On Wings of Nether

Low Graphical Fidelity

Since this is a patch day that happened to start super early… aka 5 am my time… and I don’t wake up until 5:30 I will not be having any screenshots that are not recycled or otherwise blatantly borrowed.  Since I was off yesterday I simply did not think ahead.  For me at least it feels like Monday… even though it really is legitimately Tuesday.  Maybe this is the way my Aussie friends feel since they perpetually live in the future.  Today’s post is going to involve a whole lot of faffitude, so be prepared.

For those who have not been following the news of all that is faffing about…  you have potentially mentioned that @AlternativeChat has declared that 2014 is the “Year of Faff”.  Tales of the Aggronaut is one of the many blogs that now proudly sport the badge on our sidebars.  While I am proudly participating, for me at least 2013 will be the year of Faff in that it was the year that the Godmother of Faff brought the term front and center in the collective consciousness that is the “blogosphere”. 

Faff is a term that has been in my vocabulary for some time, and not always in an extremely positive context.  When my friends and I had to jump through a whole bunch of meaningless hoops to accomplish something it would often be described as a “whole lot of faffing about”.  What has changed during 2013 and the start of 2014 is that “Faff” has become a proper destination for the evening.  Realizing this has added greatly to the overall enjoyment of games like World of Warcraft that are so chock full of fluff that you cannot go more than a few in game feet without encountering something that could be worth achievement points or something that you have yet to collect.  If for no other reason, I salute @AlternativeChat for realigning our vocabulary and taking what used to be a negative and turning it very much into a positive.

On Wings of Nether

Netherdrake_choice_noPCOver the last few weeks I have been working feverishly each night on completing my Netherwing Dailies.  As I have said before for whatever reason, during the Burning Crusade this is a grind I never participated in.  In truth more than anything it is likely thanks to the fact that during Burning Crusade I lived in a perpetual state of broke.  As a raid tank, pretty much every spare gold I had went to my volumes of repair bills.  These repair bills have decreased greatly over the last few expansions, but back then it was not unheard of that I would rack up 100-200g in repairs a night, and in BC money that was quite the little fortune.  As a result I never really had the money to get my epic flight training, which was required to start the Netherwing quests in the first place.

To be truthful, I likely never would have gotten it were not for a contrived scheme to get me my epic training.  A friend of mine started a guild lottery, where we would send him raw materials and he would turn around and auction house the materials and pool it up to fund epic flying mounts for people.  The first one apparently was universally rigged, as everyone colluded behind the scenes to give it to me.  Thankfully through this welfare flying program we managed to buy at least a half dozen epic flying mounts, and I believe the final number was a bit closer to ten.  However this was pretty late in the expansion and I never ended up going out and starting this grind.  In part I was a bit slowed by the fact that my main at the time had no harvesting skill, and as such had no daily quest for turning in that.

War Bear Time

amani-war-bear Needless to say yesterday mid evening I managed to finish out exalted and got the On Wings of Nether achievement.  You get one mount free for completing the achievement, but I quickly flew out to Shadowmoon Valley and snatched up the other 5 for what now seems like the extremely cheap price of 180g.  This puts me I think a a half dozen mounts away from We’re Going to Need More Saddles.  There are so many farmed mounts that I am lacking, that I need to just buckle down and start farming away. Over the course of the weekend however I did manage to get one of these mounts that have elluded me.

Back in Burning Crusade we farmed more Karazhan than I really care to think about, but after we had used up all of the Medivh goodness, we set our sites on the newly released Zul’Aman.  Over the course of the expansion we got better and better at this dungeon, but never quite had the gear and strategy needed to get through a successful bear mount run.  We got really close a few times… I remember one time we were less than a minute away from the mount.  Something would always go wrong and fate conspired to keep me from my prize.  During Wrath of the Lich King, I really have no clue why but I never went back and attempted getting the mount.

When they redid the dungeon during Cataclysm, I was unfortunately not playing the game… so I completely missed my chance to get the mount legitimately again.  For fear that they might eventually simply do away with the mount I decided that I needed to set my sights on this mount and just get it over with.  I realize there are subtle differences between the mount you earned at 70 and the mount you can get today… but I don’t really care.  It is a big freaking bear with horns and spikey bits.  I will likely be proudly riding this mount around for awhile, as it has officially offset my Spectral Tiger as my normal mount of choice.  Now I just need to pick a new victim, and start working towards farming up that mount.  Starting to thing the Barons Charger is a likely candidate.

All About Mounts

Do A Barrel Roll!

This week the previously announced Iron Skyreaver mount found its way to the in game store… and I simply could not resist picking it up.  The mount is amazing, but it seems that it seems to be one of those love or hate situations among my close friends.  Some of them absolutely love it, some of them completely hate it.  The pure win of the mount is the fact that every so often it does a roll…  I have been informed by one of my pilot friends that it is NOT a barrel roll.  Quite frankly it doesn’t matter because every time it happens… I hear Peppy say “Do A Barrel Roll!”.  Thanks Star Fox for misappropriating that term!

In truth in game it is a bit smaller than I had originally expected, or at the very least it doesn’t scale as much as I would expect it would for a Worgen.  Some of my friends have called it sickly looking, but really if you think about the background of the mount it makes sense.  This is a chimera that the Iron Horde has captured into slavery… likely abused and mistreated… and then augmented with badass armor and JET THRUSTERS!!!!  You have apparently rescued it from Garrosh and his evil evil machinations.  Now you and your mechano-chimera can rule the skies together!

All About Mounts

Another project I have been working on is chewing through the crafting cooldowns to make my own Sky Golem mount.  Unlike most engineering mounts in the past, this one is actually usable by all of your characters.  Which has made it a high priority for me to obtain.  At some point I need to go back and build some of the other engineering mounts, as I never actually obtained my Mekgineer’s Chopper.  Since I stopped playing Belghast as my main somewhere during Crusader’s Coliseum it just stopped being priority for me to get one.  Additionally I got the recruit a friend two person rocket, which filled the need of being able to transport people with me.  If they made it so all characters on your account could use the chopper… I would prioritize making one.

The big slowdown for the Sky Golem is the engineering cooldown, which at face value is really easy to craft.  Jard’s Peculiar Energy Source takes only ten ghost iron bars, which is next to nothing… however it is on a daily timer and unlike all of the other cool downs out there… it is lacking a “speed up for more materials” option.  The sky golem requires 30 of these, and 30 living steel.  The living steel component however is not terribly bad since if you have a transmute spec alchemist you can get extra bars from time to time.  At this point I am 6 days including today away from my sky golem mount, so I will keep you guys informed as I finally craft it.

Flight of the Netherwing

Wow-64 2014-01-18 10-17-31-93 One of the last things I want to give an update on is my quest for exalted with the Netherwing.  Essentially this has been one of those semi-casual things that I do every night.  I go out to Shadowmoon Valley, complete all the quests… gather up all of the loose eggs that I happen to see while doing those quests and then move on for the night.  I am sure if I wanted to seriously grind this out, I could do so in a single afternoon doing nothing but collecting eggs.  However at this point I am at about the halfway point through Revered.  At this point I figure I have a few more days until I have crossed the exalted threshold.  I am bad at estimating these things, but given I tend to find a half dozen eggs each day I think this might be viable.

Mostly I have been doing this because I want the count of six more mounts.  I have never particularly liked the look of the netherwing.  I love the fact that they have a whole series of colors available, but it is the whole shark nosed dragon thing that gets to me.  I have actually enjoyed the grind because I miss Draenor.  I am looking forward to Warlords in part because I am really wanting to see Draenor as a viable place again.  Burning Crusade was the expansion that I really came alive in, and grew into the role of raid tank and large-scale guild leader.  While Wrath of the Lich King was the expansion we saw the most success during, I feel like Burning Crusade is my “golden age” of WoW gaming.

Bad Luck Tokens

Feel Bad Inc

gorillaz_feel_09

This morning I am feeling like absolute crap.  Last night was one of those nights where I just could not get into playing anything.  I cycled through a bunch of different games, none of them holding my attention enough to keep up with it for long.  I am not sure if I am actually “sick” or just that my lungs are not in the best shape.  On the lung front it seems to be several things adding up at once.  Firstly it is breathing all of this cold dry air coming with the recent cold snap.  Secondly everyone seems to be smoking in the parking garage… which if I smoked I likely would as well…  but this creates a hanging cloud of death that I have to walk through every morning.  Smoke is a nuisance to most people but to a severe asthmatic it keeps me from breathing.  Each time I get a whiff of it, I can literally feel my lungs tightening.

Lastly the other night we were trying to clean up a mess and I had to help my wife empty the vacuum bin.  The dust managed to get clogged up and she had to work really hard with it to free the jam.  As a result this plume of dust came up from the container and while I tried my best not to breathe… I ended up breathing some in anyways.  As a result this triple whammy has lead to my lungs trying to close shop on me.  Severe Asthma sucks, it really does.  While it is better than it has been in years, there is always a chain of events that brings me to my knees and simply unable to function.  What sucks about it the most is that Friday I have a huge presentation to give, so I have to somehow manage to get better enough to be clear and understandable without gasping for air.

Bad Luck Tokens

skullcoin

One of the things that happens for everyone at least one time during raiding is that the loot gods frown upon you… for an extended period of time.  For me lately this has been in the form of zero weapon drops for my various alts.  Yesterday at one point I was talking to a good friend of mine and he said he had been waiting on a trinket to drop for three months.  Similarly I can remember running Karazhan for almost a year and never once seeing the necklace of Maiden of Virtue.  During the middle of our discussion a “wouldn’t it be cool” thing happened.  I do not believe that it is the intent of any game designer for RNG to wreck gear progression.  No one in their right mind would ever intend players to simply not ever get the items they need.

The idea arose… that what would happen if you got bad luck tokens.  This of course is just a name we came up for them, but you could call them any spiffy thing you want.  The idea is that if you entered a dungeon and got no loot drops that you would end up with a special token, potentially mailed to you after the dungeon run.  If you save up enough of these… and it would be a large quantity like 50 or so you could turn in your tokens to a special vendor for any one piece of gear “within reason”.  Of course this would be standard drops, and nothing akin to a legendary or anything of the sort… though my old world raid would have disagreed with you considering we ran Molten Core for damned near three years never seeing a single binding.

The basic idea is to create a route to the item even if your luck is absolutely horrible.  That through sheer diligence and determination you could still get it.  Granted the details are a bit fuzzy, but back in the day we used to have a thing called the “bitterness pool”, I am not really remembering the full details to be honest because this was something we did back in vanilla.  Essentially each player hunting for something rare would chip in some gold every week.  At the end of the raid week anyone who did not get their declared item to drop would get a share of the pot.  If you did get your drop your money went to soothe the pains of those who didn’t.  It was funny and some people made quite a bit of money from the pool… especially those seeking the Drake Fang Talisman.  But at the end of the day the pool got them no closer to getting what they actually wanted… that elusive item.

Late to the Party

Nether_Drake

When it comes to killing things… I seem to be able to do that for hours upon end without ever really getting bored of it.  However when it comes to daily quests or similar reputation farming activities…  I usually can’t seem to make myself do it.  During Burning Crusade I successfully farmed up a bunch of factions, but one of the ones that had always eluded me was the Netherwing.  There was just so much competition for the eggs, and at the time I simply could not be bothered to give up large blocks of my time working on it.  Last night however… I really didn’t feel like doing much of anything, so as a result this seemed like a useful thing I could be working towards.  The problem with Belghast, the character I was originally working on this with is that he was not a harvester, and being able to harvest the herbs and mine the ore was a quick and easy way to get a faction boost.

Last night I managed to go from neutral to friendly and put a decent dent in that.  I need to do some more research to see if there is an easy faction guide to pushing through this.  I mostly just want the netherdrake mounts for the total count, since there are a lot of them that you can get.  I have never really been a fan of the look of them, and as a result that is partially what kept me from farming up the faction.  Oddly enough I did Skyguard, which has the even weirder manta ray thing mount…  but I proudly rode that all through BC.  Additionally I need to see if there is an addon of mapnotes for the various egg spawn locations.  That seems like it will be the fastest route to the faction, to keep doing the egg turn ins.  Hopefully I will have the patience to keep doing this even when I am not feeling like crap.