Timelost

       I think one of the things I promised in my last post was an update on how well (or not well) my experimenting with pet sales in the AH was going.  I had also remarked that one of the new pets in the game, the Azure Crane Chick, seems to drop from looting crane nests on the isle about one in twenty times.  As data starts to come in, Wowhead (http://www.wowhead.com) now has posted some drop rates, and right now they are saying a 2% drop rate for the crane chick.  So far I have not managed to acquire another one.  I did the Karahzan thing on one of my rogue alt and managed to grab both a Lil’ Bad Wolf and a Fiendish Imp, both of which I promptly listed for a buyout price of 899 gold.  I also discovered I had an extra Pandaren Air Spirit, which I also put up for sale.  The following day the imp and the spirit had both sold.   A quick run of tempest keep had a Lesser Voidcaller drop for me.

      

     Staying on the subject of pets, I have decided to make it a priority to level as many pets as I can to 25, and perhaps next week, I will give the Celestial Tournament a try.  I was able to level a Darkmoon Zeppelin to 25 the other night, and I hoping by next reset that I will have around 40 max level pets.  It is not terribly difficult to level a pet all the way up in a single day, it takes about an hour, and I use the following guide:  http://fecklessleader.blogspot.com/p/pet-leveling-guide.html .  I found this site through a link in the warcraft forums, and after a week of using the advice there, I can say that this is a guide that works.

     

      I think a good main theme for this post should be time, considering I along with everyone else am probably spending a lot of it at a certain isle that lacks it.

     

      One of the first things I have noticed is that a lot of the elites are not so elite, at least not to an iLevel518 arms warrior.  Most of the generic elites are fairly easy to kill one on one at this level, a good thing since the daily quest requires killing twenty of them.  The rare or named elites are a different story; you will most likely want a group for most of these if not all of these.  I have also gotten some time in on my rogue alt who is around iLevel 498, and things are a little tougher for her but still quite doable.  The nice thing about the daily is it gives 50 valor points, meaning just from doing that single daily, I can knock out 350 valor points in a week.  On top of that there is a weekly quest on the isle, a kill and collect type quest, which can be ground out in about an hour or two.  The weekly gives 200 Valor points, so just from questing on the isle you can grab more than half of your weekly valor cap.

     

       Here is a brief rundown of the various elite mobs I have fought.  Again this is based on my experiences as an iLevel 518 arms warrior:

·         Brilliant Windfeather:  An obnoxiously pink flamingo, err crane.  Extremely easy fight, his one main attack is ‘Gust of Wind’, which will sting if you are in front of him, and do nothing if you are not. This ability has a two second cast and is quite easy to avoid.  At most he gets a single cast off in my typical fights.

·         Gulp Frog:  Another easy kill, its main ability is ‘Toxic Skin’, which applies a stacking poison debuff that applies nature damage every time you hit him.  One on one they are an easy kill, just make sure to let the debuff drop off before going off to fight another one.

·         Great Turtle:  He has two abilities of note, ‘Shell Spin’ and ‘Great Bite’.  When he retreats into is shell move away to avoid being hit by the spin, which hurts.  Although a wowhead comment recommends avoiding the bite, I don’t find this ability to be problematic at all and I simply eat it.

·         Ironfur Great Bull:  Very easy, he periodically casts ‘Ox Charge” which requires you to move out of a very visible ground effect before the cast completes (it looks like a shaman’s earthquake spell).  It’s more annoying than painful if you get hit by it, as it applies a knockdown.

·         Death Adder:  An intermediate mob, his sole ability is ‘Huge Fang’ which he spams and which hurts.  I use cooldowns for this guy.

·         Foreboding Flame:  Another intermediate level mob, he has two abilities of concern, ‘Spiritfire Bolt’ and ‘Spiritflame Strike’.  The bolt hurts and should be interrupted or reflected, and the strike creates a large ground effect (a ring of blue flame), which will hurt quite a great deal if you are in it when the cast completes.

·         Jademist Dancer:  This guy is somewhere between easy and intermediate.  His sole ability is ‘steam blast’ which can and should be interrupted or reflected, as it hurts.  These mobs are closely packed and pat about erratically and rapidly, which is where the difficulty factor comes in, you do not want to fight multiple dancers.

   The above list is nowhere near exhaustive, but just a run-down of the easier elites on the isle.

    Let’s not forget collecting timeless coins.  Even though the first week is not done, I am up to 21K coins, so I am guessing in another two weeks or so I will have enough to pay the requisite 50K coins for a piece of iLevel 535 gear.  A guild run allowed me to the loot the chest for the freebie burden of eternity, which I used to make a tanking helm to replace my raid finder helm.  Just from the three easy dailies (the pet battle with Tommy Newcomer, the kill quest and the trivia quest) you make 1600 coins a day, and this is less than an hour’s worth of work.  The above mentioned mobs drop around 20-30 coins on the average, so you should be getting 2K coins a day for very little work.

  

       Perhaps I will talk about raiding (so far limited to the flex difficulty) in my next post.

     

       Peace.