Leaving the experince bar behind with a bang.

With a little help from several guildies I'd spent several play sessions this last week grinding down that elusive experience bar. Last weekend I got involved in a couple of kills on the Brewfest boss in BRD. No drops of note and I got lots of snide remarks since I was level 68 vs the rest of the team of geared level 70's. Thanks ever so much Bliz, your changes to Brewfest this year really suck.

I returned to Nagrand and completed a bunch of quests leaving mostly the group quests only, then grouped up with guild members and ex-guildies to complete them. Durn the Hungerer hits very hard and smashed through a hunter "tank" and myself without trouble. I came back again later with a pally and we 3-manned him fairly easily. The same group finished off Tusker on the way past, neatly finishing off the Nessingwary series. Somewhere amongst this I dinged 69.

My pally friend and I continued on to Shadowmoon Valley, where I had never been before. He died attempting the stupid jump-a-tron quest in Nagrand on the way past. I picked up a flightpoint in Terrokar and the ones in SMV.



Our friend Uvuros bit the dust easily before we headed over to Black Temple.

Here I was treated to the most awesome display of AOE grinding I've seen. My friend is a 70 pally, in post-kara HEALING gear. He would run in and gather up 10-15 of the level 67-70 humanoid mobs that are on both sides of the entryway to Black temple and then AOE them to death. I was picking up around 500 exp per kill. That is around 7k exp per pull for me at level 69. Lucky my bags were almost empty! We also managed to pull several of the elite dragonkin while doing this; they went down almost as easily as the lower mobs! We would average 2 pulls per side before we would go catch the respawns on the other ramp. Once we got greedy and pulled about 30 mobs at once, but they managed to break his tank. I lasted, oh, half a nanosecond once he was down! The piles of corpses after each pull were amazing.

Doomwalker rained on our parade somewhat. Our accidental deaths earlier had applied a debuff that meant if we got close to doomwalker, his aura of death would instantly kill us. We kept out of range to continue grinding. I had gained almost 50% of level 69 just hanging on my pally friend's coat-tails before he got an invite to a raid and left me to my own amusements. I believe this was the fastest session of levelling I have had since before level 20!

After returning to Nagrand to hand in quests I was about 80% of the way through to level 70. I flew to Blades Edge Mountains and rode over the bridge into Area 52 and Netherstorm. A little bit of grinding and the completion of a handful of quests saw my experince bar creep up to within 4,000 points of levelling. Apparently my guild had plans to celebrate with me as I hit 70, so I hearthed to Shattrath to wait.

By Sunday afternoon I'd been playing alts for a while. Someone talked me into a runthrough of SM and since I needed lots of silk for my alts I agreed. I logged in to Crypt again and headed to Undercity. I got there just in time to help defend against a fairly large Allied raid. They had initial success in invading the bank and auction house areas before meeting fairly stiff resistance. The main group of allies got bogged down here near the auctioneers but some other groups broke off and ran riot through parts of UC's shopping areas. PvP madness ensued, and this time I survived well enough to inflict a bunch of kills. A mage and priest got caught in an alcove near the sewers entrance. Both fell to my blade flurry attack. A warrior got knifed in the back while busy fighting the lag monster and a druid engaged in a game of cat and mouse that ended up with another kitty corpse in the sewers.

Stragglers were still hiding out in various locations around UC even 20 minutes after the main raid was over. Several more scalps were added to my collection. PVP is a lot more fun when you don't die almost instantly!

After all that fun I took my guildmate for a quick run through SM-Cath and then SM-Lib. I farmed up a lot of silk for my alts and my guildmate got some new gear, though got growled at for rolling need on cloth gear he didn't actually need.

Later, after a break for dinner,I returned to the game. I took Cryptography to Org to bank and auction some stuff and do the Brewfest quests one last time. I arrived in time to "fight" the Dark Iron dwarves and then completed both the barrel race and barking quests while drunk. The Dark Iron invaders came back for some more while I was checking out the vendors, so I got completely smashed again fighting them off. It was then that I made possibly the biggest mistake of my whole adventuring career.

While "completely smashed", I went to the nearest quest giver to hand in for my brewfest tokens reward. However, I went to the wrong questgiver and actually ended up handing in Corens Dire Brew instead. Sure, I got a hefty sampling of tokens for this, but I also got some 15,000 exp.... which, if you've actually read this great wall of text, you will notice had the immediate effect of giving Crypt a nice golden glow and a chiming gong sound effect. Yes folks, after 38 days, 11 hours, 28 minutes and about 15 seconds, Cryptography made it to level 70. Hooray! I'm sure he had a good time of it, but he was too drunk to remember and couldn't see clearly enough to take a screenshot. He's also disappointed many guildmates who were organising some sort of special event. It wont be quite the same any more.

What does a newly minted level 70 do?

Smart ones probably start to do something about their crappy gear. Crypt is in quest greens for the most part. A few items might even be pre-outland actually. He's not set foot inside any of the outland instances nor a battleground since level 19. Decent quality items need gems and enchants. I have no decent gear, hence no need (yet) for either of these.

No, I've done nothing about the gear.

Smart level 70's grind out the last bits of their trade skills. As a skinner, Crypt had an easy time maximising that particular trade skill. First aid was also maximised very early on in Outlands. Fishing, cooking and leatherwork have languished behind since about level 45 or so. I do intend to max them all out, but am in no particular hurry to do so.

No, I havent improved any of my trade skills.

Smart level 70's start down various instance attunement quests, or faction grinds. Crypt has casually worked on Thrallmar and Mag'har rep while levelling up. Hes also dabbled with the Consortium and Cenarion Expedition. Progress for most of these now requires instance runs, which he hasn't yet done.

Nope, not done much here either.

Other smart level 70's go get their flying mount. My army of bank alts have been working hard on this for months. They gathered their resources and mailed a chunk of change over to Crypt, who accepted the Shatt flightmaster's quest and flew to Shadowmoon Village. Once I found the flight trainer and mount vendor I had the hard decisions to make: Do I shell out for just basic flyer at 800g + 100g mount, or go full out and pay the extra 5000g + 200g mount for the epic flyer, especially as patch day and wrath release are possibly going to reduce these costs?

Noooooo!

Continuing the long tradition of blowing money on fast mounts and loose women, Cryptography bought out the whole damn dealership.

800g for artisan riding skill (basic flyer)
5000g for master riding skill (epic flyer) (or is it the other way round? )

100g for tawny windrider
100g for green windrider
100g for blue windrider

200g for Swift Purple windrider
200g for Swift Red windrider
200g for Swift Green windrider
200g for Swift Yellow windrider.

Yes, that's 6900 gold. Every single copper of it is worth it though. Flying is AWESOME.

I now have 10 bag slots dedicated to mounts. Roll on patch day and the new way of handling mounts! I have three different random mount selection macros for Crypt. One for the epic riding mounts, one for the basic flyers and the other for the shiny new epic flyers.

After flying round for a bit, my friend and I made a start on the Netherwing quest chain. The first few steps were pretty easy and we both got up to the group quest to kill Zuluhed the wacked. We tried for a while to get a group going but to no avail. Then my pally friend showed up, and another rogue in our guild wanted a go at it. Pally supertank, 2 rogues and a holy priest downed that sucker twice (since one party member didn't have the quest!), then a bit later we downed him again for a mage in an allied guild.

Crypto is now flying around as a stealthed Fel Orc, poisoning peons and stealing netherwing eggs at every opportunity. Looks like I will be on a grind of daily quests for reputation for some time. Netherwing eggs seem to be fairly rare, or perhaps just over farmed, so they will not provide a massive shortcut for reputation gains. While doing these quests, I have assisted several other guildies to get started. Most of them don't have the epic flight skill yet so get stuck just after killing Zuluhed.

I also plan on starting the Shattari skyguard grind, and more cenarion expedition grinding, for their epic mounts as well as the dragon. I will very likely buy all the different varieties - I collect mounts!

On the way I'll look at getting some decent gear but am not looking to spend too much on that since more greens in Wrath will likely be sufficient... and if not, a few extra levels then back into the dungeons should make it even easier.

Mercentile Madness - Roundup.

Its about two months since my last post in this series. In that time, I've had precious little chance to work on my two "Newbie" servers.

I did manage to catch up with Ideale/Ahami on VeCo and had some fun showing off the scenery in southern Tanaris. Traceabull my hunter was only level 22 or so and proved to be an absolute magnet for aggro in Tanaris. One thing I did notice is that hunters have a large advantage vs almost any other class when fighting much higher level monsters. Spellcasters find it nearly impossible to fight anyone 5 levels above them due to their primary attacks being resisted nearly all the time. I took a 29 warlock with some guildies into SM recently and could barely contribute at all due to this. Previous adventures with my rogue have shown that his melee attacks are also heavily penalised against higher level monsters, to the point where he would be lucky to hit for 5-6 damage each attack. Hunter's melee and special shots seem to suffer from this reduction also... but not so their white-damage autoshots. Traceabull was hitting the level 45-50 mobs in southern Tanaris for reasonably respectable 30-40 hits a shot, about what he does on same-level targets. These guys are 20 levels above him! This may partly explain why hunters are so good at taking on mobs a couple of levels above their own whereas other classes are not so lucky. Even warlocks in the mid-20's struggle more than hunters do.

After the sight-seeing trip was done, we hearthed out. I met up with Ideale's druid alt and her housemate's priest, to whom I gave some enchants with the crappy mats I had available. Hopefully they made a bit of difference. I do have better enchants available if you want, ladies... just give me a chance to scrounge some mats.

Ideale was a "bad friend" and hadn't supplied a wand, so when one turned up later while I was questing I gave that to the priest as well. The two girls were busy finishing off their quests and I was off elsewhere doing my own for a bit too, though we remained in a party to facilitate chat for a while longer. I burned through the rest of my rested experience then switched over to Changeabull my druid for a bit.

Changeabull had a fairly full quest log so spent some time handing in. Once that was manageable again, he visited the auction house. Between the two characters I now have quite an inventory of stuff for sale though little spare cash on hand. Much of the money I do make is spent on obtaining cheap items for disenchantment. Some of this is still being absorbed leveling enchanting on Traceabull; he's nearly maxed it for his current level. Any of the lower level materials are returned for auction and are starting to generate decent funds.

Over a couple of days I spent several hours trawling through the AH, finding cheap stuff and disenchanting it, then using or reselling the materials. I also spent about 150 gold in market manipulation.

There was a mid level enchanting material that was in quite large supply. I bought out virtually the entire stock, leaving only a handful of very overpriced suppliers in the market. I actually then consumed probably 80% of that stock levelling up enchanting. The remaining materials were then listed back on the AH at a price higher than average but still undercutting the market. Since this was still the weekend peak, most of my stock has since moved at those inflated prices and I've made nearly all my money back using only 20% of the stock! I do have some more of the same material, since several people tried to undercut my inflated price, but I've bought them out and re-listed.

There is a second, quite expensive, enchanting material that I now have significant stock in. It has not been as successful an investment and I had several 48-hour auctions expire. Luckily I need these to continue levelling my skill anyway so it won't matter much.

I also sacrificed an unused hunter alt on a "normal" US server. I found some random guy in razor hill and gave him all my stuff before suiciding that character. I then returned to VeCo and saw the birth of "Replaceabull", a Tauren shammy. He's had a little help from his bigger brothers and is motoring along nicely at level 6.

I've also found some time to visit Cael. I got distracted by my alts on the horde side when I should have been looking after the alliance guys. Nevertheless, I've managed to boost both warlock and hunter to level 21 and have done some more market and enchanting work. Unfortunately, the friends from Dath who were playing here have more or less abandoned their characters so some of my motivation to continue has gone. I am still feeling uneasy having both Horde and Alliance on the same server... its just wrong. Anyway, once I've done a few more market scans here and rebuilt my prices, I'll hit that auction house fairly hard while casually levelling the characters.

On Dath, most of my time has been spent in various instances. I've managed about 10 levels on some of my lower alts but have done little work on Crypt, despite a fair bit of encouragement from friends and guildies. I've been very busy with work so by the time I get on wow I'm interested in instant gratification that I can get by quickly levelling an alt.

I did take Crypto in as tank to Scholomance with two level 60-ish shammies from my guild and a warlock and hunter from the LFG channel. We did mostly ok. One wipe happened early when our healer went afk (unavoidably) and was then feared right into the middle of the room pulling a truckload of mobs. We wiped again later when I made a spectacularly bad pull that somehow managed to drag two extra groups of mobs, who then aggroed a few more on their way over to beat me into a pulp. We had several more individual party deaths when I either lost aggro, or didn't gain it in the first place - rogues are not designed to tank! Once people got used to the unusual group composition though, things went well. I also ran Crypt through RFC dragging along a level 11 guildie. A full clear in 20 minutes isn't bad! (Yes, this completely goes against my "runthus are evil" policy, but he'd already been in with an unsuccessful group earlier so I took pity on him.)

Instance roles

Just thought I'd put down some ideas for tactics in small groups and low level instance running. This isn't the complete guide, just various tips and tricks.
The same roles are mostly valid in higher level instances but class specialisation has a noticeable effect; no more rogue tanks in higher instances please!

In any group there are certain roles to be filled. These can be filled by various classes at times, but obviously some classes suit a role better than others.

The Roles:

The TANK

A tank is the character doing the up close and personal melee combat with the monsters (MOB, NPC). Their role is mostly to soak up damage and prevent the mob from attacking other group members. Other aspects of this role are preventing spell casting and preventing fleeing. Damage dealing is NOT the primary requirement here, but is important in "holding aggro".

Warriors and Paladins are the tank of choice due to much better armour than other classes. Bearform Druids get boosted armour and abilities to handle this role well. Rogues, Hunters and Shamans can tank lower level instances if there isn't someone else available. No spell casting cloth wearer should ever be the primary tank. Warlock and Hunter pets can tank to some extent but have real aggro management problems.

The OFF-TANK
Similar to the TANK above, the OFF-TANK is a secondary Tank. They have a more specialised role in groups. The off-tank's job is to manage any ADDs (additional monsters) or mobs that break away from the main tank. Spell caster interruption and flee prevention are high priorities here. A general awareness of the combat zone is needed. The Off-Tank must be alert for ADDs or re spawns, capturing their attention and either managing it or drawing them to the main tank.

Almost any non- cloth wearer can be a suitable off-tank in lower level instances. In larger groups it is a warrior, druid or pally that takes this on; in smaller groups Rogues or shammys work well. Hunter pets are often acceptable off-tanks and some of the hunter and mage abilities are useful for mob management.

The PULLER

This is a role where a solo player moves away from the group and attacks the next mob to bring them back to the main group. It generally requires some form of ranged attack, so almost any class can do it.
Pulling is an art form; do it wrong and you will draw far too much aggro and wipe out your group. Done well and just the selected mobs are drawn away from their friends and onto the party's main tank.

The outright best class for pulling is the Hunter. Hunters have a number of abilities that make them great pullers, the main one being the Feign Death ability. At least one of their attacks is a slowing/stunning missile shot and they can place traps and their pet in the way of any incoming mob. They can also then feign death to pass the pulled mob over to the main tank. A failed pull done properly will kill only the hunter and not wipe the whole party.

The next best pullers are probably whoever is the main tank. There are a couple of special varieties of the pull though:

The sheep pull :- a mage uses the pollymorph spell to "sheep" one of a group of monsters. The rest of the mobs then charge straight for the mage. It is the job of the tank to get aggro off the mage really quickly.

The SAP pull:- a stealthed rogue uses SAP or another stunning attack to take out one of a group of enemies.

The DPS

Damage Per Second. People with this role have one main function: making mobs dead really quick. The trick to this is that you don't want to just spam your most devastating attacks, since you will draw more aggro from the mobs and possibly take them off the tank and onto yourself. This is bad... healers are mostly too busy looking after the designated tank and healing everyone just isn't efficient. DPS classes that pull off the main tank too often wont be invited back!

The stand-out classes here are Rogue and Mage. Both have awesome damage dealing abilities... but as noted that can also be a problem. If you moderate your damage output so that you are running at about 80% of max you should be ok. Other good classes are cat-form Druid, shadow spec priests, Shammy, Hunter, some warlock pets and warlocks.

DOTS
Damage over Time (spells). Mostly this is the domain of the priest and the warlock, but other classes have some skills in this area. Damage over time effects are useful for weakening enemies and killing off fleeing mobs.
Can generally be used on multiple mobs at once without pulling them off the tank or off-tank. Be aware that most of these effects will break crowd control.

The Crowdie
Crowd control is an ability that only some classes are good at. It involves assisting the off-tanks in removing any ADDS or just handling the extra mobs above and beyond what the main tank can handle. Rogue sap and gouge abilities, Druid root spell, mage freeze and sheep as well as various hamstring attacks are all aspects of this role. Hunters have traps that can immobilise or slow mobs as well. They get much better at higher levels but are initially quite limited. Priest and warlock FEAR abilities are also useful but run the risk of causing more problems!

The Buffer
Most spell caster classes have some role to play here. Apply bonus effects on other party members outside of combat. Remember to boost pets if applicable. Some pets buff as well.. warlock imp most noticeably.

The Healbot
Not the most glamorous of roles perhaps, but essential none the less. Priests, druids, shammys and paladins are just about the only real contenders here, though anyone with first-aid skill can assist. Without your healers, a group will die often and quickly. Another aspect of healing is of course resurrection. Warlocks have an interesting role to play here, in that they can create stones for healing and soul-storing, as well as having the abilities to drain life to keep themselves alive.
When healing, look after the main tank as much as possible and only assist others if the tank is managing well. Also note that your highest level spells are not always the most efficient.

Finding an Upside to Downtime.

Tuesday night usually means a shutdown of the WoW servers. Sure enough, they are down tonight for about 6 hours or so. I only managed to get on for about 45 minutes before they went down, so I spent that time scouring the Auction House for bargains on VeCo.

Tonight's findings were a mixed bag of stuff. I listed most of my existing stock just to clear my bags. A generic search for bargains via Auctioneer turned up the usual selection of buyouts and short term bids, most of which I have left in my mailbox for now. Several tasty items were snapped up and mailed to my hunter for disenchanting. The other items should likely at least triple the money invested but there wasn't really anything especially exciting amongst it. I had a small win with some linen cloth, in that several stacks that I snapped up cheaply were resold more or less instantly - always a nice bonus.

After the basic scan was completed, I spent about 20 minutes pouring over the weapons and armor sections looking for low-priced items. Mostly these will be disenchanted and any materials not needed for levelling up will be re-listed. Enchanting materials are handy for investments, since they do not cost anything to list on the AH. Not all materials sell particularly well, but since there's no list cost you can just re-list until a buyer is found.

The advantage to doing auction scanning immediately before the shutdown is that I am guaranteed of being high bidder on almost all of the shorter-duration auctions. My mailbox should be fairly bloated next time I log in.

This is only the second time I've logged in to VeCo since my trip. Before I left I basically shut down my auction house activity and its taking me some time to ramp back up on all three servers. It's not uncommon for me to be running 200+ auctions on a server when concentrating on questing. If I focus on trade, that number can be around 1000 active auctions. A lot of money can be made in small value high volume stuff... like the linen cloth earlier. At this stage on VeCo, my bank balance isn't large enough to look into rare or epic item trades - and quite frankly I'm not online often enough to really take advantage anyway. The time difference is also a problem, since I'm usually only on in the early hours of the morning. It's not bad for snapping up late - night bargains but customers are few and far between!

Anyway, sniping the auctions should net me about 150 or so items that can be resold. Probably 80% of them will sell at first listing, all for nice profits. That money will be re-invested in more stock. If I get time this week I may repeat this process twice more before the weekend and have a nice supply of gear to sell during the weekend peak.

What little actual playtime I've had recently has been spent with my guild on Dath. We had a guild run into Zul'Gurub on Monday. We roped in a few PUGgers but the majority were guildies - something that's quite rare for us. ZG is an old-school 20-man raid instance aimed at level 60's . Well skilled and well geared level 70's can do it in groups of 5 or so. My guildies are generally neither well geared nor experienced raiders so we had a number of casualties along the way. It was hardly the neatest run ever, but Hakkar the soulflayer and his minions died messily on our swords and good fun was had by all.

I am keen to hit up all the old-school instances and raids before they become even more irrelevant with the release of Wrath.

Wageslave

Again not too much to say. Work has been hell, and will be for probably another couple of weeks. With what little gaming time I've been getting I've nibbled away at my main projects:

I got both my main and alt Alliance characters to 21 on Cael. I invested a fair bit of my gold back into the market, mostly getting enchanting materials to skill-up. These two guys are doing ok money wise but not as well as the ones on VeCo.

I took a brief moment to log into my guys on VeCo.. and lucky I did, because I'd forgotten I had some outstanding auctions before I went overseas. I had a number of items in my mailbox with only 1-2 days left on the mail duration. I fired off a few emails and scanned the AH but haven't really spent any time there.

Most of my time has been spent on Dath. I was inspired for a few sessions to work on levelling my rogue Crypt. I managed about 3/4 of a level before getting distracted again. Somehow I ended up on a guild run into SM that was massively overpowered. We cleared Lib, Arms and Cath in well under an hour. I ended up swapping out for my hunter, who is at least more level-appropriate for SM. Was mostly pointless for me but was fun and we geared up a couple of lower level guildies.

Since then, I've been tinkering with my hunter. I've had a couple of lower level instance runs with other guildies and spent quite a bit of time helping a friend learn her hunter alt. She's just hit 24 and gained beast lore, so I took her "shopping" for skills. Like many newbie hunters, she'd let her pet languish with the lower levels of bite and growl etc. I'm fairly sure she's got the hang of it now though. The learning of skills from wild beasts is one thing I will miss once Wrath gets here.