mount farming Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Holy Faffing

I had every intent Sunday to work on the various characters that I needed to run through LFR, however when other opportunities were presented I seized hold with both hands. A few members of the guild were running instances for transmog outfits, so I joined in the fun. The likelihood that I will play my little disc priest was just massively improved. Of all the priest sets, my favorite is absolution the Tier 6 outfit from Black Temple/Hyjal. Since I was the only cloth wearer along and the only other person on my class set did not need it… I managed to soak up an entire set of Absolution gear in the run. I also managed to get a pretty spiffy staff, that I remember all the priests desperately wanted back in the day.

I of course had to transmog to the gear immediately, even though I am only 80 and wearing a mishmash of quested greens. My hope is I can maintain the outfit as I level through all of the cataclysm content. I am sure there is a crafted set that will likely hold me much like the crafted gear has on my rogue. Belglorian my priest is also my tailor so hopefully he can take care of that as I level. I hope to get this character up to Pandaria level since I am stalled out 5 points away from maximum.

Twilight Faffing

While we were out and about our monk healer mentioned that he had a severe absence of flying mounts. Immediately we all thought about the three drakes achievement for Sartharion with its guaranteed mount drop. So very shortly we wandered our way over to Wyrmrest Temple in Dragonblight and formed up a quick group to do 10 man three drakes. It was insane just how fast we were able to kill it at level 90. It was pretty easy to do at 85, but Sarth just absolutely exploded with our current epic gear. We all passed on the mount drop, and let the healer pick it up unattested.

However since we all had an army of alts, we figured we would swap around a bit and go ahead and knock out the 25 man version as well. Several of us were missing that mount, so the monk healer said for us to roll on it as well. While not as much of a cakewalk as the first one, especially since we were all on alts… it was still rather easy. As you can tell by the image I am now the proud owner of a new twilight drake mount. For whatever reason I never managed to get this one in all the times we did three drakes after Icecrown raids during Wrath, so I was happy to knock out yet another mount.

Utgarde Faffing

We did a quick heroic Ruby Sanctum since one of the folks had a quest still active from the Wrath era, and with that most of us had hit our instance lock. I however still had one more to go before I hit it, so I logged back over to my Paladin who I had logged out at Wyrmrest. Since I was so close, I decided to fly over to Utgarde Pinnacle on a whim. I have run this place on heroic so many times chasing the mount, but each and every time I have walked away empty handed. Yesterday however, I was completely shocked to see a brand new Blue Protodrake mount in my loot window. I have always liked running the zone, and to some extent I am a bit sad I have no real reason to ever return.

While I cannot get the black or plagued protodrakes, this completes the set other than the Time-lost protodrake. I simply do not think I have the patience for that camp. Each time I am in Northrend I buzz through Storm Peaks just in case it is up, but so far all I have seen is the place holder and the time-lost corpse a few times. Similarly I make a trip to Deepholme every now and then and fly the circuit, but again I don’t really expect to ever find that stone drake up either. Both camps are extremely tedious things and I simply do not want the mount bad enough to go through it. I figure I will get my share of camping done when I start collecting spirit beasts on my hunter.

Faffing Overload

One of my really good friends Ashgar came back to the game this weekend, and similar to what I do he spent a lot of time running old raid content for fun. We had talked about going and doing Blackwing Lair earlier in the day, but it never really materialized until shortly after I had gotten the blue protodrake above. He was struggling to solo Razorgore, and I knew I very much could not do it on my paladin… but there were two items I really wanted desperately from there. The first is the Untamed Blade, that I am now modeling in the above screenshot. The second is a proper set of Judgment. While I love the blue/brown set from the opening of Northrend event, simply because it is super rare… I have always wanted a set of the red/gold judgment, that matches the untamed blade. To me that is the archetypal paladin look, and I will not be completely happy until I at least have that as an option.

Needless to say I managed to get the Untamed Blade, but over the course of the dungeon only a single piece of judgment gear dropped. We did however see every single pet, so at this point I am only missing Broodlord Lashlayer, as I managed to pick up mini Razorgore and mini Chromaggus. After we made quick work of Blackwing Lair we decided to wander over to AQ40, since thanks to Twin Emperors it is annoying to solo. There we did not have quite as much luck, but I did manage to pick up the mini Skeram pet, and Ashgar managed to get one of the other ones along the way. The highlight of the run for me however is that moments from joining up the Red Qiraji Resonating Crystal dropped.

The various colors of Resonating Crystals were a source of so much drama for our raid back in the day. We formed “teams” based on the color of mount we managed to get to drop. This was egged on by the fact that one of the raid leaders was strongly opposed to any color that was not “gold”, and as such tried to get as many people on his team as possible. My hunter was a member of this strike team… and we vehemently argued when someone called us “yellow”. The above screenshot was from the first time we saw a Red mount. Prior to that moment the mount war had reached a fever pitch, with various people not willing to accept the “wrong” color of mount. After a point the raid leader just started force-looting people various colors just so they would stop slowing down the raid.

However the moment we all saw the “red one” the mount war dissolved just as fast as it had begun. No one cared about the green, blue or “gold” teams… we were all somehow lacking because we were not riding around on a red mount. During our entire time raiding Ahn’qiraj I think we only actually saw two red mounts drop. The screenshot above was from the night we first saw it… we all lined up to pay homage to the new “red leader”. Lleandryn will always have the distinction of being the man who brought an end to the “mount wars”. I joke about it these days, but very seriously… the animosity over the color of mount we were using had really reached a point of ridiculousness. Lots of hurt feelings were happening over having the wrong color, so the fact that the Red mount “saved” us made looting one yesterday all the sweeter. Now if only blizzard would stop being a pain in the ass and let us ride them everywhere.

Administrata

As part of my return to the leadership of House Stalwart, there is a ton of base level clean-up that I need to do. One of the first pieces I decided to tackle was shifting any character that has not been online in the last year to “retired” status. So many guilds kick the inactive, but I have never really liked that concept. It feels harsh since in my experience so many people renew their subscription on a whim. Logging back in to a friendly guild that has missed them, is a much more enjoyable experience than finding out they have been booted out into the cold.

This is compounded now by the concept of guild faction, that was added in with Cataclysm. Booting a character from a guild has serious repercussions for the player. It takes awhile to get to exalted with a guild, especially at maximum level… so punting folks out and making them potentially redo all that faction work just seems cruel. Setting them to retired rank seems like a good solution, since I have stripped that rank of all bank privileges to protect the guild from someone getting hacked, but if someone does return for a length of time I can bump them back up to an active rank.

I had originally planned on doing this for anyone that had been gone for over 6 months… but ended up calling it quits after finishing with the “1 year” folks. It took me what felt like an hour to get that far through the list. I can only imagine what it is going to be line when I redo every single one of the almost 900 characters guild notes. One of my goals is to do a guild census of sorts… get to know every single person that is in the guild that joined during my 2 year absence. Part of this is to set accurate guild notes that follow a pattern so that you can use addons like Prat to merge the two in chat.

WoW Bucket List

One of the concepts that I have latched on over the last few weeks is the idea of a WoW Bucket List. The first time I had actually seen this in a formalized form was over on Cuppyville, where she proudly lists her WoW Bucket List in the top menu of her site. I don’t quite have my formalized enough for that, but I have started a Google Docs Spreadsheet and as I think of things have begun adding them to it. Always in the past when I have left WoW, it has been because I “ran out of things to do”. I say that in quotes, because really that was never the case in actuality. There are far too many things to do to have ever been “done” with the game.

What happened instead is I got frustrated and lost sight of the things I wanted to do once upon a time… but have long forgotten about. My theory is that in keeping this bucket list, I will be able to pick things off of it on those rainy days when I can’t think of anything worth doing. Now several of them do require lots of people to complete, like finishing off my Glory of the Icecrown Raider achievements that I am missing only a couple of sub achievements on. But I had a conversation with a guild member last night and we talked about having some sort of a rotating raid achievement night for old school content. I love ticking off these things, and its even better when you can help a whole group full of people check those goals off as well.

Some examples from mine are…

Complete Glory of the Pandaria Hero on Belgrave
Level Gloam to 90
Level Alchemy/Herbalism to 600 on Gloam
Farm Deathcharger’s Reins in Stratholme
~~Farm~~ ~~Reins of the Vitreous Stone Drake~~ ~~in Stone Core~~

Bucket List Saves Day

One of the most amazing bloggers/podcasters… @AlternativeChat constantly extolls the virtues of “Faffing about”, that is doing the piddly little things that only really matter to you. After my hour of wrestling with the guild roster, I was not really in the mood to focus on anything much. I had originally planned on working on questing my way through Hyjal on Gloam, but as I logged in to do just that everything felt “hazy”. Normally this might have been one of those times that I logged out frustrated with not feeling like making “real progress”. However It was at this point my WoW Bucket List paid off. I looked at my long list of objectives and decided that last night would be a mount farming night, as I could chat freely while doing it.

Soloing old content is one of my biggest enjoyments in any game. There is so much nostalgia wrapped up in making your way through content that used to require a large group. You feel epic as you trounce monsters that used to trounce you regularly. Had I not raided every last bit of this content, I doubt I would have the massive shot of nostalgia that this gives me… but it almost always guarantees a smile on my face. As a result I started the evening in Tempest Keep, as a friend of mine and I made a contest of it over on our Mumble server. We started at roughly the same time and tried to see who could clear the dungeon first. Neither of us managed to get the fabled Ashes of Al’ar to drop… but last week another guild member did so it has renewed our interests.

From there I took a trip over to Utgarde Pinnacle to battle my old nemesis Skadi the Rutheless. Across the board the protodrake model is one of my favorite mount designs, and to the best of my knowledge the only two that are still available that I am missing… are the blue and yellow. While the concept of the Time-Lost Proto Drake intrigues me… and every time I have occasion to be in the area I fly the circuit of spawn points “just in case”… I do not have the fortitude to farm it. Instead I battle my old nemesis in an attempt to steal his mount whenever I have downtime. I both love and hate the fact that it is heroic, because it limits the amount of grinding I can realistically do in one sitting.

Faffing Pays Off

Upon failing once again to walk away with that ever elusive proto drake, I moved on to the next target which was The Stonecore. The second boss of the instance, Slabhide has an equal chance of dropping Reins of the Vitreous Stone Drake on both Heroic and Normal. As a result I tend to farm this mount resetting the instance over and over until I reach the instance lockout timer. Honestly this is one of the least frustrating farms I have done in a game, as there is a warp gate immediately after the boss that can take you right back to the instance. So you clear your way down, fight Slabhide and warp back up to the start, zoning out and resetting it. It was on my fourth clear of the night that luck smiled upon me and I got to tick something off of my Bucket List.

Here is a gratuitous shot of me riding my new prize immediately after exiting The Stonecore. This is my very first of the “stone drake” mounts, as I never managed to complete the heroic achievement for Cataclysm. I ended up leaving only a few months into the expansion, and at that point achievements were just not a priority. I have quite a few of the things ticked off however, so it is on my bucket list of things to finish up. I have to say… the Stone Drake model may give the Proto Drake a run for its money. My absolute least favorite however is the Cloud Serpent model, which has seriously harmed my progress on all of the Pandaria achievements.

The moment I got my drake I had to tweet @AlternativeChat to share my moment of faffing paying off. My hope is that tonight I can return to progressing on Gloam, but if not I am sure I will just grab another thing from the list. Tuesday I had every intent to work on gloam as well but instead wound up running around the world with a pack of guildies farming the Zandalari Warbringers for an attempt at their mount. So to be honest… my primary plan is to work on Gloam, but I will as always be open to suggestions of alternative paths. Whatever option we end up choosing is completely fine by me, so long as we have fun doing it.