More Leveling

So I managed to get the Shadow Priest to level 65, and all the way to Terrokar Forest. I'll be switching over to the mage for the next few days, so we'll see if we can get her caught up. It looks like the shadow priest could be the first of the toons to hit Northrend. Dispersion has been an enormous benefit while leveling cutting down very substantially on the time that I need to take to stop and drink and also making it easier to use all my dots on mobs, making them go down faster.

I'm also working on running the daily heroic on a few of my level 80's - particularly the druid and warlock. I'm still a little frustrated with the dps that my warlock does, but not enough to switch over to dps'ing on my death knight or hunter or anything extreme like that!

Gearing up the paladin for tanking continues to go fairly well and he's now got his first piece of T9 gear and is well on his way to his second piece.

I Am A Shadow Fart!

So, in case you can't tell, I'm loving Dispersion on my Shadow Priest. Something about dissolving every two minutes into a dark shadowy fart cloud and having all of my mana restored in the process is just more fun than I can stand.

I have made a lot more progress on leveling over the last week. I managed to get the rogue from 45 to 50, so he's getting even closer to Outland. I then picked up the shadow priest and got him all they way to 63. He's now starting all of the Zangarmash quests, the first of my remaining toons to get that far.

I've continued to work a little bit on gearing both my resto druid and my prot pally. I've got about 12 more frost emblems to go on the druid in order to get the Purified Lunar Dust trinket I've been wanting, and from there I guess I'll be saving for T10.

On the paladin, he's still pretty dramatically undergeared, but doesn't seem to have any trouble tanking any heroic thrown his way. Note that I haven't done any of the ICC 5 mans yet. I did manage to get my first piece of T9 on him next, but will probably go for the iLvL 245 Triumph shoulders next rather than the next piece of T9. The set bonuses for prot pallies seem to be somewhat uninspiring, and the shoulders are a much bigger upgrade since I'm currently rocking the Tempered Saronite!

Top Arena Classes and Spec's

It's always somewhat interesting to me the ebb and flow of classes that do well or don't do well in arena in any given season. Let me start off by noting that I don't tend to do much arena myself as I'm more of a battleground guy, and success in arenas does not necessarily translate into success on the battleground.

It does however provide some insight into what classes are currently performing well in PvP and which are not.

So if you look at the current worldwide player rankings for the current season, here are effectively the top 7 classes and specs represented in the Top 100. I'm listing 7 here because there are three classes and spec's that are tied for fifth.

Discipline priests - 15
Affliction warlocks - 11
Holy paladins - 11
Elemental shaman - 8
Resto shaman - 6
Resto druid - 6
Marksmanship hunter - 6

The other thing on the total list that interests me is that rogues are very underrepresented with only 4 in the top 100, and 3 of those were subtlety spec instead of the normal mutilate / prep build.

There is also only one death knight in the top 100, which is a long way from a couple of season ago which was dominated by death knights and holy paladins.

Finally, A Tank to Call Home!

So it must have just been an issue with me not understanding the mechanics of either bear or death knight tanking, because I've now gone to the trouble of gearing up my paladin a little bit for tanking (and when I say a little bit, yes he is defense capped with a 544 defense skill and unbuffed health of about 32.4K), and the whole tanking thing seems to be making a lot more sense on the paladin than it did on any of the other toons that I've tried.

I did have one rather rough Azjol-Nerub run, but I'm not entirely sure that was all my fault as the dps in the group didn't seem to have a grasp of the aggro reset feature of those lovely Skirmishers.

We can tank if we want to
We can leave your friends behind
'Cause your friends don't tank and if they don't tank
Well they're no friends of mine.
I say, we can go where we want to
A place where they will never find
And we can act like we come from out of this world
Leave the real one far behind
And we can tank.

My sincere apologies to Men Without Hats.

So, I may spend some time working on getting some additional gear for this toon, which will obviously further delay my leveling plans. But lets face it, with the beta version of Cataclysm still not released, and an expectation of Cataclysm being under beta for around four months, I've really got more than enough time to finish leveling these last four toons.

Once I have this tank fully badge geared, I will then have essentially one character from each role more or less fully geared - healer, ranged dps, melee dps and tank. My death knight / melee dps isn't as fully geared as he could be, so that might be a project for after I finish leveling, but he can still roll about 3K dps in a heroic, so it doesn't really seem to matter much in his case.

Leveling has been going well with all of that. I've been rolling along really well on the mage and have her settled in Outland. The Shaman has continued to progress and is now at level 62.

I've spent enough time in instances on all three of these toons now to be able to confirm without a doubt that leveling is much faster questing through Outland than it is running dungeons. The only potential exception is knocking out one Ramps run at level 58 which will get you almost all the way to 59 in one run.

I'll be picking up the rogue for a chunk of this week. He's the farthest behind at this point, having gotten skipped in the leveling rotation once or twice because of real life conflicts, so he's sitting at only level 45 with a long way to go until Outland. We'll see how much progress we can make during this scheduled leveling time between now and Thursday!

Can't....Stop....Leveling

So I really tried to stop leveling all of my alts and focus on Loremaster for a while, but as it turns out, the pull of my various alts is just too strong. I did manage to spend a couple of weeks working on Loremaster and knocked off 300 or so quests, which is good, but I guess I'll pick it back up once I'm done with everything else!

So I've now managed to get my second toon of the final four into Outland - my Shadow Priest. I went ahead and dual-spec'd him as Discipline and figured I'd try my hand at healing a few 5 mans - particularly Hellfire Ramparts. I originally tried Holy, but found it was just way too mana-inefficient in todays environment where no one in these 5 man pugs bothers to listen to your pleas for mana.

So, I changed up to Discipline and that seemed to work much better. So he's now sitting at level 58, and almost to 59. One lesson learned on healing in Outlands is that if you get a group with all Death Knights, it's probably worth it to just drop and wait out the debuff. Nothing good is likely to happen in that scenario.

I'm going to be working on the mage next, with the goal of getting her to Outland within the next day or so. She's currently working through Un'Goro Crater at level 55.

So, with the delay in leveling from my stint with Loremaster, my stats for May don't look very good. I finished the month gaining 20 levels in 31 days, or about 0.6 levels per day. It's brought my average for the year down to 1.13, and the current forecast to have these last four toons to 80 is for August 28th, so a significant slip from last month. Still, should be well in advance of the Cataclysm release at this rate.

It continues to bother me that I don't have a geared tank amongst my toons, so I may go ahead and dig into my piles of gold (you accumulate tons of cash leveling all these toons) and gear up a nice little pally tank to try out. We'll see how that goes.

Here's where we stand on the four remaining toons:

Joarbek - Enhancement Shaman - level 60 (will pick him up again in a couple of days and may dual spec Resto / Elemental and see about healing my way to 80)
Joarvyk - Shadow / Discipline Priest - level 58
Joara - Frost Mage - level 55
Joarstab - Combat Rogue - level 45

Getting Close on Kalimdor

So things have gotten really busy with real life lately as I mentioned in an earlier post, so I haven't made a ton of progress on Loremaster in the last week or so.

I'm basically at exactly the same place on Eastern Kingdoms - 258 quests still to go. In Kalimdor, I've just gotten down into the double digits with 99 quests to go, for a total of 357.

I've got a few quest chains that I want to wrap up in Kalimdor, and then I think I'm going to hop over to Eastern Kingdoms to make sure that I get the credit for all the quests that have you flying back and forth between continents before starting on some of the instances quests.

The big ones that I still need to knock out in Kalimdor from an instance perspective are Wailing Caverns, Maraudon, Dire Maul and Zul'Farrak.

After Memorial Day is over, I should have a little bit more time to play and continue working on knocking this out.

Loremaster Update

I know it's only been two days since I posted about my decision to finish Loremaster before continuing to move forward with leveling my alts, but just wanted to provide a quick update.

I managed to complete about 100 quests in Kalimdor since Sunday (although granted mostly low hanging fruit like Durotar and Mulgore). I've also started to go back to figure out quests that I missed in other areas and have so far covered Winterspring, Thousand Needles, Barrens (amazing to me how many quests in Barrens I had skipped), Felwood, Feralas, Stonetalon Mountains, and a few in Tanaris.

My quest log is now full, so I have a few that I need to turn in and then I'm going to focus on Silithius for a little while as there seem to be an enormous amount of quests there that I can work on for a while, having never quested there while leveling.

I'm starting to feel like I am going to have to go back and run some of the instance quests that I'd been skipping thinking that those wouldn't really count anyway. I feel like I'm going to come up short based on what I still have to go if I don't knock those out.

So here's where we stand as of today:

Kalimdor - 206 quests to go.
Eastern Kingdoms - 258 quests to go

There have been some great quests that I've done that I never did on any of my toons that have been really interesting. Counterattack! - which you get from Regthar Deathgate in the Barrens after completing Herzul Bloodmark - a great quest where you defend the outpost from waves of centaur attacks. Not particularly hard as a level 80, but would probably be quite epic and difficult at level.

The fun thing about this is it's almost like a puzzle figuring out which quests count, which don't and which you can do or don't have. I'm using an addon called Everyquest to track completed quests which makes things a little easier, and it does display zone quests that you haven't done yet, but it takes a little research to figure out which of the undone quests are ones that you can do and are likely to count.

I'll continue to keep you posted!

Outland Loremaster

So I've seen more and more speculation on various fan sites and other blogs that the Loremaster Achievement may possibly be removed once Cataclysm is released. So I've decided to go ahead and finish it up on Joar now rather than wait until later and run the risk that I won't have enough time to finish it before the release. After all, I will clearly be able to continue to level alts after Cataclysm, so that can always be delayed.

So I spent some time yesterday focused on knocking out the rest of Outland Loremaster on Joar yesterday and finally got it done!

The two final areas for me where Blades Edge Mountain and Shadowmoon Valley. The Netherwing quest chain helped a lot towards finishing Shadowmoon Valley, but there were also three drop quests that were pretty crucial in getting these things done:


http://thottbot.com/i31345
http://thottbot.com/i30579
http://thottbot.com/i32621

A couple of these were pretty difficult to solo, but I did manage to do it on my lock (so a Death Knight or Paladin should be able to do it while afk)

For Blade's Edge, these are some that I've been working on for a while. The Ogrila quests are pretty key here to getting these done.

As near as I can tell, there are two somewhat difficult routes to completing this one. The first is to solo the groups quests that you get from Mog'dorg (who sits on a tower near the Blade's Edge Arena) that have you run around killing Gronn's. I enlisted the help of my son's paladin and knocked these out.

The other is to grind out Consortium rep until you reached Revered, which will open another series of Consortium quests for you at Bashir Landing. If you don't want to group or can't seem to solo the Gronn, this is probably the easiest way to go.

Anyway, I ended up knocking all of these out yesterday and am now heading to Kalimdor to work on the quests there. The main areas that I didn't do while leveling there are Durotar, Mulgore, Silithius, Azshara and Winterspring. But I'm sure there are tons of quests in areas that I did hit, so it should be fun.

What I still have to go is 316 quests in Kalimdor and 258 in Eastern Kingdoms.

A Little Real Life Delay

I've gotten a little busy on the real life side for the last week or so, so my leveling so far in May has slowed significantly. I did manage to get my Shaman up to level 60 after last weeks update, so he's now flying comfortably around Outland. I also managed to get another 3 levels on the rogue, and one more level on the shadow priest (although I'll still be working on the Shadow Priest until at least Thursday of this week, so should be able to knock out a couple of more levels.

The Shadow Priest continues to be a lot of fun. While he's still a pretty heavy mana drain, and likely will be for another 8-10 levels or so, he's great for leveling because all of his abilities are constantly healing him back to full. So as long as I keep myself well supplied with water, I can keep rolling pretty quickly. And Spirit Tap and his other Replenishment talents do cut down on the amount that I need to drink pretty significantly.

The rogue continues to be really strong for leveling. Constantly spamming Sinister Strike gets to be a little old after a while, so I've been tossing in a rupture every now and then just for fun. Or opening from stealth and starting with either a Garrote or a Cheap Shot - again - not because these are particularly more effective or faster - just makes things interesting.

Will likely spend a decent chunk of this coming weekend leveling the mage, so hoping to have her safely deposited in Outland before the end of the weekend. We'll see how that goes. I think my guild has given up on its attempted return to serious raiding, so that should give me a little bit more weekend time for leveling, since my healer probably won't get pulled into anything.

I did switch my warlock main over to demonology. It was certainly my favorite spec while leveling, and I'd seen a ton of data coming out about how demonology was now peforming much better than destro for raiding. Ran a couple of heroics and quickly got the feel back of the demonology rotation. Was really happy with my dps in heroics at least - so there seems to be some truth to the rumors!

So here's where we stand this week on the remaining 4 toons:

Joarbek - Enhancement Shaman - level 60
Joara - Frost Mage - level 52
Joarvyk - Shadow Priest - level 51
Joarstab - Combat Rogue - level 45.

My plan is to finish up Loremaster on Joar as soon as I get these last few toons to 80, so may start providing some data around what I still have to go on that as well. Might sneak in a few quests here and there working toward that goal as well.

Outland Ho!

So after a slight pause to get my profs caught up with my leveling, I finally took my Shaman to Outland. This was the first of my four simultaneous leveling toons to make to the next stage, so I'm really looking forward to the "zone at a time" questing experience of Outland.

Perhaps for the first five minutes or so, I'll forget how much I despise Hellfire Peninsula.

So I normally wait until I hit 80 to worry about leveling the professions on my toons, but for these last two crafters, I've been having my bank alt keep an eye out for low priced mats that they need. I've been amazed how incredibly expensive those mid-level herbs are on my server, so I decided it probably made the most sense to get my herbalism skill caught up on the shammy so he can pick a significant portion of his own for his inscription.

So, he's sitting at 300 on both now and ready to roll Outland.

Not sure how far he'll get before I move on to the next toon. I need to get the School of Hard Knocks Achievement on my main. It's the last piece I need for the meta achievement. So, I'm going to dedicate some time trying to get it before continuing with my leveling blitz. We'll see how it goes. I like to PvP a lot on my warlock, but I've never really seen his role in the battlegrounds as being the flag and node captures that are part of the achievement. He's more of a crowd control / death dealer type. So it'll be an adjustment to my play style, but we'll see how it goes.

If nothing else, it'll be decent honor, right!

April Leveling Update

Now that April is officially behind us, I wanted to go ahead and post my regular monthly leveling update and see how I was doing against my goal of getting my remaining four toons to 80 by Cataclysm.

For the month of April, I managed to gain a total of 36 levels, or an average of 1.2 levels per day. This was a huge improvement over March, which clocked in at just barely above 0.8 and is pretty in line with my total average for the year of 1.27.

At this pace, I should have the remaining four toons hit level 80 by around August 4th. That added about two days to my estimate from the end of March - still not a significant difference.

It doesn't seem likely that Cataclysm will launch before then given that the beta still isn't out, and the WOTLK beta took a little over four months, so even if they released tomorrow, we'd be looking at September 1st. That would still potentially give me enough time to finish up profs and get Loremaster on Joar as well.

All good goals!

I've also been gearing up both my druid and warlock some more, so that has taken some time away from leveling as well. Can't totally give up on the end game after all!

So, for the remaining toons, here's where they stand:

Joarbek - Enhancement Shaman - level 56
Joarvyk - Shadow Priest - level 50
Joara - Frost Mage - level 50
Joarstab - Combat Rogue - level 42

With any luck, by next months updates, all of these guys (except for probably the rogue) will be questing through Outland!