Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Dig It

Oh Archaeology, you are a cruel mistress.

I powered through archaeology last night. I had happily made it up to the 300 skill level and was working through Outlands dig sites. The only two race's sites that you will find in Outlands are Orc and Draenei, so it's pretty quick to get your fragments for completions. It's really quite amazing how much easier it is to collect piles of fragments when you are only splitting your fragments between two races instead of four. Honestly if you just wanted to power level Archaeology I might recommend staying in Outlands from 300 to 525 no matter what your long term goals are. You will get 5 skill points per common solve no matter if you've previously solved it or not.

I was disappointed in the appearance of dig sites though. The Orc race only has one rare, and there are only 10 unique artifacts each for Orc and Draenei. Supposedly the code has been tweaked a little bit so that you are more likely to find dig sites for the races that you still need to collect rares for, but that must be such a tiny chance that it really isn't worth mentioning. I had solved all of the Orc artifacts, but only 6 Draenei commons, and neither or the two rares. I still had 3-4 Orc dig sites at a time at points. That was frustrating, so once I was able to reach 450 I kind of threw in the towel. I did manage to get one of the Draenei rares, but there is still one out there that has eluded me.

My pre-Outlands stockpile included almost 200 each of Troll, Night Elf, and Dwarf fragments as well as enough keystones to choke a goat (14 Dwarf, 25 Night Elf, 36 Troll). A solving I did go, a solving I did go, hi-ho the dairy-o, a solving I did go. Among many common artifacts I did find a pretty, but currently useless to me, dress and a statue, but alas no staff, or trinket. It should go without saying that I didn't find Zin'rokh either.

So now it's back to flying around the giant continents of Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor again. Only now I have stuff scattered in ever more places, yay! Oh wait, not yay. I mean something that's more like the opposite of that. On the other hand I will now have a chance to collect a very spiffy ring, so I'll try and focus on the bright side.

Still, it did not take me very long, play time wise, to level archaeology to 525. It is worth it, in my opinion, to wait until you have 310% flying speed and also to be in a guild with the Bountiful Bags perk. After all the gathering that I've done lately in archaeology I have a suspicion about bountiful bags. I think that the proc will only affect the number of key stones that you get in a dig, not the number of fragments. That is how it seemed to feel, and it makes a certain sort of sense. The fragments are considered a currency by the game, not like the keystones that are items you collect. Does anyone know for certain how bountiful bags affects archaeology?

No matter how it works I'm into the long slog portion of digging now. I can choose which continent to work on, and then fly, dig, fly to my heart's discontent. There's no way of telling how long it will take for me to find what I'm looking for, but you can be certain that I will keep you up to date. I wonder if I will "finish" before they update archeology? I can't just sit around and wait, but it does seem like I'll be missing out if I continue to work on it now. (Don't know what I'm talking about? Check out Ask the Devs #7) It sounds like there are a lot of good things in the pipes, but you never know when the changes will come.

Thursday, May 12, 2011

On Trolling and Trolls

The other night I finally convinced my husband to log on to the WoW and give the new/revamped Zuls a shot. He had of course done them into the ground back when they were relevant content, but he had only logged on for a matter of minutes since patch 4.1 went live so he had not done either in their current itteration.

Despite the fact that I have logged more hours recently he continues to out gear me, not by a lot, but by enough. He also just does better DPS. Whether that is from years playing the same class faithfully, or just because he kicks ass, doesn't matter. He always has and possibly always will continue to out DPS me for as long as we are both playing the game.

So the other night I get him to log and we hop in the random queue for Zul level heroics. I've still only successfully had one Zul'Aman run and it wasn't a successful timed run.  He had not even read the strats for any of the fights. It was quite the change for me to give him pertinent info, usually I'm getting the info from him. That part was kind of cool.

We had a mega geared death knight tank, and other than having an incredibly chatty mod that let us know every single ability that did or did not land, he was awesome. Then we had a healer and a mage that were hot to trot. They desperately wanted to complete a timed run and even the mage was shouting gogogo to the tank. I find that to be in terribly bad form. It's one thing for a healer to announce they have enough mana for pulls to continue, it's quite another for a DPS class to do everything short of actually start pulling groups themselves. Still, the DK seemed to be handling it okay, or at least he didn't complain in party chat about the two people cracking a whip on his ass that weren't even from his realm.

Things seemed to be going okay; we were downing bosses and not wiping, so I think that's a good run. As we leave the altar of the second boss and we're running down the ramp, I zone out of the instance. My first honest to goodness thought is that something has gone wrong or the tank has left the group and we all got booted for some reason. Then I realize my husband is confused, but not for the same reason I am, and he seems kind of mad. Turns out that I had been vote kicked. This has never happened before, it was a bit startling. I guess I thought maybe it would give you a message through the UI saying that you had been removed from the group by common consensus, not just poof you're out and feeling a little confused.

Watching my husband be pissed off for me was really sweet. I don't know that he has ever had much cause to "defend my honor" so to speak, but he took to it well. Of course the first thing he did was ask why I had been kicked. No one will even answer him until he keeps refusing to let them requeue. The group's first response was to try and kick him also, but of course they couldn't, so finally they had to answer him. The tank said that he had issued a vote kick because he kept getting whispers telling him to. I guess the healer/mage team (or trolls as we can call them) felt that my DPS wasn't high enough. So then my husband gets really mad because although my DPS wasn't top, it really wasn't that much worse than everyone else. And let's be fair here, someone always has to be at the bottom of the list. That's the nature of lists. If I had all the higher level gear and could pull higher DPS I wouldn't need to be queuing for the dungeon would I?

Sorry, I think I've gotten myself off topic a little bit.

Once the trolls see that he's not going to let go they try a new tactic. "Oh I'm sorry was he a friend of yours?" He informs them that actually "She is my wife" then the trolls realize their mistake, but they still seem to think that they can manage salvage the timed run and start asking the leader be passed to him so that he can reinvite me to the group. They are getting a little spaztastic and trying to get the tank to pass the lead and continue to pull at the same time. The tank finally has enough and tells them that if they wanted a timed run they should have gone with a guild group, and he leaves.

Once the tank leaves I give up on rejoining the group, because I don't want to wait through the queue again (we had a 35 minute wait to get a group the first time around). I go ahead and put the trolls on ignore. I honestly would have rejoined even after they kicked me, because I'm used to the game being full of dicks and I want new gear. The lead had been passed to one of the trolls so they give it to my husband and ask him to invite me back. He tells them that he can't because I have them on ignore, and all heck breaks loose. One of the trolls starts calling us both names saying you can't ignore cross-realm and I give my husband the obvious solution of ignoring him and telling him so in party chat. This leaves only the second troll to taunt him.

I can't believe where the last troll went. He/they got so spitting mad that they just could not contain the bile. They accused my husband of not knowing me at all. Then it was that we'd only ever talked on skype, and even that we'd probably met on World of Warcraft*, as if that would be a bad thing. I guess I should be impressed with how quickly the insults were coming, but maybe they were macro'd. My husband was considering a rebuttal when I reminded him not to feed the trolls. It's one thing to sit in the party and not let them continue, it's quite another to give them the satisfaction of learning anything more of our personal lives.

I finally convince my husband to log into WoW for the first time in a long while and all that happens is 35 minutes of archaeology boredom, and two more names on his ignore list. Thank you horrible troll puggers for making it just a little bit harder to convince him to log on next time.

What horrible (or awesome) pug experience have you had lately? How have your queue times been? We were logging on toward the end of the night so our queue may have been longer as a result, or it could be that the potential tanks have finished gearing up already and are tired of the dicks.

*For the record not only did we not meet on WoW, or online at all, I was the one that got him into the game.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Changes to Professions

There was a time when you needed to level your crafter up to 84 and complete a few introductory quests before you would have access to the highest level of patterns available in Cataclysm for a few of the crafting professions. With patch 4.1 that has changed, and now you can just waltz up to your local trainer and have access to those prized patterns. I don't think this is really a huge deal, and it really won't be affecting my play style at all.

The first thing to remember is that you cannot skill up past 450 until you've reached level 75. (I've hit this wall myself very recently.) So you will still have to level a character to 75 in order to get your skill level high enough to learn these. It's not like the "good old days" when you could have a true low level crafting alt. *drifts into happy memories of the level 1 disenchanting alts* So no matter how much of an auction house player someone wants to be they are going to have to spend time enough to get a character to 75, and really it's not that hard to go from there to 85 if you have half a mind to do it.

There's also the issue of the Chaos Orbs that you need for some recipes. Since Chaos Orbs are bind on pickup, at least for now, you are going to have to get that character up to level 85 and start running heroics. That's going to keep the casual crafter out of those markets.

For me I don't level a character in order to level a profession, I level a profession because I am leveling a character and it seems a waste not to. Since I would have gone through Twilight Highlands on my way to 85 anyway it just doesn't matter a whole lot. I'd say the only real change this has made for me is that I no longer have to take a portal to get to the patterns as I'm ready to buy them.

The change will save us all a few steps, and bring the crafting professions more in line with each other. They are still not equal in how to get your recipes, but this makes it closer. I'd say Inscription and Jewelcrafting are still far more difficult than the other professions when it comes to recipe collection. This is a move in the right direction though. It was kind of silly to penalize 4 of the craft markets with a higher leveling cap than the others.

What do you think? Is the change good or the right thing to do? Will it affect whether you choose to level a certain character to 85 or not?

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Still Digging

I've been building rest state on my death knight, because you can never level fast enough. While doing that I've been multitasking by catching up on some recorded television and working on Archaeology.

Archaeology is both easier and harder than I remember on my rogue. I've been keeping track of my solves as I go along, though I won't know until later if that data is worth looking at. I thought it would be easier to focus on fossils than it is turning out to be. I remember when I first started Archaeology on my rogue that all I got was fossils. Some of my first solves were the fossil rares. I just had way more fossil dig sites, and therefore more fossil fragments, than any of the other races.

This time around I'm getting troll, troll, troll. I'm around skill level 160 and I've solved a troll and fossil rare. I have 17 night elf key stones, 15 troll, and 9 dwarf. If I am on Kalimdor then I hit my night elf cap fairly quickly and also get tons of troll sites, while in Eastern Kingdoms all four of my digsites are frequently down in Stranglethorn and usually all of them are troll. In all I've solved 9 fossils, 5 troll, 2 night elf, and 2 dwarf.

I've been at this for a couple of days and it feels like I'm getting no where. I know that realistically I will have tons of solves queued up once I finish Outlands. I'll have almost 200 of 3 races fragments, as well as enough keystones to choke a goat. It's just slow going and I'm not sure if I have the will power to stick with my plan. I still have 140 points to go. If I did not get any more rares in that time it would be 28 more solves to get to Outlands, and I've only done 19 so far and 2 of those rares gave triple the skill up points.

I suppose there's nothing for it but to get back to digging. Thursday night it's back to leveling my death knight for a bit. Hopefully I have a good bit of rest state built up at this point.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Plan of Attack

Now that my warlock has maxed out level, and flying skill, I'm taking on Archaeology. There are some cool rewards to be had, one that I want on 2 characters, and a couple I've still never found but that I want, and I'm curious if I can go about it in a smarter way the second time around.

My first stop was to check out the Wiki on Archaeology. They list all the artifacts you can discover, and the skill level that you need to have before you can start to work on them. Here is a better looking list of the rewards you can find from Archaeology from Wowpedia. The skill level required looks to be more accurate, so I'd go by that one. This is important, because I had read that you have a greater chance to discover a rare before you've completed all the common artifacts for that particular race. I have no proof that this is true, but it certainly seems like it when I look at the rares I've managed to complete on my rogue, and the ones that I have yet to see.

The fallacy in that article was that there is a system in place that keeps you from getting a duplicate common until you have solved all the available commons. If it was ever true, it does not appear to be true any longer. I gathered fragments without solving any artifacts until my skill was at 50. This is the highest you can go just from gathering.

Since my main interests are an elven trinket that the wiki thinks can be found with 225 skill (I suspect it's actually 450, many of their skill requirements are listed incorrectly), as well as a dwarf staff and troll sword that can only be found with 450 skill, I had intended to skill up as much as possible without solving artifacts from those races. The problem is that until you reach a skill of 300 you only have 4 races you can solve from. Which means trying to maximize the amount of solves done within the fossil group (the only one I don't care about) without wasting too many gathered artifact pieces along the way to 300.

I kept track of my solves of Fossils as I went along, which is why I know some of the Wiki information is currently wrong. You get 5 skill points with each common solve, I listed my resulting skill level after each solve.
1. Shard of Wood - 55
2. Black Trilobite - 60
3. Beautiful Preserved Fern - 65
4. Beautiful Preserved Fern - 70
5. Shard of Petrified Wood - 75
6. Twisted Ammonite Shell - 80
7. Strange Velvet Worm - still in progress
You can see that I've already had several duplicates. I suppose it's possible that they have changed which commons are available for a certain skill level, but it seems unlikely that you would only have 3 available in the level 50-75 bracket.

I'm still going to try and save as many of my Troll, Elf, and Dwarf fragments as I can until my skill level is higher, if for no other reason than to have them available once I am done with Outlands. I am not going to let them go over the 200 mark though. I'm only at a skill level of 80 and I have about 140 each of those three races. If I get up to 190 fragments I'll be doing a solve to clear some breathing room.

Oh, and one more thing, getting multiple keystones from Bountiful Bags proccing is a beautiful thing. I'm not sure that there is a best way to go about Archaeology, but I'm giving it my best shot. What tips or tricks have you found useful as you level Archaeology? Are you crazy enough to do it on more than one toon?

Monday, May 2, 2011

Still Undecided

I still haven't settled into a new routine since 4.1 hit. I really don't know what I want to do with myself. There are too many great options, and I just don't get enough time to play.

I've managed a guild run of ZA on my rogue. That was a lot of fun, because I never ran it back in the day. It was my first time to see any of the fights and even though we had to attempt some of the fights more than once it was a blast. No rogue gear dropped, but a quest I picked up in the dungeon gave me a good upgrade for my thrown weapon. Still no ZG run. I've only tried once and the group just didn't know anything about the instance so it took a long time to get to the first boss and after a couple of wipes they gave up. I just haven't had time to try since then.

Currently I've been trying to find time to get into ZG or ZA groups, but between being sick and having my birthday party I just haven't had large chunks of log in time. When I only have about an hour to play I log on my death knight instead, since you get quite a bit done in an hour when you're leveling.

Of all craziness I've been thinking about busting through that final level on my warlock and then starting to work on archaeology with her. I've almost completed all the archaeology stuff on my rogue, so it really seems silly to do it on another character. What's tempting me is the fact that my horde guild has the Bountiful Bags perk and my alliance one doesn't. I'm tremendously curious to see if it impacts the enjoyment of archaeology. That and I have 2 casters so I'd like another trinket. Yes I know that I must have some sort of brain damage if I'm considering leveling archaeology again. I might have to wait until I can get the highest speed of flying on that character, it does make it more bearable.

Meanwhile I've got my death knight's tradeskills stuck. I can't progress further until she levels to 75, so I've been trying to make that a priority at this point. I just keep getting distracted by mining nodes. Must Have Shinies!