Timeless Isle: you go there, and you kill things. A lot of things.

Posted: September 13, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Gear, Professions, Raiding & Dungeons | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

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What’s happening? I’ve been “not blogging”… aka playing Patch 5.4!

Timeless Isle

It’s late at night as I start writing this, which means I’ve reached the point in the day where I’m quite tired of shooting anything and everything on the Timeless Isle.

Playing around on the Isle approximately three hours per day, I’m sitting at over 22,000 coins – and that’s without really playing smart. If I were smart, I’d be on top of rares, have completed all of the chest achievements, and so on, but I haven’t. I’m simply running around, killing stuff, and casually working on quests, Shaohao rep, and achievements, as the spirit moves me.

I’ve found this somewhat liberating, in one sense. Timeless Isle is not really a place where I am going to get any upgrades, other than from the Celestials and Ordos. Sure, the elusive Burden of Eternity can give me a 535, but from what I’m hearing, there’s a damn good chance that the stats will be “Agility-Stamina-Hit,” which, for a 535, is not an upgrade for any piece of gear that I have on my hunter. I’m not certain if this is a reasonable strategy, but since Tier slots are out for me, weapons are not an option, my cloak is Legendary, and various other pieces have tasty sockets on them, I think I’m going to use any Burdens I get to try to upgrade my Sign of the Bloodied God (Haste/Mastery ring). Any upgrade will be small if I can get something with two non-hit/expertise secondary stats, but an upgrade nonetheless. Then again, the chances of that happening are likely to be slim. (Stupid hit and expertise… for serious.)

At any rate, I’ve just been having fun romping around the new area. The real gear interest doesn’t happen until I either a) win something off one of the Timeless Isle bosses or b) start winning stuff in flex or normal Siege of Orgrimmar. Since I’m Valor-capped, I have no reason to quest otherwise. However, all of my romping has the potential to provide some sweet upgrades for my alts. Right now I’ve got all of my Timeless pieces sitting in the bags and mail of my other hunter, waiting for a time when I decide to try them out on various toons and see what I get. Since I have six other 90s, including four that I actually care at all about, gear-wise, it gives the gear-acquisition nut in me something to look forward to… even if those Timeless things are somewhat akin to playing the lottery.

Legendary Cloak

I logged in on Tuesday as soon as the servers were up. Before I knew it, I was on the Timeless Isle, and was in a raid group to start killing Celestials within seconds, literally. And those poor things went down pretty quickly – other than Niuzao, who took a couple of trips around the courtyard during the fight. Anyway, once I had the celestial achievement…

Smashing the Celestials!

Smashing the Celestials!

…I started my journey to 5000 Timeless Coins. I didn’t do it the smart way, because as much as I am usually all about getting it done NOW, I also wanted to get my bearings and the lay of the land, so I ran around and explored, killed a bunch of things (of course) for a half-hour or so, and then I made the rounds to the chests. The coins were collected in no time. After that, I finished up the cloak quest at the Seat of Knowledge in the Vale of Eternal Sorrows.

The best "storytime with Lorewalker Cho" ever!... from a personal perspective, at least.

The best “storytime with Lorewalker Cho” ever!… from a personal perspective, at least.

I’m not going to go into much more detail about it, but to me the experience was pretty thrilling. My first legendary! It was a ton of fun to be there with some of the most hardcore people on the server, taking down the Celestials as a group, and then getting my legendary. It was way more fun than just about any other part of the expansion-long questline, and it made all of the work totally worth it.

Anyway, after that, it was back to the Isle for…

Ordos

I don’t think I was in the first group on my server to kill Ordos; it was probably the third or fourth. Nevertheless, a lot of the same people from my Celestials kills were in my Ordos raid group. The extremely-brief-then-BAM!-pull instructions we got were something about stacking and get out of the raid if you get the Burning Soul debuff or something – whatever, who cares, right? We’re legendary, y’all!!! So it was chaotic, but it also wasn’t too bad. Raid instincts took over, and we all survived, and it was a fun fight.

Since this was within the first two hours of the patch, pretty much everyone in the room had a legendary, and the average ilvl had to be somewhere between 535 and 540. One thought I had at the time was, “Man, this is probably the most powerful raid group I’ve ever been in!” The DPS was insane, compared to what I’m used to…

Damage on Ordos

Damage on Ordos

…and, based on what I’m seeing here, it looks like hunters might be in an OK place.  :)

Raiding

I’m getting antsy. I want to raid. We don’t raid until the weekend each week, but I want to see new bosses. However, I’m trying to be patient.

My patience is being tested, though, on two fronts. For one thing, my girlfriend’s raid team has already killed the first three bosses, and her ilvl is up to 545. Jealoussss!!! But I can handle that – it’s the way things have always been for me this expansion. However, this is all being made worse by a hunter friend of mine, who leads one of the better raid teams on my server. He keeps whispering me updates about both his boss progress and the gear he’s getting – “got the 3rd boss to 19%, so close” – and I try to be magnanimous, but my comments have declined in quality over the past couple of nights from “awesome, good luck in there!” and “you’ll get it tonight!” to “nice. :)” He has no idea how much this is annoying me! Ah well, I just have to chuckle about it and let it go.

However, I may have to wait longer than I had originally anticipated. We have two people who declined the invite for Sat and Sun this week, including our off-tank. This highly annoys me. There’s a disconnect between my mindset – “woot, new bosses, must kill!” and the mindset that we’ll just get to it when we get to it. I’m sure that sounds dickish, but it seems logical to feel that way. However, I understand that a) people have outside commitments, and b) this is what I chose when I chose to stay on this team.

So I have to take what I can get.

Hopefully, we can find a substitute and at least smash through flex on Saturday. I’ve basically given up the idea that we could down Immerseus on normal mode this week, which is a shame, because the fight looks relatively simple, and was designed that way. I’m confident that our group could do it. We probably won’t, however. Unless something changes and we find a tank, we might not even do flex this week. Another week of sitting on my hands, raid-wise.

Sorry, I’m just annoyed. I’ll shut up about this.

Professions and the Auction House

Since I am in no hurry to – I don’t know – whatever… (see “Raiding” above), I made an effort to get all of my major crafting toons over to the Timeless Isle on Tuesday, in order to get their new recipes while picking up some coins. With two Leatherworkers, two Blacksmiths, a Tailor, and an Engineer, that meant that I had four toons over there. Fortunately – and this was grueling on my Prot Warr and Blood DK – I was able to get all of my drops on Tuesday and start on daily cooldowns. The Frost mage wasn’t bad, though: he’s at 489 now, but was blowing stuff to smithereens as usual.

Additionally, I’ve made small windows of time over the past few days to get crafted items – gems and enchants, mainly – from seven toons posted on the AH. Patch time is always a favorite for me, since I can make a huge amount of gold in a concentrated time period, and then not worry about it much thereafter. This may not be a lot for you AH pros out there, but I’ve pulled down well over 100k gold in less than 72 hours, and reached a new all-time high as far as overall gold that I have sitting amongst my toons. I’m going to keep at it over the next several days, but I accomplished my goal, which was simply to “make a boatload of gold this week.” Enchants – particularly cloak enchants, for obvious reasons – have sold briskly, but so have leg enchants, belt buckles, and gems… oh gems. Man, have I been blowing through gems!

I’m not a pro, but the nice thing about this is that I’ve been able to pad my supply of gold over a short period of time, and won’t have to worry about it much once things die down. I’ll still hit up the AH a few times per week, as usual, but I would be comfortable for a long time even if I neglected it entirely from now on.

Randomly-placed hunter thought…

After about 10 minutes on the Timeless Isle, I swapped Dire Beast in for Thrill of the Hunt. With no Tier 16 gear yet, and Arcane Shot now costing 30 focus instead of 20, I would accidentally be out of focus because of Arcane Shot spam. So I took that away and added the Beast, in order to force a shift to a more balanced use of my abilities, and it has largely worked out very well for me. Although I have to say that proccing a 50-ft-long Death Adder was startling, to say the least, every single time! They’ve since nerfed the size of the adder Beast, thankfully. Anyway, I didn’t think I would make this change while questing, but Dire Beast makes for smoother focus generation overall, which can be nice to have when fighting some of those 92 Elites.

…

Overall, the first three days of 5.4 have been a great deal of fun. I’m loving the Timeless Isle… my girlfriend loves it even more, because Pet Battles and Collecting Things! The legendary is awesome. Gearing alts is going to be a lot of fun, and I’m making tons of money selling crafted stuff.

It may take a while for me to get any raiding action in, but I’ll have to deal with that. Life is good. :)

I could write a heck of a lot more about the week so far, but I’m already over 1700 words. Enough is enough. Hope everyone is having fun out there!!

…

Thanks for reading this post by Mushan at Mushan, Etc. Comments are welcome!

Letting go of the grind(s)

Posted: March 20, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Gear, Professions, Raiding & Dungeons, Reputation | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments
Hahaha... achievements.

Ha ha ha… achievements.

Early last week, I got a call from my mom, letting me know that my grandma was not doing well, and that she and my dad were driving across the state to see her later that day.

I hadn’t seen my grandma in so long, I’d be embarrassed to admit it here. So I won’t. The tough part was that it was Tuesday, the first of five scheduled work days in a row, because my boss was on vacation (so I was taking up some of that payroll). It really stressed me out, because when my grandfather died in 2008, I had never made it up to visit him in his last years.

Fortunately, I was able to find some schedule flexibility at the end of the week, and after a short shift on Friday morning I made the 315-mile trip to see her. She was, by that time, doing better, and we had a very nice time visiting and talking, watching a baseball game together, and so on. I left mid-afternoon on Saturday, blessed by the experience, and was home in time to raid at 9:30 pm.

It was a hectic week, all told.

…

This, of course, affected my weekly race to the Valor cap. Or, more than one Valor cap. See, not only have I maintaining a capped-pace on my hunter every week since I hit 90, but I’ve also been trying to cap on my warrior, who tanks for our new alt run on Friday nights.

With patch 5.2 having dropped, here is a short list of the stuff I “have” to do:

  1. Isle of Thunder dailies (etc.) on the hunter, warrior, and maybe another toon each day.
  2. Run Throne of Thunder (Raid Finder) on the hunter, at least.
  3. Run heroics / RF / scenarios and/or do dailies to cap on the hunter and warrior.
  4. Saturday and Sunday night raids with the main team (hunter).
  5. Friday night alt raid with the warrior.
  6. Tillers: 5 level 90s at 16 plots per, plus a level 88 toon with four plots, that I try to hit each day.
  7. Living Steel, cloth, Sha Crystal, and Magnificence of (—) daily cooldowns.
  8. Somewhat consistent AH activity, although that doesn’t take much time.

This does not include having fun with alts – and right now, that mostly means playing my DK in Outland from time to time.

At any rate, the above list represents a lot of grind. And grind equals time spent, and grind doesn’t always mean fun. And time spent neither making real money nor having fun can become time wasted.

So last Friday, for the first time since I took a trip to visit with family last October, I completely ignored all of those grinds. I didn’t log in at all, because I had to go to work and then drive for more than five hours afterward. Part of me felt a smidgen of “but I need to make time for that before work!” while the rational side of me dismissed that notion as completely ridiculous.

Because it was completely ridiculous.

This may be a relatively alt-unfriendly expansion, but I have six toons in Pandaria in spite of that. I farm 84 plots per day. The Isle of Thunder can be a time sink when you get quests that are negatively affected by long re-spawn timers – or are just dumb quests, like “squash 150 roaches for 5 VP and the chance to kill the final quest boss if you actually do it.” Plus, the rares are fun, but I can’t always afford to let time get away from me while waiting for them to spawn.

I’ve been religiously farming those plots. Religiously doing those dailies. Religiously hitting up Raid Finder. Religiously capping on the hunter, and sometimes the warrior. It has felt like a duty that I was always going to be glad that I completed when I did, each week and with each positive raid result.

However, as I began my drive north last Friday, I had to chuckle to myself. I was free! No dailies today! No raid tonight! It’s sad to say, but it was actually nice to have that time off from raiding, even though it was just one day and I’d only raided twice before on the warrior.

…

Since Saturday night, when I came back, I’ve slacked off on some of that grind, and I think I will be better for it.

Despite new content with the recent patch, I have been starting to grow… I don’t know… bored? tired? of the game. This is probably a sign that I’ve been playing it too much, for too long. While the content is new, the game is basically the same, the way that I have been playing it: lots of grinds.

However, whereas I’ve usually spent days off playing WoW all day when there was nothing else pressing to do, lately I’ve been finding something else to do with some of that time. This is definitely a good thing.

But the best thing is that I am letting go of some of the grinds. I am not going to bust my butt – and test my own patience in the process – by putting my warrior through the same paces that I put my hunter through each week, just to ensure that I can get that next piece of gear as soon as possible. I’m not going to concern myself with getting that sixth toon to 90 unless I feel like it, even if it will help me gather herbs more easily with flying, and will get me the Quintessential Quintet achievement (yes, yes… I have two level 90 hunters). I’m not going to go out of my way to make sure that I have enough mats to use each cooldown, every day, without exception. I’ll still use my cooldowns when I can, but I won’t fret if they go un-used for a day or two, or three. I won’t let myself be bothered if I list auctions each and every day, because I have plenty of gold.

I’ll still play my hunter like I do, getting those dailies done and running RF and raiding and so on. And I’ll still farm my plots most days. But I need to take a break from the job that keeping a well-rounded stable of max level alts has become. I want to spend more time enjoying other aspects of the game – like leveling my DK or other toons, and working on my low-level hunter soloing project some more (sadly, he’s still 19). I also have other games I want to play, and books to read, and guitars to play, and good weather to enjoy, and spring cleaning to do, and… so on.

…

I’m super glad that I made the time to see my beloved grandma last week. I’m also relieved to have been forced to abandon the game and the grind for a couple of days. I think that letting go of some of the job-like aspects of MoP will allow me to enjoy the game more when I do play, and will make me happier overall.

– – –

Thanks for reading this post by Mushan at Mushan, Etc. Comments are welcome!