Wednesday, November 3, 2010

The AFK Invasion

WoW's Cataclysm launch event is up and running, including a purely cosmetic feat of strength for being present when one of each type of elemental rift is closed.  For the initial phase of the event, the rifts respawn on one-hour timers from the last time they were killed, so it's relatively hard to tell how long you would have to wait for a new one to appear. 

There are three approaches to this challenge:
  1. Wait for the next phase of the invasion to start, which will no doubt increase the spawn rate to the point where you can't AVOID completing the feat of strength.
  2. Fly around looking for a rift that is open.  Each zone tends to host rifts of a specific element, so you can look up which zones you need and just go roaming.  Northrend is the most crowded, so open rifts are likely to be found and killed before you can reach them.  The old world is the least crowded, but you can't use your flying mounts so it will take longer to search.  Outland theoretically sits in the middle, though I didn't have much luck when I went there.
  3. Find a very well known spawn point, such as the gnoll camp outside K3.  Park your character there and alt tab out to work on your blog.  If you're lucky, there'll be dozens of players hanging out in the same place, slaughtering anything that would otherwise pose a threat to your AFK character, and then slaughtering the rift itself in seconds when it finally spawns.
The upside to approach number 3 is that it's an amusing social event, with players from both factions showing off various rare pets and mounts while they wait.  The downside is that the rift will probably die before you get back to take a screenshot.  Oh well, at least my achievement log is updated. 
  The scene while waiting for the rift to spawn, many more players actually showed up before it finally appeared. 

1 comment:

Comments on posts older than 14 days are moderated and will not appear until manually approved because the overwhelming majority of such comments are spam. Anonymous commenting has unfortunately been disabled due to the sheer volume of comments that are defeating Google's spam filter.