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Continuing the Adventures... - Bolty - 05-03-2004
With a lack of posting here lately (*cough, cough*), I felt it was time for another one of my updates.
I've now taken my Undead Mage TheBolt to level 28, far higher than I did my first Mage in Phase 1 (23). Thankfully, I have now shed my reputation of The Guy Who Plays Too Much, since there are now Lurkers of higher level than I. Mongo's up in his mid-thirties now with his Priest; he's the high man right now of the guild. I have access to Invisibility, a spell that needs some work (but less than you might think). Playing in Horde lands is starting to feel constrictive. The Blizzard Guardians, uber-creatures that instantly kill you when you get too close, are used to block off areas that the dev team doesn't want you accessing yet. Well, I keep running into them - much of Kalimdor is still off-limits for exploration.
With the Talent system still disabled, whatever buffs or improvements our characters would get from that system are not accessible. I'm personally finding it more and more difficult to take on quests designed for my level. I do much better in groups - even just having one more character with me makes things so much easier. It's more a "slowing down" more than anything. When you're young, you can solo with ease, but I'm finding it to be a slower process now. This could be unique to the Mage class; I'm not sure. In Phase 1, Mages had access to Talents that would buff up the damage of their spells. I'm finding that my damage is lacking a bit, and the mobs I face take a bigger toll on my hit points per hit percentage-wise than before. There is no way I can increase my damage per spell attack except to level up and learn new spells at a trainer. Still, it's a vast improvement over the Phase 1 Mage, and I'm not overly complaining. I would expect things to slow down as my level increases.
I obtained Invisibility at level 26, and I'm finding it a blessing as well as a curse. This spell allows a Mage to turn completely undetectable by enemies for five minutes. As a catch, it also features the chance that at any time, you will lose that invisibility. The catch isn't as bad as it sounds - you will receive a warning that the Invisibility is turning off for around 15 seconds as the icon in the top right of your screen starts to blink. If you're VERY watchful of the icon, you will use that time to find a "safe" spot to recast the spell. Believe me, when walking around a dungeon filled with mobs that could whomp on you, you're paying very close attention to that spell icon!
So last night I had a quest to enter a centaur camp and steal a sacred hoof that they keep in a sacred flame, deep in the heart of their dungeon. I turned on Invisibility, ran all the way through their cave to the back, found that no centaur was close enough to the flame to see me grab the hoof, and performed the deed. Taking any action such as spellcasting, picking up things, etc turns off the Invisibility. So I grabbed the hoof, re-cast Invisibility, and ran out, bypassing about 20 centaurs along the way. Quest completed. Took maybe 40 seconds tops once I got to the camp.
Is this fair? Heck no, it's pure cheese of the highest order. If I were a non-Mage player, I'd be yelling to the high hills that the spell needs to be nerfed. I agree that it's cheesy, but consider this:
1) If I were in a group, that would be useless. The rest of the group would still need to fight their way there (unless they were all Mages, of course).
2) If Invisibility wore off on my way to the back of the cave, I'd be dead meat. There was no safe place to stand except right at the sacred flame - and I was lucky for that.
3) Here's the big one - by skipping through the whole thing, all I got for the quest was the 5000-exp reward.
This is something that needs consideration. I'm finding that Invisibility is a blessing, in that it helps me escape sticky situations and do things I could never do solo. However, it's also a curse. By being able to zip through that quest without killing a single Bad Guy, I just missed out on thousands of experience points and a ton of loot. Over time, the lost experience and lack of loot will make it so that I won't be able to do any quests because I'll be too weak, and I won't be able to afford to buy anything because I'll have used up all my cash. The experience gained by fighting your way through the cave is part of the design of the quest - overall, you'd score maybe 15,000+ experience instead of just the 5,000 I received as a reward. Since I had no loot, I missed out on any items and cash that I would normally get. Thus, I actually stunted my character's growth by skipping ahead. Sounds like what teachers always say - sure, you could cheat on the exam, but in the end, you're only hurting yourself.
What I saved was time. But the cost was steep, and will get worse as I go along if I continue to abuse Invisibility to get around. It's not just quests - the temptation to cast Invisibility as I explore is strong. Problem is, when you explore you need to whack the mobs you see along the way just to pave a path. That also gives experience and items to loot, and I'm missing out on that too. By gaining speed while exploring, I'm costing myself in the growth of my character.
Invisibility should be used as a spell to scout ahead, as I did with Mongo and Thenryb in a quest recently in Ashenvale. It lets you peep into rooms ahead of you and take a gander at what lies in store. But a note to future Mage players - if Blizzard lets the spell stand as-is, don't take the easy path. It'll just make it harder overall.
In the Thousand Needles, an area to the south of the Barrens where the mesa-like columns rise to incredible heights (think Grand Canyon), I encountered the most unique quest of the game so far. A Tauren wise-man asked me to pass a series of tests in order to prove myself worthy. No problem, I said, sock it to me. The first quest was the Test of Faith, and the wise-man told me that to prove my faith, I would have to leap from the top of one of the mountains. That's it.
Sure, I said, and the wise man teleported me to the top of one of the columns. Stones marked my path to a wooden plank that I was to jump from. The goal of the quest was to leap to my doom! I went to it with gusto, jumping off the plank and plummeting at least 30 stories. About halfway down, I saw the message that my quest to blindly jump off the cliff was completed (pending talking to the wise man to get my reward, of course). When I approached the bottom, I expected to be magically teleported away.
I wasn't.
"You fall and lose 622 health."
"You die."
Oops. So this wise man tells me to take a leap of faith, no problem, if I believe, I'll live, easy stuff. Then the jerk lets me get killed! :) I went back to my body as a ghost and clicked on Resurrect. I was then teleported to the wise man - still in ghost form! Apparently I had entered the radius of the teleportation area just before I clicked Resurrect. Returning to my body a second time, I made sure to stay as far away from my body as I could while I resurrected. I then took 2 or 3 steps forward and was teleported to the wise man once again, this time with my body.
I /bug'ed the quest to let Blizzard know that their landing zone was apparently off-kilter. I hope they can get the quest to work right, because it's a lot of fun and it's a lot different from any other quest I've seen. It was clear from the text the wise man said that I was not supposed to die when jumping off the cliff. It amused me that this big quest of faith - "go ahead and jump, you'll be fine" - killed me. :)
The next part of the quest is to kill off a boss Screeching Harpy, located way at the back of a cave. So of course, I turned on Invisibility, ran to the back of the cave, and set up to challenge the boss. Then I got whacked hard because the creatures there all cast Silence, preventing me from casting spells. This is something I would have learned when taking on the first monster way outside the cave, where it was a lot safer and a lot easier to get my corpse back if I died. So kids, don't abuse Invisibility! It's not worth it!
Currently I'm awaiting a friendly Lurker around level 28 to help me out with this quest, since due to the Silence there's no way I can solo it...
-Bolty
Continuing the Adventures... - lemekim - 05-03-2004
Well Bolty, me, Mongo and another mage were doing this Harpies quest yesterday. Seeing how all of us were spellcasters, the Silence made it somewhat difficult. Add in the fact that the Hapries kept knocking us down, pacified and disabled us, and you get a picture of three guys often lying on a floor, getting wacked by harpies, unable to do much. Tremor totem did nothing for removal of negative effects, neither did remove curse, disease or poison, or dispel magic. Argh.
But we took that without a hitch, thanks to shields, buffs and some totems. We made our way into the deep reach of the cave, and saw the "foodstuffs". Apparently the quest is slightly bugged. When we opened the boxes, the harpies started coming to us in waves of threes. After fourth wave or so we saw the Boss Harpie that we were waiting for. But after killing her, the waves did not stop. Soon we fought the boss harpie again. And the waves kept coming, and coming. It really turned into a "Test of Endurance", as the quest name implies.
So don't open the food boxes unless you really need to. The mage in our party told us that sometimes you can get the Boss to come out just by killing waves that were left over from other groups. =(
Continuing the Adventures... - Saxywoo - 05-03-2004
Kind of reminds me how playing Super Mario Brothers on my old original Nintendo for the first time, my older brother would say "You get an extra life if you jump down that hole....."
Or perhaps they're going to put in another quest where you have to play board games against the Grim Reaper.... (Bill & Ted flashback - sorry, Matrix Reloaded is playing all the time on HBO.)
SaxyCorp