and before at Shade of Aran for the night. It was more fun this time, as I pretty much knew how the pulls worked, and I had a great hunter to watch and follow for tips. We got the Wizard of Oz event that night, and it was very cool. Seemed pretty chaotic to me, but the raid leader just had me focus DPS on whoever he called out, so it was fairly simple. Even managed to avoid the tornado from the Crone! And, bless her blackened heart, she dropped [Legacy]. The other Hunter gave it to me, since he had some PvP axe already. Such a nice upgrade, and I love the inscription on it. Extremely cool weapon. Then I believe it was Curator who dropped the token for my Tier 1 Demon Stalker gloves. As I was still wearing (nicely) enchanted green gloves, it was a tremendous upgrade. That run also brought me up to Honored with the Violet Eye (dinged on the last mob of the night) so I was able to turn in my signet ring for the epic upgrade. Not too shabby for a Wednesday evening.

Ran a few heroics over the weekend and pulled in some more badges (I’m guessing I should earn and spend them now, as they’ll only buy outdated stuff when WotLK is released). Mostly, the weekend was spent buzzing about patch 3.0.2, which was expected to launch on 10/14. Gathered a bunch of lowbie herbs for the three projected inscriptionists in our guild.

Patch day was a pain in the ass for me, just like it was for 99% of everyone else. I’d already downloaded 1.17 gb before Tuesday, and got the remaining .03 gb and completed the installation without issue. However, Perenolde was one of the many realms that alternated between a lack of character lists and the whole server going down. I left it alone after an hour and a half.

Access on Wednesday proved unfettered, and I quickly reviewed my achievements. WOW. I got shafted on a lot of shit, on the Warlock and the Hunter. For the Warlock I received no credit at all for the numerous times I cleared Stratholme, Scholomance, Dire Maul and BRD. I may have come late to the game in early 2006, but I did kill those bosses. And for the Hunter, I didn’t get any credit for all the dailies I’ve been doing, or for insulting and killing the Brewfest boss, Coren Direbrew. Ah well, it’s not like these are all impossible. I’ll get to them eventually. Again.

On the subject of achievements, my point whoredom from Xbox Live has transferred nicely into WoW. Fuck me. As if I needed more reason to keep playing. There are a shitload of achievements I’d like to get, and I have a feeling I’ll be working on a few of them for quite a while.

Others love them too, apparently. We formed an impromptu 10-man on Wednesday and rolled through Onyxia and Upper Black Rock Spire like buttah. Ony was fun! It’s a little sad that I never took the time to follow the attunement questline, but great to finally see the old girl in all her fiery purple glory.


So we got that achievement, as well as the [Leeeeeeeeroooy!!!] title of Jenkins after our names for killing 50 whelps in 15 seconds in the UBRS rookery. We also got the achievement for killing the final UBRS boss, General Drakkisath. Then we spent the rest of the evening jumping off high towers, hunting down random elites, cooking and fishing for other achievements.

Oh, and I also re-specced BM 43/18/0 and tamed my Gorilladin pet, who I named Kriegaffe. Love, love, LOVE his aoe taunts and damage. He’s pretty badass now, and I can’t wait to get him up to 70 before WotLK hits. Fairly sure he’ll be my leveling buddy in Northrend.

And then last night I got an invite to Mount Hyjal, of all places. We had fun on the trash waves. Volley does some amazing damage now, and I’m so happy it’s channeled. My volley crits were for 400-1050 damage, but the other hunters were exclaiming 2k+ in theirs. Wiped on Rage Winterchill, but not before we got him down to 30%. Not bad for an largely mixed group of raiders from a few friendly guilds. We then moved over to Tempest Keep and took on the Void Reaver. That was a fun fight. :)

And finally, to close out the night, I charged into Stormwind, dying only once, and hit in the outer sewer area to get the [The Fishing Diplomat] achievement. That attained, I decided to try my luck in Ironforge to fish up [Old Ironjaw]. Ironforge is so much fucking harder to get into. I died at least 5 times before I found my way to the Forlorn Caverns. There were a couple of Night Elves fishing in there as well, and they pretty much ignored me for about 15 minutes, until a Gnome Mage rode up and promptly incinerated me. From there, they all camped me for another hour or so, until it got quiet and I was able to fish for another 10 minutes. A Human Warlock seduced me, but didn’t attack. A 56 Draenei Priest mind-flayed me and stabbed me for a minute or so with his dagger, but I /bored him and he ran away. Then a 70 Warrior and Rogue double-teamed me in less than 3 seconds and I called it a night. I’m thinking I’ll leave the Hunter parked there in IF until I fish the old bastard up, seeing how hard it was to get into the city in the first place. I really hope I get it soon. :D

Changes

This is going to sound weird and a bit idiotic, but I’m actually getting sad that November 13, 2008, is only seven weeks away. I finally feel like I’m experiencing a lot of what The Burning Crusade has to offer, but then I realize that it’s soon going to slip away when Arthas makes his big return.

Good news is that it sounds like it won’t be as gaping a hole from BC to WotLK as when BC hit vanilla WoW. Someone mentioned last night on vent that they’d taken their copied character to 80 in the beta and that they were only just starting to replace the major gear. Of course, I’m pretty sure this guy has been running SSC, Tempest Keep and Mount Hyjal, so those are some pretty hefty items.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been slowly chipping away at all of my major goals in WoW. Last night I finally got the chance to see Moroes die a slow (and hopefully painful) death. It’s incredible how quickly and efficiently it happened, but not surprising at all since this particular group has been working Karazhan for about 2 solid months now.

So that was my big happy. I finally got to roll with a raid past Moroes and on through Maiden, The Opera Event (Romulo and Julianne) and Curator (definitely my favorite boss voice). Actually got some loot too, which was cool – picked up Romulo’s Poison Vial and Garona’s Signet Ring. Also got a total of nine Badges of Justice, which allowed me to splurge on the Blood Knight War Cloak, my first-ever Badge purchase.

We attempted Nightbane three or four times before giving up – just too much crazy with the terrors and charred earth. Very cool-looking dragon, though.