Bag space.
We never have enough, but some of us manage it better than others. Please, don’t be “that guy.”
Occulus was the daily for both normal and heroic yesterday. It was the last heroic I need to run for the Northrend Dungeon Hero achievement and one of the Proof of Demise quests I was missing for that achievement. So off we go to Occ.
Making steady progress… kill the first boss, decide who all gets which color drake… pick up our drakes… mount up… fly to next platform…
Where is the druid?
He’s still back at the last platform, what’s up?
He can’t find the [Amber Essence] in his bag. /sigh
We spent literally 10 minutes (watching buffs slowly melt away) as he tried figuring out where it went.
Scroll up, do you see in the text where it says that you actually received the item? No. Talk to the gnome again.
Discover he’s looking for an icon that looks like his bronze drake. No, it looks like the whelpling companion icon, just yellow.
Threaten to make him link EVERY item in his bag until we find it. He thinks I’m kidding. Every one else knows I’m not.
He finally finds it and we can get on with it.
There were issues with him and camera angles and not recognizing that the 3D space in WoW is very misleading. Objects on screen are generally much farther away then they appear. You are, in fact, not “right on top of him.” You are receiving the “out of range” message because you are a mile behind me and I’m at the edge of the amber drake’s range. L2adjust camera angles plz.
But back to the bags.
This is not an isolated issue with the bags. He never has bag space on any character.
Northrend dungeons drop much less crap than the Outland and Old World dungeons do. Go back and run SM for giggles, any wing. Even with a group of 5, you are almost guaranteed to start ditching cheese to make room for all the cloth, random greens, and assorted gray and white crap the mobs practically throw at you. In Northrend, I may get a broken claw or 3, 2 random greens and a stack of frostweave. As the enchanter, I also carry the boss drops to the end where they get sharded and distributed. So in an average NR dungeon, I’m looking at filling 10 bag slots, tops. He’s the guy that has to stop mid run in a NR dungeon to dump garbage.
Have a quest item that needs to be activated (like the Amber Essence)? He can’t find it.
But, on his druid, I do believe he has a full complement of enchanting materials. All the way back to strange dust. In his bags. Not in his bank. No clue what he’s carrying on his paladin. Maybe 30 stacks of saronite ore?
He does have a “mule” character to hold stuff for his other character. I can’t imagine what that character is holding on to when he’s lugging greater astral essences all over the length and breadth of the land.
So here’s how my bags work, I have a system. I am not “that guy.”
- I use an add on, ZimUtil, that automatically sells grays for me when I visit a vendor. It will also repair my gear if the NPC has the capability to do so. I never have grays cluttering up my bags after I’ve hit a city.
- I do NOT carry enchanting supplies on me. Any drop I get can wait until I get back to Dal to enchant. Anyone that wants my enchanting services out in the field better be supplying their own mats. Nor do I carry tailoring supplies other than the frostweave currently being collected. I generally do not carry reputation items on me unless I plan on being in the area they are used for. I don’t carry tabards that I am done championing for. This is all what the bank is for. And bank alts that own their own guild where I am the only member and have my own guild bank. Best investment ever. =)
- I figured out by about the second item I picked up that any new item I collect will go to the first available spot in my backpack, going left to right, top to bottom. If the backpack is full, it moves to the next bag to the left, and continues moving to the left until it finds a spot. How about we put all the stuff that won’t move around in the farthest bag to the left? Hearthstone, first spot in the left bag. Also in the left bag are stacks of potions, flasks, food, bandages, and reagents – all items that I keep topped off with OCD zeal. My enchanting rod, spare weapon, fishing pole, etc are also at home in the left-most bag.
- Move over a bag to the right to find gear sets. All my PvP gear, all my “I need more hit rating dammit” gear, all my trinkets hang out here. Each of these items are 1 for 1 swaps with my equipped gear, so I end up with no empty slots for strange items to be misplaced into. I do not use an outfitter-type program, I swap my gear manually, with the exception of a macro to swap my PvE and PvP trinkets. The gear doesn’t quite fill up a frostweave bag, so I have a few “toys” in that bag as well. This includes things like Baby Spice, Old Spice, a Halloween wand, and I even had some mistletoe until recently. Oh yeah, I carry my Crashin’ Thrashin’ Race Car thing to amuse myself while waiting for people to get their shit together.
- Move over one more bag to the right, we’re in the middle now. Quest items get shoved in here. Towards the bottom I generally have room for stacks of frostweave that will be mailed off to my bank alt for storage and stacks of yummy conjured mana strudel. If you keep the mana strudel icon on your action bars, it matters not where you store the pastries – stick them in a dark corner out of your way. They won’t mold, trust me.
- That leaves two bags that are almost always empty when I head out of a city.
As we get boss drops, I move those to the bottom of the backpack. Just about everything else gets moved to the second bag as it drops. It’s fast and easy to do. Stop to eat strudel, open bags, move broken claw from first spot in backpack to open spot in second bag. Finish eating strudel. Kill things. Get a random green. Toss it in the second bag while the tank is marking the next batch.
The only place I do not use this method is when we do timed H CoS runs. But, we don’t bother to loot trash in there anyway, so I just end up with a couple of boss drops to DE at the end.
My [Amber Essence] went straight to the first spot in my backpack. I pulled the icon to my action bar, then tossed the item itself in the second bag, safely out of the way of incoming boss drops. It took me 2 seconds to find my essence and get it ready for use.
By taking 2-5 seconds here and there and having an organizational system that I stick to, I’m never “that guy” you’re waiting for to find the quest item of [Kitchen Sink] in his bags.
If you are “that guy,” please, do us all a favor and FUCKING CLEAN OUT YOUR BAGS ONCE IN A WHILE!
kthxbai
clearcasting 