After being corpse camped again in WoW to the point where I had to just log out, that growing hatred of PvP came back. I decided I was done. I can’t bring myself to commit to an alliance character, and there are no good horde guilds on non-PvP worlds, which leaves all of nothing left for me to play. I quit all my guilds and made a corpse out of my main character in the middle of Shatt. I do not intend on logging on except maybe to re-corpse after the servers reset.

Then I went to FF for Dynamis. At this point, I realized that the only game I might hate more than WoW at that moment, is FF. I was there out of a sense of obligation to my friends, more than any sort of desire to be there.

My WoW account expires at the end of this month, and my FF will be canceled before the new year. I’m not deleting anything, as there is always the chance I may return to one or both. I’m just going inactive for a while.

Since I’m not going to be playing anymore, this will be the last post here, aside from a handful of pictures that I intended to post and may still. I’ve been neglecting the rest of my life for far too long.

All that’s left to say is ‘So long, and thanks for all the fish’.

I’m tired of hearing about how this is all about race. But fine, then the ‘N-word’ is the best way to describe Obama, and how I will refer to it.

Obama is a clueless idiot. He is not a hero, he is not some great figure. He is an idiot, and under him, everything will get worse.

I am going to laugh. The Rev. Wright, who he spoke out against when it looked ‘bad’ for him, is now addressing everyone at his rally in Chicago. This regime of terror begins with a lie. It can only go down from here.

How does one apply for refugee status? I have a feeling we’re going to need it soon.

1/21/13. Countdown begins.

While it is true, FFXI is a lot easier than it used to be, and I don’t feel that it is completely a bad thing, no one thinks about the other way around.

When the news of the 18 hour Pandemonium Warden hit, the FFXI world was mad at SE for making another impossible to kill monster.

The reaction in WoW was a bit different — they viewed it as an epic battle, something that does not exist in WoW, at least not to the same scale.  Most bosses in WoW (that I have seen), you kill in 5-10 minutes or less, or you wipe.  It simply comes down to the way WoW is designed.  While you will always be regening your health and mana (mp) in WoW while you are not fighting, when you are in ‘battle mode’ you do not regen health.  And while you are casting a spell, you do not regen your full magic.  There is also no way to exit battle mode without running far away (unlike FF where you just disengage and run and hide while you kneel for a bit).

So anyways, in an effort to add more storyline to WoW, they have added Cut Scenes.  There is one I heard about for one of the 5-man instances.  Then there is this one (which is not really a Cut Scene, because everyone sees it, and it changes the music for the entire zone too).  Movie!  It is really creepy too, I love it, and it reflects a large amount of lore (story) in one quick event (the models for the characters have been updated since this movie was made).  It also made Sylvanas my favorite NPC in the game (or as I said to some people, she is my ‘Shantotto’ of WoW).

Now they have created this Cut Scene when you hit a certain stage in the next expansion.

[This is a huge spoiler if you play WoW.  If you don't, its just a cool Cut Scene]

Movie!

So it looks like they are trying to add more story and make the feel of WoW more epic.  In FF, you have to save the world in every expansion.  In WoW, you don’t have this.  With the expansion, you actually invade one of the Horde cities for a quest — on both sides.  They handle it through what is being called phasing, where two people can be in the same place (and are on the same server), but they can’t see each other (and may see different NPCs and/or monsters).  It sounds really neat.  It is like instancing in place, and I’m excited for it.

In the end, the mixing of ideas from FFXI and WoW get us an easier FFXI and a more epic WoW.  Doesn’t sound too bad to me, more for me to enjoy.

-pyra

I knew going in I was undergeared a bit.  And I’ve never done any raids in WoW ever.  And it was the final boss.

It didn’t end too well.  Having never done the fight before, it wasn’t explained all that well, and ended badly.  I told them going in that I had never done the fight before, they just said stand near the one guy and cast spells.  I was too close at first, but after that, I kept close to him.  I doubt I’d be asked back, sadly though.

With the expansion coming shortly, there will be a ‘gear reset’, in that all of the best things at 70, will be mediocre by comparison to the worst stuff by 75-77.  So at 80, even the most basic of items will be better than anything currently available.

But it was still upsetting.  I was hoping I would have done better.

My damage was lower than I’d hoped too.  Sadly, the add-on reset of last week caused some of my spells to be un-findable too.

I don’t regret accepting the invite, but I don’t feel like I learned anything.  It probably didn’t help that the others in the group have probably been doing this for years.

For those of you in FF-land:  imagine a brand new black mage in Dynamis - Bastok.  The zone is easy, but someone who has never done a dynamis before will not handle themselves as well as someone who has been doing black mage in that zone for 3-5 years (or even as well as someone who only has a paladin).  It comes down to, I need experience with these things, but because I don’t have any experience, it is harder to get an invite.  I know that I should have around 1000 (or more) bonus damage to spells and around 25% spell crit chance.  I currently have 695 bonus damage and 12.57% Crit Chance.  Since most of my spells were doing about 750 (in the screenshot, is one of my spell crits.  Spell crits do double damage, and it hit for almost 1400 [the square brackets is the part of the spell that was resisted]), I need more damage (I also couldn’t pull hate, while I should be having trouble not pulling hate).  I was also one of the last to die, so I don’t think that it would have succeeded, even with an amazing mage in my place.  We wiped at around 50%, and I doubt that even doubling my damage output would have saved the run.

I fully admit that I have much to learn.  Looks like I’ll be learning it as I go with WOTLK.  Really, I’m just disappointed in myself that I couldn’t do a bit better.  I could really use the gear from that zone, the one head piece would put everything else I have to shame.

Next time, assuming there is a next time.

~syd

It was becoming too much negative attention, and pulling the feed allows me a bit more freedom without the scrutiny.  I can ramble, and stray from the topic as much as I want.  I can also post every 4-6 hours (if I wanted to) and not get crap for filling up the main page.

This doesn’t, of course, shut off the feed, and any other readers will still work the same as they used to.

First monster.

Wooot!  It was off of a Kindred Thief too.

Which completes my set, making me 5/5.

Wootness.

Then at the next Xarcabard run, this happened.

So now I have a Shadow Mantle too.  Sweet!  (Maybe I should level a Paladin)

I don’t think this is extremely impressive, but on darksday, with the extra 20 VIT, I had 118 VIT.  As a Monk.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) we had some good luck with Blue Mage hats.

Yeah, I know.  It was crazy, and blue mage is now on free lot status.  I believe we got 5 of them in one run.

At least we are getting lots of drops in Xarcabard now.

On a different note, I found this funny (its from limbus).

Haven’t seen a 999 rolled in a long time.

-pyra

For anyone curious, here is how it would have played out.  Most people will be offended.  Don’t read on if you are easily offended.  If you do read on, don’t complain to me :).  The whole thing was basically designed to poke fun of the political process, and also (here’s the important part) to offend everyone.

In an effort to keep this from an all out debate in my comments, I will turn them off if they get out of hand.

Pyra would pick Umah as her running mate (Umah is my WoW alt, still low leveled, but been around about as long as Syd).  Syd would pick Ata as her running mate.

All of the FFXI world would have thrown their support behind Pyra, except for the elves.  They would side with Syd “Because they like what she has to say”.  When in reality, they would only vote for her because Syd is an elf, and due to allegations that Pyra doesn’t like elves.  The self-proclaimed king of the Elves — Prince “Rev Al” Trion would have said something like “All true elves must vote for Syd”.

It was designed to highlight that far too many people are voting based on the color of the candidate’s skin.  Here’s a news flash — voting for someone based on the color of their skin is just as bad as voting against someone based on the color of their skin.  Need proof?  Howard Stern (YouTube clip).  “If Obama were to win, would you mind if Sarah Palin became Vice-President?”  “Yeah, I like her.”  Sal went into Harlem and presented McCain’s policies as Obamas, and asked people about it.  Yeah… not voting based on skin color, really.

Continuing the Pyra vs Syd bit, everyone would have jumped on Umah saying how bad, inexperienced, etc she is.  Of course the obvious thing absent is that Syd has basically the same experience as Umah, yet Syd was running for President.  A semi-washed up actor would make a comment about how Umah will probably become president because Pyra is so old she’ll end up dying in office.

The obvious correlation here is that Palin and Obama have basically the same level of experience in government — next to none.  And Obama has been basically running for President since he started in politics.  The thing no one likes to see is that Umah [Palin] is running for VICE President, and Sydonia [Obama] is running for President.

As far as the washed up actor comment.  It is sadly true.  Matt Damon was the washed up actor.  He basically said that McCain is so old he will die in office, leaving someone with basically the same experience as his choice for President in charge.

Pyra and Syd would throw some jabs back and forth.  Anytime Pyra made anything remotely negative, it was torn to pieces on the blogs and internet.  Anytime Syd made any comment remotely negative, it was treated as gospel.  It would get to the point where Pyra would be torn apart for saying anything negative, and not saying anything negative.  A real Catch-22, and the candidate chosen by the media would sadly come out ahead.  Remember, the media chose Obama over Hillary, and now they are trying to chose Obama over McCain.

Also, Obama has accepted millions in foreign money, mostly from George Soros.  He also broke his promise to take public funds for the campaign.  This would have set a cap on how much he could spend.  While Obama and McCain had an agreement to take them, Obama broke the agreement, allowing him to out fund raise, and thus outspend.  So now the media is picking our winner, and foreigners are buying the election.

In addition, Obama’s ‘no tax increase’ is what is called a ‘marginal rate hike‘.  It works out that EVERYONE’s taxes will go up by about 10%, unless you make between 85,000 and 95,000 per year.  I worked damn hard for 3 years to make 10% more.  Now, I’m being told ‘You don’t deserve that money as much as this guy who hasn’t worked in 5 years does’.  If I get a 10% raise in my taxes, it will destroy my quality of life (which is not that staggering already), and will cause me to likely not be able to afford my condo — or I’ll be eating top raman everyday.  Could I afford slightly higher taxes?  Probably.  Could I afford 10%?  Not a chance.  Especially since VA is controlled by the Democrats, who also enjoy raising taxes, even in years of a budget surplus… I already pay too much in taxes (over 50% when you combine the state, federal, social security, etc).  If I wanted to pay 60% taxes, I could just move to Paris.  These tax increases will also hurt the company I work for.  I don’t believe it will go under, but we won’t be able to expand as quickly as we want to, and we might not be able to afford even a cost of living raise every year.

Everyone talks about this mysterious middle class.  Where I live, I’m squarely in the middle.  Maybe even borderline poor.  For my area.  If I lived in other places, I would probably be rich.  It is all based on cost of living, which no one has addressed so far.  Based on what we’ve seen, Obama figures that middle class is those making 85,000-95,000 per year.  McCain tried to define it as anyone making less than 5 million per year, and was torn apart on the news channels as ‘out of touch’.  5 million might be high, but if you define 5 mil or less as middle class, and favor middle class tax cuts, I can see what you are saying, and I can either agree or disagree.  Obama hasn’t defined middle class, yet I just saw an add which says he is for ‘middle class tax cuts’.  And yet, people eat it up.

Obama is also in favor of reinstating the so-called ‘Death Tax’, where you have to pay taxes on money or property that you inherit from a recently deceased relative.  This is that great tax that causes families to have to sell farms that have been in the family for hundreds of years, simply because the family cannot afford to pay the taxes when the farm passes from one generation to the next.

During the final debate, the announcer said that ‘McCain benefits more from keeping people afraid’.  The next day, Obama gave a speech, saying we shouldn’t run a campaign of fear.  30 minutes later, I saw an add that involved a rolling ball of yarn.  I have seen this add probably 200-300 times already.  McCain is constantly accused of running a negative campaign, yet Obama is flooding the airwaves with negativity, everyday.

I live in Virginia, a battleground state.  I have constant visitors from the democrats, and phone calls every 1-2 days.  I get 2 or so a week from McCain too. The difference here is that I asked to be on the McCain call list.  I have in fact asked to not be bothered by the democrats anymore.  They have not respected my request.

I’m not even going to bother talking about either candidate’s health plans — they both suck and are unrealistic. They are both (sadly) just telling people what they want to hear. Neither one will work.

Obama is so out of touch with reality it is amazing. Maybe he is more in touch with the youth, but you need to have more. McCain might be out of touch with the youth, but he is in touch with reality. This is what I would prefer myself.

Then there is the contradiction of a politician who unites rather than divides.  Its funny, we all want to be united, but the only way to differentiate yourself is to take a hard stance on a divisive issue (like abortion, or a social issue), then convince the world that your opponent wants to club baby seals, while you want to shower the world with rainbows and lollipops.  The only way get the power to be a uniter, is to first be a divider.

In the end, it comes down to this.  Obama is an optimist, McCain is a realist.  McCain tells people how it is, Obama tells you how he wants to think the world is, but really isn’t.  Maybe more culturally relevant, McCain is PC, Obama is Mac.  You want to like the Mac, but when it comes down to buying that new computer, 90%+ will buy the PC, even while rooting for the Mac.

Also, this is why I hate politics.

Charitwo, the infamous editor of the Wiki, experienced some odd cut scene after completing WotG Mission 8. He then added this to the Wiki. But, it was wrong information, and at the very least, not complete. He started an edit war with Urthdigger, a newer player who has a great attitude towards the game. It culminated with Charitwo locking the article until January 2009 with the comment for the edit “stoppat”.

Urth then brought this up on the wiki forums, where the consensus is, Urth is right, Charitwo is wrong. Even the talk page shows that people disagree, but the usual “I’m always right, you’re always wrong” attitude continues.

Hell, even on his talk page, you can see his attitude go furthur.

In the future, can you please take a more polite tone with other staff members?

The reply, not an “I’m sorry” or “Didn’t mean that”….

All testing takes place at the xen1 server, not here at the live wiki where the local activity takes place.

While this is possibly true, his reply to being accused of being too curt with an employee of the company which owns ff-wiki is to accuse the employee of being wrong and make curt remark.

I laugh because I love watching train wrecks in progress. Also, I like stirring up trouble. And since it doesn’t look like anyone is going to say anything, and the wiki admins are happy enough to let that post fall off the discussion board, I’m going to say something.

<3
-Pyra

Sydonia is a relative newcomer to the life of politics, a spell caster, who has lived on Crushridge for her entire life.

Sydonia went, in a matter of weeks, from a newbie to an officer of her guild.

For a candidate who has not been corrupted by years of visits from lobbyists and others who want special favors, Sydonia is the candidate for you.

This message brought to you by Sydonia for President. My name is Sydonia and I approve this message.

Pyra is a very experienced melee, originally from the Diabolos server, who now resides on the Caitsith server.

Pyra has run many successful linkshells, and when not a leader, has excelled as a member who can be counted on when needed for any task.

For a candidate with strong leadership skills and a long history of success, Pyra is your candidate for president.

This message brought to you by Pyra for President. My name is Pyra and I approve this message.

Doing some of the quests, especially the dailies on the Isle, have been almost more frustration than they are worth. The only reason I am doing these dailies is for #1 - SSO Fame, and #2 - Money for my Epic Flyer. For the SSO Fame, there is an item at Exalted fame that I want.

If anyone has ever been to a zone like the Isle on a PvP server, it is a lot of ganking, mostly by rogues or groups. It sucks. I’ve found the only solution is to just go afk in a safe area for about 15 minutes and they move on. Otherwise, you end up fighting the gank squads over and over as they find ways to kill you, or just harass you, just outside of the aggro radius of the guards. And I’m paying for this too.

So, I’m frustrated by this aspect of my daily WoWing. I’m considering moving to a PvE server. But I’m not sure I’ll like it any better. Sure this one zone is a cluster f—, but the rest of the time, I *rarely* end up PvPing (outside of Battlegrounds which are just task oriented PvP). So I’m not sure if there will be a difference, other than my daily questing will be much, much easier (I will often just not do the daily quests if I get home too late, as the frustration level isn’t worth it).

I also know that a bunch of people who read TTTO, etc, play WoW, and probably have some insight I’m missing.

I should also mention that as a 2-month old player, I don’t have a lot of PvP gear, and I’m going against people who have all the battleground-available PvP stuff there is. And as a mage, I get flattened fast, and have trouble getting past their resilience.

Thoughts?

Comment #10 - “so…..low lvls is like WoW now?”

Leading up to this, there are a lot of ‘about time’ and ‘really could have used that 4 years ago’ type comments, but this one stuck out the strongest to me of all of them.

My personal feelings are ‘who cares anymore about leveling up’. Anymore, leveling to 75 is just a chore, especially after the first time. The second, third, fourth, fifth, etc 75 just become a larger chore than the one before it (this comes from someone who has 4 75’s, a 61, and 2 53’s). I welcome anything to make this task go faster.

With that said, there is nothing wrong with having a npc assign a task to (for example) go and kill 20 rabbits, then give you an experience points reward equal to around 1/3rd of that of killing 20 monsters, maybe a small money amount, and perhaps a reward based on what you killed. Actually, such a quest does exist, aside from the experience points part. While you can buy the items from the AH, I think the idea is to go kill a number of monsters in that family, help you learn what they drop, as well as provide guidance to lowbie leveling targets. See the quest The Seamstress, and its follow up quests Lizard Skins, and Black Tiger Skins. The final result of this 3-stage quest is a Tiger Stole. Not an amazing item, but not horrible either.

So the goal of the quest (I assume) is that you kill a few even match monsters, get 500-600 exp per quest, turn it in, get a few items and some money. Now add on the quest giving you a 300 exp per quest bonus too. For quests which are much harder, or more time consuming, like the warp 2 quest, perhaps a 3000-5000 experience points bonus would be appropriate. Something that helps take the edge off of leveling. I also think that as you get higher level, the monsters should give more experience (I do realize this was increased at least once already, I believe it should be increased again, but have the base exp per kill raised instead of the potential exp from a larger level difference). I’m not saying that at 70 every monster should give you 4000 experience and you should level in 10 kills, like at level 1, I’m just saying that maybe 500-600 experience per kill (from the same monsters that now give 150-200) isn’t a bad thing either.

Lets take what would be a higher level quest. In the early 50’s, you get a quest from some npc in Rabao to ‘help clear out kuftal’. It gives a bonus experience of 2000, and 15K money (or maybe an item along the lines of a Jaeger Ring). Suddenly killing a bunch of crabs in Kuftal is a little bit more bearable. Once this became the norm, groups could pick their leveling area based on the quests they could get as well. There would need to be enough quests to match the number of leveling areas — we don’t need even more parties up at Greater Colibri. Maybe a “Go kill 200 weapons in sky, come back for a 10,000 exp bonus”. Sum of experience (assuming 200 exp per weapon no chain) is 40,000, plus the exp bonus, brings the total to 50,000 experience points (approximately). It could get more people into old leveling areas, and make it worthwhile to level there again.

I understand this has the potential to create more ‘high level n00bs’. Well, they will be created anyways, might as well not torture everyone else trying to prevent what cannot be avoided.

The main problem with this is a big one though. There just aren’t enough quests to allow for many level 75 jobs. After 1 or 2, it would be back to grinding for you (depending on how many of these quests were repeatable, and how often they were repeatable). However, since the game is as old as it is, this sort of change would bring new life into quests, and help with the 3rd or 4th 75 job that people would otherwise probably not level.

One of the last messages I have from them (I do not know if they were a guy or girl, and in a way, it doesn’t matter) is this.

11/11/2005, nearly 3 years ago now.  Yes, I have saved this as a new POL message for all of this time.

To say I miss Syd is an understatement.

A long time ago now, the Dosetsu Tree added to the game, complete with a new item — the Raikiri.  Worth over a mil at the time, I actually went out and got the drop for this person, and gave it to them.  This is the only time I can remember that I have solo hunted a monster for someone else.  This raikiri was also the 3rd or 4th on Diabolos.  Syd wanted one so badly, the stats were quite good for its time (remember that not too many people had B01 access at this time, and most mid-50 parties were in the Tree where it has nearly full-time thunder weather) and it was blue (blue blades are something we both liked a lot).

I still have this raikiri on a mule, its value next to nothing now.  I can’t see myself selling it (I have thought about it, but cannot bring myself to list it on the AH), and I may just delete the item from the game when I quit.

Syd leveled samurai after we discussed Rurouni Kenshin, one of the few animes I actually enjoyed watching, on Cartoon Network.  She did so much because she thought it would make me happy.

I have not talked to her in years, but I have not forgotten her.  The name of my WoW character is in honor of her.

If I ever met this person in real life, or in another game, I would be happy to call them a friend once again.

Even just writing this post, and thinking about my friend, makes me so warm inside again.  And sad that I do not know what happened to her.

Wherever you are Syd, come back to us please.

Lets face it, for most people, there isn’t a whole lot left to post about. And looking on TTTO, there are a LOT of people who play WoW or another MMO either to take time away from FF, or along with FF, or play it more than FF, only occasionally logging into Vana’diel. So a WoW post is probably just as interesting to many as a FF post.

Ok, I never needed an excuse to post pictures now.

Me flying through the Marsh in the outlands, saw this, though it was neat.

Syd at the edge of the world.  This is literally the edge of the playable areas, and I thought it was neat.

This is what it looks like in PvP.  This is in the battle ground called Alterac Valley, and is a resized full screen.

Very busy, lots of stuff happening at once.  Yet the lag is not very bad at all.

Here is me in Shattrath City, with my Indiana Jones hat on.

I have a witch hat now, I should take a new picture.

Oh and I wanted to share this too.  I haven’t turned it off because I find it valuable, but as you log on, you get a tip for playing.

When you view your quest log, it will show you how many people in your party are also on the same quest.  It makes questing a little easier, as there are very few many-leg quests (talk to 10 people, and if you miss one, gotta start over), these are generally made into many quests, which really helps make sure you don’t kill a monster and have someone say something like ‘I forgot to talk to that npc…. damn’.  Ok that still happens, but there is less of it.

~syd

I chose Rogue for my second class, and I made Umah, the blood elf rogue.

Currently Level 7, but waiting for my friend to have some more free time, and also still working hard to get Syd to 70 with all of her crafts leveled.

As some of you know, my linkshell has a former member who plays WoW as well, but on a different server.  Sadly, he plays Alliance *cry* on a carebear server *whine* (that means it isn’t an open world PvP server).

So, I was forced to make my own Doppelganger.

Meet… Sydonia!

I went with a space goat (Draenei) hunter.

Yesterday, I met up with one of DJ’s alts, Ewatt.

Ewatt gave me a tour of the Alliance cities, which is a decent amount of content I have not experienced yet, as my main character is Horde.

Ewatt also showed me this thing.  I don’t know what it really does, but it was fun to watch.

Supposedly, if there are 2 or more of these, they will fight each other.  But it is hard to find the recipe, therefore, there aren’t enough of them to find to fight each other.

Well, those are the new me’s.  An update real Syd post coming soonish.

~syd

Key things to know — There are two factions, the Alliance and the Horde. While some will describe the Horde as the ‘bad’ side, this really isn’t the case. They are just two groups that don’t like each other, and from my experiences, the Alliance is far more evil (because its full of teenagers playing rogue gnomes).

I did levels 1-64 in under 4 weeks. This is faster than is normally possible for a beginner. This was due to two things — #1 - my friend knows the game and the quests very well and was able to get them done fairly quickly, and #2 - linked accounts give triple experience points for all quests and monster kills.

Since in WoW, the primary way to gain experience is to do quests, we were moving around a lot, which makes easy transportation key.

The primary long distance travel method is the flight path. These cover long distances fairly quickly, but require you to talk to the flightmaster first in order to learn the path. Unlike FF, the flight paths are an on-demand travel system that will take you automatically to your destination. There are also many small settlements around the game world, most of which have flightpaths. Every so often, Blizzard will speed up or otherwise make the flightpaths faster, or add paths to make more connections. This is the opposite of what SE likes to do. SE makes things take longer, Blizzard makes the annoying things take less time.

There are three types of settlements, Friendly, Neutral, and Enemy. The status is somewhat based on your reputation (or fame) with that faction. For example, all Horde cities are ‘friendly’ to all members of the Horde, and ‘enemy’ to all members of the Alliance. Then there are other groups that will be either neutral to you (such as the various goblin cities, unless you do a lot of quests, in which case they turn friendly) or enemy (some groups will consider you an enemy if you side with their opposing group, and questing one group will raise your fame with them, but lower it with the other).

The three statuses are color coded. Green is Friendly, Yellow is Neutral, and Red is Enemy. There is a stage between Neutral and Enemy called ‘Unfriendly’. These monsters have an Orange colored name, but won’t attack unless attacked first (like a yellow).

As I mentioned earlier, the primary way to get experience points is via quests. A quest will also give you some reward (and item or money or both), fame, and experience points. For example, last night I soloed a bunch of quests. It took about 3 hours, and I gained around 400,000 experience points (not as much as it sounds, as 63->64 is around 650,000 experience points, 64->65 is around 680,000 experience points). I also gained around 250 gold (money) during this time, and raised my fame with several factions. Oh, and this was all solo too. With a current level cap of 70, and as an attack magic user (mage class), I was able to solo about 2/3rds of a level in a few hours, near the level cap, that’s just awesome (especially coming from the FF world where you can’t solo much of anything).

For gear, there are several ways to get the best stuff. The first is quests. Once you hit the outlands (starting around level 58), quests give very good items as a reward. And then the next quest gives an even better reward. The second way is instanced dungeons. These are not always easy, but give a lot of the best PvE gear. The third is battleground and arena. This is PvP, and gives PvP-centered gear (mage gear with high defense for example). Some of these items are just amazing, even for PvE events. The final way is to make it. In WoW, there is the concept of a r/ex recipe for an item, and some of these make r/ex items (so you make your own gear via the crafting system, making it so that people will level a craft that compliments their class, and at high levels, can make some really nice stuff for themselves). As a frost mage, I’ve chosen shadoweave tailoring, which will allow me to make the Bind on Pickup (r/ex) Frozen Shadoweave set.

This set can be further upgraded from its awesomeness with sockets (not sure how these work entirely, but I assume its like Diablo II) and enchanting (while my character is an enchanter, it is not high enough to do the enchants I really need, nor does it have the recipes required). The game has included a mechanism for an item to be enchanted via the trade window (and not traded, because it is soulbound). To be honest, I still do not fully understand enchanting, other than it is quite expensive and can be very profitable.

Crafting in general is different in WoW than FF. For starters, you have to buy (or be trained, or find the drop) every item you wish to make. You get an item when you hit the skill required (so if an item is 240, you can learn it at 240). Items will start off ‘red’ meaning you will be guaranteed a skillup for making one, then fall to ‘yellow’, where you will have a 50-75% chance of getting a skillup, then fall to ‘green’ where you have a lower chance of getting the skillup, and finally fall to ‘grey’ where you have no chance of getting skill. Items all have different ranges, and while one item may go from red to grey in 25 skill levels, another may do the same in 10. There also are tiers for everything. For tailoring, you start off with linen cloth from 1-75, then move to wool cloth from 76-150, then mageweave from 151-225, runecloth from 226-300, and finally netherweave from 301-375. These correspond nicely with every 10 levels of the game. Likewise, with enchanting, you gain the items needed by disenchanting other items. For items to get your skill from 1-75, you will need to disenchant items from 1-10 (more or less).

In terms of the rarity of drops, if you level normally, you will not have an issue leveling most tradeskills along as you level. I fully believe I could level tailoring and first aid without issue, just with the items you get from killing monsters, if I had not done the triple exp thing. Enchanting is much harder, especially since we leveled too fast to really get enough items to disenchant as we leveled.

As it stands now, my First Aid is 375 (capped), Tailoring is 351 (cap of 375), and Enchanting is 220 (where you’d expect it to be for about a level 50, it is the most expensive craft to level and will be my focus after I get my flying mounts and shadoweave gear. My cap is 385 on this due to a racial bonus of 10 skill levels).

These are my feelings after 4 weeks of playing. I’m still in the newbie phase, and I still really like the game. I don’t know how I’ll feel after a bit though, once the character is basically completed as far as it can go.

The only thing I can say I really don’t like is that you can only have one class per character (unlike FF where you can freely change between 20 jobs). While not a game ruiner for me, it is a negative point. It also means that to level a different class, you have to start a new character, and do some of the same things all over again. I can understand why they do not let you do more than 1 class per character — since you cannot repeat quests, it would require a redesign of a large portion of the game, or require you to just grind your way up through the levels by killing monsters.

Oh, did I mention that you get rested experience points for logging out in a major city or an inn in a minor city? This gives you double experience points until it wears off (but in my case, it hasn’t worn off in a while, and just keeps growing).

-pyra and syd