Ding! Level 85 #12

So I managed to hit 85 on my alliance hunter finally today.  My total played time to 85 was 3 days, 19 hours which is without a doubt an all-time record.  Clearly the nerfs to the Cataclysm zone leveling time had a big impact here as I suspect it decreased my time through Uldum and Twilight Highlands by probably 7 hours total.

So I'm going to go back into the rotation and continue working on the other 8 toons for the next 10 days or so until MoP drops.

I'm still also working through what my rotation is going to be for the toons to get to 90 once MoP releases in a little over a week now.

Here's my current thinking:

Warlock
Shadow Priest
Death Knight (these three are the toons that I currently tend to raid / run dungeons on the most, so I think it makes sense to get these three to max level the most quickly)

The non-gathering professions covered by these 3 include Tailoring, Enchanting, Alchemy and Blacksmithing.

I think the next set is really going to be profession driven, so here's what I'm thinking for the next group:

Paladin (jewelcrafter)
Hunter (alchemist as well)

Shaman (inscriptionist)
Druid (leatherworker)

then the last 3 are just all gathering profession toons, so what I'm thinking will be:

Mage
Rogue
Warrior

I'll then probably go ahead and do a Horde panda monk before switching to my alliance toons, where I will likely do Hunter and then Death Knight on the Alliance side.

Ding! Rift Level 50 #1

So my mage finally hit level 50 on Rift yesterday.  Total played time to 50 was 3 days and 5 hours, which makes it one of the fastest times to max level of any MMO that I've played recently.  Compare that for example to 6 days and 5 hours for SWTOR and times that tend to be around 4 days for now for WoW.

So now I'm tasked with figuring out what to do with this character now that I've leveled them.  I don't have any of my professions maxed, so that seems to be a good first step.  There are also two pretty interesting epic quest lines that I've gotten started on.  I'm not yet geared enough to do expert dungeons, so I'm left waiting for normal dungeon random queues to try to gear up for experts, while I sell off stuff from my gathering professions to try to get enough gear to qualify for experts.

All in all, it's quite a bit to do.  There are also several factions that have daily quests that eventually can reward mounts and nice enchants at various rep levels.

Cataclysm XP nerf with 5.0.4

Just wanted to put up a quick post here to confirm that they xp nerfs for the Cataclysm zones are officially in place as of last weeks patch.  I had parked my hunter prior to the patch in Uldum at about 3.1 million xp, which had him a little more than half way there before, but after the patch, I logged in to find him just a quest or two shy of dinging 84.

So I quickly knocked out a few and then he's off to Twilight Highlands, which show around 5 million xp to 85 instead of the normal 10 million.

I've mostly been messing around with my various toons and their new talents and glyphs lately though.

I've been really pleased with my destro spec on my warlock.  Significantly less to manage in terms of buffs and cooldowns and if I time my embers and chaos bolts right on damage vulnerability phases (Black Blood on Zonozz, after lightning or ice on Hagara) I can really put out some ridiculous numbers chaining 4 quick Chaos Bolts together.

I haven't had the chance to try too much on the shadow priest at this point, although I'm anxious to try that as well.

I've also been playing a decent amount of Rift during patch times for WoW and have my mage just a bar or two from 50 at this point.  I still need to go back to do professions for the mage, but I'm anxious to see what expert dungeons are like.  I'm debating finishing up my Outfitter skill.  While it does give you the ability to make some nice gear, it seems to be avaiable pretty cheap on the auction house.  So I'm debating just using gathering skills or maybe Apothecary and just use plat to buy whatever gear I need.

Mostly PvP and a little Rift

So for the past week or so, I've mostly been doing more PvP across my existing level 85 toons, trying to get several of them honor capped before the patch dropped yesterday.  I managed to get 5 of them fully honor capped, so should have a nice amount of new gear to purchase.

It's also put me to almost 74,000 honorable kills across all of my toons:

Here is where they all stand:

Warlock - 29,479
Druid - 9,227
Shadow Priest - 7,925
Mage - 6,806
Death Knight - 6,332
Rogue - 5,182
Paladin - 3,969
Hunter - 3,379
Shaman - 1,003
Warrior - 622

Total:  73,924

Of course, I'll be grinding out full sets of Cataclysmic gear on at least 3 of these toons before MoP just for fun, so I expect those numbers will go quite a bit higher over the next month before MoP.

I've also gone back to playing a little Rift lately and have managed to get my mage up to level 47, playing a combination warlock / necromancer spec.  My next highest toon is my cleric that plays primarily as shaman and is sitting at level 25.

Cataclysm Zone Leveling XP Nerf

So my alliance hunter managed to make it to Uldum potentially just in time for a nerf of the xp required to level through the Cataclysm zones.  So what's a concurrent leveling altoholic to do.

The rest of the alliance army is sitting in the mid to high 30's, so it doesn't really impact them. It hasn't been verified for sure if these xp requirement changes are going to go into effect with the pre-patch next week or with the ultimate release of MoP a month from now.

However, just in case, here is my plan for my hunter:

The leveling through Uldum (83-84) used to take 5.2 million xp and will now take 3.469 million xp.  The push from 84-85 through Twilight Highlands used to take 9.2 million xp and will now take 4.6 million.

My plan for now is to continue to work my hunter through Uldum for the rest of this week and get him slightly under that 3.469 million xp level that should theoretically be required for level 84 after the nerf.  That way, if it does go into effect with the patch, I can do one or two more quests in Uldum, level and then move on to Twilight Highlands.

I've also continued to do a decent amount of PvP on both my warlock and my shadow priest and have moved my overall total on my main server to 71,578 HK's.

I also managed to make a full pass through the rest of the alliance army and get part of the way into another pass, so here's where all the toons of the alliance army now sit:

Hunter - level 83
Druid - 36
Mage - 35
Paladin - 34
Priest - 33
Rogue -34
Shaman - 34
Warlock - 38
Warrior - 32.

I should be able to get the hunter to 85 pretty quickly after the pre-patch drops, and then I might actually work on driving one more toon to 85 before MoP hits - probably the warlock.

I'm back

After an entire week away from WoW, I'm back at it as of yesterday.  Given my time away, I really haven't made much progress from what was described in my last post.  I've managed to move my Alliance Hunter from level 78 to level 81, and he's now getting close to being done with Hyjal.

I've also done a decent amount of PvP and have now passed the 70,000 HK level on my Garrosh toons, and am currently sitting at 70,314.

I'll likely do a little bit of Deepholm on the hunter before switching back to the other 8 alliance toons.

July Leveling Results

So my flirtation with more PvP on my existing Horde level 85's has slowed down my leveling quite a bit, but I still had a pretty good month of July.  I managed to gain 59 levels, or just slightly under 2 levels per day, which is still well in excess of my long-term average.  If I can keep that pace up, we'll say that'll give me approximately 100 more levels before MoP drops and these poor guys get put on hold behind the existing (by then 12) 85's and likely a Panda Monk.  At that rate, though, all of my remaining 8 toons should be somewhere in the 40's, which seems like a pretty good place to leave them.

So here is where we stand today:

Hunter - 78
Druid - 31
Mage - 31
Paladin - 32
Priest - 30
Rogue - 32
Shaman - 30
Warlock - 35
Warrior - 30

I've also been doing a fair amount of PvP on my existing level 80's.  I'm amazed how the trends seem to ebb and flow over the course of the weeks.  There will be days where the Horde seems to go on a huge run, and then a period of days where the alliance seems to be downright invincible.

I'm sitting just a little under 70,000 honorable kills across all of my characters and finally managed to get that 9th character over the 1,000 HK mark, so now it's just my warrior sitting underneath that level, and he's at 622. 

I've also started to debate my leveling order for MoP.  Unlike Cata, where I had my Paladin and Druid go first, I think I'm going to give the honor of going first to the original Joar.  While he's not always the toon that I play the most, or raid the most consistently with, he is the one that I think of as my main.

Here's the order I'm debating at the moment:

Joar - Warlock
Joardk - Death Knight
Joarvyk - Shadow Priest
Joarshot - Hunter
Joaridan - Paladin
Joarwyn - Druid
Joarbek - Shaman
Joarnak - Mage
Joarstab - Rogue
Joarmama - Warrior
Joartobenamed - Panda Monk
Melric - DK
Melpar - Hunter

The downside of this approach is that it puts my jewelcrafter (paladin) and inscriptionist (shaman) pretty late in the process, so I may move them up a bit.

I'll also be very interested in what the leveling times are to 90.  For the 9 characters that I leveled immediately after Cata launched, the total time ranged from a high of 35 hours for my paladin - who was the first toon out of the gate at launch (and thus competing for quest mobs, etc.) to the fastest time of 21 hours, 28 minutes, which went to the shadow priest.  The average seemed to be around 23-24 hours for each toon.  I'll be tracking it closely for all 12 to see where it comes out.

PvP and Leveling Update

I ended up doing a fair amount of PvP over the weekend, and have now finished equipping my shadow priest in full Ruthless - my second character to hit that mark after my warlock.  I've also made decent progress on my rogue and have been toying with quite a few of my other characters including my boomkin, my hunter, my shaman and my mage.  The group as a whole is closing in on the 70,000 Honorable Kills mark, sitting at 68,508 at the moment.  My rogue also passed the 5,000 HK's mark, my sixth toon to do so.  The paladin would be the next closest at 3,875, so I may actually change focus and work on him a bit next.

From a leveling standpoint, I've almost completed a full pass through the alliance army again.  My hunter is almost done with Northrend and ready to move on to the Cataclysm zones and most of the rest of the characters have passed that magic level 30. 

Here is where everyone sits at the moment:

Hunter - level 78
Druid - level 31
Mage - level 31
Paladin - level 32
Priest - level 30
Rogue - level 30
Shaman - level 30
Warlock - level 33
Warrior - level 30

It is really looking like July is going to finish up as a big month in terms of total levels gained, as I'm sitting at 55 total at the moment with about a week to go.

Is Regular Dragon Soul Now Easier Than LFR?

So of all the strange developments, I managed to get the Destroyer's End title this weekend on my shadow priest - not either of the characters that I typically raid with (my warlock or my death knight).  I went along with my son's guild, filling in for a missing dps.  And we facerolled the entire thing.

His guild has cleared Dragon Soul in it's entirety several times, but has not yet gotten any hard mode bosses down, so this is not a cutting edge, progression guild that was carrying me through.  I was really amazed by how easily everything went down.  We wiped once on gunship and that was it for wipes for the evening.  And we really only wiped on gunship because the dps took the drakes down too fast.

Having run a lot of LFR over the last few weeks to get those last few pieces of tier gear on various toons (so I can have the pleasure of replacing them with quest rewards within the first zone of MoP), I know that LFR is not getting any easier.  There is more general griefing and folks intentionally causing problems in LFR than I've ever seen, so getting all the way through LFR can take several hours usually through a number of wipes.

This full clear took less than two hours, and with a group that was not particularly well geared.  We only had two healers for the entire thing, and were using two death knight tanks, neither of which even had their four piece LFR sets.  And yet, we had one of those undergeared death knights successfully one tank Madness and several of the other bosses, with a 381 equipped average item level and a Pit Lord's Destroyer for weapon.  And it was easy.

Now I'm not saying this was a bad thing.  I had more fun doing that raid than I have in weeks in LFR, but it did raise the question in my mind of was that the right thing for Blizzard to do?  Other than the auto-queue, it now seems like it is easier to get 397 level gear than it is to get 384 level gear.

To Continue or Not?

So the more I mess around on the beta, the more I think it might be more fun to put the Alliance army on hold until after 5.0 drops.  It seems like leveling, particularly for a class like warlock, could be a lot more enjoyable once the changes to basic talents and mechanics are in place for MoP.  So I may switch my one toon at a time approach for now and just focus on getting the hunter through those last nine levels.

At this point, the alliance army has managed to gain at total of 38 levels so far at this point in July, so things are moving along really nicely.  Switching from dungeon finder to questing has made a big difference as well as I seem to be able to get three levels out of a full set of rested xp instead of just the two that I was getting from dungeon finder - the difference being the xp from the quest turn ins.

I'm still not sure that the quested approach is actually faster, although it seems to still be moving at a decent pace for the levels gains.  Unfortunately, xp per hour tends to fluctuate way too much at lower levels to be able to get a decent read on what the true differences are.

5th Character with 5,000 HK's

So I hit an interesting milestone yesterday.  My shadow priest got the achievement for 5,000 honorable kills.  Looking back, that's actually my 5th level 85 character to hit that amount.  While that's not a ton compared to a lot of the folks out there that rack up enormous numbers of honorable kills, I'm still pretty proud of what that represents.

My warlock is of course, pretty far out in front of the rest of the pack, sitting at over 28,000 honorable kills, which is still not a particularly enormous number.  Across all 10 of my level 85's, I'm currently sitting at a total of 66,498, which is a little bit more impressive.

I may work a little bit on my rogue next who is the next closes to the 5K mark, at 4,216.  Interestingly enough, both my warrior and my shaman are both under 1,000, and I wouldn't mind getting them both into 4 digit territory before MoP drops.

My shadow priest has two pieces of gear left to go before he's in full Ruthless (accompanying my warlock in that regard), so will likely finish that out before I focus on any other toons.

Here's the exact numbers as of yesterday:

Warlock - 28,005
Druid - 8,247
Mage - 6,624
Death Knight - 6,332
Priest - 5,021
Rogue - 4,216
Paladin - 3,818
Hunter - 2,855
Shaman - 799
Warrior - 581

Total:  66,498