Midnight Profession Goals Achieved!

The other day I was very pleased to finally get this pop-up:

For the uninitiated, that's the achievement for raising every primary profession in Midnight to (the max skill level of) 100. (In case you're wondering, this is now my new 7th rarest achievement according to Data for Azeroth.)

On top of that, all my profession alts now have the purple version of all their profession tools and accessories. I actually made a little spreadsheet to keep track of that, and yes, it took a crapload of Abundance runs - but that wasn't a problem for me because I enjoy the Abundance event! In fact, I'd already gathered all the rare materials I needed from that a while ago; the thing holding me back on the last few crafts were other materials and concentration.

In general my attitude to this project was that I wanted to do it all "in house" with my alt army supporting each other and with minimal purchasing of mats or reagents off the auction house. At the same time, I also wanted to avoid crafting crappy or useless items just to skill up, which slowed me down some more as it often meant spending more time and resources on more expensive/harder-to-make items for skill-ups.

In that regard, the easiest crafting profession to level was engineering - I didn't start playing my engineer until quite late, but skilling up was so fast and easy that she soared right past the progress of several of my other crafters in no time. Especially compared to blacksmithing, all the crafts were so much cheaper in terms of mats, and engineers make a ton of profession tools (which were my focus) so she had lots of things to craft that gave multiple skill points each per craft.

Hardest for me personally were probably inscription and jewelcrafting, due to how many steps the mats for my desired items had to go through, with each step requiring use of concentration to get a good result, e g. prospecting ore to get gems, crushing the gems for shards, turning the shards into lenses and so on.

There seem to be certain "break points" with these where you can suddenly get the high quality result by simply using high quality mats - without having to use concentration on top of it - which speeds things up considerably, but I was probably assigning my points badly for those and it took a while to reach them.

Of course that doesn't mean that I'm "done" with professions - there are plenty of knowledge points left to earn in order to fully populate the various spec trees, but I've got to admit that's less interesting to me now, as I no longer have a specific personal goal to work towards, so it's just a matter of more gathering/grinding and fulfilling patron orders that aren't too expensive as and when they pop up.

Still, this was one of my major goals for Midnight, and since professions don't reset seasonally (please Blizzard, I'm not trying to give you ideas), there won't be as much to do on that front as the expansion progresses. Presumably there'll just be a couple of new recipes to collect in 12.1 and 12.2. 

Casual Endgame Goals

A few years ago I wrote a post explaining what you could do at endgame in Vanilla besides raiding. I'd like to catch you up on how I've been doing with these goals on my hunter in Classic.

Pet Care

Actually, let's start with a bullet point that wasn't on my list back then because it's hunter-specific. As I mentioned previously, my pets really started to fall behind my hunter's level in the fifties, so one of my first goals was to get both of them up to level 60 too. Boy, did that ever take a long time! Nearly three weeks of real time and more than 40 hours of /played in fact. I suppose it could have been done faster if my focus had been on grinding level-appropriate mobs, which is the one and only way of funnelling XP into my little companions, but I was doing a lot of wandering about and doing quests, which obviously benefitted them very little.

They are however both caught up at last, and I also went out into the world to learn higher ranks of Bite and Claw to teach them. Though the highest rank of Bite can apparently only be learned from worgs in Blackrock Spire... I said bollocks to that and settled for the rank below that. Similarly Lightning Breath rank 6 can only be acquired from a Son of Hakkar in Sunken Temple, though that seems a lot more achievable and I'll need to make some time for it one of these days.

Questing

As mentioned in my previous post, regular solo questing has actually been a bit of a challenge because of my quest log being so chock full of dungeon quests, but I have slowly been chipping away at various solo quest lines, especially in the Plaguelands.

There are a number of quests that unlock interesting quest rewards, keys or attunements that I'd quite like to complete just so I can say that I've done them, though I also just generally enjoy questing for its own sake. My most noteworthy quest achievements so far are that I've acquired the key to Scholomance and attuned myself to the Molten Core (though the latter obviously required a group).

Reputations

Just like on my pally back on Kronos I started off grinding Timbermaw rep because I wanted to get to neutral. Those two quest items you pick up and that you can't hand in before then really bugged me! At times I felt quite discouraged by how overfarmed all the furbolg camps were, but eventually I got lucky when I had some free time outside peak hours... plus I did some farming just after the release of AV, when everything out in the world was a bit quieter than usual. There was no immediate incentive to push beyond neutral though.

My reputation with the Argent Dawn is up to friendly simply because of all the undead I killed with my Argent Dawn Commission equipped while questing in the Plaguelands - this is one reputation that feels like it should mostly take care of itself as long as you stay busy in the area and keep running Scholo and Strat.

I haven't started on the Thorium Brotherhood yet and am not sure if there's really any point in doing so either, but I'd quite like to be able to dump all that Dark Iron Residue acquired during my BRD runs somewhere other than the auction house.

I also did the intro quest for the Hydraxian Waterlords, but I'd have to actually go to MC now to continue working on that rep.

Earning Money

Acquiring an epic mount doesn't feel nearly as urgent as the level 40 mount felt to me, maybe because there is a lot less peer pressure. While it seems to me that epic mounts are much more common in Classic than they were back in Vanilla, there are still plenty of people riding around on the slower mounts. Still, it's a goal to work towards in the long run. I'm about halfway there right now, with most of the money having come from questing. (Classic fortunately already has that mechanic that converts excess XP rewards into gold at max level, something that Vanilla didn't have at the very beginning.)

Professions

I figured that mining would mostly take care of itself, and it kind of did, but I was still surprised by how long it took me to hit 300. I didn't remember Thorium being quite so rare, to the point that even endgame zones like Silithus or the Plaguelands are actually filled with more Mithril than anything else. And even when you do find a Thorium node, small ones are usually gone after a single hit and even the so-called rich ones sometimes already disappear after only two taps.

My engineering is up to 285 and the last fifteen points seem very doable if I could only find some more Thorium (see above). And that's considering the very humble amounts required for engineering! I feel bad for the blacksmiths who need hundreds and hundreds of bars to level up.

In terms of secondary professions, first aid has been maxed out for a while, and cooking and fishing are close. For the latter two it's just a matter of taking the time to actually get that final stretch done.

Alterac Valley

I haven't been back since hitting honoured for the arrows, and I already wrote about what I did before then in this post.

Dungeons

Considering my casual playstyle and that I'm not really aiming to do more than one dungeon a week at max, I'm pretty content with what I've achieved so far. Obviously I've run BRD a couple of times, but I've also done Dire Maul West, Scholo, Strat Live and UBRS. The latter was more of an accident than anything else, since I had joined a guild group to kill an elite quest mob, and before I knew it they'd turned the whole thing into an UBRS run to which I just happened to come along because I was already in the group!

In order to be able to say that I've done it all at least once I still need to do Dire Maul East and North, Strat Undead and LBRS. But of course there'll be reasons to re-run the others too... for example I have a quest to rescue Princess Moira from BRD now - yep, the Horde wanted her alive back in the day too, to improve relations with the dwarves. Who knew?

Addendum

Looking at this list after writing it, I find it striking that "getting gear" doesn't feature as a primary goal anywhere. Sure, a lot of these activities will also yield gear as a side effect, but I feel in no hurry to chase any specific drops. I guess I'm just assuming that better gear will come naturally as part of doing all those other things, and it has worked reasonably well for me so far.