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| I proudly play Horde-side on The Venture Co., a US RP-PVP server. If you want to come say hi, I can be found on the following characters:
Saelym
Akema
Taetra
Industrial
Larceny
Solae
Tavris
Keebah
Kaliandra | |
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| The Alts Thing I - Inscription
We've been sort of forsaking our alts lately for lots of reasons. When it was announced that Inscription would be released with the content patch prior to the release of the expansion, I decided that I would make Industrial an Herbalist / Inscriptionist and started picking flowers like crazy. When I wasn't picking flowers with him, I was on Akema doing the same thing, flying circuits of Outland. Then, when the content patch hit, Darryl decided to make his other Warrior, Blades, an Inscriptionist, and I just ended up selling the couple hundred stacks of herbs I had on the Auction House. So there you go. On one hand, a lot of time wasted - on the other, a lot of money made that promptly went to my next big time investment...
The Alts Thing II - The Albino Drake
With the release of the content patch we also got our Achievement interface, which all in all I was kind of "eh" about. That is, until I saw someone flying around Shattrath on an Albino Drake. With my jaw hanging open I whispered them and asked them where they got the mount - upon getting no response, I looked it up on Thottbot and found out that, lo and behold, if you secure 50 mounts you get one of those through the Achievements.
I'm sure you see where this is going.
I had, in my possession (in bank and in my backpacks), 2 hawkstriders, 1 Frostwolf Howler, 2 Wyverns, and a Netherdrake. Upon visiting Eversong Woods and the livery, I had a grand total of 11 mounts to my name. Nowhere near 50.
In the span of about a week and a half, I worked my way to Exalted with Orgrimmar, Darkspear Trolls, Undercity, Mag'har, and the Shatari Skyguard. For Orgrimmar, I ground out every starting quest I could find and then ran Alterac Valley to farm blood and armor shards to turn in at the base camp. For Undercity, it was Deathknell / Brill / Silverpine / Tarren Mill / Bulwark / Eastern Plaguelands. For the Trolls, a heaping mess of Runecloth turnins at the cloth quartermaster. For the Mag'har... Obsidian Warbeads, and lots of them. And for the Skyguard, it was the easiest bit of all, as I was only a few days worth of dailies away from Exalted and just ground out the last 1400 rep killing arakkoa.
All in all, it was a long, LONG, brutal grind. Jeff helped out by farming Runecloth in Tyr's Hand on Fallapart while I was doing all the beginner quests, and he also came out to help me farm Mag'har rep. And now, I have my lovely drake to show for it... which within a few weeks I won't even be able to fly thanks to the "no flying until 77" rule in Northrend. Still, it felt really awesome to actually put my mind to doing something and just DOING it.
The Alts Thing III - Tristyn
We kind of ground to a halt with our alts. Some of them we just don't feel like playing right now, others we feel like playing but just not the pairs they're in (if that makes sense). Through playing Tristyn, Jeff has absolutely fallen in love with Warlocks, to a point where he's decided that it may be Tristyn he wants to level first come expansion. That, of course, means that she'll actually have to hit 70 before November 13. While I was grinding Old World quests for rep, he was taking Tristyn and killing things around Thrallmar, and going up levels pretty quickly doing it. We also took her as a tag-along while we were killing ogres in Nagrand, which put her up a good level and a half... she'd promptly out-levelled Larceny, putting Tristyn at 66 before we even knew it.
So then came the dilemma. Either I level Larceny up to be Tristyn's companion again, or we find someone else. That someone else happened to be Kaliandra, our long-forgotten Paladin, who'd been sitting at 66 for ages. We dusted her off, specced her, and took her to Nagrand with Tristyn, where the two of them have been making an absolute killing levelling together. Right now they're sitting at 68, with no reason for us to be concerned that they won't make it to 70 before expansion (unless, of course, we just stop playing).
I don't mind it too much, really. While a Paladin isn't exactly my first choice of character to play (not to mention I have no CLUE what I'm doing), I'm glad that Jeff's getting his little Lock levelled up without too much difficulty. I think he just needs to level up another DPS class that he can have as an alternate if he ever gets bored of playing Fallapart... it took levelling a Warlock for me to realize just how much fun I have playing a Hunter as well.
Northrend Cometh...
So the expansion is just a few weeks away now! We're looking at having a ton of 70s to face the expansion with, and right now it's just a matter of deciding who's going to level with who. This is what we're looking at right now:
Saelym / Tristyn
Fallapart / Akema
Taetra / Hedonist
Bryx / Industrial
And then, of course, are our little Death Knghts that will likely get levelled up somewhere in the middle of all of that.
The expansion's going to be a busy time for us... I can't wait!
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| As usual, I've gone a long time without updating... a whole month this time, to be exact. On September 30, Bryx and Industrial hit 70. It was a pretty nice feeling to finally get them there, our first RAF pair to hit the big milestone. With those two finally at endgame (or at least, endgame for the next month), we have seven Level 70 characters across our four accounts. We also got Tavris and Harleequinn to 60 and got them to Outland, though Saelym is babysitting them through the first few quests. Other than that, we've been pretty quiet. We're working pretty much seven days a week and don't have a lot of free time - when we do, we're sort of just mellowing out. The thrill of the RAF promo took us from levelling frenzy to straight burnout, and rather than risk totally destroying our enjoyment of the game we've decided instead to take a bit of a break. We've been watching lots of movies and, recently, playing Spore, which is a bloody addictive game in its own right. Wrath of the Lich King is one month away. November 13, this all starts all over again. It'll be really strange to dust Saelym off and actually use her for something other than levelling alts. I mean, hell, I can't remember the last time I ran an instance with her. And I think the dust has piled up so high on Fallapart that Jeff doesn't even remember what she looks like anymore. | |
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| Today, Blizzard did an incredible thing.
Providing a smooth and enjoyable experience for all players is always a priority for us, and we are continually re-evaluating our policies and programs to do so. As the state of the game has matured substantially since the inception of Paid Character Transfers, we will now be allowing PvE-to-PvP transfers on a full-time basis to provide players with more mobility and freedom to easily play with their friends. What this means is that all those people who transferred off the high population PVP servers when transfers first came available can, for the first time, leave behind the carebear servers and go back to PVP. Seems since their merger with Activision, Blizzard's been doing all sorts of things totally out of character for them. When people mistakenly transferred off their PVP realms to play with friends on carebear servers who later quit, Blizzard's response was "Too bad, so sad". Darryl transferred his 60 Orc Warrior, Finalblow, to Skywall after his guild on Gurubashi fell apart. Bad move? Perhaps. But he couldn't change it - Gurubashi is PVP, Skywall is PVE. Blizzard's response amounted to "sucks to be you". But look at the things they've put in place since the merger, most noticeably the Recruit a Friend program. Aside from nerfing the amount of experience you need to go up levels once TBC came out, Blizzard's done nothing even remotely close to the leveling buff you get from RAF. However, it's a brilliant marketing ploy that has renewed interest in the game for veteran players and brought thousands of new accounts to the flock. This is a big thing, with Warhammer coming out in full force and the WotLK expansion being only months (?) away. Speaking of which, Blizzard CEO someone-or-other said in an article that Wrath of the Lich King WILL come out this year... just not in August or September. A hefty argument is sounding for November 11 as the release day. Anyway, I would imagine the RAF was probably Activision's influence, which is an opinion shared by many tech geeks with access to the ability to create podcasts (Darryl was just listening to one the other day saying just this). And now, PVE to PVP transfers, which Blizzard was so strongly against before? Oh well. Regardless of who thought of it, Blizzard just made a lot of people really fucking happy. | |
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| Well, not surprisingly, Jeff and I decided to purchase a Burning Crusade upgrade for our fourth account and keep it. Yes, it means another 70-something-bucks every 6 months to keep the subscription active. No, I'm not exactly sure how we justified it, other than the fact that the other two accounts in Jeff's name were getting pretty cramped with characters.
It gives us options though, mainly to transfer characters from his two accounts to this fourth one, and clear out some space for himself. It also means we can do silly things, such as sign almost half a guild charter. *laughs at herself* Mostly, though, we did it because space is minimal on WoW accounts and we didn't want to limit ourselves.
Yes, I guess I'm trying to find some way to justify it. *laughs*
Our escapades with the RAF promo go well, and we still have almost two months left. In the one month since we signed up, we've accomplished the following:
~ Bryx and Industrial to 65
~ Solae and Attero to 62
~ Tristyn and Larceny to 61
~ Tavris and Harleequinn to 50
~ Keebah and Primordial to 14
Yes, we deleted and remade Kee and Prime to take advantage of the RAF buff. All in all we thought it was a pretty smart move - I'm sure with everything we've accomplished in one month, we'll be able to pull them to 60 within the next two.
Bryx and Indi, being our most established pair, are very comfortable in Outland right now. They're questing in Terokkar, and still have all of Nagrand, Blade's Edge, Shadow Moon, and Netherstorm to keep them occupied on their way to 70. Jeff's suggestion to wait until they were 60 to hit Outland was brilliant! Right now we're letting them bank up some more rested experience, because it's always nicer to play full-rested.
Solae and Attero are parked in Thrallmar and having a great time melting faces. I never thought that two Shadow Priests could quest so comfortably together, and it's taken me a bit to get used to the downtime (the only high-level spellcaster I have is Taetra, and Affliction Locks don't exactly have downtime), but otherwise they're a blast.
Tristyn and Larceny, however, are the current pair of choice, at least until they run out of rested. Mutilate Rogue and Affliction Lock? Absolutely hilarious, and stuff dies ridiculously fast. Unlike when Sol and Tero hit Outland, Tristyn and Larceny haven't needed any assistance with the starter quests.
THIS DESPITE:
Tristyn being in Level 40 gear, some only Level 20, with a whopping 90 spell damage when we walked through the Portal. Larceny wasn't much better, clad in Level 50 gear made almost entirely through leatherworking, wielding a GREY STARTING DAGGER, no offhand (so she couldn't actually Mutilate) with ZERO defense and 42 weapon skill.
All that and we still managed to do the starter quests. I don't care what anybody says, there's a lot to be said about playing with a partner who knows what you're going to do before you do it. And the fun thing is that I've played a Lock to 70, Jeff a Rogue to 70, so we can give each other advice on what to do in different situations (though I openly state that I'm nowhere near as good with Locks as he is with Rogues).
Either way, regardless of what pair we're playing, it's SO NICE to be in Outland again.
Tavris and Harleequinn squeaked out two more levels from Zul'Farrak, but I think that's about all we're going to be able to do there. It's time to suck it up and pull 10 levels of questing to get them where they need to go.
And the Shamans, Keebah and Primordial, we'll work on them eventually. - Tags:alts, attero, bryx, harleequinn, industrial, keebah, larceny, primordial, solae, tavris, tristyn
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| So here's the standing on our Recruit-a-Friend Harem:
Bryx and Industrial - Orc Hunter, Tauren Druid - Level 61
I guess these two don't really count anymore since they're no longer linked. We got them to 61 and since then have decided to let them gather some rested experience while we bring up other lowbies.
Tavris and Harleequinn - Undead Mage, Undead Warrior - Level 48
Our second pair of Recruit-a-Friends are Level 48 right now. We were originally going to take them questing at this point, but we're realizing now it's almost better to spend an extra four levels in Zul'farrak and move on to questing from there - that way you're not stuck doing quests you don't want to do.
Solae and Attero - Undead Priests - Level 59
Solae and Attero, our third pair, are half a level from the 60 mark and facing no longer being linked together. We're holding them here because we're not entirely sure if Solae can gift her levels once she hits 60. She's already given enough to Tristyn to get her to 59, but we don't want to risk losing any. These two were levelled up in Zul'Farrak until 52, at which point we went to Ungoro Crater and knocked off the super-easy quests there before heading to Felwood, doing some super-easy ones there. We also hit about three quests in Winterspring, and only the cauldron quests in Western Plaguelands - pretty much all the easy quests that we enjoy and can do quickly.
Tristyn - Blood Elf Warlock - Level 59
Who would have thought that you could level a character with ZERO effort? Tristyn was 31 before we decided to gift our RAF bonus levels to her, and now she's sitting at a comfortable 59... still wearing her Robes of Arugal.
Larceny - Blood Elf Rogue - Level 14
One of the first two characters we made on The Venture Co. (the other was Saelym - Jeff transferred his two mains), Larceny was sitting neglected at 42 for the last year or so. We decided that since I still want to try my hand at playing a Rogue, we would remake her and gift her the bonus levels, thus getting me a Rogue that I don't have to painfully drag up through the lower levels. It was hard to delete her - we put a lot of work into her - but in the end it's for the best. Her levelling partner for now is an Orc Hunter named Foreversky (named respectfully after my arch-enemy from our PVP glory days on Kirin Tor, an Orc Rogue named Foreversky).
Keebah and Primordial - Troll Shaman, Orc Shaman - TBA
Still trying to decide if we really are going to toast our Shamans and relevel them through the RAF. After all, it's only the end of August and we have until the beginning of November.
Oh Yeah...
We've also pretty much decided that we're going to keep our fourth account. I think that sets us firmly in the uber-geek category now. - Tags:alts, attero, bryx, harleequinn, industrial, keebah, larceny, levelling, primordial, solae, tavris
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| So Darryl and Vash both signed up for the RAF promo, which means they're both bringing up pairs of lowbies - Darryl a Rogue and a Hunter, Vash a Rogue and a Paladin. For a while Vash was running Darryl's lowbies through Shadowfang Keep, but he really wanted to bring up his as well. So last night, they asked us if we would mind running their four characters through something.
Well, that's all well and good, but we also wanted to run Solae and Attero through Scarlet Monastery to try and see how close we could get them to 40, and I'd also promised Heather I would run her Paladin with them.
I guess this is where having four accounts comes in handy.
Saelym took Solae, Attero, and Desidaya to Library / Cathedral while Bryx took the four lowbies through Shadowfang and Razorfen Kraul. I don't know how they ended up doing, but Solae and Attero went from 33 to 37, which wasn't bad for the half-distracted minimal effort I was putting in.
But what's cool is that I found out I actually CAN run three instances of WoW at the same time on my computer! I always thought that my rig couldn't exactly handle it, but I proved myself wrong. I had Solae and Attero on two screens about 1/4 the size of my monitor, and Saelym on a 3/4. It made clicking from screen to screen to take the wonder twins off AFK a breeze (yes, I know there are multi-box addons that you can use but I really couldn't be arsed, it's not like we do this often).
I think we're going to turn our attention more to working on Tavris and Harleequinn now that we've found out the RAF hasn't been nerfed (and may not be, at that). IF we get them to 60, and then the Priests to 60, before we run out of time (which is pretty likely, I guess, since we have until the first week of November), then we'll go and delete Keebah and Primordial to remake them and relevel them with the bonus. It's kind of funny because it means the majority of our characters are going to be spread across the two accounts that Jeff commonly uses, and the only 70s on my account will be Sae, Tae, and Ake. Ah well. Not like it's ever really been a case of "MY" account versus "JEFF'S" account. It's just kind of funny. | |
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| If it weren't for the fact that I'm using Saelym to run our Recruit a Friend (RAF) characters through instances, I would have forgotten entirely what it's like to play her by now. As it is, Akema and Taetra have gathered so much dust that when I finally go back to playing them, I'm going to suck terribly.
Last night, Tavris and Harleequinn hit 48 and are officially finished with Zul'Farrak. We took some time to do neglected Warrior quests for Harlee's stances, and then camped them out in Orgrimmar. At this point they'll need to quest to move forward, since the experience gets worse going into Sunken Temple and Blackrock Depths due to a) the higher level of the elites, which even for Saelym take longer to kill and b) the mix of non-elites in all the groups, which award less experience. There's also the fact that none of the instances are in convenient places for selling / mailing things. So while there's some pretty gear to be had in those instances, we're not going to bother with them. We'll quest the pair up through to 60 and then hit Outland, hopefully somewhat prepared.
But right now we're moving to Solae and Attero, our baby Priests. With the threat of the RAF nerf looming over us (the characters not getting 3x the experience if there's a 70 in the group with them) we're trying to level up as much as we can, as fast as we can. It's the reason we did such a strong burn with Tav and Harlee to get them up, and spent a good chunk of time with Sol and Tero last night. They went up three levels in two Razorfen Kraul runs, which puts them solidly at 25. A few more runs and they'll hit 28 and be ready for Library.
For those curious, this is how our running goes:
Levels 1-8 on starting area quests.
Levels 8 - 17 in Ragefire Chasm.
Levels 17 - 22 in Shadowfang Keep.
Levels 22 - 28 in Razorfen Kraul.
Levels 28 - 38 in Scarlet Monastery (Library, Armory, and mostly Cathedral).
Levels 38 - 48 in Zul'Farrak.
Levels 48 - 60 through Old World questing to build up some gear and practice playing the classes before Outland.
We're hoping to get Sol and Tero to 30 tonight, maybe a bit higher, depending on how quickly we can knock off the runs and how late we want to stay up. Chances are, if they're going to nerf the RAF promo they're going to do it patch day tomorrow - I'm crossing my fingers that's not the case and we'll get one more week, which should be all the time we need to get the Priests high enough to quest and maybe the Shamans too. | |
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| Let's say we have Account A with a level 70 character, Account B with a level 1 character and Account C with another level 1 character, all three characters are grouped. Account B and Account C are linked, will they receive triple experience? A: Bonus experience should only be granted if the experience is not trivial to anyone in the group. Our Quality Assurance Team is looking into reports that some of these restrictions are not consistent and hope to resolve the issue soon.
AUGH GODDAMMIT THEY'RE GOING TO NERF THE RECRUIT A FRIEND PROMO!!!!!!!!!! (who saw that coming?) *fumes* I don't know how quickly this change is going to go through, but hopefully we can at least get another pair out of Zul'Farrak before it does. Currently Tavris and Harleequinn are the levelling pair, and hit 30 last night. If we burn them - REALLY burn them - we could get them to 40 tonight, 48 by tomorrow, which would mean that they'd be out of the instance stage and into the levelling stage. Solae and Attero are only 18 still, and we have yet to remake Keebah and Primordial. Dammit dammit dammit! | |
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| Let's talk about a little bit of everything.
Alts
So on August 10, at 5:52 am, after a long night of grinding quests, drinking iced capps, and generally consuming any sugar we could get our hands on, Bryx and Industrial dinged 60. Bryx actually hit first, and Indi was about 3.5 bars away, which sucked because he didn't get the 3x experience anymore and we were pretty much out of quests. Since we were in Felwood (had handed in a furbolg quest that dinged Bryx), we resorted to a couple green quests and killing the higher level furbolgs near the Timbermaw tunnel entrance. It didn't take too long, thank goodness, and Indi finally hit 60!
Total Time Played: 1 day, 5 hours, 13 minutes, 31 seconds. That's from 1 to 60! It was a pretty hardcore grind - we started the characters on Wednesday and they hit 60 after our Saturday night / Sunday morning marathon. The fact that I was home sick for two days helped, as did having Saelym to run them through instances until their high 40s. But either way, we did it! Jeff gave Industrial the zhevra mount he got with the Recruit-a-Friend promotion and trust me, when a male Tauren is riding it the damn horse is huge! I still have a good laugh every time he summons it.
So they're in Outland now, and enjoying the comforts of the inn in Thrallmar while we work on other characters.
So on that note...
I did something a little abnormal for me and deleted one of my veteran characters. Tavris, my Undead Mage, wasn't high level - he was only 39 - but I rolled him ages ago on Gurubashi when Jeff and Darryl played with the raiding guild < Efflixi >. He only made it to 36, but he was a special little character to me because he was my first spellcaster. Special enough that we transferred him to Venture Co. when we rolled her so that I could continue levelling him, and I even started making the effort. But Jeff and I talked about it and I realized that with none of our other characters in his level range, he had nobody to go to 70 with and the process is SO SLOW if you're doing it by yourself. So when Jeff decided that he wanted to make himself a Warrior, he asked me if there was another class, any class, that I wanted to raise up with it, and I chose a Mage. Rather than keep a 39 Mage on my account that I wasn't going to do anything with, I cleared out Tavris' bank and bags, sold everything, and deleted him so that I could remake him with the Recruit-a-Friend thing. Jeff made himself Harleequinn, a female Undead Warrior, and the two of them just hit Level 22 last night after some Shadowfang Keep runs with Saelym.
We also have another pair we're bringing up, two Undead Priests (male and female) named Attero and Solae (Solae being named after my Undead Rogue that was Fallapart's original questing buddy back on Burning Legion). They're Level 18 right now, but we're holding off on bringing them to 60 so we can concentrate on Tav and Harlee.
The Shamans
Keebah and Primordial are sitting at 48 right now with nothing to do. They have a bit of rested, but they certainly don't have the 3x experience buff, and since both Sunken Temple and Blackrock Depths (both of which Fallapart can solo comfortably) are not exactly the experience powerhouses we thought they would be, they're reduced to questing their way to 60. But anybody who's done that grind before knows that it's a pain in the ass, and involves lots of running / flying all over the place. So we're wondering if it would be better to delete them and remake them with the Recruit-a-Friend. It's pretty much a given that it would be faster, and the only disadvantage is the fact that Keebah (like any of the other characters) can't be on my account. Three of our accounts are currently in Jeff's name, but mine is in my own (when we made our accounts way back at release, transfers were unheard of, so it's not like we could have anticipated that). But it's not a big deal, really, because Jeff's not going to play more than one character at a time, and it's not like we really put ownership on our accounts. I always use Fallapart to grind out Primal Life or farm items because she's well-geared and hits like a son of a bitch, and he's been playing with Akema and Taetra to get a feel for the classes.
Anyway, chances are we'll end up deleting Kee and Prime and remaking them. Which would give us a total of 8 characters we're bringing up through this promotion.
Final Count
When all is said and done and we get all these guys to 60 (and eventually 70, as that's the plan), and then bring Kaliandra up the last few levels, this is what we'll have at 70: 2 Hunters (Saelym and Bryx), 2 Warlocks (Taetra and Tristyn), 2 Druids (Akema and Industrial), 1 Rogue (Fallapart), 3 Priests (Hedonist, Attero, and Solae), 2 Shamans (Keebah and Primordial), 2 Mages (Tavris and Incindia), 1 Warrior (Harleequinn), 1 Paladin (Kaliandra). How crazy is that? Sixteen 70s? We're friggin nuts.
Guild Stuff
Still in < Fuse >, though < Fuse > is effectively dead. Dels came back to us but ended up leaving and going to < Tantalus >, not because he was mad or anything but because he knew just as well as we did that we weren't going to be doing anything. The only regular players right now are me, Jeff, and Vash, and Lethal is online now and then but I'm really wondering how much longer he's planning on playing the game.
I don't know what we're going to do on that front. Even thinking about it gives me a headache. | |
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