Timbermaw Hold Reputation Grind

No more Stratholme runs for me, unless I feel a desperate urge to take a shot at the Baron’s mount. The reason is that I finally made Ambassador. WoW’s fun factor dipped a little after that, and I wandered around wondering what I should aim for now.  The answer became apparent when I browsed through the Achievements. The Diplomat!

I was already Exalted with Sporeggar from TBC. I recently got Exalted with Mag’har to obtain my Albino drake. That left me with only one faction to become Diplomat; Timbermaw Hold. A quick Wowhead check revealed that going from Unfriendly to Exalted would take about 4 hours. I couldn’t believe my eyes! That sounded way too easy, so I decided to give it a go.

The prequests for being able to hand in feathers and beads to the Furbolgs had been done in my lowbie days, so I just had to start killing stuff. The genocide began in northern Felwood because… well, I felt like it. After clearing the Furbolgs’ camps, I went through the Furbolg tunnel to arrive in Winterspring. There are three camps there, and you can see how I traveled between them on the map below.

After having gone from west to east and then back to the westernmost camp, I went back through the tunnel to slaughter the northern camp in Felwood again. It may not have been the fastest way, but I found that the change of scenery made the grind a little less tedious. You stop getting rep from killing mobs after you become Revered. You need 350 feathers/beads to get from Revered->Exalted. I didn’t turn in any feathers or beads until Revered, and honestly, I didn’t have 350 feathers/beads until the end of Honored so it was just as well.

There are 3 quests to make the grind easier. One is a random drop from a Furbolg mob in Felwood and there’s a similar one for the Furbolgs in Winterspring. These quests can only be turned in after you’re Neutral with Timbermaw Hold, but you can and probably will loot the items before that. They yield 1400 rep each. The third quest requires you to hand in 30 runecloth. You get 1000 rep for this, only obtainable after you hit Friendly. It’s unfortunately not repeatable.

When I was Exalted, I had spent about 5 hours on this. A good advice is to not do this during a weekend, like I did (doh!), because there will be less competition during weekdays.

Fire/arc build

The Fire/Arc build 18/53/0 has got a lot of attention lately. Curiosity got the better of me, and I respeced to compare it to my normal pve spec: frostfire.

The specs are pretty similar. Replace your frostfire glyph with the fireball one. Rotation: (Living bomb, Scorch x2,) fireball/pyro.

One big thing with this spec is that you will need hit. A lot of it. More than you want to admit. Or you will never crit. Okay, gonna stop rhyming now. Seriously though, the hit cap for a fire/arc spec is 446. With a boomkin or SP it goes down to 368. Add a draenei to that and the cap becomes 342. In other words, don’t play with this spec if you lack the hit gear for it.

There’s also the matter of Focus Magic. Who do you cast it on? It’s a tricky question that boils down to if you want to boost offense or defense.

• Offense? Put it on another crit caster like an ffb mage or an elemental shaman.
• Defense? Cast it on a holy pala or a disc priest.

From my experience, I did notice a small increase in dps, but also a higher mana consumption. Never so much that you went oom or it was a problem to regen, but I still feel the need to put it out there. It might become significant after 3.1.

Argent Tournament

When I went to the Argent Tournament on the PTR I wondered how the area looks on live servers. The answer is, as you can see below, they added a whole lot of land to fit the tournament ground on.

If you’ve got an eye for detail, you’ll also notice they razed the mountain top in the bottom right of the pic.

3.1 PTR GUIDE

I’m as curious as the next guy about what will happen in the next patch. That’s why the PatchTestRealm is a great way to check out what’s new and how it works.

My last PTR experience was with 2.4.3, it was a while ago. Coupled with Blizzard’s new Launcher, things have been somewhat confusing.

I wrote this guide to hopefully help at least one person how to install the PTR.

I’m on EU servers and using Vista on my computer.

First thing I did was go to the PTR site and scroll all the way down to the bottom. You’ll see this picture.

You’re after “Character Copy”. Click it and sign in to your account. You’ll get to a new page. There you can “Download the client” and “Copy a Character”. First download the client, I saved it to my Desktop. Mind you, the client you’re getting is 3.0.1. This is intended.

Run the file as Administrator by right-clicking the file and choosing that option. A new window will pop up and you’ll begin to download the client. After that’s done you’ll have to install it, make sure you have enough space. I saved it to my Desktop again. When the client is downloaded and installed, you will automatically download the patch to update to 3.1.

When you’re downloading, you will notice that it sometimes seem to freeze. This is not the case. There’s a button on the download window called “Downloader”. If you click it, a new window will appear where you’ll see the patch being downloaded.

While the client and patch are getting installed, you can copy your character to the PTR. Go to the page where you got the client and click “Copy a Character”. This part is not difficult and should only require you to follow the steps that appear. It may take a few hours or days for Blizzard to approve the character copy. It depends on how popular the patch is. Don’t be surprised if your character doesn’t show up on the character list in the first few hours. Patience is a virtue.

That’s it! Enjoy all the PTR goodies and please, if you have a profession, don’t put up stuff on AH for thousands, even hundreds of gold. It’s a waste of time for everybody.

Success!

Today I got exalted with TB and Mag’har so I bought their mounts. Leading the Cavalry obtained and I got a pretty drake with the mail. Kinda wonder how they stuff it in the mailbox. Did it arrive by airmail? Okay, I’ll stop now.

I also handed in all my scourgestone marks which I got from my endless Stratholme runs. Hit exalted with Argent Dawn and suddenly I had the Argent Champion title too.

I’m still about 2k rep from exalted with Silvermoon, so a few Strat runs left. When that’s done, I’ll become Ambassador… and after that there’s nothing left for me to do.

Maybe I’ll skill up cooking and fishing for shit and giggles.

Stratholme

I’ve been running Stratholme with my mage to get reputation with Argent Dawn so I can get the title Argent Champion. Plenty of Runecloth drops, so I turn that in to the various city cloth quartermasters to get exalted with the city factions. That way I can hit two birds with one stone: Leading the Cavalry and the Ambassador title.

I’ve been doing the solo runs a couple of times now, having a small glimmer of hope that Baron Rivendare’s mount would drop to help me get that Albino drake, but it hasn’t so far. What amazes me is that despite the fact that I’m level 80, the gargoyles flying between the ziggarauts are as annoying as when I was level 60.

When I get bored of the Strat runs, I grind the ogres in Nagrand to get exalted with Mag’har. Once that’s done I can purchase eight talbuks for my mount collection.

Funny thing is, without achievements I wouldn’t be doing any of this. At all.

So I created a Warlock

I made a warlock cause I wanted to see what all the QQ was about. I don’t get it, I totally owned that level 2 Duskbat. The QQ might be exaggerating.

Further testing needs to be done.

First!

Oh, yes, I did.

Welcome to my mage blog, my first subject will be about the Frostfire build as that’s my current spec.

I created my mage in the middle of TBC.

I’ve tried all specs and although I can’t speak for the time in classic WoW, I must say, FFB is the most bursty and random spec I’ve played so far.

By bursty I mean, if you get a Hot Streak proc of your first two scorch applies, you better watch aggro or the tank is gonna get mad at you. By random I mean, it sometimes feel like I go for minutes without a single Hot Streak proc (and I’m sitting at 60% crit in raids), and sometimes you really go on a hot streak, if you know what I mean.
When the latter occurs, the numbers are high, the damage is big and your e-pen is huge.

In TBC I was fire. It was the pve spec if you didn’t have 2 tier 5, then it was arcane. I remember the rotation for fire. Scorch x5 and then Fireball until you needed to reapply Scorch. Not the most hilarious time of my life.

I think the devs understood that and worked to make the spell rotation more dynamic.

In the current state I start off with Living Bomb since it’s a dot (and anyone who has played a dot class knows you apply them before your main nuke), then you Scorch x2 (since you can glyph your Scorch to stack three times by just casting one) and nuke with Frostfirebolt until you get a Hot Streak proc or need to reapply Scorch.

It’s not overcomplicated like a certain shiny flare spec (I never figured out the rotation for arcane) and it’s not spam one button a la frost.

Overall, I’m content, dare I say happy, with FFB as it is. With dual-specs around the corner, PvP won’t be an issue either. Things are looking good.