Busy Work
Like pretty much everyone who plays World of Warcraft, I have a morning routine that I tend to follow. I wake up, put the coffee on, and let the dog out. While the pooch does its business, I do mine. I log into WoW and deal with the various garrison missions and daily cooldowns. Usually I have to do that for a few characters so I let the dog back in and pour myself a cup of coffee before I finish up with the delegation of garrison duties.
What happens next usually depends on my day – if I’m working, well I go to work. If I happen to have the day off, I usually have a plan to focus on one character. That means I’ll either level them up, use them to level up battle pets, run old raids or dungeons for transmog gear/pets/gold, or find something else’s face to kill.
There’s no shortage of things to do, is what I’m saying. Those things also tend to change from week to week.
My last post was about the Brawler’s Guild. My plan at the time was to run through the seven ranks and unlock the heirloom fist weapons, the title, and so on. The problem I ran into was that some classes are better at certain fights than others, and while I enjoy using my Monk there were a few fights that were elevating my blood pressure to unhealthy levels. As much as I wanted the fist weapons, I wanted to avoid giving myself a stroke even more.
For my own well-being, I turned my attention to something a little more stable – the Stables. Now I’m not what you’d call a mount collector, per se. As long as I can get from Point A to Point B at 100% movement speed, it doesn’t matter if I do it on a horned zebra or a spectral tiger. Just get me there faster than my running speed. But one day I was standing in Stormwind on a bank alt when I was eclipsed by a huge mountain of fur and ugly – the trained icehoof mount. It was big. It was different. It was something I could relate to. So the monk’s new purpose went from Brawler’s Guild to clefthoof rustling.
You’d need a black belt to ride this beast.
After running the daily stable quest for a few days, I decided to use some of my spare time to log on with a warrior that I was hoping to push to 100. While he was questing I queued him for a random battleground. Something different, you know? Sure I’d probably get smashed but it’d be a change of pace. But my warrior, well he killed some folk. And when he killed those folk, and people noticed and healers healed me, he killed more folk.
Interesting.
My 100 Fury Warrior soon found himself outfitted with the Gladiator’s Sanctum in his garrison. More motivation, and goals to kill. Also, people to kill. This meant that I needed to collect piles of broken bones, so off to Ashran I went.
I found out two things once I got there. First, not many people were running Ashran anymore, at least not on the Alliance side. I discovered this when I asked to be invited into a raid and was met with the sound of crickets. I started running around the zone, trying to find a group of Alliance folk that I could ask directly. I covered a whole lot of ground before I found anyone.
When I did finally find people, I made my second discovery. The second thing I found was that my computer is old. A handful of Alliance folk were standing at the top of a hill, looking down at an empty crossroad. I ran by them, hoping to gain their attention with my fearless approach to what could have been an ambush. That’s when my computer finally started rendering the huge mob of Horde players killing people left and right. By the time I could see that I’d just stuck my head and shoulders into a big red meat grinder, I was hanging with the spirit healer. This happened a few times before I finally dropped my settings to Fair. I ran out of time for the day so I couldn’t tell how much that would help with the renderings, if at all.
Fast forward to this morning. I put the coffee on and let the dog out, then started up WoW. At the character select screen, I stopped. I actually didn’t know what to do. I had time to check out some garrison missions on a couple of characters, but who was I going to focus on? What did I want to do?
The mount? It had been a few days since I did the daily to train the mount I wanted. I’d actually almost forgotten about it.
PVP? There didn’t seem to be a point in doing anything with the Gladiator Sanctum due to Ashran being an apparent lost cause. So was I gearing up a PVP character for running BG’s?
Raiding? The Ashran meat grinder incident made me question whether I would even be able to run a raid without lagging out to death. More experimentation was going to be necessary before I took that step.
Pet Battles? Really? Was I paying 15 bucks a month to play Pokemon?
In the end I just logged out, sipped my coffee, and went to work.
Sometimes the best thing to do, is nothing at all.
WoD Brawler’s Guild
Sometimes there are advantages to getting punched in the face.
Most people are familiar with the Brawler’s Guild (YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT, oh nevermind – Editor). It’s solo PVE where you throw down against one or more boss-style opponents in an arena setting. Think Fight Club meets WWE, without the sexy divas and spandex and more Brock Lesnar doing whatever he wanted to you. All the fun of getting dropped on your head with the additional bonus of lack of short-term memory.
Blow your CD’s on the way to Suplex City
Believe it or not, there are actual reasons a person might want to subject themselves to the Brawler’s Guild. There’s a battle pet, a mount, a title, and even a follower. But for me, there’s two reasons that I’m currently inventing new and interesting ways to weave an f-sharp into my lexicon while violently choking my mouse (no, that is not an excerpt from my yet to be written gamer erotica “Fifty Shades of Nerd”)
The first reason is that, rather than sitting in a queue for a iLevel 640 intro legendary ring, I’d rather throw 1700g at a ring that doubles as a teleporter. Hawt, yes? Of course it is. The ring teleports the wearer to their faction’s version of the Brawler’s Guild. A sweet port to Org or Stormwind, as well as a nice iLevel bump.
The second thing, the more important thing, is an heirloom – a fist weapon heirloom.
Fist weapons, or the lack thereof, have pissed me off since about forever o’clock. It’s one of the very, very few classes of weapon that can’t be crafted at a high level. Once upon a time the Jewelcrafting profession could make them, but that ship has since sailed into a very large iceberg and sank to the bottom of the ocean. And despite numerous requests, Blizzard still will not allow fist weapons to be transmogged into anything other than fist weapons. So for Monks, or Shaman, or any other fist weapon capable classes, they just had to make do with other weapons until they got into a raid and were blessed by RNGesus.
But with the changes to heirlooms in 6.1, a character could level from 1-100 with fist weapons that would be just as good, if not better, than what they could get through level-appropriate content. Going through life being able to use fist weapons. Sounds pretty sweet to me.
Of course, it makes wiping your butt a little more difficult.
I’ve been throwing myself at the Brawler’s guild, hoping not to lose my mind before I get to the end and unlock those sweet, sweet heirloom fists. Hopefully I rank up before I succumb to a rage stroke. HeelvsBabyface has helped with their guide for getting through the ranks without serious harm to myself to my peripherals. He’s how I’ve been getting through rank one.
Rokk Talk 