Rambling On

So, my goal of having a toon of each class to level 85 before the next expansion seems to be very much attainable at this point. With 9 toons already there and my 10th toon at level 76, I have 9 levels to go. If the next expansion is coming in somewhere around 18 months from now, that means I need to knock out a level every 2 months.

I think I can handle that.

So, given the complete lack of pressure there, I've been spending more time working on some of m other toons. Mostly running dailies for rep and running the daily heroic - both on my warlock and on my paladin. Both are currently geared well enough that running heroics on either of them is a breeze. They are also both geared enough that they'll be able to get into the new/old troll instances later today after maintenance is done!

So, now I'm debating which toon to work on gearing next. I'm debating between priest, hunter and death knight. The hunter and priest are actually both already geared enough for heroics. It's really just a matter of finishing the various rep grinds and getting them both to the point where they have all the JP gear they need.

I may give the priest a try as a holy 5 man healer. My complete inability to get the hang of the druid does make me want to try one of the other healing classes. I've never really done anything with the priest, so that intrigues me a bit.

I've also somewhat debated putting the shammy in that group and trying to gear him up as enhancement. I've never been a big fan of melee, but I definitely enjoyed the shammy while leveling, so I'm tempted to give it a try.

At the end of the day, I may give tanking a bit of a try on the death knight, and after I've tortured myself sufficiently, switch back over to the priest.

Most of the heroics that I've done recently through the dungeon finder have been pretty smooth - mostly due to the fact that people now understand the instances pretty well and also are finally at the point where they outgear them. You still get the occasional wipe, but it is no where near as bad as it was.

The speed leveling warrior is sitting in Zul'Drak and is pretty close to hitting 77, so I may be running a bit ahead of my "once every two months" schedule.

Breezing Through Northrend

In between running dailies and heroics on my paladin and my warlock, I'm still occasionally working on leveling my warrior. He is breezing through Northrend with ease. I'm working him through Grizzly Hills at the moment, where he just recently hit 75. Northrend really does seem to go quite a bit faster with the bonus to leveling speed as well as a couple of additional pieces of BoA.

I'm also about a day or two away from hitting exalted with Dragonmaw on my paladin which will hook him up with a nice new epic necklace for his healing set and a nice new set of boots for his ret / questing set. He's also pretty close to exalted with Hellscream, but he's going to need quite a few more commendations in order to get his epic trinket. I'm not in a huge rush on that, as he's got two good jewelcrafter trinkets equipped right now that seem to do the trick nicely. After that, I just need to finish getting to exalted with Ramkahen for some stylin new boots and then it'll just be working on the daily each day.

On the warlock, he's basically just in the daily heroic for valor points mode. I'm just a couple of days away from getting the T11 chest, and after that will be working towards the cloak and a ring.

Beyond that, I'm starting to think about which toon to gear next - still debating between the hunter and the shadow priest. The druid for some reason still runs hot and cold for me in terms of whether I find it completely irritating running heroics on him. Not sure why. I may have just gotten spoiled with the paladin having the huge heals to keep the tank up, that having slightly better AoE just doesn't seem to compensate much.

Northrend Ho

First off, sorry about the lack of posts in a while. Things have been extremely busy at work. I've resumed focus on gearing up my warlock and my paladin. The return to prominence of my druid was extremely short lived. Despite all the AoE, the lack of a truly monster heal just made me miss my paladin too much. And now that all the dps are learning what stuff they shouldn't be standing in, there seem to be relatively few encounters where I really need a huge AoE heal.

I've also been working a little bit on the warrior - he's sitting at 68 and just made his way to Northrend. Given the improved leveling speed in Northrend that I've heard about, I've decided to skip Borean Tundra and just start in Howling Fjord and then go straight to Dragonblight. Hopefully that will work well enough. I'm at just slightly over 2 days played time at this point.

Arms continues to be a complete beast for leveling, and I'm really looking forward to picking up Bladestorm in another level or two to have yet another way to mow down everything around me.

Back from Vaca and Back to My Favorite Tree

Well, I was away on vacation with the family for a week with essentially no internet access, so wasn't getting much done on the leveling front. I did manage to get my warrior to level 62 and pretty far through Hellfire Peninsula since my last post. He continues to be an absolute blast to play.

I've also rediscovered my love for my druid. I'm not sure why, but early in Cataclysm, I seem to have totally lost the feel for healing on my druid. For some reason, after a week off, it all seems to make sense again, so I've been doing a little bit more healing on my druid and have knocked out his first few heroics. So, in the interest of getting him a little bit geared, I've started working on Tol Barad, Therazane and Dragonmaw dailies as well.

By the way, for those of you that hate getting mobbed by all those dwarves while you're doing your Dragonmaw dailies, let me pass on a little bit of unfairness that I discovered today. Druids can ignite those Wildhammer kegs and pick up that food, while still in flight form. Oh yeah. Hover overhead, ignite keg, grab bread, fly away, completely oblivious to the chaos around me.

So, leveling the warrior may go on hold for a while so I can work on getting the druid caught up gear-wise to my warlock and my paladin.

Closer to Outland

I hit level 49 on my warrior last night, so down to single digits until Outland. It actually makes me a little sad as I've really enjoyed what Blizzard has done with the old starting zones so far. Every zone I've been in so far has been very engaging and interesting.

I finished up Badlands (the questing line in there involving Black Dragonflight eggs is really fantastic) and have moved on to Searing Gorge. That's the first place that I seem to have found a little bit of repeat from what I remember before, but it's still all pretty well done.

The only downside that I've been able to find from the new smooth questing paths from 1-60 and the fact that Blizzard has removed all the hopping back and forth between continents is that getting training for new spells and abilities has become a bit more challenging as there is really no reason whatsoever to go back to a capital city other than that. So it's no longer just a matter of "I'll swing by and grab that on my next zeppelin trip" because there isn't going to be a next zeppelin trip.

So, that's been a bit of a struggle, but not a big deal overall.

My guild is basically one day away from hitting level 20, which will open up the BoA head pieces, which should accelerate my leveling even further. Right now I'm at 1 day, 2 hours played time to level 49, which seems absolutely lightning fast to me. I know Joana's old record for 1-60 was 4 days, 20 hours which was absolultely breathtaking speed at the time. And it looks like I'm going to completely blow that away. Of course, Joana wasn't working with 35% BoA xp bonuses and a 10% guild xp bonus, so that makes a big difference. However, even if you adjust for that 45% boost, it should still come out to somewhere around 2 days, 16 hours to 60, and it at least looks like I'm going to be faster than that.

The difference would at least seem to be driven by the improvements that Blizzard has made to the questing experience.

Love that Warrior

I've been splitting time these days working on various dailies mostly on my paladin, and then working on leveling my warrior. I've been really pleasantly surprised by how much I've been enjoying leveling the warrior. Now I will admit, it may have something to do with the fact that he's totally tricked out in full BoA's which means he's wreaking total havoc with everything that gets in his way, but it's still tremendous fun.

I'm leveling as Arms - mostly because I already had a good two-hander BoA sword. It seems to be a pretty vicious spec though - the combination of Victory Rush and Mortal Strike seems to put most things pretty quickly on the ground.

I've been able to get him to level 40 pretty quickly. I've been enjoying all of the new quests. While I started him as a goblin, I've actually been leveling over in Eastern Kingdoms just because I really wanted to see all the new quests in Silverpine, Plaguelands, etc. It has definitely not disappointed!

I was intending do try tanking in some dungeons, but I've been enjoying the new quests so much, I haven't really felt the need to bother. That might change once I hit Outland in a few more levels and get back to the same old same old.

Sad Tree

From the 4.1 PTR Patch Notes:

• Lifebloom's bloom effect has been reduced by 20%. In addition, it now costs 11% of base mana, up from 7%.

Sad tree. Sad sad stump of his former glory.

I guess my druid will be staying on the bench while my pally continues to get all the attention for healing heroics and such.

Even my priest is getting more love these days.

And Now For a New Baby Joar

I managed to hit level 85 on my Rogue on Friday. His leveling time wasn't particularly fast - coming in at 6/9 of the toons that I've done so far - but I think that likely has as much to do with some of the personal distractions while leveling as the essence of the character. I also initially took a shot at some battlegrounds just to see what the xp per hour would be. It didn't take long to figure out that it was going to be a lot less, so I quickly switched by to questing.

One thing to note here - just because of the timing of when I hit 85 on my 8th toon and when I was working on this one - there was not a Call to Arms Battleground weekend at any point in my leveling process - so results on xp per hour for battlegrounds might have been higher taking advantage of that.

So now I'm off to do something that I haven't done in a while and that is level a toon all the way from 1. So is born my new goblin warrior - Joarmama. Credit to my guildy Tyronwa for coming up with the name. Seems perfect for a goblin warrior!

Anyway - he's outfitted in a full set of BoAs and is off to the races. Managed to get him to level 13 during the day on Friday. I didn't really play much at all this past weekend, but we'll see how far I can get him over the next week or so.

There is part of me that is debating at level 15 switching and leveling him strictly through the Dungeon Finder tool as a tank. It's something I've never been particularly good at, but I can't help thinking if I just focused on doing that and nothing but, I might have better results at end-game. And, I'm really in no major hurry to get this last toon to 85. As I understand it, the next expansion probably isn't going to be out in the next month or two - so I've got plenty of time to get this last toon all the way there.

Ding! Level 85 #8

So I managed to hit level 85 on the mage on Monday making him my 8th character to achieve that. I'll now be moving on to my last level 80 - my rogue.

Leveling the mage was fairly easy as well. I leveled him as frost and that continues to be a very durable leveling spec. Lot's of "oh shit" buttons that you can push if things start to go bad. His total leveling time from 80-85 was 22 hrs and 27 minutes, which puts him in 3rd of the 8 toons that I've leveled so far. I also managed to max both his skinning and herbalism during the leveling process, so that included time for that.

On the rogue, after looking things over, I'm planning to level him as combat. I expect he's going to be a bit of a challenge in the early going as he's still sitting mostly in quest greens from Northrend and sporting a whopping 16K health. On the other hand, with Improved Recuperate from the Combat Tree combined with Deadly Momentum from the Assassintation tree, I should be able to just grind away with Recuperate and Slice and Dice constantly refreshed. Should make him a formidable leveling machine.

This may be one of those classes and toons where its actually more efficient to just grind on mobs rather than necessarily completing quests. Of course, you lose out on the quest rewards that way, but I may still do a bit more grinding than normal.

The rogue has mining and engineering as his professions, so will likely work on those a bit along the way as well.

Level 85 #8 - Mage

So I managed to get to level 85 on the mage yesterday. Leveling as frost continued to be very easy. I

Level 85 #7 - Death Knight

Hit 85 on the Death Knight finally yesterday and have already gotten going on the mage, who is almost to 81. The Death Knight was very easy to level, and ended up being my second fastest leveling time despite leveling mining all the way to max.

I stockpiled what I gathered and will come back to leveling blacksmithing later on.

I did try a handful of dungeons on the death knight just to see if my previous conclusions on xp per hour had changed. In both cases, the dungeon resulted in a significant drop in xp per hour.

When I start the rogue for my final toon, I may try doing some battlegrounds on the rogue, just to see what the difference is there.

In the case of the DK, during Deepholm and Uldum, running instances dropped my average xp per hour to right around 1 million, from 1.5 million which is what I was easily hitting while questing. And to drop the average to that, the total xp per hour while running dungeons must actually be much lower than 1 million.