Wednesday, September 18, 2013

WoW Weekly: Treasure Island

WoW Weekly is a biweekly-ish, self-absorbed look into the things I've been doing -- or not doing -- in the game. From auctioneering and pet battling to mount farming and raiding.

Oh, Timeless Isle, you. A wide-open, unexplored expanse. Grounds of the ultimate pet battle tournament and frustrated alt-gearer's wet dream. TI. Your parallels are not lost on me.

Since I'm still LFW, I was able to hop online just after servers came up on Tuesday. First thing on the list: acquire legendary cloak. After speaking with Wrathion, everything was falling into place. Then I arrived on the Isle and became horribly, horribly distracted. I could knock off the quests one-by-one, but why would I do that when there are giant Celestials battling massive parties of fellow Horde right there in the courtyard? When I finally wrestled myself away after besting our four wise guides in order to quest, I was distracted by treasure chests, rare spawns and random events. 

After finally acquiring the cloak, I'd spent a good part of the afternoon on the Timeless Isle, each of my max-level toons having 496 gear in nearly every item slot for both specs. Yikes. Almost seems too easy. Especially when you find this---an in-depth guide to the location of ALL of the island's lootable chests---something I used when I returned to the island on an alt. However, the level of cooperation between players and factions on my populated PvP server that was brought on by the novelty of the content quickly faded and the island devolved into a everyone-for-themselves bloodbath

I'm glad to have finished most of the Isle's content on the first day. In other non-news:

  • Unsurprisingly, the RNG gods have moved on to help someone else. Then again, I'm really only still after Ashes, which has more do with endurance now than luck.
  • Found a group to kill Ordos, the boss accessible to only those with the legendary cloak, through Open Raid. Simple fight---a DPS race more than anything. 
  • Failed miserably at the Celestial Tournament. If you want to see how far along pet battling's come, check out the tourney (assuming you have the requisite 15 max level pets---though you'll never win the tournament with just 15). This is serious stuff, and pet battlers will have to be cunning in order to progress---but look no further. Lio has a comprehensive guide that will help get you through over at Battle Pet Roundup
  • Put together a new transmog (pictured in the header) for Elepheagle, mainly because of the legendary cloak effect animation. The "blue wings" were really clashing with the burnt orangey-yellows of my previous set. Consequently, I've abandoned the quest for two other sets simply because of the time involved---going to take a break from fashion design for a while.

Have you been enjoying your time on the Timeless Isle? 

3 comments:

  1. Timeless Isle is "meh", to me.
    Good points:
    - Celestial Pet Tournament!
    - Tons of Lesser Charms
    - Catch up to ilvl 496 for alts

    Bad points:
    - PvP Griefing
    - Mindless boring grinding on Fire-Cows, for no particular reason that I can tell.
    - Very, very crowded, hard to "tag" anything at all at points
    - PvP Griefing
    - Killing Celestials is hard now - everyone has their cloaks now and there's no way to get a group interested anymore.
    - More PvP Griefing, very frustrating.

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    Replies
    1. I'm in agreement on all of these points. I can't bring myself to grind Emperor rep, so I'm not going to force it. PvP was really bad for the first week on my server, now it's calmed down a bit---it's just part of what you need to expect rolling on a PvP server. I've seen the Celestials die only a handful of times since the first couple of days. That sure didn't last long.

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    2. Well, I'm on a PvE server and everyone is flagging anyway. It's really bad in that when we actually DO get a celestial group going (say, 15 of us), then about half the time a group of 6 or 7 alliance will flag and make the whole thing a mess.

      I actually wouldn't mind that so much if I actually _were_ on a PvP server, as that's part of it (and your gear choices and such are different), but on a PvE server it's just annoying.

      On the bright side, the new raid makes up for a lot of other nonsense :)

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