Friday, October 9, 2009

Dailys give HOW much??

The first two daily quests available to Alliance players in Northrend are commonly the pirate bombing run and the Dwarven excavation Air Support. They each reward 24k xp ( 26k with relic bonus ), a handful of gold, 250 Faction ( 275 if you're human ), and the excavation run gives two healing potions plus incidental loot.

Arrg! Cluster bomb Again!!

The goblin Zepplin captain ( Gotta love Led Zepp references! ) is being held prisoner at the Alliance fortress on the western edge of the Howling Fijord. He's not happy about it, but we alliance creeps get to ride around in a zepplin and drop bombs on scurvy pirates! Yarrr!! Lots o pirate love in that zone. Great job by the devs on plotline and interesting quests. Hint: Group up for this quest. Five individuals on the zepplin bombing the pirates = 5 people with 6hits each and 2 cannon kills. 1 group of players can get all 25 pirates and 10 cannons blown up with time to spare. If you're late and miss the zepplin, you can fly onto the platform. If you've missed the first ship, you may need to repeat the process. Also, if you're solo, you should be able to get line of sight and do the quest by yourself on one pass. Either way group up when you can. Don't be a douche-bag. Dead pirates and hand grenades. Come on! You'll wait at most 5 minutes for the zepplin to return. Easy money + XP.


Aerial Fire Support!

The Dwarven excavation team is clearing the dig site for Northrend relics. Sjaberorn is sending stone gargoyles daily to disrupt the operation and kill the archeologists. You get to fly a roto-plane armed with machine guns and rocket salvos. Wooot! This plane handles like a dream. Hover, speed boost, and is very easy to master. There are 3 big buttons for god's sake! Machine gun, Rockets, and Boost. The machine gun is single target stream of low level damage. The rockets are awesome. They have a 5 second recharge, but they can hit multiple targets for multiple hits. I usually have a hard time killing gargoyles in the pit, chasing them down, and taking them out in classic dogfight combat. That's how the devs intended you to have fun in this encounter.

Me?> I flew past the quarry and hovered as intercept near Sjaberon waiting for gargoyles. Two reasons: 1) The gargoyles come in waves and clusters. That makes the rockets much more effective. Tab target the gargoyle groups and you'll have a dozen of them aggroed and hovering. Just keep tabbing and gun them all down with rockets. 2) The gargoyles fall down in a VERY close pattern when they die. I just fly back to base when 8 of them have been killed. Usually when ALL of the wave is wiped out actually. Then I collect my quest reward and zoom back to the grassy clearing on the far side of the quarry. Littered in a neat little line of bodies is my loot from 12 dead gargoyles. In Total, it's over 1g of Shiny stone + the occasional green (blue) quality item from the haul. Not bad for 3 minutes of combat.

Easy to knock out these every day until you hit 74. Then I'd go into sholzar basin and get busy with Nestingwary >> The Oracles >> The Lifewarden >> Icecrown. You'll easily make 3 levels in Sholzar Basin. Sholzar is a haven for Herbalism, Skinning, and Mining. There are a number of Rares as well as a ton of Lore and multiple daily quests. Your first two zones in Northrend should be preparing you for the trip to the Basin. A Flying book is just a shortcut to getting there earlier.
What Not to skin

Note to the overconfidant newbies... Know your limitations on skinning. I hit the forward Argent Crusade camp in Icecrown and tried to kill the Lv 78 / Lv 79 spiders. They died allright. However, the Argent Crusaders will not give you quests unless you're level 77 or better. They also didn't want to heal/buff me, but they did assist sometimes. With enough +hit, I could apply DoTs and nuke down the Lv79 stuff. Stuff 6 levels above me, right?? Dam it's good to be a warlock. It did take longer than expected and multiple adds caused some problems. I couldn't regen enough mana to keep 100% efficiency and the spiders slowly chewed up my poor little Lv73 Voidwalker. His taunt was useless as well as his melee damage in keeping aggro.

I got 10 mobs killed and skinned. Then decided this was a big uphill fight trying to "farm" red color mobs. I'd rather nuke a zillion green / yellow creatures than the long 1 on 1 fights. The xp actually works out better vs level 72-73 mobs. At level 80, this would be THE spot. Before then, it's just tough going.

Stay outta Icecrown.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Northrend Grinding

I was initially going to be casual with leveling my Relic-equipped warlock. Take things slow and tour around nuking things.

Then I found out that I'm a demigod and nearly immortal compared to the squishyness of the other locks in greens and outland blues. I'm in Tier freakin 6 gear!! The rest is all Relic items. I'm using the Relic shoulders, Chest, Staff, and both trinkets. That puts me at a huge 126 Hit, 18% Crit, and 1026 Spell damage at level 70. Quite respectable. I was blowing up stuff in Nagrand. Multiple things and lifetapping / Haunting my way back to full health + full mana. Then moving onto the next pack of critters.

Northrend.... Not much has changed. Just the xp amount went up to 1200 per mob. Taking on 6 to 10 at a time means some really fast fast levelling. I decided to quest thru some of Borean Tundra and then grnid up some of the Howling Fijord. I did get myself Northrend Flying at Level 71. That Account Bound book of Cold Weather Flying rocks. Sure I have 1000g to spend on flying. Can I skip waiting for level 77? Hells Yea!!

Anyway. Got to 72 Tuesday after skinning + quest grinding. Then made 73 yesterday after more of the same. Vendoring all of the plate quest rewards that I'm getting. Gear is still superior to Northrend greens. Probably change out my outfit by level 75. Quests are giving 24k to 30k. Mobs are giving 1200 to 2400 xp per kill. Still Affliction spec is working out Very nicely.

Why change a good thing? Not enough dps? I'm doing 1k dps to 8 mobs at once at level 72 and then skinning them for decent loot + enough shoveltusk meat to last me 10,000 years. I can't remember my wife's rogue doing that much at level 80 in 178 ilevel blues. I'll change out the relic gear once I get to 80 and replace with Lv 200 epics. Till then, the relic gear is a great investment. TTFN.