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.
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