I just did my time card from last week.  Should have done it on Friday, but I didn’t get a chance.  I worked 65 hours last week.  I can’t remember the last time I worked so many hours… I’m guessing almost ten years.  I remember my first job after college at W.W. Grainger I put in a couple of long weeks (wanted so badly to impress after all), and I once had a second job working at Dillard’s to save up some money.  But both of those times I never worked more than 55 hours in a week… if that even.

Long hours… yuck.

There was an unexpected tragedy from all this.  Last week, when I got back from vacation, my office orchid was looking pretty droopy.  The blooms looked destined to fall off the plant.  It seems that the days HusbandMike and I were in California, that the office lost power and it got really hot.  Too hot for the plant to handle.  I hoped that some TLC would revive it, but I ended up spending the entire work week (and then some) at the print shop in the Galleria area getting the FERC filing ready.  This was the result:

Near dead office orchid

The blooms, gone.  The stalk, shriveled.  The soil, dry as dust.  I’m really sad about this.  It was such a beautiful plant.  It really spruced up my desk, and I enjoyed looking at lovely flowers every day.  Poor thing.  Does anyone know if I should cut it at the base of the stalk or leave it as is?

Other items of note:

1. I cried one night when I got home.  I wanted desperately to do my daily quest (I’m trying to get the Whistle of the Venomhide Ravasaur), but I was too tired for World of Warcraft.  I was already upset that I had missed several days of daily questing when I went to BlizzCon, and when I was that exhausted a repeat performance of a delay was simply too much to endure.
2. I found that I am prone to yelling at unexpected moments when I am really tired.  In the middle of a normal conversation, it seems that I have the unfortunate habit of turning up the volume.  This can be frightening to co-workers who are already sleep-deprived themselves.
3. I am useless without my BlackBerry, which I left at the office on Tuesday and never had a chance to go back and get it for the rest of the week.  It seems that I am way too dependent on that thing… one might call it my fifth limb.  The reminders and alarms on it also drove my co-workers (the lucky ones who were not at the print shop with the rest of the serfs) crazy.

That is all for now.  I missed my knitting group last week, and I haven’t written anything about BlizzCon or our trip to Disneyland because of the insanity brought on by the FERC filing.  I also am working on some pretty nifty invitations for SisterMonica’s party.  Hopefully, I will get to that soon.

I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.
Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)

In an effort to improve my dialogue and character writing skills, I have decided to structure this blog as a series of MMO “daily quests”.

Oh, the Places You’ll Go

Greetings, priest. If I’m not mistaken, you’re a-lookin’ for some gold. Times have been tough in these parts. Years ago we had our share of payin’ jobs and then some, but nowadays there are just more workers than work! But I see you’re a strapping young lass with a good set of brains, so I’ll give you a hint: Old Staffy over there knows most every businessman around here. Maybe he can steer you straight. Good luck – you might need it!

Oh, the Places You’ll Go, continued

<Old Staffy sizes you up and down>

So you’re looking for a job? My own pockets are empty and my children are hungry. I’m about to leave to find some dinner, but if you bring it to me perhaps we can talk.

<return to Staffy with Fried Hawkstrider Legs x4>

Smells great! Look, priest, payin’ work is hard to come by. But it happens to be sunfruit harvestin’ season and I know Farmer Flobby has a bumper crop this year – why don’t you high-tail it to Flobby Field and see if he’ll give you some work? If he does, I expect a handsome referral fee.

Yeah, I’m back from my unannounced inactivity! I sure have a bit of catching up to do, so I’ll be covering Mobius (up to 5/15/09) as a whole, along with those other little tidbits that have been released.

(I accidentally made my post take up the whole front page! Good job, me!)

Mobius

About

Mobius is the area where the first lord of chaos, Escherion, was sent by Drakath. You, the hero, fought a war alongside your comrades against the forces of Escherion. After you completed the war, you were sent to gather the pieces of the Runix Cube, the only thing that could stop Escherion. You gathered all of the pieces, and invaded Escherion’s castle in order to defeat him with the Runix Cube. You throw it at him. He subsequently explains that the only thing that could stop him was NOT finding the cube. And you just found it for him. Oops. You get knocked out of the tower, into the lake, where Escherion summons… THE HYDRA! You battle the hydra, and end up dropping Escherion’s tower on it.

Pros

The plot twist after you go through all that effort to get the Runix Cube is pretty funny. This area had tons of items, great artwork, and a great plot. I think making the Runix Cube puzzle optional was a great decision… I hate slider puzzles, and I’m sure I’m not the only one (I still did the puzzle anyways).  The dialogue in some parts was great as well, such as the riddle locked doors in Escherion’s towers

Cons

The quests could get annoying at times, especially the one where you get the cyclops cloth pieces. Running into a teleporter which isn’t supposed to work while you are trying to kill enemies isn’t very fun. Some of the quests were tedious. This week’s release ended abruptly, and after knocking the tower down, if you go to the next screen… it’s still standing. You can also jump straight to the cutscene in runix by joining it.

Grade of Release: 9.5/10 A little more polishing would have made this area (so far) perfect, but it is by no means a bad area. In fact, it’s great!

Daily Quest

About

Each day of the week, Valencia has a quest for a different weapon! You have to get a drop, which you can exchange with Valencia for a weapon.

Pros

Seven new weapons, and they are pretty cool looking!

Cons

At the time of release, the weapon you obtained was determined by the player’s computer clock, meaning they could simply change the day to get whatever item they wanted. Thankfully, this has been fixed.

Grade of Release: 7/10 Cool items, in my opinion. If the date trick wasn’t there at the start I would’ve given this a higher score, though.

New Enchantments (Member Only)

About

The new enchantments finally came! Level 13, 15, and 17 enchantments are now available!

Pros

Finally, a good reason to level up! These enchantments give a reason to level past 11 now.

Cons

When the enchantments first came out, they costed 10 times their current costs… Level 17 enchantments costed 300,000 gold. YIKES! Luckily, everybody who spent that much got their money back. It’s a shame free players didn’t at least get the level 11 enchantment…

Grade of Release: 9.5/10 These enchantments were much needed… I understand free players don’t get full access to the game, but they still should have been given at least one new enchantment.

Various New Items in Shops

About

Ah, let’s see… what shops were there… we had Earth Day, Cinco De Mayo, Mother’s Day, and new Good/Evil Items. Oh, I almost forgot the Guardian/Dragonlord/Star Captain shops… lots of items!

Pros

• Earth Day 10/10

We finally found a use for empty toilet paper rolls and empty gift wrap rolls… weapons! The Buckethead is one of my favorite helms to this day… I loved this shop.

• Cinco De Mayo 8/10

Cinco De Mayo (also Randor the Red’s birthday)! This shop contained various items such as the Sombrero.

• Mother’s Day 6/10

Mother’s Day! I personally disliked the shop for the same reason as I hated the Valentines shop… THE HEARTS! THE PINK! They burn

• Guardian/DL/SC shops 9/10

Upgraded members in other games finally have something to call their own! I love these items.

• New Good/Evil Items 9/10

I’m gonna include the shadow dragon here, even though it is in Aria’s shop. It is for evil players, after all. I like the new items… I think the update with the multiple new armors was better, though.

Cons

I’ll just do the cons all together… what cons? Other than ACs, which are understandable if it isn’t ALL the good stuff, these new items were flawless! Good looking (except for you heart weapons… that’s just me, though) items are always welcome.

Grade of Release: 10/10 New items rock! Some aren’t as good as others, but they’re still good.

Not gonna do an overall grade of release this week, because it’s over multiple weeks…

After you become a champion for your race by completing necessary quests in the Argent Tournament, you have the opportunity to make super quick money through the daily quests.

First, beyond the standard Champion’s Seal and ~13g (assuming you’re level 80), the champion dailies offer you two additional options as rewards: Champion’s Purse and Champion’s Writ.  The writ can be turned in for +250 reputation with one of the five player race factions and the the purse contains 10g.  If you intend on getting the Loremaster achievement eventually then go for the money because you’ll get plenty of reputation when doing quests in Azeroth – that’s a total of 23g per quest!!!  

Second, let’s magnify your efforts from the aforementioned champion dailies by picking a second race and start doing the daily quests to become a champion for them (this begins in the same tent where you received many of your initial daily quests).  The reason I say “magnify” is because many of these secondary dailies overlap with your champion dailies, thus allowing you to complete multiple dailies at the same time.  More cash in less time! 

Champion / Second Faction

Taking Battle To The Enemy / A Valiant’s Field Training

Battle Before The Citadel / At The Enemy’s Gates

Among the Champions / The Grand Melee  (same quest type, different arenas)

For these six quests alone, the total wealth accumulated is (13.23 * 6) + (3 * 10) = 109.38 gold for about a half hour worth of work.  Combine these with a couple of other Argent Tournament dailies and you’re looking at ~150g.  Not too shabby!

Well, I just spent another fun night in Ulduar25. We cleared out the siege area and Kologarn. We didn’t kill the towers for Flame Leviathan, but he was still on easy mode, so I’m obviously missing something about that encounter or it’s bugged. I also noticed that I was totally wrong about using Cloak of Shadows to avoid damage while in Ignis’ smelting pot, or it was fixed in one of the recent patches to disallow that counter. Rogues, save your Cloak of Skill for the Flame Jets. Your healers will thank you. Overall, the bosses have received a lot of nerfs… er I mean “balancing”, so every fight was a lot easier than before. It was still much fun to be in a new instance, seeing new fights and enjoying myself with my guildmates.

When not raiding, I’ve been doing my Argent Tourney dailies diligently and I hope to make some decent cash selling a couple of the BoE pets on the neutral auction house. We’ll see how that goes. I’m planning on making a post on my realm forum to let people know the pets are for sale. The profit will go towards my mammoth and working on the Insane in the Membrane achievement.

That achievement isn’t really a big goal for me, but it does have some appealing rewards. The title, “The Insane”, is pretty great and will undoubtedly be rather rare for quite some time. In addition to that, all those extra exalted reputations should push me over forty, and I’ll also earn “The Exalted” title. I’ve only seen one other person on my over-populated realm with that moniker. Unfortunately, one player trying to speculate on the auction house has driven up the prices on the rep items for a couple of the factions involved in this grind. While he’s no longer posting the items at inflated prices under his own name, it’s taking awhile for them to deflate. No doubt, his pre-patch months of posting librams at 100g+ prices really tweaked both players’ perception and their Auctioneer data. They’re steadily dropping and I’ll probably be able to scoop up a large chunk of them for next to nothing in a few weeks.

And now for something completely different.

In case you missed the news on WoW Insider, Peggle has been released as an addon for WoW. This is simultaneously very good and very bad for me. Peggle is my drug of choice when I desire a relatively mindless casual gaming binge. This is the combination of two of my biggest gaming addictions into one huge amalgam of time-wasting goodness. Undoubtedly, this will lead to raid wipes in the future.

Well, I’ve been puttering around on the PTR some more and I’ve had enough experience with the Argent Tournament to provide some hard numbers regarding how long it will take to grind out the various rewards.

Keep in mind that there are three ranks in the Tournament: aspirant, valiant and champion. It takes three days of questing to become a valiant and another five to become a champion. Once you become a champion, you unlock the five daily quests that reward Champion’s Seals. Doing each of these quests every day will reward you with five seals.

One of the quests requires you to take down an elite frostwyrm and its riders. I imagine this guy would be solo material for a decently geared tank, but I was unable to kill him alone on my rogue. If you are unable to find a group for that quest, you’ll only get three seals that day.

So, we’re looking at three to five seals per day after at least seven days of ranking up. (The last day of aspirant quests overlaps with the first day of valiant quests.) You also earn ten seals simply for becoming a champion. You start out as a champion of your own racial faction (e.g., Orgrimmar), but you can also work towards becoming a champion with the other four cities.

The daily quests for each rank overlap a lot, so it is worthwhile to work on becoming a champion of another town while you’re grinding out your Champion Seals. For instance, one of the valiant quests requires you to kill any ten scourge in Icecrown. There’s a champion quest that requires you to kill fifteen of the same monsters and each kill counts towards both quests. You might as well work on both at the same time if you’re able to do so.

Hmmm… Where was I? Oh, yes. You get ten seals for becoming a champion for the first time. If you get ten each time you become a champion with another city, we’re looking at a total of fifty seals just from gaining rank, in addition to three to five seals per day.

Now, the rewards cost varying amounts. I find it kind of funny that the epic gear makes up some of the cheaper rewards, only costing twenty-five seals each. (Then again, the gear is going to be mostly worthless if you have any epic gear. It’s the same ilevel as normal raids, heroic five-mans or crafted epics. They really should have made it BoE or at least account bound.) There is an epic Argent Crusade hippogryph mount that costs two hundred fifty seals. Each racial faction has a mount, a pet, a tabard and a banner that cost one hundred, forty, fifty and fifteen seals respectively. If that sounds confusing, check out the nice charts on WoWWiki.

Depending on which rewards you’re going for, you’ll be spending a lot of time doing these dailies. Right now, I mainly want mounts. That’s a total of six mounts, costing seven hundred fifty seals. Assuming that we get ten seals each time we become a champion with a different city and I’m able to do the group quest every day, I’ll need to do dailies for at least one hundred and forty days. In other words, it’ll take at least five months, nonstop. If I’m crazy enough to want all the mini-pets too, it’ll take another forty days. If I want tabards, I’ll have to add another fifty days. If I think the banners look cool and want to collect all of them, that’ll be another fifteen days.

All together that’s two hundred and forty five days (or thirty five weeks or nearly nine months). Doesn’t that seem a little insane to simply grind out achievements and vanity rewards? The quests are fun at first, but they’re not really the easiest or quickest ones in the world and they’re not all in a central location like the good ol’ Isle of Dailies. In fact, now that I have a good bit of knowledge concerning them, I probably won’t be investigating them any more on the PTR because they’re already starting to become tiresome.

This game really needs more content, but I’m not sure that a long, boring grind for fluff is really the sort of thing that players hope to get out of this patch.

I’ve been dabbling with the new Argent Tournament quests on the 3.1 PTR a bit and thought I might share a few of my observations with anyone that might be interested.

The new quest hub is in northern Icecrown and you can get a free first flight there from a new NPC on a Hippogryph near the flight master in Dalaran. Once you land, you’ll want to grab the new flight point and start questing. There are a few introductory quests that introduce you to a couple of key NPCs and also teach you the ropes of mounted combat. Once you’re finished with those you get to the meat of the matter–new daily quests.

Other sites have already described the advancement through questing. You basically have to work your way up the ranks in order to get access to a bunch of new items. Unlike the Sunwell dailies, these new quests do not appear to actually build the tournament grounds. Your character advances through various ranks, but the area doesn’t undergo any changes as daily quests are completed.

That said, you’ll start off with five dailies and you’ll apparently unlock more as you rank up. The first rank will take three days of questing, but you only need to do three of the five quests. You’ll have three quests from your faction’s tent that actually award the tokens you need to advance and two quests from a couple of goblins who are building the arena for the tournament. The goblin quests are totally skippable if you’re just interested in buying the rank-based rewards.

In fact, the goblin quests are probably the most annoying. I’d personally suggest only doing them once each and then totally forgoing them. They don’t award rank or any kind of faction. You’re basically doing them for a gold reward. The other quests reward the exact same amount of cash in addition to rank with the tournament and reputation with one of the two Dalaran elf factions.

I haven’t tested it to be sure, but one of the quests actually seems like an invitation to exploit other players. Basically, you’re sent to collect stone chunks by using a bomb on big stone blocks found around the Storm Peaks. You have to dismount, plant a bomb and run away before it goes off. If you stay too close, it does a nice bit of damage. I think the tooltip said something like 7.5k-9k. In any case, it seemed to be hitting harder than that, since it took my rogue down to a sliver of life every time I stayed in range. The problem is that someone could theoretically simply hang out of range on their epic mount and rush in to grab your quest items without having to go to the trouble of planting bombs, taking damage and all that. Like I said, I haven’t tested this theory, so maybe Blizzard foresaw this problem. I’ll probably be skipping the quest anyway since it’s kind of out of the way.

The other goblin quest sends you to the woods around The Violet Stand under Dalaran. You basically chop down trees to get lumber. You get two pieces per tree. The trees you’re looking for have brown trunks with green leaves, can be walked through and have a tool tip when you mouse over them. The trick here, for rogues at least (and maybe hunters) is that you can vanish after chopping down the tree and you don’t have to fight the monster that spawns.

The only other quest I really want to mention is one that sends you to an obscure pond in Grizzly Hills. This one is far out of the way and could be supremely annoying. I’d probably skip this one altogether if it didn’t reward rank in the tournament. Save yourself some misery and make the following macro:

/use Warts-B-Gone Lip Balm

/tar Lake Frog

/kiss

Now you basically just have to run around the pond in question spamming that as quickly as the cooldown on the quest item allows.

Oh and I did get the chance to poke around Un’goro. As I’m sure you’re all aware, there are no NPCs and no quests for the Horde Ravasaur mount at this point. Supposedly Blizz is planning to add those in a future patch.

I don’t think the patch will be released this Tuesday since the new Noblegarden is scheduled to be tested on the PTR this week. Maybe they’ve already been testing it and I’m completely mistaken, but wishful thinking can’t hurt too much. If we get another week before the patch, I’ll actually have a decent shot at grabbing my Plagued Proto-Drake.

If I get the chance to poke around the PTR more this week, I’ll be sure to share anything interesting I find.

I wonder how many people have personal daily quests? Lots of people will do the tradeskill dailies or the various faction dailies to stockpile wealth and tokens or merely to earn reputation. What I’m talking about is something quite different.

There are lots of things in WoW that are quite grindy, huge tasks that will eat up many hours of your life. You’ll begin to really run into these things when you’re working on achievements. After you’re done with the easy tasks of /loving critters and uncovering the map, your sources for achievement points start to get a little more…. hmm… let’s say “involved”.

I’ve already mentioned that I’ve been pursuing the 100 mounts achievement. A few months ago, looking ahead to working on this feat, I started farming Baron Rivendare’s mount from Stratholme. The Deathcharger’s Reins used to be the rarest mount in the game. Over the years, the drop rate has been slowly increased so that it is now 1:100, if I recall correctly. Those are actually pretty good odds compared to many other rare mounts, but they can nonetheless seem daunting if you start to think about running through Stratholme 100+ times.

When faced with any daunting task like this, it’s a lot more palatable if you simply create a personal daily quest for yourself. In this case it was quite simple: I’d run Stratholme once a day until the mount dropped. Running through the instance only took about ten minutes, but it was still very tedious to do it over and over again with no respite inbetween. Killing the Baron once a day made the whole endeavor much easier to swallow.

Nowadays, I’m farming up one of the Halaa Talbuks. These require the farming of tokens in Nagrand, both from killing other players around Halaa and killing NPCs anywhere in the zone. I’ve already completed the easier task, the collection of PvP tokens, and now I’m working on the PvE tokens. This is a horrible grind. Once again, to make it easier, I only allow myself to farm up a certain amount of crystal dust (which is eventually turned into the tokens) per day. All in all, I need 300 pieces of dust and they have a low drop rate (probably under 10%). By creating a personal daily quest of farming 20 dust a day, I’m able to pace myself and not get burned out too quickly.

Anyone (out of the four of you that occasionally read this blog) have any personal daily quests like this?

via Jacob, a commenter on Tobold’s blog, who set out these numbers and piqued my curiousity.

There are twelve instances in Wrath that can be run as heroics. But not all heroic instances are equal, some are very much more popular than others.

And here are some stats to prove it. The numbers here are gotten from checking how often each end boss was looted in heroic mode from wowhead. So these numbers only reflect the experiences of wowhead contributors – they also don’t account for the people who attempted an instance but weren’t able to kill the last boss. However, it’s still a large sample size.

So everyone really does hate the Oculus.

Factors in determining popularity

In previous expansions, instances were tied to reputations. So if you wanted a particular reputation reward, you were forced to run the right instances for it. In Wrath this is no longer the case. You can just wear the tabard from the faction you’d like to champion and you will win reputation for them wherever you decide to go.

This means that players are much freer to pick their heroics on other criteria. Note also that each heroic can only be run once a day, due to lockouts.

An instance will be more popular if it’s either seen to give a better time: reward ratio, if it’s easier to find a group to go there, or if it’s just more fun. It may also be more popular if there is some rare instance-specific drop that many players will want.

Lets’ see.

From the numbers above, we can see:

Everyone hates the Oculus. It’s not seen as fun, it’s hard to get groups there, and there’s no special drop that would lure people into it.

Oculus is an unusual instance because you have to use vehicles (flying drakes) to fight the last boss. But the second and third bosses are also quite tough. Annoyingly, if you die on the last boss, there is a possibility that you’ll fall so far off your drake that not only will you die but also zone out of the instance. This would mean missing a chance to loot the boss even if your group does kill it. So not only is it a long ride from Dalaran, the bosses are hard, the vehicles are odd, and there’s a non-zero chance that you will miss out on some rewards.

The easiest instances are the most popular. Violet Hold, Utgarde Keep, and The Nexus are widely known as the easiest heroics. So the risk of a group not being able to finish them is lower, and they’re very popular. Violet Hold in particular is right in the middle of Dalaran and also quick to run.  So an instance that’s quick, easy, and convenient is also popular.

The Nexus is not convenient, it’s a long ride from the middle of Northrend. But it has some other redeeming factors. It’s relatively easy, it’s one of the instances which has an extra boss in heroic (ie. an extra badge/ extra loot) and there’s also the possibility of a good epic healing mace dropping from the last boss. So healers are usually keen to go there.

As a corrolary, the hard instances are less popular. Halls of Stone, Halls of Lightning, and Ahn-kahet are harder heroics, or they contain at least one encounter that’s notorious among the player base. So whether or not they really are more difficult, the players have the perception that a PUG to those places is less likely to succeed and will likely pick somewhere easier to spend their limited time.

I think Ahn-kahet is getting a raw deal here. It’s really not that bad and also has an extra boss in heroic. But still, the perception is there.

The effect of daily quests

If an instance is the subject of the heroic daily quest, there will also be more player interest. The daily tips the effort/ reward ratio for that instance. But I’ll assume that dailies, being random, apply equally to each instance.

However, if an instance is also the subject of a normal daily, that also adds an extra reward. And only 5 of the twelve instances can be attached to a normal daily quest. Oculus, Stratholme, Halls of Lightning, Halls of Stone, and Utgarde Pinnacle.

These include some of the least popular instances. So having a daily quest doesn’t make an instance more appealing, even though it adds a fair amount of cash and reputation as a reward.

Outliers

There are a couple of instances where the numbers puzzled me.

Drak’Tharon: I would include this as one of the easiest heroics.

Yet, it’s barely more popular than Gundrak and Azjol-Nerub which are both harder, and not any more convenient to get to. So people just don’t know that it’s easy? Or is it simply that if they have limited time, they’ll run a couple of the easier heroics and Drak’Tharon just isn’t on the top of anyone’s list? My guess is that it just lacks some fun. It’s not a bad little instance at all.

Utgarde Pinnacle: Probably one of the harder heroics because of the gauntlet at the third boss, but also one of the most popular. It’s not at all convenient, but there are a few factors luring people out there.

• Possibility of a rare mount drop
• It’s next to Utgarde Keep which is easy.
• Contains an epic tanking weapon, so paladins and warriors (and dual wielding death knights?) are very VERY keen to go there.

Do tanks get a raw deal?

This is not the first time that Blizzard, in their wisdom, have put an epic tanking weapon on the end boss of a heroic and given no other crafted options for tanks who don’t fancy running it a lot. They did the same thing in The Burning Crusade.

This does apply to feral druids also, but they luck out here because their epic tanking weapon drops from the last boss of Violet Hold. Which is easy and also very popular.

By comparison, healers can grab a good crafted epic mace to get them started, and casters and melee dps have  options among the reputation rewards. We do get the option of a nice crafted epic shield. But you can also pick up a good shield with heroic badges which people will get anyway.

There’s no decent tanking weapon available as a reputation reward, epic or not. It continues to be a theme for Blizzard to encourage the support roles into heroics.

I bet some people are confused by all the daily quests that appeared now. My server, Stormrage, just enterd in Phase3, we have the Armory. Today I`d like to complete all the available Shattered Sun Offensive quests and get more reputation (useless for my druid) and more gold (always useful, right?). I found this nice article from Curse explaining the quests, I think it`s very helpful. Enough talk, now go and kill those freaks!

“Sanctum Wards” and “Erratic Behavior” are two of the new daily quests in Quel’Danas.  They were available immediately when the zone was opened, and are still available now that most (if not all) realms are in phase two.  And they are annoying for the same reason that the similar quests in Ogri’La are annoying, or farming motes at the Elemental Plateau is annoying.

As a rogue, my best bet is to be in stealth when I start combat.  Well, when stealthed I move slowly.  So as I creep toward a Wretched Fiend or Erratic Sentry, it is common for some warrior to charge right past me, or a hunter to send his pet, or a mage to blast it from 40 yards away.  I gave up using stealth, since these mobs are pushovers, but I still lose out to players with longer ranged attacks.  The place is so busy that it takes forever to kill my quota.  Same with the new phase two quest, “The Battle for Sun’s Reach Armory”.  These are annoying and will remain so until the area is not so overcamped.  Its not bad quest design

Contrast that to the new daily quest “Blast the Gateway” at the Throne of Kil’jaeden.  Since your Living Flare gets empowered by any Fel Spark death in the vicinity, there is a lot of cooperation.  It doesn’t matter who gets credit for the kill – the faster they die, the faster we all finish the quest.  So players often work together to burn them down quickly.  Much nicer.

P.S. – when I went to bed last night my server was at 6% on phase 2.  How does that compare to other servers?

Old man Barlo has heard there are Crocolisks in the canals of Stormwind City and he wants you to bring one back for him to see for himself. 

Easy peasy! Take the portal from Shattrath to Stormwind and head for the canals.  I caught a baby croc on the 4th cast.  Then hearth back, if you have your hearth set for Shattrath City.

Rewards you with a Bag of Fishing Treasures. I got 1 gold and some change, some fishing hooks (+100 to fishing for 10 minutes) and a rusty lock.

El has collected descriptions of all of the fishing dailies and the rewards that you can get here.