slaingod

So I’ve found my favorite place to farm for the main leatherworking materials, borean leather and arctic fur, in the lastest upgrade to World of Warcraft. Unfortunately, it seems like the best places are those where not having done some of the quests that cause phasing. In particular, I had heard that Valley of Echoes in Ice Crown had some fast respawn monsters if you hadn’t done the main quest lines there. But alas, I had already completed those, so I read that the Sons of Hodir cave in Storm Peaks had a lot Jormunger snakes and Bears. However I found the respawn rate to be lacking on these…but that may only be because I haven’t completed the quest lines for the Brunnhildar female Viking village.

What I did discover is my new favorite Borean Leather farming spot. So to reiterate, I haven’t done any of the quests in Storm Peaks, so I am in the ‘Phase 1’ where the Brunnhildar Warbears and Warmaiden riders are sent to battle the elite giants and wolves in the valley. The Brunnhildar Warbears spawn as fast as you kill them, as it seems there is a minimum number of monsters that need to be alive to keep the battle in the valley properly sustained. You can just kill the Warbears, as the Warmaidens die when they are dismounted by the bear dying.

You can manage the rate at which they come to a certain extent by choosing where you kill them: back up if they come to fast so it takes longer between kills for them to respawn and run out to where you are. You want to be positioned sort of near the cave entrance, but a little closer to the village. If things pile up too quickly, just move to the cliff wall near the cave so that a few of them pass to join the battle with the giants, rather than attacking you.

Best thing is, IMO, the Warbears don’t drop loot, they are just skinnable, so your bags don’t constantly get filled with garbage items you have to vendor or discard. Just like the boars at Oronok’s Farm in Shadow Moon Valley for Knothide Leather. And because you are in a different phase than most everyone else who has done the quest line, you are basically able to farm unmolested by other toons on PVP servers.

So recently started dealing with Hpricot…what a mess, even tho this is supposed to be the end all be all of Ruby HTML parsers. My main issue is a complete lack of useful documentation. I ended up having to use some_element.methods.inspect to see what the hell my options were with a particular element, where I found the etags, which was what I needed to find.

Of course I wouldn’t have needed etags if Hpricot had an option to do case insensitive searches…like when I need to parse a document for the META info, I shouldn’t need to look for ‘meta’, ‘META’, ‘Meta’ and any other flavors that someone might have typed in. I know the ‘spec’ says this is the way it is supposed to work (case sensitive), but an HTML parser in particular needs to live in the real world.

Here is a method you can call like:

doc = normalize_hpricot(Hpricot(my_html))

 #deal with hpricot case sensitivity
    def normalize_hpricot(element)
    element.children.each do |child|

      if child.respond_to?(:etag=)
        child.etag = child.etag.downcase if child.etag
      end
      if child.respond_to?(:raw_attributes=)
        attribs = {}

        begin
        child.raw_attributes.each_pair do |key,value|
          attribs[key.downcase] = value if value
        end
        child.raw_attributes = attribs
          rescue
          end
      end
      normalize_hpricot(child) if child.respond_to?(:children) and child.children
    end
    return element
  end

This code was taken from http://davidsmalley.com/2008/4/24/hpricot-case-sensitivity and fixed to work and to not make everything lower case, just the tag names and the attribute names from the html tags.