Monday, November 23, 2009

Pilgrim's Bounty

Pilgrim’s Bounty began yesterday, being the first new world event developed in quite a while, I’d have to say it captured the spirit of the week. My first impression of the event was that it was new and confusing, though it took very little time to come to grips with what I needed to do to start completing the achievements. My second impression was that all the travel involved with all the daily cooking quests was very annoying. Especially if you were like me, and hadn’t bothered to do any reading up on it all ahead of time and didn’t know you really wanted to pick up several stacks of pumpkins, sweet potatoes, and cranberries. Not to mention wild turkeys which I’ll discuss in a bit. So there I was yesterday delivering much needed food to Iron Forge and Darnassus, only to learn that each of those places wanted me to deliver food to Stormwind. I ended up making several trips between Stormwind, Ironforge, and Darnassus to get the ingredients I needed, then to actually deliver the completed food item. When I do my cooking quests today I’ll have several stacks of each available from the beginning, but it won’t alleviate all of the back and forth travel required to pick up the quests and then go and deliver the food. One would think with all the magic wielders available to the Alliance (or Horde) that someone would have thought about having portals available for all this. As you will probably have to do these quests for 2-3 days in order to get enough Turkey Shooters to complete the Turkey Lurky achievement, it’s making me wish I were a Mage.

One of the quests involves hunting wild turkeys and gives you an achievement called the Turkinator. I recall when I first looked into this thinking there was no way I was going to be able to kill enough turkeys in the time allotted to complete it, but quickly found that it really wasn’t going to be as hard as I thought it might be. In fact the only real obstacle to overcome to complete this is finding a space and a time where you are relatively alone because the turkeys are spread throughout Ellwyn Forest and Tirisfall Glade. The achievement requires you to kill 40 turkeys, but you have 30 seconds after killing one to kill the next. As the turkeys are fairly well populated in both zones, all you really need to do is find a corner some where that has no one else hunting in it to complete this successfully. They turkeys respawn fairly quickly, but not quickly enough that you won’t have to move around some in order to meet your quota. I did mine in Tirisfall Glade between the Bulwark and the farm. One thing that will make your task immensely easier to eat a Tracker Snack before hand, and set your tracking to nothing. The Tracker snack will enable you to track beasts for an hour and will make the turkeys show up as yellow dots on your mini-map. Simply run from one yellow dot to another.

One really nice treat from the event, outside of the pet of course, is that it affords you a very quick and painless way to level cooking from 1-300. Leveling 1-300 through the normal means isn't exactly difficult, provided you fish and/or are willing to travel all over hill and dale to collect all the recipes you need. But if you haven't leveled cooking yet, do it now! The Pilgrim's Bounty recipes afford you the easiest means of leveling cooking that you are ever likely to see. And once you get to 300 leveling to 450 is as simple and quick. Do not waste this opportunity.