“The Grind”
With Wrath of the Lich King arriving last week it only made sense to jump into the new content “Lich King” style. Although we had initially reacted to the beta, playing the final content was much more fun with all of our guild and friends to play along.
It only took a few hours to get my new Death Knight to level-58 beyond the starting area and into the real world of Azeroth. Upon reaching the main city (Ogrammar as we’re horde) I picked up two new professions to make me a bit of dime: mining and skinning. This is where the beauty of the Death Knight fell apart…
A level-58 character has a few options open for exploration with the Burning Crusade content being the most desirable starting point. However, quickly it became apparent that my professions of mining and skinning were useless in Hellfire and other Burning Crusade areas. Why? Professions start with a value of 1. The last expansion requires your professions to be roughly 300 before you can utilize them.
My level-58 Death Knight has no experience in the ways of skinning and mining, what has he been doing all his life? Apparently killing innocent people in small villages throughout the Eastern Plaguelands. My anticipation with leveling my Death Knight died knowing I’d spend the next few days hunting mines and killing animals as if I where a level-10 toon.
There I was, a high level character trolling Crossroads and Thousand Needles hunting for copper and tin and skinning all the low level creatures I could find. Why didn’t Blizzard consider this when they allow you to create a level-55 character on day one? If we don’t go off and grind our way to a profession level of 300 we might as well not even pick professions at all.
I was not alone in these findings, along my path I found several Death Knights with skinning knives and mining tools looking for open opportunities to cut into the earth or the dead animals skins all around them. Sure, we can kill a cat in seconds flat but the “grind” is what we wanted to avoid, this is what characters spend their first twenty levels doing!
After three sessions of mind numbing grinding I’ve managed to reach a skill of 340 in skinning and coming upon 200 in mining. Mining is still too low for high level game content so I must whisk myself away to noobville every so often to catch a few mythril nodes and pray for a gold deposit along the way.
This may not be a bug in the Wrath of Lich King expansion but it sure is an annoying design flaw.
No Paul again, you know the drill.
Lately I’ve been ignoring all these articles just spewing out rumors day after day, hoping one of them will be right. First, IGN comes out with “Report: BOTH New Xbox and PS4 Will Be Shown At E3”. The very next day they wrote that an analyst said none of the consoles will be shown. And now yesterday, they came out with “Microsoft or Sony To Quit Console Race?”. Seriously guys, stop guessing and just wait for E3 for goodness sake.
And also I hate when they say an “analyst” says so. Oh, it must be true then because this guy gets paid to “analyze”.
@Rumor: Next Xbox tablet-based?: Even though the Wii-U will be sort of tablet-based, I think that Microsoft wouldn’t be able to pull it off and will just end up sucking.
hey guys… hope you can read this before recording the 247th!
@ps4 and 720: I hope they will be announced at this next e3 but i am ready for dissapointment. and yes, if the ps4 do not have some awesome co-funtionality with the vita, sony will be effectivelly killing the it
@diablo auction houses: not only south coreia: you guys talked about south coreia and russia, but you did forget about the prisoners in china gold farming in WoW who are obligated to do it (a few months old podcast). sad stuff
@SOPA: i am a brasilian gamer who has warned all american friends to help not passing this bill project because it will affect not only US but all the world. i like the machinima channel on youtube. SOPA would kill them
@before last week’s QOTW: my only handheld console is my trusty dark DS lite and i play on it since it lunched and still love it!!! SO SHINNY
my most played game of 2011 was CoD MW2 and BF3. i know.. the controversy…
the most surprisingly fun game was terraria most preciselly after patch 1.1.
most dissapointing is Black ops (not even 100h of gametime according to steam)
LOVE YOU GUYS, KEEP IT UP!!!
I’ve heard happier versions of Jonah before.
@Gaming Flashback:
Ha ha ha 🙂
The game was mentioned before, but Jordan made this particular flashback entertaining. The other 9 games? Please make a list.
@Fallout MMO rights belong to Bethesda as Interplay settles
Well, I guess Interplay got what it aimed to get. Jonah, it’s not the ‘wrong people won’. When you sell your IP, you won’t be able to make games on it. They should have known that before selling out to Bethesda.
Yes, they had some provisions in the contract allowing them to use the name for an MMO. That’s just not enough though. Interplay should have known better.
@ Next Xbox tablet-based?
No. They want to use PC-like hardware, so that they don’t have to worry too much about software. Plus, the more components (tablet, base station etc etc) the more expensive. So, no.
They will make it more slim, I suppose. Heck, even add a touch screen front panel. But that’s it.
@Diablo III release held due to South Korea (from GameFront)
Erm … yeah, I guess it a bit more difficult to foresee all legal difficulties, especially when you need to keep an eye on all the countries you want to ship …
@QOTW – hardware specs, as asked by your reader:
My ‘modern’ machine is a single core Sempron 3000+, 1.5 GB RAM, ATI Radeon 4650. 🙂 Pretty ancient.