Monday, October 31, 2011

World Of Warcraft Update (10-31-11)

The last 1.5 weeks I have re-devoted myself to my main. His name is Charlesifer and he is a Dranei Paladin on the Lightbringer server. If you still don't know what I'm talking about then you don't play World of Warcraft. And that's OK. It is a game that will get a hold of you and not let go if you are a person like me. But let's skip the issues regarding my lack of will power and get straight to the action:

After realizing that Valor Points are almost worthless once you get all the Valor Quartermaster's gear I am driving towards increasing my achievements raising my Archeology to it's zenith and getting more companion pets and mounts. The best way to get more pet companions is to raid the auction house. There are usually pets available for cheap that you probably didn't know existed. Anything lower than 500 gold that I have yet to attain I will simply buy it. After that it gets a bit more complicated.

I am going after Tol Barad Commendations right now so I can buy the Reins of the Spectral Steed. I already have the Rustberg Gull and the Reins of the Drake of the West Wind so this is the last pet or mount I can get from the Baradin Quartermaster. While I am in Tol Barad I usually kill as many Baradin Foxes as I can. They supposedly drop a Fox Kit pet. I say supposedly because I have killed about 340 and haven't gotten one. The drop rate is stated to be 1/200 so I should be close to my second one by now. Of course, anyone who knows anything about statistics knows that I don't have any better chance for one to drop now than I did on the first kill but I think Blizzard should work something into their game that will just drop something if you get to a certain threshold of kills. This would certainly make my life less painful and provide a "light at the end of the tunnel" for grinders that are getting no love from the evil computers.

I am also farming Netherwing reputation so I can eventually get the six different colored Netherwing Drakes. I'm 4-5 days away from getting exalted reputation and have had fun doing it. It's important to me to go back to the Burning Crusade expansion and enjoy all the fun writing and quest creation that went into the first expansion of World of Warcraft. I started playing during the third expansion (Wrath of the Lich King) so doing all of this is a totally new experience and informs my play in the newer content. I can see now where some of the inspiration for current quest-lines come from and it has opened my eyes.

I got to enjoy an entertaining (and very rep friendly) quest-line called Earning Your Wings. Just know that Wing Commander Mulverick and other parodies from the movie Top Gun make appearances and I even got an achievement (Skyshattered) to boot after defeating Captain Skybreaker. You basically have to stay close to NPCs as they zip around Netherwing island and throw projectiles that knock you back and can eventually knock you off your mount, effectively ending in a failure of the quest. There are six NPCs you have to defeat, ascending in difficulty. I had never seen this type of quest before in the new content so it was fun to try even though I got discouraged on the last two.

On another front I am farming Northrend for all the rep I can get. The Kalu'ak have three daily quests (about 1,500 rep per day total) that are distributed along the south of the continent and the Frenzyheart have three dailies in Scholazar Basin. These will take a while to get up to exalted but it will be worth the end result of a pet (Nurtured Penguin Egg) and epic fishing pole (Mastercraft Kalu'ak Fishing Pole) along with several different achieves.

The perfect thing to do when you are going back through old content is to do Archeology if you have yet to do so. I raised my Archeology professional skill to 525 from 0 in the last 1.5 weeks. This took a lot of work and honestly I would say it wasn't worth the work if it wasn't for the 3 companion pets I have picked up during that time: The Voodoo Figurine, The Clockwork Gnome and the Fossilized Hatchling. As far as Companions pets and Mounts I am still looking to unearth Pterrordax Hatchling, the Crawling Claw and the Fossilized Raptor so even when you raise your skills to max in this profession there will be things to go for and I am looking forward to the chase.

Doing all of this on a daily basis including doing the cooking dailies in both Dalaran and Stormwind goes through my allotted 25 daily quests and takes up a fair amount of time.

This is just a quick look at what I am doing on my main at the moment. If these are some things that you have yet to accomplish in the World of Warcraft I highly suggest you do so, especially if you got into the game on the later side, as I did. There's plenty more that I didn't go into detail on and I have loads of other characters just waiting for me to take more of a shine to them.

New Start

I haven't blogged for a while. Probably because it's hard to get things in my mind organized into a blog post. It might be because of my increasingly long list of interests. I envy those who know exactly what they want and have a focus in their lives. I lack that. My interests as of now not including the obvious (my family and friends):
  • Sports
  • Writing
  • The World of Warcraft
  • Starcraft II
  • Probably Diablo III in the near future
  • Healthcare (most recently relating to my torn ACL)
  • China
  • Social Media
  • Comic Books
  • Zombies
I will try to get to these things in more detail in the future. I love to write but don't do it enough. Hopefully this can be a sanctuary for me to grow and discover myself. No homo.