PieHands is not addicted to the World of Warcraft

The next day, he was online, and we got cracking, killing our way through Stromgarde keep. He was level 41 and I was 39. It was awesome! Each of us was powerful enough to kill these enemies without too much difficulty. Teaming up on them was a breeze, and they could never muster a force larger than three, so we didn’t have much trouble taking them out.

Our only combat strategy was “you rend and thunderstrike, I’ll hamstring and sunder armor”, although we quickly realized that we could both rend and the target would get hit with both debuffs.

We ran into a little trouble up on the third floor, where two boss characters were hanging out with some drinking buddies. We both died twice, but then grouped with a dwarf hunter and killed everyone up there. It was super fun!

The next day we grouped again and wandered the countryside, trying to collect prison keys from the elementals. It was really fun!

These individuals were tougher, but they didn’t run from fights, so it was easy to keep from pulling more than we could handle. Fighting a dinosaur on the plains, I leaned over to skin the body. “Piehands picks up Heavy Leather”.

“Oh no way!” his fighter has forging, and could not believe that I could get a valuable skin so easily. This was going to be a good partnership! We ran from Dino to dino, killing and skinning them. I had to actually get him to stop and loot the bodies first, so their corpses were free for me to skin.

At one point, we were wandering around, searching for Fozzruk, the 41st level giant who cruises from elemental circle to another.

On the road nearby, we ran up on a pack of undead warriors escorting a zombie courier down the road. We both noticed them at the same time and jumped backward.

“Aye! We almost ran into them!”.
They looked like a tough bunch, moving together and impossible to cull singles off of the group. Also, they were zombies.

BUT! They were only level 35, and we were 39 and 41. I considered it.

“Lets kill them all”. I ventured.
They were shambling away at a snail’s pace.
“Ok.”

We ran at them.

At the time, and now again, as I tell the story, I was filled with an incredible surge of excitement and power. We could totally do this, right? It looked _scary_, and we were diving in anyway.  After being in 1,000 fights with creatures I knew what I could beat: anything at or just above my own level, or two creatures just below my level, unless they were elites.
This was a different calculation: A pack of five or six zombies four levels below us.  It seemed possible, and we were jumping in, because there was no half-way. It was all or nothing: these zombies were going down!

We charged in and started swinging, using Thunderstrike liberally as one of our few multi-opponent attacks.  Chop! chop! chop!  They fell, and a little pile of glittering corpses piled up at our feet. We got ‘em!

“Yeah!” It was an awesome moment of triumph, and we both jumped up and down.

One of them was a courier, and grabbing his loot, it looked like this little venture had completed a quest for me! Bonus!

Well well! Piehands is back!
My brother has been playing more often than I, and Cigar, my priest, has not been able to keep up. In fact, I am only at level 22 while he has attained level 40. I really only got onto the Nordrassil server because I wanted to be able to team up with him, which was absolutely not working out.

However, I had another option and I took it. I paid $25 and did a paid character transfer, moving my main character (Piehands) to the Nordrassil server.  It is perfect, except that it cost $25, and we are both warriors. The process was pretty easy. I had to make sure my mailbox was empty, which was easy, because I had been completely ignoring this character. All his mail was gone. Whoops.

The rules said that it might take a week, but it only took one day. Piehands awoke in the same place (Southshore), in a new dimension.  I lost my old guild affiliation, which was fine, and my friends list was also blank.  I’ll bet that if I had been transferred as a ghost, that I would have auto-magically been resurrected too.

Immediately I sent a word out to my brother. I had arrived! Lets team up and kill stuff!

The first thing I did was to check the mailbox for 5 gold. Nope! I sent a quick reminder.
This would be a good social experiment, to send people money and see who responded.

I also arranged all the stuff in my bags to help make sorting faster in the future. The trick here is to fill the bags from the bottom up, so that items which are stashed in the field don’t get mixed up and around all of your collectables and fine washables.

One bag contained all of my consumable buffs, one was for herbs (the herb bag). I lined the bottom of one with things destined for the auction house, and filled one with everyday tools.

My mission for the evening was to complete the “lost master” moonstalker pelts task. For this one, I needed to find a certain particular version of the moonstalker cats and collect five pelts. This was a lot harder than it sounds.

First I killed my way south. This map is chock full of bears. Damn there are a lot of bears. What are all these bears eating? The foster farms chicken ranch couldn’t support this many bears! After killing eight bears, I started dodging them, often weaving in and out of the trees to avoid fighting any more of them.

I passed the junior moonstalkers, the juveniles, the teen moonstalkers, the angsty moonstalkers, the coed moonstalkers, the young adults, the undergrads, the frat moonstalkers, the yuppie moonstalkers, the 30-something moonstalkers and the milf moonstalkers. Finally, I started seeing the moonstalker sires, and it was time to collect my pelts. Man, they would not drop. I hunted and killed seven for three pelts. That isn’t even counting the moonstalker matrons and runts I had to kill. Damn! Anyway, finally I got enough and headed back into town. Some elf in town helped make them into a fancy cloak with ONE charge of invisiblity, warning me to not use the invisibility until I was close to the cave (where I would rescue an injured guy).

I took the cloak, but did not wear it, because I didn’t want to start the timer ticking on my invisiblity. Grimclaw the polar bear was there to help me find the cave, and sure enough, it was surrounded by moonkin. I put on the cloak and silently walked past them into the…

Oh, they can see me.

By the time I realize this, there are six of them attacking me. I ran into the cave to find Voltron (or whatever) but died pretty quickly after that.

Lame. I guess I was supposed to “activate” the cloak somehow. Hm.

For some unknown reason my undead wisp appeared at the far north end of the map! Arr! It took a good 5 minutes to fly back to the cave. I was determined to not die again.

Luckily, being in the cave was an advantage. Voltron asked for the cloak and wore it himself. He asked if I wanted to sneak out or fight out. That was a neat surprise.
I said “sneak out” and he transformed into a cat and disappeared!

I was sure I was going to get swarmed coming out of the cave, but I hugged the wall and snuck out unnoticed. I ran north and cashed in the quest! Yes. Something went right!

Last night I started in Darnassus auction house, ready to finish up my business from the night before. When I checked my auctions, I only had four still going. Wow! I had initiated about 20 auctions the night before, and staggeringly, almost all of them had ended! Someone bought all of my crap! Alright!

On my way over to the mailbox, someone…bloodymouse? yelled on the general channel that he was looking to sell a netherweave bag (16 slot) for 5 gold. I told him yea, but that I would have to wait a minute before I could pay, because I was on my way to pick up my fresh money from the auction house.

I felt like that guy who never quite has enough money for gas…

Anyway, he offered to just mail it to me COD, and I let him know that would be great.

The mailbox had a ton of money in it, 17 gold total, from about as many auctions. This was great. I guess that is what happens when you sell raw materials over the weekend. I also did a little auction-gaming, buying some pearls at a very low price and selling my own for a higher price.

No bag yet though.

I jogged and flew back to darkshore, feeling rich because I had about 20 gold, (which is a lot for my 21st level character, in my opinion). I checked my quests, and just before I left town, I checked the mailbox one last time. Yes! My bag had arrived. I quickly sent the seller his money, and went to pick up the bag. ACH! I totally spaced on how the COD mechanism worked. I couldn’t actually pick up the bag without paying another 5 gold! Ah!! Well, I picked it up anyway, and quickly sent a letter to bloodymouse, asking for my second payment back! Rats!

Then I ran south and hooked up with a Draenai Priest in an attempt to kill Murkdeep the Murlock. That was fun! Two priests against an ugly mob of fishmen. A lot of holy fire and complimentary healing.

I’ll let you know how the 5Gold refund goes…

Where have I been?

I’m not dead! My brother started playing Wow again and I decided to start a character on his server: Nordrasill. I started an Elf Priest named “Cigar”, my second character in Wow and first exploration into the spell-casting set. I chose herb gathering and alchemy as my character professions.

Last night I pinged level 20, and found myself fighting Mathystra Mermen on the northern edge of Darkshore, trying to gather six relics for an ancient tree-man in the…yes..Grove of the Ancients!

I had this idea somehow that playing a priest would make me a desireable addition into groups, but I’ve only been in a few with this character. Less than 10. Partly to blame is my playing schedule, which is that I play for about 45 minutes at a stretch, which is hardly even enough time to get to know someone in game.

I have started to make announcements in the “General” chat channel about my intentions, to see if I can find anyone else on the same quests/ready for similar encounters. I’ve only had one taker, but it worked out really well. He was a level 30 warrior and our blackwood prey was completely outmatched. I barely got a chance to heal him!

Also, I’ve done some fishing with this character, which was an awesome instant cash infusion! Two words: oily blackmouth! Oh man. At first glance they seemed like useless ( non-edible) fish, but my brother clued me in that they sold for big money in the auction house, so at level 9 I took the time to hook a stack of 20 and put them in the auction house. 3 gold! Bam! I had never had this much money (at such a low level) with my warrior character! Trust fund!

So, I’m happy to get priesting advice. This is my first opportunity for resurrecting people, healing and general spellcasting.

The economy of WoW is so crazy. You start out using copper, which could be considered pennies. Regular empty flasks and such are pennies apiece.
100 copper are one silver, so those are kind of like silver dollars. For example, I might sell a stack of 20 light leather for 15 silver. $15 for light skins, ok, I can imagine that.
Gold are 100 silver, which would be $100 each, of course. There are always items in the AH (I’m thinking plate chest armor) which are 400 gold, which would be the equivelant of $40,000.

So, I guess if you have 10000 gold, you can consider yourself a millionaire.

Proctor was at a pretty low level to be attempting this, but in World of Warcraft, failing as a team is almost as fun as succeeding on your own. He was up for it. We made a simple plan and started from the front gate, killing the guards out front and making our way inside.  Theoretically, I would stay up front and face the enemy head on (tank) and he would stand in the rear and cast healing spells on me (heal).  Unfortunately, two factors were working against us in this plan: First, we could not keep the enemy in front of us. This small town was basically inside of a bowl, and we were working our way up the sides, so we were continually catching the attention (pulling) enemy guards and fighting them on their terms. Second, despite being 6 levels my junior, Proctor the paladin was apparently more threatening than I was. Enemies would run past me to get to him, then I would have to turn around and hit them a few times to get their attention. I was considerably more durable than he was, so he was getting the hell knocked out of him. This was a real problem, making it necessary to flee the town on three or ten occasions.

Our task was to kill a set number of three varieties of dark iron dwarves. We were killing dozens of the town guards, but having a hard time locating and killing the engineers and demolition experts.

After four deaths, some of my armor was red, meaning that it was battered beyond effectiveness. One more

death and my main weapon, an axe was also red, making it useless. Proctor didn’t have anything I could use

effectively, so we were forced to abandon the town for a while and make a hasty trip up north to the a repair in the Alliance hideout.

After about 8 death for each of us, we finally had the town mostly clear, and were in the final building, looking for two final demolition experts. They looked like they were going to be the final two people in town! Proctor shouted help, but it was too late. He had been ambushed while my back was turned and had quickly died.  I wheeled around killed them, completing the quest. 

Crap! I thought to myself. I had killed them, the final two, the guys we needed while Proctor was dead. He totally wasn’t going to get credit!

His ghost ran in after a few minutes and I told him the bad news. He checked his log and I had been right. No  credit. We would have to find more demo guys in town, which basically meant having to wait for them to respawn.

After an age, they finally did, and we killed them together as a team.

I was overloaded with booty, so I made a quick trip to the Ironforge auction house and set up a bunch of auctions. I had about 18 gold burning a hole in my pocket, and it had been a while since I did any armor shopping, so I poked around a bit while I was there. Starting with chest armor (where the largest percentage of armor rating comes from) and searching for the best armor a level 32 warrior can wear, it was not long before I spotted some Green Iron Hauberk, with an armor rating of 358. I checked the rating on my current chest armor: 248! Wow. I was a little scared to be spending 70% of my money on armor, but gaining 100 armor in one fell swoop was too good to pass up!

I also placed bids on some bargain-priced leggings, a helmet and a shield. These upgrades would also increase my armor, but nothing close to the 100-point jump I could get from the Hauberk chest armor.

Back out in the wild, I took up and completed the Dragonmaw  “Destroy the Catapults” Quest, and trudged north to take on the Dark Iron Dwarves.

Dun Mod’r looked pretty scary. It was a small fortified town, buzzing with gun-toting Dark Iron Dwarves. My quest required that I kill off 5 or 10 each of three different varieties of Dark Iron Dwarves, and it looked like I would have to kill the whole town to get it done.

The real struggle was that the dwarves guarding the gate respawned every 4 minutes. It was like trying to dry out a beach towel while someone is spraying a garden hose at it.

After dying five times in a half hour, I was finally joined by a level 26 paladin named Proctor.

Wow, the dragonmaw riders were a lot harder to find than they were to defeat. Turns out that Northeast actually meant East east northeast. In any case, they were fun to attack, because they fought with dually weilded swords. My goal was to collect 10 war banners, and that was pretty easy. Again, because they were a few levels below my own, I could take on two of them at a time, using attacks which struck two foes at a time. I have two such attacks at this time, “Thunder Clap” and “Cleave”, so I generally stun both for a moment with lightning and then cleave them. Sometimes I’ll “Hamstring” one of them to slow him down a bit.

The camp had a lot more acreage than this quest required, so I was not at all surprised when I was sent back to do more damage after I cashed in the war banners.

Well, finding the Dragonmaw riders was not easy. I ran Northeast into the sprawling wetlands. As I mentioned before, this area is filled with monsters which are a few levels below mine, so it is easy and fun to venture forth into the unknown.

This is one of my favorite parts of the game. Wandering around and discovering new lands, new foes and new buildings.  I also enjoy seeing new types of treasure on the new corpses. This was my first time finding Raptor Eggs and Dinosaur skins. I wandered north to the shore and took a quick swim to see what was out in the ocean.

Come to think of it, do you know what is missing in this game? Random useless stuff that you can pick up.

Like seashells, rocks, broken arrows, pottery, etc.  So far, I’ve only found items on dead bodies, or in treasure chests, armoires or barrels.

Oh well, I’d probably just waste time collecting that junk anyway. Nevermind.

I love the clamshells, by the way, which can be opened to find clam meat or pearls. I love it!

I went everywhere, exploring the whole countryside.

I had a good time slashing though a few different breeds of Ooze at Ironbeard’s Tomb. The design for the Oozes was done really well, in an original way, with human skulls floating in the jelly. These monsters were easy enough that I dared to attack them in sets of two or three.  The fighting got a little tougher as I decended into the tomb, and eventually I got sloppy and died. I was sure there would be a treasure at the bottom floor, so that was my goal. Unfortunately, the ooze spawned so quickly that I had to re-fight my way around when my ghost returned. Inconveniences notwithstanding, I made it to the bottom alive, only to find that there was no main treasure there.

I continued to trek Northeast, eventually finding my way to a little gunfight at Dun Modr. I left this alone for the time being and walked across the gigantic bridge north. This area seemed dangerous, but not lethal. I was level 31, encountering solo spiders a little higher than that.

This was the longest period of time I had spent online in months. Eventually I realized I would have to wrap up the evening without findingthe dragonmaw, so I turned around and headed back south.