Could be nice for an elemental shaman (don’t they get mail at level 40?)
That’s what I was going to post. Yes, shamans get mail at 40.
I had tour guide for a while, but this was well after I’d become fairly familiar with most of the quests in all of the newbie zones, and I found that I was doing a lot more running around if I followed TG exclusively because it had me doing things that were widely separated consecutively instead of simply grabbing and doing all the quests in one area (say, Sen’jin Village) before going off to to quests in another area (Razor Hill). It had me going back and forth, apparently going strictly by quest level. It just didn’t strike me as very efficient.
This is why I like QuestHelper - it has you do your quests in a pretty efficient order to reduce running back and forth, and you can adjust the level filter so it will only point you to do quests that are 1 level above your, or 2, or 3 or whatever you set it at.
I find its ordering algorithm to be suspect at times, though. If I’m in location A, it’ll tell me the next objective is at location B, and from there I should go to C, D, then back to A. During transit to or upon reaching B, suddenly it’ll decide I need to go to F next instead. It doesn’t always happen, but it happens enough that I generally ignore the order of quests and decide that for myself. Everything else it does is very very handy, though, and the recent update of coloring in the areas where I can complete the next objective is really nice.
Yes, but if that happens I just tell QH to ignore whatever quest I don’t want to do at that time. There are also occasional glitches when it will send me on a quest inside a dungeon that I would need a group for.
One thing I love (and this is with or without QH) is coming back into town and handing in five or six quests at once. Whee!
Absolutely, especially in the early levels. I’ve been playing my baby Druid off and on in Bloodmyst Isle, and there’s something very satisfying about gaining a level through rested XP, then returning to base and handing in enough quests to gain almost another level right there.
It’s because they’re the earliest ones you can get. People gouge on the price. Hell, I’ve seen white (or sometimes even gray) shoulders and helms for the minimum level going for ridiculous prices.
That’s the AH for you: it’s all about timing. You can list a bunch of something for weeks and have it keep getting returned to you, and then suddenly someone needs it and they buy up everything in sight.
I re-prioritize quests a decent amount of the time. (Right-click on a map objective, go the option called something like “Priority,” and adjust accordingly.) I can’t wait until they bring the “/qh find” option back, though (unless they did with the latest version), even if they just start with coordinates instead of NPC names.
Took me five minutes of Googling to figure out what the heck ToC is. Everything either linked me to Warcraft Table of Contents files or to forums where everybody knows the abbreviations and never spells it out.
Anyway, how good do you have to be with jousting to run Trial of Champions? We can’t get broadband out at my house (no cable TV, DSL, etc.), so my Internet is satellite, which has a latency of 800 to 1200 ms. I tried jousting a couple of times and just couldn’t react fast enough. Do I need to hang out after work and use my office computer to joust for a while before being able to run it?
It’s not that big of a deal. If your connection sucks, just hang back and take shots when you can; let your group know what your issue is. The jousting portion is that three groups of three go out, one group at a time - just charge as often as you can and keep your 3 shields up. Perhaps in your situation, you might find just shield breaking for your teammates to be better. When you have all 3 unhorsed, the next group goes. If you get too beat up, ride over to a spare mount (while your mount still has enough life in him to get there) and click over to the spare to get a fresh one. After the third group, then the three bosses come out and joust. After all three are unhorsed, everyone gets dumped off their mounts and the fight starts in earnest.
Unlike most instances, you can run back inside during a “boss fight”, so use that to your advantage if need be.
I made myself an Endless Mana Potion and an Endless Healing Potion. Now I don’t have to carry around all those other healing and mana potions, though I do keep certain other potions around. They’re alchemist-only, however. The SO was very jealous when I showed him. I also have been profiting very well from three new recipes I learned in Dalaran: Transmute Titanium (8 Saronite Bars=1 Titanium Bar), Skyflare Diamond, and Earthsiege Diamond. I’ve almost maxed my Alchemy. It’s at 435 now, IIRC, and I should be able to hit 450 by the weekend at least.
I’m trying to make flasks and transmutes since they’re the only things left that give me skillups, but the flasks aren’t as easy since all of them (I think) require Frost Lotus, which is selling for 20 to 25 gold for one on my server. They don’t appear often out in the world; sometimes you get one when you pick a Lichbloom. I’m still saving for Cold Weather Flying so I am trying to do the most profitable things now and the flasks aren’t that at the moment.
Whoops, mea culpa.
You can completely blow. If your group wipes before you take all three named jousters off their mounts, when you zone back in, they’ll all be dismounted. It will also reset them if you just all zone out. (I’m not sure what would happen if you wiped on the unnamed adds that you start with.)
We usually have the person with the least jousting experience work as our “trampler.” When you’re fighting the three named jousters, any time one of them is unhorsed, you have to keep running over them to keep them on the ground, or they’ll walk over to a new mount and you’ll have to kill them again. (Not from 100% HP, though, fortunately.) You kill the jousters as close together as possible, and the trampler just rides back and forth over them, spamming their #2 ability (Shield Breaker?) at whatever jousters are still up.
Depending on how often you use those, you might want to just use Crazy Alch. IIRC the Endless versions give you significantly less HP/Mana. Of course, you still have to pick up the Goldclover to make the Crazy Alch ones.
All flasks require 1 Frost Lotus. AFAIK, Frost Lotus can drop off of any Northrend herb, but it has a higher chance to drop off the higher level ones, so farm as much Lichbloom and Icethorn as you can. In Freya’s room in Ulduar, there are actually Frost Lotus plants, which I nearly peed myself over the first time I was in there. (Aaaaaand I was the only Herbalist in the group!)
Not to mention that you get two flasks from one combine, and that alchemists have the effect for double the time.
I’d been using the Mad Alchemist’s Potions ever since I learned them, actually. I do keep a few around now but I don’t need to use them as much now as I used to.
I’m in Storm Peaks now and picking like mad. I often start to saunter toward an herb, see a mob in my path, and send my pet after it so I can pick the herb in peace.
Okay, I’d completely forgotten about the shaman’s Earth Shock and Lightning Bolt spells doing nature damage. The Lightning Bolt in particular kind of crossed me up - every other fantasy game I’ve played, including Diablo II, classifies lightning-based spells as “lightning/electricity damage”; of course, WoW doesn’t have “lightning damage” per se, but I guess my brain figured it would be counted as fire damage or something.
Yeah, in newbie zones it’s not that much of a help, just because of the limited number of quests. But I think the point of TG becomes more clear at higher levels. From what I’ve seen so far, if you follow the sequence of action it suggests you find yourself turning in a large number of quests in the same location all at once, whereupon a number of other quests become available in that location. In some places it has you accept Quests A, B, and C (while ignoring other nearby questgivers), then directs you to go work on Quest B, which puts you in close proximity of the “out in the world” NPC who hands out Quest D, who sends you to talk to Questgiver E, who wants to send you back to town, and who happens to be in close proximity to the mobs you need to kill for Quest A, who are also near the mobs for Quest C. Then once you’ve gotten what you need for Quests A and C, it sends you back to town where you get to hand in Quests A, B, C and E all at once, triggering a new sequence of quests.
So what it’s really doing is cutting out the guesswork and greatly reducing the amount of running back and forth you might otherwise do. I suppose if you’re intimately familiar with a zone and already know where all the different mobs and “out of town” questgivers are, you could probably figure out an efficient path for yourself, and in that case QuestHelper is probably just as useful, But the one problem I’ve found with QH is that, barring manually assigning priorities to quests, it almost always points at whatever goal is closest to your current location and, importantly, only for quests that are already in your quest log, and without regard to whether a quest is too high-level for you at the moment. Also, QH doesn’t show you the level of a quest until you’ve already accepted it, which can result in a log full of quests that are currently too high-level for you (hello Stranglethorn Vale! My past experience in Grom’Gol has shown me that I get there, complete the first few quests that are offered which happen to be close to my character level, and then the next quests in the chains leap up by several levels and are too difficult to do right now, so they sit there in my log while I wander around trying to locate more appropriate quests).
What TG does is try put you on the most efficient path while keeping your log uncluttered. By directing you to take only certain quests, you keep you log limited to just those that you can actually do right now. Then it will direct you to accept one particular quest, which is level-appropriate and which sends you to an area where you can pick up more level-appropriate quests. Of course, the flip-side of finding yourself under-leveled for the nearby quests is finding yourself over-leveled for the nearby quests. And if you’re over-leveling the quests you’re not getting maximum XP, so at some point TG will just have you ignore the remaining quests in a location and will send you elsewhere. This also eliminates the problem of “Okay, I’ve hit level 31 … let’s see, there are six zones labeled as being ‘Level 31-40’ … which one do I go to, and where do I find the questgivers there who will give me level-31 quests?” TG will point you right to them, and will probably first point you to an NPC in your current zone who wants to send you to them.
TG also points you at obscure questgivers you might otherwise miss. It pointed one of my draenei toons to a questgiver on Silvermyst Isle (the little island off the SW of Azuremyst) I never even knew existed (the daughter of that sad nelf fisherman who thinks his whole family is dead - you get to escort her back to him). The quest reward was something I would have found extremely useful had I gotten it at the appropriate level. I was sure I had done every single quest in that zone, but it turned out I hadn’t.
The current problem I’m having is that, no matter where I am, it insists on pointing my main to various flight points and zone borders to do that Betrayal quest in Zul’Drak. Even if I’m currently in, say, Tanaris or even Shattrath. This, regardless of how many times I’d directed QH to ignore that particular quest/location - it always comes back each time I log that toon in.
I really like that new feature. Before I’d always run to the spot indicated on the map, and then aimlessly wander around trying to locate the target mob, or wondering why the hell it wasn’t spawning. Like the quest from Priestess A’moora in Darnassus to kill that spider matriarch, Lady Mynamesoundstoomuchlikeshattrathtoremember. The mob actually has three different places it can spawn, but previous versions of QH only indicated the nearest spawn point and gave no indication there were other possible locations. The first time I did that quest I camped that one spot for nearly an hour.
Huh. I’d just never seen that happen before. On the other hand, there does seem to be a dearth of low-level gear on the Alliance AH on Lightbringer lately. My ~20th-level toons have had a hard time finding anything even for sale, at any price.
But saronite ore? That’s always seemed to be a consistent quick-seller. I send it to my AH alt, she posts it, and collects the money the next day. Every time. But then my main tries to sell it herself, and it doesn’t sell. Every time. So she sends it to the alt, who sells it in a day. More random weirdness, I guess.
I was having this problem, too, until I activated the zone filter… so now it only directs me to quests that I can complete in the zone I’m currently in. But yeah, it’s not perfect.
The command is **/qh filter zone **for anyone who’s curious. Very useful. (One of my other favorites is **/qh solo **to toggle solo mode, which will include or ignore the quest objectives of people you’re partied with.)
On my server (Khaz Modan), I was doing that with saronite at 25G a stack or so. This last few weeks, people have been posting it for 15G a stack (I’ve seen it as low as 12G), and I’m just sitting on it waiting for the price to go back up.
The prices of most of the low-end Northrend herbs have crashed in the last month, too. I’m getting half what I was for tiger lily and such. Frost lotus has held its price, though.
I don’t have the Crazy Alchemist’s Potion recipe yet, since I’ve only done Northrend Alchemy Research once. I should finally be able to try it again tonight.
Dogwhistles, actually, and they were drops from somewhere, but I don’t remember where.