Posts with tag Grinding

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill wishes the mages would stop sending out the bad voodoo vibes to everything she owns so she can buy new fun things for her birthday instead of old replacements.

There's plenty to look for through the datamining, but the question on everyone's mind is, "How do I start the questline?" Trust me, when someone finds out, I'm sure the internet will explode about it. It'll probably be on a Monday, during my other job's hours, and right after this column posts, knowing my luck.

But before I get into an all-out walkthrough of the questline, I want to discuss one thing: does green fire have to be exclusive? Is exclusivity required for meaningfulness?

This morning's Breakfast Topic isn't as a simple as "Which new instance is your favorite dungeon?" We're pouring another cup of coffee because we want to hear which instance you most enjoy repeating, even if it's not your most favorite of the expansion -- because even the joy of an instance that utterly captivated you the first time through may dim after repeated assaults. As time goes on, which 5-man or scenario are you most open to (or even look forward to) running again and again?

Disclaimer: The author of this post may or may not be known for making farming pacts with guildmates ("I'll reset and re-run this instance with you until raid time every evening until you get your drop if you'll do the same for me once we get yours!") and is therefore disqualified from making rational judgments on reasonable replay value for any instance.

But surely there's more to replaying dungeons than grinding out points and shinies and rep, so let's turn our thinking away from loot for a moment. Don't use where your loot drops as a consideration. Which Mists dungeon or scenario are you most pleased to see pop up on your loading screen? What's the attraction? Is it the scenery, the encounter design, the story, or something else that keeps you coming back for more?

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My warrior recently found herself farming a lot of Khorium in order to build her Turbo-Charged Flying Machine, and while flying a seemingly endless number of circuits in Nagrand in order to get the metal (which is a rare spawn on other Outland ore nodes), I started to wonder where this farm fell in relation to other grinds. Khorium sometimes cooperates by spawning regularly, but this time, it was its usual, awful self. I'm sure the Burning Crusade-era players can relate.

And yet, somehow I still don't think that khorium is the worst thing in the game to farm. Off the top of my head, I can think of others that are or have been equally bad or worse:

• Non-combat pets A lot of farmable non-combat pets (e.g., the dragon whelps, the firefly, the Fox Kit) have a 1-in-1,000 drop rate and a limited number of mobs up at a given time.
• Combat pets Waiting for a particular pet to spawn somewhere and then finding and taming it before someone else does can be maddening if you're consistently unlucky.
• Fishing Accomplished Angler is justifiably famous for being stuffed with requirements full of RNG. Let's talk about the year it took me to get Mr. Pinchy's Magical Crawdad Box! On second thought, let's not.
• The Scepter of the Shifting Sands quest This disappeared in Cataclysm, and with it went all the work that went into farming up bug parts and Elementium Ingots, which is where I got stuck in the chain. (So close, and yet so far.)
• The Insane This almost goes without saying, although it's easier these days than it used to be.

Your thoughts, readers? What's the toughest thing in the game to farm?

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Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, the abyss stares back.

Almost two years ago, I wrote a series of articles for OverAchiever that turned out to be one of the most popular themes the column's ever visited: evil achievements. It turns out that a lot of folks care deeply about achievements that have been -- allow me to quote myself -- "milked from the angry teat of Satan himself."

Now, it has to be said that all achievements are technically optional. No one is forcing you to do anything, why do you play this game anyway if you aren't having fun, yadda yadda ... all true. But I assume you're reading The OverAchiever because you really like achievements and you think they add something to the game. (Either that, or you're just reading because you're bored, but that's fine too.) Personally, I don't think players really mind difficult achievements or even achievements that they have to peck away at over an extended period of time. But there's a line between an achievement that is genuinely difficult on its own merits and one that makes you privately think the developers want you dead.

So with that in mind, how would we reconstruct a list of evil achievements in 2012 during the Cataclysm era?

You can find the original series here if you're interested in a trip down Memory Lane, although I'll give you a quick rundown on them past the cut:

• Evil Achievements: Spotlight on Justicar/Conqueror, The Immortal, and Accomplished Angler
• Evil Achievements: The 25 most evil achievements, #25-16
• Evil Achievements: The 25 most evil achievements, #15-6
• Evil Achievements: The 25 most evil achievements, #5-1

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Fox and Basil's reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Every so often, I get asked something to the effect of "What's the fastest way to get 10,000 gold?" It's usually asked by someone who is perpetually poor in game and is looking to get a BoE or some other sort of reward that costs gold. The fastest way for me to get 10,000 gold is to log in and check my mail. My daily haul is many times that and scales based on how much time I have to craft, list, and relist. This isn't a useful answer to someone who lives paycheck to paycheck, though. So what advice would be helpful?

First off, if you're below level 85, get to level 85. This nets you quite a bit of gold simply from quest rewards and vendoring gear you acquire. If you're already level 85, the first thing you need to do is identify how much money you can make per hour running 5-mans for valor points that you can use to sell BoEs. On my realm, I could sell a BoE costing 1,650 VPs for about 10,000 gold. That means every valor point I earn could be worth 6 gold, which makes the 150 points I get from a 5-man worth 900g. I can do seven per week per character with the requisite gear. Also, every trash kill and boss kill has a chance of awarding you with valuables, including enchanting mats (if someone can DE) and BoEs.

If you'll allow me a moment to editorialize, I'm pretty damn sick of the Molten Front. This new questing area for level 85s, released with patch 4.2, is the grind-iest damn place I ever had the misfortune to grind lately.

Basically, how it works is this: First, you clear a solid chunk of the regular Mount Hyjal quests that have been available since Cataclysm's launch. This opens up a small new quest hub, the Sanctuary of Malorne, with a couple of non-repeatable quests and a few dailies. Grind those dailies long enough, and you'll get access to a new daily quest hub inside the Firelands. Grind those dailies (and the old ones), and in another week or so, you'll gain access to another set of dailies. Keep grinding, and ... yes, you guessed it, another set of dailies becomes available.

Eventually, after about 40 consecutive days of grinding dailies in the Molten Front, you'll gain access to your choice of three vendors: one with tailoring and leatherworking patterns, and one with blacksmithing plans and engineering schematics. The stuff you can make from the patterns, plans, and schematic are neat -- 36-slot profession bags and some epic i365 gear.

There's an awful lot of grind-y garbage keeping most players from these rewards. But for those of us who play the auction house, that's a good thing -- players are always willing to pay a premium to avoid a long, boring grind.

This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages.

I recently finished my Shatar Skyguard reputation grind. I'd previously done my share of rep grinding, including repeatedly decimating the populations of Felwood Timbermaw and Nagrand ogres, but I was, um, not prepared for Skettis.

We tend to be a friendly group on my server, and my previous experience rep grinding involved everyone giving each other a respectful distance, taking turns and sharing a friendly wave here or there. It is quite a bit different in the cutthroat world of the Skethyl Mountains, where more than once I detected stealthed Alliance lying in wait trying to grab my summoned mobs. When it came to summoning Terokk, I quickly learned to save that for early mornings and to scope the area beforehand just to be safe from Allies, but quite regularly, someone of either faction would swoop down into a camp where I was merrily grinding away and kill the very next mob in my sights, regardless of the fact that the next camp over was completely unoccupied. I had no idea Skyguard Rep was such serious business!

I eventually finished my grind and earned my Purple Riding Nether Ray and matching Nether Ray Fry, but I am still surprised by the experience. Ever enter into a WoW endeavor to find it unexpectedly competitive? Did you stick with it, or did you decide it was more trouble than it was worth?

This Breakfast Topic is brought to you by WoW.com's guest blogger program. Want to participate in a future call for guest posts? Read up on how to contribute, and keep an eye on the site for program announcements.

I've played World of Warcraft before and absolutely loved it -- I loved it until it became a second job for me. Then when I quit cold turkey, it turned into a bad break-up. I wanted to play it again but didn't want it consuming all of my time. I wanted to level without hating myself for sitting on a chair until my butt hurt, then finding a pillow and valiantly continuing on.

It's actually a deep, dark secret of mine (obviously not any more) that I never once got to the promised land that is level 80. I'll admit though, I had a lot of fun with the game. Hitting up instances and running through the well-written quests with friends was loads of fun. I wasn't a PvP god or anything, but I definitely had my good days back in my prime. I'll admit also that I still feel its callings now from time to time, and for all I know, I could be playing again tomorrow.

This brings me to an important question. What is it that keeps World of Warcraft players going strong? I remember when I first broke up with World of Warcraft, I went through an awkward rebound phase where I looked for any game I could find that would replace it. The sad part of this search was that I found myself wanting other games to be like Warcraft. The truth is, it may very well be the best one out there.

Even if it is the best, I want to know what gets people through the struggle of questing and grinding. As a semi-retired World of Warcraft gamer, I want to know if getting to the level cap is in fact worth the struggle. Is it the journey or the reward? What makes it all worth it to you?

Want to get Gold Capped? This column will show you how, and is written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, also of outdps.com, the Hunting Party podcast, and the Call to Auction podcast. Don't forget to drop by Onyxia-US this Sunday at 7:30 PM eastern time to get ganked by one of the CtA hosts and take the money of the other one! A good time will be had by all, and we'll be sticking around after the event to chat with readers and listeners!

Grinding is a pain. Avoiding grinds is why I got into the auction house in the first place. Repetitive and boring tasks are not fun for most people. Unfortunately, while some businesses are relatively grind free, certain tradeskills require us to do something like milling (inscription), prospecting (jewelcrafting), or disenchanting (enchanting).

The more volume you want to sell, the more volume you need to process. I know of scribes who sell 1200g a day of glyphs at an average of 8g each. That's 150 glyphs sold, which means 150 Ink of the Sea squeezed out of northrend herbs. You get 5-6 inks per stack of herbs, so this guy mills a minimum of 25 stacks of herbs a day. Each stack of herbs requires at least 4 hardware events (clicks or keypresses).

There have been reports in the blogosphere that there was an undocumented reduction to the milling cast time in patch 3.3.3. It used to be two very long, agonizing seconds for a scribe to turn herbs into pigments, and is reportedly going twice as fast: a blazing speed of one mill per second.

This is a huge deal to anyone who uses inscription to make money. Milling herbs into ink is one of those tasks that limits your production capabilities, and can't legally be done while afk. In fact, the milling grind time (four clicks, and until now, eight seconds per stack of herbs) is one of the reasons I rarely advocate new auctioneers getting into selling glyphs. In addition to generally overcrowded marketplaces and auction house campers, it's a business that requires almost super-human patience.

This will probably make the glyph market even more crowded, as the amount of unhealthy AH camping you can do with a finite amount of playtime just went up by a fair bit.

[Thanks to Wolfgang Staudt on flickr for the image]

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Patch 3.3.3 brings about small but noteworthy changes to the World of Warcraft. From a faster CoT, to putting those old Frozen Orbs to better use, to changes to the auction house -- there's several things all WoW players need to know. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3.3 will keep you up to date!

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Want to get Gold Capped? This column will show you how, and is written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, also of outdps.com, the hunting party podcast, and the call to auction podcast.

Hi folks! Welcome to Gold Capped. There are many games to play in World of Warcraft: PvE, PvP, achievements, and today I'm going to introduce you to the one that people overlook-- gold making. Not just making enough to cover your expenses, but making unimaginably large quantities of gold. Making it easily, and enjoying the process.

Before I jump in, I want to introduce myself and learn a little about you guys. I have a gut feeling that the majority of players are living "paycheck to paycheck" and treat the auction house as an expensive vending machine where they can spend their hard earned dailies money. Am I right? Please select one of the options on my embedded poll!

The long-awaited Dungeon Finder is finally out on the servers, and people have had a few days with it now, so let's jump in and gauge some early reactions. Overall, it seems to be a big hit -- tanks and healers are jumping into groups right away, and while we've heard of longer waits for DPS, it doesn't seem bad at all. While of course the initial flood of people brought instance servers down (I'd expect to see the same thing happen during peak time this weekend), everything seems to be working well since then: disenchanters are correctly dropping items out, loot is getting distributed correctly, and groups are doing what they were always supposed to do: rake in the badges and rewards for players.

Hots and Dots actually has a long take on the Dungeon Finder, including "15 Things You Should Know," like that tanks and healers are still as important as ever (if you sign up for DPS and another role, you likely won't be doing DPS), and that we're finding out very quickly just how skilled or knowledgeable people really are ("the Party Leader will be forced to confess midway [through] that they actually know nothing about the instance").

We've gotten a bunch of tips recently that claim some very e-famous PvPers are botting in BGs. If you aren't familiar with the term "botting," Dictionary.com provides us with the following definitions of bot:

1. Bot:
   –noun
   the larva of a botfly.
2. Bot:
   –noun (Australian Slang)
   a person who cadges; scrounger.
3. Bot:
   –noun
   a device or piece of software that can execute commands, reply to messages, or perform routine tasks, as online searches, either automatically or with minimal human intervention (often used in combination): intelligent infobots; shopping bots that help consumers find the best prices.

Blizzard EU Community Blue Ancilorn has posted a poll over on the EU forums asking players about one of the more prickly pieces of loot in the game: Mr. Pinchy. Usually with loot, Blizzard has been pretty good lately: if there's a piece that you want, there are usually a few different ways to get it, one of which usually requires grinding (i.e. picking up tons of Badges) rather than just getting really, really lucky. But with vanity stuff, it seems like they feel free to just put us at the will of the dice roll, and almost no other pet is more random than Mr. Pinchy. Not only do you need to level fishing (which, admittedly, is much less random than it used to be), and not only do you need to fish up a random item, but then, you need to hit a random choice of five different options. It's a slim chance on a rare chance on a nearly impossible chance.

Which explains why even those who have been trying for him for so long (ahem, me -- as you've probably heard on our podcast) haven't picked him up yet. The biggest percentage in the poll (about 26% of respondents, as of this writing) says they've been trying a lot and haven't gotten him. But strangely enough, the lowest percentage says "an absolutely enormous amount" of effort went into getting him. Which suggests that the people who are getting him are underestimating the amount of time they're putting in -- just how much fishing is "a moderate amount"?

At any rate, it seems like Ancilorn is just asking to be asking. Mr. Pinchy is definitely as much of a vanity item as they come, and there should at least be some items in the game that are very, very rare. It does seem at times that every time I suggest Blizzard won't move on something, they do, but I'd say in this case Mr. Pinchy will stay as rare as he is.

Gaviedrummer has exactly the problem that I have, only mine is probably worse: he has about 50 Badges of Justice left over from the last expansion. True, I've only got about 30, but I've also got stacks of Apexis Shards, Spirit Shards, Halaa Tokens, Obsidian Warbeads, and pretty much every other old reputation and currency item from the Burning Crusade sitting around clogging up my bank. And while some of it is just me being lazy (I could turn the Warbeads in, and I think I could probably grind out a few more Halaa tokens to pick up something there), as gaviedrummer finds out, most of it is completely useless. Yes, we can still trade for level 70 items, but who needs those any more?

It would be nice, especially with the soulbound stuff (I presume I will someday have an alt coming up through Outland that might need some help), for Blizzard to give us an out. Even if it requires level 80 to do, and even if the exchange rate is terrible (something like one level 80 badge for five or ten level 70 badges), at least we'll be able to get rid of the old stuff. Obviously, they're worried that if they offer exchanges for new items, people will go back and grind the old instances for the old currency. But there has to be some middle ground or a level requirement or something, some rate that allows us to get something for the old junk, while keeping current level 80s from exploiting the system. Heck, even cloth has a reputation turn-in value, at the very minimum.

The Stone Keeper's Shards at least have a turn-in for honor, and at the bare minimum, that's what you'd want for any currency -- something cheap that you can just cash out of the system with all of your leftovers. Blizzard may say what's past is past (and like I said, I may just need to spend a weekend cleaning out the bank), but it would be nice to have an NPC in Shattrath that can say "Oh, you're level 80? Let me just take those old tokens off your hands at a discounted price!" And it would be an Ethereal, of course.