Good Morning Folks! Well… I guess I am back in World of Warcraft for a bit. I originally installed it as a bit of a lark, to see what Housing was up to, and wound up getting back into the swing of the game. I missed the majority of the Valentines day event, but I did manage to get a few runs in, which was enough to get this shiny new mount that was apparently available this year. I am missing all of the other mounts, unfortunately. I never got my love rocket, and I never got the broom that they added either. This is not bad luck, however, for having run exactly two queues of the event, I was mostly queueing to see if I could get any of the new housing items, but alas, I did not. However, queuing for this event got me back in the swing of combat, which only further devolved me into the flow of the game. While I have been gone, though the game has been cooking, and it seems like World of Warcraft is in pretty good hands with the current dev team.
I, of course, did what I have always done… and ran a bunch of old raids for gear attempts. I remembered at one point they made it so you could collect transmog appearances from any role, not just the one you were currently on. This makes running these old raids feel significantly better, and all of the tokens that you get for gear sets are warbound and can be dropped in the warband bank. I will be using this later to help fill out missing set pieces on other characters. Yesterday I made quite a bit of progress on Warrior sets, having completed the Destroyer set and the Onslaught set, and then gained a few more pieces of Wrath. There was a time when I had the full Onslaught set, because I wore it back in the day, but apparently, the boots and bracers had gone missing from my bank before the appearance collection became a thing. I need to start working on the Warlords of Draenor sets, because they all looked pretty cool for warriors.
Running all of this content means I am now swimming in old materials and gear pieces. One of the points of realization that I learned in Guild Wars 2 is that the economy there is stable enough that I should really just sell everything and then buy back whatever I happen to need at any given time. Similarly, in Path of Exile, I have actually learned to really enjoy being a vendor and selling stuff to other players. Since World of Warcraft has a much updated Auction House system, I thought I would try my hand at being a vendor here. This largely involved installing and configuring TSM and the tool that stays active in the background and updates the auction house data. All in all, I think it was mostly a success, and on my first day of being a vendor, I sold something in the neighborhood of 28k in gold. This is a pittance compared to the gold that Stargrace brings in regularly, but she is also selling on all of her characters and has done this for a decade now. I am mostly only running auctions on this one character.
In other news, on my Dark Iron Dwarf Warrior named Belgraven, I finished The Ringing Deeps and am trying to figure out how to get the quest starter that sends me to the next zone. All told, the story for the zone was pretty good once I managed to get into it. This was part of why I bounced so hard at the launch of War Within, is that I got to this zone… which, quite honestly, the whole Earthen thing should have been the most “me” story ever, given how much I love Dwarves in general. However, I just struggled to attach to it, and I maybe should have just critical pathed the story rather than trying to do every single side quest in the entire zone. I have been playing too many games that are not World of Warcraft, and got used to the concept that I needed to do side content to progress, whereas this is more like FFXIV in that the side content is entirely for flavor only, and you will get enough experience by largely just doing the Main Story.
Another thing that I got caught up in was doing a meta achievement called Two Minutes to Midnight, which requires you to farm up nineteen rare bosses during the Midnight pre-event that is happening in Twilight Highlands. I was largely obvious to this whole thing and started fairly late in the night… which meant that I stayed up a bit longer than I normally would have yesterday. Essentially, it seems like the Twilight Highlands are on a clock, and every five to ten minutes, a new rare boss spawns, and they all spawn in sequence. So by hopping on this train, I was ultimately able to catch all nineteen of them. The only reason why I did not go to bed at my normal time… is that I did not want to try and coordinate hopping back on the train at exactly the right time. I still wrapped up by 10:30, which is not the end of the world, but it was a lot of flying around the zone and button mashing until I got out the other side.
The benefit of doing this event during prime time is that the bosses and adds go pretty quickly. You have a ten-minute clock that starts when the event spawns, and you have that long to kill enough mobs to trigger the event, then also take down three mini bosses, and the ultimate rare boss, before the timer is up. Each of the encounters has the chance of dropping a set of purple armor and various other resources, but I don’t entirely understand what to do with them yet. Hopping on the train, I was able to farm up every gear slot, plus a cloak, and a ring… and in theory, if the dailies are still available tonight, I will try and knock those out and hopefully pick up the other ring, and an amulet so that this character is relatively well geared going into midnight. Apparently, I purchased a cloak that was not flagged as part of the set piece… which seems like a bug… but if I have more resources left over I will purchase the correctly named cloak.
So at roughly 10:15 last night, I got my last named mob kill and finished the meta achievement. If I had been paying attention to this more I would have tried to run this on multiple characters. I remember an event like this happening in Silithis prior to Battle for Azeroth that effectively worked the same way. I was out there constantly to farm up full sets of gear for almost all of my Horde characters. Maybe it is a miracle that I came in at the last moment and got exactly one set of gear, because otherwise I probably would have burned myself out massively. Grinding is one of those things that I seem to be exceptionally good at, and when there is something like this going on, I can seem to put my head down and push through it. However, once I am finished… I have usually burnt myself out to the point where I just don’t want to play the game anymore, once I have lost that burning focus that was driving me. I seem to have a hard time finding a new focal point once I have accomplished my goal.
As to why I did any of this? A mount of course. You get this shiny new mech suit if you manage to take down all nineteen mini-bosses that are part of this event. I know the head start for the expansion is right around the corner, but supposedly, this event hangs around until the 2nd when the expansion fully launches. I think I will probably be spending that time trying to get through the main story quest rather than grinding up additional characters. I think I have the desire to actually try and play this expansion when it drops now. It is weird how I have gone from logging in on a lark to actually starting to mainline the damned game again. Damn you, Blizzard, for getting your hooks in me at least temporarily. I fully expect to drop this at least for the short term when Path of Exile Mirage launches on the sixth, but given how much I seem to bounce between games right now, and how I played Destiny Rising the entire time during the last league… I might find room for Warcraft as well.
