Tag: WoW

No, I’m not leaving EQ2. Or EQ1 for that matter. I’ll still be partaking in the Friday night Nostalgia, and still playing EQ2 (though lately that has been less, I simply don’t have anything I feel like doing right now. I’m eager about the expansion and looking forward to that). You can blame my re-kindled interest in WoW on a few select people, whose blogs I read daily. With NaNoWriMo coming (two days away!) I wanted a game that I think of as on a ‘lighter’ scale. Where I can dip in for an hour or two and feel like I finished something. Right now (for me personally) that game is not EQ2. Don’t read into that though! I’m not going anywhere and Sony knows they own my soul. 

So I patched (for three hours?) and then moved WoW over to the laptop. Grabbed the curse client and fanangled my way through add-on city. Finally I was ready. 

A few changes happened while I’ve been away. I haven’t been away *that* long. 

Achievements. I LOVE this. They remind me very much of the knowledge book in WAR. I’ve always loved being able to look at my characters and KNOW what they had done. It gives me something that WoW had always lacked for me (due to easy leveling, and cheap server transfer costs) PRIDE in a character. I don’t have the slightest idea what the points are used for (if anything) but I’ve only finished off a very small percentage of the ones available. 

I’m low level, no where near end game. My highest characters are level 47 (I have a few of those) but I’m looking forward to exploring and getting back into things. We’ll see how long it lasts this time around. 

Oh, another thing I know nothing about. Glyphs. I have a glyph page. I don’t know how you make them, or what they’re used for (something about enchantments?) so if anyone has some resource out there I could read, send it my way! I read everyone else’ sites about WoW and what fun they’re having but a lot of the technical bits are still in some foreign language to me. I’m not too worried (yet), but I know I have a lot of catching up to do!

No, I won’t ever be the big end game player like others I read about. I’m sure I’m too far behind, but I will have a lot of fun learning and relearning everything I need to know.

I hit 20 on the shaman two days ago, and promptly started the level 20 water totem quest. I’m almost regretting that now, and wishing that I had held off for a little bit, or at least tried to convince my group to come along with me to do it. The first portion was alright, head to the city on Azuremyst Isle, and talk to the shaman trainer there. Great, no problem. He sends me to talk to a giant water elemental, who’s on Bloodmyst Isle. Well, of course since I left my home land at level 6 to go adventure with a dwarf, I had no clue where that even was. After talking with some friends I found out it’s actually an island north of the city. Alright, swim way out there, and I need the complete opposite side of the island. Of course. It couldn’t just be nice and simple. I use thottbot to look up the quest and get the locations I need, assuming that will make things easier.

The water elemental sends me on a quest to collect 6 pieces vials from other water elementals, up north. You’d think I could just walk there, but no, there are cliffs in the way and I need to walk 10 minutes out of my way up and around in order to get to where I need to go. A few kills later, I’ve collected my 6 vials and I return only to have him tell me he needs special water from a fountain in Auberdine.

Wait a second, Auberdine? Isn’t that the night elf town way out — yes, yes it is. Of course I’ve never been there yet, having hung around Westfall and Lakeshire the past twenty levels or so. I sigh inwardly to myself and begin the walk, picking up flightpaths along the way. I find the location of the fountain I need which is of course surrounded by level 24 elementals that like to quickly add. I’m level 20, and they hurt. I try to fight one, promptly get an add (remember, I’m not twinked) plop down a snare totem and run away. Rinse repeat. This is obviously not going anywhere. So I decide I’m frustrated enough with the game for one night and logged.

Today I think I’ll just run my 49 hunter there (who does have flightpaths) and kill the elementals leaving their corpses on the ground so they don’t respawn so fast, and run my shaman over to the fountain while everything is dead. If that doesn’t work, I’ll have to wait until tomorrow when my group is on again and try to hack our way through the level 24 mobs. Of course, this is not the end of the quest. No, that would be too easy. Once I get this water I travel way back to the elemental who asked for it to begin with – and then I’m not sure what. I didn’t look the rest of the quest up to peek.

Shesh. I understand sending us all over to accomplish these goals, but for a level 20 quest, this one is hard. I’m almost starting to wish I were twinked up a little now. On the plus side, the quest (plus killing random things that got in my way as I traveled) has pushed me almost to level 21, so it was not as though the evening was a total loss. Tonight is my EverQuest Nostalgia night (see post below) so I won’t be playing WoW, but I already let my group know that will be a Friday night deal for me. I failed utterly at convincing any of them to come test the waters, and I’m sure more then a few have chuckled and laughed at this whole nostalgia expedition. Ah well.

I know people are probably more eager to read about the EQ Nostalgia group then about my trek through WoW, but be patient, that post is next. Last night found Gozad, Daegon and myself eager to level so we decided to knock out a few more of our Redridge quests. We killed everything in our path, or at least tried to. It was a little rocky, we had a few deaths. The quests we’re working on now are level 23+ where as Daegon and myself were still only level 19. I hate mobs that run, what I wouldn’t give to have a warlock join our little static group so that they can curse and prevent that sort of thing. As it is, the warrior, hunter, and shaman combo make a poor one for stopping them in their tracks. At least for now. I know the hunter has the concussion shot, but it’s got a long recast and at times isn’t enough to stop everything from running we’d like.

I’ve stayed away from tradeskilling on the shaman, and haven’t worked it much on the other two characters lately either. I played a lot this weekend and it’s nice not to have a set schedule per say in order to get things done.

So Gozad dinged 21, while Daegon and myself hit 20. I went to my trainer expecting to have to do a quest for ghost wolf form, and was surprised to find out it was just a regular bought spell. I did of course have a quest to pick up as well, for water stuff. I’ve already learned fire and earth, I’m hoping water is healing. I could use more heals. It’s hard to play the shaman with only one heal. Well, hard for me at least. I didn’t do any research into the class at all and had never listened to the hype about them so this is all very new to me. I’ve spec’d down the restoration aa line and have been having a good time of it.

So I picked up my level 20 quest, headed way back to Azuremyst Isle from Ironforge, and then decided to call it a night. Plagued by annoying headaches that refused to leave through out the day. Mayadhros was unable to play last night due to real life restrictions, I’m sure he’s starting to get frantic now that we’ve reached our 20’s. We haven’t done any instance runs yet, but maybe we can do a Deadmines run (a real one, with the group as opposed to my hunter taking everyone through) for a few remaining quest updates that folks have as well as the major quest lines that Minxes has yet to complete (even though everyone else has). We’ll see how it goes. It would of course be better if Mayadhros were there for some heals / dps / tanking too *hint hint* and Klorel reached level 15 last night on his warrior (who’s spec’ing down the dps line I believe). It’s great to be playing with friends in so many games lately. I think that’s what I’m loving most of all about any of these games. I’m playing with friends in all of them.

The rest of yesterday was fairly quiet. I wasn’t in the mood to do too much on the shaman, so I managed to ding her 18 and catch her up to the group, bought my new spells (I could really use another heal some time.. one is just not cutting it) and then decided I would camp the blood elf mask that drops on Azuremyst Isle. The mask sells for 35g or so on Uther, and for no other reason then the fact that it looks cool.

It’s a level 5 item that’s not bop, and you can share it between characters if you so wish. Since most helm pieces are level 24+ it’s nice to have a little bit of ‘fluff’ armor at such a low level. The mob who drops it is a blood elf bandit, and he has 8 or so spawn points. He’s also stealthed, which is why I took the hunter to farm it. She’s got her mount, and track stealth. He always spawns close to the road sides on the island, in a huge circular swoop. He also spawns very fast, less then one minute apart. The annoying part (aside from the drop rate on the mask) is just simply getting to each spawn point.

The mask has a 5% chance to drop, and I spent about two hours farming it last night. I managed to get two of them to drop, and gave the first one away to Daegon for his dwarf warrior. Looks mighty fine in it too. The second one I sent over to the shaman, and I contemplated farming a few more just for auction house. Not sure how much time I want to devote to that though, I can make more money (faster) harvesting an instance (or two) and it’s a lot more fun then just riding around an island in circles killing level 7 stealthed bandits.

Tonight I assume the ‘regular’ group will get together and try to make a push for 20. I believe I get my shaman ghost wolf quest then (even though honestly I haven’t the slightly clue what ghost wolf form does for a shaman) and we’ll be moving on to some other quest areas. Redridge is alright, but still not my favorite. I took the shaman back to Auberdine to quest there and catch up to the group, and was given a good 10 quests. Redridge has a few that I can do but I find the area annoying. Maybe it’s just me. After Redridge though is Darkshire,  which I adore. Then there’s STV (Stranglethorn Vale) which I have always avoided like the plague because I play on pvp servers. However, on a pve server it’s safe to hang out there, and I remember that area being a huge quest hub. Even my level 49 hunter is still doing a few strangling quests for that area. Should be fun.

Which is the key to this whole little experiment, right? Having fun, hanging out with good friends and just kicking back and relax. It’s been so long since I’ve really played EQ2 now (I basically quit the day epics came out and only popped in from time to time since then) and I really enjoy not having to log in for raids. Feeling very few obligations to play, which is what I wanted. I didn’t want to feel forced to play. What fun is that after all. Of course the game still has its allure, and EQ1 even more so lately. If SOE offered free transfers I’d probably go join Tipa in a heart beat, just for something fun and ‘new’ to do.

No sign of Rumorr last night, but I’m sure he was busy doing ‘the family’ thing. Hopefully he’s not even more discouraged by the levels we’ve (by ‘we’ I mean Daegon, Gozad, and myself) gotten. Klorel I believe hit level 10 on his warrior last night but then had company show up so he had to log early. It’ll be nice when we’re all around the same level again and can spend a little time doing instances or what have you. In the mean time though, I’m certainly having fun.

Ok so the title is lame, I thought it was pretty cute. Last night Daegon and Gozad managed to cling to 18 and I took them through Deadmines on the 49 hunter for quest updates. Minxes is a little left behind now and has no real pretties to her name, but there was nothing I really wanted anyhow (aside from maybe the 2h staff reward from a quest chain). Today I’m running a few more friends through the instance, can never have enough Deadmines! Rumorr logged on for a bit to chatter about transferring that paladin of his, and hopefully it all works out. We’ll see later this week. When the groups and questing around Lakeridge calmed down for the night (and I was still wide awake.. for the most part) I decided to go solo Blackfathom Deeps, located in Ashenvale.

I love being able to run through these instances with my hunter tanking and feeling all big and ‘uber’ as I three shot the elites that scatter around. Even more, I love being able to help outfit my friends with the items we can farm from there. That way when we do the instance ‘for real’ people have some gear already (and then my Minxes can get gear too). An ok dagger dropped (blue) that was not BoP (bind on pickup) so I stuck that on the AH (auction house) and we’ll see how it goes. I’m at 295g now, after spending some coin making a new dress for the priest (Dreamweave, which has +spell dmg and +heal, can’t go wrong) and getting some crafting skill ups. Hopefully the shaman will hit 18 tonight, maybe 19 by the time everything is said and done, we’ll see how it goes. I think I have a quest to do at 20, and that’ll be fun.

The game all in all, has been fun. I’d say it’s 99.9% due to the people I have around me. Klorel, Daegon, Rumorr, Gozad, all of ’em make the game a fun place to be for the three hours or so in the evenings we play. It’d be better if Rumorr didn’t feel any pressure to level with his already busy life, but hey, nothing is perfect. I’d been contemplating Eq1 some, of course due to Tipa’s posts over at West Karana, but alas can’t bring myself to install the game. I haven’t bought any expansions since Depths of Darkhollows (and not even sure if that was the name of it) and I know I have three level 70 characters, a cleric, rogue, and enchanter, but no idea what sort of state I left them in. It’s tempting though. So tempting. I wish after a certain number of years mmos would just grant people free transfers. If there was a chance at me getting to play with Tipa, I’d probably consider it even more. As it is, I am fairly certain we don’t play on the same server (I don’t even remember which server I’m on.. I want to say Veeshan but I believe it merged.. to Luclin?) and as she herself has mentioned, who wants to play alone.

Wow.. now does this bring back EQ1 memories or what….. what a long time ago that was..

Omg, haha. My shaman gal here, is wearing the original earing of the solstice. Sighs. Good times. Good times.