Master of Arms
Posted on April 30th, 2009 by Lawbringer under Achievements, Efficiency Tips, Exploits, General Tips, Grinding, World of Warcraft, WotLK
Getting the Master of Arms Achievement the Easy Way
Last week we covered an easy way to get the achievement It’s Happy Hour Somewhere in this article. This week let’s take a peek at an almost afk way to do Master of Arms and Did Somebody Order a Knuckle Sandwich?
Master of arms can take a LONG time if you only have a couple of weapons close to 400, especially if you want to add the unarmed bit. Those last three or four points can take 30 minutes to get even if you are swinging constantly. It really stinks if you’re starting from 50 or so and the mob fights back.
Normally, this means you run to some starting area somewhere and swing at level 10 mobs for a while with several different weapons, then move up to another area and repeat, then somewhere else – blah. I totally ignored this whole ordeal until I found a very out of the way mob that is perfect for this type of weapon training.
Now, if you look this achievement up on Wowhead, you’ll find folks sending you to mobs in the back of Dire Maul or some other nonsense. I’m not going to try to walk anyone through an instance when there is a much easier mob to get to.
The advantage of the DM guys and maybe one or two others is that you can start swinging and then go afk (sort of, there are problems). But I don’t mind making one click every two minutes if getting to them takes me half an hour less in the first place. Plus, you can use these little guys at almost any level past 50 if you want to get a head start on the achievement or level up your skill in a new weapon type because you got a shiny new epic.
So let me introduce to you the Phantasmal Lash. They are little flower guys in a very out of the way corner of Moonglade. What makes these guys so good? They are high enough level that you can whack on them for a while, plus they instantly respawn and will not attack you (for the most part).
You find these dudes at (70.3,61.1) in moonglade. It’s in the tree/cave thing and the lash mobs are supposedly popping into Azeroth from the Emerald Dream. The cave itself is full of them, but the two we are interested in are the two closest to the entrance.
Those two lash mobs are in constant battle with two druid NPC’s, so they are otherwise engaged. If left alone, the druid will duke it out with the flower fellow and kill it in around 1 minute. About five seconds later, another one will appear to take the place of the fallen, so there is always something there to whack at.
Now, you will eventually pull aggro from the druid NPC’s, but not normally until around weapon skill 350+, which means that you’re high enough level that taking a whack of two (and pretty weak whacks at that) from the vine won’t do much to you at all. In other words it’s nothing to be concerned about.
They also work with wands, unarmed – well, anything. So all you have to do is head out to Moonglade and run into the mouth of the tree. There you’ll find a lash in endless battle and all you gotta do is slip up behind him and wail away.
When he dies, wait a few seconds, right click and you’re off again. It’s kind of nice to click like once every minute or so and watch those skill points fly right by while you watch TV, listen to music, surf the web or whatever else you want.
It makes getting the arms and armless achievements about as easy as you could hope for, and doesn’t require a trip to some blasted dungeon to do it. Fast, effective, easy; and in our book, pretty Dominating.
OR you can just got to the elite 58 something guy in a cave in Northern Blasted Lands, he’s an ogre and he doesnt die… He will loose agro every now and then, me as a hunter thats no problem, he wacks my pet, I heal pet, I wack him, he looses agro, I feign death…rinse and repeat.
Hey, i know this aint anywhere near the subject of the article but i was wondering are you still recruitng for your guild and if so which server are you on cause im wanting to re roll
Ryan you can apply for the Dominate guild at http://www.dominatefenris.com/ We are on Fenris and always looking for more folks to have some fun with us.
Actually there are much better mobs in Dire Maul.
In Dire Maul east behind the endboss there are gordok spirits. They are unkillable, won’t attack and you can skill there even without getting an afk-logout because you won’t fall out of combat at any time. So just go there, equip the weapon you want to skill, hit it, go tv-watching or do something else for about 1-2hours => weapon fully skilled.
I went to the Outlands to level my melee weapons up.
At the Dark Portal there is a constant fight going on with NPCs and demons. Just equip th elowest level daggers, swords, axes, etc. that you can get your hands on and join the fight. I never did enough damage to pull aggro, and was never without a mob to hit because of their rediculously long spawn rate. Of course, this worked for the Unarmed achievement as well.
For ranged there is still no better mob than Dr. Boom in Netherstorm (just north of Area 52). Equip a low level gun, bow, thrown, etc. and park yourself on one of the rocks above Dr. Boom. Load your gun with the lowest damage (and cost) bullets available and go to town. As a Hunter Auto Shot made this leveling amazingly easy. I grabbed a sandwich and watched some TV while my ranged skills maxed out.
If you’re a druid, maybe it’s quick to get to moonglade, but for other’s it’s still a bit of travel. If you’re a shammy, this is incredibly easy to level no matter where you are. Drop a stoneskin totem, mana totem, and start wacking on mobs that are maybe 10 levels below you or so – I did this on buzzards in Hellfire (make sure to pull singles only, not the linked mobs on western side). They will do very little damage to you and what you do take, you can just flash heal yourself for occasionally. I leveled 2her skills for kicks and giggles on my shammy that way and it didn’t take too long. If you’re already 80, porting to shatt to get your orphan say, you can just run out and find any ol mobs nearby and do the same thing wo/ going to hellfire.
I just wanted to mention that having high intellect also helps this process… I know it doesn’t say it anywhere in-game but based on my own experiences, it’s true… I was working on staves a while ago and my holy pally friend was working on one of his weapons. He started out with a far lower skill level than I did, and we were both beating on the exact same mobs, yet he maxed his WAY before me. It took me almost an extra hour or two just to get staves maxed.
Obviously as a feral druid I have very low int, and as a holy pally, his was way higher than mine… I’d heard int helped, but couldn’t confirm it anywhere… this confirmed it for me, though.
So if you’re not a caster but you have an int set, you might want to throw it on while working on this. Otherwise you can look forward to many many hours of swinging.
doesn’t surprise me…it used to be on the tooltips that int helped leveling weapon skill
Or go hit the eggs is solzars basin they dont hit back at all when u break it move on to the next one
or you can always do what one of my groups did one morning. we ended up with a bugged mal’ ganis in heroic CoS before a server restart. once we got him down to 1 life and realized he wouldn’t die, we had the bright idea of doing these achievements. one of us hearthed out, bought the cheapest weapons from a vendor, and made his way back. we took turns wailing away for 1.5 hours until the server booted us off for the shutdown. all the ones that stuck it out each got the unarmed and 4 400’s achievements. luckily we were able to afk for like 20min per weapon, lol.
Maxing your weapon skill is worlds faster with high intellect. Back in vanilla WoW that was part of the intellect tooltip. It said something along the lines of intellect letting you learn weapon skill quicker. I have used this trick for years on paladin, warrior, and rogue to skill up quickly. Purchase cheap high intellect gear from the auction house and maybe an intellect pot and go outside of Shattrath city to the instance Shadow Labyrinth in the Bone Waste that has the locked gate outside (think it is south east side). Outside the instance entrance there are a number of NPCs that constantly fight the mobs running out of the instance portal. Simply beat on these mobs until you are maxed out. If you do get low on health then heal up between groups or walk into the instance to drop aggro and heal…
I did these 2 real quick but did em while farming my meats and skins in boraen on the mamouths and rhinos ….dual wielding helps alot (dagger,sword,1h axe) I’m a hunt so can’t use maces but got bows xbows and guns up have 6, 7 if u count the unarmed at 400…and 1 point I think you missed Fist weapons give unarmed
do the training dummies not work over a certain skill level? i can’t say i have ever really tried to level weapon skills using them, but I see people whacking away at them…
They are whacking on the dummies to test their DPS……You get nothing from the Training Dummies
There are also constant respawns at the entrance to Shadow Labs, 3-4 mobs at a time that combat NPC guards constantly. This is where I go for each weapon/character. Unfortunately it requires a key to open the door for access – although it’s quite easily attained.
so you want people to go allll the way to Dire Maul…i suppose people are going there for Free Knot for the insane title…
But if your high level and you want to just walk away while hitting a banished mob, the first boss in Shadow Labs is where its at. And is a quick portal to shatt away. He is banished, and any lvl 80 can walk right by without fighting anything.
Something else to consider is this…i have seen it hypothesized and i believe it to be true that higher the mob is you are trying to kill, the faster your weapon skill goes up too. Also, instant attacks that do main hand weapon damage will help as well.
Balduun, Ravencrest USPvE
I hadn’t done the quest in Netherstorm to jumpstart the Fel Reaver. So I jumped it, flew into the air, waited for the 5 ghosts to disappear, took about 5 minutes, then went back down and preceded to level up my unarmed and my staves on the Reaver. Easy as freakin pie.
if its skill ups your looking for at 80 there are vrykul slaves in storm peaks in a cave between to blue lady villiages. at the start/finish (depending on the entrance you take) three women watch over three men and fight them all the time let them get the first hit and you should never get aggro and lvl your weapon skills at the same time
Me and about 6 friends went to Aq40 one night just messing around we did the slime boss had no frost mage so we leveled all our weapon skills on him he doesn’t ever die and does very little dmg at 80.
Stockades with crap weapons worked like charm on mah preist