Peter's Blog

More Blade's Edge

It looks like I'm drifting back into a daily blog habit but I'll try to keep it brief and general, no minutae.

Continued questing in Blade's Edge and it was kinda fun. Level 65-66's are pretty easy to kill and it was one sided and each quest gives about 9 gold. I've cleared lots of space from my bags and have been auto-looting and all the spider parts, lynx teeth and whatever all add up to gold. From two quests and vendoring I made maybe 30g in a 45 minute session. The flying mount helps at cheating in quests where otherwise you have to fight your way up to a tree house and you can just fly away afterwards. This emphasises my point about Blizzard's problems designing the next expansion, they are stopping you from flying up till level 78 because it is easier to design quests where you have to fight your way in and you can only have so many caves and buildings. Incidently, my current plan would be to level up as much as possible by grinding in Outlands before travelling to any new area, simply to avoid the crowds after release day.

I was killing so quickly that my mana was vanishing so I went back to Pauldrons of Surging Mana and Aspect of the Viper and mana stopped being a problem. I know they changed the mechanics of Aspect of the Viper in patch 2.2 but I haven't been using it enough to see what the difference is. I have also been contemplating issues like finishing a fight early with an Arcane Shot so that Mae stops 'casting' a little earlier and hence gains a little more mana before the next fight. However, it's hard for me to get over the fact that Arcane Shot costs twice as much mana as a Steady Shot.

By the end of the session Blink had got to loyalty 2 and had 60 odd training points so I decided to put them into max rank Claw and Cobra Reflexes, two dps talents. My original plan was to have him nothing but tanking talents but I feel a bit of dps will help him hold agro. I put talent points into both Bestial Discipline and Go for the Throat so he should have a nice focus pool to fuel his Clawing. I haven't trained him in Bite at all, I don't think he needs it and I want his Warp available, it is so nice for going from one mob to the next during a big fight. Blink is proving to be a great pet, I think I prefer him to Tiddles simply because of the warp. The only problem with warp is that sometimes he warps off to defend me from something and I have trouble finding him and I have to use the minimap.

Mae's bow skill has stalled at 349 but that seems good enough for 1100 crits against level 66's. With Blink clawing away they maintain about 400 dps according to DamageMeters, 500 if the crit dice roll a few sixes. Reminds me to look at scopes.

I think I'm going to carry on questing for the moment, go through Blades Edge, Netherstorm and Shadowmoon. All the advise I am getting is to do the group quests to get into Ogri'la so I'll see what I can do.