The Blog From Hell

Sorry for the long gap between diaries but I haven’t been playing on OMGpwnies much of late due to a time-out from gaming over-all and some heavier responsibilities on my main. But I did go back in yesterday to cash in on the poledancing] XP bonus from the fire-festival. Which consisted for this alt of dancing around the nearest pole till the buff was maxed out, and then doing random dungeons till I dinged.

That took two. The first I got was (yet another) run through scarlet monastry, this time the third quarter, I am so sick of SM by now because it’s all I’ve seen since I’ve hit level 30. With one quarter left of the achievement I suspect I’ll be going back at least one more time – possibly even on purpose however. The annoying thing about the monastry is that it’s quarters are fairly small, while you can run through them fairly quickly – they are annoying at times and because the XP gained is so low, you end up running them many times per ding.

Something was odd this time though… there was literally no attempt to follow the usual tank-and-spank tactic. Players just ran and pulled, confident of being sufficiently OP’d to survive. After a few minutes I told them.

"I’m not going to beg you to let the tank pull, since clearly you don’t think you need it. But if you wipe, it’s not my fault" and let them get on with it, making some effort to pull aggro back where I could but not in the mood to make an issue out of it. The ones doing so did get on other people’s nerves and despite their short length we had a high turn-over of players as everybody who wasn’t higly overgeared was scared by the propensity for aggro to be spread around the players (that’s what happens when you run ahead and don’t let the tank pull – he can’t get all the mobs back at once). Oh well, finished it without too much hassle.

Next I got razorfen downs, where I had not been before. The same pattern emerged though to a lesser extent. At least it was only one player pulling and it was easy enough to pull aggro back, again I chose not to complain or let it phase me. The mobs were pretty weak and with my heirlooms I outgeared them – as did most of the group (this seems to be a pattern with alt-levelers, their characters are twinked and approach dungeons like a high-speed race without much regard for tactics, as they just don’t need them).

Razorfen is definitely longer than the monastry quarters, but not as much as the early instances like gnomeregan and deadmines. I suspect it was a really fun instance back in the day, requiring some genuine teamwork. Now it was a fast XP grind with mobs going down faster than the grass blades at a lawnmower convention. Bosses didn’t do much better, so little better that I didn’t recognize one of them (glutton) as being a boss until after he was dead and dropped an epic.

Luckilly, he wasn’t hard to tank either. As we approach the last boss I asked if I would at least be allowed to do the pull there – I did this for two reasons. Firstly because I do need the proper practise, and secondly because it was the final boss after all and we may not be quite so OP’d there as these players so confidently believed themselves to be. There was all-around consent for the request and the healer wanted a manabreak.

Soon as that was finished, I ran in – taunted and turned the boss neatly around. I haven’t had such a smooth boss pull since back in the early level 20′s. Kept the bos’s full attention uninterupted for the duration of the fight and even managed to keep most of the ads on me for a very smooth bossfight that went down perfectly well and got me my ding.

In other news, patch 3.5.5 went live for US users today, some QQ’s abound about bugs found – most in the new issues and most stuff we know how to deal with as they were there before but surprisingly no official word yet on operation gnomeregan which was scheduled to go out with this patch. The patch notes didn’t mention it, and neither does the known issues list. The patchnotes does say that Ruby Sanctum will only come out later, but as yet I could not find confirmation if the gnomeregan event is live or not (it could of course, be delayed with the sanctum but I haven’t read anything to that effect either).

Us on the European servers will be getting the patch next week, so I guess we’ll know then.

T10 gear – what a chore. It all begins with the base sets, which you have to buy with emblems of frosts, the upgrades require having the originals already so you can’t skip the base set. Though you can slowly upgrade the base set as you then raid, in ICC mostly.
So how long does it take to get T10 ? Well you need 350 Frosties for a full T10 set, including back armor. But let’s work on the first piece post back-armor (since that is usually the first people get). T10 headgear – 95 frosties. Most other items are that or higher, so it’s a good measure to work with.
The easiest and most guaranteed way to get frosties is to do a random heroic dungeon each day. The first one completed per day, gives you 2 frosties as a reward.
If you thus only do your daily HC for frosts (keep in mind, additional randoms only reward triumphs, which while useful for things like T9 or heirlooms – does not buy T10). It would take you
48 days to get enough for T10 headgear (and one to spare)… or about 6 weeks at 14 per week.

Now you can cut this down by doing the weekly raid quests. A daily random gives you 14 per week, add the weekly raid and you get another 5 – bringing you to 19 per week. Thus your headgear will now take 5 weeks to do – that’s just about 7 days saved over-all. It’s a start. Can you cut it down further ?
Well you can get a few from other quests, but those only work once – let’s assume they were used for back-armor already to make the maths simpler but if not – go find the NPC in Dala and pick up the Lady Jaina Proudmore questline through FoS, PoS and HoR for 8 more frosties.
There’s two more available in a non-ICC raid – from the final boss in VoA you can get 2. Due to raid-saves, you can only do that once a week… well actually twice if you do it on 10-man and 25-man each week – you could add another 4 frosties per week from there.
So that means you can grind 23 frosties per week now. At that rate you will need 4 weeks for your headgear, cool we’ve shaved off another week from the grind.

Finally there are some that drops in ICC itself, including from the Lich King but frankly, you don’t want to fight him in T9 anyway. There is one more option – the weekly ICC raids. They are tough – and likely only become an option when you’ve got a few T10 pieces. Those weekly’s reward the sack. Which has a guaranteed drop of 5 frosties. If you can do them all then that means 28 frosties a week become possible. Voila – 3 weeks to next item. Of course since you get these in the upper levels of ICC – you probably won’t even get to start till you have a few frost items already, at least bridging you over 5K in your gearscore. It should cut down a bit on the last part of the grind at least though.

So all in all… expect a minimum of 4 weeks to get your first T10 item, then probably as much for the next. By then you should be able to cut the last items to 3 weeks… but this is where it gets a little cooler. You only need 4/5 for the T10 set bonus… so chances are actually rather good that by now you’ll get a 264 drop for at least one slot – that’s a slot you don’t need frosties for.
Add it all up, and you can expect the process to be ready for the Lich King gear wise (skill is another matter) to take you 2X4+2X3 = 8+6 = 14 weeks.

Have fun grinding. Yikes.