The perks are cute. Like the daze resistance while mounted (Lvl 3 Stable) or being able to interact with objects (“gear pointer”) outdoors without being dismounted. But I needed the pad more than I needed some situational conveniences, so I tore it down as soon as I got the last achievement and build a War Mill. I really needed follower gear upgrade tokens, because the really good missions need followers with good ilvls.
If you get some of your followers to ilvl 645 sometimes you can get a mission for ilvl 655 gear. I’v gotten two each for both my 100s and about 4-5 pieces ilvl 645 gear on each.
Valentine’s stuff is nearly over. Finally! I did manage to grind enough to do the meta for Fool for Love, so I don’t ever have to do it again. I even went so far as to do that silly Love Magnet achievement with the 50 stacks. Got the Lovebird mount, though admittedly I just bought it in the Auction House rather than farming all those tokens myself. I ran the Crown Chemical instance every day, usually on two toons, but never got anything worth having - no pets or toys, and of course no ultra-rare Love Rocket mount.
Next up, Lunar Festival, which I have never done before at all. Anything particularly cool to go after?
I’ve hatched two Primal Eggs from Isle of Giants so far (and farmed around 3700 bones so far) and both of them were the Red raptor mount. A third egg is set to hatch on Wednesday morning, so hopefully I’ll have better luck.
That event has utter lost its charm for me. I had the meta ages ago, and any of the loot that you could grind for and buy in recent years. The toy dropped on one toon (which is to say, for all toons, thanks toybox) and another Toxic Wasteling pet. But of course, no rocket. I had 31 attempts in all, and never even saw it drop. And the Love Magnet achievement was, and for the degree of coordination required, effectively impossible. Certainly not worth the time. Maybe next year they’ll have a version of the achievement which doesn’t suck hours of your life, only to be screwed when the douchebag raid leader disbands the raid before your turn comes up. :mad:
There was a thread over on the official forums about that achievement. The general gist of the thread was that the achievement proves that the developers don’t actually play the game, and some suggestion that the achievement was actually designed by somebody utterly unfamiliar with the game.
I hadn’t even noticed the achievement; like you, I got the meta some years ago, so I wasn’t bothering.
Well, I tried the first LFR wing of Blackrock Foundry (Gruul, Oregorger, Blast Furnace).
It was interesting. Kind of confusing. No wipes until the last boss (Blast Furnace).
Gruul was pretty straightforward, but depends a lot on the tanks knowing what to do, and the raid being willing to soak a periodic cleave (Inferno Slice) that divides its damage over all affected. (A lot of the raid didn’t understand that, running away from it and causing everyone else more damage. :mad:) We had a tank get obliterated because of that, but he got a brez and we did OK after that.
I like the call-out to the old Gruul fight, because this Gruul also has a petrifying slam attack. That was a blast from the past.
Oregorger seemed pretty easy. Not much to say, really. Pew-pew, break crates, don’t stand in bad stuff, don’t let him run you over.
The Blast Furnace was intimidating because of all the adds. Lots of adds. The bomb mechanic that somehow people didn’t understand (so bombs going off in the middle of packs of players, the raid phase not advancing because no one was blowing up the furnace heat regulators, etc.)
After that got figured out (a wipe is the best teacher), the next attempt just got bogged down on the raid not knowing kill priorities in the huge mob of adds.
The third run went well and cleanly, although about 1/3 of the raid went down. Some of that was bad luck, some bad execution, and some inferior gear. (I went in with ilvl 652 and I was one of the better geared. Probably because on a fresh reset night, most of the no-kidding raiders were no-kidding raiding.)
I easily soloed Huolon last night. I’m 100/ilvl 626 and he’s a cute li’l 92 rare elite with 442k HP, but it still kind of blew my mind that it was even possible. Wasn’t that long ago you needed a small army.
And thank god, since Timeless Isle is utterly deserted on my server. I want that mount!
I do too, but I really haven’t reconsidered going back. Not enough time, too much to do.
I did a bit of retro raiding last week, though. I never got Heroic ICC 10 while I was in the raiding group of my guild, so I went back and tried it.
It was kind of pitiful. Smoking bosses in seconds. I had to be careful not to kill too fast or else stuff would bug out.
I even managed to clear Valithria (green dragon you have to heal to full health). As a hunter. Solo. The secret sauce? A spirit beast with spirit mend. And bandages. (Couldn’t heal fast enough to get the achievement, but I’m sure I’ll be able to non-heroic.)
I’ll try 25-man some time. I actually have some of the achievements already for the meta, and I’ve done a non-heroic clear, so shouldn’t be hard. I probably need a real healer for Valithria 25-man, though, or at least for the achievement. But considering I didn’t think clearing that boss solo was even possible, it’s pretty remarkable.
I’ve been spending the majority of my WOW time this week doing the Lunar Festival achievements, which basically amounts to a really extensive “World Tour” encompassing dozens of locations. Plus dungeons.
I’ve spent a lot of my gametime the last few days on flight paths. On the bright side, I stopped playing WOW during WoLK and only came back towards the end of MoP, so I’ve very seldom wandered into the Cataclysm areas. I mainly skipped those levels by doing LFG dungeons. So it’s been interesting to revisit all the places I leveled in some 10 years ago, some places exactly the same, other places almost unrecognizable. Quiet little Dolanaar was just as I remembered it, from my very first day of playing, on the weekend of launch. 
It was pretty busy back then, of course.
The patch was released today, and I went around and collected the stuff to get my jukebox going, not that it seems very interesting or remotely necessary.
After being on my To-Do list for ages, yesterday I finally finished the Lorewalker rep and got my little flying cloud mount. I picked up the two riding Yak mounts as well, bringing me up to 145 mounts.
I’ve been doing a lot of archeology, as well, especially in Pandaria. It seems quicker to accumulate fragments when you can fly AND use the feather to zoom around. And many of the Pandaria dig sites are so tiny that you can finish them very quickly and move along to the next one. I’ve long hoped that I might get the Tol’Vir ultramarine battle tank mount. I’ve done about 75 solves for Tol’Vir now and haven’t gotten it yet, but I’ll keep after it. My luck is bound to change eventually.
My priest was trying last week to complete the Darkmoon Faire archaeology quest (15 fossil fragments), and I was going nuts after clearing one dig site after another, because she just could not spawn a fossil site (at one point, all four of her “active” sites were in Uldum).
I ended up hating the “old world” gigantic dig sites even more than I already did. It totally sucks when each and every fragment is “red” distance from the previous fragment. The worst offenders, and in these cases I accuse the devs of a complete lack of sense, are sites like the fossil digsite in Hillsbrad along the river, and the various night elf sites in Felwood.
In the case of Hillsbrad, once you take the “compressed” nature of the world into consideration (somebody figured out that, in-game, the Eastern Kingdoms are only about 14 miles long, from North to South, making the entire “continent” about the size of Manhattan*), that digsite is really several miles long. So if I start at the south end, how in hell am I “surveying” a fragment that is all the way at the north end? And in Felwood, how is it that I’m able to “survey” a fragment that is on the opposite side of this impenetrable mountain?
This is the basic problem I’ve had with Archaeology from the beginning: the fragments in a dig site don’t “spawn” all at once; they spawn one at a time. When you find the first fragment, the second one spawns. And so on. It’s the only explanation I have for the way the first fragment you find is completely on the opposite side from where you started, and then the second fragment is located right back where you started, and you’d think you would have found that one first. If all of the fragments would spawn at the same time, it would totally save the aggravation of constantly flying from one end of the site to the other, back and forth, back and forth …
I will give the devs credit - they seem to have recognized the problem and accordingly shrunk the size of the digsites in Pandaria … but why they didn’t go back and shrink down the sites in the Eastern Kingdoms, Kalimdor, Outland, and Northrend is beyond me (okay, I know it would have cost us a raid tier …)
- I don’t have the link handy, but this person made his determination by literally running a character, on foot, on the most direct route from Booty Bay to Silvermoon City, and assuming a typical jogging speed for an in-shape human and the ability to maintain that speed for the entire route. He timed how long it took, factored in the assumed jogging speed, and came up with about 14 miles.
I think the much faster method of this would have been to go to Pandaria and do a few dig sites. Then you crate a few artifacts, and then you sell those artifacts to Brann Bronzebeard at the Seat of Knowledge for a couple of crates of Fossil fragments. Voila!
You could even, if you wanted to be really lazy, trade a Spirit of Harmony to the trader in Shrine for 3 crates, if you wanted to get it done instantly.
I’m working on the Seat of Knowledge achievement while I’m digging in Panda (getting a Pristine version of each artifact, and I need about 8 more to be finished.) I suppose when I get that done, I’ll try to finish the Draenor Curator achievement (the same sort of thing - find umpteen Pristine artifacts to display in your trophy room in your Garrison) and then I’m going to be done with archeology for a long, long time.
I’ve got quite a few pristine Pandaria artifacts, but I’m not sure of my total. I have one from Draenor. I’ve done very little archaeology in Draenor, because this is the lone instance where I miss being able to fly. Most of the Draenor digsites I’ve found are on uneven terrain, meaning that my telescope is pointing me to the top of a cliff, and I have to make a long, roundabout run to get up there. Too aggravating.
Other way around, alas… 3 Spirits of Harmony for 1 crate.
I know this intimately because I burned through my main’s substantial back inventory of Harmony (both Spirits and Motes) getting crated artifacts to buy Explorer’s Notebooks to get garrison follower archaeology missions. Because achievement.
(At 3 three Spirits per crate and 5 crates per Notebook, it’s brutal. Of course, Spirits are no longer soulbound, so if you have gold you can essentially buy the achievement on the AH.)
I did a fair bit of MoP archaeology, but I’m still several pristine commons short of complete… and I think a rare or two short as well.
Archaeology in WoD is just painful. I really prefer to fly in, do my digging, and fly out. In WoD, you actually have to kill your way in (on foot or land mount), clear mobs, and try to search between mob fights (respawns or pathing in). Since the crates you get for crating Pandaria artifacts are the same as for Draenor, I guess if I get serious about the achievement I’ll do Pandaland instead, because it’s just easier and (probably) quicker.
is surprisingly cool.
I have been despairing of ever finding an ore trader in my main’s garrison in the rotation of NPC guests. This toon is an engineer and a hunter, and two of his best pieces of gear are the engineering crafted gun helmet (maximum upgraded for 6.0, but only 3/4 after 6.1 dropped). I needed that damn ore vendor to get the schematics to create upgrades to 4/4 for those slots. I never saw her.
(Uncle Saurfang visited a lot. I am highly honored, High Overlord, but could you please visit a little less often than three times a week, and send that ore vendor over if you see her? :smack: kthxbye.)
So, I decided to try the “Find a group for random purposes other than raids or instances”, and the option that pretty much meant “really random purposes, rather than old raids and such”.
A little text searching of the resulting group list uncovered a lot of people who very kindly opened up the hospitality of their Level 3 garrisons to visitors, and who had the ore vendor up at that moment. SCORE!
Join the group (the host/group leader was set to auto-accept all invites), switch to leader’s garrison, and BAM. It’s not Uncle Varok any more, it’s that ore vendor. YAAY! 
While I’m at it, “/target soulare”… well, they have a Soulare of Andorhal garrison follower! “/tired” and I get the nifty (and otherwise hard to get) Wayfarer’s Bonfire toy. Now I can take down my own Tavern and stop my futile weekly quest to get that follower myself, for the sole purpose of getting that toy. (Replaced it with a Trading Post, ultimately. Because I need to replace the grind for the Steamwheedle Preservation Society with another, and the Laughing Skull orcs are the logical choice. Not to mention the economic opportunities the TP offers supporting my own tradeskills.)
While I was visiting the garrison, I found and /wave’d to our host and got the Garrison Buddies achievement as well.
Moral of the story: random grouping for garrison stuff is AWESOME.
Agreed, this is a pretty awesome tool. Personally its been great for me to find groups for trapping elite beasts for leather. Usually no problem to find a group while flying to Nagrand, or creating your own. and after about 15-20 mins of running around chain pulling the beasts you have enough trapped for 2 weeks worth of work orders.
I had a really lucky past few days for mount collecting. After camping a few Zandalari Warbringers, I got quite a pile of those 1000 Rep tokens for factions that I wasn’t exalted with already. So I got 3 new mounts from Golden Lotus (the cranes), 3 more from Shado Pan (the tigers) and one from the August Celestials (the August wind serpent).
Also, the Warbringer eventually dropped a Slate Primordial Direhorn. All of that put me over the 150 mark, which also awarded the Jade Pandaren Kite mount.
Nine new mounts in 2 days - been a long time since I had so many new ones at once.
I finally got around to trying LFR Iron Assembly.
Actually rather fun. No too many deaths, and the mechanics are fairly clean and survivable. I had some problems with Operator Thogar, but that’s what I get for playing on the tracks. (I got hit by trains three times, but I’ll claim that lag was responsible for at least two of them.)
My mouse died in the middle of the Iron Maidens fight, so I was pretty much immobilized and got killed by ground crap. That doesn’t explain why the rest of the raid died less than 15 seconds later, so I guess my mouse wasn’t the only problem I had.
The wipe recovery bought me the time to grab another mouse and get it connected and set up. We cleared that fight the next shot, and I looted the doohickey for the third quest for the current stage of the legendary ring line. That just leaves grinding several hundred more elemental runes. Man, you need a lot of those.
I know, 900 of the things! I need to buckle down and work on getting as many of those per week as I possibly can, because otherwise I’ll still be farming them this Christmas.
I have around 200 so far, mostly from my Garrison and the occasional LFR run. The legendary “showdown” seems to get harder with every Chapter, though, so I’m not even sure that I’ll be able to beat the next one. The last one (chasing down and killing the mob in the cave near Khadgar) was way past my skill level, though I eventually scraped a pass after about 10 attempts. Although my gear has improved somewhat (iLvl 653) since then, so maybe that will help.
Congratulations!
There’s a total of 3 Direhorn mounts that drop off the Warbringers – Slate, Amber, and Jade. You can tell which one they have a chance of dropping by looking at the one they’re riding.