Must log in...

I wonder if we are all addicted, but still I take nights/weeks off once in a while, and I don't feel a compulsion 'must log in'. I think blizz shares a portion of the blame here for creating such a huge time sink. Gevlon cheerfully ignores the massive effort it took to get to 80 and get geared. Yes, once you are at that point, you could only spend 20 hrs or less raiding, but typically you get bored of doing just raiding and want to see other parts of the game, which requires a larger time sink.

Some things I really hate about blizz is:

1) required dailies (JC, argent tourney), short world events that take a huge amount of effort to get the achievemnt (i was 95% done with flame fest and it was over, so I just wasted 20 hours of my life doing it (not entirely, got half a level and 100s of gold).,

2) gear progression at end game - you need to spend X amount of hours farming Y so you can do instance Z with better loot, so you can do instance A with better loot.

3) Forced obsolescence; yes the instance will be there, but the drake achievements disappear, the effort will become trivialized (== not fun), etc. If you just want to see the instances, well you can, but its trivial. We did ZG last night for the first time; was a total joke. We had only a small idea how the bosses worked, we rounded up entire rooms, etc.

4) Long forced sessions. While leveling: Notice how some (maybe half?) of quest hubs don't have a inn nearby? That's so you can spend yet more time running back and forth to the inn. Thanks blizz!

Notice how you have to clear an hour of trash to get to the boss, and the trash respawns? That's to spend more time/effort to get the phat loot. (I think this adds to skill == fun, but it can get ridiculous; i really love instances with minimal amounts of trash).

And 14 bosses in an instance (= 4 hours typically) - Thanks blizz!

Yeah, you don't have to log in, but the time sink and the idea of wasted time wouldn't be nearly as bad if they took some effort to minimize the amount of time it took to do stuff. WoW is better than most MMOs though, at least you don't have to spend two weeks releveling if you spend a night wiping.

Toon update

Was in Chicago for most of weekend, at a conference. My thought about leveling the druid for a few levels in outland proved to be quite painful. At one point it was 10 hours per level, vs 5 hours per level in NR. After level 71.5 i moved to NR and things are moving decently there now. Still having some trouble with mobs as dps is still low for NR. Druid leveling is just slow! But no downtime, that is a plus. Can't wait until we can get heirloom cold weather flying. I'm saving up for the epic flyer now but I'm very low in funds having bought tons of BOEs for the DK.

On that front, started doing argent tourney, spent about 3000g to make the tanking blue set and 3 BOE epics. Thinking of getting the titanisteel destroyer, but it's really expensive (8 titanisteel, 2 frozen orbs). I tanked hUK for the first time last week, then did hUP and hHOL. For the last two we had to swap out people to get better dps. My tanking dps is very low since all i have is +defense stuff, and that makes tanking a pain in the ass. Further, no upgrades from heroics yet, although now i have 3 under my belt and things should get better all the time.

At this point I have 2500g and the AH market is getting pretty cold, hard to make money nowadays. Still, i'll keep doing the JCing and hopefuly cut blues will sell decently. Currently most of them are only 30g or so each, far cry from 80-100g in TBC. Its actually decent money just to level, about 60g per hour, but training costs are very high. I'm not looking forward to the training costs for the druid; i think it will be about 300g per level. Well, if it's money I need I can now just grind out dailies; two hours of icecrown dailies/quests would yield at least 300g. I really just want to push the druid through and get to 80 as quickly as possible and start doing some heroics and naxx, I really want to raid a bit more than I am, and given that the choices are a dps (hahaha) or a DK (haha right), the druid is the best chance for me to get into PUGs.

Did ZG for the first time last night. I think i won't do that again, it was just pretty boring. Pretty much like ZA but bad gear and every time you loot a corpse it drops some rep crap, but there are like 10 of them, so you end up rolling a zillion times and with a ton of junk in your bag. I finally wised up and just stuck with the lock, brought 10 stones, and got someone to tank. Its ironic i think that we have a bunch of tanks but only the officiers are healers (xiola, Tsu, Asharr). Tanking is fun, but jees guys go resto or holy pls!

Short toon update

Spent about 3000g? Thereabouts! Getting my DK in decent tanking gear. Got 4 epics now and almost all blues, need to replace my belt. That plus the JC ring should boost me to defense cap. Man that is hard to reach! You pretty much have to have every single piece of gear have some amount of defense on it. Anyway 22k HP unbuffed, pretty decent i guess.

Did hUK with just blues and 470 defense. Was pretty tough with holding aggro, that with my best friends (really solid and skilled group). I surely thank them for their time; spent about 2 hours in there, i think we wiped once.

Did MC with the guild last night. Turned into an hour long 'oh MC, let me come - sure lets stop the raid, switch in my lock, summon, reclear trash, get back to the boss, repeat'. this happened 4x. Eventually we had about 7-8 guys, and i bruoght my hunter for max dps (2500 woot!) Anyway after we got everyone actually in we just steamrolled the place. Was alot of fun. Had two mid-60s guildies so the gear didn't totally rot (but I am almost sure their greens were better, since MC gear is so stacked with resist stats).

Planning to do ZG on sunday.

4th of July

Well the 4th came and went. I think the sad thing for me is that I really wanted the fire festival achievement and pet, and misjudged when the event would end. Well, it ended and i was 5 hops from geting it done. Now i have 600 of the emblems that will just rot i guess. I opened a petition but I dont have much hope. I guess life goes on. If i was that type of player i'd have titles on all my chars, etc.

The good news is that with all that running around my DK went from mid-78 to 80! And just in time to tank Kara on sunday. It went okay, i pulled too much once and we pretty much wiped. Other than that it was smooth sailing, as expected from 8 80s and a 72. All the gear rotted pretty much. But! 4 patterns dropped, everything in kara. 3 enchants, and the gun +hit for engineering. So we're super happy about this. I think there is some incentive for some to run it again. We tried gruuls lair but it was just too much for us. Maybe if we had a paly or warrior, but I couldn't generate enough hate and wasn't geared enough to take the substantial hits. It's designed for 5 tanks. Anyway we'll have to see if we can get it done later.

Also my little druid is no longer little, she's officially 70 (now mid-70), and the last toon i'm leveling (as of now i guess). I still have the lock at 73 and my alliance hunter at 75. So...we'll see. I did most of Borean tundra, ran nexus and got my 2 blues (nothing decent). I'm still at least in half outland gear, which is sad. Leveling in NR is very tough for me, basically healing every pull. If there are two mobs, forget it. So just like hellfire.

Future plans? Well continue leveling the druid; doing isle of QS dailies (great and easy, but not as good as NR stuff - but easy!), then hit SMV and netherstorm. By then i'll be 72 or 73 i guess. Skip over to dragonblight, at 75ish go to scholozar basin, then storm peaks. I'm surprised i'm tanking so much on that toon, now that i'm out of hellfire (and DK starter zone). It's better than DK tanking, but still.

Faction change coming 'soon'

http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=69505.0

This is just. WoW. Although I'm somewhat pissed/sad that I wasted many months leveling a tauran druid when i could easily transfer my alliance druid over. This is just wonderful. Maybe my friend who is alliance can join us...hmm. All those problems of wrong server/wrong faction PVP vs PVE...not a big deal any more. Of course game is 4 bloody years old.

Argh.

Toon update

I played somewhat this weekend, maybe 5 hours or so. Was a nice break after work and after errands and yard work. My little DK is 78, mostly from running a few quests in the mornings before work. My druid is now 66.5, due to running zangamarsh stuff all weekend. I'm out of rested as of last night, so i'll probably shelf the druid for a while. Just 1.5 more levels until NR! I may just push through this week and get the last 1.5 levels out. Not sure.

I ran LBRS for the first time ever, and also AQ20. Those were fun and very doable for a guild like ours (the first was a run thruogh by an 80 and the second was a 10 man raid of mostly 80s). There was just a ton of stuff dropping; the rare +15 agi pat dropped in AQ, a bunch of BOE blues dropped in LBRS (plus 5 easily obtainable quests). Also i got my seal for BWL, need to finish that quest line up. Last night I tanked Underbog, for the sporegar quests, and got up to friendly with them. That was fun and different; the pug druid sure was an idiot though. No idea of the proper kill order. I had thought i would be cat-feral and resto as dual spec, now i see i need to invest more in tanking since there are never enough tanks. Tanking is slightly more challenging than healing, which is about as easy as dpsing. All i have to say is 360 degree swipe = win.

Ti ore

Well we are getting some info on prospecting rates of rare gems from Ti ore (see here). Looks to be about one per stack of ore. So you would sink in, right now, 200 gold, for a stack, and get an epic gem, on average. My thoughts are that ore prices are going to go up and up and up until the patch hits, then plateau for a few weeks, the drop down to a steady state.

But who knows! Now that we have some ideas on the prospecting rates we start to know how much we need to accumulate. The other thing that people are overlooking; with all the farmers in icecrown, I find myself competeing with several people all the time. If I am lucky i'll get a node or two in an hour. That's not much reward for time invested.

BUT! There is another way to do this. GO do WG every day, and reap in the honor. Remember gems sells for 10k honor? If you don't care about PVP, just soak up the honor and buy gems. That would be my plan. The time reward is funner, and you wouuld put in the same amoutn of effort to get 10k as it would to farm a stack of Ti ore.

Update: Well, you never know how the market will react. It seems the chinese gold farmers were out in full force mining the crap out of Ti. On sunday morning there were no less than 10 stacks of Ti, selling at 8g/ore and dropping. I bought 5 stacks or so at 130g a stack (6.50g each). My guess is that i'll break even on the investment, since I don't have any JC tokens in stock. My further guess is that when 3.2 hits, the market will be glutted with Ti, and the gems will sell for 100g each uncut, and 120g cut. Rare gems are already not selling, even the scarlet rubys. The others, i really can't give away. So far JC is a giant bust for gold purposes.

Well, not quite. You see those chinese gold farmers? They were selling stacks of eternal earth for 90g each. And i buoght a few, made some rings (hint next time do the ring that is 1 EE and 1 E shadow which is 1/2 the cost of a EE). Anyway I made 300g that night, selling dust/GCE. However when the EE stacks were 150g I didn't make much of a profit.

Right now i'm back to 2000g on hand, maybe that much again in auctions (which are totally not selling). Now is the time for raw materials; sell your dust, sell your ore. Other than, not much is selling.