Looks different around here, I know. But so does Azeroth. No, not in the private sector where you’ve occasionally heard me from. The real deal. I resubbed on Friday…for a month. Who knows, I might wrangle enough gold to buy a free month as well. But in the short term, we’ll see how it goes. It doesn’t mean I’m back for Shadowlands. Much as I have to have the Collector’s Edition at some point for my collection, I’m in no rush. Instead I came back to see what everything else is like.
The first thing I did was putter about on a couple of toons. Elcombe still has a 6-tab Guild Bank full of pets. So, guess no one hacked me at any point. After checking that, I took him to the barber shop to see what the new options looked like. He ended up looking like Stephen Baldwin apparently.
After that, I did what I do most. Maybe best. Took a bag full of pets over to the auction house. It’ll take me a little while to get settled into the market. But if I can sell a lot of what I’ve got in stock, that free month might not be all that difficult to achieve. Heck, if I put all my toons in one place it would be mission accomplished. But, that’s not the case, though I do still know how to move money around to some degree if I so desire.
Then it was time for familiarity. Over to Zarahi and druid adventuring. She was sitting at the top of the toons at level 42. So I puttered in Warlords for 1-2 levels and then made my way to Azsuna. Apparently I had some quests there from the last time I logged in…a couple of years ago. So I went through a few of the storylines.
Then decided to take her to the Barber Shop. Holy crap, I can be a Druid of the Flame. Permanently. Didn’t see that one coming at all…and nope, didn’t even look at Bear Form.
At this point, I decided to go to Zandalar. Figured her last few levels would get me on track to unlocking Allied Races. Of course, I didn’t put much research into how to do so and was disappointed when I completed the Zandalari stuff and it turns out that’s just the beginning of what was needed. Oh well, still hit the level cap in no time at all.
When I realized I wasn’t unlocking the Trolls just yet I thought I’d visit a place I’d been dying to see: Siege of Orgrimmar. If I can’t have what I want, at least I can go kill Garrosh, right? Well, not so much. Despite researching the issue, I just could not solo the Scrolls of Pandaria. After dying about a half dozen time I gave up. Between the trolls, Garrosh, and this site causing me grief (hence the new look), I wasn’t in the best of moods by Sunday night. So, I needed to remedy that. Went to a favourite place. No, not Karazhan oddly. Instead it was off to Sunwell Plateau. Wasn’t long after I paid Kil’jaeden a visit and felt better. Even had the Chaos Pup and Wretched Servant drop.
So I experienced some of the new and some of the old. We’ll see what the next 30 days brings. I know Shadowlands hits this week and as I said off the top, I’m in no rush to get it. I haven’t played the game in a couple of years so there’s lots for me to do for my dollar (which, yes I was fairly certain I would never again give Blizzard…eh, times change I suppose). I’ve certainly built up a few thoughts on how things are in Azeroth now. We’ll see if I can get them out here with some semblance of frequency. No guarantees, but for now we’ll do our best and enjoy the ride.
I came into the week thinking I had ample time for farming and generating gold. In the end, I made money…but not as much as I thought I might. Spent some free time leveling instead (Hunter hit 95, Priest 94, Death Knight 77) and then life got in the way as it often does. But I’m still curious to see how things went.
I talked last week about sharing how to play for free. Specifically, how to make at least 25 thousand gold a month. That gets you pretty close to the cost of a token, depending on the market at the time. What I have started doing, is charting everything I’m making over the course of one month, day by day. What I’m enjoying most about it is the opportunity to see for myself just exactly where the gold comes from, what I might be doing well, and what I could improve on. I won’t be capped or anything like that, but I’m happy doing enough to get by and can build on that. As I said before, my goal is simply to be able to continue playing the game for free. So let’s see how we’re doing, shall we?
If you’ve put in any time making gold, then you should know of one of the biggest assets for doing so: The Undermine Journal. For the past four years, the site has been an amazing resource for deals as well as just a great source for pricing on everything. Whether it’s your server, or game wide, the financial info and item availability was a click away. Unfortunately that appears to be ending this month.
According to the website, you can no longer subscribe and auction information is no longer updating. Whomever hosts the servers for TUJ is not able to meet the needs of the site and as such it is going to close by the end of the month. Whether it’s an official closing is yet to be determined though. The folks there seem to want to keep it going but time will tell.
There will probably be a period where this site is completely closed. We may be able to find a new dedicated host, but there are a number of improvements that should be made here before Warlords of Draenor is released anyway. So if WoD is released and The Undermine Journal is down, it’s probably not coming back.
While I haven’t used the site nearly as much in recent months, I refuse to downplay how important it was and what an amazing resource it was for those serious about gold making. Some days it’s hard to remember the days prior to it existing. Heck, if not for the Undermine Journal I wouldn’t have my Deathcharger. I certainly hope it comes back, not only because I was a fan of using it but because I think it’s incredibly valuable for the community. I never like to see any part of the community permanently log out, and this is no exception.
Having said that, there’s going to be a shift in power for gold making for the next little while. Add-ons are great, but they can’t run in real time on all servers like the Journal did. Great deals and rare listed items can’t be accessed outside the game right now and that gives those with a little more time the advantage. With nothing much to do before Warlords, the Auction House PvP is open for more aggressive folk. So while we hope the Undermine Journal isn’t down for long, your opportunity just went up.
I took Tumunzahar out last night for about an hour as I try to come back. Aside from lowbies, he seems to be the one (class?) I still remember how to play pretty well. I didn’t queue for an instance or anything, as I wasn’t sure what my window of opportunity looked like. But, in that hour, I did come to a few conclusions:
the auction house is as easy to make quick gold off of as it ever was. I’ve played maybe 5-6 hours since coming back and made 5k.
No, I’m not an auction junkie again, I just realize I left the game somewhat broke. It was totally worth it though!
The Ironforge cooking dailies are still simpler and faster than Stormwind.
The chickens in front of Ironforge no longer run around like their head is cut off when you need to catch them.
Oh Illidan. The chickens sparkle. Twilight jokes aside, it’s like they think the players can’t see that it’s a chicken, or might be confused that it might not be the right chicken.
I still don’t like much of the Jewelcrafting dailies in Stormwind. Oh, yay, look, back to Cataclysm.
If it isn’t the goo, it’s no doubt the gems I don’t have and will cost 40g each on the auction house.
Pet Battles are just as I remember them, and so is my affinity towards having one of each.
I seriously need to remember to heal them first. That or I need to level a lot more. That might actually not be a bad idea, as I can see my son really liking that.
They mark rares on your map now?
There are a tonne of rares in Pandaria.
There are a tonne of rares in Pandaria when there’s no one around to kill them.
As a Holy Priest, I cannot kill very many of them. In fact, I finally killed one on my own with Tum last night.
It’s the Nannermancer up there. I swear, Tum’s underneath him there quite alive and quite well.
Yup. The next rare I found slaughtered me. The dog he summoned was doing more damage than I was.
The Pandaren lore still doesn’t pull me in. There are nuggets of interest, but for the most part it’s just “there.”
In the rest of Azeroth, I’ve always wanted to read the quest text. Now…*shrug*
This game still has way too many “collect x of this, while killing y of these and activating z more of these things.”
Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed myself. Smite spamming isn’t exactly my cup of tea, but Tum is 88 and at the moment I’d just like to get him to 90. I’m in no rush, and will heal dungeons when I get the chance. I’m just a bit too busy to commit to one without going “afk” more often than I would like.
The success of this blog stems from this time last year, when I took part in the Blog Azeroth Thanksgiving event put on by AmerPriest. I even finished second in said contest, and have been humbled ever since. I signed up for it again this year (the event, as I don’t believe there was a contest) but my mind was blank on what to write. I knew something I was planning on doing, but I sure couldn’t write about that because it would spoil everything. So I kind of played dumb when people asked about it, and the Thanksgiving event came and went.
Remember when I posted about wanting to earn a fair amount of gold by Winter Veil? No one ever asked me what it was for. Actually, Magik did and I dodged the question rather well. But other than that, people supported my effort but never questioned why I was trying to hoard it. Well, try I did. However, in six weeks or so I made less than 30 thousand gold. So I knew I was never going to achieve my goal. I was dejected, but was going to make the most of it anyway.
So I’ve quietly gone about my business, nickel and diming wherever I could. I acquired most of the things I needed in anticipation of Winter Veil when I would execute my plan. Well, with all the talk of Thanksgiving this week, and some things I will get to in a moment, I began thinking about moving up said plan. Low and behold yesterday came. I looked at my Friends List prior to the Laid Back Raid and there were seven of the eight people on that I needed to talk to. The only one missing was Healblade and while I knew he was coming to raid, I still e-mailed him and ninja’d my wife’s Facebook to message him there as well. Fortunately as I was rounding up the others, he made it on.
First I had to get Navimie, Helke, Repgrind, and Tome to roll toons on Runetotem. Then I had to say no DK’s, Worgen, or Pandas. I needed something that didn’t have to sludge through a start zone considering I gave them zero notice. They all obliged, and as we started to come together there were many questions I refused to answer. Instead I had the Mages take everyone to Ironforge while I zipped to Shattrath quickly (because what I wanted wasn’t closer!). I circled back and picked up Repgrind and we arrived at Bruuk’s Corner. This is a significant location as it’s where I used to hold our guild Winter Veil parties.
With everyone gathered, I began handing out a present to each one. Once I was certain everyone had their gift, I allowed them to open them. Now before I get to the what (and someone of you will know from reading other blogs), let me get to the why. I hold friendship in very high regard. Each of these people, and more, are incredibly important to me for their own reasons and it comes down to being who they are. So, it was a short time after Mists launched that I got the idea to give my friends each a Jewelcrafted Panther Mount for Christmas/Winter Veil.
As I said, I decided to bump up the timeline. Arv was supposed to be one of the recipients, but I found out he snagged them all at some point, and as such I was able to move on to another person. That’s good because I was disappointed I couldn’t make one for each person that I wanted to. Jai, Matty, Shoryl, and more were all people I really wanted to give this gift to and I couldn’t make it happen. Yes, it disappoints me. I could have pulled it off, but I refused to accept someone’s offer of gold (or buy it online) because I wanted to earn each of these my way. It was more rewarding, but in the end I didn’t get to give to everyone.
As it was, talking to a Jewelcrafter and saying I had the money and mats for eight panthers was enough to floor someone. Heck, they thought with all those materials that I wanted the Black one. Thank god there was no red stack of gems or my plan would have been foiled (I had them made 20 minutes before I rounded everyone up). But everything did work out just fine in the end. I would have liked to have celebrated with everyone for far longer, but there was a Laid Back Raid scheduled that some of us had to get to.
Firelands was interesting. It didn’t occur to me the zone would look very much like it did amidst all those bloody dailies. I’m also glad for the folks that came along, because I never would have known where to go. We had a few wipes, but we pressed on. It was nice to have content that had its challenges, but we perservered in such a casual manner. I again have to thank Arv and others who provided great leadership with each fight. Alas, we were not entirely successful on this night. Despite many efforts, we were bested by Ragnaros himself. The mechanics of that fight are still pretty tough. But he can rest assured we will be back.
I had dying down to an art form.
I had a great time in there, but the truth is…I didn’t want to go in the first place. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go to Firelands, I didn’t want to do LBR or really even be on WoW. I haven’t for some time. I kind of just go through the motions off and on. Up until now, very few people knew that I am suffering from serious depression at best, more likely it’s bipolar. Don’t know for sure, because I’ve not yet had the referral processed for proper analysis (long wait around these parts). But needless to say, it has diminished my interest in a number of things and one of those is WoW. For a long time I’ve been logging on just to get those panthers made. Add in my video display issues when I have been wanting to play, and my time has been slim.
Christmas is coming. That’s a busy time for me, and I will also be sending my laptop away for repair at some point. Combined with my mindswings and it’s hard to say when I’ll want to be on or what I will want to do. I like LBR runs, because all of the people involved are great to be around and do cheer me up. At the same time I have to recognize there will be a period where I’ll simply be offline and not able to run them. Whether someone else is able to take over in my absence or not will be determined before I take off. But I will be taking what I’m terming a sporadical. It’s not a full sabbatical but my appearances will be much more, well, sporadic.
I also recognize with the holidays coming, it would have been harder to get all those people together as I was able to in that instant last night. It was important to me to be able to have them all together at the same time, because that’s just how I am. I know there was some concern I was doing it because it was my swan song, and in some ways this post might suggest that, but that’s not the case and nor was it the plan. These mounts were always meant to be a Christmas gift to great people. Nothing more, nothing less.
I’ve just had a lot going on mentally as of late and that’s becoming a focus for me because it’s gotten worse in the last month and in ways I’m becoming much more concerned about it. I’m taking the appropriate actions of course, with counselling and meds and a strong network of support. So that’s why I moved up the date, why you haven’t necessarily seen me online as often, and most certainly why I haven’t been posting or commenting nearly as much. I just haven’t had it in me, and when my laptop goes on repair vacation it will be even more so.
To those I gave the cats to, I’m going to reiterate just how important each of you are to me and how awesome you’ve been just being you and this is a small way for me to say thank you. To others, I wish I could have fully shared that thanks. But if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re one of those people and I just wanted to thank you from the bottom of my heart.
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