We No Haz Spirit Beast, But We Can Fly
We made 77 in two days. Not even trying until The Bubble of Desperation.
The Bubble of Desperation? That’s the 20th one. The one where you quit questing and just blindly and voraciously kill sh!t. If it moves, it dies. Red, yellow, it doesn’t matter. Kill everything, don’t stop, get that last 5% of the XP you need to level as quickly and as furiously as possible. Rambo-mode.
So why don’t we do the Bubble of Desperation for twenty bubbles?
1. It’s tiring. Questing provides little naps. Doing professions are breaks.
2. You don’t build reputation. Factions give some nice rewards.
3. It feels like cheating. Blizz put the quests in there for a reason. They’re forcing us to walk everywhere because they want us to see the scenery, skipping the quests is like skipping all the “real” content.
4. It becomes a math-game. If it take two million XP to level and each mob rewards us with 2k XP, we know we need to kill 1000 mobs to level. Simple, countable, but hardly a rich and rewarding gaming experience.
754… 753… 752… /groan
So what would happen if you re-tuned your brain to not give a hill of beans about that list? What if your purpose in playing the game allowed you to ignore the rules of, “Why We Quest”?
Imagine that you wanted to tame, oh, let’s say a rare spawning Spirit Beast. Your raison d’etre is to get this pet, who cares about anything else. And let’s say you know of only two places the Spirit Beast spawns. What would you do?
You’d run back and forth, between the two spawn points, and kill everything as you went, until you found the Spirit Beast.
Well, that’s what we did, (except for the “finding” part). And we leveled without hardly trying at all.
Oh we did a few quests so we could get the flight point with Hemet Nessingwary. And then we did a few quests just to break the monotony of grinding. But we mostly made 77 in Sholazar Basin just by exercising our Gorilladin as we ran between the Spirit Beast’s two known spawning points.
So do we “appreciate” the scenery now that can fly again? Did walking for seven levels have any redeeming qualities whatsoever?
H3ll no. Squared.
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15 Responses to “We No Haz Spirit Beast, But We Can Fly”
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this bubble of desperation you speak of, xp grinding mobs till your blue on the face.. this is the past time of the mmo generation dag nabit!
the old cats who grew up on EQ1, daoc, ffxi, etc etc.. they know what im talkin about
instances are boring, questing is dreary.. who doesnt miss spending 4+ hours grinding AA”s in Bastion of Thunder??
back to dailies i go i go
p.s. where be the podcast? :*(
I’ve gotten into the habit of Rep grinding from 67 or 68 to 70 while I still get experience for killing stuff and then going back and doing the quests for the money after 70. Figure I’ve got to kill x number of certain mobs to get my faction rep anyway. Probably not the most efficient way to do it, but works for me.
Guess that will change with Wrath.
P.S. BRK, Won’t you have to be in to work early the morning after Wrath comes out?
I’ve always believed that the best way of leveling is to combine grinding and questing. While I’m in town, I’ll look at my quests and figure out a path to do them that takes me in a big loop, and then I kill each and everything I can find on my travels. If I do it right, I make it back to town with three or four complete quests, a bag full of loot to sell, and a crapload of experience.
With this Gorilladin and the Volley from heaven, this ‘grind’ you speak of took what…..an hour?
Look on the bright side, all that walking is good for your health, while everyone is getting tanked at brewfest and putting on beer bellies that make ogres envious, your doing hours of cardio!
And if that doesn’t make any true dwarf give up on this hunting for spirit beast lark and go directly to brewfest (do not pass ironforge, do not report 200 goldspammers) then you might just be obsessed!
I love quests though, for the story, Blizzard didn’t write all those long quest texts, you know the bits before the summary, for their own amusement. They write them for us, questing is rewarding because a story unfurls around you as you quest, whereas with grinding you miss a lot of the game experiance.
Well, keep trucking on the spiritbeast
And I’m also gonna try the Gorilladin/Volley combo of death
Let’s see if the page eats my comment as usual, telling me I’ve got not java/cookies *sigh*
I come from a long line of grindfest MMOs. WoW is one of the first to show me quests can be a genuine alternative to grinding, and has kept me away from the “same old grind” for years since.
Content is king, so the industry pundits always say. As someone still new to Kara, let me shame those of you calling instances boring - you’ve just not been given new content for too long. The problem is, most MMOs cannot generate sufficient new content to keep it fresh and interesting for month after month after month, unless you pay attention to some Asheron’s Call fanatics - which I don’t.
MMOs are all experiments in progress. Admit it, we all feel like beta testers at some time or other. At least I did yesterday trying to find a NON-broken ravager doing the daily “Rediscovering Your Roots” quest. As they go, we can only hope they learn. When a company goes too long without learning about its faults, this is when it gets set up for another MMO to steal away its clientele.
since you mention flying - I thought I’d ask. (not looking for spoliers, but…)
How is the gold in the beta? Is it the same “OMG 5000g for an epic flyer!” heart attack or are most things reasonable in relation to the gold you make?
I mean this as someone who knows that the epic flyer is manageble IF you don’t get bored with all the dailies and farming for high priced mats and you actually want to use some alts.
I mean, 20K for the Mammoth sounds huge - not sure I fully understand why you need multi-person mounts, although the vendor aspect sounds cool.
So, i guess the real question is - should we expect to stop everything and grind gold at 77 to fly again?
I had a really long comment about grinding typed up, and I lost it in a script error when posting. So, I’ll just ask what I originally came to the site a few minutes ago to ask before I saw this post: Any update on this week’s podcast?
Hey, thats that Frenchie that flew over the English Channel recently.. Reminds me I need to link the article to some idiots that were #$@#ing about Iron Man being able to fly, with a 4part harmony stating that the human being is too un-aerodynamic to fly, yada yada, etc.
For me it’s not the last few bubbles, its that middle part from 25% to 75% that make me bonkers….
After 50% I start getting antsy, cause I”m ‘halfway done already’. Guess I got no patience haha.
I really don’t get the whole spirit beast thing though, there’s just one and it’s a cat, right? Or is the hope that there will be more types soon?
And not particularly looking for spoilers, but is there any good reason you can’t fly going into Northrend?
@Phourc
I think the idea is that they didn’t want people to have the ability to fly over all the content, so they took flying away until lvl 77 to force you to experience the new zones/terrain fully.
I personally cant stand grinding for xp, and I try avoid the desperation bubble.
just knowing i’ve got 1,456 more to kill is completely depressing, even if id kill 1,945 for rep.
Grainger: A friend of mine in the beta said the ‘cold weather flying’ is either 750-1000 gold, or you do a quest at 77 to get it. You fly a plane and shoot things down, the plane takes some damage and the pilot says ‘I’m bailing out, you take over’… he had already bought the flying then, but he thinks that gives it to you.
Multiple seats on a mount makes for easier travel with groups, especially when you’re herding lowbies that either don’t have mounts or have slow ones…
Besides, the motorcycle looks all kinds of cool.
Thanks for the info Kemonojin.
Either of those options sound very reasonable.