Lo-Quality WoW

Considering this is a patch post, I probably should be writing this under my generic title. The problem is, most of my experience was doing it as my hunter and my hunter, who I play the most, is the one I would have the easiest time noticing any changes. So it’s being shoved under my “Lo-Quality Hunter” rather than “Lo-Quality WoW” label.

Well, since I logged in at Dalaran, the first thing up was doing the Northrend “Orphan quests”. If you forget, you should also receive a notice in the mail letting you know that the orphans need help. For the quest, you take either a wolvar or oracle orphan around, just like the regular Children’s week quest lines. Fortunately, you don’t need to have rep with either the Oracles or the Frenzyheart to do them, you just choose which you want, which will also determine which companion pet you get at the end. That is assuming you can talk to the orphan matron.

I don’t know if people are naturally idiots or just being dicks but since the matron was in an outdoor location, guys came up to her on their mounts and either blocked most other people indirectly from her, or covered her completely. Meaning you had to be lucky, see where her shoe was, and click on her, which I did. Plus, given that it was a new patch, everyone was on and doing all the neat new stuff, it was also laggy as heck. Meaning you did click on her, then waited two or three minutes for the quest to pop up on your screen.

I decided to do the wolvar orphan, although I am doing the oracle with my warrior. Again, similar to the regular children’s week quests, you get three locations, then two more than an extra on at the end. For the wolvar, you take him to Grizzlemaw in Grizzly Hills, the Bronze Dragonshrine, and to Snowfall glade. The glade one is specific to the wolvar quest line because the oracle one has you take your orphan to Winterfin Retreat over in the Borean Tundra. Considering your orphan is looking for “playmates” for the type specific quest, it’s a good thing you just go there. Wouldn’t want to take your orphan to a place with new playmates only to have to slaughter them before the orphan as they attack you.

Next set, you take the wolvar orphan to visit Alexstrasza at the top of Wyrmrest temple and Nesingway over at Sholazar. The oracle orphan also visits Alexstrasza but instead of Nesignway, visits Etymidian over in Sholazar. Once those two visits are over, you go back to Dalaran, pick up a Small Paper Zeppelin from the Wonderworks to throw to them, and then it’s back to the orphanage. Sometime after that, you’ll receive a letter from your orphan along with the means to summon your new companion pet!

Next up was trying the new Argent Tournament dailies. The lumber and stone dailies are no longer there since the coliseum is now built. The Champion quests have changed slightly (I no longer have the Valiant ones with my hunter, I’ll have to see if they have changed with my warrior.) Instead of 15 general Scourge, you now have to kill 15 cultist. And the battle before the gate one requires 3 commanders to be downed. But don’t fret, I had the impression that they made the mounted combat part easier. Or at least I seemed to take down the champions faster than I used to while taking less damage, and managed to take out three by myself.

Then I did the Crusader dailies. These take you to either newly populated or just completely new outdoor areas. The ones I had were relatively easy. Also, there’s a continuation of the black knight quest chain. My only issue with it is that I wish Blizzard would stop having only one specific mob that needs to be killed for the drop needed on the quest. Or at least increase the respawn rate. I had six other guys with me waiting for one mob to pop up. Fortunately, since it was only Champions, it wasn’t as many people as it could have been plus everyone was actually nice and took turns about it, instead of the usual “mob pops up and everyone shoots it in the hope of doing the tag” method.

The next thing I tried was the Trial of the Champion. Except, being the dummy I am, I read up on the Trial of the Crusader by accident so I was completely surprised by the battle. Anyway, a guild team needed a fifth and I was it. It’s a three round match, the first “round” being with three champions for the opposing faction. (In other words, my group faced off against three horde champions and I’m sure horde faces alliance champions.)

This is a mounted fight initially, with the champion being escorted by a couple of other mobs. Generally you take the mobs out a group at a time, basically if you’re near, use your thrust, otherwise you should be doing shield-breakers and charges when at a distance. There’s several ways to do it with either concentrated attacks or how we did it which was generally hit who you can with the ranged attacks and keep switching targets to further targets. I did get knocked off my horse at one point but managed to make my way to the edge of the ring and hop on another to rejoin the fight.

Once the champions have all been unhorsed, everyone jumps off their horses and it becomes another battle. Since each champion is a player class, expect the regular things you do from humanoid battles. Healing, rogue stealth attacks, stuns, all the fun stuff. A little chaotic depending on where everyone is when you jump off your horse, but not too bad.

The second fight is with members of the Argent Crusade I believe. We faced Argent Confessor Paletress who pulls a “memory” out to fight us, generally a boss or elite you’ve probably killed at some time in the past. Fortunately, they only have special abilities of being a memory rather than the actual abilities of that boss, especially since we ended up with Heigan. I would have hated to suddenly have to do the safety dance in there. You take the memory out, then back to the confessor. Why? Because the confessor is more or less immune to damage until the memory is gone. Neat trick eh? The other person you can face it Eadric the Pure which I’m told is just a tank and spank fight. I’ll have to see if I can catch it next time.

Lastly, you face off again the Black Knight. Again. For a dead dude, he sure gets around. It’s a three phase fight. The first phase is pretty standard with a ghoul add with an annoying charge attack. However, once you have him down, he pops back up as a skeleton. This is a little more annoying because he brings friends with an Army of the Dead type spell. The mobs are weak but have an annoying habit of chasing your healer around the room. Once you have him down, he pops back up. Again. This time as a ghost. No adds, but whatever he did managed to kill our healer but we killed him before he got the rest of us.

Not bad, kinda fun and because of the slight randomness of what you’re gonna get each time, something that’ll keep you slight on your toes. The drops are pretty decent gear, regular Naxx level or so. Or at least nothing dropped that I would even considering to swap my gear for. The group I was with wanted to run a few more but my guild wanted to do a few things.

So I then found myself with guildmates heading over to Utgarde Keep to do a “timed run.” As I mentioned before, the last time we went in, we did it at a pretty good clip. So we decided to see how fast we could do it. Our druid did the tanking, we had my hunter, one of our death knights, a priest for healing and we pulled another death knight from the Solitaires for additional dps. From the instant we entered the entrance until Ingvar the Plunderer went down, it took 26 minutes and 15 seconds. We could easily have shaved off two additional minutes because at one point we lost two people and it took a bit for them to get back and rebuff. We’ll probably try it a few more times, especially since you now get Emblem of Conquest now.

Then we decided to do a Violet Hold as well. And of course just as we enter is when the Agency guys contacted me and the PKT druid to come do their VoA run. They were running about 2 hours after their normal run time, which is why we went and started running guild instances. We gave our apologies and went in to Violet Hold. The first boss we pulled was Moragg. Naturally I pulled the Optic Link a couple of times, but then again I forgot to close in on him. Either way, it was no problem. However, the next boss we had was Xevozz and our tank forgot if he was supposed to kite him or not. Thus his two little energy balls got close to him and he wiped the group out. Next try, we did kite him around as we should, although the tank went a little too fast and actually pulled him back to one of the balls, which fortunately dissolved about a few seconds later. Otherwise, this one fell easy.

Let’s see, what else in the patch? They changed a few things like the title choosing and the mail sender lists to be scroll lists, which is nice. The quest panel is now dual-paned, making it easier to read the text but also takes up a lot of room on your screen. The comparison feature is nice, telling you exactly how your stats will differ with the new gear. I would have hoped several of my addons would have been 3.2 ready but the only ones I had were questhelper and recount. The PKT druid does like his new cat skin but isn’t as happy with his new bear skin. I know everyone is happy about the new arrangements with the riding skill and mounts. The place is just too darn big to try to travel everywhere on foot.

I’ll have to play some more to see what else has changed and affects me. I know that my hunter’s traps are now on separate cooldown categories, which is nice since I can now use my black arrow and still drop frost traps for the Gluth kiting fun. They also adjusted Lock and Load but I haven’t really noticed it being affected yet. I also know I picked up a bunch of achievements but I haven’t really gone through the list. Guess we’ll see how tonight goes.