Belghast

This morning I am struggling to come up with anything worth writing. Allergies are killing me and I am in sorta a histamine daze. We have a very lovely screenshot of what it looks like to be in Swamp of Sorrows… where everything is either orange or green. Were it not for my glowing eyes you would have trouble making out my facial details. This is an era in the game where objects don’t really throw off proper lighting, and as a result the campfire that I am standing beside is doing nothing to illuminate the scene.

Last night I more or less finished Badlands, minus all of the quests that involve Uldaman, which we still need to run. There are some quests in zone that I could do but they were higher level than was efficient for me to grind out, and also in a super dense and dangerous area of the zone. As a result I hopped a flight to Stonard and have been whittling through the quests that I had in Swamp of Sorrows. They also are largely higher level, but the zone as a whole is pretty spread out allowing you to keep from getting a bunch of multi-pulls.

That all may change as I am about to start hunting the murlocs along the eastern coastline, and we all know how they love to chain pull. In theory I really need to gather up a group of people and make an attempt at Uldaman, to knock out a bunch of the quests there. That might be an objective of this evening but the biggest challenge is the time zone thing. Last night was just a case of people logging in within a very staggered manner never quite giving us a party of five until Tam/Ash/Kodra had already committed to running some Wailing Caverns on their alts.

Forty really is about the halfway point in the leveling process not 2/3rds as the numbers would make it seem. Things have really slowed down significantly and each level seems to take way more effort than the previous one. I think this is around the point where I started to lose focus in the initial game launch, because I never quite made it to 60 at launch. I think I got to somewhere in the 50-55 range before wandering off originally and going to play Everquest II with some friends for awhile. I then came back and pushed through the rest of the levels and started the traditional level 60 activities.

I know next week my attention is going to start being split, and this weekend is the Tulsa State Fair, which means I am not going to get much leveling done on Saturday. The hope is on Sunday I can pour on a few more levels so I have a shot in hell of keeping up. Destiny 2 Shadowkeep launches on October 1st and I know I will start spending a bit of time each night in that as well. There is also Monster Hunter World Iceborne that I have yet to really touch. I don’t want to lose focus but we have officially entered the doldrums where that becomes a challenge.

Last night I was a bit scattered in my gameplay. I had a few goals, and none of them were really met. Firstly I wanted to knock out a bunch of quests in the Badlands, because I am slowly being lapped by many of the 40 something dungeon group. One of these involved killing a ton of wildlife that drop various meats. After much slaughter I wound up with two stacks of Red Wolf Meat, which made me realize that I had no recipe to get cooking skill points from. This of course lead me to go over to WoWhead classic and figure out which recipes used that item, and where to find them.

This then lead me to realize that I would need to make a trip to Camp Mojache in Feralas, which is a zone I had yet to visit so far. Were I thinking about speed I would have flown to Thousand Needles and run north, which would have gotten me to my destination pretty quickly. Instead I mistakenly flew to Desolace and ran South, causing me to traverse almost the entirety of the zone. To add insult to injury… I seemingly forgot I had a mount and ran almost all of it by foot. I did however buy my patterns and move on to Thousand needles to farm the Mithril nodes up in the perch area.

The hardest part about this phase in the game is how spread out everything feels. Once you are in a place you feel fairly committed to it just because there is no easy way to bounce to the other continent. By this point my hearthstone was up, which I have set in Orgrimmar which I then popped over to Undercity on the Zeppelin. Without a doubt lately I have been running up on the Zep tower just as the one I needed is pulling away. From there a long flight path down to Kargath got me back to where I started the evening… the Badlands.

The other mission I had for the night was to get Blacksmithing to 225 so I can start the quest to unlock the later levels of that profession. The cruel irony is that in theory I should be killing up off Iron, and I need a metric ton of it. There is a quest that I need to craft 4 Steel helms and 4 Steel chests… so I am focused on creating those and seeing where it gets me skill wise. The suggestion is that I bank all of my Mithril until I have 235 skill, which is a long way from where I am. Also seemingly Iron became valuable on the auction house again, so buying my way out of this rut isn’t exactly viable. So instead… I will be mining the copious amounts of Mithril and Iron available in the badlands while I knock out as many of the quests as possible.

This leads me to the title of the post. I spent a very long time last night killing rock elementals because I need 10 small rock shards. The drop rate of these seems to be almost nonexistent, so I will probably get the rest of my level just killing them without touching any of the other quests. The positive however is that pretty much all of the areas with Rock Elementals have several ore node spawns. So I can hang back, slaughter rocks and grab the nodes each time they pop. This is apparently my life now.