Monday (2 May) - Order of the Dragon

Monday (2 May) - Order of the Dragon

One of the changes that came with Cataclysm was a brand new mechanism where guilds could earn experience, and with experience increase the guild's level and earn bonuses for the players in the guild. No one was quite sure how that would work, or whether it would make any difference. With a few months of observing the new guild leveling system, I think it has been a very positive addition.

Guilds that have a large, active membership get the most benefit, since they level faster and get access to better and better features that everyone in the guild benefit from. Very small guilds, though, such as Happy's "Order of the Dragon," have a very tough time leveling. When such a small guild does level, it is a major, major accomplishment.

The highest level member of Order of the Dragon is Lao, a level 85 priest who has been the architect of nearly all the guild leveling accomplishments.

"Group Ding! - By Lao

Lao logged on last night with the main reason of seeing if a chest piece that she had up on the AH sold. This is the same type of chest piece that she made an 8k profit on last time. No dice. This is the third, and maybe last, time she has had it up and no biters this time around. She might just have to wear it but she loses a lot of haste (around 164) which is the number one item of desire for most any caster.

While she was on she glanced at the sun dial and realized it was not that far off until the Tol Bard (Brad?) [actually, Barad] battle. Since she still had the weekly to-win quest she decided she should head over and grind out some quests until it started. Tol Barad is nice due to each daily earning you 16-18 gold. If you own the area (meaning that your faction won the last battle) you can get up to six more quests done, on top of the six that anyone can do at any time. This means about 200g can be gotten in about an hour's time.

Lao zoned in and started to shuffle through the quests looking for fast easy ones. She liked to do one, turn it in, do another, and turn it in vs. getting them all done and all turned in, in one blow. She see's that she has the skeleton on the hill, by far the easiest. Not only is it very close to the quest giver but you only have to kill one guy (err.. skeleton) that is easy to get to.

She runs in and boom, he is dead. Lao turned that in and was off to the next, spiders. Now Lao does not tend to care for the “kill xxxx number of xxxx” type of quests, they tend to be too long for her preference, especially if there are a lot of others going for the same kills. But it was a slow day and which means she can usually just turn in a circle and pick them off as they respawn, without running around.

After killing off 12 smaller arachnids and one mother spider (that took issue with her young being picked off), she ran to turn in the quest and WOOSH! At first it startled Lao. She was pretty sure she was not that close to being exalted with Hellscream (the rep faction for this area). Then she realized she was right, it was not her becoming exalted but the guild reaching level 2! Lao was so excited that she rushed to the vendor and sold the broken spindles out of her bag to celebrate.

Okay, maybe Lao should have been more excited than that, but what level two gives you is a little bit of an experience boost to help you level. Since Lao is already 85, this means nothing to her. Next level, 10% more movement speed while mounted. Now that might matter.. so in 10 more months (assuming Lao does not move on) our guild might get there :-)

Oh, and Lao helped win the Tol Barad battle, got all her quests done (cha-ching!), and is now 50 points away from being exalted with Tol Bard.

All of the Order of the Dragon SALUTE! Lao for bringing the guild to Level 2! /CHEER!

In other news it was all quiet from Wild, but others in the family did get some business done.

The DER family has been leveling yet another member of that large family with the confusingly similar names. The mage Daethbot #? (there are so many of you!) had reached level 52 and was hoping to get some game time on Tuesday night with one of Wild's Horde side members. Canvassing the Wild family, there were two possibilities. Hunter Mery was level 57 and ready to rock and roll, but that would mean Daethbot would have to level to at least 55 in order for the two to be in the same battlegroup bracket. The other choice was the shaman EZ, who was level 46 and would have to level up to 50 in order to be in the same bracket.

Unfortunately, the shaman in Wild's family have fallen on pretty hard times. After Wild had reached level 85, JB was given the nod to follow in Wild's big hooves and level to 85. She worked hard at it, getting to level 83. After that, though, JB found it harder and harder to find time to level, and after awhile she could not even get time to do the necessary herb farming that was the source of flasks Wild needed for raiding.

Things were even worse for EZ, who became a completely forgotten member of the family. Given Daethbot's request, Wild called on EZ to find out just what her situation was. The only word for it was dismal. EZ, abandoned since Cata, had never even had her talent points restored after the reset. Her bags were clogged with junk that had never been organized. Her user interface was an unreadable and unusable disaster. EZ had reached a point where she wasn't sure even of what spells to use anymore. The poor girl was in truly sad shape.

Get it together, Wild told her, and gave her one day to get it done. EZ had a lot she wanted to say to THAT - but held her tongue. She privately told herself that Wild would get his comeuppance - after she got that day Wild had promised.

The first thing EZ did was to build back her Enhancement talent spec. Then she sorted through her gear. She was completely dismayed by the choked bags that held both valuable gear (for melee work and healing as well) along with useless stuff that had never been sold off. She got her melee gear together and into some semblance of organization, and piled the rest in a corner to be sorted out later.

She then worked on assembling a coherent spell priority and getting her totems packaged up properly. She got advice from JB, who could at least show her what spells to use and in what order. After a lot of work she was relatively satisfied. It wasn't pretty, but it was workable. Pretty would have to wait.

Next, EZ begged other family members for some heirloom gear to help make leveling go a little faster. JB, Shevils, and even Java contributed. [Wild hopes getting that stuff back to their rightful owners doesn't become a problem. Keeping track of who has what is quite a challenge]. And being in a level 2 guild also helped out with leveling.

EZ finally felt ready to test everything out. After some thought, she decided that Tanaris was the best place to start. Lots of things to kill at around the level where she could get good experience and still kill things relatively fast. EZ soon learned, though, that she had never ventured that far south before. Tanaris, at least for the moment, was out of reach. The closest she could get was the battered and flooded horde camp in Thousand Needles. Fine, EZ decided, let's start there.

Pre-Cata, Thousand Needles was a hot, dusty plain covered in tall spires of rock. Those spires are what gave the place it's name. While the beasts of that region stayed mostly on the ground, the humanoid population lived at the top of the spires, using bridges to travel between them. The Cataclysm flooded the entire zone and destroyed most of the bridge system. The result was the place was now one large lake dotted with islands that used to the tops of those spires.

EZ was soon deep into questing in the area, and enjoyed it quite thoroughly. It was new and fresh, just as she was after such a long absence. Most of the work was either out on the lake or beneath the waters. She even got her own boat to use while she was in the zone. The goblin island (that pre-Cata was a goblin town out in Shimmering Flats - which no longer exists) that EZ was based out of was a true testament to the bizarre and delightful engineering of the goblins. EZ had so much fun she got a little tipsy at the bar - and even started a bar fight among the Alliance element. Yes, there are both friendly and hostile goblins at the island - but they only get rough if you, say, accidentally hit one over the head with your mug of ale. Ok, so EZ had had a LOT of ale.

EZ reached level 47 and is close enough to level 48 to likely get there. Some of the questing had become frustratingly difficult - from the standpoint of just finding cave entrances and such - that she finally called it a day to give her aching ale induced headache a chance to clear up. Level 50 would be a long haul, though, one she's not sure she will reach.

JB, too, had finally gotten some game time prior to EZ's return. Wild, who had not missed JB's flasks too much when he was raiding only once a week, started to get desperate now that he could be in raids three times a week and needing three times as many flasks. JB could make the flasks quickly enough; the problem was getting the materials together. Happy was getting truly annoyed at how much those mats cost on the AH. JB was an herbalist, and could farm the mats, but she needed to be level 84 to get into the Twilight Highlands to get the right kind of herbs.

JB started as a pvp healer in battlegrounds to gain some experience, and that was a lot of fun, but it wasn't getting her all that much experience. JB had stopped leveling in Uldum, so it was there she turned to next. She pulled together her Enhancement gear set and headed out. There were actually a lot of quests still to be done, and she worked through them while also farming the whiptail herbs that were prevalent in the area. She had a pretty long way to go, but was successful in her mission. JB is now level 84.