I'd love a kiss, but last time you put your back out...
So the 3.3.5 patch rolled out to the EU servers with no problems at all, and everyone was delighted. Rose petals fell in a soft rain all over Dalaran, and above the background sounds of residents and visitors sneezing, coughing and asking each other for antihistamines, a paladin, clad in armour of shining steel, walked hand in hand with a tiny mage. For they were very much in love and, matters of a practical nature relating to stature notwithstanding, intent on fully enjoying each other’s company. The only distraction was the murmuring of the crowd, who (despite the peculiar noises emanating from Breanni’s kennels) could just be heard, engaged in conversations like “They should give us a free month for this”, and “Fucking Blizz, this is the worst patch ever” and “Anal [Greater Blessing of Wisdom], hur hur hur”.
Ok, so it was generally pretty ropey on Wednesday. Apparently at least some of the servers didn’t go live till around the 6pm mark, and when they did go live there was the odd… problem or two? DMF seemingly had no access to instances (the dungeon finder did nothing, and walking into and instance portal did nothing but lock up the game either). In game transport services like the boats weren’t running, and even some daily quests involving vehicles weren’t available. I had a couple of instances of graphic corruption followed by instacrash when I tried to take a screenshot, and a further instance of corruption which I chose to quit from, having grown tired of re-making the same changes to my addons and re-agreeing the T&Cs again and again.
Anyway, heroic badgers farmed and the two-minute Lol Ahune down, I was faffing about in Dalaran and I happened to notice that I had two skills (two-handed swords and two-handed maces) at 400, and two skills (two-handed axes and one-handed swords) at 399. Hmm, I thought. A little googling and I embarked upon a plan, which I found easily enough but I’m going to share anyway.
Step 1: buy the speedy training weapons you need from the vendors in Dalaran. There are (I believe) one of each type available, so get all of the weapons you’d like to train.
Step 2: Head to the Blasted Lands. How you get there is entirely up to you, but you’re aiming for Dreadmaul Hold in the top-left corner of the map. When you get there, head inside the circular building and after clearing a few ogres, you’ll find Grol the Destroyer, a level 58 elite. Commence with the hitting.
Grol says "hi"
The trick here is that Grol can only be killed by a particular quest weapon. His health will go down, but will stick solid at a single health point if you don’t have the quest weapon to hand. Put your back to the wall, and wedge yourself against one of the supports (he has a knockback), and whale away. If you have two screens, or a second PC, you can easily do other things, and you’ll want to — it can take a while. Particularly if you decide to go for the unarmed achievement as well. *cough*
This is where being a paladin is very handy. I applied Devotion Aura and Seal of Light, and that was more than sufficient to keep my health completely full. Periodically the remaining ogres would respawn, and a quick consecrate would be sufficient to kill them off without further work. Boring as hell, but easy. If you’ve got a self-heal, you can probably do something very similar.
One more thing: bring a book, or a DVD, or something. Seriously. It takes *forever* to achieve, particularly the barehanded option. But I did it, and you can too.