Peter's Blog

Life as a Level 70 Farmer

Flying is fun, although you only realise how slow the normal flying mount is when you take a griffen ride. An epic would be nice.

I decided to level up the bow skill with some easy grinding on level 66 Ogres in Nagrand, specifically the Warmauls in the north-west as I didn't get much competition. I've collected enough Obsidian Warbeads to convince the Kurenai to sell me the BRK approved leather shoulders which are certainly better for dps than the Pauldrons of Surging Mana which do absolutely nothing for dps apart from sustain it with a mana dribble. I'm keeping both pairs of shoulders to help me switch between dps and farming mode.

Have found occasion to attack camps of level 71-72's and am happy to say I can kill them in less than 30 seconds. They are tough, Tiddles needs lots of healing but they are doable. Found mana thistle in the camps, not too keen on having to kill three level 71's for a single sprig but what else can I do?

I've started grinding Skyguard rep, I found Skettis and did the bird egg bombing daily quest. It's quite easy although I have been dismounted from the flying mount by the angry birds and plummeted to my death. The graveyard is nearby. I may go for the Nether Ray mount although they are pretty ugly things. The epic bird mounts don't look as nice to me as the snowy ordinary mount. At the least I would like the Skyguard cape with the slow fall facility to avoid the plummetting.

In other news, I got enough halaa tokens to buy the one 18 slot bag they will give me, although it'll take a lot of juggling stuff out of a 16 slot bag to replace it with the 18. I can then use the 16 in the bank to replace an old 10 or something I am using there.

Pet News

While grinding the ogres I found Corki in a cage which led me to another level 67 elite that I couldn't burn down before it had killed Tiddles. Ok it's a three-player group quest but it bothers me that I can't handle it. I've decided I need a tanking pet, something tough with all it's talent points spent on health and armour rather than things like dash and claw.

There were two candidates that were available at levels 69-70: Scorpids and Warp Stalkers. The scorpids have better armour than Warp Stalkers (+10 over +5) but Warp Stalkers have the awesome Warp ability where they warp to the target monster instantly. I decided this ability would give the stalker the potential to be a good tank/farming pet. The scorpids have a scorpid sting facility which has recently been nerfed to uselessness and I don't think they can learn dash which makes them pretty hopeless.

I flew to Skettis and the first Warp Stalker (Blackwind Warp Chaser to be precise) was a level 70: great no levelling needed so I just grabbed it (freeze/tame, no probs). I trained it with max rank Growl and took it to the Firewing place to grind signets for Aldor rep, easy level 63 kills but it was nearby and it would give us time to bond.

Oh, it is wonderful the way he warps into a fight, he's there before I've let go of the mouse button. I've called him 'Blink'. Another nice thing about the warp ability is that it's cooldown is only 15 seconds so it's normally available for the next fight. Fighting two casters, he will even warp from one to the other once the first is killed. I'm getting nice 1200 steady shot crits now the bow skill is 349 and the new shoulders have upped my crit to 15%.

I had my first play with 'Misdirection'. I set misdirection on Blink, then did an aimed shot at a melee mob. It worked! 900 odd damage and the mob ran straight at Blink. Easy pulling!

I compared Blink's stamina/armour stats to Tiddles and he is actually a tiny bit lower in both numbers because his loyalty is still minimum and I haven't trained him in Greater Stamina and Natural Armour. My plan is to train him in ONLY these and no dps abilities as there are not enough talent points for both.

I don't really think this will help him tank a tough level 67 elite but it will help. Incidently, I walked over a level 65 elite earlier in the quest chain. Twice. And the first time I didn't realise he was elite when I started the fight.

Professions

I'm mulling over whether to switch professions around. Swapping Mae's Alchemy with Pook's Mining makes big sense. Mae has the flying mount and can farm herbs and ores easily, Pook sits in ironforge and can make pots and transmute and I can save his blacksmithing for if I ever run him again. Mae has huge herb stocks, probably over half the mats I would need to get pooky up to level 350 where he can transmute.

The only downside to the plan would be that I wasted the Sporeggar rep I ground to get the primal earth->water transmute. I wouldn't want to have to kill 450 naga with a paladin to get it again. That would take weeks.

I could start off by dropping Pook's mining and training him in alchemy and enjoying double transmutation bandwidth.