Skyguard Journal

[Worba]

Having way too many alts, and being primarily a solo'er, it's always a challenge to find new motivations to level my toons - these are some random experiences I had recently with my deathknight Evildolly, who is a lvl 79 gnome using unholy spec. Evildolly was originally Pamela Redpath's doll, but her time in the haunted house had left her rather, well, evil, and thus when Pamela ascended, her poor doll was left behind to fend for itself...

Frenzyheart Frenzybrew and the Hodir (single seat!) mammoth got me through wotlk, but I had about a 1/4 bar of XP left till 80... and I've always thought gnomes looked best on nether rays, so I figured what the heck - back to Outlands! And just a word in advance - this is not a /flex post, none of this is SRS BZNS, it's just me stumbling through and having fun.

Day 1: re-familiarized myself with Skettis - back in the day I spent absurd amounts of time here on my female NE Velocity (took me a while to get around to grouping for the Ogri'la chain), funny how much... smaller everything seems now (allowing for the fact that this toon is herself, much smaller...)

Day 2: ran the Ogri'la opening chain. Maggoc I managed okay, but it was downhill from there; Grulloc flattened me and while I almost beat Slaag, I didn't quite make it. Rather than retry, obsess about tricks and CDs etc, I switched to Velocity (now 85) and taught them both not to pick on her little sister (since the quest objective is a clickable object rather than a looted item). Switched back to Evildolly and blew through the next 2 ogre fights without any trouble and am now down wit' da ogres...

Day 3: more dailies, including some of the shard bosses in Blade's Edge Mtns - happily none are anywhere near as tough as Grulloc or even Slaag. Amazing how things open up out here when you no longer need to worry about finding a group to run the content! Also started camping the aether-tech event for the first time on Velocity - no 1:1 threats but intercepting the mobs before they can reach the NPC becomes quite the game of whack-a-mole.

Day 4: Evildolly still working on dailies, finished her Terokk chain but think I'll hold off fighting him till she's upgraded to cata greens... also worked on the consortium prison key progression with Velocity - kept the aether-tech alive through the swarm event and finally got a look at the rewards - pretty neat! I was able to buy enough proton accelerator things to do the accelerator boss a dozen times or so before the vendor despawned, but sadly just got a bunch of harbingers - Bash'ir himself didn't feel like visiting apparently.

Day 5: Evildolly is now up to honored, and can use the skyguard helipad to scoot back and forth, and the NPCs are starting to bow and scrape (yay cheap ego padding)... Velocity has given up grinding for prison keys and instead is running heroic mana-tombs to get up to exalted with Consortium - she was already about 12k/21k at start of wotlk so not too far to go, and once she makes exalted she'll have better benefits anyway...

[Worba]

Day 6: took a break to make 81 on Evildolly and upgrade her gear to cata greens, then back to Skettis to try Terokk.

First go: beat him (yay!), but glad for the extra 100 or so ilvl because he's still tough even at 81 / ilvl 277.

2nd try didn't go so well as I seemed to misstime the NPC smoke bombs - thought it had dropped but apparently the smoke wisp is a precursor to the "actual" shield remover. Or something.

After I'd chewed on my keyboard for a little while I decided to grind up another 40 time-lost scrolls and try again - this time in blood presence / tank gear, and things went better.

Funny to think that you would need to run cata content to handle stuff from 2 xpacs ago - but in a cool way!

Also finished grinding consortium to exalted with Velocity, and got to see the "bonus boss" from mana-tombs. Time for her to head back to cata content methinks...

[Comett]

*nibbles on popcorn*

[Worba]

Day 7: finally made revered, and now the entire camp of NPCs pretty much bursts into wild cheering and applause every time I land ^ ^ It's a party 24/7 when I'm around, lol. I also got access to my parachute cloak, one of the only ways for a non-engineer (erm, non-mage... ehh non-priest (?)... erm, non-druid oh heck IT'S GOOD FOR FALLING DEATH KNIGHTS) to survive long falls... I bundled it into my flying mount macro like this:

#showtooltip Winged Steed of the Ebon Blade
/use [nomounted] Parachute;Combat
/use Winged Steed of the Ebon Blade

To make this work, you create an equipment set with your current gear called Combat (or use your own and change the code above, ofc), and then a second one with your parachute cloak on, called... Parachute! Everything but the cloak should be set to "ignore", so that you never need to change it. Now, when you mount up, you also equip your 'chute... and when you dismount (by clicking the same button), it switches you back to your normal gear.

I also hit honored with ogrila, and unlocked some new quests including the darkrunes for the incredibly awesome Shartuul's Transporter event... sadly while the NPC still converts darkrunes for you, the event itself was apparently shut down a while back due to bugs. Boo. At least I got to run it a few times with Velocity back in TBC... but man I don't think I've seen any solo content before or since that even approached it in terms of challenge, depth of design or sheer coolness (excepting perhaps for the dragonmaw race... but even that was more of a distant 2nd...)

Now that I'm more used to the Terokk fight it should be fairly smooth sailing from here on in as I can use that to pad out my dailies - you get like 1400-1500 rep just from grinding the scrolls, minibosses (100 ea x 4) and ofc Terokk himself (500).

Can't wait for mah new flappy-thing!

[Worba]

Day 8: after running my dailies and a LOT of Terokk power grinding, I've gotten to 11/21k toward exalted - that's about 8k rep in one day. Woot!

I'm so used to the "new grind" a la "fixed X number of quests / day for everyone, and nothing else" that it took some time to refamiliarize myself with the fact that it wasn't always like this - in TBC they were still in a transitory stage between mob grinds (think old EPL or Sillithus) and daily quests, so you actually had both. Very nice to be able to pour yourself into it from time to time.

Now that I'm more used to the Terokk fight it's become very do-able, though I'd not quite call it "easy" - easy enough to get him down to "shield mode", yes (provided you're in cata gear or really good wotlk gear...), but once he starts toggling back and forth between shield and rage, you really can't afford to snooze!

I also ran the ethereum staging grounds quests over in Netherstorm - I don't recall appreciating this area so much back in the day, but now - pure awesome. It's amazing how much cool they managed to cram into the same area; same general idea as Bash'ir's Landing*; and at the end I got me The Burning Crusader - a long forgotten but very cool weapon, and perfect for a transmogrification comeback!



*Velocity finally gave up on trying for an autograph from Bash'ir after 15-20 fruitless accelerator summons depleted her leftover stash of apexxis shards...

[Worba]

Day 9: took a break and just did the dailies, for about 1300 rep

Day 10: did the dailies plus one Terokk grind, for about 4000 rep; it's amazing how much rep you get from all the kills, elixirs, scrolls and miniboss parts needed for one Terokk summon. Am now at 16.5/21k, should make exalted in one more day... or 2 if I'm lazy.

[Worba]

Day 11:



And as a nice little bonus, on my last Terokk takedown, I got one of these (that's Evildolly in the middle) :