Fun with Farming: Rhinos of the Tundra

Fun with Farming:
Fun with Farming is a segment where I discuss some of my favorite places to farm. One of the most important things for me in a farming place is that it's somewhere I can have fun, be entertained, and make a little bit of cash too!

Hey guys, so I just wanted to say something about my favorite new place to farm. It's certainly not the best money maker out there, but if you just have a little time and feel like doing something fun and easy this is it. So just to the south of the Amber Ledge are tons and tons of Rhinos. These guys roam around in packs of 4 to 6 and are level 68 or so with something like 6-7k health. In other words, pre-made easy to AoE groups. And there are a ton of groups, plenty so that by the time you have wiped them out the first groups will be respawning again!

I started doing this a couple weeks ago when it was the Mustard Dogs cooking Daily and I noticed there weren't any Rhino Dogs on the AH. I figured I could get my own and make them for cheap and also throw a few up on the auction house for some extra cash. They sold faster than I could have imagined even at as much as 2g each, sometimes even more! (Selling them in stacks of 4 because the quest requires 4 Rhino Dogs.)

So last night I went to do it again and decided to get a little more in depth break down! So, I threw on some poisons to use as my timer and went to work. In 30 minutes of farming I go 98 Rhino Meat and 37 Chilled Meat. Now that in and of itself isn't bad but one of my favorite little additions is the greys they drop. Each Rhino has basically a 100% chance to drop Matted fur, these sell at 11s 85c each, and in that half hour i got 174 of them, for a total of 20g 61s 90c. They also sometimes drop Cracked Horns which sell at 13s 5c each. I got 40 of these for 5g 4s. They also have your usual world greys which ended up being 6g 55s 23c. So, assuming I sold all the greys and sold the Rhino Meat as 2g each Dogs the way I have been that's 228g 57s 13c over only 30 minutes of ridiculously easy farming! And that doesn't even include the Chilled Meat which usually sell around 5g per stack, so that's another 10g. And, if you are a skinner you will get at least a Borean Leather Scrap from each one of these guys. For me that would have been 174 Borean Leather Scraps (if I hadn't dropped skinning last week, oops.)

I know it's not the best, most efficient way to make money, and it will take a while to sell the dogs if you don't flood the market in order to keep the price high, but still. I had fun mowing them down and it was easy. If I can take 30 minutes of my day and get that much done, then why not right? Especially since I will be using a decent chunk of that Rhino Meat to get my cooking up a little further with those Small Feasts!

So bop on over to the Amber Ledge and check it out! And if you are farming for some cooking mats there's also a lot of low level Mammoths near by but I haven't tried farming them too much yet. When I do, I'll let you know how it goes!

Good Luck!
~Bury

Grinding with Gorn: Timbermaw Hold

Grinding with Gorn:
Gorn One Eye here, for your weekly dose of reputation grinding. I'll be your guide as we travel through the World of Warcraft and learn about the various factions and how to best gain reputation with them.

Welcome to our new column, Grinding with Gorn. Here I'll be going over various factions across Azeroth and the surrounding lands each week and telling you a little bit about each one, why you might want to gain reputation with them and most importantly: how to go about doing that!'

We'll start this off with one which I know very well, my own faction, and the publishers of this fine piece of reading material: The friendly furblogs of the Timbermaw Hold.

The Timbermaw Furblogs live mainly in Azshara and Felwood, their base of operations is a series of tunnels connecting Felwood to Moonglade and Winterspring. They are one of very few races of uncorrupted furblogs in the world and if you help them fight off some of their enemies they will be glad to accept you and teach you their ways.

Why: The main reason that anyone would want to gain reputation with the furblogs of Timbermaw Hold is that the easiest way for most people to access Winterspring and Moonglade is through their tunnels and you must be at least unfriendly in order for them to allow you to pass unharmed. They also offer some nice recipes for a few of the crafting professions as well as a fun trinket and a very nice twink off-hand frill. Some of the most notable recipes include the enchanting formulas for Enchant 2H Weapon - Agility and Enchant Weapon - Agility which are highly sought after by most twinks as well as people looking to enchant their heirloom items. And what leatherworker wouldn't want the cute and bad-ass sounding Warbear Woolies pattern? At exalted you can purchase the Defender of the Timbermaw trinket which is mostly useless at higher levels, but who doesn't want a furblog friend to tag along with them on their adventures? The Timbermaw are also one of the factions required for the Diplomat achievement and title.

How: Most people who have quested through Felwood and the surrounding areas will likely already be at least unfriendly with the Timbermaw tribe, but if not it is very easy to get started. The only quests which will be required are Timbermaw Ally and/or Winterfall Activity. Completing one of these quests will boost you straight to unfriendly with the Timbermaw, as well as open up repeatable turn in quests which will be important later. At this point the best way to begin gaining reputation will be to start killing as many Deadwood or Winterfall furblogs as you can. Each mob you kill from these two tribes will all grant you reputation until you reach honored. There are also a few tribal leaders and rare spawns which will grant more reputation per kill and can be killed all the way to exalted. Also, members of the Deadwood and Winterfall tribes will drop Deadwood Headdress Feathers and Winterfall Spirit Beads, respectively. These can be turned in in stacks of 5 for 300 reputation at each turn in. Don't turn any of these in until you have reached honored! Since killing the unimportant members of the tribes will stop giving you reputation at honored it is best to save these turn-ins until then! As much as we loved it when Bury came and gave us loads of these before he was at honored status, he definitely regrets it now...so learn from his mistakes! There isn't necessarily a better choice as far as which tribe will be easiest to gain reputation from, however if you are part of the Alliance and working on reputation with our neighbors, the Wintersaber Trainers then killing members of the Winterfall Tribe can help them to gain reputation there too. If not, I would recommend the Deadwood Tribe as they can be found in rather large groups in the Southern and Northern parts of Felwood.

Summary: If you are an enchanter looking to appeal to the twink market, want some oddly named leatherworking or tailoring patterns, or just need another exalted reputation for some reason, then head over to Felwood and Winterspring and start facerolling some Deadwood or Winterfall furblogs!

Link: For all the information you need about the Timbermaw Furblogs, check out these links:
WoWHead
WoWWiki

This is Gorn One Eye saying, Good Luck with your Grind!

Gnome Genocide in Dun Morogh; Gold Sellers Responsible?

This was the scene late this afternoon outside the Ironforge Gates in Dun Morogh. Hundreds of gnomes lay dead, their bodies arranged into some sort of sick advertisement. There is no question as to who is responsible for this horrifying event as the bodies clearly spell out the identity of the culprits. The bodies were discovered late in the afternoon on May 15th after local Pie Vendor, Sraaz ran screaming into the Ironforge commons.

"We thought he had finally gone mad, what with all the people chasing him around this past Valentine's Day." Said Bruuk Barleybeard, owner of the local pub Bruuk's Corner. "He ran in throwing pies and screaming bloody murder before he passed out. It took a few shots of me famous Dwarven Stout to calm him down, and when he finally told us what he had seen we couldn't believe it. We grabbed a few guards and ran to the gates, I couldn't believe my eye. There were a lot of good gnomes there, and regular customers too."

It certainly is a sad day for the gnomes, and an even sadder day for the state of gold buying and selling. These despicable people are constantly finding new (and decidedly creative) ways to catch the attention of their target audience.

"It's just sick, that's what it is," said Bruuk, shaking his head. "Use all that money clean out Gnomeregon, then we'll talk. Until then, they best be on the look out, this spikey looking mace here ain't just for opening a keg, you know."

All in the Family

So I suppose it would make sense to give you guys a little idea about my different characters so you can know where some of my posts and thoughts are coming from. We'll start with a little history of my time in WoW.

I actually only started playing WoW in early December 2008. I have been playing a few different MMOs for years but never really even thought about playing WoW. To be honest the idea of paying a monthly fee wasn't something I ever thought I would do and I was one of those people who just thought WoW players were a little crazy. (Sorry) I knew my cousin had been playing WoW since the early fall and he was always getting on my back to play it but I just brushed it off and told him I wasn't interested at all. So what changed my mind? Oh, you'll love this... It's actually more of a who, that changed my mind. The one, the only, the apparently most sold out rocker that ever was: Ozzy (The Undead Warlock) Osbourne Yup, those commercials are not just hilarious, they actually work! So yes, I decided to try out a free account to to appease my cousin. He told me to start with a shaman or a druid. Being that a I didn't have TBC I couldn't make an Alliance side Shaman, and for some reason I didn't want to make a druid. So I ended up starting with my first character, a Gnome Warlock. After becoming immediately addicted and hitting the level 20 cap in about 3 or 4 days, I was in. Before my ten days were up I bought my subscription and away I went.

I decided to reroll then seeing as I got to level 20 in no time at all and decided on a Dwarf Rogue. All my friends were dwarves and I new the starting zone, and a rogue because I thought it seemed like kind of a cool idea at the time. Bury is currently my main character and the one I spend most of my time on having just hit 80 a few days ago and I have loved it the whole way. My biggest problem with leveling was always that if I pulled too many things I was pretty much screwed since there was no real crowd control once you were in a fight and there was pretty much no way you were hitting more than one person. (Until I made the wonderful decision to respec to Combat somewhere between Outlands and Northrend, that certainly helped.) I am now specced as Assassination because the best rep reward weapons I could get at level 80 were Daggers and I am loving it. I haven't used Mutilate since some time in my 60s or something and it is a lot of fun, not to mention that I have AoE now which I can't state enough, I LOVE IT!

As far as other alts go, I have been spending most of my time not on Bury on a new Dranei Hunter I made. I got a Hunter to 10 once before but didn't enjoy it too much, but after watching BRK's Baby Hunter videos and learning how to kite and use my ranged weapon properly I had a blast and I am loving the Hunter. It's fun to be invincible at lower levels, but having a sort of built in tank that you can heal is great! (I never got very good at using my Void Walker in my Lock days as I was still learning the ropes of the game in general pretty much.) My favorite part of having a hunter, however, is the awesome customizeability and challenges that having a pet provide. I absolutely love trying to find a cool and unique pet, that also does the job I need it to do. At level 12 I took the long hike from Bloodmyst to Dun Morogh to grab Bjarn because I wanted a unique tanking pet and I always thought the pure white bear was pretty cool. I also picked up a really cool looking spider, the Myst Spinner because not only does it look super cool, but I decided around level 18 that I wanted to try battlegrounds a bit and twink out my hunter a little at 19. I grabbed the spider thinking it would be fun to have the web ability, man was I right, concussive shotting and webbing the horde dude with the flag over and over again is so gratifying. I gave my hunter a few crappy enchants that my now 225 enchanting Lock could make, crafted a couple leather things and a semi decent guns and hit WSG. It was way more fun than I could have imagined. I even did pretty well for a first timer, scoring top on my team a couple times. Of course the horde had a rediculous amount of twinks and we usually lost, but it was lots of fun. (This was before the 3.1 uber twink nerf.) I'll probably make another twink sometime in the future just because it was a pretty good time, but at this point my Hunter is somewhere in the mid 20s and now has one of my favorite pets in the game, the Ghost Saber. If that's not a pretty cat, I don't know what is. I'll probably be having some posts in the future about Hunter pets.

I do have a Gnome Death Knight who is something like level 57 right now, too. I only really plan on getting him to around 65 so he can do a couple professions for now, but maybe in the distant future I'll get him to 80, we'll see.

Finally, I have just recently started a Night Elf Druid. (Ironic considering my cousin told me to do that 5 months ago....) I was thinking about what kind of class I would want my next 80 to be, and I wasn't sure exactly what role I would want to do. I know I would like to try something other than melee DPS, but besides that I wasn't sure so I figured what could be better than a Druid, the class that can literally perform every role in the game? I'm actually pretty excited about it too, leveling a new character should be fun and I'm looking forward to trying out healing and tanking, as well as relearning (or more so just learning) to play a caster. And since my main is a leather worker I should have her geared pretty well all the way to 80 too!

So there's a little, or maybe a lot since it seems that I like to write novels, about my characters. I have a pretty good variety as it stands and I definitely like playing all the different ones. So hopefully that will provide a little insight into why I'll be writing about some of the topics that I do!

DING! Who's your Daddy..errr....Patron...?

So I'm a little late getting to this post (finals will do that, even to the best of procrastinators) but I finally hit level 80 on my first character last week shortly after finishing up the Children's Week achievement and getting my first 'real' title besides Jenkins which everyone and their mom seems to have in Northrend. So this post will be a little bit about my first experiences at 80 and also my opinions on Children's Week. As if we haven't already heard enough about it.

So I'll start from the top. Level 80. I spent the first 76 or so levels of my WoW life questing as people usually do. At level 76 I realized that due to the fact I had taken a week or so off from leveling I had a ridiculous amount of rest experience built up and I was getting upwards of 2000 experience per mob I killed. So I thought to myself why not just find a mob with some nice drops and grind a few levels out? Thanks to a certain money-making related blog which I hope to mention in later posts I found just that place in Sholazar Basin and I literally grinded all the way from level 76 to 80 in the same spot and made a nice little chunk of change along the way as well. But I didn't actually ding 80 here. No, no, no, not this Dwarf. Being a good friend of those ugly Tuskarr known as the Kalu'ak, I decided it would be best to hit 80 with a bang. Or ding, as it were. So I took the flight over to Kamagua and picked up everyone's favorite walrus-friendly quest: The Way to His Heart. Was it worth it? You're damn straight it was worth it. I just love seeing those walruses (walrii...?) fall in love. And besides, the Kalu'ak were hooking me up with a fancy dagger for my new spec at level 80, so it was the least I could do to show my gratitude.

Man it's great to be level 80. As a rogue I finally get something I have been waiting for since I realized that my ultimate downfall was pulling mutliple mobs accidentally: AoE!! Fan of Knives is wonderful! I specced into the Assassination tree when it hit 80 as well since based on my available rep reward weapons it was my best option so I am getting the 150% dagger bonus as well and man is it fun. I was in Dustwallow yesterday farming some thick leather real quick for the goldmine that is Nightscape Headbands (the topic of a future post) and it was so much fun to just pull a whole bunch of those stupid level 40 dragonkin who caused me so much stress in the past and one shot the whole bunch of them. I have also been farming Rhino Meat near Amber Ledge in Borean Tundra for the cooking dailies and the market that they make for Rhino Dogs. I can even pull big groups of those level 68s and kill them all with no problem. It is so much fun!

As far as doing things a level 80 *should* be doing, I haven't been to good about that. I have run part of HoL (was lucky enough to get pulled into the end of a run and get a glove drop) and I got some shoulders from Nexus. But the only other Heroic I have even completed so far is Utgarde Keep just tonight with no drops for me, and I had an utter fail of a run in Heroic CoS last night after a couple of my friends started bitching at each other and one promptly logged in the middle of the instance, and another fail in Violet Hold after we wiped on Cyanigosa and no one felt compelled to do the whole stupid thing all over again. But I certainly have done a decent job of blowing a fair chunk of my money buying myself some decent BoE blue gear from the auction house as well as some nice enchants, so I suppose that's a step in the right direction. Hopefully once this whole silly finals week thing gets out of the way I'll be able to start getting a lot more heroics in and get myself a little more geared so I can start doing some 10-man Naxx runs with my new guild!

Now, about this Children's Week thing...Aside from the fact that I find it a bit odd that my little human orphan friend enjoyed watching me stuff my face and break the rules of battlegrounds, it wasn't really all that bad. Let's start from the top. Home Alone. Umm....done....moving on. (Aside from a nice little bug which caused me to lose this the first couple times I logged out and have to redo it, not a big issue.) So next in line was Daily Chores. This one still seemed like it would be pretty easy aside from the task of logging in and doing a daily each day. But it turns out Blizzard changed the way it worked so that all you actually had to do was do 5 dailies, even all in one day. So that took me no time at all and we were on to bigger and better things. The next easiest one I figured would be Bad Example. This one turned out to be quite easy, and I even made a little money off the people too lazy to go to Dalaran and buy the brownies and doughnuts and what not. Fortunately for me one of my good friends had the recipe for the Chocolate Cake so after quickly farming the mats for that since prices on AH skyrocketed hours after the holiday began I was all set and had only two real obstacles left. I managed to get lucky and get a really well geared tank and healer in a group I was setting up for regular Utgarde Pinnacle so getting Hail to the King, Baby wasn't too much of a problem. So then we come to the PvP achievement: School of Hard Knocks. This, I was quite worried about. I figured I would end up being in some of these battlegrounds for a lot of battles, just hoping to get lucky and get what I needed. Although I ended up getting the Warsong Gulch, Strand of the Ancients and Arathi Basin parts in one go, and the Alterac Valley on my third try after getting a great rogue related tip from a guildie, I still didn't really like the idea of this achievement. No I'm not going to bitch and moan about it being 'too hard' or 'too based on luck' or blah blah blah. In fact, I do sort of like the fact that this may have caused some people to not try or not get the title, making it more unique, but I really think Blizzard should have gone about this in a much different way. I think it's great to include PvP achievements in what are usually PvE type events, because it does force people to see some of the other content, and who knows they may like it. I know the first time I set foot in Warsong Gulch I had a blast. My problem was simply that although these achievements are part of normal game play in these battlegrounds, the thought of everyone in the battleground trying to do the exact same thing is pretty useless. The best example of course is returning a flag in Warsong Gulch. I mean yea, sure the flag needs to be returned if it gets dropped, but am I always going to be the one to do it? Probably not, with 9 other team mates there's a darn good chance I won't be. This of course led to people just sitting in the flag room waiting for the opposing side to come grab the flag, not realizing they were doing the same freaking thing. In Alterac Valley it led to people racing to all the towers and spreading out just trying to be the first person to tag one. Not exactly the best strategy it would seem. I got lucky in that as I was a rogue, I just sat, stealthed, in a tower the Alliance already had, waited for a couple horde to come take it back, and then when they left I took it back for the alliance again. Done. Of course if you can't stealth this becomes a whole lot more complicated, and obviously I wasn't doing our team a whole lot of good camping out in a tower we already had.

How do I think they could have gone about it differently? It's hard to say exactly. Obviously the first thing that comes to mind is to simply make it: 'Win a battle in this, this, and this battleground.' But then there are servers whose population is so wonky that one side really never wins and so that wouldn't be fair to them. It could have been, kill X number of Horde/Alliance players with your orphan out. But then that is too simple, and again kind of goes against the goals in most of these battlegrounds. Not to mention the fact that it's kind of sick to have to kill a bunch of dudes in front of some poor kid. I don't have any specific ideas that I came up with. But I think something a little simpler, along the lines of, you know, having you team score in WSG, or maybe, get an honorable kill inside a tower you do/don't control in AV. I dunno, I'm just making things up now but I think in the future Blizzard should consider how the achievements they put in place will affect the way people play and see battlegrounds. I necessarily want easy because, for me at least, having a semi-unique title is part of the fun, but something that can be obtained with a little bit of effort or time, without wrecking the overall experience for other people involved doesn't seem like too much to ask for.

In the end, I got the achievement, although I am pretty sure the Alliance lost every one of those battles I was in, headed back to good ol' Stormwind and turned in my little buddy in exchange for a friendly new turtle pet and a fancy precursor to tag on to my name.

It was a good week.

We're Live!

Welcome welcome! This is the Timbermaw Times, a blog written by a World of Warcraft player for players! In this blog I'll be discussing a huge variety of topics based on my experiences in WoW. Most of my posts will probably be drawn directly from my day to day activities and the insight I get from my travels. There will be posts about money making, leveling, working on achievements, and pretty much everything else I find myself doing or feel like talking about!

There won't be any specific posting schedule at this point but I will do my best to keep up and post at least a couple times a week on a few different topics as my schedule permits. Hopefully someday we will be able to get some guest posts from other players and we'll probably see an occasional post from some of the inhabitants of Timbermaw Hold, where this fine publication stems from.

So strap in it's going to be a fun ride!

~Bury