Alterac Volley » Mounts

Glory Of The Hero

Nance — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 03:07:56 +0000

Over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve been devoting almost all of my playing time towards finishing up the rather daunting, to me at least, Glory of the Hero achievement. I’m proud to say that as of last week I wrapped up the last few required achievements needed and now I’m flying around on the fancy Red Proto-Drake you see above.

I wanted to write a short post about the individual achievements we struggled with the most so that anyone else thinking about taking a run at this has a basic idea of the challenges ahead of them.

Difficult Achievements

Watch Him Die
We really had a hard time with this one at first, and after several failed attempts at off-tanking the guardians we eventually decided that an all out DPS race was in order. So we zerged the Gatewatcher with all the DPS we could muster and after one bad attempt we pulled it off successfully on the second try.

Less-rabi
For us, the real struggle here was our group makeup. We rarely had the right people on at one time with the right number of interrupts so several attempts were made with PUGs and it never came together. Eventually, for my achievement, we managed to knock it down on our third or fourth sday of attempts. The trick here is to remember that after the boss is below 50% health he transforms every 5 seconds so you really have to be on the lookout to interrupt him. We found it easiest to count in your head to five instead of relying on a mod to tell you when the transform was coming.

Chaos Theory
The secret to this achievement is to make sure you clear out all of the trash leading up to the boss. That includes the stuff in the corner, behind the platform, that leads up to the boss himself. When the fight starts you need to stay at range of the rifts and just DPS the adds down as they come to you. In between you attack the boss until he goes immune at which point the entire group falls back down the ramp as the tank keeps aggro out of range of the rifts attacking the rest of the group. By the end of the fight, there will be dozens of adds coming at you so it’s a DPS race to finish.

Make It Count
I think Occulus is one of the worst Heroics out there. The flight mechanic is annoying and kind of buggy but the actual fights themselves aren’t that difficult. This achievement was really just the result of practice from doing the other Occulus related achievements in the game. The one tip I have, aside from practice makes perfect, is to not bother looting anything the entire time. You might find those seconds you save pretty valuable at the end.

Worth The Effort

In the end, trying for Glory of the Hero was a lot of fun. The mount is cool, for sure, but the real reward was the entertaining groups we put together as we all tried to finish. Doing the same Heroics, over and over, can get stale pretty quick (even if you’re trying to gear an alt like I was) so a bit of a challenge thrown in the mix now and then made things very entertaining. I recommend everyone gives it a shot if they have a decent group of friends to help them out.

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Quick Impressions Of Patch 3.2

Nance — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:44:56 +0000

I managed to get the patch yesterday on my Mac with little difficulty so I was able to jump right in as soon as Greymane was up and check things out. Here are my impressions of Patch 3.2 after a few hours of play.

Champion’s Seal Loot

There’s some decent loot to be purchased with Champion’s Seals now. I immediately blew most of my stockpile of 300 Seals by buying the fantastic Sunreaver Dragonhawk mount (pictured above), the Argent Crusader’s Tabard for quick teleporting to the Tournament area and last, but not least, the Bind on Account Polished Breastplate of Valor to complete my BoA Plate set.

New Argent Tournament Dailies

The new Argent Tournament Dailies, which I believe you need the Crusader title to do, are relatively simple. They all involve a bit of travel but it didn’t seem as awful as the original four Champion dailies feel with the exception of one daily that is all the way in Storm Peaks and might not be worth the effort for some.

The amount of Seals and gold you can earn by consistently doing these quests is going to be pretty impressive. They don’t appear to require groups either so those of you, like myself, with an allergy to playing with strangers should be pleased.

Isle of Conquest

I tried the new battleground, the Isle of Conquest, a few times but I want to hold off my impressions for awhile. It was insanely laggy and the map is so huge, with so much going on, that it was hard to get a good grip on what it will really be like in the future. I think once Patch Mania simmers down and we all have a time to figure this battleground out it’s going to be one of my favorites though.

Trial of the Champion

I managed to give the new 5 man, Trial of the Champion (or ToC as the cool kids call it), a shot on both Regular and Heroic. We didn’t quite have the heals to live through the Heroic version and we quit after several wipes on the second encounter. The Regular version, minus one “Oops” wipe, was much smoother and gave me a good look at what this new 5 man has to offer.

Some people are going to white hot hate the opening fight that requires jousting. But it’s relatively simple and compares well with the Battle Before The Citadel quest. The next two encounters reminded me heavily of Violet Hold. Actually, the whole Trial of the Champion is kind of like Violet Hold on acid. It’s just small trash and then boss time. If you like Violet Hold’s gameplay then you’ll probably love ToC as well.

Emblem Changes

The switch from Emblems of Heroism to Emblems of Conquest in Heroics is great. Now I can gear up a bit without having to bite the bullet and join a raiding guild. Also, this should make interest in my small stable of alts increase as the odds of getting them in good gear just drastically rose with the Emblem change.

Early Verdict

I have to say that even after just a few hours that I like this patch a lot so far. The new battleground, while confusing at first and very laggy, shows some promise as well. The Emblem changes, new dailies and the new 5 man should help keep my interest in the game going strong.

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Reins Of The Bronze Doh…

Nance — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:16:48 +0000

I ran Heroic Culling of Stratholme for the second time ever the other day. Tthe idea of trying the timed run was tossed out as we were all getting ready to head inside. I had never made an attempt at that before, and no one was particularly serious or gunning for it, but a few minutes into the actual run it was pretty clear we at least had an outside shot of completing it. We stepped up our efforts a bit and with decent DPS and excellent tanking and heals we did very well.

With about two minutes to go on the timer we sprinted to the end just in time to take on and take out the Infinite Corruptor for the Culling of Time achievement and the chance to roll on the Reins of the Bronze Drake. The resulting Need roll by everyone in the group is posted above. As you can tell, it was a heartbreaker for yours truly.

[Edit: I assume] when players tie using the Need/Greed system the game automatically, and silently, does a re-roll to determine the winner. So even though you can’t see it in that screenshot there was actually a second roll handled by the game that awarded the mount to a player not named Nance.

For what it’s worth, our group’s tank won the mount and since he did an excellent job it seemed fair enough to me. In the end I was more interested in the achievement than the mount so while it was a bit of a kick in the face as far as the roll was concerned I can live without the Bronze Drake for now.

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One More Mount For The Week

Nance — Sat, 23 May 2009 20:10:33 +0000

I was minding my own business today, running some Argent Tournament dailies, when a tweet from Danial at Less QQ, More PewPew caught my eye. He mentioned getting the Ambassador title on his character and I immediately realized that since I recently got that title as well I now had enough Exalted reputations to finish the Leading the Cavalry achievement.

It turns out this achievement is painfully easy to complete once you have Exalted reputation with the five main cities of your faction. Before I got started I only had 21 out of the 50 mounts I needed to complete the achievement and get the Reins of the Albino Drake reward. A few quick trips to each Horde city and I was buying up 8 and 80 gold mounts left and right. I had to finish up in Nagrand, of all places, to buy a few Talbuks and I was done.

The whole process only took a few minutes of travel and maybe 2,00 gold or so. I actually bought a few more mounts than I needed and ended up with 56 total by the time I stopped.

Glory Of The Hero Over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve been...

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My Mysterious Egg Stops Making Omelets

Nance — Mon, 18 May 2009 19:12:46 +0000

One of the first things of any note that I did shortly after Wrath launched was hit exalted with the Oracles so I could start purchasing the Mysterious Egg every week. I reached Exalted back when the White Tickbird Hatchling was selling for 250 gold and not the 30 gold it goes for today. So I’ve been buying these damn Mysterious Eggs for a long, long time and today it finally paid off.

Today’s egg, once cracked, revealed the loot I’ve wanted from the start: the Reins of the Green Proto-Drake. Now I can stop this senseless and drawn out process of weekly disappointment. I still haven’t gotten a Proto-Drake Whelp to drop but I might just bite the bullet and buy one off the Auction House.

It’s time to turn my attention to reputation grinding with the Frenzyheart Tribe so I can get the Mercenary of Sholazar achievement.

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White Polar Bear Mount & More…

Nance — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 06:21:39 +0000

After loyally, day after day for weeks and weeks, running the daily quest in the Storm Peaks that gives the Hyldnir Spoils I finally got the Reins of the White Polar Bear to drop for me. Hallelujah! Now I never have to do any of those monotonous dailies there ever again in my life.

WIth my notoriously, and possibly self-imagined, bad luck with WoW loot a mount drop like that would normally be enough to make my day…

But Wait, There’s More!

My girlfriend, out of nowhere, managed to buy an entire Nobles Deck for me. She bought every card but the Six of Nobles for a total of 8,100 gold. That’s way below the market average on my server so that was a really nice job on her part. Unfortunately, the Six is a super hot commodity right now and I’ve seen people asking to buy it on Trade for up to 6,000 gold with no sellers in sight.

Luckily, someone finally announced they had one for sale. The price was 3,100 gold and she jumped on it. For a total of 11,200 gold she put together a Deck that typically sells on the Auction House for 4,000 gold more than that.

I pieced the deck together as soon as the deal for the Six was done. A quick run to the Darkmoon Faire and I’m the proud owner of a Darkmoon Card: Greatness. Not a bad way to end the WoW day.

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Problems Claiming the Swift Zhevra Mount

Nance — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 21:54:16 +0000

This is just a quick tip for anyone having problems claming their Swift Zhevra mount from the Recruit-a-Friend screen at the official WoW site. I had seen a blue post on the official forums a few weeks ago about there being problems but never saw a follow up.

When you’re eligible to claim the mount a small icon will appear next to the account you are linked with. Clicking on that icon will bring you to a screen asking you to select your server. After that, a list of your characters on that server will appear along with a button that, supposedly, will send the mount to that character when you click on it. Unfortunately, whenever I clicked on that button the screen would refresh and nothing happened.

After a week of clicking the button fruitlessly I finally realized the problem. This particular page on WoW’s site doesn’t appear to work for people using the Safari browser on the Mac. So if you’re having the same problem as I was try using a different browser. Firefox 3.0.5 worked just fine for me in the end and now, as you can tell from the photo above, my Death Knight is riding a ridiculous zebracorn.

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Exalted with the Wyrmrest Accord

Nance — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 06:38:45 +0000

Smart hunters would probably use the new Championing system to grind reputation for gear upgrades from the Argent Crusade and the Knights of the Ebon Blade as soon as possible. Not me, folks. I was working for the Wyrmrest Accord from the second I bought their tabard.

Finally, this morning all of those Heroic runs paid off in the form of my very own Red Drake as seen above. This is, hands down, my favorite mount I’ve ever had. It’s actually so cool I’m thinking about finally dropping Engineering since the only reason I went with it in the first place was for the Turbo-Charged Flying Machine.

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Mammoth Buyer’s Remorse

Nance — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 22:21:25 +0000

Ever since word leaked out that there was a mammoth mount in Wrath with vendors I’ve been stockpiling gold. When more details on the Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth came out (including it’s outrageous 20,000 gold price tag before reputation discounts) I was still really, really pumped about someday buying one.

Well, the day has come where this epic mount can finally be mine but I just can’t bring myself to make the purchase yet. I’m already suffering from a severe case of buyer’s remorse before it’s even been bought.

Do I really need a mount that carries passengers when I mostly play alone? Will this be that useful in a PvP setting like a battleground to justify the expense? Am I really going to want to run around on foot when I can normally just fly everywhere much faster?

The biggest hurdle for me right now is the fact that there is another mammoth option that costs a significant amount less in gold but more in time. The Ice Mammoth from the Sons of Hodir only costs 1,000 gold but requires a reputation status of Revered. Fortunately, I’m only another week away from hitting Revered.

I think I’m more pumped about the concept of a mammoth mount in general than I am about one with on-board vendors and passenger capabilities. I’m going to sit on it for a few more days but I have a hunch that as I get closer and closer to Revered with the Sons of Hodir I’ll go with their mammoth and save my money.

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