Peter's Blog

Changed Realm

I have moved Maevyn and Pook to eu-eonar where they could be with an alt I was fond of. Eonar is a bit quieter than aerie peak and I prefer it. The tranfer process only took about half an hour despite all the warnings about not being able to play for five days you get while signing up. I left Sissle and the old auction alt on Aerie Peak. I have gone off levelling a priest, the range of offensive tools sounds limited.

Maevyn

Maevyn is currently level 66. Since I figured out that steady shot is far more efficient than arcane shot I have altered my grinding macro as follows:

/petattack
/castsequence [reset=18] hunter's mark, scorpid sting, steady shot, steady shot

Two steady shots uses slightly more mana than one arcane but gives twice the damage. Result? Killing average mob takes circa twenty seconds and thus is tolerable. I press a mouse button four times and wait for mob to die. Mana lasts a few minutes of constant killing, longer if I switch to Aspect of the Viper where the extra mana dribble makes up for loss of dps from Aspect of the Hawk.

Mae has died about three times in the last three or four levels, twice through falling from high places and once through being dismounted when riding through a camp. Mini-map tracking and being aware of ones surrounding s ftw

She has joined the scryers, primarily because it is not fatal to fall off their lift...

At level 66 and still fighting level 63's in TK forest things are easy but quest rewards are for sub-optimal gear. Doesn't matter much against sub-optimal opposition. Armed with a nice blue gun Mae and Tiddles tooltip dps is about 320 compared to pook's 125.

Tiddles

Tiddles is level 64. Have tried the following pets:

ravager

very good dps pet, didn't come with dash and so was slow into fights and didn't run it long enough to train it up. Got a random whisper asking me how I got it's armour so high: over 7000 with no training and comparable to pooky! Some of that comes from Mae's armour and her predilection for +agility.

warp hunter

the warping into a fight is great but again didn't aquire enough training points to train it with bite/claw so it's dps was noticably lacklustre. I definitely trained a level 64 warp hunter from the bone wastes in TK forest but as soon as it was tamed it's label changed to warp stalker. Warp stalkers are to be avoided as pets as they have caster stats. If you don't know what that means then good luck running a hunter.

I realised that while I was messing around with other pets Tiddles levelling was lagging and as pets level VERY slowly > 60 I'm concentrating on Tiddles to make sure she reaches 70 at more or less the same time as Maevyn.

Pookypoo

He's now my auction alt. I can't be bothered to run him, paladin grinding is beyond tedium compared to hunters (two kills and a mana break). I've done research and I think his problem is his gear is crap: he's got lots of +spelldamage but as a retribution paladin he ought to have AP, strength and agility. I'm working on changing his gear but each item change seems to be costing him stamina. I recommend the Ratings Buster addon when gear shopping.

Maezyn

My new Dranai huntress with a Nightstalker cat called... Pook. Level 13 and taking about eight seconds to kill the average mob. I plan to level her as marksman to see what that is like. I run her while Maevyn gets rest bonus: I am refusing to waste my time levelling Maevyn without it.

Maezyn is skinning but I've vacillated about her second profession going through mining, leatherworking, engineering and then mining again. I feel that crafting professions other than alchemy are a waste of time until the point where you can make level 70 epics which is too far away for Maezyn to worry about. I think Maezyn will skin and mine and make nothing more than money.

Alchemy

Maevyn is about 353 alchemy. She can transmute primal mights but there isn't a lot of money in it without farming materials so she is still transmuting arcanite for fun and profit. Borderline tempted to farm Sporeggar rep for the easy-money transmute primal earth->water recipe but it involves killing 432 naga.

Maevyn rarely uses health pots and the drops she gets suffice. She uses unstable mana pots using the ragveil from Zangarmarsh when she needs a quick mana fix. These are the only pots she bothers to make.

Incidently you can buy the primal might transmute recipe from a bird man in shattrath, although it's green it isn't a drop. Don't get suckered into buying it from the AH like I did

Secondary professions

Fishing

got it over 250. Found that by binding a key to cast and using auto-loot one can catch maybe four fish a minute and hence go at a more reasonable pace. Must be in mood for it. Need about 500 more catches to get to level 300

Cooking

267. Deciding whether to level cooking with or without fish. Without means returning to Silithus to farm sand worms, with means fishing in Azshara at a point where level 250 ain't good enough, even with +75 baubles. Ultimately enough meat drops to keep tiddles happy and Mae is productive enough without the buffs from cooked meats so I would only level these up for completeness.

First Aid

got a billion netherweave cloths and could get it to 375 at will but can't be bothered. A stack of netherweave bandages vendors for 2g.

Money

Through vendoring her Outlands drops Maevyn has already got enough cash for the basic flying mount.

LOTRO

I bought a copy of Lord of the Rings Online but can't get past the first quest (which for some reason it makes me repeat whenever I start the game up, and once I've done that quest I'm bored and want to do something else). It's like a WoW clone with higher resolution graphics but choppy frame rate, even on 2.6GHz dual core. The loader program is buggy: I never recall WoW showing me a stack dump. I've cancelled the subscription.