Welcome to the Windy Weather Website.
These are musings from my vantage point on the Oregon South Coast.
A long-time software engineer and general geek, I continue my exploration with Photography, 3D Graphics, Linux and other nonsense. Come along for the ride.
Fishing in Krasarang Wilds
If you want the Azure Water Strider mount, maybe because you’ve heard that the Broken Isles has lots of ponds and streams, you’ll need to get Exalted with the Anglers. I tried to read the guide on WowHead, and got more confused the more I read. It’s a cute, but pretty much useless treatise on the glory of fishing rather than a guide about what to do to get the mount.
Well it’s not that hard to get started from zero in fishing to making progress toward the mount. The guide makes it sound like you need to go back to the starting areas and level your fishing, but you don’t. I started from Fishing = 1 next to Nat and with the basic rod. You don’t need to level your fishing first.
Hurray! Draenor Pathfinder! Flight for everyone in Draenor.
But, Well. I must confess. I used a shortcut.
It turns out that there is this item called Medallion of the Legion that gives 1000 rep for all the factions in Draenor. Super short cut.
These are dropped at a low rate from some bosses on Draenor, but they appear on the Auction House. When I first looked they were going for about 16KG each, but later I found them for 6.5KG each. But in a few hours I had enough Medallions.
Whoopee.. Reached 110. I ground some dungeons, completed a quest I had hanging around and voila. 110. It took about a dozen dungeons, which is a lot really, to get from 108 to 110. And it’s a long wait for a Legion Dungeon – 25 or 30 minutes on average. At lower levels wait times are more like 10-15 minutes. I remember back in the 40’s when I could get two levels from a single dungeon and back in the 60’s when I would get at least a level from running Hellfire Citadel. Oh well. But I had an Azsuna quest sitting in my quest log for one of the Titan Relics and the last dungeon was apparently the Eye of Azshara. Here are some pictures from that last fight.
So far so good. But something strange happened.
Ok. I’ve been playing Legion for a week or so. Time for some gripes.
It’s too hard. My fingers are bleeding here. Let’s look at some history. I first joined Wow back in Cataclysm days and being an Altaholic, I had a few toons up through the 80’s through Vashj’ir and Deepholm. I wasn’t into dungeons much, so I was wearing mostly quest gear and some crafted pieces. I was doing fine. The game was fun.
Then came Pandaria, and I got trashed. Why was that? There was a sudden item level jump between the quest gear of Cata and Pandy. And the gear they gave you on the Pandy Intro quests looked way better than Cata quest gear, but it was really just trash. So you step off the boat and get trashed by the 3 Hosen that jump you. I couldn’t move out of the outposts. Pandaria was just NO FUN. I never found out whether I should have ground up some dungeons for gear or whether I had to be a serious raider – never had done one back then – to get reasonable gear for Pandaria.
Death Knight ready for Draenor
After leveling in Pandaria, you’ll want to go to Draenor. If, like me, you have a pretty much full set of Heirlooms, level to 91 before you go so you’ll take advantage of your heirlooms. When switching campaigns, they need one more level to catch up. But with the XP boost they give, putting on a level or 2 is easy. I only did about 1/2 of Pandaria and it was mostly to get the gear styles for transmog. So I took a Death Knight at 91 to Draenor, and he did fine in terms of survivability. But, it’s a drag to not fly.
I built my Garrison and using the Wow-Pro guides was able to finish Shadowmoon Valley. But then Legion went on sale and I went for it.
Draenor Pathfinder
Well, why not get flight? It’s called Draenor Pathfinder. Account wide flight in Draenor from the git-go for all your toons. But’s gonna be much easier to get it with a Demon Hunter, isn’t it. I had started a Demon Hunter and they are Over Powered Killing machines. I had one that I’m leveling in Azuna, but it seemed best to build a second one and leave right away for Draenor.
Demon Hunter
To send email across Realms, that is.
So with patch 7.3.0 – Shadows of Argus – , they have added the recognition that you have characters on other realms when you send email. But you can’t actually send email to those realms. Sigh. “You are not prepared!” as the old quote goes.
Sending to other realms gets you “You can’t send to that Realm” and of course if you try to send cross faction you still get “Target is unfriendly”.
Someday we can hope for cross realm, in-account at least, mail.
Addons are Trashed – most of them
In other news most of my addons don’t work.
I was disappointed that BankItems failed. Ark Inventory replaces all inventory displays and I don’t like that much. Gatherer failed, but GatherMate2 works apparently. But of course I lost all the data from Gatherer. At least TomTom and SellJunk works. And there’s an update for Wow-Pro so it works too.
At least I’m prepared to do some leveling with Wow-Pro.
:ww
Let’s run the numbers. For a private University- Such as Harvard.
The Endowment is about $40 Billion and the Operating Budget is a little over $4 Billion.
So what does it cost to go to Harvard?
So, based on the student population and the expenses per student, the students only contribute about 10% of the annual budget of the University. So it could easily be FREE to go to this University and the University would not go broke. After all, they are making more then 6% on their huge endowment, which is more than $2 BILLION with a B every year in income on their endowment. On which they pay no taxes. Yep. Universities pay no taxes. So what about the students in “Professional Programs”? Well those folks “Live at Home” and their expenses are paid by their employers, right? No? Shame on them.
Other private institutions and I dare say, state institutions are in a similar situation. So why is college tuition going up? Why are these institutions hoarding their endowments rather than making college affordable? Why is Yale running an expensive golf course at government expense – that is, not paying taxes on it?
Pick the college that you are interested in and Google it for yourself.
University should be free for everyone in the US – Tuition and Reasonable on-campus expenses should be paid. The Rip-Off business of College Loans should Go Out of Business and all student debt should be forgiven. Colleges are in the business of selling mortgages on the futures of our young people and we as a society should stop it.
That’s my 2 cents.
:ww
Ok – So what now?
So just how do you level these days?
I’m back to Wow after playing back in 2011 – 2013, so a lot of things have changed. As I mentioned in my last Wow post about Economics, the leveling experience is different in many ways. When I restarted in the May 2017, I had some characters up to 85 or so, both Horde and Alliance, and some saved gold. My goal was to build a realm of about a dozen Alliance toons starting with a DK that was already 85, a Hunter in low 80’s and a few other lower level toons. I’m an Altaholic so I try to play all the classes and many of the races.
Here are some tips that I’ve learned about how best to level.
(1) Take advantage of Heirlooms. With a 10% Exp boost for each piece and the power they give, they are worth the gold, even if you need to use a Wow Token to get and upgrade them. I splurged and have both Agility and Intellect Mail as well as Plate and Cloth sets. 32 Total, all upgraded to Level 100. Sure I could get 3 more for the side car mount that comes with the Achievement at 35, but I don’t have any more toons lower than level 20, so everybody already rides. Honored rep with your guild allows you to buy helms and legs, so that can be four pieces of armor. At 10% XP boost per piece that’s 40% XP boost per kill or quest – I think. At least I’m leveling a lot faster than otherwise. I’m leaving areas about half way through as I quest. The heirloom weapons are very powerful too. So that’s a minimum of five heirlooms per spec type. But there’s a lot of overlap. Druids and Shaman can both use the Mace with Intellect or Agility for example.
GW2 Trading Post Graph
After playing World of Warcraft back in 2011-2013, then Tera and Guild Wars 2, I’m back playing Wow again. I’ve been watching two things:
There have been a few changes in Wow since I played it, or at least there appear to be. And this note looks at those changes in the economics by comparing Wow with the other two games I’ve been playing.
The first thing I’ve noticed is that changes in a game that are made to allow folks to level up faster greatly affect the economy, or can. And in some cases they can basically wreck the economy for some groups of players.
As some toons reached about 70, I created Cloth and Mail armor with crafting. There are several problems to be solved:
It turns out that the Wow crafting panel has a search feature, and if you choose “unlearned” then you can search for recipes that you don’t know.
