All posts by Siha

I’m Shutting Up Now!

I just wanted to say two last things before I sign off for the day:

* Sorry for the spam, and I hope it hasn’t cluttered your RSS feeds too much. Those daily quest guides were a wall of information, and putting it all in one big post would have probably choked poor WordPress.

* I’d like to pimp Girls Don’t Game, a new(ish) video- and computer-gaming blog started by a friend of mine, Monique, and a friend of hers, Dana. So far, it’s shaping up to be an interesting and insightful collection of reviews and commentary, and it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on if you’re interested in computer gaming. And if you’re not interested in computer gaming, why are you reading this blog? :)

A Guide to Daily Quests: New in 2.3

Patch 2.3 has not yet been released, but it’s going to include a number of new daily quests. Here’s a brief introduction to them:

Instance Dailies

From the 2.3 Patch Notes:
New daily quests are available in the Lower City for 5 man heroic and non-heroic dungeons (Once at a time, a bit like battleground weekends, each day you will get quests for a different dungeons). The following non-heroic dungeons are concerned: Shattered Halls, Steamvault, Shadow Labyrinth, Black Morass, Botanica, Mechanar, and Arcatraz. All dungeons will get quests in Heroic mode. If you’re getting the non-heroic and the heroic quest on the same day for the same dungeon, you can complete both by running it in heroic mode once. Non heroic quests will reward you with a Ethereum Prison Key (various reputation), gold, and reputation with the Consortium. Heroic quests will give you 2 Badges of Justice, gold, and reputation with the Consortium

As an example, I’m looking on the test realm right now. The quest givers are two Ethereal NPCs in the Lower City, one aligned with the Consortium – Wind Trader Zhareem and Nether-Stalker Mah’duun. (They can be found by looking for a blue ! on the minimap – another new feature in 2.3.) The normal-mode daily quest today is for Steamvaults, and requires you to kill 14 Coilfang Myrmidons – reward: 16 gold and an Ethereum Prison Key. Today’s heroic-mode daily is for Heroic Old Hillsbrad, for the Epoch Hunter’s Head – reward: 24 gold and 2 Badges of Justice.

Battleground Dailies
Each day you can do one daily quest to win a battleground; the reward is 12 gold and 419 honor. The questgiver is in Lower City; I don’t know if there are also questgivers in other cities, or if it can be done before level 70. The problem with this quest, of course, is that it requires you to win a battleground, which is a problem in battlegroups where one faction dominates.

Cooking Dailies
I’ve been wondering how these are going to work, so here we go! The quest giver is a goblin called The Rokk <Master of Cooking> in the Lower City. Today he’s asking you to cook “Demon Broiled Surprise”.

“I want you to take my beloved cooking pot and head out to Blade’s Edge. Throw in some shortribs and crunchy serpent – already cooked for extra flavor – and broil it over an abyssal’s corpse, the only thing hot enough to do the trick.”

Rewards: 7.5 gold and either a Barrel of Fish (flavour text: “A warning label reads: Do Not Shoot”) or a Crate of Meat (flavour text: “Mostly meat and whatever else was sitting around.”) Both items are white-quality and BoP; they contain a few high-level cooking mats (scarce fish, useful meats, etc) and also have a chance to contain a new cooking recipe.

A Guide to Daily Quests III: Blade’s Edge

3. Blade’s Edge Quests
These give Ogri’la and Sha’tari Skyguard reputation. At Honored Skyguard you can catch a free flight straight from Skettis to Ogri’la, and vice-versa. These quests give you monetary rewards and Apexis Shards, which are used to power some quest items, buy rewards from the rep vendor (including health and mana pots that work in the Blade’s Edge plateaux and Gruul’s Lair) and buy flasks from the crystalforges in Forge Camp: Wrath and Bashir’s Landing. These flasks can be used in Gruul’s Lair, and are very useful for it. In the early days of these dailies you will be scrounging for Apexis Shards (which also drop off mobs killed in the area); after a few weeks, you’ll have more than you know what to do with.

3.1 Precursors:
These are the worst precursors of the lot, because they include 5x 5-man quests. Most of them can be 3- or 4-manned, but the second-last quest absolutely requires 5 people to summon the boss.

They begin with a quest from an ogre in Lower City (below the Scryer bank) to speak to Mog’dorg the Wizened, at the Circle of Blood in Blade’s Edge Mountains. Mog’dorg will give you 3x 5-man quests to kill gronns and loot items from them.

Continue reading A Guide to Daily Quests III: Blade’s Edge

A Guide to Daily Quests II: Skettis

2. Skettis Quests
These give Sha’tari Skyguard reputation. At Honored Skyguard you can catch a free flight straight from Skettis to Ogri’la, and vice-versa.

2.1 Precursor:
There is a quest-giver (Yuula) next to the griffon master in Shattrath City. She gives a quest to go and kill 20 ogres in the Barrier Hills, which are very close to Shattrath – just behind (NNW of) Aldor Rise. This is a fairly trivial quest; the ogres are easy pickings, although beware of some pathing elite ogres, and an elite gronn in one of the huts. After this, her follow-up quest sends you to Black Wind Landing, the Sha’tari camp at Skettis. Quickest way of getting there: griff to Allerian Stronghold and then fly SSE up into the mountains, if you’re Alliance. If you’re Horde, flying direct is quicker if you have an epic mount; otherwise, fly to Stonebreaker and head in from there.

2.2 Quest Details:
There are two daily quests available at Skettis. They give monetary rewards, and the escort quest also gives you 2 unstable mana pots or 2 volatile health pots.

Continue reading A Guide to Daily Quests II: Skettis

A Guide to Daily Quests I: Introduction

I originally wrote this guide for my guild forums; I’m reposting it here as it may be of use.

This guide is going to be full of old news to most of you, but I’m sure there are some folks who haven’t yet started on the dailies, and it’s my hope this will be of some use to them.

1. What is a Daily Quest?
A daily quest is, as the name suggests, a repeatable quest that can be done once a day. It usually has a non-repeatable precursor, and a decent cash payoff; dailies were brought in by the devs to help with providing a gold supply outside of farming, to reduce the demand for gold sellers’ services.

You can only do 10 daily quests per day, so if you have access to more than 10 quests, you have to choose which ones you want to do. Most daily quests give faction rewards as well as gold, and you can continue doing the dailies indefinitely even after you get Exalted with the relevant faction(s).

There are, so far, three types of daily quest: Skettis quests, Ogri’la quests and Netherwing quests, if one categorises them by quest location/faction. The devs have said there will be more types in future, including a cooking daily. (!) These should be coming in patch 2.3.

Note that for all daily quests currently in the game, you need a flying mount to access the areas involved, and the quests requires level 70. A level 70 without a griff could probably be summoned around by a party with a warlock, though.

[Quick links: Dailies I: Intro, Dailies II: Skettis, Dailies III: Blade’s Edge, Dailies IV: Netherwing]

The Joys of Rerolls

I’m an altaholic, I admit it. On my main server, Proudmoore, my character list looks something like this:

  • Level 70 Paladin
  • Level 70 Mage
  • Level 63 Priest
  • Level 37 Druid
  • Level 24 Shaman
  • Level 19 Hunter

plus two other attempts at hunters, another shaman, another priest and another paladin, all under twenty, and about seventy gazillion banker alts. (Why yes, I do have two accounts, how could you tell?) So when it comes to starting a new character, I have lots of options. I have plenty of cash to help them along their way; I have enough stockpiled resources to help them skill up any tradeskill; I have a higher-level character with whom I can dual-box to push them through any tricky quests.

I’ve recently started a little warrior alt on another server to play with a close friend, and it’s just weird; I’ve got none of those resources to hand. No twinking, no helping hands; what I’ve got is what I’ve got. Combine that with the fact that I’m playing with a default UI (since I’m not familiar with the warrior playstyle, I’m not sure how to configure things best yet), and it feels almost like a new game again – except I have to stop myself from watching the trade channel for familiar names, or thinking “oh, I’ll just swap to my banker alt and mail over some ore”. Good times.

Which makes me wonder, really – I know I’m not alone in generally clinging to my ‘main’ server, but I also know plenty of people will happily reroll on another server at the drop of a hat, and will very often have one or two characters on each of half a dozen servers. That kind of mindset is really alien to me, that willingness to shelve all the resources one has worked for and start over totally fresh, over and over again – but hey, as long as they’re having fun, more power to them. In the meantime, I’ll be over here on my lonely little warrior, looking sadly at her bank balance. :)

Welcome Aboard!

Welcome to Banana Shoulders, my all-new World of Warcraft blog. I intend to cover a mix of new features, in-depth analyses, a bit of theorycrafting, general tips and advice, and links to useful resources. I’ve played a paladin for coming up on three years now, but I also have a high-level priest and mage, and I try not to restrict myself to focusing on any one class. :)

I’ve been contemplating a World of Warcraft blog for a while, and have dithered on the issue for oh, months now. (Every time I listen to a WoW podcast I keep thinking “man, I could do this better”, but I know I don’t have the time for that!)

Why “Banana Shoulders”, though?

It’s something of a paladin in-joke, really. Those of you who were raiding Alliance-side in pre-Burning Crusade days may remember the delightful graphics of the Paladin Tier 1 set, aka “Lawbringer”. The helm looked a bit ridiculous, but you could hide that. You couldn’t hide your Lawbringer Spaulders, though, much as one wanted to.

See? Banana Shoulders. (You can kind of see why paladins were itching to upgrade to their Tier 2 Judgement Spaulders, right? ;-))

2.3: Cooking Dailies Again

Okay, time to summarise another of the cooking dailies. I’ll continue adding info about these as long as we’re seeing new ones pop up.

Soup For the Soul
Requires 4 Roasted Clefthoof (each of which takes one Clefthoof Meat, which drops off various types of Clefthoof beasts in Nagrand). Take the provided Cooking Pot to the Ancestral Grounds in Nagrand (at 26,61) and find the cooking fire (which is a middling-sized bonfire, rather than one of the cauldrons). Use the pot at the fire to combine the Roasted Clefthoof into a Spiritual Soup; return the soup to The Rokk to complete the quest.

Netherwing Eggs are rare?!

I’ve been doing the Netherwing faction grind lately, to get the Commander’s Badge for my tanking set, as it’s one of the best trinkets available to me at the moment. Netherwing Eggs (as described in my guide to the Netherwing dailies) are theoretically fairly rare, as well as highly-sought-after.

I must have the luck of the Irish, because somehow I generally manage to get anywhere from two to five eggs a day. They’re still exciting, mind you; my usual quest partner is probably now partly deaf thanks to my enthusiastic glee on TeamSpeak every time I find one. Today was a ‘typical’ day; I scored three of them, all ground spawns in the Nethermines. I’m sure I’ve had more than two dozen eggs by now, and boy howdy it speeds up the rep grind nicely*.

* – I’m now about 80% of the way through Revered – you only need Revered for the Commander’s Badge, but I figured “well, if I’m doing dailies for cash, I may as well do ones that get me Netherwing rep as well”. I’m not particularly enamoured of the Netherdrakes, but another Exalted rep to tuck under my belt is never a bad thing!

Zul'Aman

Coming up in patch 2.3, as most people would be aware, is a new 10-man raid instance to follow on from Karazhan: Zul’Aman. It’s another troll instance, in the fine tradition of Zul’Farrak and Zul’Gurub, populated by animal god bosses (the loas) and their worshippers. It’s meant to be a fast, fun instance for reasonably advanced casual guilds: it can be cleared in a few hours, there’s extra quest rewards for clearing it within a set timespan (think of the old 45-minute Strat Dead runs; same sort of deal) and it resets every three days.

To get a bit of an idea of what’s required, my guild went and gave it a bash on the Public Test Realm last weekend. It was certainly… educational. And bloody.

Very bloody.

This charming chap is Nalorakk the Bear God, the first boss of Zul’Aman. He alternates between his troll form (seen here) and a giant bear form, switching multiple times throughout the fight.

He’s a pretty tough boss, and needs two tanks to fight him. The tanks taunt him betwen them – one for troll phase, one for bear phase – and while he’s busy tearing new holes in them, the DPS kill him. He does some nasty DoT bleeds during bear form, and a silence, and a charge, and a two-target cleave, but he’s fairly simple. From a raid coordination perspective, he’s probably closest to Attumen in complexity; he’s certainly easier, strategy-wise, than Netherspite or Aran or the like. Gear-wise is a different story; he’s got about 1.7 million health and does high DPS, especially to the tank for the bear form phase. Our raid team was pretty much fully Kara-geared, but I suspect you wouldn’t need to be quite that well-geared; a cohesive team that can reliably do Illhoof-level bosses can probably do him, provided one tank is very well geared. A team with undergeared tanks is going to be in serious trouble, simply because Nalorakk puts out so much damage, particularly in the bear phase*.

(You can find more details about the strategy for fighting Nalorakk here at WoWwiki.)

And here you can see his inevitable death scene: we killed him on our second night, when we had a more suitable raid composition. It’s a fun and relatively easy boss fight, and certainly a good introduction to the zone; we didn’t have time to try the next boss, but word has it that the difficulty level on boss fights ramps up very quickly.

* Also, on a specific strategy note, Nalorakk does a 2-second silence during his bear phase, which can often lead to tank deaths, so having your healers maximise their HoTs during this period is a good idea.