WoW PvP and More Rift

So spent a big chunk of the weekend doing more PvP on WoW. My mage and my rogue are now almost completely geared out. I think once the two of those are done, I might start to focus more on Rift while waiting for the next patch.

On Rift, I've been a bit more focused on the mage lately, rather than the cleric, and have now gotten the mage to level 31. I'm finding the warlock / necromancer combo to have a lot of survivability and almost no downtime from a leveling standpoint. I'm currently rolling through Scarwood Reach, having finished Scarlet Gorge a little before I thought I would. I think I probably abandoned Gloamwoods a bit to early.

In any case, the leveling process has been pretty straightforward so far. The story line through each zone is pretty decent and each individual zone tends to have a culminating event type quest and story line that's very similar to the way WoW has redone many of the new early level zones.

My only major issue continues to be ease of transport between zones. It looks like so far that there is only one city in each zone with a "portcullis" that allows faster transport between cities. So there's no easy way to get between major bases in each zone. Also, while in the earlier zones like Silverpines, there were calling trainers in that same major city, that doesn't appear to be the case anymore, so it requires heading back to one of the major cities to train new spell levels every few levels.

So far, incorporating leveling through dungeon queue's doesn't seem to be particularly feasible given the incredibly long queue lengths - typically well over an hour, unless you sign up for healing or tanking. All that being said, it has still been an enjoyable leveling process overall. My goal here is to get a character of each calling to max level before the release of SWTOR. We'll see how that goes.

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.