Category Archives: World of Warcraft
Level 110 Class Trial
Okay, so a bit of a hiccup in my random gold-making challenge.
I’d just gathered my gold from the mailbox and hearthed back to start farming when “poof”, I was booted to the character selection screen. No warning, nothing.
WTF?
A quick Google search told me what I needed to know.
If your World of Warcraft account is upgraded to the newest expansion, you can take advantage of the new Level 110 Class Trial. You can use this feature to take a character for a test drive before you decide to use a Level 110 Character Boost.
To start a new Class Trial, click the Level 110 Class Trial button while creating a new character.
Your new trial character is playable for three hours, or until you select a zone from the Scouting Map. After the trial is over, your character is locked from further play. You can purchase and use a Character Boost to permanently unlock your trial character.
Note: You cannot enter raids or low-level dungeons while on a Class Trial.
Guess I timed out on the Class Trial Demon Hunter. It would have been nice to at least have been given a countdown or something.
It sucks that thousands of gold were locked away and eventually deleted. But at least I can start over, using an alt this time.
NaNoGoldMo
As many people know, NaNoWriMo is the tag associated with National Novel Writing Month, a month where people challenge themselves to write 50,000 words (which equates to about a novel). It a challenge for budding writers who find themselves stuck, or who tell themselves “I’ll get to it later.” Traditionally it takes place in November, but the community promotes other challenge months as well.
This November, I’m getting involved. Which means that most of my free time will be taken up at the keyboard. While this is not anything new, I’ll be writing on the keyboard and not killing digital snakes and wolves, or picking flowers or rocks. I may squeeze in some WoW time but it’s really not a priority.
Especially in November, when I won’t be attending Blizzcon. I’m still choking on that bitter pill. I haven’t swallowed it. I just let the damn thing dissolve in my mouth, leaving a very horrible taste on my tongue.
This leads me to today when I came up with the damn fool idea of Azgofamo!
No, I’m not having a stroke. I also did not faceroll my keyboard.
AzGoFaMo – Azeroth Gold Farming Month!
It’s the beginning of the month, so I thought I’d try this challenge for October and see what kind of results it produced. The goal, much like the challenge in November, is 50k. In this case, it’s fifty thousand gold. That’s half the price of a token, more or less. Not bad for thirty minutes a day.
The self-appointed rules are simple:
- One character.
- Thirty minutes.
- Profit?
I made a Demon Hunter and used the trial boost to get her to 110. I unlocked the new content, set my hearthstone, and started about my business. I then took everything I picked up, used the portal to Stormwind, and posted everything on the AH.
The plan is to use the Hearthstone to port back to the new content, farm until the cooldown on the Hearthstone times out (30 minutes on an unguilded character), then use the remaining few minutes to portal back to the AH and post.
Why do this?
- It will help me to manage my time. Next month I need to set aside enough time to get the word count in. This will help me get into that target mindset.
- I could use the gold to help guildies who might be having trouble making gold on their own. Despite what people think, not everyone has the know-how.
- It’s something I could do next month as well. If I reach my word count for the day and I still have about half an hour, I could pop in and do my thing.
Day One is done. I may sneak on later to do my thirty minutes for yesterday, giving me one hour logged for the first two days of October.
Has anyone else tried something like this in Battle for Azeroth? What did you do for your gold farm? What kind of results did it produce for you?
BfA – Battle for Attention
I gotta tell ya, I’m at a weird place with World of Warcraft.
On the one hand, I’m still playing. My Alliance DK hit 120, and I’ve taken a few of my alts into the new content. So it looks like I’m justifying the expansion I guess.
On the other hand, though, I haven’t touched my DK since he hit 120. I think there are world quests, or whatever they’re called this time around. But this has been my M.O. – interest in different aspects of the game coming in waves. My current leveling goal is my Void Elf Monk, who sits at 71. He gets about five minutes of playtime when I decide to log on (monk daily) unless there’s a podcast or youtube video I can listen to. In which case, I may play until that’s done and then log off.
It feels like my current goal is the gold making for token purchases. I use three alts for that, and that’s mostly my hour of game time. It usually goes like this:
- Log on with Miner, get a stack of ore, send it to AH alt, log off.
- Log on with Skinner/Herbalist, run a quick route to get some bloody bones and skins, along with whatever herbs I happen to trip over. Send the skins to my Leatherworker, herbs to AH alt, log off.
- Log on with Leatherworker, make Honored gear if I have the BOP mats. If I do, make the gear and send it to the AH alt, log off.
- Log on with AH alt, collect gold, collect mats, post everything, log off.
- Oh, and log on with Monk to do his daily quest. Log off.
- Rinse and repeat the following day.
With the markets still new, even that 15-20 minutes of gathering and making gear nets me 20-25k gold per week. Still gets me a token, now that the prices have dropped. Even so, I don’t feel like I need to do this every day.
I suppose I could blame Blizzcon, and the fact that I’m not going, as part of my lack of motivation. I love going to Blizzcon because I really feel like part of something larger. Part of the community. Part of belonging to something. But with not going this year, I feel like the act of grinding to 120 on numerous alts with no goal other than hitting 120 as motivation… it just feels flat to me.
How are you finding Battle for Azeroth? Where are you putting your focus?
BfA – Bad Freakin Attitude
When the very first Battle for Azeroth trailer came out, the leaders of both factions flexed their muscles and people lost their minds. Sylvanas unleashing her battle cry gave folks “the chills”, and watching the young lion Anduin flexing his holy might gave others “the feels”. Social media ate it up, and people lined up behind the badass Horde Warchief, while ruthlessly mocking poor Anduin.
I feel bad for the Alliance. Actually, what I feel bad for is the Stormwind PR department who, after a number of expansions, still can’t get the hook that the Horde did. It’s what they call in professional wrestling, “being over” or having the fans buying into, and supporting, a character. In this case, the Horde has been “over” for years. “For The Horde” is a catchphrase that has been money, and the Alliance could never come up with a suitable rallying cry. “For the Alliance” seemed like a knockoff of the more popular phrase, and the brief “Alliance Roar” that Chris Metzen tried to get over one year at Blizzcon never caught on.
That probably has nothing to do with the rest of this post. I just felt it needed to be said because, over the past few weeks, catchphrases have been the least of the WoW Community’s concerns.
Sylvanas went and committed genocide of a sort by burning down Teldrassil, the World Tree. She just straight up wiped out an entire population of Night Elves. Because reasons.
That had the interesting reaction of Alliance supporters wanted her burned at the stake and Horde players tugging uncomfortably at their collars. Some fired back with “you don’t know the whole story, there’s probably a good reason for Sylvanas doing it”. Others felt the Warchief lost her mind and decided to remove their shoulder pads in protest.
As soon as I saw the cinematic, I just assumed that she was being manipulated by the Old Gods. Get rid of the World Tree, build their strength, promote a war between the two factions with enough power combined that could stop them. You know, that old song and dance.
But that’s me, and this all may be moot because there have been events after this that I just lost interest in. Not because Sylvanas did a Very Bad Thing, but people online are really taking this personally. And that really doesn’t engage me at all.
Tomorrow, Battle for Azeroth will officially launch. For days and possibly weeks after, I’ll be doing two things – avoiding the toxicity of social media while people lose their shit over this, and leveling my Monk character through old content. Hopefully, by the time he reachest Current Content, people will have calmed down somewhat and I can enjoy the game as it was meant to – as a game.
The Battle Begins Again and Again
I’m fortunate in that I don’t feel the overwhelming need to live on social media. That’s probably why I only have a passing awareness that people were shitting all over the new patch.
There are problems, sure. But there’s good there too. At least, that’s what I hear. Vaguely. I’ve been working big hours since Patch 8.0 came out so I haven’t really had time to sink my teeth into whatever Blizzard did. Of course, what I did do, didn’t exactly get me to break out into a happy dance.
- Log into the Class Order Hall.
- Check for gold missions and see they are no more. As expected.
- Attempt to use the “nuke one world quest from orbit” ability and find the nuke greyed out for scrap.
- Try to talk to nuke distributor and find he will no longer return my calls.
- Delete Order Hall addons.
- Log off.
Of course, then came today’s patch. Today, the Battle for Teldrassil began… with a yawn. After throwing down in Darnassus on both Alliance and Horde characters, the end result was unlocking some world quests.
Greeeeeat.
Guess I’ll log in again next week.
Until then, I’ll try and get this song out of my head by playing it repeatedly. At least this content has some strong replay ability.
Rokk Talk 