Yes, I’ve not been a very good lemming. It’s been a busy time around the Amateur house and when my time was idle…well, blame that darn Hearthstone. It requires a simpler kind of focus some times. That said, it isn’t that I haven’t been working on the screenshots, I just never had a chance to post and then decided to just bundle them all together.
Yes, Saintvache finally capped this morning. As you can see I picked up a sexy set of achievements in the process. Better late than never. Despite a higher survival rate than Tumunzahar, I definitely found the leveling process to take longer. Perhaps because there was such a hiatus in the middle of Tum’s go that it didn’t seem so bad. I will say, quite obviously, it improved when I ended up in a new guild. The XP boost was nice. But even so, I found 89-90 was smoother than the rest of Pandaria. I think because even when I couldn’t really hop on and bang out some bubbles of experience, I could still take about 10-15 minutes and do three little quests to get me close to a million xp per day.
I would start with the Cooking Daily. On Horde side, my personal preference is Thunder Bluff. They’re all pretty simple and if you land Mulgore Spice Bread, you’ve really got it easy. I will say a Fishing Daily will help even more, but few of my toons have fishing (two come to mind). After that I took the Blasted Lands portal, where I headed to Karazhan for the Pet Battle Daily, and then back to the Blasted Lands to go through the Dark Portal and do the Pet Battle there. As I said, three quests, almost one million experience.
For what it’s worth, you need just over 18 million experience to go from 89 to 90. If you did just this every day and used your time for other toons, you would ding in just under three weeks. Sure, that still seems like a fairly long time, but not when you’re only popping on for 15 minutes at a time. You’d be there before you know it (toss in the Darkmoon Faire around the same time for a couple of easy Profession Quests as well and you’re laughing).
So now what? Well, I joined said Guild last Saturday or Sunday and thanks to the Lunar Elders and the rest of my ventures, I’m halfway to Exalted. Since I helped them unlock the Dark Phoenix mount, I find myself beckoned to finish that rep and get said mount. I’m sure part of that will come via the Timeless Isle. Once again, it has more appeal as a class that can throw out some damage and survive, versus my Holy Dwarf. Along with that, it’s probably time to start boosting the rest of the Amateur Army. I know Liouxpold is on Pandaria, but I can go without the place for a little bit.
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:
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 first month of the year is gone in a few short hours (or possibly it’s already gone in your part of the world) and if there’s one way to summarize it, that would be WHERE DID MY IMMUNE SYSTEM GO?!?! Seriously, I was sick every day this month. Some were better than others (the strep throat phase suckethed horribly), but on the whole I’ve had some variation of a viral infection or flu since New Year’s Day. Ugh.
Daily Quests. We’ve all done them. We all get incredibly sick of doing them after the 2,533,901th time. Most of the dailies we encounter are end game, or if not then they are likely for some reputation we are looking to improve upon. However, not all of them are that bad. Some, are actually fun or are simply worth doing. I’ve excluded the Holiday ones from the list as while they are dailies, you can’t do them any time you want.
5. Let’s Do Lunch: Thunder Bluff / Ironforge
I put these together, because obviously it depends what faction you’re a part of as to which one you’ll actually be able to do. Are these dailies incredibly fun? Perhaps not. What they offer instead of fun is sheer ease in return for solid benefit. Unlike many dailies the Cooking (and Fishing…ew) can be done as early as level 1. These two cities in particular offer ones that are very easy (Spiced Bread or a variation of it? SIGN ME UP!), and also tend to not have as much competition on the occasion you have to hunt down some spawn items in town. You never have to go far, and you receive XP (if needed) and Cooking Awards for quick and easy work. At lower levels, the XP is a considerable amount and thus I consider it a “must” for anyone looking to quickly level alts these days.
4. Defending Wyrmrest Temple
Unless you grab the Wyrmrest Accord tabard and run a tonne of dungeons before it’s too late, you’ll essentially need this quest to hit Exalted and get your Red Drake (which is a must for nearly all my toons). From the moment I stumbled across this quest in the Temple, I did it every day just for the sheer joy of it. Hop on dragon’s back, ride dragon, burn other dragons. It just felt epic, and it’s something I haven’t really felt in the Cataclysm dailies to be honest. I still know people who as soon as they become eligible book it straight to the temple for that very same feeling.
3. Thrusting Hodir’s Spear
If riding a dragon made the list, you had to expect fighting your way out of one’s mouth would as well! Once you’ve completed the prerequisite quests, this is one of the Hodir dailies that opens up and it’s a hoot as well. Grab the spear, fire it at a Wyrm and then hold on. You fight on it’s belly for phase one, and then in it’s mouth for phase two. Again, it has that epic feel to it. Plus, unlike defending the Temple, if you fail at this you don’t parachute to the ground. You fall. You die. The risk element is what gives it the edge here.
2. The Air Strikes Must Continue
Good old Isle of Quel’Danas. This was the first true daily hub location and was relatively well received. It came in Patch 2.4 and the first time I got the chance to do this quest I was hooked. You literally fly over Sunwell Plateau, creating a virtual sneak peak of some of the nasty folk awaiting you inside. That, plus the bombing run mechanic that a number of quests have gone on to use (and used before it) make for a great combination. Long before I did the Shattered Sun Offensive rep grind I still did this daily.
1. Thieving Little Pluckers
This quest is entirely responsible for me compiling this list. Down in the lovely land of Uldum is where you’re handed a giant mallet and essentially told to go whack some pygmies. Stacks of three mean ten swings and it’s over…which I’ll admit is unfortunate (though I do have two characters doing it now). There’s very little after a rough or long day that can match the stress release of pygmy whacking.
Enchanting is one of the few professions where it really is a good idea to have a vast array of recipes. Some are not that useful, but most serve some purpose or another. While you can make a decent amount of coin on endgame enchants, the real gold lies in Weapon Enchants -because twinks love them…and your average Joe likes to see his weapon sparkle.
Look up the formulas for Fiery Weapon, Crusader, Unholy, Intellect, Spellpower, and Lifestealing. If they’re even on your Auction House, they’re probably not cheap (though Lifestealing has come down). For the next tier of Enchants, look up scrolls for Mongoose. Insane prices, right? That’s because for twinks these are the best at what they do. If you’re high enough, run Karazhan and kill Moroes because the recipe is a guaranteed drop from him. Also, gather up the gold and buy Fiery Weapon and Crusader. Combined, these two recipes will probably cost you 400 or 500 gold (maybe less if you’re lucky). You can make that back in less than two weeks if you’re a casual auctioneer, just on scrolls of these two. I’m on both factions and various servers and right now the materials for Fiery Weapon (Essence of Fire and Small Radiant Shards) cost me about 10-20g a scroll. I sell them for 25-50g. For Crusader (Righteous Orbs and Large Brilliant Shards), the cost is closer to 50g, but they sell for 80-100g. You can see the money just on those two, but the other ones I mentioned are worthwhile investments as well. If you want to take things further, seek out what enchants twinks of all levels are using, be it weapons or even regular, or BoA, gear (because those items are going to continue to grow in numbers). The efforts you need to go to in order to acquire the recipe will be a mere investment when you start reaping the return rewards.
Speaking of investing, I wanted to quickly mention two items going in opposite directions at the moment. A hot item for the next few weeks is Small Egg. If you see these prior to the start of Winter Veil for less than a gold, you’ll want to grab them. They shoot to 2-5g each thanks to the recipes for The Winter Veil Gourmet.
The other item, the Recipe: Savory Deviate Delight comes with a buyer beware. This was one of the hardest recipes to come across prior to The Shattering, and would go for 200-1000g depending on the server and availability. Now, it’s worth about 10% of that, because the drop rate has shot through the roof. I know of one person who had three drop in under an hour while questing in Northern Barrens (its new drop zone). If you can get this for a decent price on the Horde side, it does still hold some value on the Alliance side, so it’s an item that could net you a flip return, albeit at a fraction of what you would’ve gotten for it a month ago.
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