I’m a Farmer! Gah, it sounds so sleazy when I write it down like this, but I can think of no other way to describe it. It’s a familiar tale, of course; the happy-go lucky Adventurer races through World of Warcraft, almost incidentally earning enough pretend money to cover the costs of skill training, maybe buy a few nice shineys to help with viability, and then level 40 turns up and bam! A bill for a horse and skill to ride it, totalling 90g.
Forewarned is forearmed though, and having seen so many blogs go on about it already, I know what is coming; one advantage of coming into this whole ‘World of Warcraft’ craze a year after all the cool kids. So I’ve just turned 38, a personal best to date, have got my skills up to date, and now have to knuckle down and save, if I ever want my Velociraptor GT this side of Christmas.
Looking at the pricing, 90g (=9,000s=900,000c), and the amount of cash you get for a typical L40 quest, around 50-70s, and the amount of cash that cash-carrying mobs drop at that level, 3-5s or so, and I wonder if the whole mount thing is actually intended to happen on L40, or whether that’s just a minimum level kludge to stop alts being twinked the money and galloping all about the newbie areas.
Regardless, to raise that kind of cash at level 38, you’ve got to be deliberate about it. In my case, this involves getting involved in the whole Auction House thing. I usually tend to ignore MMO economies. I use and make do with quest rewards where available, and generally just sell any shineys I find to the nearest wandering NPC shrubbery merchant, or similar. I do craft, but almost entirely for my own use, and rarely as a ‘business’. Of course vendors don’t pay nearly as much as these shineys and craftables are really worth, and rightly so, which means there is a lot more money to be had on the Auction House.
But first I need things to sell, so I’ve started farming my old haunts. I still remember doing Wailing Caves as a full group, and how challenging it seemed at the time. This was only a month ago, mind you. Now, at L38, I’m doing it solo. It’s a lot easier, but that presents challenges of it’s own; I died once by complacency – not resting long enough between fights, and the huge tree monster boss at the end took me down to a sliver of my hitpoints – a close call. The tree monster is about L23 Elite, which just goes to show.
I got 0 xp for the entire trip, and although I ended up with bags full of green magic items, none of them were of any use to me at all – I already have much better. But I can certainly put them on the auction house. I’m vaguely aware that it’s wrong somehow, that I shouldn’t have to do it like this, but on the other hand, when I enter the swirley, it becomes my dungeon. I really don’t like camping lowbie spawns in a shared world, as often I ended up doing in Everquest, because of the theoretical possibility that a group of said lowbies might want to actually earn the loot properly, instead of someone like me just waiting 15mins, hitting one nuke, looting and then charging them all their life savings for it. In an Instance, there isn’t anyone else, so my looting is depriving no-one. What more subtle damage I am doing to the economy by then putting all that up for sale, is another question. Still, WoW operates a ‘Equip OR Sell’ system, which effectively ‘destroys’ a lot of items. Perhaps my replenishment is necessary?
Anyway, the farming will continue until I have my ride. I miss my Dwarf Priest now…the ridable mountain rams are much cooler than the go-faster war lizard, although not nearly as colourful...