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

Dinged 90 and the race is just beginning

Well I dinged 90 a few days ago and even as the warm yellow glow of achievement left my character I began recalling the plan for the next stage.

• Ring of Blood v.Panda for the weapon upgrade
• Then BLacksmith skill to Max level to unlock the nice gear upgrades
• Rep grind with the Klaxxi bugs, farmers, and all the others.

As far as activities at 90 the Mists expansion has gobsmacking amounts of activity. You can even get Valor points (yummy) from daily quests. Given the time I think I could do at least 50 productive advancing quests in a day. Shucks that’s got to be over 10 hours of dailies just there – and they all count an are productive!

Happy farming, grinding, and wow’ing it up.

Transmogrify – Old Rep Gear

Edit: as this look uses primarily white items, its not really a transmog set; more an rp set.
More cool old gear, now from the Bloodsail Buccaneers – you know, the bad guys hanging around near Booty Bay. Arrrr.

Remember too that it is Pirate Day soon, so expect a few scallywags and such to shiver your timbers. The Rep gives you all the basic kit, Hat, Shirt, Pants, etc. the groovy weapons are from elsewhere.

The be all and end all of this rep is that its bloody long and hard to do, it makes you hostile with a variety of Neutral cities, and you get to look like a Pirate. Whats not to love about a huge red hat, fluffy shirt, and a ship’s wheel as a shield. Nuff said really.

Image is straight from wowhead, a pirate surrounded by corpses was too sweet to resist.

Transmogrify – Old Rep Gear

More cool old gear, now from Honor’s Hold rep – the Alliance guys in Hellfire Pen.

Transmogrify – Old Rep Gear

With the whirlwind of news about reusing gear models, I though a mention of the cool old-ish rep gear, like the gear from Shattered Sun Offensive from The Burning Crusade. When you’re pondering gear for that special set – consider the old reps you’ve already earned but don’t offer traditional tiers – they’ve got some great stuff.

A rare Monday

It is a rare Monday night when I can get home on time, cook diner, eat it without an inhaler, and then login. So with only a slight delay (which I apologise to my guildies for) I was not only well fed, but also logging into Warcraft.

All the folks were already on their way to the raid, so I trundled along and found my way to the instance through a little guesswork and some luck, and we got rolling. There were many pulls, some pulling of legs, and not just one but many inappropriate and darn entertaining comments through Vent. As the night progressed I got the hunch that as a collective we were a little off our game, but for me I was just happy to be inside the instance actually doing something – so I did not care in the slightest.

It was also a night playing again on my Death Knight rather than the Hunter which I’ve been leveling to raid with. It is an ironic twist of fate that all the while we’ve been trying to get players, now my DK is a viable raid toon again, with only a standard amount of competition for raid role-slot. I just laughed and said yes … the DK was always where the fun is. How could somebody not love charging into death wearing boiler plate and a grim smile? I love the fact that DKs have no threat wipe, it speaks plainly to how they are meant to be played: up front and at full speed. Mortigen is back baby!

Last night was a reminder of why I play. The rewards (see below) were nice, but the sensation of playing in a raid again was the real buzz. I think I’m still buzzing.

It was a good night.

Cata Rep and Normal Gearlist

A guild forum discussion started about where to get gear while prep’ing for heroics. This will probably form the basis of my activity after hitting 85.

Here is a few WoWHead item searches listing all the Cata items obtained by Rep, ordered by slot. Use the class / spec select in the filter to change the priority of the items.

www.wowhead.com/items?filter=qu=3:4;sl=1…5:25:23:21:20:8;gb=1

Then the same search, with the items that drop from Normal dungeons added, so a list of gear to aim for.

www.wowhead.com/items?filter=qu=3:4;sl=1…5:25:23:21:20:8;gb=1

And now any items that also are crafted or quest drops, added into the mix.

wowhead

Happy hunting

Random news and thoughts

No major theme for this post, just a series of stuff that I found, saw, or experienced over the last week. Read more about bad pugs, WoW Ripoffs, Mortigen’s titles, and 10m vs 25m below.