I played a bit of WoW tonight, finally finishing off the Loremaster of Eastern Kingdoms achievement and doing a handful of Netherstorm quests. None of them were particularly exciting though, and I felt like I was getting a bit bored again, so perhaps my return to WoW was a little premature.
Oh well, there’s still plenty of other games to play. And by plenty I mean way too many, of course…
Today’s WoW session was a mixed bag of things, starting out with leveling an alt a bit. I don’t really intend to play them a lot, but it might be useful to get them to the point where they can do some mid-level crafting.
After that it was back to the Outlands, where I gathered enough adamantium ore to claw my way to 350 blacksmithing, which later on in the day let me make some nifty new cobalt armour for myself. After finishing off a few quests in Terrokar and Blade’s Edge (mostly in areas I can now fly to), I headed off to Netherstorm and started working on the quests there.
I only got a handful done before I got the itch to try and get fishing up to Grand Master level, so I headed back to Orgrimmar and fished for a bit. I even managed to fish up Old Crafty, for an achievement, so I then headed to Northrend to see what I could find there instead. In the end I wound up with six or seven stacks of good food items, a blue dagger I caught on one cast (no stats or sockets, though, but worth a bit of gold), and made it to 350 skill.
And then it was back to the Plaguelands for a bit, originally just to finish off one quest but I discovered a handful of other quests I hadn’t finished and worked on them for a bit. I’m now only 8 quests away from the Loremaster achievement for the Eastern Kingdoms…
It was another day spent in WoW, and I managed to clear out three dungeons this time: Sunken Temple, Wailing Caverns, and The Deadmines.
Sunken Temple I actually had to go back and do a second time, since I ran across the big boss but he wasn’t attackable, and I hadn’t realized that something else I did later on made him attackable; I thought I needed to start a quest line elsewhere or something. Ah well. I’d done Wailing Caverns before, but it was so long ago that it apparently didn’t record it as an achievement. And the Deadmines is really an Alliance dungeon, so there wasn’t much to do but rush through and kill the boss.
I also finished off a bunch of other miscellaneous quests, primarily around Blasted Lands. I’m now within 35-45 quests of finishing off the Loremaster achievements for Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms. It might still be out of my reach though, if a lot of the remaining ones are for high-end raids or PvP. This list of easily-missed quests should come in handy.
Continuing on with the Great Dungeon Cleanup, I finished off Uldaman tonight. There was really only a single quest left, but it was annoying since it required entering the instance twice and flying all over the place in between. At least the instance part is fairly short. I also took the opportunity to knock off a handful of other overlooked quests while traveling around, as well.
Next up, Sunken Temple. That’s probably as high as I’ll be able to go by myself until I gain more levels.
I didn’t really feel like starting anything new, so I wound up back in WoW last night, and I took the opportunity to finish off the Blackfathom Deeps and Gnomeregan dungeons and prepared for Uldaman by finishing off the quests that could be done just outside the instance.
It was actually the first time I’d been to Gnomeregan, and the layout of it is a bit confusing at first. I managed to stumble into the end boss earlier than expected, skipping a big chunk of the dungeon, but it seems to be meant mainly for Alliance players anyway. I’m still missing one quest for there, since a ring I need didn’t drop, so I’ll have to come back at some point
And since I still had some time to kill this evening, I popped back into WoW just to take care of the Zul’Farrak quests I had queued up. They were, unsurprisingly, fairly easy at my way-too-high-for-it level, though the pyramid fight did get a bit hectic just due to the constant stream of enemies.
That completed seven quests in my log, and I only picked up three new ones as chained quests, so I’ve freed up four quests slots, at least.
I finished off the last two chapters of World of Goo tonight, and as expected, chapter 4 had a rather ‘virtual’ twist to things, adding a bunch of new goo types and things like blocks and slabs. The epilogue chapter was fairly short, consisting of only three real puzzles, but they were much harder than the others. I didn’t have to use any more skips, but I did have to consult some hints on a few of these later levels.
All in all it was a rather interesting, well-done puzzle game with a lot of style. I don’t think I’ll be going back to try and get the ‘OCD’ ratings on each of the levels though; I barely scraped by on most of them as it is…
Continuing my trek through unfinished games, I got back to World of Goo today and made it through the end of Chapter 3.
So far I’ve only skipped one level, “Tower of Goo” back in the first chapter. You have to build a really tall tower in that one, and I’ve failed every attempt so far. If I take it slow and stable, I wind up using too many goo balls and don’t have enough to meet the level completion quota. If I take it quickly, it winds up swaying and collapsing before I reach the pipe. Oh well, at least the game lets you skip a handful of levels if you get stuck.
Chapters 2 and 3 introduced more new goo types, of course, with a particular emphasis on fire and explosions in Chapter 3 through flammable goos and bombs. The ending, culminating in the launch of “Product Z” in the game’s story, ought to make the next chapter interesting…
And of course, right after I say I’m taking a break from WoW, I go and spend all day today in it… It was the start of the Lunar Festival event though, and these quests are only available for a limited time, so I had to do them soon anyway. I wound up getting all but two of the achievements for the event, and those will have to wait until I’m level 80 anyway since they involve Northrend.
And along the way I wound up picking up a couple pieces I needed for the quests in Zul’Farrak, so I’ll probably head there first whenever I return in earnest. I’ve still got a half-dozen or so quests to finish up there, that have been in my quest log for ages now, and it should be easily soloable.
I worked through a few more of the Frontlines missions over the last few days. Mission 3 started out like a stealth mission, but it wasn’t too long before the enemies had discovered where I was and most of the rest of the mission was spent trying to coax them out of hiding or sniping them. The second half involved defending a town against a couple waves of enemies, which I barely scraped by on — I’m never very good at timed bits like that.
Mission 4 was mainly a whole lotta tank battling, and then mission 5 took the battle to inside a mountain, where there were all sorts of corridors and boxes and platforms for them to hide on.
I also toyed a bit more with Defense Grid, managing to complete the ‘Grinder’ mode of Waste Disposal. In this one only ‘walker’ enemies appear, but you have to survive through 99 waves of them and the groups of them get bigger and bigger and bigger… It took a whole lot of meteor towers and a couple others I don’t often use, like inferno and concussion, but I made it with only two cores lost.