Elgar Gets Some Love/Hate

I decided to give Elgar a little play time.  Upon logging in, I realized that I had 3 pending rare items for archaeology and should maybe spend some time on that since I really haven’t in months.  As I flew around I kept a close eye on the Dungeon Finder waiting for the CtA:healer.  It usually pops at least once a night. 

As it was, CtA:healer popped up 4 times and I took advantage all 4 times, giving me a nice little break from the archaeology. 

Stonecore:  One wipe on Ozruk, the mage kept spellstealing the reflective debuff and I was paralyzed all 4 times before finally the tank went down from LOS.  We communicated the need to leave up the buff so I could reflect.  Next time, flawless.

Lost City:  Squisky tank, but manageable.  First boss, DK and melee shaman stand in the bad.  I am struggling to keep squishy tank up and get tossed into the pillar 4 times…yes, 4.  So the DK wasn’t getting much in the way of heals as there wasn’t really time to spare.  Sorry.  But after the fight he says “healer, you need to keep up with heals.”  I say, “Really?”  “Yes, really.”  I then say, “DK, you need to not stand in the bad.  Yes, really.”  The tank went on to defend me and there was probably a vote to kick me, but it didn’t pass.  I stuck it out for the goodie bag. 

BRC:  Corla, has anyone not done this?  All three DPS, “me!”  F—-  We wipe once, but they seem to get it.  Second time, lock goofs up his, but we’re able to hold it together, but the interrupts didn’t happen and we lose it.  Lock drops group, warrior DPS comes in, I take locks beam, we execute it perfectly.  Props to the rogue and hunter for never having seen it and figuring it out pretty quick.

What was the last instance???  Hmm, maybe I only did three.

Anyways, after archaeology and satchels, Elgar, Troutwort, and Rossini all ended up with a new mini-pet!  Elgar got the clockwork gnome, but also had a Captured Firefly and a Tourney Bear Cub in his bags!  Whee!  Trout got the firefly because he has a wasp pet that is the same model, and Rossini got the bear cub because so many of the others already had it.  So a good night for all!  Just a few more and Elgar will have enough JP to buy his T11 robes…yes, I’m behind the times!!  Still sporting that green wand though…

The 4.1

Okay, so today is probably the patch, I am limited to what I can view from work, so I just assume it is going to happen and/or is happening.

I am not going to comment on every little update, but I thought I’d comment on some of the changes that will most directly impact me. 

Elgar – Priest
Elgar is interested in a few things this patch, and number 1 is the additions to Archaeology.  Seven new rare items have been added to the game and there is also less of a chance of getting a dig site for a race you already have all the rares for.  Which means no more endlessly digging up fossils for nothing.  Though they added more fossil rares, so still…fossils.  He he.

None of the changes to the priest class are all that glorious for disc priests, they made it so that you can only remove magic from yourself, but absolution that both disc and holy get make it operate as normal again, so it really only affects shadow priests ability to cleanse others.  Holy Fire now works with Evangelism (yay), nothing big there.  Durations of PW:Shield was reduced to 15 seconds, but Divine Aegis goes up to 15 seconds.  I’m not sure how I feel about this.  There have been times where PW:Shield did last more than 15 seconds, but they are really making it somewhat of an “Oh shit!” button to absorb rather than before where I really felt it was preventative.  We’ll see how this works out…less chaining of shields that is for sure…so I’m not REALLY thrilled about it.

Rossini – Warlock
Dark Intent kinda gets a nerf when placed on other damage dealers but still has the same effect on healers…but really you should have been putting it on your Resto druids anyways.  Seed of Corruption and Rain of Fire have more damage, which is on par with most AOE getting a buff. 

The big change is that Soulstone is a battle rez now, which has pros and cons.  The pro is I don’t have to worry about if it just fell off during a boss fight, but the con is that I have to remember I have a battle rez now if someone drops during combat.  Also we can’t count on it for quick wipe recovery.  I will have to see how this works, I’m not sure I fully understand it.

No real changes to demonology.

Schubert – Mage
Schubert is frost spec primarily, though he has a fire spec too.  So Frostbolt, which is his main spell, getting a 10% damage increase is awesome.  AOE damage from Blizzard is also increased which will be nice too since it basically does like no damage now.  Ha!  Ice lance is getting a nice buff too when used with Fingers of Frost which happens quite a bit if Deep Freeze is on cooldown.

Frost Armor is redesigned and is kinda interesting at least for PvP, it has a slowing effect for attack speed and now works on ranged attacks, I assume this means hunters.  So that must be to counter hunters, who I think already hate frost mages, in PvP.  It will also grant mana regen if glyphed, so for long fights switching armor types during movement phases will help regen mana too.  Good times!

Haydn – Rogue
I only use Haydn occasionally as he’s level 61 and working through Outlands, but he’s spec’d subtlety and so being in stealth is critical.  So the changes to stealth in this patch seem awesome.  First, the cooldown of stealth was reduced from 10 to 4 seconds.  This means when you’re out questing there is no downtime between mobs.  I know it seems like there shouldn’t be, but most combat times take about 4 seconds with a subtlety rogue.  Secondly, the cooldown is reduced by the subtlety tree even further, so there is NO cooldown on stealth. 

Now you see me, now you don’t!

Also, the talent that reduces the cooldown on stealth also increases the stealth movement speed.  I will actually walk/run faster when stealthed, than normal!  CRAZY, but awesome.  I’m excited about that.

And lastly…

Troutwort – Hunter
A few big changes for all hunters:

1)  Tamed pets now match your level – yay!
2)  Happiness system is gone, no more feeding pets – double yay!
3)  Glyph of Mend Pet (that used to give happiness) now makes your pet bigger smaller – okay, not so excited, but I get it.  I will have to get rid of this, I like big pets.

So those things are just kinda novelty things, but makes pet management and taming a little bit nicer for all of those that like to have a variety of pets. 

And that is my little summary.  I guess there’s some new dungeons or something, but meh.  Account bound items are now battle.net bound which is fun for alts on different servers and such.  Yay!  Also there is a new guild recruiting system, I’ll have to set that up tonight too.  We have a pretty attractive guild (I mean good-looking) so naturally people want to join us.  😉

Happy Tuesday!

Monday, Monday

Okay, I don’t have much to say, except the fishing tournament ended to a glorious success!  The winners are posted here.  It was pretty awesome as we fished up over 9500 fish!!

The weekend was filled with other shenanigans too, Friday I was at the casino (I came out $100 ahead!) and Saturday I was leveling the Worgen Warrior with a friend who is new to WoW and terrible…so it was frustrating and really hard.  I realized that the big issue was they just didn’t “see” things.  Like literally, computer tunnel vision?  He’d be hitting like arcane shot and go, it’s not working, I said “Does it say why?”  “Where does it say that?”  /facepalm  I dunno, the BIG RED LETTERS “You are too close to your target!”

So that was slow, but now that account (my second) is suspended so I’m going to be back to worgen leveling at speeds I am more comfortable with.

Elgar did more archaeology, it’s like he can’t get enough!  And FINALLY got his 10 rare artifacts!  He just has terrible luck with those things I guess!  At least he’ll be able to empty his bank soon as the patch is anticipated to drop tomorrow.  I will have to look into the archaeology chests that I saw on WoWhead.  If I can fish up archaeological things that would be awesome too!

What’s a Patch?

Normally I’m all up ons with the patch notes.  This patch 4.0.6(??) has kinda snuck up on me as I can’t view the notes from work and I am not always spending time at home looking at the notes.  I better start doing it.  I am hoping that the patch rolls out tomorrow.  I have been catching tidbits of the notes as time goes on though.

I heard about the big buff to the absorption of PW:Shield, which is much needed.  Currently my shield breaks when fighting one normal quest mob, since they hit for ~3000 or so it seems like maybe the shield absorbs 12 to 15 thousand.  That doesn’t seem like much.  I would think that since I’m spec’d into shields it should be able to withstand damage from normal quest mobs much better.  Now granted, I don’t have any real numbers on this, all I know is that I used to be able to keep the shield up through all my smiting and now that is not the case.  They seem…weak.  So the big buff of 200+% more absorption is welcomed. 

But there are a few other patch things that I just found out that I wasn’t aware of, one of them is that archaeological completed finds will be bumped in price, so those things that sold for 5 silver will sell for 1 gold and things that sell for 10g currently may sell for as much as 350g coming up!  That’s awesome.  Sorta.  I wished I had read this sooner than this weekend so that I could have saved some of my junk.  Elgar is still currently sitting on about 500g of items from just the weekend, so that will be nice.  He’s still after he staff from the dwarves, but managed to finish up the dwarf and orc achievements as well as the staff (Seven Scepters) achievements for archaeology.  I sorta wish all those archaeology achievements were rolled into some meta achievement like they have for fishing or cooking, but no such thing.  Apparently there will also be archaeological crates that can be fished up from floating wreckage and will contain archaeological keystones (dwarven rune, highborne scrolls, etc.).  That’s pretty cool too!

The guild also completed the Critter Killer guild achievement for killing 50000 critters.  Apparently we’re just mean like that.  This unlocked the Armadillo Pup pet for us!  However, it’s currently only available at exalted with the guild.  The patch will reduce the requirement level to revered making it much more available to people.  We’re pretty excited about that opportunity!  I know I was killing critters all over the place, and even after we got the achievement I still felt myself using holy nova and hellfire to capture groups of them.  Poor things.

Another change will be that you don’t have to discover the instances anymore to get them on random dungeon finder.  This will make queueing up for a random more enticing to me.  Sure I know, just go find them, but bleh.  Getting to the ones in Uldum would require that starting questline and Rossini just hasn’t done it.  I’ve been too busy with other things.  I thought I would like the idea of finding the instances, but mostly I just find it annoying now.

Elgar also managed to find a pool of bloodsail wreckage in STV to complete the Scavenger achievement, putting him one step closer to “Salty” the big ones there will be winning the fishing tournament and fishing up all those annoying fountain coins.  That will be a project for much later.

The current projects for Elgar is to level alchemy.  He got the pattern for the drake mount from his canopic jar so now he needs to level that up.  So I’ll be working on collecting herbs with him because that mount will be caught after by friends and guildmates and even the auction house.

Perhaps the patch will be tomorrow and Elgar and empty his bags and bank of Archaeology crap.  If not, I might have to work on someone else until he has bag space for his hobbies.

The Accidental 85

I know I moaned and groaned about the push for me to hit 85 on the warlock.  The intention there was to get ready for raiding.  But I just couldn’t do it and nearly had a mental breakdown trying to encourage myself to even log in during that push.  Once I relieved myself of that pressure I started to really have fun with the game again! 

During my off-time during warlock leveling, I would appease my sanity by working on archaeology with Elgar for the sake of curiosity of this new profession.  I noticed that I was gaining quite a bit of experience for digging up artifacts.  I didn’t think anything of it at first, until I dinged level 81.  Then 82…etc.  And finally last night after completing level 525 last week and finally finishing up the raptor mount, I hit level 85.  But because I hit it my way, I was actually really excited! 

The crazy thing about it though is, I haven’t done any quests other than a few daily cooking and fishing quests, which actually rewarded about the XP that two digs would give me.  So… now my priest is level 85.  There are a few cool bonuses about this.  All my quests that I’ll eventually do for rep, will just give gold.  The bank of Elgar will easily recover from my training binges to get the characters all trained and flying.  There’s no pressure for Elgar to do any particular zones first.  Because he’s 85 I can head off to Twilight Highlands if I would like as my first questing area.  Though I think I might hit Uldum with him.  I haven’t seen it yet on any toons.  Then I’ll decide where to go from there. 

It’s pretty nuts, that I now have two level 85s, and I reached that point in two very different ways.  I’m more excited about the priest though, because I’m doing what I want, how I want.  So that felt much cooler to ding level 85 from basically just archaeology.  We’ll see where his adventures take him from here!  The warlock will still do his daily quests for reputation with Wildhammer, but for now, he’s just relaxing.

Preparing for Cataclysm

Um…wait, wut?  Troutwort, shouldn’t you already be prepared for Cataclysm since it came out already? 

Let me explain.

Though I worked on archaeology a bit right off the bat with my priest, I tried hard to level up my warlock to raid with my guild mates.  But I’m not a raider and so this didn’t work out for me so well, the “power leveling” (I use that loosely because most wouldn’t consider it that) burnt me out of warlock play and the game for a bit since it wasn’t what I was enjoying.  In recent posts, I’ve decided I need to take back my altoholic lifestyle as most of my alts had gone over 20 days since last login.  This has never happened before!

So the push for the warlock meant that the others were pushed aside.  Last night, I finally got around to logging into nearly all my alts.  So I took the time to run around and train professions so that I could start leveling them.  I also realized I hadn’t purchased Azeroth flying on all my characters yet so that was a trip to Stormwind too.  Are there other places you can train it?  Hmm.  I have to admit that it felt good to get on the other characters even if it was just for a little bit.  I got excited because I haven’t spent any time on any gathering professions in Cataclysm and so am looking forward to trying that.  I got everyone situated and now am ready to do whatever I want.  And last night, whatever I wanted was archaeology.

I know people find it horribly boring and not that rewarding when you dig all day and only get a 5 silver artifact, but there are others that sell for a little more and with any luck you will get some minipets or mounts.  I have gotten the mini skeletal raptor, and a bunch of weird trinkety things, but that’s it–no mounts.  Though I am getting closer on some of the other achievements.  I’ll spend some time digging in Outlands and Northrend this weekend to finish some of those up.  The character I’ve been doing archaeology with is Elgar the priest.  He was at 507 going into last night and managed to hit 525 one piece after dinging 84.  Yes.  Elgar reached level 84 simply by maxing out his archaeology (plus a few irregularly completed cooking/fishing dailies). 

It felt REALLY good.  And I logged out shortly after feeling accomplished for the evening.  I know it isn’t something everyone will understand, but I finally for the first time since Cataclysm felt prepared for Cataclysm.  All my characters are ready now should I decide to choose them.  Completing archaeology with Elgar was also really an awesome feeling.  He’s ready to start adventuring soon!  Though I do feel that due to his obsession with playing in the dirt, he might hold out just a little bit longer after some more archaeology.  He he.

I’m looking forward to more shenanigans this weekend.  I feel a little bit sad that I was unable to hold up my end of the deal to get the warlock raid ready by mid January, but I just couldn’t do it.  That’s not who I am.  He’ll get there eventually, just takes me a little while longer.  And I know that I don’t get the same satisfaction from downing raid bosses as other people do.  I get as much or more from things like completing profession achievements, winning the fishing tournament, grinding old reputations, and/or knowing how to cook bizarre recipes.  It’s just a different game I play, I am not saying I don’t like raiding, it can be very fun, but it is not my main motivation.  Exploration and experiencing as much of the game as possible drives me more than a few shiny purples.  😛

Enough With The Archaeology!

I stopped focusing on my archaeology temporarily so that I could focus on leveling up on the warlock.  I managed to finish off Vashir ending at 50% of level 82, then headed over to Deepholm to finish up and ding 83.  I loved Vashir, the underwater world provided a stunning visual leveling experience and the quests were organized very well with a perfect mixture of kill, collect, and use-this quests.  It was good.  So I’m gonna give 2 thumbs up to Vashir.

Deepholm is also visually stunning so far.  A dark cave world which is pretty cool.  It kinda reminds me of Netherstorm for some reason.  I didn’t get too far into it, but it does seem like I have to travel lots more between quests than I did in Vashir.  It was also much more crowded than Vashir was, which already started to work on my nerve since there was heavy competition for quest mobs.  A couple of times everything was killed with no respawns that I wasn’t even sure I was in the right place since the landscape was void.  We’ll see how it goes.  I felt myself getting frustrated though.  I can only imagine what it was like those first few days!  Yikes!!

I did some more research on archaeology though as I am trying to figure if there are things I want to focus on trying to find.  A list of rewards from archaeology is here and the list of the dig site types is here.   These may help you if you are looking for things as well.  The dwarven staff looks amazing, though I’m sure it will be a lucky day if I get that and not another pair of dwarven baby slippers.

Archaeology Through Northrend

So on my priest, the fabulously moustached Elgar, I have been doing lots of archaeology. 

It’s kinda fun, and as someone else said, it’s much like treasure hunting!  Here are some observations so far:

1)  On Azeroth (levels 1 through 60) you will find fossil, dwarf, troll, and night elf artifacts.  Kalimdor has more night elf and troll and Eastern Kingdoms has more troll and dwarf.  Fossils are everywhere. 

2)  You gain skill each time you dig up something until around 80ish (though some say until 90 or 100).  After that, you only gain skill up from completing artifacts (5 skill points for each one).  I sorta wish I hadn’t completed any until after I was finished getting skill ups from collecting.  That’s a tip for future archaeologists!!

3)  It is tempting to use your bonus artifacts (the scrolls, runes, etc.) to help boost up a completion, but keep some handy as well because when you are completing rare items they often allow you to use more than one–so far one item was allowed to use as many as three which is worth 36 points towards your completion.  You don’t want to get a rare item that takes 145 artifacts to complete and have no bonus artifacts to use.

4)  Rare artifacts take a long time to complete, but are kinda cool!  A reminder to yourself for each of your common artifacts you complete is that eventually you may get mini-pets or mounts!

5)  Skilling up in Outlands is very fast because there are only two types of dig sites, Orc and Draenei.  This allows you to obtain the pieces you need must faster since you’re not spreading out your artifacts between 4 possibilities.  Also, I noticed that around level 350, I started to collect not just 3 artifacts each dig, but anywhere between 3 and 6 from each dig.  This can speed things up as well.

6)  Northrend will be slower again because now you have 4 dig site types again (possibly 5).  You get two new dig site types the nerubian and vrykul, but you’ll also start finding troll dig sites again and night elf dig sites.  I am not sure if there are dwarf dig sites as well, I haven’t come across any yet, but it seems likely. 

You also can gain quite a bit of experience from archaeology.  I have gained about 5 million experience from digging and am around level 400 for archaeology, I am certain that this experience will take me from level 80 to 83 without trouble.  It’s quite crazy!  I have not done any Cataclysm quests on Elgar in order to see just how much experience I can attain from getting to 450 archaeology.  At that point I will start leveling as the dig sites will be in the same locations as my quests.

Archaeology is NOT fast.  The actual digging and locating of artifacts doesn’t take very long, however, traveling between dig sites can be time-consuming as only certain digs will be active for you.  Fortunately, you do not have to compete with other players for these dig sites, which is very nice. 

I’ll post more updates and I discover new items or tricks and such about the secondary profession of Archaeology.  This skill doesn’t really provide a DPS bonus, so probably caters more towards pet and mount collectors and those who are interested in some fun quirky items.

Keep on Diggin’

This past weekend was filled with all sorts of activity:  I started questing on the warlock, I started a worgen warrior, and of course Elgar the priest kept digging up crap.

After what seemed like endless digging, I was approaching 300 archaeology skill and then finally, I got a rare dig!  So for those that don’t know, you actually know when you’ll find a rare item.  The item you are always working on is indicated in the tab of the type of artifact it is.  So in my fossil tab, I could see that I was working on Skeletal Raptor and it indicated that it was rare rather than all the others which were common.  This raptor was the baby Skeletal Raptor pet.  I had to dig up 85 fossil fragments to complete him.  I also got a rare item for my next Night Elf artifact and that was the Druid and Priest Statue Set.  That also required a large number of artifact pieces.  So here I was so excited to get to Outlands to dig, but I get two huge projects.  I all but abandoned any dwarf or troll dig sites at this time, pushing for 300 was the goal, but I wanted so badly to complete these rare items.  Finally I got them and added the pet to my collection and got my little special item (Statue Set) which basically puts a white and green beam from the sky down on me and then little green leaves fall around me…for about 10 seconds…every 15 minutes.  If you ask me, since it’s such a short duration, it should be a shorter cooldown, but whatever, it’s still a toy I’ll use to impress people.  😛

Outland digging went much quicker, Orc and Draenei dig sites there.  The fact that you go from 4 types of dig sites, to just two on a smaller map, has made the leveling from 300 to 375 much quicker.  Around 337, I again got the double rare.  The Orc rare item was the Headdress of the First Shaman (who by the way was apparently enhancement) which is a level 70 epic mail helm with agility, stam, hit, crit, and three gem sockets and is bound to account.  The Draenei one was something like the Arrival of the Naaru which apparently will summon a short re-enactment.  Again the rare items are great, but really slow down the leveling as both the items took about 130+ pieces to complete.  I did manage to complete the helm, but haven’t completed the other trinket as it was getting really late. 

Sadly, I won’t have a use for the helm, having all 10 character slots filled already and a level 80 hunter and shaman.  Some of the other Bound to Account items will be awesome and I can hopefully get some use out of them.  Of course there is always the skeletal raptor mount and the silithid bug mount too.  I have a feeling I’ll need to do lots of archaeology to get those, but it isn’t too bad.

The goal of course is to have my archaeology skill to a point where Elgar can dig while he’s leveling through Cataclysm stuff.  I should make it to Northrend digging tonight.  I fear traveling there will be slower than Outland as it is a bit bigger, but again there’s only Nerubian and Valkyr artifacts so it should go pretty quickly I hope. 

While it is a slow process, there are some neat rewards if you are willing to put in the time.  Also, the experience is quite awesome.  I am now level 82 with 50% complete.  Had I been rested, it would have been far more.  But it does mean that I have gained about 5 million experience just from leveling archaeology.  Elgar has yet to do a Cataclysm quest.

The Archaeological Experience

So I have been working on digging up crap.  I shouldn’t say crap, but mostly it is.  Slowly working towards my achievements in archaeology though.  But it actually totally seems like a profession that even after you get to 525 could have tons of potential to keep doing archaeology anywhere. 

I’ve made it to 187/225 and have about 91% of level 80 completed–that’s just from archaeology digs!  To me that is crazy that I have nearly completed a whole level just from this.  But I suppose I should be getting rewarded since my dig items are selling for about 5 silver so I spend more on flight paths around Eastern Kingdoms than I am making from this profession.  Our guild got its first archaeological achievement too for digging up 500 items.  Though I’m not sure the achievement is correct, it says we completed 500 items, which seems fairly impossible since even though I’ve been digging away since patch day, I still have only completed 23 items.  I know we don’t have that many guild members doing archaeology at the moment.  I think that it’s total items dug up, which is more on par with collect 100,000 herbs or ore.  I’ll have to pay more attention to it tonight and see if the number increases for the guild after each of my digs.

I will again mention that I am totally shocked I”m getting so much experience!  Normal is 5,500 rep each time I dig up an item, and rested is 11,000.  I’m not gonna complain, but Elgar will hit 85 without stepping into a Cataclysm zone!  Okay, not really, especially since I heard that 83 to 84 is around 5M experience and 84 to 85 is >9M experience.  Oy!  Lots to do!  At this point our highest guild member is 66% completed with level 84.  Probably more as I type this and I am guessing she’ll be 85 today! 

As for me, I’ll keep digging away as I’m hoping to find some rare items, it seems though it’s completely luck and someone said the order in which you dig things up is completely random.  I will however hang onto my [Dwarven Baby Slippers] for some time.  It was actually the 2nd Dwarf item I recovered, but it is too funny to sell, even for 5 silver.