Don’t call it a comeback, I didn't go anywhere.... :)

5/29/09

I’ve been concentrating on leveling toons lately. On Demon Soul, Bloodshrike is now 62, Bullkathos is 52, Thrillkiller just got to 50 last night, and I buckled down and ground out levels with Kukoshakaku, so he went from 28-35. I had to, he has about 400 clefthoof leather that I’ve been keeping in the mail system forever, and I want to just keep it in the bank once I learn all the recipes in there. Plus, since I got Tsuris on Daggerspine to level his LW to 300, I found some nice, actually useful leather items that I wanted to make for my rogues/hunters/shamans/druids when they got to those levels.

Helm of Fire is an awesome leather helm, and the mail Dragonscale chest is pretty sweet for hunters and shamans. The Stormshroud pants aren’t that great though, only giving slightly more crit than the level 37 pants Thrill had, and a lot less Agi and Stamina. I’ll see if it’s worth making the whole set for Thrill. They’re basically a dodge/crit set, and designed for rogues or feral druids, since one of the set bonuses is for regaining energy.

Speaking of Thrillkiller, he went on a rampage this last weekend. I was tired of having old quests clutter up my quest log, and I realized that since I had been so anal about completing every quest I came across, Thrill was already half-way or better on most of his reputation levels with the capitol cities. I figured I might as well get more rep by knocking out the dungeon achievements and quests. So, during the Memorial Day weekend, I had Thrill solo Wailing Caverns, Blackfathom Deeps, Razorfen Kraul, and Razorfen Downs. Downs was the hardest, since Ammenar the Coldbringer had his summons swarm me, and I had already used up a Fel Iron bomb on him, and had just used my Harm Prevention Belt on Glutton. I think I was still 48 when I took down Glutton, but he hits pretty hard.

This Dungeon clearing kick got started by Thrillkiller being in Booty Bay, and deciding to do Gnomer. I had already snuck down in there before to get the Discombobulator ray schematic from the Punchograph-D machine, but I didn’t kill Thermaplugg. Since the last patch changed how the engineering Lil Smoky and Pet Bombling recipes drop in that you can now get both of them from Gnomer, and you can’t get them from renewing your membership, I figured it would be a good time to pop in there, get both recipes and kill Thermaplugg, and be on my way. No such luck. Thermaplugg is supposed to have a 100% drop on the Pet Bombling recipe, which may be, since I only killed him once and he did drop it. But Warcraftpets.com lists the drop rate of the Lil Smoky recipe from the Arcane Nullifier, Crowd Pummeler, and Peacekeeper mechs at 20%. Thottbot lists it at around 2%, which is how it was for me. I probably did 6 runs on that blasted instance, killing 1 Crowd Pummeler, 4 Peacekeepers, and 10-15 Arcane Nullifiers each run. I think it was the last Arcane Nullifier in the area on the 6th run that finally dropped it, and it was a good thing, because I was ready to just forget about it. Luckily, Bullkathos already has the Lil Smoky recipe, so when he goes into the instance, he’ll just use seaforium charges to blow the back door, come in thru the Engineering Labs, get the Discombobulator recipe in the Engineering Labs, then go kill Thermaplugg and get the Pet Bombling recipe.

I also worked on Bloodshrike (Darrowmere), my Blood Elf hunter. She knocked out Ragefire Chasm (very good Thunderbluff rep on those quests), and Wailing Caverns (decent TB rep). I was surprised that the Leaders of the Fang quest gave no rep at all, even though you usually get rep when you have a quest to kill a boss in an instance. But, the Glowing Gem quest that drops from Mutanus does give a good bit of TB rep.
I’m mentioning TB rep because I want Bloodshrike to have a Kodo, and not the Hawkstrider that Blood Elves get. Granted, the Hawkstriders are a lot better looking than the elephants that Draenai get, so I guess I should be grateful.

While Bloodshrike was finishing up quests, I took her to Ashenvale to do the Test of Lore section of the whole quest chain that starts in 1K needles. It ends up with quests to go into Scarlet Monastery, so I want to do it with SOMEONE who can actually benefit from the quest rewards that drop. While I was there, I noticed I hadn’t killed Shadumbra, so on my way back from dropping off the book in Stonetalon, I swung by the Laughing Sisters and took Shadumbra’s head. Since I was there, I figured I’d go up to Feralas and pick up the neutral flight point there, for when I could come back to it at 45 or so. So, I ride up there, and I noticed a Human Rogue that was a skull to me. He had about 2500 hp, and I had 1900 at level 39, so he was probably 10 levels above me. I’ve gotten used to higher level players not attacking me, and I figured he’d do likewise. I figured wrong. I’m heading toward the flightpoint, when all of a sudden I got sapped. I stand there, swaying dazedly, while he calmly proceeds use my back as a pincushion. I got a bit annoyed at that, so I charged back from the graveyard, found him starting to use his hearthstone, so I rezzed and immediately started attacking. He hadn’t killed Arikara, so I was able to summon him instantly, then I popped my Mithril Mechanical Dragonling trinket and my Gnomish Harm Prevention belt. The Mithril dragonling (unlike the others) has a limit on how much it can scale up with your engineering. It can only get up to level 50, whereas the Mechanical Dragonling and the Arcanite Dragonling scale up based on how high your engineering level is. So, my level 62 Bloodshrike has an Arcanite Dragonling guardian that’s probably level 75 or 80.
But I digress. Between Arikara, my dragonling, and me riddling him with holes, the rogue got kilt. He tried to do the smoke bomb escape, but since I always start out with a Hunter’s Mark/petatttack macro, I was still able to see him, and of course my dragonling could too. I bet that sucked for him, thinking he was big and bad by taking down someone gray to him, then that player coming back and just annihilating him in retaliation. In hindsight, I should have stuck around and killed him a few more times, just to drive home the fact that it’s not cool to pick on lower levels.

After that, I decided to take Bloodshrike to Badlands, since that’s a 40-45 area, and it would be a good place for her to work on her skinning. Plus, I’ve had the items for all the turn-in quests in that zone for far too long, and I need to start clearing out her bank.
I’m so relieved to finally be able to level Kukoshakaku in Leatherworking. Not only that, but due to my pack rat mentality, I’m able to make multiples of items that will actually sell well on the AH, instead of having to sell them for less than the cost of the mats. I was looking ahead at what the mats are for the Stormshroud set that I’ll make for Thrillkiller, and I noticed it took a bunch of Ironweb Spider Silk and Essence of Air……..hmmmm, Clockwrknyt just so happens to have a hundred or so Essence of Air in her bank, and probably about 50 Ironweb Spider Silk. I just went from 275 to 285 last night, and was able to learn about 10 new recipes. I did notice that the Stormshroud chest recipe wasn’t among them, and apparently it drops off a specific mob type in Azshara. Looks like Pallor needs to make another trip up there.