Monday, June 16, 2008

Bang Head Here


Every once in a while, I hit a wall of frustration with WoW. This is a normal occurrence for me in anything I engage in, whether it’s school, employment or recreation. Lately, though, due to high gas prices, I’ve spent much more time on WoW (less expensive than trying to go out, especially as, where I live, everything is very spread out and you need a car to get anywhere), and have thus found a lot more to be frustrated about.

Right at this moment, I have two unenchanted pairs of gloves sitting in my inventory. One is Botanist’s Gloves of Growth as a step towards a haste set, and the other is Thunderheart Gloves. Yes, I can has T6! The only problem here are that the enchants are very expensive. Each Enchant Gloves – Major Healing costs six Greater Planar Essences, six Large Prismatic Shards, and six Primal Lives. Since I need two enchants, double that. Add to that I need to gather the mats for Boar’s Speed and I’m now up to needing 20 Large Prismatic Shards, 12 Primal Lives, 12 Greater Planar Essences and 8 Primal Earths.

But the fun doesn’t stop there!

Remember that list from before about things I needed to do-slash-get? Let’s see what I’ve accomplished:

Made two Primal Mights (out of five) and gotten Exalted with SSO. I had made one Earthstorm Diamond, but then my new helm dropped and I needed it for a meta socket. So, now my shopping list is 20 Large Prismatic Shards, 18 Primal Lives, 12 Greater Planar Essences, 8 Primal Earths, 1 Earthstorm Diamond, 1 Skyfire Diamond, 2 Fel Lotus, 3 Primal Mights, and 2 Nether Vortex.

Now if that isn’t daunting enough, mix in my small, small gold pile of about…1.2k gold. Across all my characters. I do not have epic flight, and I do not foresee myself getting it anytime soon. I cannot commit too much time to doing dailies; and when I do them I am horribly slow at any of them that require something to die. Though I’m an herbalist, farming is the same way; things die much too slowly and I have to have help, which means I have to drag someone out of the way to kill things for me, split the profits with them (I don’t mind doing this), and then feel guilty about bringing them to do something which is, inherently, really, really, boring. It doesn’t matter if they want to do it; I don’t like asking.

Besides all of that up there, I need to work on my honor situation. I am, irresponsibly, not in possession of a 2 minute PvP trinket, and therefore gimp myself on a few fights such as Rage and Archimonde. Season 4 is coming out; my three pieces of Gladiator are going to be woefully obsolete. I don’t even have all of the Vindicator’s set; I still need my boots and my rings.

I could do this if I respec’d, possibly, but my money is so low and my play time (though relatively plentiful) is so sporadic it becomes difficult to simply recover what I lost by respec’ing, let alone make extra gold. And since I need to spend time farming, I can’t really do many dailies. The flip side of the coin is trying to do dailies to buy what I intended to farm, but it seems like since everyone can do 25 dailies a day, inflation has gone out of control.

Then I have this…other problem? People keep trying to offer to give me gold. Which is a lovely gesture in itself, but I cannot accept. One, because I will never, ever be able to pay it back, and two, I have the “if they can do it, so can I” mentality. When I was fresh at level 40, I made the money for my riding mount in three days, and this was Pre-BC where that was (at level 40, anyway) a feat. Or it felt like one. When epic riding came around, I scrounged for gold again and got a PvP mount so I could get a Ram and not have to spend that chunk on a Saber Mount I didn’t want. Regular Flying was easy; Druids do have it made with that. But after all that, I can’t stand the thought of asking for someone else’s gold to pay for my epic skill. I want to be able to do it myself, to know that I can do it. Only problem is, it’s almost looking like I can’t.

Did I mention I’m power-levelling cooking? 245 skill at the time of writing this.

I know I can’t get everything done, but it does feel like I’m gaining no headway. Illidari Council is, hopefully, tonight, and I’m all prepared for that, but otherwise, I’m starting to fall behind. It’s starting to look like the only solution is to get my paladin to 70 so she can smack mobs around for me.

/grindteeth

15 comments:

Convalescence said...

Aha, my love. I certainly approve of leveling the Bellbell, and will do as many elites/instances required for such!

Also... I don't mind being dragged around on Enchanter to help you farm skettis tree's, actually... I've only been farming them to ninja you the Life's, whilst I use the herbs for elixir spam.

Anonymous said...

My advice is to take everything 1 bit at a time, so for example for your alchy stone (im guessing), you need 3 more primal mights, which isnt really the case, you need 1 primal might for now, and forget about the other 2 until you have the first 1. That seems to work for me, otherwise i would never of got all the crafted crap ive got atm on my level 70s :p

A said...

if you ever need gems, you can log on my character to make them, at least until the transaction is complete :)

Anonymous said...

Once a week, make farming day. Respec feral, put on the blue drops or extra kara purplz and then do the 25 dailies. The gold from it will quickly repay the respec cost and you will have some to save still.

Send your greens from them to an enchanter. Usually you will get some GPE. Sell the dust for shard gold. Buy shards.

Farm Primal Life in Zangarmarsh in the Dead Mire. You can kill the mobs there easily without any respec due to their low level. Also you can herb them for some more motes of life. Sell any extra one for gold.

You can farm easily in BEM at Bashir's landing for Primal Mana and Primal Fire in HP when you do the SSO dailies. These two areas have such an easy daily, you can do it with out a respec anyway so you can farm there a little bit every day. Sell the extra ones for gold.

You don't have to have so much stress. You have to farm in an efficient way one or two times a week and buy some things in the AH.

<3

Anonymous said...

Agreeing with Breen.

You have to prioritize. Of course when you lump everything all together, it's going to seem overwhelming! Make an ordered list of what you want to accomplish, and break all of the requirements down by their different steps. In that way, every bit seems that much more doable.

The key to doing dailies (especially as resto) is to just do the easy ones if you don't have the drive to do the grinding quests on any given day. It's better than not doing any dailies at all, and that gold will add up!

GL!

s k graham said...

And I will say, if someone will loan you the money for the epic mount, your herbing will go SOOOO much faster. Dailies too, for that matter.

Anonymous said...

fish... fish a lot...

A quick 30-45 minutes fishing expedition in Terrokar can yield 2-3 stacks of furious crawdad, cook it into Spicy Crawdad, sell that for 30g a stack, rinse and repeat.

It's far more efficient than doing dailies for healers and tanks, and you don't risk repair bills.

Anonymous said...

I feel your pain. I have been resto now for a few weeks (I was a turkey before) and the daily situation is horridly slow. Mobs I used to kill before they even reached me I now find myself lifeblooming myself because they melee me down to half health. before I can kill them. I discovered that the robots on Quel'danas do a silence, something I never knew because they never got close enough when I was a doomkin.

It's to the point I'd almost consider respeccing for half the week, do 3-4 days of dailies as a turkey or a kitty, and then go back, but that would cut my gold intake by 100g a week. It's a tough proposition. I just got the SSO badge legs last night, bought 140g worth of gems for them, and now I have to save up 10 more primal lifes to spellthread it =\

Currently I'm levelling a dps warrior so I can do dailies on that instead. Good luck with the paladin =]

Crasticus / Deathwing

teflaime said...

If you have someone doing them with you, to the daily in BEM (the mana thieves one), the Sunfury Plans daily in Netherstorm, and th3 2 dailies in Hellfire at Kazzak's throne...This will net you about 40g, 3 shattered Sun Supplies, and 5 Marks of Sargeras (that can be sold for about 2g/per on my server). You'd both get the spoils from these, they are all reasonably quick (dump the Netherstorm one if they take longer than you want, as that's the most variable in drops). Then, you should be high enough to do the cooking daily (I think). And if you can, do the fishing daily. Easy gold there.

I usually spend about an hour a night doing the 4 SSO dailies and the fishing daily, but my druid is feral...However, with help, they should still go pretty quickly.

Unknown said...

I don't have a good comparison of the various ways to earn money.

Grinding quests can be boring but is very effective. I paid for two epic flyers through questing. Those people who offer to give you money - maybe they'd be willing to do some dailies with you.

Fishing is boring to level up, but fishing and cooking can make good money. I suggest doing the daily fishing quest each day - the 10m it takes does help you get a few skill points each day.

Herbalism is SO much easier once you have an epic flight ability. I'd suggest not bothering with herbalism until then.

Anonymous said...

Good luck on the cooking, I just finished leveling mine along with fishing. I hope you're doing both of them together, it's SO much easier that way.

Bell said...

@bordektor - actually, my fishing is already 375 ^^

Jon said...

We should arrange to do dailies at the same time if possible. I'll also be grinding some honor this weekend to get my new mace.

I'd also be happy to send you my food if you could cook it for me. ;)

Bell said...

@jon - but...you have 375 cooking. Couldn't you cook it yourself?

/confused

Jezrael said...

I think Jon is suggesting that to help you level your cooking Bell :)

I commiserate with your conundrum -I sometimes get overwhelmed with the amount of things I'm trying to achieve - especially now that I have 2 70s that I'm trying to keep going. Sephiroh shamefully has no enchants to her gear yet and now that I'm getting nicely Kara purpled I really can't get away with it anymore.

I try and assign a couple of days a week to farming activites. Sometimes I farm (mining on Jez, skinning on Seph) and sometimes I run dailies. It depends on my mood.

I'm probably weird and stupid but I'm also not taking Seph to the Isle of QD until she's finished all of her quests - I'm just about to start Netherstorm. Probably silly but still the gold is good and the quests are pretty easy at level 70.

I'd suggest prioritising what you want to achieve and working down the list. Plus throwing in the caveat of doing what appeals to you most at the time.