Making notes on the patch notes(and undocumented changes) for today and wanted to let other solo-ers know about some of the interesting changes taking place today.
CLASS CHANGES
Hunter: Pet happiness is going away. This change to may or may not be a welcome change. It basically means one or two extra bag slots for my hunters. With talents and glyphs, I rarely had to feed my pets, but I kept food around just in case(and several types, depending on which pets I would switch between). The glyph that formerly increased pet happiness will now change the size of your pet to smaller-which is fine by me, I hate huge pets, they are just obnoxious.
Also, all tamed pets will now automatically be the same level as your hunter. I didn't have a chance to test this, but I am hoping this applies to all pets already in your stable as well. Also meaning that they would level up when you do, same as Warlock pets. Very nice if so.
Rogue: Stealth cooldown reduced to 4 seconds. FOUR SECONDS! And with the Nightstalker talent on level one of Subtlety, it is reduced to ZERO SECONDS! Yowza I can't believe how happy this makes my many rogues! Now, Blizzard, please reduce the cooldown for Druids!
NEW MINI-PETS
Wintersaber Cub: Purchased from a vendor in Winterspring
Panther Cub: Quest reward from level 85 questline regarding the new Troll dungeon in Stranglethorn. Does not require entering the dungeon or any groups or any pre-quests other than the questline you start from either Orgrimmar or Stormwind.
Voodoo Figurine and Pterrordax Hatchling: Archaeology projects from Troll and Fossil projects.
It also appears that there are going to be new choices in the Children's Week events which arrive the first week of May(next week!). For Azeroth there will be a snail named Scooter and in Outland, a fenstrider named Legs.
DAILY QUESTS:
NEW! fishing and cooking quests are available in the Alliance cities of Ironforge and Darnassus, and Horde cities of Thunder Bluff and Undercity. Not certain if there is an achievement related to them, but at least I can break up the monotony of the dailies by putting alts in other cities. NOTE: You canNOT do all 3 sets each day; one daily of each kind per day. I suppose you could research daily to see if one of the three is one that rewards more than one skill point or award token and do that one, but not sure if the time needed would be worth it(unless you are a mage!).
GUILD INFO:
For those who are in guilds and for those who aren't.
GUILD FINDER
One thing I hate about looking for a guild on alts that aren't in my personal family guilds is doing the research or interacting with so many jerks to find the diamond in the rough. I am hoping that some of my higher level players can find a guild that fits their playstyle. If not, no skin off of my nose. I have one alt in a level 25 guild that is so huge that there is rarely talking, noone says "grats" and I can be fairly anonymous. The only other guild I have a character in is basically a family type guild where I know most of the higher ups are stay-at-home moms like me. If I can find others on other realms like these, fine. If not, no biggie.
GUILD REP TABARDS:
For those characters of mine in my family-only guilds, there are bind to account tabards are available to effectively double the amount of rep gained within the guild. Not that our level 6 guild has many perks or items unlocked, but being revered or exalted with them would still be nice! And for the alts in the big guilds, well then I can get to the cool stuff even faster(not sure I would ever buy that Scorpion mount though, just too ugly and scary!).
BATTLE.NET ACCOUNT BOUND
All items that were previously "account bound"(and are still realm bound) can now be sent to characters you have on other accounts under your Battle.net account. So I can send any heirlooms over to my daughter's account, or presumably also the Baby Blizzard Bear(which my level 85 Paladin is missing, but I am pretty sure my kid has!) or any Archaeology items I dig up!
WINTERSABER
Aside from the adorable little Wintersaber cub that can be purchased in Winterspring, it is now much easier to get the Wintersaber mount for my Alliance alts! My human mage did this grind about a year ago, and even though the rep had been upped by then, the grind was still a PAIN! It has now been changed to be more inline with the Venomhide Ravasaur questline for Horde. You get a baby Wintersaber, and feed it, train it, and raise it until you can ride it! It takes 20 days if you don't skip a day and then you have one of the best looking ground mounts in the game!
There are a few other minor things that are interesting such as Old Ironforge finally being open to visit, Honor gained being doubled, trading Justice Points for Honor Points(I only get Justice Points when I do Holiday bosses, never enough to buy anything), all cities having all trainers available, and targeted mobs or npcs showing as a dot on your minimap. It's the little things that make me happy!
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Monday, February 28, 2011
The state of a small guild
I hear people talk about being in "small guilds", and then they talk about what raid they are doing that week. That isn't a "small guild". Our guild is small, three -3- active people: myself, my husband and my kid(who isn't all that active). And this past week we hit level 5.
I know I b*tched and moaned previously about how unfair it is for us small guilds-and I still think it is-but I think we've done alright. Yes, I really think we should be much higher at this point-and I wouldn't give two hoots if every other guild were already level 25. Five levels in three months, so maybe, just maybe we will hit level 10 by May or June. That is of course as long as we keep doing dailies, because we are running out of characters to level up to 85.
So a three person guild has hit level 5. It really makes me think twice when I see any guild at a lower level attempting to invite me on realms where my characters are guildless. And I have joined a couple of guilds on other realms. One on my Dwarf Shaman, which is the same guild my old Dwarf Paladin was in many moons ago. That guild is around level 13 right now and they have many 85s, and they attempt to raid. My Undead Death Knight(level 83) just joined a mega guild, level 18 I think, just for the hell of it. There are so many people on usually, I never need to even acknowledge them.
Not only has our little guild managed to make it to level 5, but we also went around and knocked out all of the Classic Dungeon Master achievements last week. Requirements were changed to only need 3 out of 5 people for the achievement, so we lucked out in that one. We might eventually attempt to do the Outland Heroic achievements, though I still don't even know where all of the dungeons are in Outland. Shame there isn't a "regular Outland dungeon" guild achievement-those would probably be easy.
The biggest news of all though-we actually managed to kill Zul'jin in Zul'Aman! We went in just to farm Hex Sticks so my kid could get the Mojo pet(success!), and we just kept attempting each boss and succeeding! Of course, there was no guild achievement, we would need 8 people in the group-but we got the individual achievements, which will be nice if they happen to take old Zul'Aman away. But still...we killed Zul'jin! Us crappy little players in our less than 333 gear! (I'm sure many are laughing at how they soloed it during Wrath, but hey it was pretty exciting for us!)
So little guilds can accomplish, we will just be years behind every one else(which sucks). Now if we could just find a Human Hunter and Night Elf Mage in battlegrounds to get that Alliance Slayer achievement and have that little Guild Page minipet!
I know I b*tched and moaned previously about how unfair it is for us small guilds-and I still think it is-but I think we've done alright. Yes, I really think we should be much higher at this point-and I wouldn't give two hoots if every other guild were already level 25. Five levels in three months, so maybe, just maybe we will hit level 10 by May or June. That is of course as long as we keep doing dailies, because we are running out of characters to level up to 85.
So a three person guild has hit level 5. It really makes me think twice when I see any guild at a lower level attempting to invite me on realms where my characters are guildless. And I have joined a couple of guilds on other realms. One on my Dwarf Shaman, which is the same guild my old Dwarf Paladin was in many moons ago. That guild is around level 13 right now and they have many 85s, and they attempt to raid. My Undead Death Knight(level 83) just joined a mega guild, level 18 I think, just for the hell of it. There are so many people on usually, I never need to even acknowledge them.
Not only has our little guild managed to make it to level 5, but we also went around and knocked out all of the Classic Dungeon Master achievements last week. Requirements were changed to only need 3 out of 5 people for the achievement, so we lucked out in that one. We might eventually attempt to do the Outland Heroic achievements, though I still don't even know where all of the dungeons are in Outland. Shame there isn't a "regular Outland dungeon" guild achievement-those would probably be easy.
The biggest news of all though-we actually managed to kill Zul'jin in Zul'Aman! We went in just to farm Hex Sticks so my kid could get the Mojo pet(success!), and we just kept attempting each boss and succeeding! Of course, there was no guild achievement, we would need 8 people in the group-but we got the individual achievements, which will be nice if they happen to take old Zul'Aman away. But still...we killed Zul'jin! Us crappy little players in our less than 333 gear! (I'm sure many are laughing at how they soloed it during Wrath, but hey it was pretty exciting for us!)
So little guilds can accomplish, we will just be years behind every one else(which sucks). Now if we could just find a Human Hunter and Night Elf Mage in battlegrounds to get that Alliance Slayer achievement and have that little Guild Page minipet!
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Loremaster at last!
I finally finished up Loremaster on my Druid last week. I already had all of Eastern Kingdom and Kalimdor done(and nearly complete when achievements were introduced way back when), all of Burning Crusade, and all of Northrend except for Icecrown. Finishing all of the Cataclysm zones were easy. Finishing the last 20 or so quests in Icecrown was the hurdle.
Since I rarely group outside of family members, the 5man quests in Icecrown had been a sore spot in my Loremaster trip. Being 85 and having more hit points than most of the NPCs you have to fight now made it trivial. That didn't mean I didn't have fun in the process. My daughter and I took an hour or so hunting down the leftover quests and knocking them out.
And viola! I had my title and silly looking tabard(well, silly looking on a Tauren female). I think I will be using this title and only this title for a long time to come. This feels like quite an accomplishment for me, an unabashed altoholic who spends time playing on at least 6 or 7 characters a day-doing dailies and an hour of questing here, hour of questing with someone else there. I have one other character who is somewhat close to getting the title, but none of my others is even in the ballpark.
But it feels nice to have it done. Now to wait and see if they ever add an addition to "the Seeker"(3000 quests completed), seeing as how my stats say I have around 4800 quests complete with her! A new title at 5k quests would be a cinch since I have barely touched any quests in the new and improved low level zones! Bring on "the Quester"! (or whatever might sound much cooler than that!)
Since I rarely group outside of family members, the 5man quests in Icecrown had been a sore spot in my Loremaster trip. Being 85 and having more hit points than most of the NPCs you have to fight now made it trivial. That didn't mean I didn't have fun in the process. My daughter and I took an hour or so hunting down the leftover quests and knocking them out.
And viola! I had my title and silly looking tabard(well, silly looking on a Tauren female). I think I will be using this title and only this title for a long time to come. This feels like quite an accomplishment for me, an unabashed altoholic who spends time playing on at least 6 or 7 characters a day-doing dailies and an hour of questing here, hour of questing with someone else there. I have one other character who is somewhat close to getting the title, but none of my others is even in the ballpark.
But it feels nice to have it done. Now to wait and see if they ever add an addition to "the Seeker"(3000 quests completed), seeing as how my stats say I have around 4800 quests complete with her! A new title at 5k quests would be a cinch since I have barely touched any quests in the new and improved low level zones! Bring on "the Quester"! (or whatever might sound much cooler than that!)
Tuesday, February 08, 2011
Still solo after all these years
Despite my distaste for Cataclysm when it first came out, I'm still rolling along just fine. As can be seen here-I'm playing so much I don't find the time to post! (but today is patch day, so...and the death of power shifting for my beloved Druids, /cry)
So far to this point I've...
Another note, our little guild of 3 is level 4. It isn't much compared to most, and it is disappointing still that it is taking so long to get higher, but it's getting there. We might fill up a 1/5 of a bar per day, depending on how many dailies I feel like doing(and whether I'm playing on another realm altogether). The perks we have so far #1 faster leveling(haven't really noticed), #2 faster mount speed(haven't really noticed-except that my Swift Flight Form is slower than everyone else-at least that changes with the patch today), and #3 Increased rep(this one helps since quests and dailies are our only way of gaining rep).
I'm still not as thrilled with this expansion, but that can always change. The Argent Tournament didn't come in until well into Wrath, so there is still hope for more fun and dailies in the future. And at least they made the one "group" quest in Tol Barad available without joining the group. If only they would do that with the named mobs on the other island. I am so sick of the fighting over the named mobs, my ignore list is filling up by leaps and bounds. >.<
Oh and "Boo" to the Packers. Just "boo". Bleh, the Puppy Bowl was more interesting.
So far to this point I've...
- Have 4 characters at level 85
- Most of the rest of my 80s are at least level 83(only 2 of them haven't really been touched)
- Troll Druid is level 74, Dwarf Shaman is level 65
- Goblin Rogue is level 40
- Worgens are still lagging behind, just not thrilled with them
- Doing as many of the Holiday achievements as possible with as many characters as possible(only the easy ones and any that give mini-pets)
- All four 85s have their Tol Barad weapons, working on the Ghost Wolf mount with my Druid
- Main Druid is at 14 archaeology rares, ready to make the push to "Professor" after the patch hits and makes it somewhat easier
- Still NO dungeons done except for holiday bosses and any that can be soloed at a higher level
Another note, our little guild of 3 is level 4. It isn't much compared to most, and it is disappointing still that it is taking so long to get higher, but it's getting there. We might fill up a 1/5 of a bar per day, depending on how many dailies I feel like doing(and whether I'm playing on another realm altogether). The perks we have so far #1 faster leveling(haven't really noticed), #2 faster mount speed(haven't really noticed-except that my Swift Flight Form is slower than everyone else-at least that changes with the patch today), and #3 Increased rep(this one helps since quests and dailies are our only way of gaining rep).
I'm still not as thrilled with this expansion, but that can always change. The Argent Tournament didn't come in until well into Wrath, so there is still hope for more fun and dailies in the future. And at least they made the one "group" quest in Tol Barad available without joining the group. If only they would do that with the named mobs on the other island. I am so sick of the fighting over the named mobs, my ignore list is filling up by leaps and bounds. >.<
Oh and "Boo" to the Packers. Just "boo". Bleh, the Puppy Bowl was more interesting.
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