Good progress

This past week, I've continued to make great progress on leveling my various alliance characters.  I've managed to push my hunter all the way to level 66, just questing in Hellfire and Zangarmash.  I'm likely going to delay taking him to Northrend until level 70, not because that's necessarily more efficient, but because I'm extremely tired of questing in Northrend.

My lower level toons are all working their way nicely through their respective starting areas and I've had a few that have hit 20 and gotten their mounts.

I'm debating switching to dungeon leveling for a number of my toons including bear druid, paladin, priest and shaman.  I never really did dedicated dungeon leveling on any of my characters, so I'm curious to see how it goes for long periods of time.  Plus, I'm interested in trying low level tanking and healing on a variety of different characters.  I'm going to wait till level 18 to start on my bear druid so that he has swipe before I try.  The others, I might just jump right in.  Of course, the druid is sitting at 17 right now, so we're not talking about a lengthy wait.

How They Breeze By

Ah the low levels are fun.  They just sort of breeze by.  A total of 18 levels in 6 days.  And I wasn't playing all that much for most of that time.  If only all the levels went so quickly.

I've been making really good progress through the lower levels on most of my alliance characters.  I've also figured out an easy way to keep track of all of their professions and have just lined them up exactly with all of my Horde characters, making it extremely simple to keep track of who has which profession.

I'm going to switch back to some of the slightly more challenging fare though and work on pushing my Hunter further through Outlands.  We'll see how that goes.

Leveling Alts Before MoP

Having achieved a lot of my goals for Cataclysm much earlier than I thought I would, I've been playing a lot of SWTOR lately.  I managed to get a Republic Trooper to the level cap, and I'm well on my way to having an Imperial Agent there as well.  During that time, my WoW activity has been limited to doing some auction house crafting activities each morning and running LFR on a couple of toons once a week.

However, I'm starting to get a little bored with the questing and leveling experience in SWTOR and I find myself coming back to WoW, like returning to and comfortable old blanket.  It really surprises me that I'm getting bored with running the quests on Dromund Kaas for the third time, but I seem to have no issue at all doing the same quests in Hellfire Peninsula for the 12th or 13th time in some cases.  Perhaps it is the familiarity, perhaps it's because WoW just seems more polished and runs better on my machine.  Some of it is certainly that the extended dialogue scenes at each quest pick up and turn in get to be tiresome and time consuming after a while.

The whole experience has really made me appreciate how polished and refined the questing experience has become in WoW.

I think part of it too is that in SWTOR you are constantly faced with a lot of Light Side / Dark Side ethical decisions impacting what appear to be real people, not fantasy creatures.  I play these games for entertainment and for escape from the difficult decisions of the real world.  I'm not sure I'm looking to be making those in my game too.

So I'm turning back to WoW, and I see that I have a whole stable full of alliance characters just waiting to be leveled!  So I'm going to dive back in and see how far I can get before the MoP drops.

I've already gotten my alliance Death Knight to 85, so I've got 9 characters left to go.  Here's where they currently stand:

Hunter - level 61
Paladin - level 16
Warlock - level 13
Rogue - level 13
Warrior - level 12
Mage - level 12
Druid - level 10
Shaman - level 10
Priest - level 10

At least in theory, at my normal pace, I should be able to gain 123 levels between now and when MoP launches, assuming a mid-September release.  That should allow me to get my hunter to 85 along with one other toon, and make pretty decent progress on yet another, or I could mess with all of them just a little bit.

We'll see how it goes.  I'm also going to take this opportunity to try out a few new addons that might be helpful for leveling and will report back here what I find in that category.

The End of A Bad Series of Rolls

So on the 41st attempt, I finally managed to win the roll for the tier shoulders on my death knight, ending an impressive string of futility.  This boosted my average iLvL by an impressive 3 points, by upgrading from my ZA/ZG shoulders and also by allowing me to switch from the tier head piece to the valor head piece.

So I now only need two more pieces of gear on the death knight, both of which can be obtained from the last half of LFR.

I'm debating which character to work on gearing next, but I think I've settled on working on the rogue, since that playstyle seems to match up better with my connection / lag issues.  Anything with a long cast time tends to be death for my dps.

Right now, SWTOR is holding my attention from a leveling standpoint, but there is at least a chance I might go back to working on Alliance characters prior to MoP release.