Summer Slow Down

Memorial Day weekend seems like a harbinger for the rest of the summer. I didn’t play much, and didn’t really miss WoW all that much either. We cooked out almost every day, and we worked around the house and in the yard. I mowed. I took my son to see the new Indiana Jones flick Friday night.

I took an extra day off yesterday, but it was maintenance day and the servers only started to come back up around 1:30. Since I have to leave to pick my son up at school around 2:15, and my server was still down at 2:00, I didn’t play at all yesterday.

I did have some spotty, hour-at-a-time play over the weekend, but did not accomplish much of anything. On my Warlock, I got the bright idea to farm this Enchant recipe in Netherstorm. A Paladin guild mate was talking in gchat about how this enchant is so great for tanks, but no Enchanters on the server seems to have it. So I travelled up North to Manaforge Ultris and started farming Ethereum Nullifiers and Avengers (you have to kill the Avengers to get the Nullifiers to spawn).

I thought it would be easy. There are plenty of mobs to kill around the Manaforge. I circled it again and again and again, picking up and completing a quest or two out of the base camp on the North side of the forge. I did this Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, for the limited amount of time I could play each day.

I could have been doing dailies. Instead, I farmed this enchant that never dropped. Even now, I am still parked out there in Netherstorm, though I probably will end my search for the elusive recipe tonight. I have a Zul’Aman raid at 8:30.

I even managed to kill one of the unique Ethereum Jailor spawns, which supposedly has a near 100% chance to drop a cell key, and all I got was some Netherweave.

By the way, Netherweave doesn’t sell for shit on the AH. I’ve been making stacks of it into Heavy Netherweave bandages and selling them for six gold a stack because I can’t sell it on the AH. The dailies have totally killed the market for cloth.

The sad thing is, I was so frustrated by that enchant not dropping, I will probably go back there and farm some more after tonight’s raid. I’m stubborn like that.

In other news, my hunter has not seen any action in weeks. My Shaman, which I was so excited to level up to 60, has been sitting at 60 for a couple weeks as well. It’s been a bit of a drag to level him, now that I am past the stage where I can benefit from XP boost given to levels 20-60. Contributing to my lack of enjoyment of my Shaman, I respecced him Resto thinking that I would start to run Hellfire Ramparts and Bloodfurnace for as much Honor Hold rep as possible before beginning to quest.

As it turns out, I am a chicken. I am afraid to step into healing a PuG, never having healed much of anything in my life as a WoW player. Stepping out from behind the slacker mentality of a DPS class is a tough first step to make. Healers and tanks have so much pressure riding on their abilities.

I belong to a good guild, so why should I have to PuG heal, you ask? My guild is also heading into some slow summer months. A lot of people are going on vacation or otherwise taking a forced or voluntary break from WoW. Our raids are being combined with those of another guild, just to keep our progress at its current level. If I want to level my Shaman and learn how to heal five-mans, I have to do it on my own.

Resto is not a bad spec for leveling. My survivability is way high, as I’ve discovered when trying to mine Fel Iron nodes in buzzard-infested areas of Hellfire Peninsula. As soon as I kill one buzzard, another attacks me. I’ve had to kill as many as five or six buzzards before being able to mine, and the only reason I survived at all was because I am Resto.

But Resto just isn’t as much fun as playing as Enhancement. If I totally chicken out and decide to solo level to 70, I’ll probably respec back to Enhancement and play my Shaman as a melee DPS.

Bomb Them Again

So Patch 2.4 hit the live realms on Tuesday.  We were out of town most of the week, so I did not have a chance to experience the new content until the weekend.  My first impressions are generally favorable.  I have been doing the Shattered Sun dailies on both my warlock main and my newly-minted 70 hunter.  I have not ran the Magister’s Terrace five-man instance.

I am most impressed by the amount of gold I can earn in a day with these two characters.  I also like the green rewards (and potential for Badges of Justice) in the Shattered Sun “care packages” given as quest rewards.  My warlock is fairly swimming in Arcane Dust from the reward items I have disenchanted.

However, therein lies my ambivalence about the new daily quests.  I think they are called dailies because one can spend all day on them, on all one’s level 70 alts, and never experience anything else in the game.  Add in the potential “reward” of completing a phase, or opening a portal to Quel’Danas from Shattrath, and players can quickly come to feel like a hamster on a treadmill.

Today, there was some griping in the new zone General chat about being at only 15% of the second phase, and someone else expressed a worry that people were wearing out and giving up.  Indeed there is some potential for exhaustion of an otherwise great idea.  While flying the bombing run, I had the thought that the repeatable quest was so much like several other daily “bombing” quests Blizzard has introduced, that as fun and easy as they are, I could grow very tired very quickly.  Especially since this bombing quest has been made more difficult; usually one has to run the bombing gauntlet as many as five or ten times to kill the quota of mobs, due to their increased health.

Right now, I think what keeps these dailies enjoyable for me is that I do not have my epic flying mount, and my hunter still needs his normal flying mount…and my Shaman is level 54 and will soon be eligible to buy his epic land mount.  Furthermore, my warlock needs to max his enchanting profession.

In other words, I need gold, thus these quests have come along at just the right time, for me.  Between my bank, my hunter, and my warlock, I have over 1500 gold, a few hundred of it accumulated just in about two or three days of doing the dailies.

Other people may find the dailies merely tiresome.  I am afraid that as much as everyone appreciates the easy availability of gold through dailies, another bombing run won’t answer most people’s desire for new content and a richer game experience.