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Tuesday, August 10, 2010

I'm rocking a Quel'Delar and I'm loving it

A long time ago I was expressing my wish to acquire a Battered Hilt for a Quel'delar for my hunter. It proved to be a pipe dream because I stopped playing the hunter and instead found new love in my retribution paladin.

After running a ton of heroics and realizing that my dps sucked in comparison to raid-equipped players, I endeavored to improve my gear.

One day, a couple of weeks ago, I spotted a Battered Hilt in the auction house for only 6500 gold. I only hesitated 2 seconds before I bought it. On my server the hilt goes for at least 7000 gold. In fact I've only seen it once for about 7500 but most often these days it hovers around 8-9K. It follows that 6500 is a good price. After spending 20K for my tanking gear I figured 6500 was chump change.

And so I embarked upon a quest of epic proportions which culminated in Quel'Delar, Might of the Faithful. I won't describe the chain itself because you can follow it starting here. It's a fairly long quest and the initial chain is followed by about 2-3 more chains. There's a lot of running around involved but the hardest part is running the 3 Icecrown instances which are the hardest 5-mans in Wrath of the Lich King.

What I find a bit weird about this chain is that it requires you to run the instances in this order: Pit of Saron > Forge of Souls > Halls of Reflection. This means that if you've never completed Forge of Souls before, you'll have to run that one first, in order to unlock Pit of Saron.

You don't have to finish Pit of Saron (unless you've never finished it before) because you can complete the required part of the quest after the first boss. Just use his hammer to smelt the saronite. Oh but wait, you'll probably still need to kill Ick and Krick because likely you won't have enough saronite and there's more of it around these two guys. In the end you should stick around and finish the dungeon with the rest of the group because that's the nice thing to do. If you're dps, I guess you can get away with dropping group. I went as tank and would have felt like a dick to abandon the group.

By the way, the whole chain can be completed on normal and I recommend it because it's easier.

In Forge of Souls you have to get to the end and kill the final boss and then use the forge behind him.

In Halls of Reflection you just need to get inside the instance whereupon the quest item (the unfinished weapon) jumps from your inventory and attacks. You'll have to defeat the blade and then loot it. The ghost of Uther the Lightbringer will be present and you can trick the blade to attack him instead, and he will kill it for you. The only problem is that likely you won't be doing enough damage to get credit for the quest. I attempted this about 5 times on my own before I gave up and found a group. A group is the easiest way to complete this quest because the blade hits very hard when it does a whirlwind attack.

Now that the hard part is over you'll have to run around some more, including a trip inside a phased version of the Sunwell.

After all this I found myself with Quel'Delar, Might of the Faithful. At ilvl 251 it's simply the most powerful weapon I could have obtained outside of raids. I enchanted it with Berserking, of course.

Shortly thereafter I also upgraded my craptastic trinkets to a Darkmoon Card: Death and a Darkmoon Card: Greatness. The new weapon + enchant + 2 new trinkets gave me over 1000 dps extra.

Along with a few other upgrades, I'm now frequently top dps in most random instances. According to the dps meter I do in excess of 4K dps. I really love seeing those big numbers roll. A couple of nights ago, however, I was shamed by a particular random run in Culling of Stratholme. I ended up as the 5th member in a guild run. The other 4 were guildies and it was obvious they were uber-geared by the way they devastated that instance. Up until then I had no idea Culling of Stratholme could be run in less than 10 minutes. Not one of these guys did less than twice my dps. I could barely hit 2 spells in my rotation and the mobs would be dead.

All this effort and gold spent for a cool weapon and two levels later, at 82, it will all be for naught. One of the quests in Cataclysm awards a blue weapon that's leagues better than even today's legendary Shadowmourne. BTW, the DK tank in the Stratholme run I mentioned previously was rocking a Shadowmourne. This new Cataclysm weapon is ilvl 305 and it's called the Axe of Earthly Sundering. The stats on it are amazing and I can't help but ask myself what stats will epic weapons have.

Here's a shot of my paladin sporting his new weapon.

8 comments:

Redbeard said...

Congrats on getting Q'D!

Until I finally broke down and bought a hilt, I'd only seen the Battered Hilt drop once --the second time I was ever in Pit of Saron-- and I grew tired of waiting to see the quest chain.

I think the highlight for me in the chain is the trip to see the Sunwell in operation. That was simply amazing, and the big shout out from Sunreaver at the end was anticlimatic.

Call-Me-Kenneth said...

Nvm if you find beter greens on cata, this weapon will have a ton of value added due to rarity. right now they go for 7k but 12 millon ppl run the instances 24/7... imagine when only a few thousands run them while leveling and only a few times each.

Elkagorasa said...

So, far I've seen a few very similar items in ICC 10 raids to the lock (lense of mind) version of that sword. Not enough for me to replace it after spending (cough) 9k on my hilt.

Anonymous said...

On my server, they don't drop much below 10-12k and are rarely up. A friend bought mine for 12.5k. (Given that I supplied over half of her 75 pets, it was fair!)

The quest chain was great, and even fun. I gave mine to my Warlock. Of course, not a few days later, I got Abracadaver... and since my offhand has been Shriveled Heart, the staff is superior. For now, her QD rests in the bank.

Still, my inner ret paladin (who is really my Alliance ret paladin still wielding the Titansteel Destroyer) is now very much wishing for a Q'D of her own. I may have to start keeping an eye out.

(I run FoS/PoS every day on my mage. I've never seen it drop on her. Other characters, I've seen it drop 3 times. In groups where 4 of us were from my server, and 1 person was a LFD pugger... the pugger ALWAYS won the need roll.)

Darth Solo said...

Thanks guys.

I've run a bunch of Icecrown 5-mans on both my hunter and my paladin and I've never seen the hilt drop.

This is one weapon that I'm not gonna shard or vendor even though I won't be using it in Cataclysm.

6500 gold was too good a price to pass. I actually bought another Battered Hilt a few months ago for a low price (8500 at the time) and then flipped it around on the auction house for 10300. Almost 2K profit. You can bet that's what I'm gonna do if I can grab it again for such a low price.

Markco said...

I apologize for leaving this in a comment, feel free to delete if you'd like but I couldn't find your contact information on the site.

I'd like you to partake in my blogging carnival which happens every 2nd day of the month. Today at 8:00 AM I will be revealing next carnival's topic.

Cheers, oh and I love flipping these battered hilts, very easy and great money every time.

Anonymous said...

I stopped playing WoW last week. Items/stuff from Cataclysm... well there is too much good stuff to make me like the current live content. Running ICC nowadays is a little boring. I really want to start a fresh toon and relevel from scratch in the revamped Azeroth.

Seeing a blue item for level 82 that powns a legendary weapon is just.... meh :)

Darth Solo said...

@Markco hey I saw this comment but it might be too late now.

@Anonymous yeah it's kinda depressing when you realize that all this hard-gained gear will be replaced in a couple of levels in Cataclysm. Still, since I still run heroics, I love doing plenty of damage and generally performing at the top of my ability.