Farseer Kamalia; Fist of Ra-den & Doomhammer

I finally finished Kamalia’s Order Hall Campaign on Thursday night. I could kind of predict where it was going by the time I picked up the third set of Champions, but that wasn’t a bad thing. I enjoyed the story, and by the time I finished the campaign, I was feeling quite a bit more comfortable with the Farseer role.

Tonight (Friday), therefore, I went and collected Kamalia’s other two Artifacts. I pulled my Demon Invasions mace and Salvage Yard shield out of the bank so that I could do the Elemental quest chain as Elemental. Then I did much of the Enhancement quest chain as Elemental, too, only switching to Enhancement about halfway through. Then I had to spend several minutes selecting talents and setting up my bars, as I hadn’t tinkered with that spec at all yet — and I had to equip my Finkle’s Skinner in my off-hand so that I could have two melee weapons to make some of my abilities work😛

I enjoyed both of the stories. I had been thinking that it was wierd and backwards for Shaman to get their fist weapon from Xuen in Pandaria while Monks get theirs from the Tol’vir. The story of Highkeeper Ra as told by Xuen made the Shaman fist weapon make more sense — but I still need to level my Monk and see how their fist weapon story plays out before I will be fully satisfied on that account. The Enhancement story made me feel even more fond of Stormcaller Mylra — and I’m glad to see Thrall experiencing some consequences from the way he dealt with Garrosh. That ending cinematic from Warlords!Nagrand bothered me so much that I skipped it entirely on the two or three other occasions that I actually completed the storyline of that zone.

I’d been stockpiling small Artifact Power items to pour into my Elemental Artifact as soon as I got it. A few large AP items from doing some world quests later, I had my Elemental Artifact up to level 12. I’ll leave it there for now. Small AP items can go into my Enhancement weapon, while large AP items need to go into my Resto weapon until it is fully powered (it is currently level 15).

I’ve found that for all of the Shaman Artifacts, I like either the basic appearance or the first upgraded appearance (from finishing the Order Hall campaign), in the first color, the best. Maybe later in the expansion I will want to mog over them because I will have some shibby keen idea for a mail Transmogrification kit — but for now, I’m quite happy to use them just the way they are.

Despite my sense that the Heart of Azeroth would be perpetually damp and chilly and slippery and rimed with salt, I’ve come rather like the place, and I almost always leave Kamalia logged out there.

The Shaman experience all around gets a big Bravo, Blizzard! from me.

~*~*~

Now I’d like to get started on the Order Hall journey of another character — perhaps my Demon Hunter, because she’s already gone to the Broken Isles, acquired her first Artifact, and established her Order Hall? or maybe my Blood Elf Mage or my Druid, because I love to play them? — but Kamalia still has much to do. I need to do Leatherworking and Archaeology so that I can get the white and spectral moose mounts. I need to do Fishing so that I can eventually figure out how to get the Artifact Fishing Pole (hey Blizzard, can you please make fishing poles moggable to other fishing poles?). I’ve just been doing enough world quests to keep my Emissary quests cleaned out, and I think I’ll keep managing world quests in that way until I’ve reached Revered with all the factions for Pathfinder. I need to follow up with Khadgar about Light’s Heart. I haven’t been very diligent about collecting Order Resources, and I’ve been prioritizing Artifact Knowledge over the Order Hall upgrades — and I’ve still got a long way to go on both of those tech trees.

And then there’s Suramar… the zone is breathakingly gorgeous and I’ve been delighted by all the little details in Suramar City itself and some of the quests that I’ve done so far in the zone have been tremendously fun and amusing — I just haven’t gotten very far into it. Now that I’ve finished my Order Hall campaign and gotten my other Artifact weapons, I ought to be able to focus on Suramar.

I read on WoWhead today that the final quest for the Good Suramaritan achievement requires going into the Emerald Nightmare to kill Xavius. I didn’t LFR in Warlords due to burnout and no tier in LFR and being able to get raid gear from Garrison follower missions and lack of interest in the story aspect of those raids… but I’d been thinking I might want to LFR again in Legion. Work is keeping me busy enough, though, that LFRing is going to have to be a play activity that I sacrifice, so I probably won’t visit the Emerald Nightmare until I get to the point in the Suramar questline where I have to do so.

Read Full Post »

wandering around the Broken Isles

Last night, BTH wanted to run some Heroics with his guildies, so I went off to finish the Loremaster achievement in Stormheim. Or was it the other way, around, that I wanted to finish the Stormheim Loremaster, but BTH had already done it on his own time, so he went off to run Heroics with his guildies while was doing that, and then just kept going? Either way, we ended up playing independently last night.

Now I know what Sylvanas was UP TO in Stormheim. No wonder Eyir is upset (to put it mildly)! I also feel quite badly about how we treated Ashildir. As much as I dislike and distrust Sylvanas, I’ll probably do that questline with my Priest anyway because she is keenly interested in the Val’kyr and their origins. There are definitely some dangling threads at the end of that questline, though, and now I’m wondering if they’ll be tied up in the Patch 7.1 questline that leads into the raid, or if they’ll be addressed in a later patch.

After I got the Loremaster achievement for Stormheim, I looked around and decided to go exploring. I wanted to finish up the leveling zone Exploration achievements and get all the leveling zone flight points. I wandered around in Stormheim for awhile, thoroughly enjoying the scenery and discovering multiple side-chains that we’d totally missed. Trying to get to the Weeping Bluffs in Stormheim, I wandered up into Highmountain. So then I explored all the places we hadn’t quite gotten to in Highmountain before returning to Stormheim. After that, I hopped over to Azsuna and visited the Isle of the Watchers. Talking to a flight master there, I discovered that there was a flight point in an area of the map that I’d already discovered that I didn’t actually have. So I went and got that, too. I travelled to Val’sharah, but then it was bedtime, so I logged off at Bradensbrook. This morning, before work, I hopped on and headed toward the areas of the zone that I didn’t yet know. I had to check Wowhead, though, to find Mistvale. It’s up so close to the border of Suramar that I wasn’t sure if that area of the map was Val’sharah or Suramar, and I couldn’t clearly see any roads that I thought I ought to run up.

I found so much stuff in the leveling zones that I’m curious about now. I assume that I’ll probably get sent to some, if not all, of those little places eventually by World Quests.

As we quested through the zones, I found Earth Shrines in each zone. A couple of zones had two! At these Earth Shrines, an earth elemental was in trouble, and when I rescued it, it gave me 50 Artifact Power. I didn’t discover any new Earth Shrines when I was wandering about yesterday evening — it’s still possible that there are more to find, but I’m not ready to ask Wowhead for the list yet — but I did discover, on a tiny island off the western coast of Val’sharah, a Wind Shrine. Because I was cramming in a little WoW before work, I didn’t take the time to help out the wind elemental right then. I’ll have to remember the spot and come back to it later. I’ll also now be on the lookout for Wind (and Water and Fire) shrines in other zones as I revisit them for World Quests and my professions. The +50 Artifact Power is nice, but what I’m really wondering is if something cool happens if I manage to find all of the elemental shrines, like maybe the Hidden appearance for my Artifact weapons? If you know, though, please don’t tell me — it’s still early enough in the expansion that I want to try to find it for myself!

Update: I went back to the Wind Shrine at lunch. It was a different type of challenge than the Earth Shrines were — those were just combat; this was avoiding tornadoes, which I have always been bad at… It gave me 60 Artifact Power when I beat it, and it was difficult enough and frustrating enough — it took several attempts — that I hope there aren’t as many of these as there were of the Earth Shrines.

Anyhow, now that I have completed the Exploration achievements for and obtained all the flight points in the four leveling zones, I can go to Suramar!

Read Full Post »

Oh! I dinged!

Tonight, BTH and I went to finish off the main story questline of Highmountain. We have the quest for Nesingwary’s camp, but knowing that it is completely a side-chain, we chose to ignore it (for now) in favor of pursuing the Pillar. When we got to the dungeon at the end, we managed to duo it up to the third boss, which was too much of a DPS check. So we hopped into the LFG queue, and, being a Tank+Healer combo, immediately got a group. We had to re-start the dungeon, but it was still faster than trying to duo the rest of it would have been.

I started the evening at maybe 75% from 108 to 109. When I went to turn in the Pillar at Aegwynn’s Gallery, this happened:

I hadn’t been paying attention to my XP bar very much, so I was totally surprised and a bit startled. I only managed to not be too caught off guard to get screenshots because I was already poised to screencap the little RP event that I knew would happen when I turned in the Pillar.

Then of course I got bombarded with new quests. I accepted them up, but doing them will have to wait. It’s bedtime. Khadgar can chill out (he’s good at that, right?).

We still have to do Stormheim, to get the Pillar and to get friendly with the zone faction for World Quest unlocking purposes, so that will be our top priority for the next day or two.

Read Full Post »

So, those Demon Invasions…

Last Tuesday, my Priest was inadvertently the first of my characters to actually participate in a Demon Invasion. She’d hopped from the Shrine in the Vale to Wrath Dalaran to the Caverns of Time to run a CoT Heroic, and when she zoned in to Tanaris, an Invasion was in progress. Naturally, she had to go help out just to see what all the fuss was about.

I did a few with my Alliance Mage next, then Kamalia.

It is so cool to see mixed-faction flocks of flying mounts traveling around the zones to take out Legion structures and commanders!

It took me quite awhile to get to an Invasion in each zone with Kamalia for the achievement. For some reason, Azshara seemed to be the least frequently active during the hours when I play.

After doing several Invasions with my Priest, my Alliance Mage, and Kamalia, I found that by the time any one character had collected enough Nethershards to purchase one of the Transmogrification Ensembles, she’d already collected almost the entire set from the boss drop chests. With multiple characters of each armor type, if I do two or three Invasions with each one, there will be enough overlap in the drops they get that I shouldn’t have to spend any Nethershards on the Transmogrification ensembles — which means I can spend them on filling out accessory gear slots instead.

At the moment, though, I’m still working on just getting all my alts through the Broken Shore scenario and their first Demon Invasion for the quest chain. Then I can go back and start doing repeat Invasions to work on filling out the Transmogrification ensembles and equipped gear.

Kamalia had to do a lot Invasions before she got a weapon drop. I don’t think that I’ll have time to do enough Invasions with every character to get all of them a full kit of equipped 700 gear and a weapon drop. Bother this expansion and its pre-launch events coming out right at beginning-of-the-school-year crunch time!

Read Full Post »

time to start farming Dragon Soul…

When the method for obtaining an Emerald Drake to complete the set of mounts representing the five Classic/Aspect dragonflights was first announced, I was glad that a) no PvP would be required, b) I already had all but three of them, and c) the ones I didn’t have yet were from soloable places.

I promptly assigned my Draenei Mage to camp out at Onyxia’s Lair. I’d KO Onyxia every week for a few months, then get bored and leave her alone for a month or two.

I didn’t have a character whom I wanted to just leave camped out at the Nexus, so I only poked at Malygos occasionally (when I wanted something else that he dropped). I saw the Blue Drake — which I bought on the BMAH during Mists — drop, but not the Azure one.

Occasionally, I contemplated taking all my capable characters to Onyxia’s Lair and the Eye of Eternity… I’d get through two or three and then get tired of Malygos’s spiel and quit.

The Onyxian and Azure Drakes are drops from one-boss raids. The Blazing Drake, however, drops from the last boss of a long raid, and the penultimate boss of that particular raid is a real pain to do. So I didn’t even bother with that one at all.

I was getting pretty discouraged by never seeing the Onyxian Drake, feeling like by the time I managed to get the achievement, I’d be done with the game entirely and wouldn’t be able to enjoy having the green drake.

In the past couple of weeks, though, I’ve found myself wanting something to do until the Demon Invasions begin. So why not, I thought, go biff Ony and Maly with all my active alts?

The Azure Drake dropped for my Monk last week. The Onyxian Drake dropped for my Rogue this week.

Guess I’d better start farming Dragon Soul… Now, who to do it with? Probably the Rogue, for the Wrathion lore of the Fangs of the Father questline more than for the weapons themselves.

Read Full Post »

Stable Master

Examining the Achievements listing, it occurred to me that completing the Black Claw of Sethe mounted combat challenge was not, in fact pre-requisite to doing the Garn-Tooth Necklace challenge — and that only the latter was required for the Stable Master title. So I didn’t bother with the Black Claw of Sethe at all and just picked up the Garn-Tooth Necklace. Over the past week, I have been taking out the mount-in-training whistles and beating up one or two of the quest bosses.

It was much easier than I expected — even ridiculously easier than I’d anticipated — doing the bosses as Lone Wolf Marksmanship. Even with the debilitation of the challenge item, the mounts took less damage than when I’d been doing the ordinary mount training quests as a pet-less Beast Master — probably because the bosses were dying faster.

And that’s all my Warlords content goals completed. Now what am I going to do until the Demon Invasions actually begin?

Read Full Post »

the Mages’ Council

After a few days, the Underpowered Death Knight reported that she had collected twelve different pamphlets from the Doomsayers. It had taken her that long to be sure that she’d gotten them all, as after she’d gotten a handful, she started to get duplicates, but there didn’t seem to be any more than that. She gave them to Kaelinda to analyze. Flicking through the tattered, stained, crumpled, blackened, worn, damp, scrawled, scribbled, odorous, ominous, demonic, prophetic pile, Kaelinda quickly concluded that advice from other expert opinions would be valuable. She invited her Mage friends to study the pamphlets with her.

“The things that Kael’thas’ followers said about their plan to bring Kil’jaeden through the Sunwell,” Kaelinda said, “sounded a lot like this. There wasn’t actual death in that transformation, but the rest of it is more or less the same.”

“This drivel,” Kaprikka scowled, “is distressingly similar to the propaganda that Socrethar used to seduce the Sargerei.”

“I wasn’t there during the War of the Ancients,” Keriluna mused, “I was born a few decades afterward. My parents didn’t like to talk about that time, but when they thought I was old enough, they told me about it. These words… they are just like my parents’ memories.”

“Oh, I think I know what this one’s talkin’ about!” exclaimed Khrissalys. “Did yeh hear about how King Magni got turned into diamond when he went to commune with the earth just before the Cataclysm? Well, he woke up and I saw him with my own eyes walkin’ out of Ironforge.”

(the other two prophecies reference the second and fourth Legion comics)

Kaoling shook her head sadly. “The evaporation of the mists was enough of a shock, and then Pandaria was devastated by the escape of the great Sha, and especially the destruction of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms. I think there are many Pandaren who feel like their lives were turned upside down who would be susceptible to this message. Those who were severely afflicted by the great Sha might be even more so.”

“There are many who are unhappy with the current state of our governments,” Kymberlea observed, “Those who ask, where is Lorna? Where is Tess? Where is Calia? It is bad enough that these people are… reluctant to fight in the normal conflicts of our nations. It is worse to think that those sympathies could be used to persuade them to turn traitor to our world itself.”

“Why,” Kenosha muttered disgustedly, “why are my people so stupid? After all that we have suffered because of our bloodlust in the past, why would they think that this is the most honorable way to deal with this threat?”

“Most of my family belongs to a sect of the Church of the Holy Light that has as one of its tenets being prepared for future misfortune,” Kaylynda explained, “I bet that’s where this list originally came from.”

“I’m not sure that this is actually related,” Kivrinne said, “This looks to me like a left-over Twilight’s Hammer flyer from before the Cataclysm. That, or poetry by a high level cleric of the Forgotten Shadow. I hear that priests who turn their backs on the Light are going not just into the Shadow, but all the way into the Void now.”

“Dem Darkmoon carnies are pretty clever,” said Kikimaia, “I wouldn’t trust just a suit, though. I’d feel bettah if it had a voodoo charm ta strenthen da illusion, too.”

“What a scam!” hooted Kermione. “We should put out some counter-pamphlets telling people not to trust this at all. Gallywix’ll just take your life savings and enslave you. Been there, done that!… Didn’t get a T-shirt, though… hmm, maybe I oughtta suggest the idea to Boss Mida.”

“Only two air fresheners?” said Kelilla, “They really think a demon invasion would be over that soon? But what’s more worrying is that they aren’t including any Trogg repellent.”

“Still, if there are folks trying to make gold off of this” — the Gnome waved her hands to encompass the pamphlets held by the Goblin and the Troll — “then this kind of stuff must have been going around for awhile already.”

Kaylynda shook her head in astonishment. “Just what has been going on on Azeroth while we were all away on Draenor…?” Her eyes widened and she buried her face in her hands. “Kairoz, you blithering idiot! Whatever you thought you were doing when you brought Garrosh to Draenor, you’ve gotten us into way more trouble than you were planning for!”

“You mean –” began Kaelinda, “Oh! Remember what the Black Prince said? What he showed us?”

All around the table, heads nodded.

“That is what this is all about.”

“You know,” Kaylynda said after a moment, “tomorrow is Tuesday. New and strange things always seem to happen on Tuesdays. Kaelinda, you had better tell your Death Knight friend to continue keeping an eye on these Doomsayers, just in case they change their behavior somehow tomorrow…”

Read Full Post »