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RE: Pandaria begins

Kisker — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 15:24:00 GMT

I'm still lagging onn the horde side, but do have one toon at 90 now. Some follow up stuff:

Start doing golden lotus quests right off at 90. They are in the golden pagoda in the valley of eternal blossoms. The quests are hard, take a while to do and don't give a lot of rep. Ergo, you might as well start them early, since that rep is going to take some time to earn. I do recommend that you run a couple heroics first to get your gear level up a bit first, as we are talking level 90 densely-packed mobs with over a half million hits.
I'm liking the farming and serpent riding quests. The serpents give several quests that give good rep and get you closer to having your own cloud serpent. The farming quests make farmer Yoon like you enough to expand the size of your farm plot. Mine went from 4 to 8 plots yesterday. Woo! At up to 5 units per plot that is up to 45 veggies a day, or nearly half a stack. it looks like there's room to further expand, too.
When you hit 90 don't keep running regular instances to get enough gear to join heroics. Just go to the AH. For a couple hundred gold you can probably patch up your gear level with some pvp gear and get into the heroics. Once you start running them you'll begin to accumulate 440-463 gear. I THINK 463 is raid minimum, but can't swear to it.
You can get patterns for purple gear from rep factions, but there are an awful lot of rep factions out there. You could spend your whole day just doing rep quests these days. I don't recommend doing this, by the way. We are just starting this expansion. Nothing says you have to burn through it (and burn yourself out) right at the beginning.
Crafting: Most crafting is pretty good right now. Most herbs and ores are fairly common. Sprites of all flavors, and also high-level mogu, drop a lot of cloth. The one big bottleneck I've seen has been with alchemy. Most elixirs, flasks and transmutes all depend on golden lotus. To date golden lotus has been rare and expensive on the AH, often going for between 200-400 per lotus. I'm not going to be doing a lot of work with these, at least not at that price. The one big useful one here is green tea leaves. These are found literally everywhere in big quantity, sell for cheap, and are awesome for both alchemy and inscription. For whoever it is that keeps dropping them in the guild bank, I thank you! They have been a big help!
Food! Get to Haffhill in the valley of Four Winds and talk to Farmer Yoon if you haven't. He'll get you started farming up veggies. these can be used for cooking (and the different cooking factions), for quest turn-ins (the horrible bag of groceries quest-I'd avoid that one), or to sell for a bit of coin on the AH. seriously, if you aren't in a hurry to level cooking and get cooking rep, well, lots of other people are, and the cooking mats market is pretty healthy. Just look at the Ah for a couple days and see what is popular. Veggies stack to 100, and I saw a stack of scallions sell for 1200g the other day. With 8 plots of land you can make almost half a stack per day for the investment of maybe less than a gold per day and 5 minutes of time. I'm just sayin'. That's like 500g a day for an investment of one gold.

I hope this helps! I also hope our GM puts an announcement of the message of the day for folks to swing by here and check it out (wink, wink!).

RE: Pandaria begins

Vladracul — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:04:00 GMT

Good hints Kisk, thanks, I gotta get my butt in gear and level my toons--WAY way behind...

RE: Checking in

Vladracul — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:03:00 GMT

Welcome back GOTS, saw you ingame the other day.

Peace,
Vlad

RE: MoP announcement coming

Vladracul — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:02:00 GMT

Yeah I got an email from a prior GM of Haggis, Dunnar, and he asked if anyone in the guild was playing GW2. I told him I didn't hear of anyone other than someone at work who mentioned it the other day.

Thanks,
Vlad

Pandaria begins

Kisker — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 13:58:00 GMT

My, oh, my, the silence here is deafening. So, I'll kick things off!

Pandaria landed last week, and we already have several level 90s in the guild. Congratulations! I have been pretty sidetracked by RL obligations myself, but have been playing some. Here are my initial impressions, along with some tips I've picked up.

First, Pandaria is freaking gorgeous. Sweeping vistas, loveley architecture and soe first-rate art direction all combine to make it really pleasant, at least while leveling. I haven't seen any of the end zones yet, but I'm hoping they aren't just more bleak pits where we are expected to spend most of our time.

Second: Questing is better. They've taken most of the questlines off of the phasing train-ride, so you can more freely quest around and do the things you enjoy. That is huge. There are still a lot of the classic "kill 20 of these and bring me 15 of those"-type quests out there, but they vary it up.

Third: The instances don't suck. In Cata 5-mans had a tendency to involve a lot of corpse-running. Not so much in panda. Plus, the places are interesting, good-looking, and not so long as to make you have to block off two hours to get through one.

Fourth: Dailies. The dailies are spread out over an enormous number of factions. You could make dailies your entire game if you wanted, tilling your farm, gathering stuff, thinning the herds. Some guy was complaining that alts were killing him because with 3 alts it was taking him six hours a day to do them. I've always said: WoW is a game, not the army. We're going to have panda for at least a a year of a year and half. No need to do it all today. And probably no need for as many alts, what with more actual content being available. Which leads me to...

Fifth: Lots of stuff to do. Pandaria is really dense. You never have to go far to find something to do. Me, I tend to level alts when I'm bored. I had 4 level 60 toons when BC came out, 4 level 70 toons when Wrath came out, 6 level 80s when Cata came out, and am starting panda with 7 level 85s (and 2 more in the 60s and 70s). I don't need to use all my alts all the time. I just want to love the one I'm with, so to speak.

Tips: A few tips to help you out:
-Ore and herbs: These are either broken right now or Blizz just decided to up availability. There are copious amounts of gatherables out there. Go forth now, while people are leveling crafting, and make some easy lucre!
-Crafting for tailoring and enchanting: I believe it is the Jade temple (or not) that has a quest where you need to gather some oranges for a party. There are orange-stealing sprites by the trees, though. While they are meant to be an impediment to you getting the oranges, in fact they are easy to kill, respawn almost instantly, are NOT aggro, and drop lots of cloth. I ground there for about 15 minutes on my warlock and got something like 70 BOLTS of cloth made. Tailoring made easy, in other words. I also recommend making daily trips to the Silken Fields in Valley of the Four Winds, to make Imperial Silk.

For enchanting, having lots of cloth means you can make stuff for disenchanting. Dust can now be turned into essence, which makes things a lot more interesting. I wouldn't make scrolls at this point. everyone leveling already is, so you won't make any money that way. Honestly, I'm finding that I'm replacing gear so often (due to the new and fabulous quest reward system that looks at your class and spec and offers appropriate rewards) that I'm throwing enough enchants to keep my skill level pacing leveling.

I haven't done jewelcrafting yet, but hear the ore shuffle is still alive and well. That's where you buy ore, prospect it, cut the blue gems and either sell of craft the yellows. Right now, with the enchanters leveling, it is a great time to flood the AH with cheap crafted greens. I made most of my Cata money on jewelcrafting. it is tedious work, but it will pay if you need cash.

That's what I have for now. Enjoy, and good adventuring!

WoW watermarking your screenshots

Kisker — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 17:59:00 GMT

This is odd:

http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-warcraft-general/375573-looking-inside-your-screenshots.html

Blizzard apparently hides account and IP data in screeshots that people take, presumably to hunt down private WoW servers. It doesn't contain passwords, but it does contain account ID and account name, which could be used for other nefarious purposes.

RE: Checking in

Gillis — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 16:43:00 GMT

Its been sent Got. Hope to see you back soon

RE: Checking in

Gillis — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 22:38:00 GMT

Hay Got.

I just saw this. Do you still need this. I should be in game tonight and can hook you up.

Gillis

RE: Checking in

Hellstryfe — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 00:51:00 GMT

can anyone use a Scroll of rez on me my email is Hellstryfe@live.com

RE: MoP announcement coming

Kisker — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 13:08:00 GMT

Actually, they've only ever released one XPAC (LK) in November, plus the original game. BC was January and Cata was December. But yeah, they do favor those mid-winter months normally.

I think this one has been pushed by the imminent release of Guild Wars 2. A lot of people don't know it, but the Guild Wars team was originally comprised primarily of disaffected Blizzard people that quit right before WoW went live. I think they are seen as a pretty big threat, so Blizz hotfooted this realease to try and steal some of their thunder, like they did with LK and Warhammer Online.