Tunnels of Doom

I hit level 80 on Saturday night questing around in Icecrown which was what I intended but not exactly what I expected. My expectations were that I’d take the earliest opportunity to head over to Vashj’ir or Hyjal around, oh, 78-79. But I got kind of caught up in the questing in Icecrown even though I breezed through most of it and honestly I didn’t go when I first hit level 78 because I made a strange decision at that moment to try and catch my Blacksmithing skill up to a reasonable stage which caused me to stall at level 78 for days on end while I flew around Nagrand mining Fire and Earth Motes.

My rationale for working on Blacksmithing was that I was making a lot of progress on my other profession—especially Mining which, along with First Aid, I find ridiculously easy to level. The Cooking and Fishing dailies in both Orgrimmar and Dalaran did a lot toward moving those both along (actually I credit the Pilgrim’s Bounty requirements for most of my Cooking progress) so all that was left was poor Blacksmithing which, if you don’t keep it fairly even with your mining and therefore your current zone ore supplies, is a chore to level. One nice thing about Mining is that the mats from it sell for a grip on the Auction House. One bad thing about that is if you ever want to fast-track your Blacksmithing you end up paying those same prices you enjoy gouging other customers for the rest of the time. Since I’m a cheapskate I end up low-level farming for things like Mithril in Thousand Needles so I can make useles-to-me boots and greaves that either sell for a few gold to vendors or run up my re-listing fees on the AH. It’s pretty frustrating but I was so sick of profiting off my Mining mats and occasionally deciding to check on Blacksmithing only to discover I’d sold everything I needed to skill up the day before, I decided I needed to buckle down and make it a conscious decision.

I’m still a few Adamantite runs from getting up to the Wrath-level in my Blacksmithing skill but fortunately I’m not that far off and I at least learned my lesson and started saving all those Cobalt and Saronite bars instead of trying to make a quick buck off them and having to go back and re-farm later. But in between farming ore, dailies, cash generation (mostly from gems) and the general twiddling around that seems to define a lot of the game I was able to take some questing breaks and hit the Wrath level cap. I’d say that I immediately ran out and grabbed Cataclysm but the truth is I bought it long before that point. My rationale was that I wanted to fly in Azeroth to speed up some of the basic activities plus I was hitting skill level caps with possible skill ups being lost due to not having access to Illustrious Grand Master ranks but honestly I really just wanted to confirm for myself that I was ready to go whenever I managed to ding 80.

So, I’m 80 now. When it was time over the weekend to check out a new leveling zone I don’t know why but I picked Vashj’ir first. This was a weird decision because I have a really bizarre phobia about undersea visuals (for example, a slew of images that give me the über-wiggins can be found on this Google images page) and Vashj’ir is, well, it’s all underwater. I dunno, I guess it was because when I flew over the southwestern corner of Mount Hyjal as part of an Archeology profession run it looked very similar to other things I’d seen and done previously in WoW. So I went under the sea. Predictably it kind of freaked me out especially once I got to the point where you get the Seahorse mount and as it was touring around the zone while I tried the mini-game to break it and make it tame, I caught a glimpse of the massive and super creepy looking Whale Shark and I decided, “I’ve got to get out of here, I’m going to have nightmares.” And I did have nightmares. I may need therapy.

Now I may actually have stayed and just manned up about it but I was compelled to leave Vashj’ir for another more directly game-related reason: I found the zone to be ridiculously difficult. Part of it is certainly the three-dimensionality to the zone: Naga cruising around overhead were constantly going aggro on me and rushing down when I really needed to be using a bandage or eating. It was hard for me to get used to watching not just my immediate vicinity on the ground but also checking over my head for possible mob attacks. If it had added just an interesting new challenge to the mix that would have been one thing but it felt like it was just brutally difficult and no fun at all to constantly be ghost running and paying for repairs. No thanks. And maybe it was because I was a fresh 80 and not someone who’d dinged 80 back in 2008 and spent the last two years building up raid gear or honor grinding for top tier stuff but the overall difficulty curve between level 80 mobs from Icecrown and level 80 mobs from Vashj’ir felt wildly uneven. I could chain kill Scourge mobs from the Fleshworks using Victory Rush to restore my health to at least 90% after a 1-on-1 fight and I could maintain three or four simultaneously attacking mobs without dropping pretty easily. Once I got to Vashj’ir I’d have 20-30% health after each mob (not enough for Victory Rush to make up the difference) and if I pulled aggro on a second before the first was less than 15% health, it was pretty much curtains for me.

Between the frustration and the creepiness of it all, I bailed on Vashj’ir and went to Hyjal instead which I’m glad I did because once I bothered to do the entry quest where you get to see Deathwing and the rise of Ragnaros, it was clear Hyjal was going to be suitably epic for my run toward 85 and in fact I think Hyjal is going to be much more lore-heavy which is what I really like/want anyhow so it all works out there.

It turns out I kind of like the approach of letting my character level advance in bursts as opposed to steadily. While it’s been something of a hassle to work on Blacksmithing one thing that has been fun is how it’s forced me back into Outland where I’ve gotten a new respect for zones like Nagrand, Blade’s Edge Mountains and even Zangarmarsh (which I really enjoyed the first time through). I tend to treat the dailies, auction house fiddling, skill training, and achievement hunting as kind of my ceaseless To-Do list of stuff I want to ultimately accomplish and the questing is the real task at hand which everything is built around. That means I don’t really worry much about my XP/hour stat because some sessions I’ll knock out two dozen quests in an hour or two and other times I’ll play for longer than that like on a weekend night after the family is asleep and do very little other than fly around for hours and post a couple things onto the auction house.

I also rolled a Worgen (Priest, in this case) and worked up to about level 8 (which, based on the number of level 6-9 characters I have is about my one-session limit) so I could experience the starting story/zone. It’s simply fantastic what they’ve accomplished in terms of storytelling with this sequence and while I’m pretty focused on getting my main to 85 so I can actually enjoy and engage in some end-game activities for once, I’m anxious to get back to the Worgen because I really like this character and I’m intrigued to see the game from the Alliance side for once.

Blood Bowl

I actually have another game to talk about this week: I had a chance to play Blood Bowl on Xbox Live against Doctor Mac for half a match anyway. I brought in my Skaven (Nimh Conpoops) against his Lizardman team which in retrospect I probably should have picked an unfamiliar team of scrubs since he’s new to the game and a couple of my Gutter Runners are just insanely overpriced with five and six skills each which means even with the inducements it’s kind of hard to defend against a one-turn scorer. And of course not knowing the teams meant he left an opening for me, I got the Quick Snap roll and did score in one turn. Overall the game works great on Live although the omission of online leagues is both puzzling and a hugely missed opportunity.

The one problem I know the game has is that it isn’t quite transparent enough about what it’s doing or, sometimes more pertinently, what it isn’t doing. I lost a turn because it isn’t intuitive how to declare a blitz and a pass action on the same turn and as a result I left my ball carrier more or less defenseless due to an interface issue that I never would have had to worry about in a tabletop environment. For that reason alone I think there needs to be either a take-back option or at the very least an action preview that goes into more depth about what is supposed to happen on that turn than the current system conveys. I think by and large no one wants to win based on a mistake in the controls by the other player; they want to win based on strategy mistakes executed with the best intentions but either undesirable or unfortunate outcomes. Which is why, ultimately, I think Blood Bowl for PC (even the recently released PC-only Legendary edition) is a great fill-in for fans of the game but will never actually replace the tabletop game.

One minor downside of this Doctor Mac/Blood Bowl development is that I was planning to let my Live subscription lapse and now I’m finding a new reason to renew it. Curse you Microsoft and your payment model!

There was a point in the last week or so when I thought I might actually have a chance to be leveled appropriately for the new Cataclysm content on the day it came out. Granted, this would have been a strictly technical appropriateness since the new zones of Mount Hyjal and Vashj’ir are theoretically 78-82ish and there was a chance I’d make it to 78. Realistically you’d want to be level 80 though and I knew that wasn’t going to happen, despite my very calculated efforts to level as efficiently and quickly as possible.

In the end I made it to level 75 last night as people were out shivering in the cold waiting for midnight releases to buy the game which was pretty good (three high level dings in about a week considering the relatively limited amount of time I can put into the game) so I’m reasonably sure that by the time I scratch together the real-world money to buy the expansion I’ll be sufficiently max leveled. What I felt was a more impressive feat was that I also picked up Artisan Flying for my (discounted!) 4,000 gold. I guess you could infer from this that the Auction House madness I engaged in as of last update worked although it wasn’t as easy as making that initial run and then sitting back watching the gold roll in. In fact I did almost all of my leveling in Borean Tundra (minus the 74-75 span which I’ll get to in a minute) specifically so I could stay near Warsong Hold and its ready access to the Orgrimmar Zeppelin because I had a circuitous route around the zone that would allow me to make semi-regular stops back in Org to babysit my auctions, offload the new acquisitions on the AH and also pick up the Cooking and Fishing dailies. I prefer to do the quests rather than actually level either profession the regular way because frankly I find fishing in particular to be vindictively boring and both daily quests offer not only some reasonable currency and XP rewards but profession skill bumps as well.

I had thought that I’d end up making the bulk of my cash via the big ticket items I had: Pristine Black Diamonds, stacks of Hardened Adamantite Bars I’d been laboriously creating, etc. In the end I found that selling lots of lower end stuff was far more reliable and profitable: I offloaded a bunch of linen stacks, Thorium Bars, Fel Iron Ore and other comparatively easy to come by items for a much higher profit margin simply because it moved quickly and without any price compromises or re-listing fees. I knew it would be a learning process but I had hoped to be pleasantly surprised with a few set-it-and-forget-it massive sales and that wasn’t really the case. The good news is that I’m getting better at it fairly quickly and even after spending all 4,000 of the gold I had almost as soon as I earned the last copper piece I spent the next hour or so before I logged off for the night wrapping up some quests so I could move on to the next zone and I had made nearly 200 gold in just that short span so hopefully by the time I get to level 80 I’ll be ready for Grand Master Flying.

So speaking of that last zone: After I finished up in the Borean Tundra, which I liked very much, I went to Dragonblight to drop off a go-talk-to quest and I remember thinking that my stay was going to be brief because the place hadn’t really impressed me when I did my initial flyover for the exploration achievement. I think for one thing I didn’t get the sense that this was such a key location in Northrend because the one complaint I have about it is that it’s listed as a level 71-80 zone which is a huge span comparable for non-starting areas only to the old pre-Cataclysm Barrens (I think that went from level 10 through 25) and perhaps Hellfire Peninsula in Burning Crusade which is technically listed as 58-70 but as more or less a starting zone I think is kind of stretching it to say there’s much of anything to do there beyond maybe level 66. It’s likely that Dragonblight is similar in that saying it’s a level 80 zone is pushing it a bit but the key is that while HP was super imposing the first time you enter what with the Pitlord fight going on right as you come through the portal, once you get over to your faction’s hub, it’s basically like any other zone with the only other really imposing areas (like the crystal in the northwest with all the elites wandering around it and the Pools of Aggonar with it’s ridiculously aggravating boss) being tucked well away from common travel paths. Dragonblight, by contrast, has you cruising through clouds of brawling dragons if you’re on a flying mount as well as having region after region that is packed with high-aggro mobs so that riding through it feels like hitting wave after wave of hostility. It felt on initial inspection like a high-level questing area and one that I thought was strange because I assumed the Icecrown Citadel was where everyone would rush as soon as they got close to level 80.

But I’m glad the quest progression lulled me into staying because I may have missed the Wrathgate cinematic that happens after you complete the Veteran of the Wrathgate questline (mercifully it never requires any grouping) and it was really something cool that I had heard about but mistakenly assumed was kind of Feat of Strength-like in that if you missed it the first time through you were just out of luck. It was also nice to have seen it go down after having read The Shattering because a lot of the early conversations in that book reference the debacle at the Wrathgate and it was kind of mysterious to me what the big deal was. I found it strange that if you followed the Venomspite quests as well as the Agmar’s Hammer and Wyrmrest Temple lines you ended up kind of being responsible for everything that goes down, even though the survivors seem to be fairly certain of your heroism in the whole ordeal.

The cool thing about Dragonblight is how much story is packed in here. From meeting with the Dragon Aspects in Wyrmrest Temple, to actually seeing Ysera asleep in the Emerald Dragonshrine to the quests around the bones of Galarond, it’s all just very cool and absorbing. One thing that really sucks as far as what I’ve read indicates is that apparently the next “Act” in WotLK comes to a head in a quest called Battle for the Undercity which Cataclysm has made obsolete and is now removed from the game. Since I only made it to the point where I could even try it the day before it got removed I never had a chance to see this part and never will. I recognize that Blizzard is doing a progressive thing with Cataclysm that involves changes to previous content and as such some things are going to be affected in a permanent way but it’s little details like this that kind of don’t sit quite right with a latecomer. I mean, I can get past the fact that since I never leveled an Alliance character I won’t ever see the original Stormwind from vanilla WoW. But something like removing a quest which everybody seems to agree is awesome and part of what made Wrath so well received less than two years after it was made available feels like punishment for not staying current on the game.

Then again I hate to admit it but from their perspective it’s kind of working on me since I’m now fairly determined to catch up to Cataclysm and stay on top of it enough that I don’t have to miss anything cool like that again. Nefarious!

Now we come to the part of the year where I ramble incessantly about World of Warcraft because it’s the primary non-critical topic occupying my mind these days. It’s a state of being I know will not last, because history tells me sooner or later I’ll get my short attention diverted to some other gaming-related topic like Blood Bowl or Assassin’s Creed or GURPS or whatever but for now you have to suffer my meandering and ill-informed thoughts on Blizzard’s MMO. Or, I suppose, you don’t. You’re under no obligation to read these posts to completion. As I keep saying, I’m not the boss of you.

Anyway, WoW.

My steady progression toward 70 continued as I dinged level 69 mostly by following a very cool and very long quest chain through Shadowmoon dealing with the demise of Gul’Dan and the complicated efforts to retrieve something called the Cipher of Damnation. It’s such a well put-together progression that I was really hoping it wouldn’t peter out as so many other chains have by suddenly springing a group quest on me but two quests before the end and sure enough it drops a group on me. You know, I have absolutely no problem with WoW including group quests but I think it would be great if Blizzard was a bit better about A) demarcating questlines so the story was a little easier to follow without the aid of (awesome and super-useful but arguably unnecessary) sites like wowhead.com and wowpedia.org and also, B) identifying if a particular quest is in a chain that will sooner or later require a group. It gets pretty frustrating to have to constantly bail out on interesting lines so I can go level elsewhere for a while until I’m strong enough to come back and solo the rest of the chain.

I will say though that the Cipher of Damnation line contains one of the most frustrating and annoying quests I’ve yet encountered in WoW: “I Was A Lot Of Things…” It’s sort of a reputation grind (only without any rep): it basically is a blocker quest which allows the NPC to open the rest of the chain quests only it has nothing really to do with the story being addressed in the rest of the line. And oh my is it annoying. Essentially you have a group of neutral mobs patrolling a smallish region with medium respawn timers and a ton of aggro mobs with short respawn timers who prefer to attack the neutrals. You need the neutrals in order to transform a teeth-grindingly rare node in the region into a gatherable object so you’re trying to do several things simultaneously: Protect the neutrals from the aggro mobs, look for the elusive nodes and then hope there is a nearby neutral so you can get the gather. You only need ten of the gathers but because the aggro mobs respawn like crazy, the nodes are tough to come by and the neutrals are never where you need them to be it becomes a real test of patience. The whole thing is made worse by the fact that the neutrals can easily get caught in AoE attacks and will turn aggro on you as well which means you end up having to just kill them and restart their timer in the ultimate futility exercise. It took me well over an hour and a half to get the requisites and by the end of it I was about ready to go back and PvP the questgiver just on principle.

Regardless, I eventually made it to 70 by running around and doing quests from Shattrath City in the Terokkar Forest and the Auchindoun region. They weren’t quite as awesome as the stuff I found in Shadowmoon but it was good enough to get me to 70 and then I was able to hit up Quel’danas to get the achievement for vanilla WoW exploration. Almost as soon as I landed in Quel’danas I left, because the dailies there were sort of overwhelming and annoying for a newly minted level 70 and I noticed that I had a 10-day Wrath of the Lich King trial waiting on my account which I immediately activated and headed up to Northrend to check it out. I went to the Howling Fjord first and found it kind of uninspiring but then on one of my Auction House runs back to Orgrimmar I noticed the Borean Tundra zeppelin and gave that a shot instead. Much better in terms of leveling for 70s in my opinion. With only a few days I abandoned leveling for a bit and focused on exploration after I dropped (painfully I might add) the 500 gold on Cold Weather Flying and spent the better part of three days flying over Northrend to get the world explorer achievement and the spiffy “the Explorer” title, which I bear proudly.

Curiously around this time patch 4.0.3a came out and dropped The Shattering on everyone as part of the ramp-up to Cataclysm and I noticed that in an effort to get new players caught up for the expansion they dropped the price on all the older titles so you can get them all for only $40. It benefited me since I was able to buy WotLK for only $10 and it really wasn’t a hard decision to make, I had been waffling about what to do once the trial ran out anyway, leaning mostly toward going ahead and buying Wrath even at the $40 price. So yeah, here we are.

As of now I’m level 72 and while I’d love to ding 80 before Cataclysm comes out, I don’t think it will happen. Well, frankly there are six days left and it would take a herculean feat of dedication (and frankly irresponsibility) to make eight levels in under a week. So I’m probably not going to do Cataclysm until it’s been out for a bit which was the plan all along although now I’m thinking (depending on available funds) it may happen much sooner than February.

What’s kind of curious to me is that this rapid push toward Cata has gotten me thinking about what’s really motivating me in the game right now because as much as I keep thinking I want to slow down and attend to several little side projects I keep thinking about like soloing old dungeons and leveling a new profession and working on the Death Knight I felt I simply had to roll once I had Wrath installed, when it comes down to it I find myself doing only one of two things when I play: Leveling as fast as I can and trying to earn enough gold to pay for Artisan riding which would give me a fast-flying mount. What I finally came up with for why this is the case is that no matter how much I like my main, I can’t shake the feeling that he’s not representative of what I really want to be doing in the game. At this point he’s nearly sixty levels higher than my next-highest level toon (not counting the DK) and I think ultimately what I’m trying to do is just get a max level character so I can settle him into a routine of dailies and/or gold generation so I can go back and focus on trying to find the character I really want to be. I don’t think (anymore) that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that especially since I’m still having fun leveling this content for the first time but it does come with a sense of impatience because it’s pretty well established from everything I’ve read that maxing out your first character is much, much harder than subsequent attempts.

Amusingly what has frustrated me the most in the last couple of weeks has been the most trivial of matters: I had a set of pauldrons I got off a random mob drop which were vastly improved, stat-wise, from my previous set. The problem was they were ugly as sin. I mean really, really hideous. I probably picked them up when I was level 68 and I carried them around for a few days because I couldn’t stand the sight of them. Finally I couldn’t justify having the means to better stats and not using them. But of course since I didn’t get any more shoulder drops and I’m saving every copper I can for Artisan flying I had to wear those dippy looking things for five levels. Finally I found a new set last night which aren’t spectacular but at least don’t bring shame on my family name by their very presence. I also replaced a very good (and rather expensive when you take into account the gems I bought for it) helmet I’d been toting around since Zangarmarsh primarily for aesthetic purposes. I can’t decide if the designers of the game use the visual element of the gear as an incentive or if they have some other, more nefarious purpose in mind. I know I’m not alone in sort of caring about how my avatar looks: I don’t need to be perfectly matched but it does irk me when I end up with a gaudy blue helmet, green-and-black boots, a purple chestpiece and red gloves. Ultimately I end up tolerating it because from a game perspective I care more about being effective in combat than in looking cool but I can’t deny that appearance makes a difference especially when deciding whether to voluntarily upgrade (via the auction house) or not.

Speaking of the AH, I’ve been hoarding gems I found from mining runs since the beginning of the game because they’re both useful in some Blacksmithing recipes and because I kept thinking that I might someday want to do Jewelcrafting and it would be a bummer to have to go back and re-mine all those low-level nodes. But as my bank slots kept filling up with more and more gems that were just sitting there “just in case” I finally broke down and decided to put them toward my fast flying mount by selling them. Of course I didn’t want to undertake a venture like that blind so I went over to Curse.com and heaved a big sigh and installed Auctioneer plus a metric ton of other AddOns.

So why the sigh? Because AddOns, as supremely useful and excellent as they can be, are also an enormous pain in the neck. They require a lot of babysitting and usually the more useful they are the more customizable they are as well which almost always means there is a learning curve. For example, the ArkInventory bag replacement AddOn allows you to categorize your bag via certain set criteria (useful for not having to waste time manually sorting your bags) but where it’s really powerful is that you can create your own custom criteria using a set of formula rules. But naturally you have to figure out the syntax for these rules which involves things like learning to write “tooltip(Spell Power, mana per 5) and equip() and soulbound()”. Granted, it’s awesome once you get it set up the way you like but the process of tweaking and modifying and researching and doing incremental adjustments to every aspect of the game from interface to maps to money generation to quest tracking can take literally hours. Practically speaking that entails spending time in game but not actually playing the game and instead fiddling with it. Maybe some people like this, but I don’t. But ultimately it’s necessary if you want to achieve certain specific goals (like improving your field of vision or maximizing your XP/hour or, in my case, improving my revenue from the sale of gems without doing a lot of painstaking research).

So I loaded up my bags with gems and trundled off to the Auction House to try and make a bunch of gold. I tried to be as savvy about it as I could. In addition to using Auctioneer to ensure I was pricing my stuff to sell but still setting it so I’d make as much money as possible, I also avoided flooding markets and I tried to stay clear or mostly clear of markets that already had a lot of listings. For example if I saw that Azerothian Diamonds were selling for 25 gold each and there were only three or four listed, I’d go ahead and list all four of them I had on hand at 2.5% below the lowest offering. However if I went to sell some Shadowgems and noticed they were selling for just a few coppers more than vendor price at the lowest and there were fifty or sixty listings, I’d either set them aside and decide to come back later to check the price or I might drop one or two on there at a middle market value as an experiment just to see if perhaps they were commonly listed but sold quickly and could potentially still net some profit once the lowballers were snatched up and all that was left was my reasonably priced offerings. Occasionally I’d do something like that but perhaps set the bid amount competitive with the low prices and ratchet the buyout price much higher with the notion that if someone was a stickler for the bargain I could at least get some movement on the products but if the need was more pressing they might be inclined to pay closer to what I really wanted just to not have to wait.

In a way it was a lot of fun. I’m no economist by any stretch of the imagination but it never fails to amaze me how many sub-games WoW manages to contain within the context of a larger system. I’ve played lesser games that more or less mimic the complexity (often not even as well) of the Auction House economy and that’s all they do. Never mind the role-playing, social, competitive, storytelling or co-operative aspects you also get with WoW.

Anyway, this was all done shortly before logging off for the night last night; I’m hoping the next time I have a chance to log in I’ll have a mailbox full of riches waiting for me.