How To Survive: Alterac Valley

I am NOT a PvP-er.

If you’re like me and don’t PvP, it’s a bit daunting going into a BG and having no idea what to do, where to go or what the objective is. This week it’s Alterac Valley, so I thought I would blog:

Alterac Valley for Alliance in 5 VERY simple steps

1. Follow the group. Pack mentality works every time. There are 40 players in this BG and the majority will head straight for the end objective which is…
2. Kill the boss. You start at the top, “Drek’Thar” the boss is at the bottom. With 103m health and 4 buffs, he’s quite a dude. By doing other stuff, these disappear making him much less menacing. In order to do this, you first need to…
3. Capture the towers. After the initial mad rush out of the Ally base, breakout groups will go and ‘cap the towers’ en route to Drek. The main ones are Iceblood Tower, Tower Point and the Frostwolf Towers (by the boss). In order to do this, you kill the boss inside. Each tower is on a timer, giving the opposing faction time to defend and recapture. Once the timer is out, the buff on Drek wears off. Of course sometimes there might be nasty Horde lurking inside…
4. Pewpew. Whether this is killing the Horde who may try to defend, or killing the mini bosses in the towers, or the NPCs who lurk around.
5. Wait around. For Ally, this is *usually* a faceroll. I usually go and kill the mini boss in the Iceblood Tower, then wait at the boss, killing any hordes who might try to defend. EZ.

Visual Aid

My highly professional picture for you below.

You’re the blue. Horde towers and bosses are in red. Kill the red and any Horde you pass on the way.

See, who said PvP was complicated?!

Treasure Trove Scenario

The Treasure Trove scenario – a solo experience aimed at enabling you to pic up a whole host of goodies.

Quick Info

• Kill rares on the Isle of Thunder (list and map) to get a Key to the Palace of Lei Shen
• Hand the key in to Taoshi in the cave at 51,46 to gain access
• Loot chests to have a chance at things like Elder Charms, Rep tokens and Burial Trove Keys (for extra chests at the end)

As far as we’re concerned, this scenario is good for two things: getting as much gold and charms as possible, or for getting to the last room to loot the golden treasure chests.

1. Final Room run

Pros: hi-tailing it to the final room and killing the  boss there gets you access to 3 special chests which contain a chance at better loot.

Cons: there’s only a chance at the better loot – it doesn’t always pay off. You also miss out on loads of chests which contain the goodies along the way. However, if you get there quick, you can always double back and loot some in the time you have remaining.

Extras used: Potion of Light Steps (1 Elder Charm, requires Friendly with Kirin Tor Offensive), 3 Polymorphic Keys (3 charms each, requires Exalted with Kirin Tor Offensive).

Our view: It’s not worth it, we prefer the gold and rep tokens (on our mains) or the charms (on our alts). However, we’ve put together a video for you to see the route and where I used the potions and keys.

2. Loot run

Pros: lots of goodies

Cons: we never have enough time to get to the final boss and/or get caught by the traps a lot causing me to slow down

Extras used: none

Our view: Go for it! We tend to circle around the room looting every chest possible using speed boosts. We’ve uploaded a video – mistakes and all – to show how much we got and the loot.

We average:

• 10-15 Elder Charms (17 on this one)
• 1-3 Burial Trove keys (2 on this one)
• 15-20 Tattered Parchments for rep
• 1 or 2 Ritual Stones
• 200-300g

Enjoy the clip!

Deth’tilac

After yesterday’s exploits I thought I’d go for a quick run around Molton Front and Hyjal to see if any of the rares were up… and Deth’tilac was!!

Deth’tilac, Spider, Molton Front

This was a really hard tame which Mr B did really well at mastering it after a couple of attempts.

Key Points

• Can’t tame under 20% and hits like a truck, so this is a kiting tactic
• Take a friend with a rooting spell, such as a druid or a shaman with an earthbind totem
• Have your pet out for this, it will help a great deal
• The area you have is very small, so make sure you know the area you have to move and don’t fall off the cliff

Taming Strategy

•  Have concussive shot, frost trap, revive pet and arcane shot where you can reach them easily. A spider pet is ideal (it has a web) but any pet is fine
• Deth’tilac will use a move called Deth Strike which will one-shot anything in melée range, but give a 10% damage to the spider. Therefore, you will need to sacrifice your pet in order to damage the boss enough for you to tame. Of course, you could kite it round but that would take a long time.
• Keep up concussive shot, frost trap and wait for him to use the ability on your pet. When he does, your pet will die and you need to get as far away as possible to revive pet before he catches you. Rinse and repeat. If you root it, it will cause the ability to happen, so a friend with this ability (or a spider pet) will make it quicker. We found Feigning Death works as it transfers all aggro onto your pet, thus causing the ability to proc.
• Once at 20%, get as far away as possible using your slows, dismiss pet and tame.

It’s a fantastic looking pet, a must-have I think, so good luck!

A Day with the Dinosaurs

After much deliberation, I decided to have a break from the daily grind of, er, dailies, and go get me a dino.

Myself and Mr B went off to the Isle of Giants to farm the Zandalari Dinomancers for the Ancient Tome of Dinomancy which enables hunters to tame the Direhorns on the Island. We also started the grind for Dino Bones for the mount.

Getting Started

• Fly to the furthest point in Kunlai Summit (Zouchin Village) and fly immediate North – don’t panic about the fatigue, it’ll dismount you so keep on swimming.
• Get to the island and pick up the flight point so next time you can fly there from Pandaria
• Take a friend (we took a healer – disc priest – so he could DPS at the same time), as it will be much easier
• There are different ‘sized’ mobs on the island to look out for – small, medium and large. You can only tame the smallest ones of each species

What to do

1. Be careful how you pull the mobs. My hunter is only 464ilvl and we pulled 2 by mistake – a small direhorn and one of the larger ones and it wiped us out

2. Go and hunt the Zandalari Dinomancers (they look like trolls) – take an immediate left up the path from the flight point and there are 4 or 5 there

3. Kill them for the Tome. We killed 6 before it dropped and we didn’t have to move from that spot

4. Pick which colour Direhorn you’d like to tame, and voila – done.

I haven’t named him yet – any ideas?

Other adventures

• If you like collecting pets, like myself, then you’ll be interested to know you can also tame a Devilsaur (I found 2 different colours, I named mine Rex!)

• Oondasta is here for you to enjoy trying to kill

Hunting the bones

This is a good old-fashioned grind – be prepared for the long haul. In exchange for 9,999 dinosaur bones, you can buy yourself a Bone-White Primal Raptor which looks very nice indeed. If that isn’t tempting enough, for 999 you can buy a Spectral Porcupine pet which also looks very pretty.

Each mob awards a different number of bones. We managed the small version of the mobs pretty easily between 2, and this is what we discovered:

Young Primal Devilsaur: rewards 11-13 bones

Primal Direhorn Hatchling: rewards 7-10 bones

Pterrorwing Skyscraper: rewards 13-16 bones but has a massive AoE attack which nearly wiped us out until we got the hang of it!

There are larger versions of these mobs but I suggest you get a small group together with better gear than HC blues 😀

Whatever you’re there for, it really is a beautiful place to spend time in. Good luck!

Mrs B’s Noob Guide to Fishing

Following on from my Archaeology guide (http://wp.me/p34kY5-2p), it’s now time for some fishing.

Fishing on my raft with my “Dragon Fishing Pole” (requires, Anglers – revered)

There are loads of good fishing guides, but as with a lot of WoW things, it doesn’t tell you the basics in laymans terms. That’s what I’m here for!

The Basics

• 4 secondary professions: Archaeology, Fishing, Cooking, First Aid
• Learnt from the appropriate trainer in each city: ask a guard then look for the arrow on your mini-map (I didn’t realised it showed you the way – thick or what!)
• Broken down into levels of 75 points (although you can train the next level after 50 points) which you need to go back to the trainer in order to progress. I definitely did not grind for an hour before realising I couldn’t gain more points because I hadn’t trained…
• Accessed by pressing ‘P’, clicking ‘Professions’ (the little tab at the bottom of the pop up page), then pulling the icon out (shift+click) onto your toolbar. (N.B. You can bind this button to a key so you’re not clicking it every 17seconds – it’s much faster!)

Fishing in 3 steps:

1. Use the ‘fishing’ button to cast the line – it’s like a channelling spell, click it once and watch the magic
2. Hover your cursor over the bobber in the water (look, it turns into a funky fishing icon!) – when it bobs (can be tricky to see, having the sound turned on helps, as it makes a splashing sound), click it
3. Loot the fish

Getting Started

• You need to be level 5 to learn the skill
• You don’t need to have a pole or a lure, but you can purchase these from a fishing trainer in a major city – some poles/lures give extra fishing skill so they’re worth investing in
• DO THE DAILIES! They give you bonus skill points and a loot bag – you can get lots of cool stuff from them. Also, the Darkmoon Fair once a month gives extra easy skill ups too
• You can fish anywhere – as long as the water is deep enough. You could level it all in one place – but this is incredibly boring.

Levelling Up

• This is the boring bit… you cast your line… and you wait. REMEMBER TO TRAIN EVERY 50-75 LEVELS.
• I reccommend you pick the highest level zone for your skill and fish there. If you’re levelling cooking at the same time, you will want to do some research about where to get the fish you need
• Pools: these are little nodes where fish congregate, dotted around any body of water – salt or fresh. You’re more likely to catch fish rather than junk grey items, so they’re better to fish in.
• Weather Beaten Journal: your best friend. This is looted from either a daily reward or fished from a wreckage (floating piles of wood) dotted about in coastal waters. Once you get it, learn it, and turn on ‘track fish’ (the magnifying glass by your mini map). This will show all fishing nodes as yellow dots, making it much easier to see them.
• You can also loot and buy fishing items which increase your skill, I would really reccommend you equip these as it’s quicker and easier to fish with them. Totally ruins your transmog, but heyho.

Achievements

Again, for an achievement-holic like I am, this profession holds a lot of excitement. It’s also a big – as Mr B would say – “time sink”. You spend hours doing these achievements.

Some of my favourites are:

• The Coin Master: this involves sitting at the fountain in Dalaran and fishing endless hours for the coins that you can catch. If you get a GOLD coin, throw it back into the fountain. This will give you a short buff which will make it more likely to fish up another coins. You should be able to catch enough coins with the buff to catch other gold coin so you have a continual buff which helps a lot with this achievement.

On my ‘Mushroom Chair’ (Molton Front dailies) fishing at Dalaran coin fountain

• The Lurker Above: in Serpentshrine Cavern. I just like that you can fish up a massive fish and can then kill it. Awesome.
• Outland / Pandaria (etc) Angler: you know me, I like sightseeing and these achievements gets you out in the world fishing in lots of cool places.
• Tournaments: search your calendar and wowhead for more info – they’re really fun but I’ve yet to win one!

I hope I have enlightened you – happy fishing!

Mrs B’s noob guide to Archaeology

The little gems that are secondary professions! They can be quite confusing if you’re new to the game, so I shall attempt to shed some light on them. I’ll start at the very beginning, with Archaeology.

The Basics

• 4 secondary professions: Archaeology, Fishing, Cooking, First Aid
• Learnt from the appropriate trainer in each city: ask a guard then look for the arrow on your mini-map (I didn’t realised it showed you the way – thick or what!)
• Broken down into levels of 75 points (although you can train the next level after 50 points) which you need to go back to the trainer in order to progress. I definitely did not grind for an hour before realising I couldn’t gain more points because I hadn’t trained…
• Accessed by pressing ‘P’, clicking ‘Professions’ (the little tab at the bottom of the pop up page), then pulling both out (shift+click) onto your toolbar.

Archaeology in 3 steps:

1. Survey the area to find artifacts
2. Find then loot artifacts
3. Solve artifacts to create items to vendor or use

Getting started

• You need to be level 20.
• No need for anything but you and your map. Have empty bags as you’ll collect a lot of stuff to vendor.
• This is a LOT easier with the flying skill of any speed – I admire you if you’re attempting this whilst levelling.
• Train at the trainer then open your map – see those tiny little – almost invisible  – spades dotted around the place? Yeah those. Click on it, this will open the area (e.g., Western Plaguelands or Northern Stranglethorn).There are 4 active at any one time on any one continent.

• Now see the red highlighted area on the map? That’s where you have to go. Yes, they’re dotted all over, and yes, it takes forever. Suck it up.

Levelling Up

• So, assuming you’ve found your way to the first dig site, (see my “Noob Guide to Azerothian Worlds for help on this very confusing subject!!) all you need to do now is press the ‘survey’ button which looks like a spade (see picture above). I would keep this out on your main interface – you’ll be using it a lot.
• Once you’ve pressed it, it will work its magic and sprout up an instrument – looks a bit like a telescope with a flashing light on it.
• The telescope points the way of the next fragment of artifact you’re looking for. Red means you’re far away, yellow means you’re not that far away, and green means you’re pretty damn close. Move in the direction, keep hitting the survey button. When you discover it, a fragment will appear. Click it to loot it. You will get upto 7 fragments per loot.

Solving Artifacts

• Open up the archaeology page by clicking the symbol (in pic above). It’ll look like this:

• Blue tab on the right shows your artifacts in progress, the purple one below it shows what you have already solved.
• Each area of the world has different artifacts to discover depending on the races that preside there. As you can see, I have only uncovered some of them and a lot are currently in progress (10/50 Pandaren for example). Depending on which 4 are active and which continent you are in, you have a limited selection at any one time which – as I’m sure you’ve gathered – means it’s a long process to solve each artifact.
• Once you have the required amount of fragments, you go to your archaeology page and click it to solve it. The solved artifacts either vendor for gold or can be used (mounts, pets etc). The rarer it is, the more you need. Joys.
• Each fragment you dig up nets you 1 skill up point, each solved artifact gives 5 and rares give 15. REMEMBER TO TRAIN OR YOU WON’T GET CREDIT. I totally didn’t ever forget…
• Each location only holds a few fragments, so you can’t stay there indefinitely – see, I wasn’t lying when I said flying helps!
•  What you discover and in which order is entirely random. So cross your fingers and toes and hope what you want comes up quickly. I got the Fossilised Raptor and the Clockwork Gnome somewhere between 500 and 600 points and haven’t had anything since. Typical.

Achievements

For an enthusiast like myself, archaeology holds a whole world of undiscovered achievements (I hope you like my pun there). Along with the milestones for 150, 225, 300, 375, 450, 525 and 600 points there are also a whole host of others…

• Finding certain numbers of common artifacts
• Finding certain numbers of rare artifacts (a nice title comes with these too!)
• Storyline achievements – finding artifacts relating to lore.

WoWdigs is a really comprehensive site which goes into much more detail than I have space for, especially on achievements and mounts/pets: http://www.wowdigs.com/achievements.htm

Happy Hunting !!

Mrs B’s noob guide to the Azerothian worlds.

If you haven’t already read it, I’d reccommend you read my complete noob guide first: https://mrandmrswow.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/mrs-bs-noob-guide/

One of the most confusing things in WoW, in my humble opinion, is definitely finding your way around. How do you know where everything is? How do you get there? Knowing is a skill. No, an art.

First, really important things you need to know about the different continents:

Eastern Kingdoms

• Looks like the UK
• Hosts lots of major cities which high level players hang around in looking important
• Starting areas for humans, dwarves (grisly little brutes), gnomes (small, so small!), blood elves (weird pointy ears), undead (says it all), worgen (funny walking dogs)

Northrend

• Take a jumper, it’s blimmin’ freezing
• Looks like Australia and is home to Dalaran
• Has some good hunter pets – if you can be bothered waiting

Kalimdor

• Horde are everywhere
• Bad to get to if you get seasick
• Starting areas for orcs (ugly!!), trolls (see previous), tauren (cow-like creatures which have tusks… what’s all that about??), night elves (Mr B has a thing for these little yummies), draenei (yeah, the feet ARE weird!), goblins (look like someone has projectile vomited over them, poor things)
• HORDE ARE EVERYWHERE!

Pandaria

• Uh, PANDAS!

Maelstrom

• It’s the big swirly thing in the middle…

Outland

• Has some really pretty places to visit if you’re having a touristy day out (Nagrand, Zangarmarsh, Netherstorm)
• Shattrath is here
• Nightmare to get to from Eastern Kingdoms

Now you know the important stuff, let me go into some of the particularities. Bear in mind I play Alliance so this may not help you Hoardies much 😉

1. Eastern Kingdoms – Vashj’ir (watery place) / Uldum (desert-y place)/ Hyjal (got a big tree and loads of burning stuff) / Pandaland / Tol Barad (lots of horde) / Twilight Highlands (high level stuff) / Deepholm (in the big swirly thing): go to Stormwind and take the portals out the back of Dwarven District. Hopefully, knowing this now will save you lots of running around later!
2. Stormwind – Ironforge. You KNOW you want to take the tram! Pick it up from the Deep Run Tram place in IF or from Dwarven District (co-ords 66,34). If you’re boring, fly from the flight master.
3. If you want to go to Isle of Quel’Danas, unless you’re closer, go to Ironforge and fly from there. It portals you and saves you a looooong flight. Wish I’d known that when I was farming Magisters Terrace….
4. Eastern Kingdoms – Dalaran:  go to the docks in Stormwind and get the boat from the harbour… I’m sure there’s probably a way to tell which dock is for which boat…
5. Eastern Kingdoms – Kalimdor: depending if you want to go north or south: either get the boat to Darnassus then fly, or take the Uldum portal from Stormwind. Or, get the boat or a mage to portal you to Theramore.
6. Eastern Kingdoms – Outland (Shattrath): take the Dark Portal. Go to Stormwind, find the Mage Tower (yeah, that took me about an hour too!), take the portal. Enter Blasted Lands, go through the Dark Portal (straight in front of you). Hope you don’t get ganked. Voilà.
7. Eastern Kingdoms – Pandaria: Portal at the place in Stormwind (or take the gunship in the air if you haven’t been before). At the major city in Pandaland (Shrine of the Seven Stars) there is a similar portal room to all the major Alliance cities. Worth considering setting your hearthstone here at 90 for that reason.

Of course, you could always befriend (or pay) a Mage to portal you to the main cities of Stormwind, Ironforge, Darnassus, Exodar, Theramore, Shattrath, Dalaran, Tol Barad, Vale of Eternal Blossoms. Oops, maybe I should have said that first…

Boats… blergh.

REMEMBER: you have a hearthstone. Save it to your current most-used location and save yourself loads of time flying / running around.

Good luck in your adventures – if all else fails, at least you’ll give Dora the Explorer a run for her money!

Mrs B’s noob guide

As a new player, I found (and still find!) a complete lack of guides for those who don’t understand WoW or MMo language. So, welcome to my guide – I hope you find it enlightening.

1. You’ve successfully managed to download and log in to WoW – phew. First problem, what character, class and realm to choose. Each has their own intricacies, which of course you have no idea about yet. You know what – take a lucky guess for now, you’ll probably want to change later anyway.

2. Horde vs Alliance. I chose alliance because *ahem* the horde looked really ugly (goblins… really?!) but each has their own storyline. I’m not qualified to talk any further on this subject – Mr B will do a post another time.

3. Addon: a complicated techy programme downloaded from various sites to ‘enhance’ your gaming UI. UI: “user interface” or how the screen looks in laymans terms. You won’t have these when you first start playing (of course, these things are never easy!) which means levelling your first character is a hard slog – you don’t know which quests or where to get them from. Get one… or several. Yes, definitely several.

4. Questing. Gah. Pick up a quest, hope it’s the right one, do what it says, realise you didn’t do it right, go all the way back, do it again, hand it in, don’t understand where to get the next quest from, find the next guy after extensive googling, wonder why it won’t let you accept it. Rinse and repeat… for hours. See point 2 for help with this nonsense.

5. Running. You will run. A lot. Stick to the paths and hope you don’t run into the opposing faction or mobs (note: enemies). At 20, you finally get a mount. This joy is shortlived however, as it only goes a bit faster than your feet. At 60 you can fly, which is the best thing EVER. Oh, this stops in Pandaria til level 90, so enjoy it while it lasts.

6. Dungeons. What’s your speciality? DPS, tank, healer? No idea? Neither did I. Need? Greed? Pass? Ha! In a nutshell: a group of players who know exactly what they’re doing, and think they can play your char (note: character/toon) better than you.You get loot, only need the things that are good for your character (get researching!) and greed on everything else.

a) DPS: follow the tank, don’t hit anything he’s not hitting, and hope you don’t die.

b) Healer: get a healing addon (grid or something similar), shield the tank and hope you don’t let him – or yourself – die.

c) Tank: Most who sign as tank know what they’re doing, but still. Follow the map, hit things, don’t let baddies hit your team and hope you don’t die. Don’t let anyone else die.

7. Portals and flight master. Getting around WoW and the various worlds has got to be, hands down, the most confusing thing in the game. I play a mage – with ready made portals to the main cities – and STILL don’t know where anything is!! There are 5 main ‘continents’ (for use of a better word) which you need to navigate between. Each city has portals to different places, some have docks with boats to diferent places, and some – stupidly – you can only go one way. Flight masters go to the various ‘towns’ within each ‘continent’. Each faction has their own major cities etc etc. I’d reccommend writing everything down, then you can have it at-a-glace if you need it. Or wing it, if you live on the wild side.

8. PvP / PvE / RP. Fighting real people / fighting baddies in the game / pretending you’re someone else. All have their pros and cons, try ’em out and see.

9. Guilds. Group of (hopefully) likeminded people to form an allegiance with. Each has their own mission statement (see point 8). You can always leave, so pick one and experiment!

10. Chatting. /w = a whisper or private message. /gquit leaves the guild (see point 9 – a handy one to know I found!). /g talking in guild. /p for talking in dungeons (see point 6). Lots of others, google is your friend!

11. Professions. Things to do to waste your time. I mean, *ahem* earn you gold and level up. Secondary are the ones everyone has (fishing, cooking, archeology, first aid). Primary are your own two choices. Plenty of guides out there and lots of different choices – some are beneficial for certain characters. Go… google!

12. Transmog, reforging, gemming. Totally unnecessary (in my noob-opinion) but really good to do. Transmog is morphing your clothes to look like other clothes – e.g., changing the colour. Great for us style-conscious fashionistas out there! Reforging is a world I don’t understand but you can get addons for this which do it all for you – basically optimising your stats on the gear you have. Gems add certain stats depending on their colour: seeing as I get Mr B to do all mine, I’m not qualified to explain. Better to ask a guildie.

13. Acronyms. Oh em gee – too many! Merits a whole seperate post I think – google is your friend! FYI: I wouldn’t ask in trade chat, they can be mean!

14. Achievements… press Y. Lots of things to work on, again, with plenty of guides. Lots of fun with guild members and/or friends. Probably better to leave til you’re higher level and/or not so much of a noob.

15. Ganking. Members of the opposite faction, usually of a higher level in groups, lying in wait and killing you. Again. And again. Very frustrating. One word of advice: do NOT throw keyboard on floor in frustration after the 15th time of being ganked… this does NOT help the situation!

I hope I’ve covered most of the things which are potential stumbling blocks. There are many more, but I would need a novel in order to explain. Good luck, and happy WoW-ing!