Loremaster Update

So I have managed to make a crazy amount of progress on Loremaster in the past week.  Part of this progress was actually a little bit of discovery and memory rather than actual questing, but there was a ton of that as well.

So first to the discovery and memory part.  After talking about my progress with some guildies, I was gently reminded that the overall zones achievements are in fact account wide, and that there was one character - my warrior - that I leveled AFTER Cataclysm.  I even talked about it here in this very blog:   Love That Warrior Blog Post

So not only had I leveled this character after the old world reboot, but I did it in Eastern Kingdoms.  (I fortuitously discovered this at the point that Joar was almost completely done with Kalimdor)  So perusing through the epic Joarmama's achievement list, I discovered he had made enormous progress on many many of the zones in Eastern Kingdoms.  By the way - Joarmama - great name for a goblin warrior, am I right?

In the meantime, I had been feverishly working through completing Kalimdor on my warlock and managed to get through all of that last week.  After that, I went back to the warrior and did the last few quests in each zone that he needed to finish them up.

So last week, I was sitting at 890 quests to go, with 397 in Kalimdor and 493 in Eastern Kingdoms (or so I thought, but not really as it turns out).

As of this morning, Kalimdor is done and I have a total of 97 quests to go in Eastern Kingdoms in the two Stranglethorn zones.  And that's not going to take me long at all.

The process itself has been a lot of fun.  Quite a few really cool quests that I hadn't done before and really enjoyed.  A couple of challenging spots as well - typically any quest that involves "weakening" an NPC and then capturing him doesn't work really well when you're one-shotting things immediately.  Main issue in Kalimdor was a quest in Feralas that involved capturing an Ogre-Mage.  The key, unfortunately seemed to be getting naked and giving myself rez sickness, and that seemed to do the trick.  That was only one quest out of hundred, but I would not have been able to complete that zone without it (I tried).

Oh, and Ghostland sucks.  Combine having to run with a serious of quests that don't seem to be well organized geographically, and it was probably my least favorite zone of all.  That one needs a revamp.

So that's it for this week.  Assuming I'm done in the next few days, I'll go back to leveling my alliance toons.  Mage is up next.  He's currently sitting at 78 or so.

Cheers,

Joar

Revisiting Loremaster

So back in the fall of 2010 I decided to take a crack at finishing up Loremaster on my main.  I got pretty close too.  Within 40-50 quests or so.

I had been planning on it changing with the release of Cataclysm and was planning to get it finished by then.  But then the pre-patch for Cataclysm dropped, and the ability to finish it actually died a couple of weeks before I had anticipated, so I never got it done.  Everything in Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor effectively completely reset except for a handful of zones on each continent.  And I never went back.

So now I'm taking another look at it again, anticipating a long drought of new content between now and when Legion drops in early 2017 (joke!).

As of this morning, I have 890 quests to go, 397 in Kalimdor and 493 in Eastern Kingdoms.  So I think I'm going to work on it a bit, in between fiddling with leveling on my Alliance toons.  I had my 17th toon hit 100 last week, so I now have 5 to go to have a max level of each class from each faction.  And given how fast the leveling process is now, I could finish those 5 easily in 2 months or less, so I've got plenty of time to finish this up.  The mage is up next, who will be further boosted by a nice shiny new heirloom ring out of my shipyard missions.

So that's it for my Warcraft entertainment these days.  I'm going to be going back and doing some old school questing rather than worrying about more and more garrison missions to accumulate more and more gold that I'm not actually sure what I'm going to do with anyway.

Cheers,

Joar

Too Much Speed for Immersion

So I've discovered that the downside of leveling my alliance lowbies one at a time is that it really brings home just how incredibly fast leveling is these days.  Most place, I'm only getting in one or two quest chains in any given zone before I'm ready to move on to the next.  In Uldum for example, I managed to unlock Ramkahen and went to talk to the first guy, killed some scarabs and some raiders and I was done and off to Twilight Highlands.

In Twilight Highlands, after babysitting Anduid around Stormwind for a while, I didn't even get far enough in the actual zone to unlock the portal back to Stormwind before it was time for Pandaria.

And I'm doing absolutely nothing unusual to boost my leveling speed.  Just wearing my heirlooms and queuing for dungeons regularly.

It makes me glad that I did all of those zones at level when they were current, because it sometimes feels a bit sad that I'm missing out on the story.  On the other hand, given that this would be my 17th time reading this particular story, it's probably not all that critical for me personally.

It does make me want to go back and finish up Loremaster on my main.  I got really really close before Cataclysm dropped.  I was down to less than 50 quests to go to get it completely knocked out and I just never quite got it over the finish line, so all of that work effectively evaporated once Cataclysm launched.  I think I'll probably finish up the druid before I take that on though.

In the meantime, I'm still just enjoying playing the game.  There's not much in the way of news, so rather than get upset over every little twist and speculation, I'm just focusing on playing.  As much as I love my various Warcraft podcasters, it also means I'm not listening to much these days.  I'll pick things back up once the beta goes live.  Hopefully that's before March.

My druid is sitting at level 87 now and on his way to Kun-Lai.  It's at least possible I'll have him all the way to 100 before the end of this week.  Then it will be time to decide if I want to move on to the mage, or take on the Loremaster challenge on Joar.

Cheers!

Joar