LFG Steamvault at level 80

3/10/2010

While perusing the list of blogs I read, I came across Mania's tweet about wishing there was LFD available for running lower level dungeons at 80, i.e. ZG. Seriously, why not? It's hard enough to drum together a group using the trade channel, and you already could group for these dungeons when you were a lower level, why not at a higher level?

I'm still grimly pursuing my Loremaster achievement, with only 20-30 quests left on both Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms. I've gotten most of the quest achievements in Outlands, and gotten Sholozar Basin, Icecrown, and Storm Peaks completed in Northrend.
I'll finish up with Borean Tundra, Dragonblight, Grizzly Hills, Howling Fjord, and Zul'drak after I've gotten Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms Loremaster finished.

Most of the quest achievements in Outlands, I said. However, Bloodshrike probably did 3 or 4 of the quests in Hellfire Peninsula before moving on to Zangarmarsh, because I stumbled on this little tidbit of info. Thrallmar - "If you do the bulk of the Thrallmar quests instead of quickly moving on to the next zone, you might expect to reach Honored after 1 or 2 levels of play. However, once you reach Honored, you hit an earnings barrier that you can only remove when you are level 68 and can start re-earning points in the Shattered Halls dungeon.....One option is to grind reputation via Ramparts and Blood Furnace runs to 5999/6000 before doing any Thrallmar quests outside the instances, as those continue to yield reputation up to Exalted."

At that point, I seriously never thought I'd see the inside of a dungeon unless I was soloing it. So, I just ignored the quests, and took myself to Zangarmarsh. Now, being the achievement hound that I've turned out to be, I wanna get exalted with Thrallmar. I'd also like to not have to solo those dungeons ad nauseum to do so. I just ran Hellfire Ramparts for the hell of it with my Ally mage Clockwrkmage, and had a blast with the group, Blizzarding everything in sight. Granted, at level 80 it wouldn't be difficult, it's just going to be boring, and even running it with a group of 60's would speed things up.

I'm not sure why the capability to join any dungeon isn't available. Apart from the possibility of Stockades being farmed by Horde for the easy availability of wool cloth, I don't think someone is going to constantly run Wailing Caverns for the greens that drop.

Also, going back to the title of the post, I'd like to go for the Guardian of Cenarius title, but again, I missed the boat on that one. While it's simplicity itself to turn in Twilight Texts until you ding exalted with Cenarion Circle, it's a bit harder with Cenarion Expedition.

I do have to say I like how Blizzard has refined dungeons and zones in Northrend. Dungeons are shorter, zones don't have a lot of quests that force you to go to a different zone, come back, go to a 3rd zone, come back, and finally the quest chain is completed. Everything is more linear. When you're on your first toon, you don't mind doing all these far-flung quests, as everything is new and exciting. On your 10th toon, you look at the quest, you evaluate on whether Blizzard actually provided enough mobs to complete it on the first pass, or whether the quest item has a ridiculously low drop rate, and then you might decide to not pick it up at all.

While I do want all my toons to be at least exalted with the home cities, I'm passing up a lot of quests nowadays, just because I don't want to do them. Like in Harold & Kumar go to White Castle, I've gone too far.
Kumar: I forgot my cell phone.
Harold: You wanna run back and get it?
[both turn and look at their front door 20 feet from them]
Kumar: No, we've gone too far.

As of 2/6/2010....

I just wanted to jot down what I have at this point in time, compared to my meager achievements of a few months ago. I think I had 1 or 2 titles then, and maybe 5 exalted reputations. Feel free to think to yourself "TL-DR," and move on.

As of now, I have 16 Exalted reps (5 home cities, Netherwing, Sporeggar, Sha'tari Skyguard, Shattered Sun, Scryers, Argent Crusade, Kirin Tor (mainly leveled off cooking and fishing dailies), Sons of Hodir, Horde Expedition, Sunreavers, and the Oracles (finally!)).

11 unique tabards including one from Shadowmoon Valley .

65/100 mounts.

75+ pets.

472/550 Loremaster of Eastern Kingdoms, 615/685 Kalimdor, 15/90 in to Hellfire and Back with all the other Outland zones done. Summit of Stormpeaks and Into the Basin are my only completed Northrend zone achievements, but I'm 112/140 in Icecrown.

I'm 2187/3000 on the Seeker achievement, plus 1474 dailies equalling 3661 total quests done.

Merrymaker and Hallowed make 2/8 for the Violet Proto-drake grind.

Titles: I can now call myself Bloodshrike the Ambassador, Chef, Crusader, Merrymaker, Explorer, Hallowed, or Pilgrim. Or affiliate myself with Of Orgrimmar, Sen'jin, Silvermoon, Thunder Bluff, Undercity, and the Shattered Sun.

Out of Phaze

So, Bloodshrike, and ONLY Bloodshrike, will be going for the Loremaster achievement. I'm not going to put myself through the misery of slavishly trying to complete all those quests again on another character. I'll do the rep grind for certain factions if they have recipes that that toon needs for their profession(s), but I'm done with being a perfectionist.

I guess this whole thing kind of spun off from me doing the Icecrown quests. I'm currently about 104/140 on them, and I grouped with a BE rogue for a few of the group quests. One in particular was kind of funny. See, I only really got into Northrend at about level 76. I did all of the Sholazar Basin quests by level 77, then came back to Northrend for the Storm Peaks, and I know I got 80 before finishing the quests there.

When I finally started in Icecrown, I went straight to the Argent Crusade, did the intro quests, then became an Aspirant. I did those quests for 25 days, becoming "Champion of ..." and "Exalted Champion of .." at the same moment, since I was already exalted with all the home cities. It wasn't until about halfway thru Revered that I realized that the OTHER quests in Icecrown probably would help boost my Argent Crusade rep, so I wouldn't only rely on the dailies for the rep grind. Doh!

Needless to say, when I finally hit Exalted with the AC, I had over 180 tokens to spend. The first 50 went for the teleport Tabard, and another 120 went for my clothies to level up in style.
I also spent about 10kg for another teleport, though this one actually helps me kill stuff faster.
So, between the tabard, ring, 3 engineering teleport devices, and my hearthstone....I'm almost a mage!

Anyways, back to the original story. The BE rogue and I were about to kill the dogs and the casters for the Guardians quest, but when he came to join up with me, I couldn't see him. We could both see the monsters, but since we were in different phase stages of quest chains, we couldn't see each other. It was quite interesting to coordinate attacks on the monsters, especially since I'm a suspicious basterd, and don't trust that people are pulling their weight unless I actually see them fighting. But, we got it done with only 2 people, so it was a lot better than trying to solo it. I had tried before, and died twice while only killing one of the mobs. But, since we had also done Basic Chemistry and Coprous the Defiled, that finished my list of group quests that I need, except maybe the Banshee's Revenge. Ahh, I'll be happy to get this zone over with.

This <- ^ -> way to Achievements

12/08/09

Since I'm waiting for the patch to download, I might as well post!

Well, thanks to the advice and comments of Joar and Kring, I finally got 2 achievements that have been bugging me for a while.
On the Blade's Edge
Check here for tips on how to get this. I had picked up the Orb of Grishna at one point, but I must have thrown it away, because the Ravens Wood Stonebark were still hostile to me. This achievement is very dependent on you doing 2 things.
1) Kill ALL the sons of Gruul.
2) Get all the Pick-up quests - i.e., all the items that drop that say "this item starts a quest." This item from the Bladespire Ogres is good for quite a long quest line.

I also got Nagrand Slam after deciding to run through Auchenai Crypts for Auchindoun, which is 8th in a 14 step chain quest.

Now I just need do about 78 Hellfire quests for the Achievement, and after getting Exalted with the Netherwing (sweet, sweet dragon mounts), I will never, EVER go back to Outlands with Bloodshrike if I can help it.

Woot! Download finished, time to play.

Loremaster or Bust!

11/9/09
I’ve been trying to get around to having Bloodshrike on Demon Soul get the Loremaster title, since he’s the closest in terms of quests completed in Kalimdor/Eastern Kingdoms, missing only about a 100ish on Kalimdor and a little more in the Eastern Kingdoms. That’s fine and dandy, but what I’ve noticed is that it’s kinda impossible to do the Outland Loremaster without going into Auchindoun, since you stall out at 77 out of 87 quests in Nagrand at that point. I really don’t like being forced to go into dungeons, especially ones that would take me forever to solo. I’m sure I could probably get a group together for running it, since they’d appreciate having an 80 along, but I hate getting into PUG’s.

I guess this is just whining, because it’s really not that hard to get the quests needed for the Outland Loremaster achievement. Heck, I’ve still got a bunch of Consortium quests I could do in Netherstorm, including the quest line that leads up to the X-52 rocket helmet. It’s just that my philosophy has been “If I can’t solo it, I don’t want to do it.” I hate waiting around in Trade, spamming “LFG for whatever,” when I could be out completing other quests, or on an alt, finally getting around to leveling them.

One thing’s for sure, I’m not going to even attempt Loremaster on any other toon. It’s even worse on Alliance side, requiring 700 quests each for Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms. And, correct me if I’m wrong, but they aren’t all this easy. – Ding!

I’m also going to need to do a lot of quest catchup in Northrend too, since I mainly leveled to 80 while still in Outlands, doing all the dailies I could there. I’ve really only touched Sholazar Basin and a little bit of Borean Tundra. I guess it’s a good thing that Pallormortis, my DK, is almost to 70. It would be fun do the quests in Northred around their level, and actually get good amounts of XP for completing them, plus the quest rewards would be around my level. I’m really, really tired of doing quests that are gray to me, just to tick off 1 more number on quests completed.

Edit: Due to completing the Shadowmoon Valley quest achievement, I got some more quests to take back to Nagrand, to visit Altruis the Demon Hunter. So, I'm about 84/87 for Nagrand, and the Auchindoun quests should be filled this week, since I'm going to knock out the Thanksgiving holiday achievement on Bloodshrike at least.

And, after being 80 a few weeks, I finally remembered to visit a hunter trainer and get my level 80 spells, as well as retraining my gorilladin to be more of a tank. Doh! That allowed me to solo the quest in Netherstorm, where you have to defend Area 52 against a Fel Reaver, using a weak version that dies after a little while, leaving you to try to solo it, since there's nobody else out there. I couldn't do it at 79, but finally got it done at 80.