World of Warcraft

RamenJunkie, Champion of the Orc cause, has arrived in Pandaria.

While RamenJunkie was my first character, I got tired of playing Hunter and switched to Warrior with Ramchan, who became my “Main”. A Main is a primary character with the most effort put into it, an Alt is a secondary character. An Alt can become a Main, but it can be a bit tricky to overcome the time investment in a Main.

Also, the little backstory one may create for your characters. I’ve got some vague backstory to most of my characters, it more or less relates to their actions and path through the game, but there are little liberties to flesh out a character. While Ramchan is Horde aligned, she is also Bloof Elf aligned, and cares more for their needs than the Horde or Orc needs. Her main story also revolved around destroying the Lich King for revenge against the destruction of the Sunwell. All of the stuff after was just supplemental adventures. Pandaria for the Horde was never an issue. For Ramchan, Pandaria was an adventure, but it became obvious that the Horde were helping to destroy the wonderous land of Pandaria, and Garrosh had to be stopped.

RamenJunkie is Horde all the way, and Orc all the Way. Even his path through the game put him directly under both Garrosh Hellscream and General Nazgrim repeatedly. RamenJunkie, Orc Hunter is fiercely loyal to the Orc cause, and does not care about the land of Pandaria beyond conquest.

Running through with RamenJunkie has been considerably more efficient than my run with Ramchan. I am much wiser and more attuned to how the game mechanics work mostly. When leveling Ramchan, the only stats i cared about were Armor and DPS. I hate to imagine what kind of cloth, plate, and leather mish mash I was wearing without realizing that Int is meaningless to a Warrior. I do know for a while I was emphasizing Stamina, but that is mostly for Tanks and a lot of Mail Hunter gear using Stamina. At least that would have been closer. Now I’m maximized and tweaked for maximum Crit and Hit like a good Fury Warrior.

with RamenJunkie, it’s considerably easier. For starters, there are way fewer classes that use Mail, so I can generally just “pick the mail quest reward”. I also went through a lot of the game in Heirloom Gear, which meant I mostly just picked the quest reward with the highest vendor value. I also understand iLVL and how it relates to stronger Gear, so when my Heirloom Gear stopped being useful at level 80 and 85, I knew how to drop a few thousand gold on the auction house to replace it with good gear that will last until I can grind Timeless Isle and run LFR.

I also was way less obsessed with exploring and questing for the sake of story. I’ve been there done that, so I could just cut to the chase more easily and get on with leveling.

It’s just, easier the second time around.

Since I’ve FINALLY finished with my Legendary Cloak quest, I’ve gotten back to business of completing the Loremaster achievement before Warlords of Draenor comes out. I’ve also been working on leveling up some alts to level 90, so I can have so variety for the new expansion. I’m not worried about uber gearing the alts, the new expansions tend to do a good job of gearing characters during the opening quests, I just want to get them up to the point where I can hit the ground running.

So I’ve been doing some zones on alts, and some zones on my main. The nice part of about old content on a max level character is that you can literally breeze through it and one hit every enemy. It’s a pure quest and story experience. The bad part about old content on a max level character is that some of the quests can be difficult or near impossible.

Like the quest depicted above. The quest is to weaken 7 spiders to Lunk the Ogre can get his jollies riding them around. It’s a silly pointless quest ultimately but it needs done. These spiders have around 3800 hp. My main, fully geared, hits for anywhere between 100-120k damage. Needless to say, “weakening” a spider is not something that is easily done.

The best I can do is strip off all of my gear, thus reducing my stats as much as possible. The end result is certainly a much softer hit, most of the time. Stripping down to the basics gives punches that hit for around 400 damage, definitely something I can work with. Except that occasionally there is still a critical hit for around 4,000, which of course, kills the spiders.

These sort of quests actually aren’t super common, probably for the reasons here, but they are there occasionally, and dealing with them can certainly be a bit tricky.

So, after what feels like months of work, I’ve finally obtained my Legendary Cloak. This is a lengthy quest chain which rewards the player with an iLVL 600+ Cloak that includes a bonus proc for loads of extra damage. In the current game it is straight out the strongest item you can obtain. I was prepared to mostly complain about this quest line but after obtaining the Cloak, I have to admit, it felt pretty bad ass. A lot of the longest part comes from all of the repetitive grindy parts. The overall chain is broken down into Five chapters of varying lengths.

Chapter 1 requires a rep grind, and collecting 20 random drop items from Raids ( Sigil of Power and Sigil of Wisdom )

Chapter 2 involves a rep grind, a valor grind, and killing a mini world boss that is tricky to solo. It also involves winning PVP matches on two particular maps, something tricky for PVE folks.

Chapter 3 sends you on ANOTHER rep grind, and after 20 more random drops from Raids (20 Secrets of the Empire ). It also requires you to obtain 40 pieces of hard to get Trillium Bars, which is easy if you are a miner but expensive if you are not (I think I dropped 2-3k gold on the AH for these). After that you get a really tricky Solo scenario and an almost as tricky Solo mission. THEN you get to collect 12 more random Raid Drops (12 Titan Runestone ) and the Heart of the Thunder King.

I should probably mention, with these 52 Raid drop items. You only get them from bosses, the drop rate is ridiculously low, and you can only loot Raid bosses once a week. This is the absolute WORST part of this entire quest. Rep and Valor grind? Fine, I can handle those, Chasing these stupid stones and sigils and crap, running the same long ass raids repeatedly? I hate that. Raids queues can last an hour easily, then the Raid itself is another 30 minutes to an hour. If you’re lucky, you might get one drop in that two hours. This wouldn’t be so bad except Raids are horrible for secondary bonuses, like Gold, and Valor Points and Justice points. You’re already at level 90 so experience doesn’t even matter.

Chapter 4 gets easy, you visit each of the four Celestial temples and completed a Solo challenge battle depending on your class and spec. It took me 3 tries to win a 1v1 battle with Wrathion. It was simply a matter of learning the fight, learning when to doge, and when to burn him down.

Chapter 5 takes you to the timeless Isle, where you have to gather a handful of Timeless Coins (I already had this) and fight each of the Celestials, which is as simple as opening the Other Raid Queues and waiting for a group to add you. All of the Celestial battles are simple Tank and Spank fights. This will give you your upgraded Legendary Cloak. There is one more Raid to run to kill Garrosh in Seige of Orgrimmar but frankly, I enjoy doing that run and it’ll be a change from the other Raids over and over.

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.