WoW Journal - 17-December-2007

Christmas is here! Or rather the Feast of Winter Veil started in World of Warcraft. As most seasonal events in WoW that means a bunch of quests with fluff rewards, for example the mistletoe to turn your mount temporarily into a reindeer. As there is also a machine that turns you into a gnome with a santa costume for half an hour, you can be the little santa riding on a flying reindeer through Shattrath. Too bad you won't be the only one who had that idea.

Besides the fluff there is one Winter Veil quest which gives out a more useful reward: the Stolen Winter Veil Treats, leading to You're a Mean One, in which you have to kill The Abominable Greench in Alterac Mountains. Reward is one mid-level random tradeskill recipe. But those recipes can *only* be gotten from that particular quest. They are for alchemy the Elixir of Frost Power, for tailoring a green holiday shirt, for engineering the Snowmaster 9000 (making one snowball per day), for leatherworking the Gloves of the Greatfather, for smithing the Edge of Winter, and for enchanting the Winter's Might enchantment.

Now because of my frost mage I absolutely wanted to have the recipe for the Elixir of Frost Power. Having 4 characters of at least level 35, and two characters from my wife's account, I did the quest 6 times, but no luck. I got the enchanting recipe, which is also useful for the mage, as it adds +7 frost spell damage as a weapon enchant. But fortunately a friendly guild mate found the potion recipe and sent it to me. Hunting the Greench is a bit annoying, especially if you do it 6 times, because there are so many people who want to kill him. Grouping helps, as ideally it gets the quest cleared for all group members. But only if they are all near when the Greench dies. Which isn't as easy, as the group usually spreads out to cover several possible spawn points. In the best case I tagged the Greench with an instant damage spell from my mage, turned him into a sheep, and we killed him when everyone was there. But in several other cases I managed to tag the Greench, but other players not in the group then killed him, before the other players in my group were close. Then I still had the quest done, but neither my group members nor the players who did all that damage to the Greench got anything out of it. Rather inconsiderate!

In any case, this was one of the situations where I was happy that I had played Everquest before. A typical WoW player can't stay 5 minutes on the same spot. An Everquest player knows how to be patient and camp the same spot for a long time. For the Greench I just choose one spot where I had seen him spawn and just waited for him to appear. While waiting I made a macro saying /target The Abominable Greench; /cast . So when the Greench appeared, I was always the fastest grabbing him, even if other players were around. Because they were running around, while I was concentrated on the one spawn, and had the macro to grab it fast.

Besides the Feast of the Winter Veil I mostly did daily quests. Thanks to all the readers who advised me to stick with the Netherwing daily quests! I followed their advice and really, after you get to friendly the quests there become much better. The Booterang daily quest is a blast, and the quests in the mine are also much easier than the quests you need to grind to get to friendly. Meanwhile I got to honored, which opens up some racing quests. But I think I won't do them right now. I'm spending christmas at my parents house, and only have the laptop to play WoW on. For the racing I'd rather have the 22" widescreen monitor, and not the 12" laptop screen, because otherwise I'll never manage to evade all that stuff the guy I need to race throws at me.

In any case I already have a curious problem with the daily quests: I'm hitting the cap of maximum of 10 daily quests per day. Which means I'm making just over 100 gold a day. I have 4k now, just 1k gold to go for the second epic flying mount. I can't do the Netherwing daily quests with my priest, because apparently you need to have the epic flying riding skill to get past neutral with the Netherwing. Strange that the best quests to make the gold for the epic flying mount are only available to those who already have one!