Peter's Blog

Why the V

I remember now why I mapped V to arcane shot. I had a go at kiting and V was a more convenient place for it than the 8 button.

My first attempt at kiting was with a ravager in Hellfire Peninsular. Essentially I did the following:

• set pet on passive (don't want it interfering, grabbing agro etc)
• target ravager
• shoot at it
• run away
• aspect of the cheetah
• whenever cooldown is up, jump, spin 180 degrees, fire arcane shot, spin back, carry on running

It was actually much easier than I though it would be. My main problem was not waiting long enough for the arcane shot to cooldown. Also ravagers seem to make this easy as they don't run very fast, I had to keep stopping to let it catch up. Anyway the V key is close enough to ASDW for me to be able to run in the right direction, spin with the mouse and shoot.

Satisfied with the ravager I tried a Raging Colossus, a level 63 elite. I tried kiting it along the hellfire road but they move very slowly and it was too easy to get out of agro range, so it would turn back and go home. After a few trys it seemed as if there was some kind of barrier to stop them being kited.

Next try was Boglash the elite marsh walker thing in Zangarmarsh. I kited him (her?) to the Cenarian place nearby and the cenarians hacked it to bits for me. Nice but I didn't get credited with the kill No drops, no quest complete, nothing. Bah.

I tried again with the level 63 elite at the pools of watsit but I had big problems there keeping my kiting path clear of demons and slime things and eventually I gave up.

I forgot about kiting after that as nothing required it. I've killed a couple of elites but mainly through firepower and dextrous trapping (e.g. the guy who splits into three). Then this weekend I had two goes at trying to kill a level 65 elite bird, one try ending in a wipe (albeit very close), the second a pet death and feign death (which caused the elite to vanish). Only later did I remember the kiting option. I may give it another try only I have to kill another bird some distance away to get the meat to attract the elite and I have to do this on every attempt. It would be cool to kill the bird, apart from the satisfaction of soloing a group quest the reward is a nice trinket.

The regular questing is getting very samey and I am having motivation problems (another bird camp to attack? Yawn). Soloing group quests may lighten things up.

Money Money Money

I had a nice blue jewelcrafting design drop from an infected tree thing. It sold in less than a day for 150g, the most I have ever sold anything for. I think the buyer may have put it back up for 400g but I'm happy. Allakhazan had it's median price as 250g but I prefer to sell things fast.

I invested the profits in primals and made another 30g selling a single Primal Might and I still have the mats for another one. Primal Mights need five other primals to make (Fire, Air, Water, Mana, Earth). It is not economic to buy them all but I had Earth and Fire from my grinding and that makes the difference.

I had enough Netherweave to make 81 heavy netherweave bandages so I made them all and vendored all the stacks but one for 4g80 each, getting first aid to 375 in the process. Netherweave would probably auction for more but if vendoring profits involve the letter g I'm not all that bothered. Besides, with so many clothy green drops in the game it's not like I'm depriving the clothy classes of their raw materials.

As I was flush with cash I bought 25g of herbs to get my alchemy to 360 (Super Mana Potions). It doesn't seem that far to the magical 375 mark. A splurge in the Ah would probably see to it but I would need a very good reason to do that: decent (i.e. useful to me) recipes are few and far between, this is the only thing on my must have list.

There don't seem to be any BoE blue weapons in the game between the Gunblade at 65 and the epics at level 70. This makes levelling quite economical, lots of money coming in but not much to spend it on apart from powerlevelling professions.