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How to get to level 70 without losing your marbles
In World of Warcraft, getting the thousands upon thousands of rotting bear carcasses and boar meat required to get from one to seventy was enough once. Doing it twice makes most of us want to slam our heads into a keyboard repeatedly. Perhaps it is time to log off? No, you must not log off. Quitters never win and winners never quit. Get that soda, get those chips, and put that headset on! Over at Eurogamer, there was someone who felt the pain and found a way to get the job done. A few useful tips and tricks were jotted down for you to make your leveling experience more enjoyable. Tired of killing gnolls? Go for a swim in the river and laugh at murloc screams. Need to run from Loch Modan to the Wetlands? Run over to the dam and jump off to get there. Can't keep track of all those quests? Tips for that too! For your mental sanity, if nothing else, navigate yourself on over there, park your toon in the inn, and read up. You will thank yourself for doing it.
Phase 1 Dailies: The Multiphase Survey
Finally, we reach the end of our grand tour of the phase 1 Shattered Sun-related daily quests. "The Multiphase Survey" is assigned by a doubtful Draenei named Harbinger Harnomen who can be found somewhat clockwise of the flight master in Shattrath, and it goes like this: Go to the Spirit Fields in Nagrand, which are near that giant crystal Oshu'gun. Put on the provided Multiphase Spectrographic Goggles. Fly/ride around and look for Multiphase Disturbances (pictured), which are only visible when wearing the goggles. When you find one, get near it and right-click your goggles. The disturbance will disappear. Six of these "readings" and you're done; flutter on back to Shattrath for 4g 10g, 250 Shattered Sun rep, and another Shattered Sun Supplies (c'mon, Badge!). Seven daily quests later, what's our total take? 78 gold, 1550 Shattered Sun Offensive reputation, a Major Rejuvenation Potion, and two Shattered Sun Supplies. Not bad for the work of an hour or so.
Phase 1 Dailies: Sunfury Attack Plans
Here is another Shattered Sun daily that originates in Shattrath, from Lord Torvos who stands just north of the flight master (right by where you picked up "Gaining the Advantage"). The premise of "Sunfury Attack Plans" is that we know that the Sunfury elves up in Netherstorm have some attack plans, and we want them. We want one of them per character, every day. So get yourself to Netherstorm, find some Sunfury elves (any Sunfury elves), and kill them until one of them drops the attack plans. I usually go for the mobs near Manaforge B'naar simply for convenience.Like many single-drop quests, this can be maddeningly inconsistent. Today I got the plans on my first kill, and a guildy of mine claims to have killed over 100 before finally receiving the item. We'll have to wait until a bit of data for the database sites has been collected before we can find out what the drop rate is, although if I had to guess I'd put it around 10%. For your troubles you are rewarded with 4g 10g, 250 Shattered Sun Ofensive rep, and a Shattered Sun Supplies, which contains a random green item and has a chance to contain a Badge of Justice as well.
Phase 1 Dailies: Gaining the Advantage
You've dealt with automata and the Wretched on the Isle of Quel'Danas. You've slain demons and blown up the transporter at the Throne of Kil'Jaeden. Are there more Shattered Sun-related dailies left to do? You bet! There are three quests that are assigned in Shattrath, and here's one of them: Gaining the Advantage. Posts on the other two are coming shortly.Allegedly, some people in Stormwind can make oils that will help in the fight against the Legion, and they need Nether Residue to do it. This quest is assigned by Emisarry Mordin who paths near the flight master.For this quest, all you need to do is be a skinner, herbalist and/or miner, and go out and do some gathering. Any Outlands herb (not Golden Sansam or Dreamfoil), ore node, or (I assume) skinnable mob has a chance to drop Nether Residue, of which you need eight for the quest. The drop rate on herbs felt like around 30%, possibly higher on higher-level herbs. So it's a fairly easy quest to do, and as a bonus, you get some herbs/ore/leather. Go on back to Shattrath to turn it in, and be rewarded with 16g, 250 Shattered Sun rep, and two one Major Rejuvenation Potion.
Phase 1 Dailies: Blast the Gateway
This is the companion quest to "Blood for Blood," and is given by Magistrix Seyla up at the Throne of Kil'Jaeden ("The Missing Magistrix" is a prerequisite). In "Blast the Gateway" you take on a mission to help shut down the Legion Gateway, by means of an interesting quest mechanic. Right-click the supplied Sizzling Embers to release a pet Living Flare, which follows you around. Contrary to what WoWWiki says, I find that it will not despawn if you use your flying mount, as long as you don't get too far away from it (so be careful on your epic mounts). Find and kill the Incandescent Fel Sparks, which are fire elementals that wander the Throne area. They have a fireball, but like most of the mobs involved in the dailies, they're not hard to kill. Every a Fel Spark is killed with your Living Flare nearby, the Flare energizes. Note that you don't actually have to kill the Spark yourself; if you see some other people killing one, go help, and any flares in the vicinity will get energized. Once your Flare accumulates enough energy (it takes about five eight kills), it will become "unstable" and turn green. Take it over to the Legion Gateway, near Magistrix Seyla, and it'll release its fiery power. Done! Talk to the Magistrix for 12g and 250 Shattered Sun rep. I did have my Flare despawn on me once, but I think I flew up very high or something. I've definitely had it follow me on my flying mount just fine. But you should be careful, because if it does despawn you have to start the quest over.
Phase 1 Dailies: Blood for Blood
Now that you've completed "The Missing Magistrix" and teleported to the Throne of Kil'Jaeden in Hellfire Peninsula (or flown there if you've already done the teleport before, but completion of "The Missing Magistrix" is required for this quest), you're ready to do Blood for Blood and its companion quest, Blast the Gateway (next post). Magistrix Seyla at the Throne assigns both quests. Blood for Blood goes like this: Kill Doom Heralds, those big swordy demon things you see stomping around, and loot their blood. You need four, and it seems to be a 100% drop. The blood powers the Felblood Siphon that you'll use in the next step. Find Felblood Initiates (pictured) casting wavy green things at the structures on the ground and cower at their eliteness. Now use the Felblood Siphon on them, and, just like the giants from Ferelas, they will weaken into non-elite pushover Emaciated Felbloods. Kill. Do this four times, and you're ready to return to the Magistrix for 12g and 250 Shattered Sun rep. This was a fun quest, although last night it was absolutely impossible to find any Felbloods because of all the players competing for them. Much easier today though; they might have upped the spawn rate (edit: they did). The Felbloods stun briefly when you use the Siphon on them, which gives you a chance to get some distance and/or cast a spell. Next up is Blast the Gateway, which is a good quest to do at the same time as this one. I wonder where Kazzak is hanging out, though -- has he always been killed when I've been up there, or did they move him?
Phase 1: The Missing Magistrix
This isn't actually a Sunwell daily quest -- it's a one-time thing -- but it is done on the Isle of Quel'Danas, and it does open up more dailies (keep an eye out for posts on "Blood for Blood" and "Blast the Gateway"). "The Missing Magistrix" is picked up from the Shattered Sun Staging Area, and asks you to go look after an operative gone AWOL by means of a portal and a scroll. You do need a flying mount to get this quest, since if you didn't have one you won't be able to get back from where you're sent without burning your Hearthstone.Finding this portal seems to be very difficult for people, so I'll provide as much information as possible. The coordinates are 48,44 It's south and very slightly east from the Staging Area It's subtly indicated on the map in the screenshot It is a wall of green glow similar to the Dark Portal into the Outlands Once you get to the portal, right-click the Captured Legion Scroll in your inventory to be teleported to the Throne of Kil'Jaeden, where Kazzak usually hangs out. Don't do this if you're not read to go to Outland, since there's no reverse teleport (at least, not yet). The portal is guarded by some non-elite demons, but you can avoid fighting most of them by going around behind. Once you do port through, you'll appear at Magistrix Seyla's feet, ready to turn in the quest and get to demon-slaying. Easiest 9g ever.
Phase 1 Dailies: Erratic Behavior
Continuing our examination of the phase one daily quests in patch 2.4, here is "Erratic Behavior." It is easily done at the same time as the other Isle of Quel'Danas daily, The Sanctum Wards. It's gotten from the Shattered Sun Staging Area, and asks you to convert five Erratic Sentries into friendly ones by means of the magical crystals they give you.The Erratic Sentries are found in the same place as the mobs for The Sanctum Wards: an arc starting at the Staging Area and proceeding broadly southwards along the western shoreline. They're non-agressive (yellow) mechanicals (pictured), and although they're level 70, it's still uncommonly easy to kill them. Sometimes they can be found reduced in health bandaging themselves up, and in general they move a bit oddly -- I guess that explains the "erratic" part.After you kill and loot, target the corpse and right-click the Attuned Crystal Cores in your inventory; the Sentry will turn into a friendly one and stagger around briefly before disappearing. Note that you can't convert corpses that you haven't killed yourself. Convert five corpses, and you're done. Return to the staging grounds for 9g, 150 Shattered Sun rep, and warm fuzzing feelings for helping get to Phase Two. This quest is still available in Phase Two, but renamed to "Further Conversions."
Phase 1 Dailies: The Sanctum Wards
Welcome to the first post of a new series on the daily quests available in Patch 2.4. I'll be going through all the quests that are available in phase 1, one by one. This is one of the two daily quests on the new Isle of Quel'Danas, and it's called "The Sanctum Wards." It goes well with Erratic Behavior, which I'll cover in the next post.The quest itself is pretty simple, and goes in two parts. Hunt down Wretched Devourers and Wretched Fiends, and slaughter them for their Mana Remnants. You'll need four Remanants, and the drop rate felt like it was around 50%. The mobs are only level 68, and don't pose much of a problem; they do a puny drain life/mana and a very short silence. They can be found starting in the Shattered Sun Staging Area and spreading in an arc down near the western shoreline. Once you have your four Mana Remnants, come back up near the Staging Area to a Crystal Ward (pictured, at 49,35) and right-click the stack of Mana Remnants in your inventory. There's some nice pretty zapping effects, and you're done with your quest. 9g and 150 Shattered Sun rep await you. You have now completed one of the two quests that will progress your server towards Phase Two, so thanks for doing your part! This quest is still available in Phase Two, but renamed to "Arm the Wards."
Forum post of the day: Really bad quests
Most of us have at least a couple of alt projects that we're working on. Once you've leveled to seventy you get a feeling for which quests are a breeze and which ones are painful. Arross of Thorium brotherhood started a thread entitled Really bad quests where players listed their least favorite quests. Some honorable mentions include: Arross of Thorium. "I have to say so far the worst quest I have ever had was Super Sticky in Un'goro Crater. The drop rate isn't bad, it's horrible." Shrosarias of Burning Blade, "Any quests having to do with murloc. Murlocs = evil." Ashcroft of Smolderthorn, "Zeth'Gor Must Burn! had me tearing my hair out by the roots. It was so very demoralizing to go from BG-topper to single-quest-dyer in one fell swoop." Arteree of Rivendare, "Almost every quest in Westfall." Etamalgren, "imo, any escort quests are the worst quests overall, except for the skettis daily and the nagrand escort."
Darkmoon Faire Decks: An overview
As I've mentioned before, The Darkmoon Faire is currently in Terrokar Forest, just outside Shattrath City, so if you have decks to turn in or need to refill your private stock of Darkmoon Special Reserve, now's the time to get on it. But if you're still a little bit taken aback by the prospect of gathering all those cards, or wondering if the trinket at the end will really be worth it, we'd like to help you out. In this post, we'll be looking at both the old and new decks and listing some pros and cons of each deck so you can figure out if you want to spend the next month tracking down cards before the Faire shows up in Elwynn Forest in March, or even if you just want to blow your epic flying mount fund on getting a deck before it leaves for the month. We'll start in on everything after the jump.
Drysc weighs in on questing
Player Tychlona of Kul Tiras made a fair point in a forum post when she noted that it sometimes gets a little annoying doing "collection" quests where it seems to take hours to collect what you need, Be it Gray Bear Tongues or Helboar Meat. I'd say that most of us can likely feel her pain on that measure. Drysc answered her later in the thread with some of his own insight into the process of questing and dealing with various types of quests. His point that sometimes seeing that "5/30 Windroc" notice in your quest log can make a quest feel like a bit of grind is very understandable, but I have to counter that seeing that "8/10 Monstrous Crawler Leg" in your quest log and knowing you've already killed 30 mobs without those last 2 legs appearing can feel just as grinding. He says a few more interesting things that may shine some light on Blizzard's questing philosophy, which I'll discuss after the jump.
The Daily Grind: What is your quest?
One of the things that we can't seem to get away from no matter what MMO we're playing is the presence of Monty Python quotes. A particularly funny exchange combined with the daily news surfing brought the concept of open-source GPL MMOs (like PlaneShift) to mind. These worlds essentially allow talented folk to join the team and make up their own quests using the world that is already established. For today we thought we'd ask -- if you had the knowledge and time, what kind of a quest would you make? Now let's take it a step further and ask about the worlds you play in; if you could write a quest for any MMO, either currently available or in beta, what game would you write it for, and what kind of quest would it be? Would you make up one of the "go collect x items" quests, or would you write in more history, instead sending players all over the place? Would it be really easy, or really hard? Would it be a holiday event or daily quest? Would it involve killer rabbits?
Player posts an abundance of AoC videos from Norway press event
A lucky player by the name of Avery, from Age of Conan guild The Acolytes, won a trip to attend Funcom's press event in Norway and has uploaded a huge amount of footage. There are videos on questing, raiding, mounts, music and more from AoC. Heck, there's even a video of the real-life mounted fighting that was performed for the event attendees in the parking lot outside. A few of these videos are embedded after the break, and this post at The Acolytes forums has a list of all of them, and includes a write-up of Avery's opinion on the crafting system at the current time. Keep in mind these videos are on Stage6 and require a Divx plugin.[Thanks, Griz]
The Daily Grind: Do the little things bother you?
There's a fun little rant over at videogamer.com about a couple of the odd annoyances that questers experience in World of Warcraft, like the infrequency of loot drops and the relatively slow traveling speed sans mounts. A favorite line: 'Did I just kill a mutated Raptor whose brain was held in with just the skin on its head?' As a Tauren Druid, I know exactly the quest he's talking about, and yeah, it's something I wondered about myself, briefly.But these things differ from game to game, and no game ever gets everything completely right. These little quirks are things that the quester must simply grin and bear, trusting in the larger picture to make more sense as an objective. Or is it that cut-and-dried? Have you ever quit playing a game because of too many of these weird little quests? Does there need to be more reason in what you do? Do you even bother to look at the mission description?
WoW Rookie: Quest wrangling 101
It's no coincidence (just in case you thought it was) that when you first log into the game, the first thing you see is an NPC in front of you with a golden exclamation point above their head. Quests are a fundamental part of this game, not just in terms of lore and story, but also in character advancement (and earning all of that gold and XP that you're going to be doing). A good part of the game (in fact, the major part of the game up to level 70) is just handling all the quests and tasks you've got to do. From FedEx to kill quests, and from huge multi-part quest chains to simple fetch quests, handling all of those tasks is extremely important from the moment you enter the world of Azeroth.So today on WoW Rookie, we're going to give you a few tips on how to handle this most important of missions: figuring out where, who, and what's up with all the missions you get in the game. Keeping track of what you're supposed to do is sometimes just as important as doing it, and so after the jump, we've compiled a few tips for getting your Azerothian to-dos done.
The Daily Grind: Getting ground under
One of what seems to be the universal complaints about many MMOs is the inherent grind involved in them. From the earliest days, we grind levels, reputation, trade-skills and/or professions. In end-game, you grind more factions, raid bosses for certain loot or quest completion, and potentially even more experience to gain additional talents or to unlock alternate abilities. This grind has been there since the earliest days. But the question is this: Is grinding really an absolute requirement in MMOs, or have we simply come to expect a certain inherent level of grind as an inevitability? Is there some new mechanic that hasn't been introduced yet that you think might be viable? Or perhaps there is some variant on quest styles beyond the "collect x number of y items" or "go kill x bad guy" that hasn't been properly explored?
Massively's Pirates of the Burning Sea crafting hands-on
Yarr matey! Lift the gunwhales, lay out the plank, and shine yer cutlasses, there be... crafting to do? Sure, crafting and trading might not be the traditional pasttimes of choice for the pirates of lore, but we here at Massively have been sailing the seven seas (well, actually, just one of them) in the Pirates of the Burning Sea beta, and I am fascinated with the crafting system. Flying Labs has mixed some old ideas in with some new innovations, and put together a crafting and trading system that just might rival the fun of more traditional piratical activities.For a short walkthrough on what they've put together (and a look at the economy tutorial quest), hit the link below.%Gallery-11209%
EQ2's producer responds to expansion grouping concerns
One of the greatest things about Massively Multiplayer Games is that the dialogue about them isn't a one-way street. With most games, fans wait for the word from on high, and discussion about single-player games tends towards fighting over scraps. With MMOGs, the considered commentary of players make for interesting reading in and of itself. That's the case we find ourselves in today, just a few days after the release of Sony Online Entertainment's Rise of Kunark expansion. Mostly the buzz seems to be positive, but a pair of bloggers have given voice to players feeling a bit put out by the pack's core leveling mechanic: questing. Yesterday Tipa (of the West Karana blog) and Kendricke (currently writing at the Clockwork Gamer site) took issue with the fact that group grinding isn't as profitable as it has been in previous expansions.Specifically they're raising this objection as it relates to the famed Karnor's Castle, a bastion of EverQuest Live lore and newly revised for SOE's new vision of Kunark. Tipa sums their issue up on her site: "Just doing quests and killing in a risk-free, outdoor zone, beats hunting in a semi-risky dungeon. How is that even possible. Dungeons are supposed to give you superior benefits for the trouble of grouping - better experience, better loot. Somehow that got lost ... When word of this gets around, KC will become a ghost town. People will do the Kylong Plains/Teren's Grasp quest lines, then move to the Fens and just skip Karnor's. SOE, it's not too early to consider tuning this zone. Grouping in KC should be more rewarding than questing outside."Scott Hartsman, the senior producer of EverQuest 2, took a few minutes today to answer their concerns for us. Read on to see further discussion from the player's POV and Mr. Hartsman's response.
Breakfast Topic: Repeat visits
Seeya from Dethecus has an interesting question for us to answer this Saturday morning: What's the total number of times you've visited the instance you've seen the most of?Most guilds raided Molten Core many, many times to gear up everyone that needed it, and back at 60, I spent many weekends plowing through the lava packs down there. I've also run Shadow Labs many, many times since BC dropped, and Steam Vaults and the Arcatraz have also seen me go through quite a few times. Nowadays, Karazhan is probably getting the most traffic, although the cooldown on it probably keeps people going through there as often as they'd like. And don't forget lowbie instances-- I've been through SM and Deadmines on every character at least a few times.But for me, the instance I've been through the most times overall is definitely UBRS. There were days, when I first hit 60, when we would run it twice a day. I've tanked it, healed it, and DPSed it. I've learned it, taught it, marked it, master looted it, done every quest in there and seen every drop. I've seen a hunter pull Drakk, a Mage pull Drakk, a Warrior tank them all, and even seen a Rogue do the pull. I can't count the number of times I've seen Eviscerate IX drop, and at one point, I could probably list off both all the pulls and Rend and Nef's dialogue to you-- without being near a computer. UBRS is my instance, and I'd put my runs through there at almost 100.So what's the instance you've run the most, and how many times have you been through?
