Thursday, March 20, 2014

Lessons from a Boosted 60

So with my Warlords of Draenor pre-order, I went ahead and boosted by level 60 Shaman to 90, in the process earning him max level inscription and tailoring in the process.  The process seemed to work fairly well, was intuitive and easy to understand.  I then set about grabbing some quick Golden Lotus rep so I could learn the recipes for the spellthreads to start making some money.  Picked up a few extra glyph recipes in the process dropping off the mobs I killed for the Golden Lotus rep.

So far it has worked pretty well.

The only downside was the unexpected confluence of my decision to boost a 60 to take advantage of the veteran profession boost with Blizzard's decision to do a realm merge with my alliance server at the same time.  At least in the short term, the realm merge has had the immediate impact of cratering glyph prices, making it not nearly as lucrative as it appeared to be when I first started analyzing the process.

But glyph prices do tend to swing a fair amount over time, and I'm guessing a server merge is a fairly traumatic event to the local economy, so I'll stick it out for a while and see how it goes.

In the meantime, I continue to take down Ordos each week on an assortment of toons, run the occasional LFR here and there and am back to working on the rest of the alliance army.

Had an interesting run on my hunter this past week where I managed to get both best in slot trinkets to drop out of LFR in the same afternoon.  The turned around and had a Dinomancer Tome drop almost immediately on the Isle of Giants.  It was a good day to be my hunter.

Ordos finally put an end to his lucky streak by awarding him with the traditional double gold.  So you can't have everything.

I'm heading out on spring break next week, so won't be playing much or posting.  Will be soaking up the sunshine and barking at my kids to stop fighting.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

To Boost a 60 or a Low Level?

So now I'm completely torn.  The final announcement that boosting a level 60 character to 90 will also boost both of that characters chosen professions to 600 makes my decision on which character to boost just a little bit harder.  My alliance shaman, who is an herbalist and inscriptionist is currently sitting at level 50, and would be pretty easy to level those last few levels.  Having a max level inscriptionist would be a nice source of gold for my other toons on that server, so it's very tempting to go ahead and level that toon, especially with how quickly a monk can level to 60 with full heirlooms and the xp boost.

So I'm tempted to go ahead and level the shammy those few extra levels and boost him for the extra source on income on my alliance server (where I currently have exactly 0 maxed professions).

In other news, I've continued to do a little bit of LFR here and there on my monk, my paladin, my shadow priest and my shaman.  I've been trying to get those last few random drop glyph recipes on the shaman without much success.

I've also gone back to leveling the alliance side army and have gained a few levels there on the shaman, priest, mage and rogue, all of whom are in the mid to upper 40's.

So that's the story for now.  I'll be running Ordos on a quite a few toons over the next few days just to gear a few more folks up, for reasons that sort of escape me.  And in the meantime, I might be focusing on that shammy a bit more.

Monday, March 3, 2014

Level 90 #14, and How Quickly We Gear

So on Friday, I managed to finally push my warlock over the finish line to 90.  I did it sitting in an airport boarding area.  I've been spending so much time waiting for delayed flights lately, I was thinking it might be interesting, in a sadly disturbed and insane kind of way, to level a character from 1-90 completely while sitting in airports, waiting on flights.

So when Saturday rolled around, it then quickly became an exercise in how quickly could I gear this character up.  She was basically starting out with a full set of Timeless Isle gear, with the exception of the neck piece, which I thought I had, but apparently not.  Must have used it on the bloody paladin or something.

In any case, I then purchased a second trinket from the JP vendor and ran Arena of Annihilation for the weapon.  That got my character geared enough for ToT, but not quite there for SoO.

One run through ToT was all it took, particularly the staff off the twins before Lei Shen, as well as tier pants and pretty new boots, and my new femdorf warlock was all ready for SoO.

I did manage to get her through the first wing.  Of course the Immerseus trinket, that I waited months and months for on Joar dropped for the dreaded femdorf the very first time through.

So within 24 hours of hitting 90, I was able to get my ilvl all the way up to 499, partially also with the help of nice PvP gloves off the Celestials.

So we'll continue to work her through SoO as time allows so that she can become the 12th member of the Joar army to kill Garrosh.

Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online Updates

I continue to balance my playing time between Elder Scrolls Online and Guild Wars 2.  I finished running my Reaper through the new Guild War...