I make poor choices. In theory there is a lot of things that I should have been doing up to this point that I have not. Tam for example trained only the bare minimum of abilities the entire time during playing his rogue. I could have probably done this as well given that there is a very slim number of abilities that I actually use. As a Warrior I mostly only care about tanking… and when I am not tanking I only care about being able to burn through mobs as efficiently as possible without having to completely shift things up. That means I spend most of my time in either Defensive or Arms, and instead of 2 Handers I am more or less dual wielding. This would rule out a whole bunch of abilities that I would never use… but I did not do this thing.
For further bad ideas… for some reason I decided this weekend to burn up fishing from scratch and got it to around 130 before wandering off aimlessly. That means I did in fact spend the money on getting the book that takes me to 225. Why did I do this? Quite honestly I don’t know but I got a Big Iron Fishing pole and decided that I wanted to use it. That time could have been better spent probably doing literally anything else that could have earned me gold. Instead I wound up spending it… and making more bad decisions. That said you apparently catch enough fish going from 1 to 130 to be able to cook your way up to 150 skill. I may or may not have power leveled cooking on my Hunter who is just barely 10.
So here I am at level 40 with a need for 100 gold… which is a truly staggering amount of gold at this level. As it stands I am sitting around halfway through and am entirely focused on procurement of more gold. The challenge here is that everywhere I go to attempt to get the gold.. I am finding isn’t working anywhere near as well as I thought it would. I’ve wandered around aimlessly and while I made about 5 gold last night off my schemes the wanderlust is definitely cutting into the grind time. Dungeoning is an option, but the problem with dungeoning is that I am also increasing my level at the same time which isn’t exactly something I am amped to do for the moment.
So I thought I would take a few moments this morning and talk about what makes a good grind spot. Because I am still hunting for my own sweet spot after trying a bunch of things that I hazily remember as being good ideas. Ultimately there are a bunch of variables that you want to keep in mind as you approach trying to find an ideal location to hunker down and camp.
Near a Vendor – In theory you need to make sure whatever camp spot you are going after is within a short distance of some sort of vendor that you can sell at. Inventory is a premium and you are going to need to eventually empty your bags out.
Green – You need to kill really fast to be able to efficiently grind and as a result you need to make sure the mobs you are fighting can barely fight back. This means you more than likely want to find some area that is green to almost grey to you. It means your time to kill will be really high and your need to drink/eat will be less.
Non-Communal – You want to find something that doesn’t call for help. Ultimately you are setting up a machine and you want a fast but steady pace to mobs. If you can AOE grind then more than likely this goes out the window but you are looking for some place that won’t overwhelm you.
Non-Runners – In a similar boat you more than likely want something that isn’t going to run because you waste time chasing them down. If you have Wing Clip or Hamstring this becomes less of a problem but you still have to make sure you have that debuff on them before they start to run.
Valuable Vendorables – You are looking for something that drops something of value often. That value can be entirely negotiable but ultimately you are going to make most of your money from something you can quickly dump on a vendor and get back to farming.
Tradeskill Friendly – Look for something that you can increase the value of with some quick tradeskilling. Skinning/Leatherworking is the king of this because you can easily convert a lot of leathers to something that can be dumped on a vendor quickly for a profit. Similarly cloth can be upsized a bit into bandages for a few copper profit per bandage.
Cash Drops A Plus – If you are fighting something that drops cash it helps to make up the doldrums when the thing you are fighting isn’t dropping anything worth selling. Pure cash drop farming however is a really slow way of getting money. They need to be dropping something else be it cloth or vendor greys.
High Density – You need a lot of mobs in a very small area to keep you from having to run around a lot. Running around is time when you are not earning money, so you need to find something you can be constantly killing until your bags fill up.
Privacy – The biggest part of all of this is you need to find an area that is relatively unknown, because you don’t want competition in your farming. You need to be able to run your loop and fill your bags in peace, which tends to be the problem with valuable farm spots. Every single farm that I remember from Vanilla is way over-camped right now, because we all need that 40 gold. This is forcing me to branch out and try and find more creative options.
I’ve yet to find my perfect location, but I will eventually find a spot that ticks most of those boxes. I thought however I would throw out some of the things for you to think about as you try and nestle into your own farm spot. The grind is one of the more tedious parts of the game, and the amount of gold that you need to come up with is really a struggle at this level. However I am roughly halfway there. This is more or less my focus for the time being, and for now I am going to just keep my head down and go at it.
I love this spot in Arathi
First off I have to say… I am shocked and amused at just how many people ended up reading my “non-post post” from yesterday. I am also thankful for the people who checked up on me throughout the day to make sure I was okay. I have no clue why I suddenly needed copious amounts of sleep Wednesday night, but I most certainly did. Last night however was apparently the opposite and it enabled me to do some shenanigans that I will probably pay for later.
For the better part of this week I have been living in Arathi Highlands working on the warrior quest. The drop rate of the items needed from the elemental “exiles” is sufficiently low enough that when combined with how tough they are to take down it feels like I am mired to almost a halt. At this point I have 8 of one type, 6 of another and 2 of the last. The other side event that has been going on this week is that Eliyon and I have been trying to make some dungeon runs happen. Thalen and Vernie both needed another trip into the Library to finish a quest. We all needed a run through the Armory to get credit for the overarching quest and I think Eli probably wants the axe. Lastly we have all been sitting on a stack of Razorfen Downs quests.
Yes You Can Pet the Dog
While I failed completely at taking any screenshots of our Scarlet Monastery run, we started there and did the two wings. It was around this point that it was nearing 10 pm and in theory should have been the moment I begged off for the night. However given that last night was effectively my Friday and that I was off work today… I kept going. We all agreed to make our way to Razorfen Downs and start working our way through that instance. I was a bit surprised that Vernie agreed to this given that I think he probably still had work today.
There is an aspect of the dungeon design of Vanilla instances that on some level we knew at the time but never really marveled at. So many of these instances are designed in a way that they clearly expected you to go in and do one side of the dungeon, and then return a bit later to finish out the dungeon and do the other side. So in Razorfen for example you have two sides that are accessible from the entrance. You have the side with Undead Boars that ultimately gave themselves over to the Scourge, and then a side populated with more traditional Undead skeletons and ghouls.
The Boar side starts around 34 and tops out at 39, and honestly was a pretty easy jaunt giving us a bunch of false confidence. So much so that we damned near wiped when we got the first pull of Undead side without being completely ready for it. The level increases to 37-39 for the trash mobs and the final boss is 41 ramping up the difficulty significantly. The wide level ranges I believe are designed to have you split your run up over several nights, like we have done with Scarlet Monastery. We talked a bit last night about how they could have messaged this better, with making having a quest that sends you into the instance and there being an obstacle that you then have to leave the instance to figure out how to get past.
In a style that Grace would have been proud of, we managed to take down the final boss by the slimmest of possible margins. All it took was sacrificing the tank, because seemingly I was the only one who died regardless of everyone getting super low. Effectively we struggled because we were “ignoring the mechanics”. The final boss summons 3 ghost adds when you have pushed the health past certain thresholds. What we should have done is stopped dpsing the boss and cleaned up the adds before returning to fight the boss again. Around the time the summon happens the boss roots the tank making it super hard for the adds to be picked up.
Instead in truth nub fashion we burned harder escalating the problem and making it a race to one of two conclusions… we win or we wipe. The problem is that once you start a death race like that, you really cannot back out and try the actual strategy. The only reason why we won at that point after failing the mechanical components was by sheer determination to push through. As a result however I have a really nonsense sword that will hold me until I can get a Thrash Blade, and something to fill my neck slot, along with the lopsided tanky shoulders from Scarlet Monastery. The only negative of this whole situation is that we didn’t wrap and I didn’t make it to bed until roughly 12:30. A really long time but a really fulfilling one as we knocked out three instances.
I am struggling a bit when it comes what to call this post because I don’t want it to seem overly alarmist. That said I have noticed something over the last seven days that gives me concern. I mentioned these thoughts to my friend Eliyon yesterday and at 7:00 pm CST last night he agreed that there might be something to it. Last week there would have likely been 8-10 people on at that time of the evening, but last night there were three… and of those 3 one of which was Stargrace’s auctioneer that she leaves logged in most of the time while doing other things. There has been a noticeable drop off in activity.
Granted at this point we are twenty four days after the official launch of WoW Classic, and also at this point folks are exiting what I would call as the “easy levels”. At 37 the going is so much slower than it was even in the 20s and I have been chewing on this level for a couple of nights now. Granted I am not focused on being optimal and more focused on trying to get as much ore as I can to push up blacksmithing and mining, along with keeping up with the constant maintenance of needing to craft food. As a warrior I eat an excessive amount of food, and in order to lower downtime I am eating every 2 or 3 encounters.
I am not sure if I can really call this a trend yet since it more or less just started happening over the last week. I know of several cases where folks have stuff going on, like Grace for example is going to be out of pocket for another two and a half weeks or so. The west coasters don’t tend to start showing up until 9 ish my time, which means that in many cases we are ships passing in the night. They are coming on as I am logging off and I think players are starting to move away from playing the game at any cost and trying to find a more healthy balance. All of these things are probably adding up to the absence that I have noticed, but it does still give me pause.
For me at least I have not felt the sirens call of something else. I didn’t even pick up Borderlands 3 for example because I knew I would be otherwise engaged. Similarly there is a bunch of stuff coming out this week that I am likely going to just let sit there unpurchased until I hit a lull. The desire to hit 60 and gear up is way too great to allow myself to be distracted by something else. The only thing looming on the Horizon that is likely going to pull me away at least part of the time is the impending release of Destiny 2 Shadowkeep on October 1st. Even my beloved Monster Hunter World and its Iceborne expansion has not been enough of a draw away from Classic.
The positive is that there seems to be a group of us all in the same level range that seems to be similarly committed to this nonsense. So long as I can keep easily building guild groups I am likely going to stay engaged. However I wanted to throw this discussion out there. Have you been noticing a drop off in your own guilds? What things have been pulling players away from the game that you have noticed? I am curious if I am alone in this observation. Ultimately I am hoping this ends up being just a “bad week” and not a lasting trend. The servers are still actively populated and the chat channels lively, but I have noticed a thinning out of players in the level range I happen to be in.
I think ultimately I am finding myself between waves. I am too slow to be part of the “first” crowd, and too fast to be among the folks that are still in their early to mid twenties. I think maybe I need a change of scenery. I have been focused on grinding out the items needed for the Warrior level 40 weapon quest, and doing runs along the walls of Arathi for ore. This means I am moving every so slowly, but it does give me constant access to raptors which serve as two sources of cooking materials. I still have no clue where I am going to get the money in a few levels for a mount, and I figure that is going to be another phase that stalls me out as I go find something grey to grind. The various “gold farms” that I have heard of are all heavily camped, so I may just go without a mount for awhile.
Last night I participated in something and will pay today for it. I’ve kept a fairly firm rule that I try not to get engaged in much within Classic after about 8 pm CST. The reasoning being that I generally head to bed around 9:30 pm and go do my winding down activities before falling asleep. Very few dungeons take less time than a minimum of an hour and a half. Gnomeregan was one that I had expected would take roughly 2 hours, and was ultimately right. When I got home however we had all of the members of a group minus one player, that was expected to be logging in soon… so I allowed myself to commit to tanking.
The challenge there is that soon was a little longer than I expected and we had not started the instance until about 8:40… which had us leaving the instance around 10:40 two full hours later. It was a lot of fun, but I also need to not allow myself to get pulled into this practice on the regular because I definitely can feel its toll this morning, as I am a little groggier and creakier than I normally am. 5 am comes really really early. There was a time when I was in the habit of going to bed at midnight every night, but I have gotten out of that habit and it is probably for the better health wise. Classic and timezones are conspiring to try and shift that however.
I think everyone has memories of Gnomeregan being a giant pain in the butt, but to be honest I wasn’t exactly sure why until setting foot into the dungeon last night. There are a bunch of mechanics that just conspire to make the player suffer. Everything seems significantly higher aggro than most areas, and there are a bunch of “gotcha” mechanics that allow what was a stable pull to snowball with a large number of adds quickly. There is also the deep level range of the stuff at the top of the zone being level 25 and the final content being around 36. That deep level range is felt significantly as you gain confidence on the early packs and start paying for it later on the final trench clear to Thermaplugg.
For the most part I had been praising the fact that we had the old feel with some of the more modern conveniences of reasonable pathing. Pets for example do a good job of not pulling everything in the zone if you hop down off something. For the most part they now just despawn and you summon them back. Chain aggro also had seemingly been less of a thing, that was until getting into Gnomeregan. While doing the final clear the mobs are packed so tightly between two sides of a trench and the basin of the trench… that things get really twitchy making it extremely easy to wind up with a massive train of Dark Iron Dwarves seemingly coming from out of nowhere.
The above image shows what happened to us twice as we started pulling that last stretch. At first we were trying to hug the lefthand wall and pull only the mobs along that catwalk, and managed to get a massive train from the trench. Then we opted to pull our way down the trench and had almost reached the bottom… when we got a massive train coming from either side. There was no fighting through the sheer volume of mobs that came at us. The first time we had shaman reincarnation to get us back up and running, but the second time we remembered the back door to the instance and the fact that ghosts can apparently run through doors. We had the key in our inventory from a previous encounter and were able to get back down to the Thermaplugg area rather quickly.
We successfully completed all of the quests associated with Gnomeregan that were available to the horde, and I finished off one level and managed to make a little bit of a dent into the next. Another funny thing happened on the way to the irradiated cesspool however. We were waiting on the boat at Ratchet and up rolls another Undead player named Blodghast. We were talking about it in party chat when he sent me a tell saying something to the effect that “we might be cousins”. I need to friend the character and actually run some stuff with them given they have a good taste in names.
All in all it was a really fun night, but I need to ration this whole staying up way later than I intended thing. I guess Thursday is a reasonable night to do this on given that my Fridays are generally fairly light. Given that it is Friday however we might do some more late night shenanigans because I am starting to collect quests for Scarlet Monastery. I do feel a bit bad because Grace is going to more or less be out of commission for the next three weeks. By that point I will have leveled well out of her optimal range, but I plan on running a bunch of dungeons to help her catch back up.
