The Jocy-Fist Challenge Part 4

The Jocy-Fist Challenge Part 4

Fist is having a rough time keeping up with Jocy as the pair enter the weekend. Fist is still at level 95 +89% and scrambling for time to get to level 96. Indomitable Jocy, howewer, kept an iron fist (pun intended) on the leveling time. Jocy fought her way to level 97 and is over halfway to level 98. Fist crafted herself an i640 helm and shoulders to boost her gear level from i565 to i577, improving her kill rate and leveling speed. She still has to wrest time from Jocy to make any headway.

Though Jocy has stymied Fist for the moment, Fist was interested in seeing if Jocy started collecting garrison plans. Jocy is level 97 now, she has the Talador Outpost, and she's completed every quest in Talador, earning all four of the zones' achievements. She's even completed the outpost in Arak. After all that work, Jocy hasn't gotten a single garrison plan. Jocy checked in at Ashran, too, where plans can be bought, but the vendor refused. Jocy remains stuck with her garrison at level 2 and her buildings at level 1. It's frustrating, because being able to make garrison improvements as you level is an incentive to keep leveling. Jocy and Fist might as well ignore the garrison buildings until they reach level 100, when they'll have to beg gold from Happy to buy the plans they need.

Jocy is currently at level 97 +63%, but don't expect her to stay there very long. One thing that is beginning to hold her back is that as she faces tougher mobs, her gear level isn't keeping up. Jocy's gear is now i580, only three points above Fist's i577. Fist isn't over-geared, Jocy is under-geared. As a measure of progress, Wild's gear level is i644.

Jocy and Fist are going to have an even greater issue as they close in on level 100. Happyface no longer has the means to buy every piece of interim gear they want while leveling. Draenor's resources lack the volatility of earlier expansions. Price fluctuations are small and the trend of ever decreasing prices is challenging Happy's creativity at making a few extra gold. Even the always needed bags continue to lose market value. Happy once sold embersilk bags for over 400 gold each. Now they sell at under 300 gold. Happy's cut has shrunk to the point he may no longer be able to make a profit on them.

The same is true for most items now. The margin is very thin. Currently, Happy has to rely on the sale of high cost items, like enchants and the new 30 slot hexweave bag that Wild can craft. The hexweave bag is a good seller and nets over 2000g apiece, but the hexweave cloth required to make it has a finite limit (ie, the cloth is soulbound and can't be sold or purchased) on how much can be made. Ultimately Happy has to wait until Wild has enough cloth before he can make one to sell. The enchants don't have that restriction, but the price tag of the enchants is steep. It takes about 1900 gold on average (some enchants cost more than others) to make one high level enchant (Warsong, Bleeding Hollow, Shadowmoon, Thunderlord, etc). Wild can't produce the mats fast enough, so Happy has to buy them off the AH, but he can't buy too many at a time since even small price changes greatly affect the sale price on such high cost items. Happy can easily spend 10,000 gold just to make 3-4 enchants.

When they sell it's big bucks of course, but if they don't . . . well, Happy really, really hates selling at a loss.

The Jocy-Fist Challenge Part 3

The Jocy-Fist Challenge Part 3

Jocy has kept the pressure on Fist, focusing hard on completing quests in Talador. Her expectation is that the completion of all quests in Talador will finally get her the building plans she wants. Her work was nothing fancy - kill everything and anyone that got in the way of completing quests. So far the map says Jocy has completed two of the four major achievements in Talador.

Although Jocy monopolized most of the time before the crash, Fist snuck in some work when Jocy was forced to take a break. The current tally is:

Fist went from Level 94 +65% to Level 95 +84%, not bad
Jocy went from Level 95 +57% to Level 96 +68%, good but Fist gained a little ground

Then everything went south. Jocy and Fist must have been progressing too well, so the gods of WoW decided to make things harder.  Both Jocy and Fist use the standard quest arrow to show the direction of the current quest. For some reason that arrow now disappears well before getting to the area of the quest. Sometimes it's obvious, so no problem, but in other quests it can make finding things or areas you're after more like an Easter egg hunt. What's supposed to happen when getting close is that a blue zone will appear on the map, outlining the area to look in. That zone doesn't appear anymore. Also, when looking for a specific item or character, a yellow dot shows the location. That yellow dot no longer appears. Effectively, the lack of these aids slows down the leveling and raises the frustration level.

Wild used to be addon crazy and I'd blame the problem on that, but I use very few addons now, and they're the same addons that I used before when things were working correctly. I was forced to do a user interface reset so that I'd have a clean interface, WTF folder, and Cache. Of course, that wipes out all of the settings I'd put in place. With four characters to fix, it will take at least a couple of hours to get everything back into shape, with no guarantee it will work. Some things can't be corrected at all after a wipe, such as the Auction House. Months and months of collecting pricing trends went out the window. Happy will have to rebuild them over time. Fortunately, Happy knows what things cost, and will make adjustments, but it's still a pain.

The impact on Jocy and Fist is significant. Very little will get accomplished until the new settings are back in place.