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Mists of Pandaria Leveling Map
To say it’s been a rough couple of weeks would do the past a disservice. People who follow me on Twitter (@The_Herculano) know the story so there’s no point in rehashing it here. My astute conclusion has been therapy via World of Warcraft, and while it might not have been very therapeutic, it has been productive.
First, Hello to Mists of Pandaria. Leveling was going to be “fun”. The quotes are not accidental.
There is so much I want to discuss about leveling, the expansion, general experience, but for the sake of brevity let me just say this: it took me 1 Day 4 Hours 6 Minutes 4 Seconds to see this pop up on my screen –
And so it beings.
What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been
Apparently the Internet is not filled with assholes.
Let me start by saying that this post is a bit late, but this is the price we pay when we have other things to do. But I think that by letting this post soak a bit, stew in its own juices you might say, it has had the potential to turn into something more. Something delicious.
I’ll start by posting this –
That, as you might have noticed, is a purple proto-drake. You obtain said creature by completing the Meta Achievement What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been. That’s right, you too can fly Barney the Dinosaur if you complete a few (like, just about all) of the World Event Achievements.
It’s what I did, you see. Well, I did and I didn’t.
First, the “What I Did” part –
School of Hard Knocks, the nightmare of an achievement, was the last hurdle for me. And let me tell you Internet, PVP players are not cool with PVE folks dragging their kids through a battleground. BG after BG, I’d hear in raid chat that people resented the fact we were there, that they were not going to help us complete our stupid objective, and as far as they were concerned we Care Bears could all just roll over and die in a ditch.
(Incidentally that last part was only voiced once, BUT YOU GUYS WORDS CAN HURT OK!)
School In Session
I finished two parts of the School of Hard Knocks achievement pretty quickly – Assault a flag in Arathi Basin and Assault a tower in Alterac Valley. The flag was simple enough; just race out of the gate and get the flag. The Alterac Valley tower was a bit different. I ran into the tower and there were a bunch of Alliance folks standing there by the flag. I watched them and waited for them to attack. When they didn’t immediately try to stab me in the eyes or fire lighting bolts at my testicles, I suspected these folks might be on the same page as me. So I rolled up and capped their flag without any hostility on their part.
Naturally I was killed as soon as I left the tower.
Punch In The Eye (of the Storm)
Capturing a flag in Eye of the Storm took some time, but even more luck. After about six of these BG’s, I understood the strategy the opposition would use. They would send two people to capture towers, and send the rest to stand by the flag and murder the shit out of anyone who showed up with an orphan. See, if you had an orphan it was a safe bet that you weren’t a PVP’er, and therefore didn’t have PVP gear. Under those circumstances, getting anywhere near a flag was akin to sticking your head into a wolverine’s cage: you were going to get ripped to pieces, it was going to hurt, and there was no way around it.
Lady Luck decided to clock in after her obvious drinking binge and gave me a drunken wink while she showed some leg to the opposition. The flag respawned… and no one was there.
No on except me.
I grabbed the flag and ran like my ass was on fire.
Now I’m not a PVP guy. I know warriors have all sorts of tricks, trinkets, and abilities to help them survive. But at that moment, with a herd of pissed off Alliance people attacking me and trying to kill me, all I could think was COMEONCOMEONRUNRUNRUNRUNDON’TDIEAAAAAAHHHHHH.
Somehow, I capped it. With Hordies healing me, running interference, and just being there for me, I capped the flag.
I finished off the BG and don’t even remember if we won or not. I still had one battle(ground) left to fight.
Friends in Low Places
Warsong Gulch.
You’d think this achievement would be easy enough to do. Just fill up the flag room with Hordies, wait for an Alliance player to run in, let him grab the flag, kill his guts out, return flag. Easy peasy.
Not so much if the Hordies don’t care about orphans. Heartless bastards.
In retrospect it might have been better to get this one done on the first day. More people would have been doing the achievement, and probably could have opted for the pile on and kill strategy. I ran it in the middle of the week, after the big glut of achievement hunters already had what they needed. So when everyone charged out to grab the Alliance flag and all the glory that goes with it, only three of us sat back with our orphans.
Great. You know what works worse than three PVE players hanging back to “protect” a flag? Having a druid flanked with rogues roll in like SWAT and take the flag, leaving only disappointed corpses behind.
I didn’t want to admit defeat. Maybe the next BG would be luckier. But I suspected that Lady Luck had passed out for the evening, leaving me with the hangover.
Death after death, gnome rogues unwrapped my entrails like it was Christmas morning. Side note – people who make fun of (or hate on) gnomes either a) have never faced a gnome rogue in a BG, or b) have had their ass handed to them by a gnome rogue in a BG. They’re small enough that when they cut you open, they can crawl inside your torso and make you dance like a bloody hand puppet.
In an act of suicidal desperation, I chased after the druid flag carrier. I chased her right into the heart of the Alliance fortress. She stopped in the tunnel and I started attacking her. Now was my chance! Now was my best and only chance!
I then watched her drop the flag right in front of me. In a panic, thinking I’d killed her or somehow knocked it out of her hands, I picked it up and returned it. This was promptly followed by the achievement spam, and then by my death as the gnome rogues caught up with their flag runner and ran me through.
This was the “What I Didn’t Do” part of the achievement. I didn’t kill the flag runner. She gave me the flag because she saw my orphan and knew I needed the achievement.
This druid, Anyaka helped me end my Long Strange Trip. And for that, I am grateful.
And while for me the Trip is over, the Journey continues onward.
I’ll just be flying Purple Class.
Taking it to the Extremis
Noblegarden Swift Springstrider
Being so close to completing the Meta Achievement “What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been“, completing the World of Warcraft Noblegarden World Event went without saying. I was kinda surprised at how quick I finished it. I started Sunday afternoon, and by Monday evening I was done. I would have been done on Sunday but I had to slap some bunny ears on elusive members of the Alliance.
It was now time for me to relax and get back to focusing on other business. I was working on Hellscream rep and tokens to get my spectral wolf mount, as well as leveling up a DK on another server. As far as Noblegarden was concerned, we were done with each other for another year.
That is, until I saw it.
What… what the Hell was that? Why was there an albino flamingo, an abomination of Nature itself, running past me?
And why the Hell was it carrying someone on its back?
The Swift Springstrider, a bird so ugly I didn’t know how someone could hold the reins and cover their eyes at the same time. Did it come with beer goggles? It looked like the kind of bird you took home from the bar on a drunken bet. One that you lost.
No. Hell no. There was no way I wanted that bird. I would rather ride a mound of kodo feces between my legs than that thing.
But, y’know, just out of curiosity I checked to see how I could get one.
Turns out there were two ways: As a rare drop from inside a Brightly Colored Egg, or by spending FIVE HUNDRED Noblegarden Chocolates at a holiday vendor.
Hmmmm.
Now I’m not going to tell you that I got the Swift Springstrider for myself. But if I did, here’s some tips that I (would have) used to help farm up the five hundred chocolates.
Macro: to get from Point A to Point B quicker, I (would have) used this macro:
/use Egg Basket
/use Brightly Colored Egg
This (would have) helped keep the haste buff up while opening the eggs and stacking the chocolates, or whatever was inside the egg.
Location: When I was farming eggs for the Noblegarden achievements, I visited three locations: Razor Hill, Bloodhoof Village, and Falconwing Square. I managed to find a spot at each location that maximized the spawn points in a small area. Note: this is on a high pop server.
Tarou made this video which points things out much better than I could.
So there. If you’re are one of those who are so inclined to get one of these hideous birds and refuse to seek help for your obvious illness, good luck to you.
Son of a bitch.
Shared Topic – Herculano The Love Fool
Let’s do this.
World Event – Love is in the Air
I think it was Brewfest of last year that got me on the road to What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been. I’d been sitting on the Brewfest achievement for almost a year. All I had to do with drink the final Brewfest brew and the achievement was mine. Once that was done, I noticed the next World Event was almost completed as well. I’d done bits and pieces of various Events, but never bothered to put it all together. Eventually it became my mission to complete them for the Meta Achievement.
We are now getting into Crunch Time.
I had only three events left to complete: Love is in the Air, Noble Gardner, and For the Children. Piece of cake, until I realized that I was going to be on a week long vacation during Love is in the Air. I finished off as much as I could, and before I left on my vacation I only had to Pity three Fools and find some Flowers. However, I’d only have maybe a day to do it, and if Murphy’s Law had his way it wouldn’t be easy.
My vacation was exhausting – from Canada to Las Vegas, then Arizona, then California, then back to Vegas before flying home. It was a family affair with my parents, and if you follow me on Twitter you know why having my Mom there was such a big deal. But once the holiday wrapped, it was time to get some business taken care of.
First: Run the dailies, use the tokens to buy the three remaining Love Fools that I needed for the achievement.
Second: Coffee. Okay, this was actually first. I am only mostly a machine; I still have human frailties like sleepy and sore from days of walking more than I drove (and I drove over three States – you do the math).
Third: Start Pitying some Fools. I thought the Gurubashi Arena was going to be tough since the odd time or two I’d been there before, I’d been jumped by an Alliance Rogue who had no business being out there other than to be some special flavor of dick. Luckily there were no such hiccups this time. Culling of Stratholme was cake, leaving only Naxxramas for the win. Despite being part of the largest guild in North America, I felt like I should be able to get into the raid instance without asking for help. This is called being anti-social, kids. Don’t be this. It’s something I’m working on.
Protip: Until you get over being socially inept, create a FREE starter account and level a character up to 10. This is the minimum level that a character can be to get into a raid instance. Once you have your raid toonie, have you main invite him and form a raid. You can then get into the raid zone.
I asked for help and actually got a couple of offers. Who knew that interacting with people could be so beneficial! I zoned into Naxx, dropped my Fool, /pitied the bastard and got the achievement.
Fourth: More coffee because.
Fifth: For the Bouquet of Red Roses, I hit regular Blackrock Caverns. The second boss dropped the flowers, so if I didn’t win them I could quickly drop the group and re-queue. Nothing like running through a zone that you over-gear and over-level. That suited me fine since I hadn’t run a 5-man in months, and had never run Blackrock Caverns. So we burned through the instance, killed the boss, and I rolled /need on the flowers.
Bam. Herculano the Love Fool. One step closer to my purple proto-drake.
Shared Topic – Love is in the Air
At Blog Azeroth, Effraeti posed the following as a Shared Topic:
With the in-game World Event “Love is in the Air” and its correlation with IRL Valentine’s Day next week, I have been thinking about character love interests (and also because I am a hopeless romantic).
Who is your main character’s love interest? Are they involved with someone, do they pine for someone?
Many bloggers lately have been discussing playing with IRL couples who raid together. How would this transfer to the characters they play? Why would their characters slay dragons together?
I am curious on everyone else’s thoughts! I will post a response to this over the weekend, in time for Valentine’s Day, and link it when it is live.
Love interest? Well, maybe once upon a time…
The ground had disappeared far below him, hidden by clouds and distance, and still Herculano urged his Netherdrake even higher into the sky. The air was thin, cold. Every breath was like struggling to inhale molten steel, scorching every inch of his throat and lungs. But that was merely physical pain, and physical pain he could deal with. It was the deeper pain that pushed him beyond his limits, time and again, much to the dismay of anyone around him. Today, that included a mighty Netherdrake. The beast could finally take no more, and the Orc felt the muscles in his mount’s back tighten and twitch. They were as high above everything as they could be, but for Herculano it wasn’t high enough.
It wasn’t high enough to reach beyond. Reach where She was.
Staring across the vast blue emptiness, he couldn’t remember exactly when he’d lost her. Perhaps a part of him didn’t want to remember it. He was a mighty warrior, slayer of Gods and Dragons, yet there were still some doors he could not bring himself to re-open. On rare occasions he would allow himself to think back to a time when She was with him. They had grand adventures and faced down many a foe. At night they would lay together in the cold and their love, their fire, would keep them warm.
And just like that, in that brief moment of happiness, he would remember that She was gone.
And just like that, he would destroy whatever was in front of him. With blade. With fist. With teeth.
Demons feared his rage.
Dragons feared his destruction.
All because She was gone.
Herculano watched the sun slowly sink into the clouds, and embraced the pain of the icy chill stabbing into his flesh. The light was giving way to darkness, just as his mount’s strength was beginning to give way to fatigue. Grudgingly he jabbed his heels into the Netherdrake’s hide, signalling for it to begin its descent. As he watched the clouds gently rise to greet him, he knew there would be no love to keep him warm on this or any night. It was that knowledge which fuelled his ever-burning rage, an inferno that would never be extinguished.
Until She was with him again.
Rokk Talk 