This is the last weekend of the year's Midsummer Fire Festival in World of Warcraft. Though the holiday achievements were buggy as usual, the event remains a great time for leveling alts. I dusted off Cheerydeth The Third and gained about 5 levels entirely from exploring the world, unlocking almost all of the old world flight paths, and visiting bonfires. She will sign off with half of the Festival achievements, the pet, and one of the outfit pieces in case I want to pursue the holiday again next year.
(Why, you might ask, would I voluntarily spend that much time - during which I could have been gaining even faster exp by questing and killing mobs - traveling despite all my frequent complaints on the topic? I don't mind traveling and exploring when that's my actual goal. I had a fair amount of fun trying to dodge some pretty tough mobs - especially those pesky Timbermaw Furbolgs - at a rather low level. Travel is only annoying when I have to sit and watch my character return to locations I have previously reached instead of doing something else that I actually want to be doing.)
What, besides the intrusion of real life, could compete with all of that? Well, it turns out that EQ2 is also holding a bonus weekend, including tradeskill exp and a never-before-seen bonus to AAXP.
Comparing Two Bonuses
The Fire Festival has various advantages over EQ2's bonus. For one thing, it was announced in advance and does not fall entirely within a holiday weekend (during which players may have off-line commitments). It also contains actual new content (along with the aforementioned bugs), where EQ2's version simply ups the rewards for existing content. Still, EQ2's version is likely to win the weekend's battle for my keyboard.
The fact is, I'm just not all that interested in leveling yet another WoW alt. It turns out that the chase for heirlooms is merely a convenient excuse to continue running the occasional 5-man instance, which I still enjoy despite long since claiming all the relevant rewards. I've got four level-ready alts parked at various points on the exp curve, including a Horde Warrior with access to content that I've never played before, but none of them really grabs my attention.
By contrast, double tradeskill exp coupled with 100% banked vitality means that Lyriana should easily gain 3 tradeskill levels this weekend, without even trying all that hard. She only needs 8 more levels to reach the current tradeskill level cap, after which I will be free to adventure until the expansion without having to worry about where my next spell upgrade is coming from. (Also, any future alts would get a bonus to their tradeskill exp for my having a capped crafter on the account.) The AAXP bonus doesn't matter quite so much to me, since I don't really need maximum AA's to support my solo playstyle, but it's a nice additional bonus for doing content that I was going to do anyway.
I suppose the other way to look at it is that I don't really think that WoW's leveling curve needs a bonus, while I do think that EQ2's tradeskill exp curve drags a bit. I'd rather have a slight, permanent increase to the rate of tradeskill exp, but I'm now so close to the level cap that I suppose I'll settle for a temporary jump to ludicrous speed.
If you're finding the tradeskilling slow, here's a couple things might help (maybe).
ReplyDelete-- Check your /claim and see what tradeskill potions you may have available, assuming you haven't used them already. They range from +28% or so to +55% or so and last 30-60 minutes depending on the pot. No, it's not huge, but at some point every little bit helps. The WS I'm working up to 80 is using her last few in her 70s -- I *could* save them for the expansion, but that's more hoarding than even I'm comfortable with and the pots aren't tradeable even to your other chars. Might as well do something with them.
Note that they chew rest xp up really fast (it's not exempt bonus xp, I guess), so I use them when I run out of rest xp, which actually makes the slowdown seem a little less... slow.
-- Do tradeskill instances. Mort and I have been doing those every day or two, and from 50-70 they're good for about one level per instance. Better still, they use "fake" resources and you don't have to pay for fuel. Downside is, they're hard to do alone -- takes Mort and me 75-90 minutes to complete one. You're more than welcome to join us, but we have this freaky-ass schedule where we tend to do a lot of our gaming in the morning and very little later on in the day. Still, maybe we can work something out if you haven't got the levels you need by the end of the weekend. ;)
Tradeskilling slow? You are doing rush order writs, right? Those give a ton of XP regardless of whether your have the rested xp or not. After level 60 on my crafters I didn't even look at my rested amount. Didn't care -- the writ xp leveled me, not the actual crafting xp. Well.. not much anyway. I'd still make 1 of everything every time I leveled to get he bonus from 1st craft.
ReplyDeleteI'm loveing the AAXP boost. I went from 69.25 to 70.003 on my dirge's adventrue level tonight, but went from 76 to 79 AA's in that same time. I think I'll be grinding lots of solo quests tomorrow. . . .