Added the Bloodhoof Bull mount off Nakk the Thunderer this weekend, as well as the Crazy Carrot pet. Still searching for the Edge of Reality scenario for the mount.
I also condensed my alts and rolled my first Alliance characters in years. I now have a Human Monk and a Worgen 'lock. Haven’t leveled Alliance since I got my Nelf Rogue to 70, the then-cap.
To stay sane, I’m not going to invest so much in this toon – no seeking out and completing every single quest, no hunting down every recipe, no trying to get the best gear before I’m 100, if I even get that far. So far, the Monk is pretty fun – already got her to lvl 11.
I will definitely be taking advantage of my battlegroup’s Alliance dominance – I like the Horde, but losing gets old fast.
The only thing new was a companion pet for 100 chocolates. So I went to Falconwing Square, the place to hunt [del]Easter[/del] Noblegarden eggs for Blood Elves. It was very low population, so it went fast. Grabbed egg spawns as fast as I could move. It was great. Where was this past years, when I was grinding the mount and the other stuff?
The pet in question is just a companion, not a battle pet, so not very practical. If you’ve leveled a Blood Elf, or visited a BE town (easier for Horde, but Outland has some too), you’ll see floating flowerpots. That’s what this pet is.
(There’s no logical reason a floating flowerpot couldn’t be a battle pet, but Blizz decided it wasn’t.) Oh, well. At least by gotta-catch-'em-all compulsion is satisfied.
One of the more amusing things I did while gathering eggs was planting an Automated Critter Defense Cannon close to one of the egg spawns. It fired pretty much continuously, blowing up the little bunny critters spawned occasionally by looting an egg. When I set it, there must have been three dozen rabbits loping around. But not after!
(Has no effect on PCs transformed into bunnies, alas. I don’t really appreciate competition. )
Same thing, except I also got the black bunny ears. Falconwing Square’s the tits – you can run laps around the fountain, and then circle the fountain for moar eggz. Took me 30 minutes to get 150 chocolates, and most of that time was spent opening the nonstacking eggs.
I also let my inner completionist run mad over acquiring all the Horde followers, and wound up getting all of the easily-acquired ones except Dark Ranger Velonara. Her contract is not sold by the NPC (I have the Smuggler’s Den in Spires of Arak) and I’ve read about others having the same problem, so I’m guessing it’s a bug. Kind of annoying, but I’ll distract myself with upgrading my 8 new followers. I also bumped up my War Mill to level 3 and unlocked the NPC that trades upgrade tokens for Iron Horde scraps. I’ve got 1700 of those things, so my guys should be 100/675 soon.
After reading that description, and viewing it on WoWHead, I have no doubt that I will find my friend, Nunepi, on Lightbringer, sleeping on the bank steps in Stormshield with that pet floating beside her.
I first met Nunepi way back during Wrath of the Lich King. I finally got my first character to level 80 (my human female paladin, Eilyssana), and there was Nunepi, a female gnome rogue with the pink hair and big pigtails (“Boartails”, as the style is called), sleeping, naked, on the steps in front of the “Alliance” bank.
Nunepi is one of the “characters” on Lightbringer. During WotLK, I got into the habit of placing a Tiny Green Ragdoll or Tiny Blue Ragdoll next to her sleeping form, when I passed her little passed-out body on the steps. Over the intervening years, I’ve cast various buffs on her, and she almost always stands up and /cheers at me when I do so (telling me that she recognizes me as well as I do her).
Looking Nunepi up in the armory revealed to me that her player had created a large number of alts, all female gnomes, all looking exactly like Nunepi, but of different classes.
I finally got around to messaging Nunepi during Mists of Pandaria. As I suspected, Nunepi was played by a dude. We’ve had some nice conversations. And he’s still doing his usual thing: leaving Nunepi sleeping, naked, on the bank steps. Yet he still has all of the achievements.
Someday I’ll find the patience to grind away at the rest of the archaeology I haven’t done yet. (Not that one, or a Crawling Claw, or Sandstone Drake, or Zin’Rokh… quite a few of the original rares, in fact, let alone the Pandaria or Draenor ones)
Yay! I actually managed to snag that mount fairly early during Cataclysm. But my main, an alchemist, has still never found the recipe for that damned dragon mount …
Today I finally got around to soloing the Gruul’s Lair and Magtheridon’s Lair raids, leaving only Karazhan to complete for the Outland Raider achievement. The first boss in Gruul’s Lair did the same thing to me that the first token-dropping boss in Hyjal did: he dropped three identical shoulder tokens, which token wasn’t for a paladin. So I’ll have to go back again. At least that raid isn’t the PITA that The Battle for Hyjal was to solo. I swear I had to go through the Hyjal raid five times to get the right token from the second boss.
I’ve been grinding away at archeology so much lately, that now that I finally found what I was looking for, I’m not sure what to do with myself!
In the process of getting the bug mount, I also got every Pandaria archeology achievement, though I’m still missing a handful of older ones, and most of the Draenor ones. Not sure if I have the stamina to keep going until I get Draenor Curator, that achievement just looks very unattainable. And there’s no mount or anything tempting to keep me chipping away at it, really.
My mount collection is getting close to 170, and I’m not really sure which faction I should tackle next - anyone have any advice for fast-tracking with the Tillers?
The Tillers dailies are worth 1075 rep a day. Each plot you harvest each day is worth 50 rep, so that’s up to 800 rep a day for a full-sized farm.
As you expand your farm, make sure you buy the farm improvements (the sprinkler, the pest repeller, the plow) because the purchased items are actually quest starter items, and the associated quest is more Tillers rep. (Not to mention making farming a lot easier)
Once you get to revered, spend 50 gold on a Grand Commendation of the Tillers, which doubles faction reputation gains with the Tillers from that point onward, and on all your alts. At least that will make the Exalted grind less grindy.
Well, I finally finished Chapter III of the legendary ring quest chain on my main last night. (The only thing outstanding was a 10-rune shortfall (890 out of 900 needed to make three elemental tablets to turn in for this quest). I got those last ten, not in a Blackrock Foundry LFR run (as would be customary for me), but one of the garrison missions that can award the runes. Kind of anticlimactic, but I’ve grown a little tired of BRF LFR anyway.
The after-quest to free Garona from Gul’dan’s domination (and acquire her as a garrison follower) is, frankly, a pain in the butt. I forget who, but one of our illustrious SDMBer WoW players once complained bitterly about fake difficulty: making quests artificially difficult with bogus mechanics for no reason than to say they’re difficult. This quest doesn’t allow you to use any of your class’ abilities, and saddles you with an unreliable mechanism to try to advance through it. If you think of Metal Gear Solid, that’s kind of what this is like. Except you can’t shoot anyone. Which, for a hunter, is about as wrong as it gets. :mad:
I have no idea why Blizzard felt the need to implement a completely different game within WoW, and make it mandatory for progress through the legendary sequence.
I frankly exploited around it, after reading up on how to ditch the unwieldy fake-difficulty mechanic and use my character’s own abilities to accomplish the actual quest goals. I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizz hotfixes that so you can’t do it anymore, because sadism. So hurry up and get through the legendary questline to the end of the 6.1 content before Blizz closes the loophole and restores mandatory joylessness.
Speaking of the legendary quest line, if I go ahead and do the initial quest, will that get Khadgar’s Servant out of my garrison? I just find it so annoying having him wandering around, giving the tour to the exact same two NPCs.
I think so. On the three lvl 100s I have that have done or are doing the legendary chain, I don’t recall seeing it wandering around my garrison any longer.
As much purely hands-on stuff I have to do in the garrison (“I’m the commander, and the only miner and herbalist that can actually gather anything, and the primary combat defender, etc.”), I’d love to be able to yell at the flunkies Khadgar’s Servant is leading around and get them back to work.
Double-ditto for the various peons sleeping on the job. Dammit, the main psychological benefit of (Horde-style) leadership is the ability to directlymotivate the workers! Why am I not able to do this?
I really have to admire your patience. I have tried, TRIED, to summon the patience to go the full 10 resets per hour you’re allowed. But I never have. It’s just SOOO MUCH RUNNING AROUND. For no purpose. Plus that damn-hell annoying trap chamber with the bugs or rats or whatever. (Or the long way 'round, great.)
It was a great instance at-level.* It’s tedium incarnate even when you can bypass almost every mob. Plus having to run the entire boring way back to reset.
I think the boring run-back is what finally destroys my will to reset and try again.
Anyways, extreme congratulations. You’ll never have to set foot in that blighted hellhole again!
*TBH, I liked it even more in vanilla, when Strath was one big happy instance. Our guild even had non-standard naming for it: “Left Strath” for the Scarlet Crusade half, and “Right Strath” for the undead side.
I am so grateful to be finally done with it. I wanted to get the mount so bad, but like you said, the grind was just awful with all that running around. Unlock the gates. Can’t skip any bosses. Backtracking. Locating the treasure chest. The bug trap. The room at the end with a dozen or so patchwork horrors that can not be quickly Battle Horned or grouped together 90% of the time you have to go chase one or two of them. Then wait for the 30 or 40 Mindless Undead to swarm you. Finally killing Rivendare and then the stupidly long run-out. Reset. Sell off the junk, auction the worthwhile items. It just takes forever. Even running around at full speed, I never did hit the 10-instance lockout with Strat, even grinding it for multiple hours in a row. I’m pretty sure that even my speediest runs were in the 7-8 minute range. And even if you DID manage a 6-minute run, there’s still the selling off of the loot after every run - Og help you if you don’t have the mammoth vendor mount.
This last grind session today that finally produced the mount, happened by chance. I needed to get Exalted with the Tushui Pandaren faction on a particular toon for the Pandaren Ambassador achievement. So I bought a tabard, and figured I’d grind it out in Strat so I’d have a chance at the mount while I was at it. I hit Revered at the same time Rivendare finally dropped the mount.
I’d seen him drop his epic weapon 3 times, and each time had a heart attack when I saw the purple drop instead of blue, and then was disappointed. Today when I saw purple my first reaction was to not get too stoked because it was probably just the weapon again. :rolleyes:
As much as I’ve complained about the tedium of that run and de-prioritized that grind compared to other mount sources (raid and heroic meta achievements, f’r’instance) I may have to go back and try that more.
My 9-year-old daughter plays her own little alt occasionally on my account: a cute little human hunter. (Level 30 at this moment.)
This child of mine is completely horse-crazy, so the toon started out as a way of just riding around the many interesting mounts I’ve accumulated. But she spotted another Alliance player rampaging around on what looks like a Forsaken skeletal warhorse and disclaimed that it was unfair that that guy was on a Horde mount and she couldn’t.
It wasn’t a Forsaken warhorse. It was Rivendare’s charger. :rolleyes:
So I guess for her sake I’ll resume that terrible terrible grind. Daughters will do that to you: melt your brains and make you do things you can’t stand doing.
Made another run through Gruul’s Lair yesterday, and the first boss dropped exactly the same three not-usuable-by-paladins shoulder tokens (Fallen Hero; I need Fallen Champion) that he dropped on my first attempt last week.
And … made my first attempt at clearing Kharazan. I can see why that place has so much nostalgia value. It’s probably the most amazing-looking old raid I’ve been into. Alas, I was completely stumped by the chess event. Is that thing even soloable? I mean, I figured out what I was supposed to be doing, sort of, but I could barely see what I was doing because I couldn’t find a decent camera angle, and then I simply could not get my “pieces” to move forward.
I got “Little Red Riding Hood” in the Opera event. That was fun!
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