Still Not 80...

Well - my travel and work schedule last week and this past weekend along have gotten noticeably in the way of me getting Branwyn the rest of the way to 80. I did finally manage to hit 79 yesterday, but almost exclusively through questing. I just don't have the patience to wait for the battleground q's in order to level through the battlegrounds, so I've basically just given up on it. It's really not that difficult to just quest the rest of the way. I may give it one more shot on Wednesdasy doing chain AV's to see how it goes and how long the Q's are. Wondering if they've gotten any shorter since the XP nerf hit.

I'm also toying with the idea of picking up my Death Knight after I ding 80 on Branwyn and being a little bit more active with him. I was messing around with spec's and test dummies yesterday and was really surprised with the consistent level of dps I was able to maintain with fairly crappy gear. It would be a decent amount of work to go back and get the Sons of Hodir rep, but it might be worth doing. I've also been wanting to just go through and do a ton of the Classic and Outland dungeons on one of my 80's, and it just seems like that might be easier on the Death Knight than on the Warlock - who tends to be a bit on the squishy side for instance soloing.

My other choices were to finish leveling my alliance hunter - currently sitting at level 60, which would probably take at least 24 hours of play time to get to 80. Or to level a paladin, which would probably be slightly better than the Death Knight for what I'm looking to do, but my pally is only at level 26, so I'd be looking at a ton of time to get him to 80.

Either way, I will definitely be leveling both the hunter and paladin all the way to 80 eventually, but I may spend some time doing 5 mans on the Death Knight and grinding Sons of Hodir and Argent Tournament stuff in the mean time. I might try to get Oracle Rep on the Death Knight too. Never bothered with that on my warlock, and might be fun to try. Oh - and will still almost definitely spend time leveling my other toons as well!

Leveling Update

Well, I managed to get Branwyn to level 78 over the weekend and was all prepared to launch into my plan of finishing leveling to 80 in battlegrounds. And that's when I discovered the flaw in my plan. As it turns out, the queue's for the battlegrounds in the 70-79 bracket have gotten ridiculously long on my server. It can easily be 30 minutes, and hour or more to get into any particular battleground.

Now it used to be the general consensus that AV was the way to go, but with yesterday's nerf, the experience gains have gotten to be a lot less and the waits to get in have gotten much longer.

So, I think I'm back to questing on Branwyn for those last two levels. After that, we'll see what the battlegrounds look like in the 80 bracket on my server. The lines seem longer than normal for my level 80 toons as well, so might be time for a server switch.

After getting Branwyn those last two levels, it will definitely be time to pick things up with my Alliance hunter and get him the rest of the way. I will likely try to work on the alliance hunter simultaneously with a few horde toons, just for fun.

Woo hoo blacksmithing!

Well - this has certainly been a productive week. Branwyn just dinged 73 today. He'd probably be much further along, but I've been working on other stuff on my other toons. I know - total lack of focus. It happens to us altholics. As long as I'm having fun, I don't really care.

I am definitely just going to level Branwyn another 5 levels through questing to 78 and then will outfit him in the crafted PvP gear and go from 78 to 80 through battlegrounds, just for fun. Unless I get further distracted, I think this weekend will be focused on getting Branwyn the rest of the way to 78 and hopefully get some battleground runs in.

So my big distraction has been blacksmithing. I finally managed to get Tormal essentially maxed. What do you mean by "essentially" - basically I'm at 440/450, which means I can make all the high level stuff that I want. As near as I can tell, there are no new recipes to pick up at 450. I've got everything...so I'm maxed, right? So I can finally make myself a Titansteel Destroyer and get rid of that rather pathetic De-Raged Waraxe I've been rolling with. And Branwyn will have his Titansteel Guardian all ready for him when he hits 80!

I also finally managed to get Joar those last couple of points in enchanting, so now he is legimately maxed at 450 - which does make a difference in enchanting since you can only do the stamina bracer enchant at 450...

Oh - and I continue to sneak over to my alliance hunter who recently hit level 60. There are enough differences between the Alliance and the Horde quests in Outland to keep me at least mildly interested.

Once Branwyn hits 80, I've got some decisions to make. I would like to finish leveling my hunter, although I'm increasing thinking of leaving him on the alliance side so I can continue to see all of that content. I would like to level a toon with herbalism and alchemy - which will come in very handy with my other profs for the transmutes - but can't decide between picking up the pally or the shaman. Seems like both would be fun. We'll see.

There's Something You Don't See Every Day

I was running a PUG of regular Naxx with my druid yesterday. Trying out my new resto spec and healing gear. We were humming along pretty nicely when our tank announced that he had to go. One of our members started hitting General and his Guild chat looking for a replacement tank and managed to find a death knight to come help us.

Wow. Can't say I've ever seen anything quite like this. The guy was geared mostly in cloth and leather with a fairly random assortment of stats, including quite a few pieces of spellpower and mp5 gear - obviously essential stats for a death knight tank. ;-)

Needless to say, the run did not progress well from there, and we ended up calling it after a half dozen wipes on trash. A couple of us in the group tried to whisper the guy to ask if he wanted some suggestions on gearing a death knight tank, but apparently he was gearing based on how the pieces looked on his toon. To each his own!

Northrend!

It just amazes me how fast the weeks fly these days. My druid, Branwyn, just recently dinged 69 in Northrend. The quests there seems to be going pretty easily with the flying tome provided courtesy of my other toons. Interestingly enough, I'm starting to lose motivation for the push to 80, now that I've finally gotten him to Northrend. So you might see me go back and pick up that hunter for a little while. Who knows.

Tormal has also made really good progress on his mining (which is now at 400) although not as good on Blacksmithing - because I refuse to pay 20g for a stack of mageweave cloth, which is what it is going for on my server these days. Yes - there's not much there, so folks can dramatically overcharge.

I know - this would be a huge opportunity to go farm mageweave and make some serious coin, but I'm just not that motivated! lol

The paladin spent the entire week on the shelf, so nothing to report there.

Joar now sits only needing 4 more badges for his new Wintergrasp pants, and also got into a pretty decent Ulduar 25 run with the guild, where we got Kologarn, Auriya and Hodir down before wiping a few times on Thorim and calling it quits (we only had 18 people still in the raid by the time we got to Thorim).

We also tried CC25 / Anub'arak on Sunday night with about 19 people as well before discovering we definitely needed a full raid for that beast!

All in all, a good WoW week. I'm debating putting Branwyn in pure Overcast gear once he hits 78 and just leveling the rest of the way to 80 in battlegrounds just to see what it is like. I also tried briefly leveling my priest (who is at level 14) in WSG, before deciding that the XP there is probably too low to make that very viable - better to switch at 20 when I can start doing AB's. I still like the idea of leveling the priest through BG's rather than questing, particularly since I can use Joar's tailoring skills to keep him geared.

Hey, It's September?

When the heck did that happen. Wasn't it just July? Where did the summer go?

A couple of interesting developments this week on the character front. My druid has now finished up Hellfire Peninsula and is now questing comfortably through Zangarmash, which he finds much more appealing because of all the Cenarion influences around! He's level 64 now. The only new development at that level was Lifebloom, which he'll be using pretty extensively once I switch him to resto at 80. But for now, my dungeon requests seem to center around tanking, not healing.

I've also decided to go ahead and finish leveling the professions for my Death Knight, Tormal. Mining and Blacksmithing. Part of this is a desire to have great gear available for when I finish up the druid and start leveling my paladin again. Part of it is I hate not being able to mine every time I have this toon in Wintergrasp and there's a Titanium node RIGHT THERE..and I can't do anything about it.

My son is also in the process of leveling up Jewelcrafting, so those will work well together. Anyway, those professions may get the bulk of my attention this week (or at least for the next couple of days) and then I'll return to the Druid.

I'm in much less of a rush to level now. Once the paladin is done, I may level the Shaman, or I may just wait and continue leveling other classes once the expansion comes out in the hopes that they will make the Azeroth portion as good as the Outland and Northrend portions are now. Oh, and my Alliance hunter is still waiting at 58 to be leveled the rest of the way. I may wait for faction changes on that one. I did a few of the early quests in Outland and was somewhat disappointed to realize they're basically exactly the same has the Horde quests, just a different quest giver. I'm assuming there will be some differences eventually - not likely to do the Mag'har chain for example - but my initial disappointment was enough to put that toon back on the shelf. He'll likely sit there until the paladin is done. Poor Reladaar.

I think I've also settled on my profession mixes at least for now. I currently have Tailoring, Enchanting, Mining, Blacksmithing, Skinning and Leatherworking covered between the toons I now have close to 80. The hunter is also skinning and leatherworking, but I will likely change that. I'm thinking the paladin will go herbalism and alchemy (although I might save that for a goblin) and then I'm just wondering if I even want to bother with either inscription or engineering. I'm thinking no, but we'll see.