Shieldwall VP rewards

The Shieldwall rewards are live, and are as follows (5.1 patch notes):

• 458 trinket for approx 100 gold as a starter reward,
• a 496 ring at Honored, costing 1250 VP,
• a 496 Belt, Boots, and Trinket at Revered, costing 1750 each,
• Exalted gets you a new flying mount.

The starter reward is likely to go to an offset, as most raiders have better in main at the very least. Despite the undertone of my last post, this gear is welcome, and will make the dailies for the other factions a secondary consideration.

Getting to Revered will be very rewarding for raiders as 496 gear is far better than MV gear, and good for HoF. The honored Ring also means that you should skip the other Valor rings now if you have not purchased them, by comparison this is better – because it can be upgraded with more VPs to 504 gear level.

There are five dailies to do each day, each granting +250 reputation, 5 VPs, and 2 Lesser Charms of Good Fortune.

You will need 6500 Valor points to buy all the gear for one spec, and will also need to have unlocked the various Reps. That is 1300 daily quests performed if this is done by dailies, so I hope everyone has a realistic impression of how long these will take to get, and also how important a 496 ilevel is compared to some raiders still using 476 gear. I think a raider who is missing key items such as Boots, Belt, Rings, or a Trinket should be doing these dailies before they raid – the upgrade is guaranteed and a powerful change.

Or 13,000 VPs if you wish to have gear for both specs which might be used in raiding.

Yet the VP rewards for activities are apparently as desired and working as intended? Bullshit. Only working as intended by people who don’t play the game. I’m nudging closer to giving this Valor treadmill away for good.

ps. Wasn’t operation shieldwall something in Mass Effect, or by Bioware? Have we run out of names for armies fighting?

pps. If the end boss of the Tier is the Sha of Fear, does that mean this is the War on Fear? How did the war on Terror go?

Faction reps gaining slowly

A quick toon update on Reputations in progress for Mortigen my Death Knight, making me think that daily quests do have a reward, but by golly that does not make them entertaining.

• Black Prince now Honored. Not a big deal without the drops needed from raid bosses, which are darn rare and most of what I need now coming from Heart of Fear.
• Golden Lotus now Revered, so I can save that little more valor and might soon have some upgraded epic Shoulders. Yay. Anyone got some spare Valor? Also means I can unlock the Shadow Pan to start more quests. And a step closer to the epic quest reward too.
• Klaxxi now Revered, also not a big deal due to the Valor requirement on rewards. I suppose it is one step closer to Exalted and a free 487 epic item. Yippee. Grind.
• Tillers now totally beyond my comprehension of which idiot farmer likes me, and which are snarky. I do not understand why Farmer Yoon (or whatever his name is) actually needs rep or help. What he really needs and actually has is a host of available players to be slaves on his farm while he stands idle beside the hut watching. That shovel pusher is lucky he is not a yellow-mob, because I’d be killing him every week. Yes, I am exalted which is why these turkeys get the biggest rant.
• I also do not understand how to get Cooking leveled quickly. All my non-“Way-of-the” cooking is gray.
• Anglers have had a brief look in, but fishing is no more compelling than before, which means that it’ll be one of the last things I do each week if I have the time.
• Archaeology is after fishing/Anglers. Yawn.

So I keep doing Golden Lotus and Klaxxi for the Exalted quest chain, garnering Valor to buy the Shoulders, then add Shadow Pan into the mix instead of Tillers so that the epic Helm will one day be something available too.

It’s nice to have an upgrade path. See you online.

A few nice things like kills, achievements, and factions

A few nice things happened in the past few days; so this post is a long-ish one.

Firstly I was able to join the raiders for our Guild first Elegon kill – booyah! That is a poor fight to be melee but we did it with a few characters playing up close and personal.

The tricks in the fight are plentiful, mainly based upon how to manage the stacks of the damage debuff so that you (a) increase your own damage to Elegon, (b) don’t take too much regular “pulse” damage, (c) don’t die when the large elemental style adds explode on death, and (d) gathering the sparky-adds in the third stage.

Now we head off to the Emperor fight, which is even worse for melee – with the “fun” mechanic where you watch which way the animation goes to dodge, and need full raid awareness, and luck, and manage the adds. I’d rather be doing many other things – grumble.

I finally gained Exalted with the Tillers (yippee), and very underwhelmed with the rewards. As rewards there is a tabard, a Yak, a few cooking recipes, and a basically useless knife. I didn’t expect the earth, but the rewards along the lines of automating the farming (like the bug sprayer and watering system) would have been good, or reducing the instances where we need to perform maintenance on crops?

Like what types of things you ask?

An actual scarecrow (not the toy), which reduces the chance that you get the birds, or rat-thingy infestation. Or anything which makes doing the dailies a little faster, now that the rep is at maximum.

I still have to get each bloody NPC’s individual rep to maximum so not out of the woods yet. Overall I’d like Farmer Yoon to actually be animated around the farm doing things…like farming. It actually looks like I did a lot of the farming and he just stood there. That lazy son of a bitch owes me more than a “thanks pal!”. If he walked around and did things it would go a long way to making it feel like we both did the work.

Is there a faction or way I can now get back down to Hated or At War so I can kill him? Do the Mogu need a champion?

I also happened to get the achievement Chef de Cuisine for 10 points when learning the 2x cooking recipes from the Tillers, indicating 160 recipes known. I don’t like cooking and these two additional recipes are all but useless. Meh, but yay +10 points!

Upgrades via Valor and Justice points soon – interesting news.

Some information via MMO Champion on how the items will be upgraded in patch 5.1. Basically PvE players get the option to use Justice to increase lower level gear by about 8 levels (463 to 471), and Valor gets two steps of 4 levels each costing 750 Valor per increase (489 to 493) and then (493 to 497).

As an offering its not bad – perhaps… I don’t have a sense yet if all gear will have this option, or if it will be only selectable items. If the items themselves are rare, then I can’t say much positive about this offer, as it will do nothing to stop luck being a major factor in improving gear. The point seems to be that effort can get a reward which is absolute. It would give reasons for the daily quests rewarding Valor, as it would have a permanent and tangible use beyond the initial purchase.

Related articles

• Random stuff from MMO Champ and Blue Posts
• A thought about the Brawlers Guild

WoW 25% discount on faction change

Via WoW Insider, the faction change cost is reduced by 25%. Huh? The purpose for this offer amid the total end of an expansion? Fark. Offer the same deal when MoP goes live and they’ll likely make far more money.

From WoWInsider:

Have you been wondering what life is like on the other side of the faction fence? Blizzard has offered faction changes for quite some time now, allowing players to flip factions at their whim. This weekend, Blizzard’s holding a sale offering 25% off faction changes. Please note that a faction change isn’t a realm change — it’s just switching from Alliance to Horde on your current realm.

However, this change does make things quite handy for cross-faction trading, plus it opens up a whole new side of questing and exploration to do. Before you jump to make the move, however, you may want to check out Blizzard’s FAQ on the faction change service and give it a read. There are a few things that switch over when you change factions, like mounts and titles, and a few things that are wiped out all together, like Argent Tournament achievements.

Right. So people are so in need of misc wow stuff that they will faction change a toon? More money than sense. Far more. Note to those people – hey give it away to charity.

Probably too grumpy with that last part. Grrrrr.

Paid Faction Change

Faction change was announced a few days ago, and its been a heated and typically whine filled debate.

Good god wow community, quit your bitching. Folks seem determined to crap on any idea, change, or shift in the game. I like reading the constructive feedback, can stand the “but this might break…” posts, but there seems to be a solid contingent of players who are determined to find anything that is new and bitch.

Like I said in one of the threads on project lore:

There is no gear, achievement, etc issue that cannot be solved with a little logic.

The players who want this service will pay well for it, and it pretty obviously not aimed at players who are happy to re-roll. Its not aimed at hardcore “back in my day..” players either. The players who want it will also accept some fudging of results too. Its aimed at players who wish to play without re-playing the content. And they’ll have to pay – more power to ’em.

Just like paid toon transfer (or the barber shop, recruit a friend, easy modes, or frigging anything) you don’t have to use it and it does not hurt your game if somebody else does.

C’mon guys, there are great things to talk about.

• Players might to to play with their friends otherwise lost to other factions.
• It can be used with some rules to help realm balance.
• You can switch a toon over to see how the other side of the game without starting from scratch.

I’d like to see them allow the races to stay the same, but the toon make a permanent Faction change. There is no class unbalance anymore (shaman vs paladin); so having a Human traitor to the Alliance; or an Orc who was raised by elves but did not revolt like Thrall is a cool idea.

Give the player base one Traitor per server limit, and see what the RP realms do. They’ll go nuts with stories, movies, and all sorts of roleplay.

ps. yup, I know I bitch like the rest of them from time to time. Ohhh the irony.