MMORPG

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.

I make poor choices. In theory there is a lot of things that I should have been doing up to this point that I have not. Tam for example trained only the bare minimum of abilities the entire time during playing his rogue. I could have probably done this as well given that there is a very slim number of abilities that I actually use. As a Warrior I mostly only care about tanking… and when I am not tanking I only care about being able to burn through mobs as efficiently as possible without having to completely shift things up. That means I spend most of my time in either Defensive or Arms, and instead of 2 Handers I am more or less dual wielding. This would rule out a whole bunch of abilities that I would never use… but I did not do this thing.

For further bad ideas… for some reason I decided this weekend to burn up fishing from scratch and got it to around 130 before wandering off aimlessly. That means I did in fact spend the money on getting the book that takes me to 225. Why did I do this? Quite honestly I don’t know but I got a Big Iron Fishing pole and decided that I wanted to use it. That time could have been better spent probably doing literally anything else that could have earned me gold. Instead I wound up spending it… and making more bad decisions. That said you apparently catch enough fish going from 1 to 130 to be able to cook your way up to 150 skill. I may or may not have power leveled cooking on my Hunter who is just barely 10.

So here I am at level 40 with a need for 100 gold… which is a truly staggering amount of gold at this level. As it stands I am sitting around halfway through and am entirely focused on procurement of more gold. The challenge here is that everywhere I go to attempt to get the gold.. I am finding isn’t working anywhere near as well as I thought it would. I’ve wandered around aimlessly and while I made about 5 gold last night off my schemes the wanderlust is definitely cutting into the grind time. Dungeoning is an option, but the problem with dungeoning is that I am also increasing my level at the same time which isn’t exactly something I am amped to do for the moment.

So I thought I would take a few moments this morning and talk about what makes a good grind spot. Because I am still hunting for my own sweet spot after trying a bunch of things that I hazily remember as being good ideas. Ultimately there are a bunch of variables that you want to keep in mind as you approach trying to find an ideal location to hunker down and camp.

• Near a Vendor – In theory you need to make sure whatever camp spot you are going after is within a short distance of some sort of vendor that you can sell at. Inventory is a premium and you are going to need to eventually empty your bags out.
• Green – You need to kill really fast to be able to efficiently grind and as a result you need to make sure the mobs you are fighting can barely fight back. This means you more than likely want to find some area that is green to almost grey to you. It means your time to kill will be really high and your need to drink/eat will be less.
• Non-Communal – You want to find something that doesn’t call for help. Ultimately you are setting up a machine and you want a fast but steady pace to mobs. If you can AOE grind then more than likely this goes out the window but you are looking for some place that won’t overwhelm you.
• Non-Runners – In a similar boat you more than likely want something that isn’t going to run because you waste time chasing them down. If you have Wing Clip or Hamstring this becomes less of a problem but you still have to make sure you have that debuff on them before they start to run.
• Valuable Vendorables – You are looking for something that drops something of value often. That value can be entirely negotiable but ultimately you are going to make most of your money from something you can quickly dump on a vendor and get back to farming.
• Tradeskill Friendly – Look for something that you can increase the value of with some quick tradeskilling. Skinning/Leatherworking is the king of this because you can easily convert a lot of leathers to something that can be dumped on a vendor quickly for a profit. Similarly cloth can be upsized a bit into bandages for a few copper profit per bandage.
• Cash Drops A Plus – If you are fighting something that drops cash it helps to make up the doldrums when the thing you are fighting isn’t dropping anything worth selling. Pure cash drop farming however is a really slow way of getting money. They need to be dropping something else be it cloth or vendor greys.
• High Density – You need a lot of mobs in a very small area to keep you from having to run around a lot. Running around is time when you are not earning money, so you need to find something you can be constantly killing until your bags fill up.
• Privacy – The biggest part of all of this is you need to find an area that is relatively unknown, because you don’t want competition in your farming. You need to be able to run your loop and fill your bags in peace, which tends to be the problem with valuable farm spots. Every single farm that I remember from Vanilla is way over-camped right now, because we all need that 40 gold. This is forcing me to branch out and try and find more creative options.

I’ve yet to find my perfect location, but I will eventually find a spot that ticks most of those boxes. I thought however I would throw out some of the things for you to think about as you try and nestle into your own farm spot. The grind is one of the more tedious parts of the game, and the amount of gold that you need to come up with is really a struggle at this level. However I am roughly halfway there. This is more or less my focus for the time being, and for now I am going to just keep my head down and go at it.

First off I have to say… I am shocked and amused at just how many people ended up reading my “non-post post” from yesterday. I am also thankful for the people who checked up on me throughout the day to make sure I was okay. I have no clue why I suddenly needed copious amounts of sleep Wednesday night, but I most certainly did. Last night however was apparently the opposite and it enabled me to do some shenanigans that I will probably pay for later.

For the better part of this week I have been living in Arathi Highlands working on the warrior quest. The drop rate of the items needed from the elemental “exiles” is sufficiently low enough that when combined with how tough they are to take down it feels like I am mired to almost a halt. At this point I have 8 of one type, 6 of another and 2 of the last. The other side event that has been going on this week is that Eliyon and I have been trying to make some dungeon runs happen. Thalen and Vernie both needed another trip into the Library to finish a quest. We all needed a run through the Armory to get credit for the overarching quest and I think Eli probably wants the axe. Lastly we have all been sitting on a stack of Razorfen Downs quests.

While I failed completely at taking any screenshots of our Scarlet Monastery run, we started there and did the two wings. It was around this point that it was nearing 10 pm and in theory should have been the moment I begged off for the night. However given that last night was effectively my Friday and that I was off work today… I kept going. We all agreed to make our way to Razorfen Downs and start working our way through that instance. I was a bit surprised that Vernie agreed to this given that I think he probably still had work today.

There is an aspect of the dungeon design of Vanilla instances that on some level we knew at the time but never really marveled at. So many of these instances are designed in a way that they clearly expected you to go in and do one side of the dungeon, and then return a bit later to finish out the dungeon and do the other side. So in Razorfen for example you have two sides that are accessible from the entrance. You have the side with Undead Boars that ultimately gave themselves over to the Scourge, and then a side populated with more traditional Undead skeletons and ghouls.

The Boar side starts around 34 and tops out at 39, and honestly was a pretty easy jaunt giving us a bunch of false confidence. So much so that we damned near wiped when we got the first pull of Undead side without being completely ready for it. The level increases to 37-39 for the trash mobs and the final boss is 41 ramping up the difficulty significantly. The wide level ranges I believe are designed to have you split your run up over several nights, like we have done with Scarlet Monastery. We talked a bit last night about how they could have messaged this better, with making having a quest that sends you into the instance and there being an obstacle that you then have to leave the instance to figure out how to get past.

In a style that Grace would have been proud of, we managed to take down the final boss by the slimmest of possible margins. All it took was sacrificing the tank, because seemingly I was the only one who died regardless of everyone getting super low. Effectively we struggled because we were “ignoring the mechanics”. The final boss summons 3 ghost adds when you have pushed the health past certain thresholds. What we should have done is stopped dpsing the boss and cleaned up the adds before returning to fight the boss again. Around the time the summon happens the boss roots the tank making it super hard for the adds to be picked up.

Instead in truth nub fashion we burned harder escalating the problem and making it a race to one of two conclusions… we win or we wipe. The problem is that once you start a death race like that, you really cannot back out and try the actual strategy. The only reason why we won at that point after failing the mechanical components was by sheer determination to push through. As a result however I have a really nonsense sword that will hold me until I can get a Thrash Blade, and something to fill my neck slot, along with the lopsided tanky shoulders from Scarlet Monastery. The only negative of this whole situation is that we didn’t wrap and I didn’t make it to bed until roughly 12:30. A really long time but a really fulfilling one as we knocked out three instances.