With the release of Patch 2.4.3 today, construction has commenced at the docks in Stormwind. It's located between Cathedral Square and The Park, at the end of the canals. If you talk to the workers in the area, they'll tell you that they are preparing to bust out the wall to create a new entrance to the city. There's lots of life bustling around the construction site, and here's your first tour.
One of the stated goals of making daily quests so vast and varied in WoW is to help out those people who would rather quest for money than grind primals all day and night. A good goal, and definitely one that I support. Questing is usually a lot more entertaining than grinding out piles of motes.
However, to me it doesn't seem like dailies have replaced grinding as a way of making money. It works fine as an alternative, but it doesn't quite stand up to other ways of generating gold. Dailies make it easier to get money, but it doesn't seem to me like it's the best source of income, contrary to what most people say about daily quests. Dailies allow you to make one hundred gold in an hour, but farming the right primals can get you quite a bit more. Even Fishing in the right places, as Eliah pointed out to me, can double or triple what you could make in that time through daily quests. Let's not forget that the gold generated by daily quests has inflated the market on some items required in crafting, making it even more profitable to grind out the raw materials.
What are your thoughts on daily quests as a replacement for old fashioned farming and grinding? As an alternative? Have they done their job well as another option for generating gold, or have they just thrown the market off? Is it possible for anything to actually usurp grinding raw materials as the number one money maker?
I have these questions about some of the random things I find in World of Warcraft. One the one hand, I'm intensely curious as to the answer to these questions. On the other hand, I'm really not sure I want to know.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of playing the game sometimes is imagining what it is that is really going on behind the scenes. With an imagination like mine, this can sometimes lead to really interesting ideas as to just how things work.
My wife sold another Captured Firefly at the Auction House just a few minutes ago for 800 Gold. When I mentioned this in our virtual WoW Insider foxhole, Daniel remarked that he didn't have the patience to farm it. I don't have the patience to farm those things, either, but my wife surprised me by telling me that she doesn't farm for it. Instead, she makes it a point to kill all the Bogflare Needlers in Zangarmarsh on the way to her daily quests in Blade's Edge Mountains. She'll often end up with a bunch of Fractured Carapaces and Twitching Legs, but when she lucks out and gets the awesome pet, it's guaranteed Gold.
I guess it's just a smart thing to do that I never really thought about. Killing those Needlers won't take most 70s too long and Zangarmarsh is along the way to Blade's Edge, anyway. Making a short stopover to take a chance on the Firefly is a prudent move as far as making money is concerned. It doesn't take too much time and the gray item drops are worth a decent amount when sold to vendors. Making money is easy if you make short stops along the way, such as fishing the pools of Pure Water on the way to wherever you're going for guaranteed Motes of Water. Engineers can do the same thing by extracting Motes of Air from the gas clouds in Nagrand while doing The Multiphase Survey in Osh'gun. Sure, they'll probably need to keep swapping goggles, but it doesn't hurt and gives players more loose change.
I'd like to thank Ceylene for summoning fellow guildies to our fishfest at Stillwhisper Pond. It's a long run to Blood Elf territory for our young Tauren friends to make.
Though we did have fun raising our Fishing skills together, we have more exciting things planned for the future. We will definitely be getting together for Children's Week and maybe even something before. Look for events to be scheduled monthly or more often.
While this is a casual, event oriented guild, we do have some members who are leveling up. Many of the members can invite to the guild, so if you are interested in joining us on Zangarmarsh, ask an online guild member for an invite. I am often on as well and am happy to have any readers join us. Look for me as Robiness or Robinelle or Robinara or Robinella or Robinique. Yes, my altitis has altitis.
So here I am at level 70, back in the land where your mom is that easy and Chuck Norris is that cool: The Barrens. I'm not here to save the Crossroads from ganking Allies and I'm not here to run noobs through Wailing Caverns (so stop asking). I'm here to fish.
Fishing is the one secondary skill I didn't work on because, well, it's boring. But now that you can make tons of cash with the new Fishing Dailies, I'm leveling up fish-catching skills. The problem is that once you get to 225, and finish that annoying quest with Nat Pagle, fishing gets even more boring than it was before. No matter where you fish, each skillup is farther apart and you have to hang out in places that are far below your level if you don't want to miss a lot.
The first thing I did was search WoW Insider, because that usually does the trick and I found a great guide to Fishing and Cooking, but the advice for leveling to 300 says "may god have mercy on your soul because Blizzard won't." Not a good sign. I also found a link to El's Extreme Anglin' which is a fantastic fishing site, but I couldn't find any advice for making the trip from 225 any less painful. So I asked The Spousal Unit who has won the Fishing Extravaganza more than once and after some experimentation on my own, I'm well on my way past 265 and making a lot of cash at the same time.
Each week or so, Robin Torres writes WoW, Casually for the player who has 2 hours or less to play at a time.
Let the raiders have fun with their world firsts, Blizzard also kept those of us with limited playtime in mind when designing the Sunwell activities. If you are level 70 and haven't gone over to the Isle of Quel'Danas, get thee to a Flightmaster in Ironforge or Silvermoon and get in on the fun.
You may think with all the hubbub about the new bosses like Brutallus that the new Sunwell zone is raider-only territory, but you would be wrong. The daily quests there are fun and easily doable solo. You earn a lot of money, a lot of rep with people who will give you cool stuff, and you help your server progress through the new content. There has never been a better time to be level 70 and casual.
I'm not sure if anyone else noticed, but all of a sudden, fishing seems to have become an extremely profitable profession. With the introduction the daily fishing quests in Patch 2.4, those with a bit of luck have found themselves getting a hefty profit from the Bag of Fishing Treasures that the quests give out as a reward. Any angler worth her salt knows that fishing can be profitable through selling fish cooked or raw through the Auction House, or even as junk through the vendor. Before the introduction of the goodies that come inside the Bag of Fishing Treasures, the Goldenscale Vendorfish was probably the most expensive gray item in the game, selling for 6 Gold to vendors. Anglers who are also cooks could profit nicely from raid buff foods such as Golden Fish Sticks or Skullfish Soup, or simply sell the raw ingredients. Even low-level fish sell rather well to those who would like to level their cooking.
My wife just got an Eye of the Sea from her fishing daily quest reward. Yesterday, she got the Weather-beaten Fishing Hat and last week, on the second day of Patch 2.4, she picked up The 2 Ring. She fished Mr. Pinchy mere hours after she had the skill to fish in the pools around Skettis, while we'd met anglers who had been after him for weeks. She also gets at least one Badge of Justice a day from Shattered Sun Supplies. I, on the other hand, have gotten only one on either of my two 70s despite doing all the daily quests since the patch went live. Whenever we do drop quests, she always finishes before I do even when I start killing before she does. I guess you could say the RNG, or Random Number Generator, has taken a liking to her.
The RNG hates me. I ran Heroic Slave Pens and Steam Vaults enough times to get to Exalted with Cenarion Expedition but never saw the Pauldrons of Wild Magic or Wave-Fury Vambraces drop for my Shaman, who was Elemental at the time. I guess this is also why I just PvP, because I have the kind of luck that Danasked about in an another Breakfast Topic. Here's the flip question -- do you know anyone with insane luck? Someone who gets a quest drop on the first kill, perhaps, or even the luck of finding really cheap stuff on the AH? I've mispriced wares on the AH as Silver instead of Gold (alright, that's more stupidity than bad luck, but hey...) while other people find those exact misplaced wares. So, who's lucky around here?
I can't say that I've ever seriously tried to do the Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza -- I've seen it happen a few times, and I love the idea, but I've never committed to fishing long enough to be competitive in it. But I'm reconsidering that after reading these extremely fun tips from Resto4Life. Some of them are Druid specific (I bet the Shaman waterwalking spell would come in handy when trying to cross over to islands and through streams), and some of them are just silly, but it's just the right kind of thing to get you in the mindset to do a little Sunday angling. The two sources Resto pulled from have more: Tree of Life has a few helpful tips, while The Game Dame goes in-depth in laying out exactly how to win the event.
And it's a good thing we've got these, too -- as of patch 2.4, as the anglers among you have already heard, there'll be a few new fishing daily quests, and some brand new rewards (the fishing hat is now blue) from both the quests and the Extravaganza.
I still don't know if I have the interest to sit there, rod in hand, waiting for a fish to bite, but there's no doubt that this is a fun little, often missed part of the game. Very nice to have something fun like this going on weekly on the servers.
Each week, Robin Torres writes WoW, Casually for the player who has 2 hours or less to play at a time. Well, it used to be weekly and it will be again, starting today.
When last I wrote, which was ages ago, I promised to answer some reader mail about getting groups quickly. And then I vanished for a bit. I'm sorry about the interruption in this column and I will get to the reader mail, but not this week. With the new patch getting closer to release, I think I need to talk about some of the changes that will affect those of us with limited playtime.
First of all, our coverage of Patch 2.4 is very extensive and perhaps a bit overwhelming. I do recommend, however, spending some free time that you have access to WoW Insider catching up with the changes for your class, professions and playstyle. You don't want to spend your precious WoW session discovering unexpected changes after the new patch comes out.
I love my wife. I don't think I can say it enough. I was able to convince her to play World of Warcraft with me when the game first came out and luckily for me, she got hooked. We've been playing partners ever since, from her getting lost in the Orc and Troll starting area to exploring Sunstrider Isle together for the first time. Sometimes, she humors me by playing a few Battlegrounds with me or even helps me complete my Arena games when my teammates -- who have more or less quit the game -- fail to log on for the week. Sure, I have to twist her arm to do it, but she enjoys ribbing me after matches: "I thought you were good? How come I beat your DPS and got all the Killing Blows?" Sometimes, I help her farm or watch her back while she fishes up another Mr. Pinchy. Even when we're not together -- like when she immerses herself at the Auction House while I PvP -- we chat in-game and IRL. I can't be thankful enough for actually being married to my favorite playing partner since others just aren't as lucky. Some of our bloggers, like Lisa Poisso, plays with her entire family! Just how cool is it to play with your better half and two kids? Amanda Dean has spent the last week showing her mom around Azeroth.
How about you? Do you have a favorite playing partner? Whether it's your significant other, a roommate, a brother or cousin, or maybe even someone you met in-game, is there someone you enjoy playing the game with more than other people? Maybe there is one person you spend more time with than anyone else in Azeroth (or the Outlands, as the case may be). Why? What makes the experience unique or special? The coolest thing about an MMO is that you play with other people. And sometimes, there are just some people we like playing with more than others.
This is an interesting idea, though I'm not quite sure it will work: An enterprising guild (that Kimberly from LJ is in) has put together a site called WoWDailies.com, which is basically a list of what daily quests are available on which realms for any given day. As an idea, it's a good one -- pull up the site, and you can see what daily quests are available (BG, fishing, cooking, and instances) on your realm that day.
In practice, however, it's easier said than done. The site relies not on info from Blizzard's servers, but from visitors to the site -- just click a realm name and you can input what quests are available. But anyone can do that, and there's no accounting for whether the quests are real or not (I accidentally entered some probably false information). I think the quests do reset every day, so at least if someone enters the wrong quest it only stays up for less than 24 hours, but still, you have to trust that what's up there is right.
In fact, I'm surprised Blizzard hasn't created something like this to check every day -- they've got a calendar of BG weekends, so it's natural that they'd somehow let us check what quests were available out of game, and maybe even be able to plan instance runs ahead of time. At any rate, until then, WoWDailies will have to do. If you're lucky enough to have someone updating your realm correctly and on time, it should be a good resource.
The ring features +22 to the primary five stats, making it (wait... let me make sure my math is right here...) 22 times better than The 1 Ring.
I'm not sure of it's use initially. It's a well rounded stats ring, so perhaps a druid or other hybrid class might be interested in it if they find themselves changing roles often enough. However for a single role / gear set, there are a plethora of better choices easily obtainable.
Of course, with that said, it makes a helluva nice ring to start off at 70 with.
One of the first things I checked out on the PTR was the new fishing daily quests. Call me a glutton for punishment, but I actually enjoy fishing in WoW and have been increasingly interested in this quest ever since it came to my attention via the official forums. Now that the 2.4 test realm has been up for a few days, I've been able to do three of the new, randomly rotating quests which start from Old Man Barlo just outside of Shattrath City.
The first quest I discovered, and the one that I've seen the most so far, is called "Shrimpin' Ain't Easy". It requires you to fly to Zangarmarsh and fish up a few Bloated Barbed Gill Trout. You can catch these by fishing in any of the lakes in the zone. Once you reel one in, you can open it like any other package in the game to collect a few shrimp and gray items. One fish can hold multiple shrimp and this quest can be completed pretty quickly, assuming that you don't encounter any bugs. Currently, I often encounter a bug where I'm unable to catch any fish (aside from the special fishing pools, which don't yield the quest fish) in Zangarmarsh while on this quest. Abandoning and retaking it has fixed the problem every time so far.
One of the stated goals of making daily quests so vast and varied in WoW is to help out those people who would rather quest for money than grind primals all day and night. A good goal, and definitely one that I support. Questing is usually a lot more entertaining than grinding out piles of motes.
My wife just got an Eye of the Sea from her fishing daily quest reward. Yesterday, she got the Weather-beaten Fishing Hat and last week, on the second day of Patch 2.4, she picked up The 2 Ring. She fished Mr. Pinchy mere hours after she had the skill to fish in the pools around Skettis, while we'd met anglers who had been after him for weeks. She also gets at least one Badge of Justice a day from Shattered Sun Supplies. I, on the other hand, have gotten only one on either of my two 70s despite doing all the daily quests since the patch went live. Whenever we do drop quests, she always finishes before I do even when I start killing before she does. I guess you could say the RNG, or Random Number Generator, has taken a liking to her.
I can't say that I've ever seriously tried to do the Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza -- I've seen it happen a few times, and I love the idea, but I've never committed to fishing long enough to be competitive in it. But I'm reconsidering that after reading these extremely fun tips from Resto4Life. Some of them are Druid specific (I bet the Shaman waterwalking spell would come in handy when trying to cross over to islands and through streams), and some of them are just silly, but it's just the right kind of thing to get you in the mindset to do a little Sunday angling. The two sources Resto pulled from have more: Tree of Life has a few helpful tips, while The Game Dame goes in-depth in laying out exactly how to win the event.
This is an interesting idea, though I'm not quite sure it will work: An enterprising guild (that Kimberly from LJ is in) has put together a site called WoWDailies.com, which is basically a list of what daily quests are available on which realms for any given day. As an idea, it's a good one -- pull up the site, and you can see what daily quests are available (BG, fishing, cooking, and instances) on your realm that day.
Two Ring to rule them all, .jpg)
One of the first things I checked out on the PTR was the new fishing daily quests. Call me a glutton for punishment, but I actually enjoy fishing in WoW and have been increasingly interested in this quest ever since it came to my attention via the official forums. Now that the 2.4 test realm has been up for a few days, I've been able to do three of the new, randomly rotating quests which start from Old Man Barlo just outside of Shattrath City.
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