I wish you all a wonderful Wednesday! It was once again a long night filled with many farmed herbs (Yep, WoW!), to be prepared for the raids this week. Since my twink is now in the area to supply my main character with potions, I don’t have to leave any money at the auction house – instead, I have quite different problems.
I’m sure most of you will still remember “Malte” – the symbolic developer at Blizzard responsible for all the game content that is supposed to annoy players. If “Malte” is still unfamiliar to you, you should check out the old blog from Barlow again to close a glaring knowledge gap:
In recent years it has been quiet, and aside from content poverty in Warlords of Draenor, there has been no really “annoying” content in World of Warcraft. But now I’ve found my new hate object: Starlight Roses. They are one of the new herbs from Legion and grow exclusively in Suramar. The roses are needed for almost all alchemical ingredients, such as flasks and damage potions – so they are a must for every raider. They are not particularly rare; as a herbalist, there are usually one or two points on the minimap where you could pick them.
But WoW wouldn’t be WoW if it were that simple. Thanks to the new profession system, there is a specific “skill level” for each plant, which increases the yield when harvesting a plant. Only with the Starlight Rose do they really troll the players. Newbies harvesting Starlight Roses primarily get one thing: junk. When harvesting, you regularly receive “Starlight Rose Dust” – a gray item that can be sold for a staggering 5 copper.
The more roses you try to pick, the more dust you accumulate until you finally manage to pick a rose intact (for the Nether, what could possibly be so difficult?). With a skill level of 1, you rarely obtain a rose, at a skill level of 2, significantly more often. In other words: The higher my skill with this plant, the more often I succeed in picking it, and the rarer I receive the dust.
And now Malte comes into play. After picking (what feels like) 10,000 roses (and throwing half away as junk), you randomly receive the quest for skill level 3 of the Starlight Rose. Here you not only have to defeat an elite mob (which is pretty tough alone), but also bring 20x the item “Starlight Rose Dust”. Yes, you read that right. The gray junk that you threw at the vendors a thousand times before – because it’s damn gray and in the item description even has the keyword “useless”.
And suddenly the whole situation turns around. Now I have to farm Starlight Roses and hope that the gathering fails so I can get the stupid dust that I will shove into some NPC’s face until they say “stop”.
So my advice to everyone who wants to level a herbalism twink: Save the dust. Otherwise, it will only frustrate you.
Thanks, Malte.
