Motorcycle for My Birthday

I asked my daughter a few weeks back whether I should work on saving up cash for one of the mammoth mounts that can carry two passengers or if I should concentrate instead on the Mekgineer’s Chopper, an engineer created motorcycle mount that can carry one passenger.

My daughter immediately said, “The motorcycle!”

As a father, I should probably worry about that answer from my daughter.

Logically, this probably wasn’t the best choice.  One of the passenger carrying mammoth mounts was much cheaper than the chopper, while the other mammoth mount was… probably cheaper as well considering the materials involved, and comes with a vendor.

Still, I like to have a task, and putting together the materials for the chopper would keep me busy for a while.  I would have to make 12 titansteel bars, which you can only do once per day, and which require some expensive materials.

In an effort to conserve gold, I decided to harvest all the materials myself.  This was helped along by the Zapthrottle Mote Extractor, an item for which I had the recipe but which I had not bothered to make.  In assembling that to harvest gas clouds, I found that if you want to make money on my server, you should be harvesting and selling fel iron at the auction house.  I went to harvest my own since it was selling for about the same price as titanium.

And so the harvesting and collecting began.  The best run I had was 16 titanium veins in Wintergrasp in about a 30 minute gap of time.  It was an event unlike any I had seen before.  Nobody else seemed to be around and nothing but titanium seemed to be popping.

Yesterday, after nearly two weeks of gathering materials, I had everything together to assemble the chopper.

Several of the parts, the Goblin-machines Pistons, the Salvaged Iron Golem parts, and the Elementium plated Exhaust Pipe are supposedly rare salvage drops from mechanicals in Northrend, but I have never seen one, so I ended up having to spend the 12,500 gold to purchase all of them from the vendor out at K3.

That was most of my gold, but I was ready.  I hit create and waited.  Once done, the key was in my inventory.  I could try to list it at the auction house, or click on it and make the chopper mine.  I made it mine, getting the chopper and an achievement.

The achievement put me at 4000 achievement points.  I quickly mounted the chopper to see what I had.

Vikund on the chopper

A human looks pretty good mounted on the chopper.  Gnomes on the other hand…

The license plate

My daughter pointed out to me several times that the chopper license plate reads “PWN.”

I told my daughter that the chopper was done.  She immediately got out one of her characters on Vikund’s server to go for a ride.  Unfortunately, most of her characters are on other servers, so she only had a level 15 hunter available for a ride.  Still, we grouped up and went.

Driving off in Stormwind

That is actually her saying “weee!” despite the text bubble appearing over my head.  We headed out to Elwyn Forest.

Down the forest road

She called me on Skype from her computer so she could tell me where to drive.  We rolled all over the place.

Underwater chopper

Water figured in a number of her requests.

Upsidedown underwater chopper

Thanks to a water walking potion, we even rode over the water.

Riding down the Stormwind canals

We ended up riding all over the place for about 90 minutes.  When we tired of the area around Stormwind, we made our way to the Barrens and rode around there for a while.  We had quite a bit of fun and my daughter’s character collected quite a bit of discovery experience.

She did get killed once during the ride when I strayed a little to close to some higher level mobs.  That was during a quick ride in Northrend.  Level 68s kill a level 15 pretty fast.  Fortunately Vikund can ress as well as ride.

So was making the chopper worth it.  I think the next picture answers that question.

Unrehearsed testimony

That was a pretty big bonus, especially since yesterday was also my birthday.  That might have been the best thing I got all day.

After a while we had to break for dinner.  But when putting my daughter to bed, she started asking if there were other places we could ride.  I think, in addition to the free discovery exp, she was having a lot of fun just riding all over the place.

Planning rides for another day

So the chopper was well worth the investment for me.