Trinity is Coming: Set Your Training Now!

In a few hours the Tranquility server will be coming down and the elves… gnomes… dwarves… I forget who does the work behind the scenes in Norse mythology… but anyway, they will be spreading all sorts of Trinity goodness.

The transition from today to Trinity is supposed to take 24 hours, with the down time starting at 2:00 GMT December 5th and ending at 2:00 GMT December 6th.

Of course, veteran observers of CCP downtime will comment that for every hour of planned downtime, there seems to be an additional hour of downtime required before things are stable and running.  Complex systems and unintended consequences have a way of ganging up on you at upgrade time.  I know that pain well and do not point an critical finger at CCP because of it, I just try to accept it.

And, with these things, there is nothing worse than having your skill training end while the server is down.

Okay, there are an almost infinite number of things worse than that, but that doesn’t mean I like my character sitting there without a skill being trained.

Optimists will check their skill training plan and be happy if their current skill finishes up at some point after 2:00 GMT on December 6th.

Realists will make sure that they any currently training skill will end at least 24 hours after that time.

Me?  I am going the pessimistic route, believing that the code name “Trinity” is a sign that downtime will be tripled.  I put both my characters on 9 day skills this morning.

We shall see if I am merely being paranoid or not.

Blackrock Depths – Round 1

We started rounding up quests lines and such for Blackrock Depths almost immediately after we finished up Sunken Temple a couple of weeks back. Thanks to World of Warcraft patch 2.3, the process of running down some of these quest chains gave us a pretty decent boost to our levels. So we started out Saturday night with the following group:

54 Warlock – Bungholio
54 Priest – Skronk
54 Mage – Ula
54 Paladin – Vikund
55 Warrior – Earlthecat

Of course, once we all got there, the first thing Skronk told us we had to do was die.

In order to get the Shadowforge Key, which I am told is an extremely handy thing to have as we progress through the instance, you have to run a specific quest. But to get that quest, you have to be dead.

The quest giver, Franclorn Forgewright (*groan*), who is a ghost. You can only speak to him and get his quest, Dark Iron Legacy, if you are also a ghost, which means dying.

In past instances, the need for us to wipe in order to get a quest might not have been much of a challenge. But now that we were all at the high end of the level range for BRD, there was a distinct possibility that we might not die at all.

But we needed the key.

So Skronk said we should just get it over with, jump in the magma, die, run back, and get the quest. While Ula was bringing up relevant questions about dying, coming back, corpse collection, and what not, I jumped off the center and into the magma and died. Ula, without getting much in the way of answers to her very pertinent questions, jumped in after me, proving once and for all, I guess, that if your friends jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, you probably would too.

Earl and Bung were still travelling, so they did not join us in our deathfest just then.

Ula and I came back as ghosts at Thorium Point in and ran back to BRD and found Forgewright to get the quest. It is a little difficult to tell if somebody really has a quest for you as a ghost. Everything is in shades of grey.

Once Ula and I had the quest, we needed to revive. Therein lay the trick.

Ula was smart to be asking questions. As it turned out, where we landed in the magma was a rather awkward location. We could not get close enough to our corpses to revive without actually being in the lava and Skronk could not get close enough to them to resurrect them himself. We jumped into the magma as ghosts and tried reviving then getting to some safe, high point from which Bung could summon us. We failed. Nor did we get ourselves any more accessible.

So we released, used the angel at the graveyard by Thorium Point, and took the 10 minute penalty and durability hit.

Fortunately, there is a guy who does repairs right there at the point, so we were able to start with a clean slate on durability. And, as it turned out, it took about 10 minutes more for Bung, Earl, and Skronk to get the quest, so we were all ready to enter the instance at the same time.

The instance.

I won’t say is was a boring run, because it wasn’t. BRD is a huge and unique location and we all had a good time.

It would just be somewhat tedious to read about in detail, as we did not really make any mistakes. We were more than powerful enough to take on any group we came across. We had only one death, and it was one of those, “Oh crap, I wasn’t watching my health” sort of events.

We managed to go through the Detention Block, the Circle of Law, and a few other locations and the only place we came up short was the vault, as we did not have enough key drops (you need 12) to get that event going.

The quest count was quite high. We went into BRD with at least 10 quests, completed some, received more, and all made a level in the process. We all made at least a full level worth of experience, so the update to quest experience and the reduction in experience required for level 60 are both starting to show. At this rate we will all be past level 60 before we finish the pre-Outland instances.

Of course, we were presented with the usual array of mail and leather drops, all perfect for a party that is all cloth or plate. I did get a nice item from Fineous Darkvire though, the Foreman’s Head Protector.

I had been watching Troy earlier in the evening and coveted a helm with a plume. And now I have one.

Not quite a Greek helm, but it will do.

And we still have more to do in BRD next time around.