Elkagorasa the Casual

The War Within has been a wonderful expansion for casual, solo play. Each patch has added a new way to engage in the game. Each of these modes provides end-game play that has its own transmog items, gear, mounts and pets. If you want, these can all be run with a group, but Blizzard has figured it out and made them scale up when you group up.  Dastardly Duos This is a new limited-time game mode where you and up to 4 more people fight in an arena-style battle dome. The concept that your team has been pitted by goblin promoters against animatronic knock-offs of legacy raid encounters. During the fight, your team encounters waves of trash, followed by bosses from legacy raids. Randomly, gears will drop off, which can be used as a power-up that can change the fight dynamics. There is a key that allows you to control a vehicle and use its weapons. There's a time extender to prolong the fight. Last, there's a call for reinforcements that brings in more trash mobs. There's a score ...

Ah February. Love is in the air. Those heart shaped chocolates. The exchanging of sappy cards and trinkets. The endless grinding the apothecaries for a mount with an insanely low drop rate. Ah holidays.. So, Elkagorasa has been taking a bit of a holiday. He's gone back to Pandaria to do a little recreational activities. He started the adventure hanging out with Nate on his little floating town. Elk was already honored among the Anglers as being a decent fisherman. Getting exalted meant hanging out for 3 different adventures each day. These trips ranged from fishing up garbage (player competition), killing puffer fish, and collecting the clam meat. The 'worst' was fishing up a piranha from the rivers . The oddest was fist fighting a shark . (spam #3 on cooldown). Those goblins loved sending him to 'blow-up' things, but usually he would just DOT everything up and watch it die quickly. At hitting Revered, Elk picked up the Angler commendation , basically turning ...

After the compromise last week on no-flying ever again, I decided it was ok to restart the rep grinds for mounts. Flying out to Netherwing ledge reminded me of the Sha'tari Skyguard  and their mountable rays. I remember hating working on this rep at level and had only made it to Friendly. Over the weekend, I read through the guide " Nether Ray in a Day ". This guide details all of the quests that are available for this faction. One commenter pointed out that you can technically you only need to do the repeatable quests (if you don't care about other faction reps). So I flew up and started the grind. Some hints if you're just starting. Kill everything in the zone. Everything gives rep. (Ok, I don't know about the lizards, but they probably do too). I fly into a hub, and start spamming rain of fire over everything. The mobs give 10 rep, their little pets give 5, those fast orange birds give 10 rep and even the treants give 30 rep.  The skettis have a hi...

Tonight, I plan to start working on my Netherwing  reputation. This is the faction, that sits way out in old Shadowmoon Valley, under Black Temple. WowHead quest progress. (/) Where to start? As of this moment, I am HATED with a capital H by this faction. Checking WowHead is awesome. I points out that the last quest that I completed in the Introduction chain is Karynaku . Two more quests and I'll become an ' Ally of the Netherwing '. This final quest provides (without buffs) 42,000 rep! But.. Being that my guild is level 25, we have Mr. Popularity  and it's Darkmoon Faire week, so there's WHEE ! (or the Hat , buying 4 to last weekend) that will add another combined 20% rep to the gain. 42000 + 4200 + 4200 (50,800 reputation gained). The first 42k moves you from Hated to 0-Neutral. 4200 moves you from Neutral to Friendly (1200:6000). The final 4200 will bump me 600 short (5400:6000) of Honored. Rep required per level And then... I can start the que...

Looking at all that's coming out about garrison 's in Warlords, I am excited. The opportunities of having various npcs all working for me sound intriguing. Gathering blueprints from the various questing zones so that I can expand my garrison into areas that this single toon can't do. I look forward to expanding a blacksmith's hut and getting myself some nicer weapons. So I spend the next 2 years building up this awesome, working town of Elkagorasa'shire. With everything I need to level up my gear, start raiding and maybe even some world PVP. I am totally excited that I'll be able to guide my progression through the game and tailor my daily quests to what I love to do. Plant a farm, go fishing, make GOLD on the AH... all at my garrison. I can almost hear the jingle in my head. But like any expansion, I foresee my Pandaren farm going fallow. Why would I need to plant Windwool cactus while living in Draenor? My garrison is already going to have a farm ran by an...

Last night after running the dailies, my tailor finished off her rep with the August Celestials. Immediately, I hearthed back and picked up the pattern for the Royal Satchel . One for Elk and One for Eride. Yeah, immediately 4 more bag slots by replacing the Embersilk bag . Move the embersilk to bank slot, replacing 20 slot bag. This got me thinking, what other rep can I easily work on? On thing for sure, Eride needs her " Black Prince " rep. Through no intentional means, Elk is Honored without even trying. Probably from LFR raids and killing all those Klaxxi? One trick I found on Wowhead via the comments was to run successive runs of a daily quest for the Shadow Pan . It's a bit of a cheat personally; run quest, abandon and run again, but you can easily make 1000 per run (100 kills at 10-15 rep each).  Combine that with the current DMF " Whee !" buff and you'll make another 100 rep each run!! :D Elk has moved on to building his Order of Cloud Serpent...

4 days of dailies for the Sunreaver Onslaught and I've gone from neutral to honored. Nice. Of course it doesn't hurt that there are anywhere from 12 - 19 daily quests to complete. At honored, I was able to pickup this new belt for 300g. It was a decent upgrade from what I had before . I completed the first of the raid's last night in the Heart of Fear LFR. From the Blade Lord Ta'yak fight, I won a new pair of bracers . As a note, don't use an Elder charm when you have already won the bracers. I simply got 2 sets of bracers. FYI, I hate this boss fight. Without a run-speed bonus, I was not able to finish this fight. I simply could not get out of the way of the tornadoes to avoid all of them. Maybe a potion? I ended up dying at the end of the hall where the boss first ' blew ' us. I like this strat, if I could have only reached him the first time... An easy strategy for 2nd phase is this: When you first reach him, keep applying DoTs. When Boss HP is ...

Inspired by Cynwise , I decided to do a little math. Ok, no deep analysis, just some basic calculations on my gear. I want to know what it's going to take to get me into the next level raiding. Current iLevel I have an average gear score of 465 equipped now. This is found by doing a simple average of my equipped gear. Fire up Excel, and fill in the numbers, easy to do. By tinkering with the numbers for gear iLevel, I found that by increasing a single item by 10 points (460 -> 470), it makes my overall average score increase by ~1. For example, when I replaced my crafted PVP helm (450) with the scenario reward (463), I went from an average score of 464.5 to 465.3 (0.8 increase). To do a full point increase, I'd need a 16 point change (i.e. 450 -> 466). I want a 470 overall (average) ilevel. To do so, I need to improve my over all score by 4.7 points or add 75 points on my gear. Add REP Gear Spin it around, I have 3 pieces that are over 470, (2*476 and 4...

I have come to realize that raiding without rep grinding is going to be very very boring. I am stuck at this point waiting for the random number gods to drop me an upgrade. I am still sporting my crafted pvp helm and several other blue sub-460 items. My only saving graces last night, a winning roll on heroic version of my old shoulders  (450 -> 463), and "Love Is In The Air" started Sunday, so I picked up the 480 necklace  (463 -> 480). Finally, off the AH, I purchased a new pair of bracers  for 1100g (450 -> 476). This only brought my overall average iLevel up 3 points (from 462). Outside of straight RNG, I COULD look into valor/rep upgrades, but bah humbug. It just sounds painful. Shado-pan (head), Golden Lotus (chest), Dominance Offensive (shoulder, belt, trinket & feet) and/or Klaxxi (legs & belt) all Revered. As you can see, I am not very reputable. In fact, Dominance Off likes me best with only FRIENDLY. You'd think that since this is a ...

So, my game play had dropped of quite a bit lately. I took Tuesday off from work and spent my time playing Fallout: New Vegas , not WoW. Nothing like playing a FPS, console-ish game on your PC to change your DPS style, ammo matters. The one mechanic that really had me is the 'weight gain' aspect. You cannot simply carry something in every bag slot until they are all full, but each 'major' item has a weight value and your character can only carry up to that point. Beyond that my movement is impaired (no jumping, no running) and if I go too far, he simply falls over. Imagine if Blizzard decided that they finally needed to implement this in WoW?!   I just died because I won the roll on Mimiron's head , but looting it because it exceeded my weight limits!! The one grind in WoW I have managed to keep up is my reputation grind with the Tillers. I've managed to do the dailies about 3 times the last week. I have an 8 plot farm and at revered I was able to pickup th...

Sitting here today, looking at all the news releases coming out on Mists of Panderan, I start to wonder if Blizzard really could have picked a different race to come out in the next expansion. OK, sure, it has Panderan in the title, so really, would there be any other option?? Aside from that, as I skim down the story line in the game so far, is there a distinct class/race combination that screams out to be played? The Azeroth lore is fairly rich with strong classes, but most are already played, or simply variants of what is already there. This got me thinking... what about the centaurs ? I mean, there's a whole quest chain in Desolace where we befriend one of two local tribes. We work on getting their trust so that we can move on to the next area. If I remember correctly, all horde picked the tribe closest to the stronghold there so they didn't get attacked running to/from the base. BUT, that's besides the point. Think about the benefits. Melee friendly clas...

Last night, on a whim, I ran over to Eastern Plague Lands and tried running through Stratholme. Two purposes, play around with my Felguard and Demo spells, second get my Argent Dawn rep, so following a half-remembered forum post, I went in and started killing. 0 rep earned 2 hours later, bags laden with a dozen or so, soulbound level 50 epics!, I never found the book I was looking for. Half expecting to find a glowy, twinkly book sitting on the ground by the second-to-last boss. All in all, I never got a point of rep. A few things I forgot: There are prequests. The quests are well detailed in this comment . I plan to try again later this week. Doing these quests would have gotten me to Revered. Since, I am already there, so I was hoping to skip them. My Argent Dawn commission . It was in my bank. Oddly, looking at the commission entry on Wowhead, this has been removed from the game.  Supposedly if you had done the prequests, you should be able to pick up a replacement. If yo...

At the moment, I am working towards my Exalted reputation with the Ramkahen. After finishing the quests in this zone, I was still a long way from Exalted. Picked up the Tabard and started wearing it for all my heroic dailies. Each evening that I log in, I do my 2 Ramkahen dailes before anything else. Still a full 10 days later, and I am still working on the stretch from Revered to Exalted. Ugh. On the other hand, I finished off the Deepholm quests late last week. I've ran the dailes 3 times, and was able to pull down a massive 4500 rep. Just running dailies alone, I believe I should become Exalted about the same time as with Ramkahen. This is why I believe those Ramkahen need more dailies. With only 2 dailies currently active, I can only get ~500 reputation each day that I run. With some of the options available in this zone, the lack of fun dailies, is not because of a lack of great quests. Personally this zone is ripe with great 'vehicle' type quests. Some of my p...

I have an idea. I think it's a good idea. I know, it's a long shot, but that's why I created this Idle Thoughts category. So, I was reading in the upcoming PTR notes about the changes coming to the Guild tab: Guild Interface A View All button has been added to the profession display regardless of whether Show Offline Members is checked. Online members can now be sorted to the top of the View Crafters list. The guild reputation cap is now displayed in the tooltip. So, I can see all the various recipes that my guild can make, now I want a disenchant button. You know that function you get while in a group, to disenchant items when you have an enchanter on hand. See, I have a tailor in my guild who has a recipe for those cool, i346 pants. I have all the mats, but this guildie is in a different time zone, so she's never on, at least not when I am. I could mail her the mats, hope she makes the right ones, and wait until tomorrow. But I got a disenchant button, so.....

I know, I know, you're not an achievement whore ( like me ). You're not a mount junkie ( like me ). You're all about the game. Still it's free rep to champion one of the new races coming into the game, and Blizzard has made it EASY to get exalted with your faction's new race. I ran a Heroic HOR and picked up a quick 1000 rep with the goblins . You need approximately 40,000 rep to get to Exalted. That's an easy (at the current rate) 40 heroic (Wrath) dungeons. Just for wearing their tabard...Combine that with a bunch of Justice points you'll get.. Cheaper prices when purchasing from the Goblins Possibility of a loud, alliance bashing mount Tons of badges justice points for your Tier 11 set when Cata drops next week.  Why are you not championing while in the dungeons?

Over at Just My Two Copper , Markco has posted a great review of the various Guild Perks that are coming in Cataclysm and how they will help you make MORE gold. If you haven't had a chance, this site is an excellent resource discussing gold making methods and tricks. Personally, I am excited about a few of these per k s as they are directly going to replace benefits from BOA gear, and trinkets like the riding crop . Simply by joining a guild, you will (eventually) get all these perks. The rate at which your guild gets each perk is based on points, points you get from completing quests (and possibly more that I haven't seen). These points also add directly to your reputation with the guild. Better rep, better rewards you can purchase at the guild vendors. For a breakdown of all the various perks, check out this WowHead breakdown .

I was reviewing my reputation with  the various factions today and I realized that I've hit Exalted with about 15 different groups. 16 (of 20) according to the achievement page. This implies to me that I should have or be really close to completing the Ten Tabards achievement. Unfortunately when I review, I currently have only equipped 7. So, how do I go about acquiring the remaining 9 that I've earned? How do I even figure out which ones I've already purchased? Due to the lack of stacking or separate character tab, I've tossed the " Championing " tabards as soon as I hit exalted. OK that means I've worn: Argent Crusade Ebon Blade Kirin Tor Wyrmrest Accord Next, I have my guild tabard (5) and my Explorer tabard (6). Ok, I just realized that I got a tabard from fire festival (7). Whew! Thanks for lending your ear, er eyes. Now for the remaining tabards.  I qualify for all of the horde tabards, but they appear to be 50 champion seals each (s...

 Last night, I was lucky enough to be asked to fill a DPS slot in a new (progression) ICC 25-man raid. The guild has a few members that I used to do heroics with, so they had some experience with me. This guild has been running ICC for awhile, but hasn't downed all the bosses yet. The beauty of joining an existing raiding group is that most of them have fairly decent gear (high 5500 -> 6100). I missed out on a few drops, simply because I didn't know how to bid on the first boss ( nice neck dropped). I was lucky enough to get the following: Corp'rethar Ceremonial Crown - This crazy helm has fire or green gases emitting from it. As Fulguralis mentioned, it is a bit 'hawt', but I also feel like batman. I got this for the minimum bid of "4 dkp". Plague Scientist's Boots - These boots dropped off the last plague wing boss we did, Festergut.(21dkp) Dark Coven Leggings - I was only 10 Frost badges away from 95 when I started the raid. By complet...