WoW Wednesday – So… Damn… Close… Edition
World of Warcraft has several in game events surrounding real life Holidays, some more obscure than others. This last few weeks has been the Midsummer Fire Festival, which seems to span between Summer Solstice and the 4th of July. Midsummer is one of those crazy easy to get Achievement Events since it mostly involves flying to every zone visiting bonfires. You collect tokens and can buy special (useless) gear. Like the hat that lets others use you as a camp fire.
More importantly, getting this achievement helps get me one step closer to a long term goal I have been working on.
I am 9 PVP kills away from the Meta achievement “What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been”, which involves doing all of the achievements for each holiday. Unfortunately, I can’t get it until Halloween. At least I’ll have a spiffy Violet Proto Drake for my efforts just in time for WoD… which is a no fly zone…
WoW Wednesday – Books Edition
So it’s been a pretty uneventful week in the game, just leveling up the Hunter mostly, and even that wasn’t super frequent. I thought I’d take a minute to discuss some of the Lore related books I’ve read recently. I think one of the aspects that really appeals to me with WoW is that the overall store, often called "Lore" is really tight. Blizzard is pretty consistent on everything, more so the closer to present day you get. There are other large universes but there are often contradictions.
Star Wars is all over the place, and chances are the Star Wars timeline not wiped out by the Prequel Trilogy years ago is going to be wiped out by the upcoming new movies. I tried to get into Star Trek after reading some really good post everything books about the end of the Borg, only to find out that the Borg have been wiped out several times in the fictions and in general, Trek novels seem to completely not give a crap about any sort of overall continuity. Transformers is one of the worst and does a complete reboot every two or three years. Hell right now Transformers has like 3 or 4 overlapping timelines. The movie are all one, Prime/Rescue Bots/Next Show are another, TF Novels are one, that sort of relate to the others all at once, there are the video games which may be in movie or Prime continuity, I think, then there are the comics. It’s a little ridiculous.
Then there are other worlds, like the Tolkien Lord of the Rings world which is pretty finite in it’s lore and not really expanding.
Warcraft has a whole mess of books that fill in details and gaps, to supplement the ten year old MMO title. You can even roll back farther and pick up the three RTS titles previous to WoW. There are some inconsistencies with the early Lore but it’s really pretty tight these days.
So I’ve been working my way through the books to help fill in some of my gaps. Most of my interest in the Lore stems from the Warcraft 3 plot of Arthas and his fall from grace into the role of the Lich King. Which is probably a place to start.
WoW Wednesday – Pandarian Loremaster
My latest efforts have been to pick up on some of the missing achievements for Mists of Pandaria. Specifically, the questing related ones. I started with the Lorewalker storyline, which mostly involves traveling all over the continent of Pandaria and reading little story lines on scrolls scattered about. This gathers reputation with the Lorewalker faction, and gives and achievement. Having Exalted reputation with the Lorewalkers allowed me to buy a new Cloud Disc mount, but it’s kind of a boring crappy mount. If i am going to surf on a flat mount, I’ll stick to one of my flying carpets.
Besides, I also worked on grinding out Exalted with the Order of the Cloud Serpent, so I can now ride bad ass Chinese dragons. Much cooler than some lame Cloud Disc. Since I’m on grinding Reputation, I’ve also managed to finally get Exalted with the August Celestials. This unlocks a few final quest chains relating to the Four Celestial Temples, as well opening up the recipe for Royal Satchels. I talked a bit about bags on my recent Banker Alt Post. Royal Satchels are 28 slot bags. They are a little expensive to make though, requiring 12 Imperial Silk. Imperial Silk is made in two ways, a Daily cooldown craft which also teaches a new Tailor recipe. OR A non cooldown craft which doesn’t teach anything new but requires Three Spirit of Harmony. Spirit of Harmony are created from Motes of Harmony which are semi rare drops off of any Pandaria enemy (as near as I can tell).
I had enough Imperial Silk stocked up to make 4 bags. My recent creation of a Banker means I really don’t NEED these bags too critically, so I decided to throw them on the Auction House for 2750gold each, which is pretty big money. I even sold one, which is good because I’ve been burning through gold outfitting my Hunter in Heirloom Gear.
Anyway, aside from reputation and Lorewalking, I’ve completed the actual Lore quests of Pandaria and gotten the Loremaster of Pandaria achievement. I still need to do the peripheral quest lines, like the Idle of Thunder and the Alliance vs Horde thing in Karasarang, but I’ve done all of the mainline quests, every dungeon, and all of the raids. I’ve essentially done it all. I’m pretty familiar now with everything happening in Pandaria, which is pretty cool. I’ve even read through the Vol’Jin book, which explains where Vol’Jin was between getting “killed” and returning to become Warchief.
On a totally unrelated side note, I found the most awesome Trinket ever….
Sadly, this rainbow effect is only for one quest. Not sadly, the quest reward trinkey instead shoot Rainbows from your fingertips which causes (weak) damage to things. It’s not enough to use as a weapon but it will kill critters. Irritatingly, it was like a hour long cool down. Anyway, it’s hilarious on my Orc Hunter, because I purposely designed my Orc hunter to be ugly and grouchy looking.
The Hidden Class of WoW
World of Warcraft has nine classes to choose from when creating your character, Warrior, Paladin, Hunter, Rogue, Mage, Warlock, Shaman, Druid, and Monk. But there is a secret tenth class, in, the Banker. Each player has a limited amount of space to store items in. Each item takes up one bag slot, though some stack up to a certain level (often 20). Gear is always one item per slot. There are several options for storage available with varying uses.
On your person, you can carry 5 bags, one being the core 16 slot “backpack”, the other being varying sizes depending on what kind of bags you have. Most low level players have 6-8 slot bags, there is a 14 slot bag that can be bought easily and cheaply from the Bag Vendor, the most common largest non specialized bags are the Frostweave (20 slots) and Embersilk (22 slot) bags that can be tailored. Mists of Pandaria added the 28 slot Royal Satchel for Tailors to make as well, though getting the recipe is a long reputation grind and then the materials to make the Royal Satchel require a daily cooldown.
A level 90 character likely has 4 Frostweave or Embersilk bags in addition to their core 16 slot backpack giving them 96-102 slots on their person. There are also specialized 32 slot bags for professions, such as a 32 slot herb bag, or 32 slot mining bags.
Players also get a bank, which is only accessible from a bank but allows long term storage of less used items and trinkets or particularly notable items the player may have picked up over their travels. The base bank has 28 slots and has an additional 7 bag slots for purchase. Bag slots work like the player bags, in that any bag can be stuck in a bag slot. Having a full compliment of Frostweave or Embersilk bags in the bank will give the player somewhere around another 120-130 item slots.
There is also a Void Storage vault. This is a special 80 slot bank that is primarily used for storage of armor that a player wants to use for Transmogrifying. Transmogrifying (where one armor is given the appearance of another) can be done directly from the Void Storage. It costs a player 100g to unlock the Void Storage vault and another 25g per item to deposit items into storage. It’s not cheap to use so anything that is frequently taken in and out is not recommended for Void Storage.
In the end, a single player is looking at around 300 item slots to keep junk they collect.
You can get a LOT more with a Bank Alt. Many items that clutter up your inventory are crafting Materials. These are items you may need later and in large quantities. They may also be items that you are just collecting up to sell on the auction house. They may e items you want to keep for an alt, such as Heirloom Gear. All of these items are much more effective when pooled on a character that is dedicated to storage. This character will never run any quests, so he doesn’t have to worry about carrying quest items or upgrading his gear or hauling around vendor trash items. The Banker can be loaded up with bags dedicated to storage of items.
With a little effort the banker can be part of his own guild, giving access to an even larger and much nicer storage space in the form of the Guild Vault. I finally gave my Banker a guild but wandering around Orgrimmar offering 20g to anyone who would sign my guild charter. It takes 4 other folks to create a guild but only one person is required to maintain it. So you can get people to sign up, then kick them out. If you are upfront about this they often won’t even care that you’re kicking them. Generally, characters without a guild (necessary to be able to sign) are low level and could use a few gold anyway.
Each page of the Guild Vault has 98 slots. The cost to open a new page is increasingly larger but for a few thousand gold you can eventually, easily get an extra 400 or so bank slots.
The Guild Bank is organized very nicely too, especially compared to the player bank. Each tab can be given a custom icon and name, making sorting large amounts of Materials really nice. Another nice benefit is that you can give yourself a fun custom title as your Guild Name. This really helps for the aspect of tricking out your Banker. Some people choose to run around as naked Orc bankers, I prefer to run around in a stylish Banker Suit.
The Sha is Angry!
So, after remembering how great Chen Stormstout is, and that the Pandaren are among my favorite WoW Megabloks figures (probably below Worgen and above Taurens), I decided that the Sha of anger set was probably a good investment. I was a bit wary of the Sha build but it turned out to be considerably more awesome than expected. He is loaded with Ball joints and the center mass is a pretty detailed build. He stands up on his own really well and is appropriately largeish. He is not as large as the Sha of Anger is in WoW, he’s closer to being the size of the Sha of Hatred. They all pretty much look the same really though, so if you were really nutty you could buy this set 7 times for the Shas of Anger, Hatred, Fear, Pride, Despair, Doubt, and Violence.
The extra Monks might be useful too, though having 7 Chen Stormstouts would be a little much.
Happy 30th Birthday Transformers
Thirty Years ago today the first Transformers comic was published by Marvel Comics.
I never really read the comics much when I was younger though I’ve read quite a few of them more recently in reprints.
The first book was kind of awful, characters based more on toy art than what we all know the characters to "actually" look like.
The show is what really drove this show originally anyway, at least that’s my opinion. It’s probably not worth a whole lot though, I was more of a Gobots fan at that age.
