Monday, November 2, 2009

Attempting Loremaster

Loremaster was one of those achievements that was in the back of my head as a someday kinda thing, would be nice to have but not too urgent. That all changed when Cataclysm was announced, suddenly all the quests were going to change and if I wanted to do it I now had a deadline.

One of the reasons for our faction change was to see the game from the Horde perspective, this included all of the original quests. So when the faction changes were available I said to myself this would be a perfect opportunity to complete the achievement and experience the other sides' questlines. Perfect ! However, I was in for a shock when I saw the numbers; I had lost so many quests that even starting the achievement seemed too daunting.

I eventually did start and managed to find quite a bit of time this weekend to complete a bunch of zones in Kalimdor. I finished Stonetalon, Desolace, Feralas, Silithus, Ungoro & Tanaris. Now, this was just the first pass, quests that are immediately available or can be picked up by completing chains within that zone. No quests that required leaving to do something and than coming back.

My plan is to do the first pass on all of the zones, than do the same in Easterm Kingdoms. I will follow that up with quests for all of the instances (which will have the effect of also getting the achievement for all of the instances.) After that I will start following questlines and tracking individual quests.

My life was made infinitely easier by a new feature that will be available in 3.3. A new command that Addon authors can use to query the game to receive a list of quests that have been completed. Finally, we will be able to get detailed information on quests we have completed. There is an awesome addon called Everyquest, which when used from day 1 can be used to track what quests have been completed and which have not. The author has now added the functionality (currently only on the PTR) to use the new function to get a list of quests you have completed. That is what I did, I transferred a character to the PTR, downloaded the client and got a list of what quests I have completed. I than transferred the addon database to the live client and had me an up-to-date list which I have been going off of.

On a side note, my Mysterious Egg was kind enough to gift me with a Green Proto-Drake Mount this weekend. If I ever receive a Proto-Drake Whelp pet I will be finished with the Oracles. Once I get to Exalted that is.