Concerning flight points

There are an awful lot of WoW-related sites, aren't there? I find new ones all the time, and I'm pretty sure I've only seen a tiny fraction of the total. But it occurred to me a couple of nights ago that I've never seen one that writes about WoW the way I play it - so I thought I'd start one!

I'm in a guild, but it's not a raiding guild, and I don't think any of us wants it to be. It's lovely - made up of real-life friends, probably about 15 in total, not counting the ones who are still in the guild but haven't been online in months. (Needless to say there are a lot more than 15 characters.) So we may eventually make it to Karazhan, but other raids are unlikely. However, for various reasons I do still spend most of my time soloing, and it seems that a lot of this time ends up being spent doing things that most people might find a little odd. Hence the OCD part of the title. (I've never actually been diagnosed with OCD, but one of my best friends regularly accuses me of having it, and he may well be right....)

Anyway, while spending 12 straight hours on Saturday night doing my latest slightly insane thing, it occurred to me that there might be someone, somewhere, who might just find it useful to know what I know. Hence this blog. It's not intended to be authoritative in any way - I'm not a good enough player for that. I just want to share some experiences, and I plan to concentrate on the more unusual ones :-)

So - flight points. I've had a thing about these for ages. I'm a bit of a completist in general, as I'm sure I'll explain another time. With my first character (Santuzza) I collected the early flight points in the usual way, i.e. as I came upon them naturally. But I got unbelievably excited every time I found a new one - it was literally my biggest thrill in the whole game. (I should point out that my very favourite aspect of the game has always been exploring new areas, and finding a flight point was always the highlight of any exploration.) So I went in search of all the later ones at a much earlier level than was wise (I think I was almost level 40 at the time - I'm pretty sure I didn't have a mount). I was determined to be the first person in the guild to get all of them, but I said this to someone else (who's not in the guild any more - he quit the game not long afterwards), and he decided to try to beat me to it. Which, not surprisingly, he did, since he was level 50something at the time, which meant he was mounted and also had far fewer deaths! (I should point out that this was in 2005, so Outland flight points weren't on the list.)

Of course there's no reason why he shouldn't have done what he did, but I was absolutely devastated at the time. Silly, eh? But on all my characters since, I've been obsessed with collecting all the flight points at the earliest possible moment. But when is the earliest possible moment? Well, I'm glad you asked :p Clearly it is of course possible to start going after them at level 1, but even I'm not that insane. (In any case, the exploration would take you up several levels.) And going after them all at level 70, if for some bizarre reason you hadn't picked any up till then, would be extremely easy. I think the earliest possible moment to start is probably about level 15. I haven't tried it myself at that level, but I've tried starting at level 18, and that's what took me 12 hours the other night, with Gianetta. (I levelled to 20 in the process, but not all of that was exploration XP - I was doing the fire festival quests at the same time, and I got lots of XP for handing all those in.) (Iolanthe, Mabel and Katisha all did it at round about level 19-20, but the fire festival inspired me to try it slightly sooner wth Gianetta.) (Iolanthe is of course the only one of these to have all the Outland flight paths too, but she did get them all at level 60 rather than waiting! Madmargaret got all the Horde ones at about level 20 - that was exciting because they were all new to me!)

For those who've never tried this, I should probably explain why it takes so long. For a start, no mount, obviously, so you have to run a LOOOOOONG way. And, depending on where you're running, you're quite likely to get killed a lot, which means either corpse runs or judicious use of spirit healers (these are more use in some places than others, as I'll get to shortly). In some places you can run the whole way without being killed once, if you're lucky, whereas in other zones you literally get killed again as soon as you resurrect, so that it's only the resurrection radius that allows you to make any progress at all. Also, if you're a really good player who seldom dies (not like me!) you may not be aware that if you die repeatedly in a short time, after the first few times the game imposes a time delay (which increases each time - I think my highest ever is about 10 minutes) before you can rez again. I believe that the reason for this is to discourage people from doing exactly what I do :p Also, your armour becomes red REALLY quickly, particularly if you do use a spirit healer, and of course that means you die sooner, so it costs a lot in repair bills because you have to repair it every chance you get. Admittedly we're not talking much money at such low levels, but most of my characters have usually been broke (until, of course, I started making loads of gold in Outland and sending it back to them).

All of the above may seem fairly obvious, but what's probably LESS obvious is that there are some high-level zones that you can actually run straight through without dying at all, and some unexpectedly tricky lower-level ones. And there are some zones that are quite easy once you realise which is the best way for a low-level character to go, but almost impossible if you just try to run in a straight line. (Needless to say I do know exactly where all the flight points are, so it's not a case of searching for them.) For example, I imagine that most people would assume that the most difficult zones for a level 18 character to run through would be Silithus, Winterspring, EPL, WPL and Burning Steppes? Wrong. The hardest - by a LONG way - are Tanaris and Felwood. And this has been the case on all 5 characters I've tried this madness with, so it's not just because of the particular class involved.

I want to write about the strategies involved - plus WHY Tanaris and Felwood are the hardest - but this intro has ended up much longer than I expected, and I need to go out shortly. But I'll post again later, and explain further :-)