November 20, 2008

Even More Harvesting, and Thoughts on Raids

stargrace November 20, 2008 8Comments

Even though there was no in game notice this morning, servers came down promptly at 10am EST for their daily hour of downtime. It was announced on the forums at least, which is a fairly safe place to check if you’re not seeing messages in game. Perhaps this will address the vendor bug that’s allowing people to sell things to a particular TSO merchant for large amounts of coin. The /motd in game says that those who are ‘taking advantage’ of this will find their coin removed by the end of it all, but that at this moment there is no ETA on when that may be (or how it will be done for that matter). 

In the mean time I’ve been working diligently away at my harvesting cloak. It’s a good thing I actually enjoy harvesting, because this is not a quest for the faint of heart. I’m up to harvesting T5 now, and it sends me to Rivervale and Ferrott to harvest 20 of each sub-type of node. (20 wyvern meat, 20 bear meat, from each zone for example). Remember how you complained in the past that dens didn’t drop anything but meat? Well now you’ll want them to. 

I’ve also come up to a slight bottleneck in this quest. Rivervale is a small zone when compared to the other ones that this quest sends you out into. There are 10+ people on Najena also at this part of the quest, and in true greedy harvester fashion they ignore any node that’s not one that they need. Since I don’t mind harvesting and since T5 requires rares for the crafter epic, I follow up behind them and harvest everything I see. I’ve gotten a good chunk of rares and supplies for my crafters. It does mean that my progress on the quest is quite a bit slower, I still require a lot of supplies from Rivervale. I’m not in a rush though. 

I typically don’t have a great deal of patience in game. It’s a fault that I admit to every so often. This quest is quite relaxing, and I’m not so gung-ho about completing it as I am just collecting harvests from every tier. With the new guild hall hirelings I find it a rare sight to see any harvesters out there. The market is flooded with rares that no one uses and aside from the elusive T6 harvests (sinking sands and PoF which are difficult zones to harvest in to begin with) they sell for 10-30g and no more. Najena is not a server for lower level characters. I miss that about Antonia Bayle, which caters to a lot of lower level characters due to their role play community (which is a fantastic one might I add). Since I have both of my accounts active, and the ability to create new characters on the second account still I may make one on AB just to relax and kick back on. I do have a level 30 guild over there after all that Calreth has been keeping warm for me. 

Harvesting gives me lots of time to think about what direction I’d like to go in the game. Taking a look at my site one year ago this month I was just getting into RoK raiding (the expansion released earlier last year) and having ups and downs with it as my guild attempted Thugga for the first time. I’ve been debating whether or not I want to get back into raiding full time. Despite having been on Najena for quite a few months now I’ve kept mostly to myself / Nostalgia and a few close friends, and I don’t have the connections I had on Antonia Bayle as far as raiding guilds go. There is also a larger diversity of raid guilds on Najena because it has a heavy aussie / EU population. The only issue with returning to raiding would be the time I would have to devote to it. While I would be able to make the time for it, I start to feel restricted and constrained having to adjust my life around a video game. I like to be able to come and go as I please, and if I’m simply not in the mood for something, I don’t log in. Partaking in a raid guild means others rely on me, and I’d feel obligated to put forth my best effort in whichever encounter we had planned for the evening. I don’t like to do things part way, and this is one of the biggest reasons I’ve avoided the raiding scene for the last year. Before RoK I raided fairly heavily, and I had a lot of fun with it. Once my guild dissolved though I had trouble finding a new ‘home’ and things just went down hill from there. 

I guess we’ll just have to see how it goes! I hope everyone else is enjoying their time in Norrath. Hopefully those polar bears will have my copy of TSO today, but I’m not holding my breath. Since Shadowgeist had raids in the new content lats night he caved and bought the digital download. Every day I’m not playing in the new expansion I tell myself I’m extending the longevity of ‘fun’ by that much. So far it’s worked.