Archive for April, 2008

Now that everyone has hit 70 I’ve been able to slow down a lot and get round to doing the things I need to get finished before I start the grinding seriously, so I spent most of the long weekend doing that, and then logging out and ignoring WoW for the rest of the day to hopefully recharge my energy for the next push.

The first thing I did was decide to get Nuaaki up to 300 herbalism so as to get past needing to herb in Azeroth and be able to pick flowers in Outland so as to avoid wasting all those nodes in instances and the ability to skin bog lords for motes of life that are needed for primal mooncloth. Overall it took me about 5 hours to get from 1 to 320 and I made about 150g from selling the herbs such as gromsblood, dreamfoil, etc so it was a very worthwhile exercise and I believe infinately easier than the mining skillup is going to be for Smara next weekend.

After that I spent a few hours a day on getting quests done to try and finish off all the zones and leave myself with just dailies and instances to try and cut down on the number of decisions about what to do each day when I log in. The first thing I did was finish off Netherstorm quests..well not entirely, I still have to kill Nexus-King Salhadar since he kicked my ass the first two times I did him. I’m not sure exactly what the problem was I was having but I think I was tanking him too close to the casters and they kept getting caught in the aoe/frost nova he has and then once I got knocked back it was hard to get back in range and taunt him off whoever he had agro on before they were dead, but I think I have ideas for him again after one or two more upgrades.

Thinking about that, and then the times I had trouble in ramparts, I have noticed I really have trouble in fights now where the mob does a knockback and agro-wipe since after they knockback Smara they will go after the closest character and that will invariably be a caster who then gets their ass handed to them before I can get Smara back in range for a righteous defender cast…I think I need to be thinking a little faster and maybe frost-nova and back out with them which means I will need to re-add secondary movement keys for the casters and bind frost nova to a hotkey so guess I’ll take that into account when I redo my UI and get instance macros done this weekend.

After finishing up Neterstorm I headed to Shadowmoon Valley and dropped 4500g on 5 flying mounts for everyone and started off questing there, with the goal to get all those quests finished this week in between GTA4 sessions. I got a fair few of the Wildhammer Hold quests done so now it’s just finish off the ones left there that I haven’t done before such as Path of Conquest and Truncheon’s line (basically the ones that need a group for) and move on up to the Aldor camp for their quest lines for extra Shat’tar and Aldor rep before I need to worry about instances and fel armaments for faction with the groups. After that I will only have the Og’rila, Skyguard and SSO daily quests to do which should be about 200g per character for ~90 minutes work a night, which will mean around 30 days for enough gold to buy epic flight and the CE hypogriphs for all 5 characters (though this excludes money made from each instance run), so thing are looking reasonably good if I can keep up the grind.

Looking at instances and loot drops today, I can’t really see the point to doing instances below CoT level now as none of them really have loot drops that will be an upgrade for any of my characters and don’t give faction unless on heroic so I think after I run them once or twice to finish off the quests associated with them I’ll just not worry unless they are the normal mode daily. Even de’ing the drops only gives me a small prismatic shard so I’d need to run the entire instance to get one large prismatic shard while I’d get that from de’ing a single boss drop in a CoT+ level instance for the same time investment so there isn’t even really an incentive to do the lower instances for those which is a shame as I actually like some of the lower instances, but sadly this isn’t about doing what I like it’s about doing what improves my characters in preperation for WotLK so that has to take precedent.

Well, I was off work sick the last two days and decided to take the time to get the last 3 levels I needed to hit 70. Managed to do it around 7:30 last night and immediately created a 5v5 team for them and played my 10 games, just managing to sneak them in before the points rollover. I went 0-11 and dropped to around 1380 rating but still ended up with 308 points for the effort. I learnt a bit about the arenas and can’t see myself really spending any time to get better in them with my current group as I don’t think I have the dps yet to have a chance even if I do so for now it’s just get in and get my games and points for the week and ignore the arena until the next week. The current goal I have for them is only to get around 4k points for main weapon and off-hand for each char anyway, so hopefully I can stay around the 250 points a week mark and have season 4 not start until I get the points, though worst comes to worst I’d be happy just getting even 2.3k points to get the main-hand weapons as they are still the best item I’d see in quite a while and will make the most impact as a long-term upgrade to each character compared to any one peice of armour.

Now I start the grind of finishing off leveling my tradeskills, have to start herbalism (though hoping it will only take a day or so to get to 300ish) and get mining, jewelcrafting, engineering and blacksmithing all up past 125 though the last three of those will be done in conjunction with the leveling of mining (ie won’t leave a farming location until I get all the mats I need for the three tradeskills from those nodes) so while the mats farming will take longer it means the skills leveling will be quicker and less expensive than AH’ing what I need.

After that I have to start grinding out the instances to gear up to start heroics, then grinding those for gear, faction and badges with the ultimate goal being to have all characters speced out in the sunwell vendor loot (or equiv/better from drops/crafted) before WotLK drops. I’m going on the assumption of a november release for it (though have heard little voices saying january) and an average of 3 badges per heroic and 2 hours per heroic as a conservative estimate, which means I should average about 10 badges per day if I include more runs on weekends or the dailies, so I’d be looking at 100 days of grinding to get 1k badges per character. If I get into heroics by the end of july I’d be on track then to hit my goal by november and be fully geared to push through WotLK at a good clip without worrying about upgrades until around level 76 (if I can use BC and T3 as an indicator) so I think that’s fairly doable depending on getting into the heroics when I plan and not getting burnt out on them once there.

The other advantage I can see to the instance grind now is that I’ll see quite a few khorium and adamantite nodes in them as I go that I won’t have to worry about competition or ninja’s so that will speed up the post 300 tradeskilling, the BoE drops will be able to be spread to who needs them or sold with funds going into the guild bank to help with the 28k cost of 5 x Epic Flying + CE mounts and my collection of large prismatic shard will keep me in enchants quite easily as any boss drops that can’t be used will be able to be de’d straight away. The only concern I have about any item right now is the whitemend pants recipe since it drops off fire bitch in Botanica and don’t think that is a fight that a multi-boxer can do (or at least my group couldn’t do it) so I might have to run some instances of it in a PuG with Calliori to try to get it.

One of the really big things I have never seen mentioned regarding multiboxing, and one that made me really happy as it took me by surprise, is just how many quests you can do as a matter of course that you may have skipped over when solo leveling purely because the time investment to find a group to do them is too significant. Over the last week or so I’ve done maybe 10 quest lines that I have never done before for just that reason, such as the Altuis quest line in Nagrand or the 2 gnome fel reaver quests near area 52 (and damn, Fel Reaver, but with a heart was one of the most intense fights I’ve done yet…finished it with everyone on around 10% mana and 15-20% health then followed up with Manaforge Ara that was just as intense but with a timer on it too) which has led to me getting gear I have never had before, and it being some of the best available at the time or currently outside instance loot, but more importantly it has led to storylines and plot development that I’d never seen or heard of before and that has added more to the enjoyment of the game now than any peice of loot could.

As an example, last night I found a group of 3 quest-givers just near the bridge to Manaforge Ara that I’d never seen before because I’d never been there before while solo. One of them is a draenai named Kaylan who is trying to resurect fallen comrades but failing, and once you finish the quest he wants you to return a message to an aldor questgiver in area52 that he is no longer a member of the aldor, that the light has failed him. Now that was cool because it gives some indication that even in a world filled with abilities such as resurection, people can lose their way and their faith and so it made me start to wonder if it would be possible for things to happen in the future to other characters in the game…it opened up possibilities that while they may never happen always leave the seeds of doubt in your mind. The kicker to this was that a quest line flowing off from that has you questing along to complete a key for a teleportation device to send you to the lair of a demon that’s off in the twisting nether and typicially inaccessible to you apart from this teleport. Once you get to the final quest you find the demon, and Kaylan has completed his turn away from the light and is now a demonic henchman for the demon you are after. That to me is a great reason to play the game and do the quests but it makes me sad that in all the time I’ve been playing the game, I have never seen it until now and gets me wondering how many others have also missed out on such great little side-items in our rush to level and stay insulated (either as soloers or multi-boxers).

Having said that, my hypocrisy will show through once WotLK drops and I rush to make my team the first to level 80….