Monday, February 29, 2016

Where's Me Lucky (Lovely) Charms?



Love is in the Air, a February World of Warcraft festival, was over at noon today server time... and on the dot, as I was just ready to turn in quests and buy from the vendor ... poof! All the Lovely Hearts, all the Lovely Charms, all the Lovely (though every time I start to say that, I think,  "Where's Me Lucky Charms?") Charm Bracelets ... all gone. All that work!

Partway through the festival, all the most rewarding farming sites for the Lucky, erm, Lovely Charms were nerfed by WoW. I actually witnessed it, and it was later confirmed by posts or comments on various WoW related websites.

One morning last week, I was able to play early. I went to an area with a reasonable amount of mobs and made sure that I wasn't moving in on someone who was questing or also farming the area. No one was there. If someone appeared, I moved to a side area, and only focused on a few mobs in that area, so that I'd not be depriving anyone.

I don't usually go crazy on dps. I was playing my hunter, who is usually spec'd Beast Master, but who had changed for that time to Marksman, as I had just tried out a few Timewalking instances. I don't often choose the uber blaster multishot, Barrage, as I find it often attracks more than I want. That day, I was in the middle of almost a month of Recruit A Friend leveling, and just wanted to see how feasible it might be to grab some charms and get an idea of how long it would take. I'll admit, I was in a bit of a rush to get back to leveling the RAF characters, so ... ready, aim ..... FIRE! BARRRRRRRAAAAAGE!

Holy Moses in the reeds!

I watched my text log, and in that one barrage I got 5 Charms. Oooo! I'll try it again! 4 charms! I used Barrage every time the cooldown was off and in less than 30 minutes, I kid you not, I had easily about 120 charms. That was nice.

I left there and went to leveling a bit. Later, I came back to the garrison of another hunter, yes, I love hunters. She went to the same spot, about 4 hours later, and I tried the barrage technique. First time ... nothing. Second time ... nothing again. Third ... fourth ... not a single charm. I changed back to my original hunter, thinking that it might have something to do with the stats, the dps, etc. Same thing ... no charms when using barrage. I tried going only to single shots, and then every 4 to 10 shots I got a charm. Boo! I tried it with Multishot ... no charms. I also found that if I had my pet active and it attacked - no charms.

Granted, I was at the bottom of the xp gain, killing 90's one a level 100 character. Why then, was I gathering mad charms 4 or 5 hours before this with my pet out, using aoe as well as single shots? It seems, from the posts and comments, that people were reporting this wondrous bounty to GM's, and WoW went right to work nerfing all the prolific drops zones. -Sigh-  Some people were gathering hundreds of charms in an hour in certain places, and I can see that that was a bit much. I had gathered nowhere near that, and in the end was left carefully plinking away, with my pet on passive, hoping that I would get a charm here and there ... agonizing!

Is this the new Zen of Farming?

Oh, yes, right ... another Love Fest has gone by, and still no rocket. It should be a two-seater anyway. I'll get the Touring Rocket. Problem solved. No more rocket envy. I'm moving on.


[An interesting aside: As I had said above, I was leveling RAF characters before and during Love Is In The Air. One of the characters had taken the quest "Test Your Strength" from the Darkmoon Faire and had not completed it. As that character was questing in Pandaria, as well as looking for Lovely Charms, I was curious to see how WoW would handle the tallying of each of those at the same time. Last month I found, just by chance, that having the quest "Test Your Strength" on a character who was doing Halfhill farming dailies made gathering Grizzly trophies go rather quickly. Each mob killed was counted toward the quest. When on a hunter, using aoe spells, and with an active pet during Love Is In The Air with the "Strength" quest active ... after the Holiday nerf ... again, no ticking off of trophies for quest and no Lovely Charms.]


Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Am I Crazy ...

I've been debating for months whether or not to post something. I've thought of it many times, composed many a post in my head while gaming, and yet I don't write. The most prominent reason to not post is - why do it, when I hardly ever post anyway?

I'm doing it.

 This post started out to be about how I am now using the 4 Recruit A Friend accounts I bought in December 2015 so that I could receive the 4 battle pet rewards. I've leveled 3 characters to 90, and am just finishing leveling another 3 characters to 90. That will be finished later this afternoon. I've got a third group to level from 50 to 90. All of these characters are Horde. I hope to level another group of 3 characters on Alliance before my 90 days are up. Am I crazy? Of course. Now for the best part of my WoW experience today, and the game is not even back up yet.

Recently I've wondering why I'm still playing, since all the people I used to play with are no longer playing, and if they are, I've lost touch with them. Is gaming still in line with who I am? On the Real Life server, I am a person who believes that there is a sacredness to life, to all aspects of life. I've often wondered if there are others like me who play games. I'm currently playing World of Warcraft, and have been again for the past 2 years.

WoW shut down for maintenance earlier today, and was supposed to be up by now. As in days of yore, restart has been delayed, so I decided to read some WoW blogs that I've enjoyed in the past. I am happy that I did, because I found out that there are other people who play WoW who think similarly to me.

I was touched and inspired by a post by Zwingli on his blog Zwingli's Weblog O' WoW: When Life Intrudes, about the death of someone that he knew, honouring that person's life. I was quite touched and inspired. Thank you, Zwingli, and blessings to the family of Jeremy in their time of loss. Blessings to the spirit of Jeremy, whose life touched, brightened and inspired those others around him.