Due to (good things redacted), my schedule is haywire this week and there’s a lot of uncertainty. I wanted to have Episode 11 of the Kurncast up last night, but I did two full takes (17m and 20m) and hated them both, so I was going to do it tonight.
Buuuuuuut. (Good things redacted) happened and that leaves my week pretty much up in the air. Plus client work, plus other stuff, so I won’t have a Kurncast this week.
Depending on how the week shapes up, I might not end up having a Raid Leader’s Sneak Peek, either! We’ll have to see how it goes.
Kurncast will be back next Sunday night/Monday morning. Thanks for your understanding! :)
Finally, if you’re in need of webhosting, please do consider Bluehost! If you use this affiliate link, you’d also be helping to support me in various WoW-related efforts. I’d really appreciate it, thank you. :)
I finally finished my quest for the legendary cloak. Unsurprisingly, I have some thoughts on the matter. ;) I’m going to break down the different chapters of the quest and comment on them separately before discussing my overall impressions at the end. Go get a beverage. Trust me.
Chapter 1: Sigils Can Suck It
Being that I’m not a rogue who got Fangs of the Father, I had to grind rep for Wrathion.
First, let me be clear: I’m not opposed to a good, old-fashioned rep grind. Really, I’m not. That said, just killing mobs to do so is (and always has been) annoying. I’ve done it several times in the past (Hydraxian Waterlords rep to Honored, for instance) but there’s no other real way to gain rep with Wrathion. Just lots and lots… and lots… of killing.
Part of me enjoyed the mindless killing of the Mogu in the Vale (which was where I decided to rep grind), but it wasn’t fun by any stretch of the imagination.
That said, it was ten times more fun than collecting 10 Sigils of Power and 10 Sigils of Wisdom.
Perhaps if I had been a regular raider this expansion, instead of not playing for 17 months, I wouldn’t have been frustrated at the low drop rates. Maybe I would have taken it in stride that sigils only dropped occasionally from the bosses of Tier 14. (Yes, I know that they continued to drop through Throne of Thunder and the first half of Siege, but the hypothetical is if I’d been playing and raiding consistently, so that’s a few months of just Tier 14.)
On the one hand, loot is random. It always has been and it always will be. It’s part of what keeps people going back. How many times did I kill General Drakkisath for my Beaststalker Tunic? 60. Six-zero. SIXTY. Over the course of a couple of years. I killed Gandling in Scholo for my Beaststalker’s Cap 4 times before I even SAW that helm, but killed him an additional 24 times before I won it. I’m fine with random loot in general. It’s like it’s the natural order of things.
That said, 20 random-drop, required “legendary” pieces is a lot of killing bosses. Like I said, maybe if I’d been a regular raider, I wouldn’t have minded, but as someone who was catching up through LFR and not raiding regularly with any group… this was less fun. LFR in general is not terribly fun, so to do LFR run after LFR run and not get the requisite number of sigils is disappointing.
Kurn, why didn’t you raid regularly?
Okay, so that’s a fair question and I may as well answer it now. After over a year of not needing to make time to raid, not having to set aside 3-4 hours three times a week, I really didn’t want to start doing that again. I play at weird times and it’s not really consistent. You can find me online at 7am or 7pm, 2am or 2pm and it changes frequently. I didn’t want to be tied to my computer for raids. As much as I enjoyed raiding in the past, I didn’t particularly feel like raiding regularly again. Certainly, to do so when I came back (March) would have meant doing so with another guild, because my own guild of Apotheosis was knee-deep in heroic Siege of Orgrimmar at that point. Doing so with another guild would have meant character transfers and, honestly, I didn’t feel like giving Blizz any more of my money (I’d just pre-ordered WoD and resubbed for a month), so I decided against it. Also, I typically raid on my holy paladin, but I wanted the cloak on my hunter, with whom I had not seriously raided since Vanilla — and I was seriously behind on gear compared to organized raiders.
Yes, I could have used services like OpenRaid and all that in order to have smoother runs, but I’m notoriously private about my BattleTag and have turned off RealID and until these systems receive the basic in privacy-related tools, I will do my best to not use them. It’s a Thing for me. And while I recognize that I’m one of very few people who feels this strongly about privacy in the game, that’s my choice.
So did I make things harder on myself than I absolutely needed to? Sure, I’ll admit that. But that doesn’t change the fact that chasing down 20 sigils was unpleasant for me. I would wager it was unpleasant for everyone.
Okay, back to Chapter 1…
The reward for this, the Crystallized Dread? I didn’t even get to use this! It’s still sitting in my bags. Why? Because I’d picked up a bow from Tortos in the Throne of Thunder. So my actual reward for finishing Chapter 1 was to be able to move on to Chapter 2.
Chapter 2: Vexing Valor & Problematic PVP
Chapter 2 brings us to Krasarang Wilds. Despite the fact I dislike PVP-like things (oh boy, more on THAT later), I kind of enjoyed the short period of time I spent in Krasarang, killing Horde mobs to get to Revered. (Yes, I could have gone to Isle of Thunder for all of this rep grinding, but I wanted to experience all of the content Blizz had put in.)
I think this was the one portion of the questline where I was genuinely bummed that no one else was out there doing dailies. It felt very lonely and empty, sort of like how Azeroth felt when they introduced Outlands in Burning Crusade.
The Valor Point section wasn’t too bad, but I fully admit that I had it easy, only needing 3000 Valor Points versus 6000. So I’m not going to complain. I’ll say this, though: six weeks of Valor Point capping is tough and it feels like an artificial barrier for a month and a half to prevent one from advancing “too quickly” on the quest line.
It also wasn’t clear to me (or many others!) that you didn’t need to save your VP, that you could spend them. Perhaps that’s because the VP needed when I did the quest was the same as the VP cap. Plus, the tracking was odd (although I’ve read theories that could explain why — preventing the dropping of the quest/loss of progress, faction transfer issues, etc), but in the end, I got my 3000 VP pretty easily.
Next up was killing Warlord Bloodhilt in Krasarang. Hunters are OP because I soloed him as Survival with my turtle pet and a couple of different talents than I usually take. It wasn’t really hard, but it wasn’t a cakewalk. I liked this. :)
The Lion Roars includes some of the worst experiences I’ve ever had playing WoW and I probably would have stopped there if it hadn’t been for my brother, who had temporarily resubbed. It took me close to a week of trying for about an hour every single day to get both wins.
Why in the fuck does a PVE-related questline, which just required you to raid, which just required you to earn Valor Points, require you to participate in BATTLEGROUNDS?
I used to PVP a lot on my hunter. I got to Knight-Captain (and just missed Knight-Champion a few times!) in Vanilla. I got so tired of the zerg rushes, of the constant death, of everything to do with PVP, that I just stopped doing it, for the most part.
Over the years, I’ve played around in arenas now and again. I got to Rival in Arena Season 2. I kind of like arenas. In 144 2v2 games with me (as a holy paladin) and my brother (arms warrior), I won 73 and lost 71. It’s occasionally fun and I got a bunch of this season’s gear, but ultimately, PVP doesn’t really interest me. As soon as my brother stopped playing again, I stopped caring about arenas.
So to be forced to do PVP stuff in order to advance what is clearly a PVE questline makes no sense to me whatsoever and was probably one of the more miserable experiences I’ve had in the game. Don’t get me wrong — I’ve done School of Hard Knocks. I’ve done With a Little Helper from My Friends. It’s not that I’m just completely terrible! But winning these two BGs was exhausting.
Eff that. I especially hated that it was the new ones. I know how to play Warsong Gulch, Arathi Basin and Alterac Valley. Why not give me the choice of winning two BGs? Just any two. Why THOSE two? Maybe they wanted to push people into trying the new ones? Guess what? I am NEVER going back to Temple of Kotmogu or Silvershard Mines EVER AGAIN. I have developed such an intense loathing for them. It goes beyond my hatred of most BGs. It’s frightening, to be honest. And the sad thing is that when I heard about them before the expansion came out, they sounded fun. The Temple of Kotmogu especially — I loved thinking about the various tactics for scoring when they announced it. I had even thought that maybe I would play around a bit in it with my brother, like, willingly. Silvershard Mines was interesting to me because I play some Team Fortress 2 and it sounded just like a Payload map.
And yet, terrible experiences. They might be the best BGs to ever hit WoW, but I have the worst associations with them now. I’m never, ever touching them again.
You also have to feel sorry for the poor PVPers who had to suffer through countless PVE scrubs. At least I brought with me my brother, who was a decently geared and skilled arms warrior…
Okay. Enough. I could rant about this for another 1000 words, but I’ll leave it at this: Keep your goddamn PVP nonsense out of my goddamn PVE experiences.
Full disclosure, I did half of my rep and secrets before any of Blizzard’s temporary buffs and the remaining half during the time in which the temporary buffs were active.
The first half wasn’t so bad. I got to about 11k through Revered with Wrathion by screwing around on the Isle of Thunder and doing some concentrated mob killing. This is another point where I lamented not doing things with everyone because the Isle of Thunder was just so empty and sad. I didn’t experience probably 75% of what Isle of Thunder had to offer and I’m kind of sad about that.
I also got 11/20 Secrets of the Empire before I tired of LFR and took a lengthy break. I returned to LFR during the two weeks of the Gaze of the Black Prince. So when I walked into the appropriate LFRs to pick up my 9 remaining secrets, it was perhaps a bad thing that I got all nine and still had bosses left to kill. I had presumed (perhaps foolishly) that I could easily knock out both my remaining secrets and all 12 Titan Runestones and finish the quest during the last week of the Gaze buff.
It had taken me literally 20 minutes (with the guild perk Mr. Popularity, plus my Battle Standard of Coordination) to finish off my rep and hit Exalted with Wrathion, so I was ready to move on to the next stage. I turned in my 20 Secrets of the Empire (and my 40 Trillium bars) and was anxious to go kill the remaining bosses who would start me off with my Titan Runestones.
After four bosses, I had 3 Titan Runestones. You’d think someone with a sociology and statistical background wouldn’t take that as FACT, but apparently I internalized the 75% drop rate.
Boy, was I unhappy to only get 7 Runestones out of the 14 possible bosses. It was so discouraging. Here I thought I could knock it all out during the last week of the Gaze buff and finally get my stupid cloak and be done!
I was apparently mistaken.
Anyhow, the other parts of the chapter included a pretty uneventful time over at The Thunder Forge. Maybe it’s that my gear was around 537 in average ilvl, but this was easy and boring as crap. Kind of neat to see an Algalon-like dude, though. That’s a nifty model.
The Nalak bit was pretty hilarious. Again, because NO ONE is EVER on the Isle of Thunder (and because I am stubborn as hell and want to do things by myself whenever possible), I did this by myself thanks in particular to this comment at Wowhead.
I ended up getting my last two Runestones this week, plus the Heart of the Thunder King. And so, we move on to…
Chapter 4: Is that a CHALLENGE?
Okay, so this was both neat and ridiculous.
I talked to all of the Celestials and ended at the Temple of the White Tiger in Kun-Lai because, well, I’m a DPS who isn’t a caster. I had a Celestial Offering to help me out, too, and at the Temple of the White Tiger, it gives 10% extra Strength and Agility.
So I click on the gong and get told it’s the melee DPS challenge.
My actual reaction: “what in the fuck, do I have to go do the CASTER challenge?!”
So off I went to the Temple of the Jade Serpent. Hey, look! 10% increased Intellect thanks to my offering. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense for a hunter. (I still miss my mana bar.)
Anyhow, Wrathion pwned me twice and then I was like “okaaaaay, time to regroup.”
I swapped a couple of glyphs and a couple of talents and even FORGET to glyph Black Ice. I learned it (I hadn’t known it), but forgot to actually select it as a glyph to use. Whoops. I ended up not needing it, though. Swapping to Binding Shot was really helpful and the third try was successful, although just barely.
Given that hunters pick the Tigerfang Wrap, I think it’s especially odd that the challenge took place at the Jade Temple.
That said, I really enjoyed the actual fight. It wasn’t all that hard, though. Kiting Artorius through Winterspring for my Rhok’delar was more difficult and took me far longer than the ~30 minutes I spent in total from the first pull to finishing this challenge. Which is a shame, really. I would like more stuff like THIS. THIS was fun.
Chapter 5: Challenging the Celestials
Get 5000 coins on Timeless Isle? No problem.
Defeat all four Celestials: actually, so much easier than I would have thought.
The “other raids” button is carefully hidden away, but was awesome in finding a group for all of the Celestials. 30 minutes later, they were all defeated.
And done. Got my cloak.
Then, for fun, I killed Garrosh and saw Wrathion get pissed off at Varian. Look, I’m no fan of Varian’s, but Wrathion, you suck. I long for the day when I can skin you. That said, I laughed out loud when he said he should have taken control himself, just like “Auntie Onyxia”. Props to Blizzard for that, and the bit with Anduin remembering her as Lady Katrana Prestor.
Concluding Remarks
So I have a legendary. But it sure as hell doesn’t feel like a legendary, despite all the hoops I jumped through for it. Let’s see, 20 Sigils, 20 Secrets, 12 Runestones, 2 BG wins, one-on-one combat, killing all the Celestials, OH, and grinding to Exalted with that little bastard… Yeah, legendary hoops, but the cloak feels ridiculous. This cloak feels like the Kingslayer title did after three months. The first month, it’s all shiny and new and YOU KILLED THE LICH KING YEAH!!!! The second month, you start to be bored by the invites to join someone’s run. The third month, everyone and their brother has the title.
That’s the same thing with the cloak. I cannot imagine how actual, organized raiders feel about their hard work when people like me (ahahaha, I’m a “dirty casual”!) can get the exact same cloak with nowhere near the same time invested. I queued up for LFR. They did actual raids. Their boss kills were more difficult than mine (probably, anyway). Isn’t it a sad thing that I have the same cloak as Tikari, who is currently 13/14 heroics in Siege of Orgrimmar?
I think it’s sad. Also, ridiculous.
A legendary is legendary not because the item’s colour is orange or because it has better-than-average stats and a neat proc. A legendary is legendary because it’s rare. Or it’s supposed to be.
Tell me, what’s the barrier in getting a legendary cloak today? There’s one tricky part, which is the one-on-one combat with Wrathion, and that’s it. Everything else is pretty easy and just takes a lot of time. But it’s not even a lot of time all at once! It’s time spent at your leisure! You can do an hour of LFR here, two hours there and 30 minutes some other time.
So with just a tiny bit of skill and time spent at your own leisure, you too can get a legendary cloak.
And that’s a problem. Legendary cloaks are now basically required for any raiding guild.
While this is fair for those raiding guilds (the cloaks ARE really good), it’s less good for people who just want to break into raiding. Having the cloaks existing at all is an artificial barrier to entry to organized raiding. Don’t get me wrong, I LIKE barriers to entry for raiding — a lot — but the time commitment to getting a cloak is a lot longer than an attunement quest (or six).
It’s also bad for guilds who want to have that kind of standard because it reduces the pool of available talent substantially. But it’s a difficult decision to make: do you take the undergeared person of that class or do you hold out and pray you get another good disc priest or elemental shaman or whatever it is you’re searching?
I don’t envy guild leaders or raid leaders today. They have difficult choices in terms of recruitment and, frankly, I’m relieved that I’m not involved in their decisions.
As to the legendaries… I don’t think there’s a good way to do them. Giving them to everyone is awful. Giving them to one individual feels bad, too.
If everyone has a legendary, it’s the same result as if no one has one. So I vote to get rid of them.
What do you think?
(PS: Catch more of my writing over at SentryTotem.com, Tuesdays and Fridays!)
Yes, the podcast is still on the blog site for now. I get into it a bit in the podcast. ;)
Also in this week’s podcast: talk of the legendary cloak, a teaser for my next Sentry Totem column about guild perks, some chatting about Alpha/Beta and I explain why Sentry Totem is a site you need to visit! :)
Finally, if you need webhosting, please consider Bluehost! If you use this affiliate link, you’d also be helping to support me in various WoW-related efforts. I’d really appreciate your support. Thanks very much! :)
Short post today, just letting you know that Episode 8 of the Kurncast is out! Sorry for the delay — it’s been a long few days. Hopefully, I’ll be moving the Kurncast over to kurn.info in the next week. I promise that this is something that is happening sooner than later this time. Once properly there, I’ll be submitting the podcast to iTunes and Stitcher, so that’ll be a good thing done.
Have an awesome week and stay tuned to me on Twitter (@kurnmogh) to make sure you know where the show is hosted next week! :)
It’s been a really exciting week in terms of World of Warcraft for me this past week! I got into the Alpha, I hit 600 tailoring, did some achievements and am making progress on getting to 100 mounts.
Totally forgot to mention this in the show, but be sure to have a look at the Wowhead Character Planner, for ideas on what achievement to chase next. It’s quite useful and handy!
And here’s another video of this awesome little tower in Frostfire Ridge, the Time-Warped Tower: http://youtu.be/6d9BwKuZDNs
I’ll definitely be adding more videos throughout my time in Alpha and Beta!
I also forgot to mention that I am definitely moving the Kurncast over to my guide site over at kurn.info, probably THIS WEEK, so be prepared to be directed over there. I’m also going to be adding it to iTunes and Stitcher when I do so. :)
Lastly, if you need webhosting, please do consider Bluehost! If you use this affiliate link, you’d also be helping to support me in various WoW-related efforts. I would really appreciate your support. :) Thanks so much!
I’d like to start this post off by saying how grateful I am to be included in the Warlords of Draenor Friends and Family Alpha. It’s no doubt due to my affiliation with SentryTotem.com and I’d just like to say that being the Guild Leadership columnist over there for the last couple of months has been a great experience. I love writing about guilds and leadership and problems that you might face and that’s now brought me into the Alpha. So thank you to Tickle for all her hard work in getting Sentry Totem up and running and thank you to Blizzard for allowing me the opportunity to play around in Warlords of Draenor.
Okay, having said that, let’s talk about the content.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN, I CAN ONLY PLAY HORDE?
I tried to copy my hunter, Kurn, to Lost Isles (PVE/US). Unfortunately, character copies to Lost Isles are disabled or something. And character creation on Lost Isles is disabled — for the Alliance. I’m not actually angry or anything about this, because the fact of the matter is, this is an Alpha build and they want to test out certain things. So right now, they want to test out the introductory Horde experience.
This is the longest I have ever spent playing a Horde character pretty much ever. I am an Alliance supporter through and through (despite the fact I pretty much can’t stand Varian), so this is completely weird to me.
I created a pre-made hunter since I figured I’d spend most of my time questing and killing things, rather than healing as a holy paladin, but I do plan to explore holy paladins too.
Oh, and before I go on, screenshots are busted in that the default .JPG format isn’t working. If you’re in the alpha and your screenshots aren’t working, do:
/console screenshotFormat tga
Warning: each screenshot will be several megabytes. Thanks to Kodiack on the alpha forums for the tip and thanks to Crow (@unlimitedBLACK on Twitter) for pointing me that way. I highly recommend IrfanView to open and convert the .tga files to .jpg.
Still, let me tell you, it’s worth taking screenshots. Some of the stuff I’ve seen is just beautiful.
Click for a larger version.
And some of it is just hilarious.
Click for a larger version, brother! ;)
Anyhow, I made myself a pre-made goblin hunter because, well, goblins are fun-looking and suit me a lot better than orcs, trolls, undead or tauren. Or blood elves. Or pandas. Yeah, so I went goblin.
You get a crapton of mounts on a premade, plus the Camel-Hoarder title, 10k gold and… oh man, my addons. I miss my addons. It took me forever to set up my bars and they are SO not well-organized, but more or less reflect how my live keybinds are. Sort of.
So far, in terms of story and such, I’ve built my garrison, have barracks and a follower (actually, come to think of it, I have a “contract” for someone else, so I imagine that’s a second follower) and that was… interesting? I mean, it wasn’t boring, but it wasn’t terribly exciting. Not yet, anyhow. We’ll see how that goes. Meanwhile, I know that the Godmother is ALL ABOUT GARRISONS, so here, have a link to her garrison stuff.
I’ve also spent a fair amount of time running around with Thrall and Durotan and hey, look, it’s freaking Drek’Thar:
I enjoyed killing you in Alterac Valley, you jerk.
USER INTERFACE CHANGES
So here’s what right-clicking on a unit frame will now do. I think this makes life a lot easier for people. Everything is right there for you to change stuff and it’s nicely broken down, IMHO.
The minimap has changed a bit, too:
Those yellow dots are actually what I’m searching for in my currently selected quest. You can see the blue area of where they’re supposed to be located, but now I can just see where the things I’m looking for are actually located. This is helpful in a few different cases, but, well, this is probably where my Vanilla-self comes out and goes “is that really necessary? I already know in which area to look, why do I need them marked off for me?” I can see that a newer player would be pleased to have that, but for me, it means I really don’t have to read quests…
The little scroll thing to the left of the clock is basically the progress of your garrison’s missions.
And here’s what your mission progress looks like:
Click to see the larger version.
There are also now these weird outlines around various mobs when you hover over them.
Red outline for hostile, I suppose.Green outline for flagged friendlies?
And blue outlines for non-flagged friendlies, I gather. Basically, it’s just another way to express the statuses of various mobs, as if the text colour of their names/affiliations isn’t enough. I’m not really a fan, but again, this probably lessens the learning curve for a newer player. For me, though, it’s just distracting.
Oh, check out the stuff in my bag:
So that’s a row of food they provided, and my Hearthstone, but it took me a while to understand what the hell these little yellow ovals were on some of these icons. And then it dawned on me — they’re all grey. Thus, vendor loot. Thus, gold icons on them to show “hey, you get gold for this!”
You can also see some green and blue outlines if you look carefully. Those indicate, at a glance, the rarity of the item.
Oh, and currently, some gathering nodes are in, but sometimes you’ll just randomly get a sack of ore or sack of herbs to make up for sources that aren’t in yet.
HUNTER STUFFZ
There is a new visual for the Freezing Trap. Instead of being in an ice cube, mobs are trapped in spikes of ice.
On the one hand, I liked the ice cube. On the other, targetting was always a little wonky with those in the way. While I worked out how NOT to accidentally target my trapped mobs, sometimes I had to move my camera A LOT to target a different mob.
I’m currently Survival, by the way. Not having Serpent Sting as something to push is so foreign, but it’s wrapped up in Arcane Shot. Not having Kill Shot is also strange. I may play around with Marks a bit later, because I am, at my heart, a Marks hunter.
Misdirection is somewhat broken at the moment, which I knew from keeping up on hunters at Bendak‘s awesome site, Eyes of the Beast and through his Twitter. Basically, they were going to have Misdirection persist for like, an hour. So because of that, they removed the Glyph of Misdirection that allows you to essentially chain-cast MD on your pet. But then they reverted the Misdirection for an hour change and, well, MD is kind of useless on my pet, only being able to cast it once per 30 seconds. So I’m hardly using it, although I really ought to macro it to something.
I also dinged 91 and got my first Draenor perk: Improved Camouflage. (I’m a bad hunter because I never use Camo, right?)
Is it still considered a “perk” if I don’t use the base ability pretty much ever?
Also, Survival has a neat passive called Survivalist, which heals you (over 10s) for 15% of your total health after you kill a mob (presumably one that is worth honor or experience), which is nice.
One thing that’s bugging me is the lack of Aspect of the Hawk — but not for the reasons you may think. It’s because with Aspect of the Hawk, I had a reminder to turn off Aspect of the Cheetah. Also, it would automatically turn off Cheetah when I hit Hawk. I’m thinking I may just glyph Cheetah so I’m no longer dazed and it cancels the aspect when I’m hit. After years and years and years of training myself to hit Aspect of the Hawk to turn off Cheetah/Pack, I’m finding it difficult to remember to right-click it off, or hit the button again.
STAT SQUISH
Love it. Love everything being a couple of magnitudes lower than on live. It feels comfortable to look at a number like “1412” instead of “141,200”. I feel as though I can understand the smaller number a lot better.
I also picked up a couple of upgrades, like these legs:
And those numbers, 56 agility, 84 stamina, etc? Those look a lot better to me than the crazy numbers we have on live. I have 1634 agility on my legs on live. I’ll stick with double (mayyyyyyybe triple) digits over four digits any day. I wasn’t ever worried about the stat squish, but I am 100% on board with it. These are very similar numbers to what we saw on low-level blues in Wrath of the Lich King, like on stuff out of normal Violet Hold. (Seriously, look at the Tattooed Deerskin Leggings to compare.)
Anyhow, that’s about it for now. Anything you’re curious about? Let me know. I won’t really be able to stream (my upload rate is pathetic and resulted in a very poor streaming experience when I played around with it today), but I CAN do screenshots and talk about stuff!
And now, I leave you with this screenshot, without any context whatsoever. ;)
Welcome to what may be the last episode of the Kurncast hosted here at Kurn’s Corner! I’m planning on shifting it over to my guide site at kurn.info in the next week. Perhaps two weeks. Why? I want to get it listed in iTunes and Stitcher and such, and while I’m not really inclined to go get a domain name for it, I figure that it’s for the best to separate the podcast from my actual blog.
(Oh dear, this means I need to actually write more blog posts…)
Oh, and here’s the post linked from the Undermine Journal about making cash in Bastion of Twilight:
Finally, if you’re in need of webhosting, please do consider Bluehost! If you use this affiliate link, you’d also be helping to support me in various WoW-related efforts. Thanks so much! :)
Yesterday, June 4th, accounts started being flagged for the “Friends and Family Alpha” of Warlords of Draenor. Lots of people on my Twitter feed got in, but I didn’t. (Which, honestly, is okay. I hope I get in eventually, though, like once they hit actual Beta.) Anyhow, I was working on my forthcoming Raid Leader’s guide and I got to a bit about perks for raiders in your guild. One of the perks I suggested was giving raiders guild repairs and then I frowned, because I wasn’t sure how (with the item squish, etc) things were going to look in Warlords of Draenor. So I asked on Twitter if people could give me an idea of what repair costs looked like.
Thanks to THEEEEEE Matticus and Crow, it appears that things are significantly different in the Alpha than they are on live.
Repair cost is currently based on a simple formula. For green pieces of armor, it’s durability points to be repaired * (ilevel – 32.5) * 0.02 silver, assuming you’re neutral with the vendor. For rares, it’s the same, but multiplied by 0.025 silver and epics are the same but multiplied by 0.05 silver. (Then rep discounts kick in for 5% at friendly, 10% at honored, 15% at revered and 20% for exalted.)
So Matt threw himself off of a cliff a number of times:
@kurnmogh@unlimitedBLACK I hope you appreciate the number of times I jumped off a cliff to get you that number!
And he let me know that with all of his gear at RED durability (meaning 0 durability), the repair cost was 3g while Friendly with the Frostwolf Orcs. His gear was all green cloth (since he plays a priest) and his average ilvl was somewhere around 510.
So, hold the phone. We have 8 pieces of armor that are repairable (I didn’t even start taking weapons into account) and if they were ALL at 0 durability, the cost was around THREE GOLD to fully repair? This did not seem like how it is on live, even if they WERE greens and they WERE cloth.
So I did a quick test on the helm formula. Green cloth helms have a maximum of 70 durability points. So let’s plug that into the formula:
Durability Points to be repaired: 70
Mutiplied by (ilevel – 32.5, let’s say that’s 510 – 32.5) = 477.5
Multiplied by 0.02 silver
Multiplied by 0.95 to get our 5% friendly discount
That’s 70 x 477.5 x 0.02 x 0.95 = 635.075 silver.
Or, about 6 gold, 35 silver and 8 copper. Just for the helm. That’s double what Matt was reporting for his entire character!
To make sure I had the right formula, I got on live and bought a 429 ilvl green cloth helm, stripped my 90 warlock down to nothing except this new helm and went out and killed myself about 13 times to get to 0 durability on that helm (which had 70 durability points, losing 8% per death). My math gave me an estimated repair cost of 5 gold, 55 silver and 10 copper with a neutral vendor and a 4 gold, 44 silver and 8 copper repair cost with an exalted vendor. And, wouldn’t you know it, those estimates were spot-on when I went to repair at the a repair vendor in the Shrine (neutral) and the Shado-Pan repair vendor (exalted).
I verified with Matt that his helm was 70 durability and his chest was 115 durability (same as the current max durability points, although I had some confusion in there due to some outdated info) but it still seems as though costs for repairs have (at least in this Alpha build) dropped DRASTICALLY.
So — if you’re in the Alpha, let me know if you’ve noticed the cheaper repairs. Once character copies are working properly (as I understand they’re not? And Alliance isn’t even playable at the moment?), let me know if this carries over to the epics!
Obviously, this is only a very early Alpha build and I’m sure things will change, but I wonder if this sort of thing will stick…
And so, ladies and gentlemen, here I am with Episode 5 of the Kurncast!
This week’s episode talks a bit about tailoring and also various in-game titles you (and I) like. It also includes an extra-special bonus clip from May 19, 2013… What could that be about, I wonder? Only one way to find out — listen to Episode 5 of the Kurncast!
What’s your favourite in-game title and why? Let me know by hitting me up on Twitter: @kurnmogh.
Finally, if you’re in need of webhosting, please do consider Bluehost! If you use this affiliate link, you’d also be helping to support me in various WoW-related efforts. Thanks so much! :)
