Leveling on Rift

In addition to doing a lot of PvP on my various characters, I've also picked up Rift recently and have been playing that pretty extensively. As you can imagine, as an altoholic, having 4 new "callings", two new factions and lots of new zones to quest through, on top of new dungeons, new warfronts and lots of other things to explore has me pretty engaged at this point.

So far, I've managed to level a Guardian Mage to 26 (running as a Necromancer/Warlock/Chloromancer combo) and also managed to get a Defiant Cleric to 25 (running as Justicar / Shaman / Druid).

There are a number of things that Rift seems to be doing really well at this point. First, every calling has at least one soul that includes a pet, which makes leveling certainly faster and easier. On top of this, 3 of the 4 callings have souls that include healing abilities. I'll caveat this by saying that I haven't played a warrior much at this point, so I'm not as familiar with the abilities of this calling. If there's a warrior soul out there with significant self healing, I'd really appreciate the info.

The interface and the questing system seems pretty intuitive and the zones are really well laid out so far. One of the things that I definitely miss from the redesigned WoW is all the flight paths. Basically, in Rift there is one major town in each zone that includes a portcullis that will teleport you to the major town in another zone that you've visited. Some of the zones are quite big and this can make travel a bit of a hassle. On the positive, you can get a mount very early on which helps a lot.

The various Rifts and zone events also help break up some of the routine of questing, providing fun things to do in a group, and decent rewards. The only downside to some of these events is if you're on a server where groups don't tend to rally to defeat the events, you can find the NPC's that you need for quests wiped out by invasions for a decent period of time. It can be a hassle if you're just trying to quest and do your thing.

On the WoW front, I've also rediscovered the joy of PvP on my shadow priest, so he's been getting a little extra love these days. I've been trying to do more on my Shaman, but just having a lot of trouble finding a PvP spec that I enjoy. He might be destined to be the one character under 1,000 honorable kills.

PvP Progress

As I described back in June, I really enjoy PvP on basically all of my toons. It's really just a matter of finding the spec and play style that I enjoy, but I really find that just about all of them have something interesting to offer in the PvP environment. And for an altoholic, it's often much easier to continue to play across a wide range of toons than it would be to raid on a large variety of toons.

I hit the magical 25,000 HK mark on my warlock recently and also passed 5,000 HK's on the mage, both significant milestones since my last update. I've also been spending a lot more time on the rogue lately and he's moving up the rankings of my toons from a total kills perspective.

I've decided one thing that I need to focus on is getting everyone into the four digit category, so will likely be playing a bit more on the warrior and the shammy in order to get them both over 1,000. I'd really like to heal on the shammy instead of going as enhance, but unfortunately, I just don't have the gear for it. My try to do some auction house gearing though to see how I can do.

Here is where I currently stand on all the toons:

Warlock 25,006 HK's
Druid 8,058
Death Knight 6,332
Mage 5,261
Paladin 3,636
Rogue 2,402
Priest 2,281
Hunter 2,253
Shaman 555
Warrior 361

Total 56,145

If the Ruthless set will be the last set purchasable for honor before the next expansion, I'd really like to get all of these toons to the point that they were in full Ruthless beforehand, but that's a pretty ambitious goal. Right now the warlock is the only one in full honor gear, with the mage and rogue close behind. So we'll see. It's not like I've never set ambitious goals in the past.

Balance Around 5 Mans?

It's clearly impossible for Blizzard to appropriately balance all of the classes around all of the various possible endgame activities. They struggle enough just with balancing things between arenas and raiding. My experience with my Death Knight over the last few weeks has made me wish that a little bit more attention might be paid to balancing the classes a little more evenly around the casual player that just likes to run the occasional 5 man instance.

Maybe the issue is that I just shouldn't be concerned with dps meters in 5 mans, as long as the dps is good enough and we're getting through everything, why should I care. But it bothers me.

I've been playing my warlock a long time. I would say I'm fairly skilled at playing a destruction warlock in a PvE environment. Even when the talent tree fairy moves things to the point where destruction is significantly behind affliction in theoretical output (as most would argue it is now) I'm still able to get significantly higher DPS out of my destruction spec than I am as affliction. There is a degree of muscle memory and inate understanding of the right things to do at certain times.

So I find it frustrating, that on my death knight - a character that I have played seriously in instances for about 2 weeks, I am not only able to eek out slightly higher dps than my warlock (who is better geared) - I'm able to embarrassingly crush the warlock. It isn't even close. On test dummies, in instances, while AFK in front of the auction house, my death knight is able to generate dps that is about 25% higher than my better geared warlock and massively more practiced.

As a caveat, I'm not talking about an enormous difference in gear levels here - it's about a 400 point different in GearScore and about a 4-5 point difference in average item level. The item level difference is less than you might think given the GearScore difference, but that's because I've still got one PvP item and one tanking item that I'm using on the death knight.

Not sure there is much that could be done about it since balancing things around 5 mans would then likely create offsetting imbalance at the raiding level. But it would sure help my poor warlocks self-esteem.

At least the death knight doesn't bring cookies and crowd control!

Some Serious Death Knight Love

So I've been running quite a few instances on my death knight lately. I finally gave up on the idea of trying to be an effective tank with him - it's just not in my genes or something. Instead, I managed to pick up a pair of cheap Gurubashi Punishers on the auction house and respeced to dual wield frost and it was off to the Chaos Orb collecting races.

I must say, I have really been enjoying it. I've been able to do really competitive dps with some pretty bad gear - starting off with 4 or 5 pieces of tank gear and 4 or 5 pieces of PvP gear. I've been able to replace about half of that it this point with Justice Point purchases and have enough orbs at this point to upgrade at least one of my weapons. Just waiting on my alchemist to finish up the Truegold for me. Unfortunately, I'm still way to cheap to just go buy the stuff on the auction house.

I managed to do 4 full troll heroics over the weekend without a single piece of gear dropping for me - although all I was really hoping for was the helm off the panther boss and the shoulders off of Daakara. I still need to grab the T11 chest piece for Justice Points and the Justice Point cloak (since I was brilliant enough to pick up the tanking cloak from the Thrall questline), but then should be in pretty good shape for rolling on the DK.

I also managed to grab the T12 chest piece on the warlock this past week as well. Just running for fun on the lock at this point. Might try a few instances as affliction and demonology. I've been playing destro so long, it just feels like it's likely to be more competitive for me because of the muscle memory.

So, with all that in place, I might work on running stuff on the priest next. I still need to unlock the Molten Front dailies on the priest - he's the last character that hasn't done the requisite quests in Hyjal. It would be good to at least get the necklace if not unlocking the rest of the vendors. He's already got an epic belt and boots and should be able to pick up a set of legs pretty cheap.

So that's been the story of the last week. I also managed to get the Alliance Death Knight to 71, but have been spending a lot more time than normal running instances on my Horde toons.

On to Northrend!

My alliance death knight made it to Northrend during this past week. This is the first time I've worked on leveling an alliance toon through Northrend and the differences are pretty interesting. the alliance definitely seem much more upbeat about things once you hit the shores of Borean Tundra than the Horde were. Valiance Keep is also a much nicer place than Warsong Hold - although you definitely feel more like an attacking army at war over in Warsong Hold.

I've also been working through Molten Front dailies on most of my toons. I have now completed the Molten Front on two characters - my warlock and my hunter - and am very close to having them done on the death knight. I've also started to finish up the quests in Hyjal needed to unlock them on my shaman. Once that is done, it'll just be the priest that still needs to unlock them.

I've been debating running some dungeons as dps on my death knight just to collect some Chaos Orbs. He's my max blacksmith, and it's just become very apparent to me that I just don't enjoy tanking. I'm not a huge fan of melee dps either, but seems like that's an easier route to accumulating Orbs since it's apparent they're not going to become BoA or tradable anytime real soon.

So for now, I'm trying to balance working on Molten Front dailies with leveling my alliance death knight. So we'll see how that goes.

The Early Levels Breeze By!

So I'm still cranking out my Molten Front dailies on my Horde toons, and still ran a ton of dungeons this past weekend on both my warlock and my druid. I also tried tanking for a bit on my son's fairly well geared Death Knight tank. Yep. Still don't really like tanking. Not sure why I bother even trying every so often. Just a waste of gold and time.

In any case, I've also been working on those alliance toons that I mentioned earlier. The early levels really fly by (duh) so even without heirlooms, I managed to get a ton of levels done last week without dedicating a whole lot of time.

Here is where we stand as of today:

Death Knight - level 65
Druid - level 10
Hunter - level 30
Mage - level 10
Paladin - level 7 (and probably up next!)
Priest - level 10
Rogue - level 13
Shaman - level 10
Warlock - level 13
Warrior - level 12

That's a total of 24 levels since last week. Granted, those are almost all the absolute easiest possible levels, so that's an almost completely meaningless number for a week. But I'll take it anyway.

I'm also very close to having the Molten Front dailies fully complete on a second toon - my Hunter. They're still under way on both the Death Knight, Paladin and Druid. I still need to do enough questing in Hyjal to unlock them on both the Shaman and Shadow Priest, and might just do those two next after I finish those last three. So we'll see. At some point, I'm likely to have had enough of Molten Front dailies and switch to leveling my alliance toons exclusively. We'll have to see.

But today, with maintenance underway, I'm off to play a little RIFT.

Back to Leveling?

So I'm very close to accomplishing most of the goals that I set out for myself after hitting 85 on character #10. At that point, I was mostly looking to finish leveling my remaining professions, work on getting my main to exalted with the guild, finish gearing a few more toons and work on making some gold.

The addition of the Molten Front dailies have added yet more for me to do, so at this point, I'm starting to lose interest in all of it. I could still potentially work on gearing the shammy, warrior and rogue a bit more, but I've gotten to the point that the frustrations of the groups that I get through the dungeon finder tool generally outweigh the time invested.

So I'm debating switching back into the leveling game and moving on from just having 10 characters at max level and try to go for 20 by the time the next expansion hits. The plan is that having done a Horde character of each class, I would then switch and try to do an Alliance character of each class.

I've already started to set this up as you may have noted from my sidebar. So here is where I stand on the Alliance front:

Gnome Death Knight - level 65
Night Elf Hunter - level 30
Worgen Warlock - level 13
Dwarf Warrior - level 12
Gnome Mage - level 8
Dwarf Paladin - level 7
Human Priest - level 7
Draenei Shaman - level 7
Night Elf Druid - level 6
Worgen Rogue - not yet started.

So that's the collection. That's 155 total levels with 850 to go, which would take 695 levels between now and the next expansion. If I generally average a level per day, that's probably not happening, but it might be interesting to try. If I guesstimate the next expansion at 12/15/2012, that's 501 days, so 1.4 levels per day.

You Can Go Crazy With These

For some reason, it seems like Blizzard has done a much better job this time around of promoting some degree of immersion with the new Firelands / Molten Front dailies. As a serious altoholic, this can obviously result in spending huge blocks of time doing nothing but dailies. With 14 dailies quests per day from the Molten Front once you have everything unlocked, across 10 different level 85 alts, that works out to a whole ton of quests.

For those of you doing the math at home, that also works out to a ton of gold. Fortunately, I hadn't progressed far enough in Mt. Hyjal to have unlocked the dailies on all of my toons. At this point, there are two more that I need to quest on in order to unlock it - priest and shaman. I find with a decently geared level 85, it can be done in about an hour or two, so it's not a huge investment in time.

I'm also not progressing at the same pace on all of my toons. My warlock and my hunter are the furthest along with my death knight and paladin not far behind. I just managed to unlock them on the druid yesterday and am off to the races on that toon. Have not really started at all on the mage, rogue or warrior.

I'm also finding more than ever that there are plenty of things for me to do in the game - whether it is working on PvP on my warlock or mage, running heroics, working on dailies, leveling professions or even dipping into a little bit of raiding.

My guild is currently 2/7 in the new Firelands raid and invited me in for a few tries on Rhyolith the other evening. Very interesting encounter. It's a great fight for a destro warlock given the burst that I'm able to unleash on the legs to bring some quick turns. Getting used to "steering" a boss presents a bit of a challenge, but we learned quite a bit on a series of tries. We didn't actually get him down while I was there, but learned enough that the guild was able to get him down a couple of nights later.

50K Honorable Kills

If only it was on one toon.

As someone who is obviously a severe altoholic, I rarely play any one toon with enough intensity and commitment to get those large numerical achievements on any of my toons. So to make up for that, I tend to track their accomplishments as a group.

I just recently passed the 50,000 honorable kill mark across my ten toons, which is something that I'm particularly proud of. I've continued to do a lot of PvP. I managed to get some decent gear for my priest before the patch dropped today, although nowhere close to getting him into full Bloodthirsty.

Here are the numbers as of patch day for each of my characters:

Joar - 22,423
Joarwyn - 8,058
Joardk - 6,273
Joarnak - 4,206
Joaridan - 3,333
Joarvyk - 2,281
Joarshot - 2,040
Joarstab - 1,240
Joarbek - 555
Joarmama - 213

Total - 50,622

Halfway to the 100,000 mark!

PvPapalooza

I've been going back and forth lately between PvP on my warlock and on my mage. I must say, the extreme control that comes with being a frost mage in some ways have me leaning more that direction than towards the warlock. I've just been having a lot more fun with the mage.

I've also been messing around with a variety of my other toons on the PvP front trying to figure out who to gear next. My warlock is in full bloodthirsty and is honor capped for the patch. The mage is also full bloodthirsty and is about a quarter of the way to the cap.

So, I've been debating who to work on next. I've been messing around off and on with the hunter, feral druid, resto druid, warrior, frost death knight. Also been wondering about either enhance or resto shammy or possible disc or shadow priest. Needless to say, nothing is really speaking to me and I can't decide who to focus on gearing next. Normally, with my propensity for ranged, I would say either hunter or shadow priest next. I tried the hunter a bit and it really wasn't speaking to me. Might give the shadow priest a bit of a spin next and see how it goes.

I also had a couple of really fun runs with the new warrior, so even though I tend to be fairly melee averse, I might actually go that way next. This is the extreme downside of being a leveling addict, is once you've got all those toons to 85, it becomes quite perplexing figuring out who to play next. Of course, it always gives you the option to mess around with everyone just a little bit, which is sort of what I've been doing. I even dished up a nice subtlety spec for my rogue, who is normally just my bank alt and played around with him for a few. Also incredibly fun.

Or I Could Do Some PvP...

So I set out a few things in my last post that I wanted to work on next having achieved my goal of a level 85 of each class. So yeah - haven't really done much of that. Instead, I've been spending a lot of time on PvP on both my warlock and my mage. My warlock now has a complete set of Bloodthirsty PvP gear and is really a complete pain in the neck in BG's. (You can just hear the allies going "#$@#$ Fear...somebody kill that @#$#@ warlock....Feared Again! @#$$#@...will somebody get him..")

I've also been working on gearing my frost mage who must be equally frustrating. The main thing with the mage, is unlike my warlock, I don't tend to run any dungeons on the mage, so he doesn't really have a decent weapon. So I've been working on Tol Barad dailies to get the staff from there. Just a day or two away. And then I should be a complete pain.

I did manage to get the Shaman geared enough to run troll dungeons, and I did run a few normals on my fresh 85 warrior - enough to realize that I don't really enjoy running dungeons on the warrior all that much. I think I'm just not much of a melee person at heart really.

I've also been working on finishing leveling both my leatherworking and blacksmithing. It's slow going as I'm too cheap to just buy the mats that I need to finish them up. I did manage to get both of them to 500 though, so just those last 25 points to go.

Then I'll finish up engineering on the rogue, which is sitting at a much less respectable 464.

Joar finally did get to honored with the new guild, which enabled him to finally purchase the fish feast recipe that he's been wanting.

On the PvP front, I'm closing in on the 25,000 HK mark on Joàr. He's sitting at 21,902 right now. I also captured a flag for the first time in WSG the other day and was quite surprised that I'd never done it before. So, first flag capture in the 60th battle per my statistics page.

I'm also approaching the 50,000 HK mark across all my 10 toons - sitting at a total of 46,095 right now. I may also try a little bit of PvP on the rogue, but we'll see.