Posts with tag grind

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 aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! This week's community post is the Auction House Junkies podcast's most recent episode.

The recent UI developer Q&A contained a little nugget that I found interesting:

Quote:

Milling and Prospecting are incredibly dull and very manual tasks at present, especially when you do them in bulk. Speaking as a scribe, the entire manufacturing process from herb to pigment to ink to glyph is both time-consuming, boring and sending me well on my way to repetitive stress wrist and index finger injuries.

Yes, we totally understand why this is a problem. The reason we can't make it work just like other trade skills, is that we don't know which herbs and ore you want to use. If you have some cheap ore and some very expensive ore, we don't want to accidentally use the expensive ore. There are a few ways to fix this. One is we just redesign Milling and Prospecting. If they were recipe-based, then we would know exactly which material to use. It would also add a huge list of repetitive recipes to your Professions pages. We could also make some kind of new UI (think of something simple, like the Reforging UI) to let you drag and drop the materials you want to use. The advantage of the "box" solution is we could also use it for Disenchanting.

source

I was thrilled to hear Blizzard's considering changing the way this works. I had always just assumed that the clunky design of milling and prospecting was on purpose to put a limit on how much ore or herbs one player could process.

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?

Yesterday, Bornakk said clearly that the Battered Hilt drop that starts the Quel'delar questline was dropping at the right rate, which is much less than when the patch first hit. And then of course, in last night's fixes, they went ahead and increased the drop rate anyway. He also claimed there were no plans to make it BoP, but who knows what'll happen in the future? For now, however, you can still buy and sell the quest item for quite a bit of gold. We'll have to see where the price eventually ends up -- on the staff here, we've seen anything from 8,000g to over 23,000g, and Twitter tells us that people are paying an average of around 12k or so, going up to as high as 30k (or even shady real money offers in online classified ads). Our own Matt Low has actually seen the drop three different times, and lost every roll. It drops off of any of the mobs in the Heroic versions of the Frozen Halls 5-mans, and as Bornakk says, any class can use it to come up with a pretty solid weapon, so the competition will probably keep the price high, depending on where the drop rate ends up.

The silver lining, if you really want one, have terrible luck, and don't ever expect to have all that money, is that the price will probably go down eventually. Bornakk says that as people move up into Icecrown and start picking up weapons that are even better than the sister blade, demand is likely to drop off a bit. But he also says that Blizzard does want this to be a special and relatively rare item, so you'll still have to probably either be lucky or ready to grind it out. Good luck -- I'm out there searching for one with you.

I'm kind of surprised we've never done this one on PLP (in fact, I think we may have, though I couldn't find it in the archives at all, and it just changed recently anyway). But just in case you don't want to spend $10 of real money on an epic in-game pet, you can try to get this one anyway.

Name: Parrot Cage (Hyacinth Macaw) (Wowhead, Thottbot, WarcraftPets)
Type: Epic (yes, Epic) Noncombat Pet
Damage/Speed: N/A
Attributes:

• Allows you to summon the Hyacinth Macaw companion pet, one of the most beautiful "parrot style" pets in the game.

It's been a little while since we've heard from Nyhm and Summergale, especially as a duo act. That made the tip that they've released a new video an incredibly exciting bit of news. The bonus to this news is that the video isn't just a song, but also includes a brief mock-commercial as the opening to the video.

The opening commercial is a parody of the Real Men of Genius spots by Budweiser. In the short segment, Nyhm and Summergale poke a bit of fun at the immense shoulder armor design favored by World of Warcraft. I wish I could say some of Nyhm's hypothesized designs were so far-fetched as to be laughable. But based only on a quick, visual scan, I could almost see Arthas dropping some of it.

The song itself is called Grind. It's a WoW-themed parody of Busta Rhyme's Break Ya Neck. I have to admit that Grind didn't appeal to me quite as much as other work from Nyhm or Summergale, but the video introduced a technique that I thought was a lot of fun. The chibi-like portrayal of the singers really lightened up the video, and made the entire production much more engaging. It was a cool thing to do, and I'd like to see Nyhm grow that technique more in future videos.

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Just in case you hadn't realized already, the news we got last week about patch 3.2 made it clear that the Argent Tournament is going to play a sizable role in our future Wrath of the Lich King activities, so if you, like me, have been lazy about completing all of the various tasks the tournament offers, now might be the time to change that outlook and get to work over there. By the time 3.2 rolls around, there will be even more rewards to be attained by champions of the various cities, so if having a squire of your own hasn't been temptation enough, maybe the promise of future content has helped.

And speaking of help, in case you need some, we've got you covered as always, from guides to the various dailies to a review of the rewards available. The question today is: have you been convinced yet? A good number of you have probably been rolling in the AT since 3.1 dropped, and probably have a whole stack of Seals already (if not the Hippogryph mount itself). But for those of you who've been lagging behind, has the promise of new AT-related content in 3.2 lit a fire under your Stabled Quel'dorei Steed? Or are you meh on on the idea of grinding out daily quests just to get more PvE content to grind out?

Most of you are excited for 3.1 so you can start raiding Ulduar, or take advantage of the new class changes. But I know what some of you are on pins and needles for. It's the new title The Insane.

Insane In The Membrane is exactly what it sounds like -- an achievement for people who are completely nuts. To earn this title you must be willing to spend a lot of time destroying and raising obscure factions in Azeroth. I mean a lot of time. It requires that attain the following:

Honored with Bloodsail Buccaneers
Exalted with Everlook
Exalted with Ratchet
Exalted with Booty Bay
Exalted with Gadgetzan
Exalted with Ravenholdt
Exalted with Darkmoon Faire
Exalted with Shen'dralar

Yep.

If you want to get started on this brain-breaking journey, just follow the jump.

I realized the other night that I have quite possibly the strangest complaint about Wrath of the Lich King possible: There is nothing that you can just go grind if you want to do something mindless. By grind, I mean endless killing of mobs for some minor gain. One of the biggest reasons I play WoW is for social purposes. I play WoW with a lot of my friends, and sometimes when I log on I just want to use the game as glorified IRC while I stab things.

This worked well in The Burning Crusade, because there were a lot of quests that required you to pay attention to what you're doing, but there were also a few reputation grinds that you could do just by murdering lots of mobs, which was great for those lazy days. Zaxxis Insignias, Warbeads, Marks of Sargeras, all of that stuff. If I didn't want to do anything complicated while I chatted away in guild chat, I could just round up a bunch of mobs and killify them, and I would still be making progress toward some game goal.

The expansion draws ever nearer, and many folks are working away at the last important bits of Burning Crusade content. We're looking to see Wrath by the end of this year. I've been spending a lot of time leveling alts to get ready for Wrath of the Lich king. I've noticed that this has been surprisingly easy compared to my previous leveling experiences. In the last week or so I've leveled my Warrior from 40 to 56 with very little resistance. I've probably only been ganked a total of ten or so times.

I'm beginning to think either most people have shifted their priorities from hunting lowbies to preparations for the level 70 to 80 grind. Or could it be that many of the folks who would ordinarily be giving me grief have been preoccupied playing in the beta test? It reminds me of the unofficial truce between factions immediately following the release of BC.

Has your gaming experience changed recently?

Arrowd of the US Cairne server has a question: How do you keep leveling without getting bored, abandoning a character, or rerolling? She says that she's had around 14 characters, and she's never managed to stick with one past about level 45. She always gets bored, and she wonders if there is a way to avoid it.

Now as I've mentioned before, I've leveled a lot of characters myself, and have a few 70s, but even I can sometimes get a little bit tired of the grind, and sometimes even I need to make up goals to keep myself focused. Sometimes I even need it for my level 70s if I'm running low on gold or raiding supplies. In that way, I can definitely feel where she's coming from, but I do (usually) manage to keep myself motivated.

Sometimes, for me, the Motivation is pretty simple. For example, on that Shaman I'm leveling, what keeps me going is the prospect of getting some sweet Dual Wield action going. I'm actually having a lot of fun with her, so I don't need to focus on it too hard, but the idea of imagining her with 2 axes enchanted with Windfury is a mental picture that is too awesome to put into words. I mean, we're talking cover of a Dragonforce album awesome.

So now I turn the question over to the rest of you. Whether it be leveling on a lowbie or grinding on a 70, how do you keep yourself motivation when the going gets tough and you get tired out? Is it the promise of a new skill? A new piece of gear? What keeps you charged up and logged in?

After the 20th Supremus kill the game can get a tad boring. There's no doubt about it. Raiders know well that you have to spice things up to keep it fun. One way to do that is to have a lively bunch of people you raid with. With them things can get "interesting" at times. The fellow officers and I in my guild have decided to make things interesting by betting on the number of people that will die during Supremus.

For some reason Supremus always manages to kill a few too many people. Not too many that we can't one-shot him, but enough that it makes you scratch your head. No one dies on Illidan, Council, etc... but Supremus? Run for the hills!

So to keep the fight interesting someone picks a number, say nine. That number is "the line." Myself and a couple others will take under the line, and a couple others will take over. If less then nine people die, each of us gets 20g. If more than nine die the other folks get 20g each.

Is betting against the raid like this a good thing?

Some people really seem to enjoy repping up with various factions. I am not one of them. I've known people who complete the maximum amount of daily quests on multiple characters. It's fantastic that Blizzard has opened up opportunities for relatively easy gold and reputation, but I wish there was a little more variety in the experience.

Prior to Patch 2.4, when the limit was ten, I don't think that I ever completed more than four or five dailies per day. Now that we've been bombarded with Quel'Danas dailies and the limit is twenty-five, I do up to eight on rare occasions. I almost always complete the daily battleground quest, but that's about it most days. I know that they're an excellent source of gold, but they feel like such a chore to me. I find daily questing to be almost as much fun as washing dishes and doing laundry. If it means I never get epic flying mounts on my characters, so be it.

How many dailies do you do and what keeps you motivated to do them?

Grinding for reputation is a part of the game. Think of it as leveling up with different factions. Last week we looked at the levels of reputation. This week we'll examine some of the reputations that you encounter in Azeroth.

Each of the major cities represent factions reputations that you can grind up with by completing quests and donating cloth. Increasing your reputation with the cities of your faction gives you the opportunity to purchase their racial mounts and tabards, in addition to discounts from vendors. For example if you play a Human, you can rep up to exalted with Darnasus in order to get a Nightsaber mount. Be warned, though because of scaling restrictions some models may not have access to all racial mounts.

I'm currently working through Zangarmarsh on my Hunter, and this weekend I spent a lot of time grinding two completely different kinds of mobs. The Withered Bog Lords in northern Zangarmarsh were cake for my Hunter -- they weren't exactly gentle with my pet, but he was able to eat the damage, and I could have grinded right away on them all day. At the exact opposite end of the grinding scale, however, were those stupid Umbrafen Eels -- not only were they under water (always annoying), but they've got this on-hit electrical damage thing that just drove me nuts. I stayed to play with the Bog Lords for a long time, racking up the XP, but as soon as I was done with the Eels, I got out of the water and stayed out.

Fighting these two back to back got me thinking: what's the easiest/hardest mob to grind on? Some mobs (like the tigers in Stranglethorn or the bears/spiders in Ashenvale) are super easy to grind -- they have no special abilities, they're spaced out, and they go down fast. But others -- most gnolls, in my experience, and lots of casters -- are just annoying as all get out; they run around, pull others, heal up when they're almost dead, and give you lots of headaches while taking them down. Those are the mobs you don't sit around and grind on -- they're the ones you avoid completely after you've done whatever quest requires you to kill them.

What are your favorite or least favorite mobs to just grind on in the game?