Initial Results on Rotation Leveling

So part of the thought on leveling these last four toons on a rotations basis was a bit of an experiment around whether maximizing the rested xp in this fashion would outweigh the inefficiency that's bound to arise from picking up toons and setting them back down every few days.

So with the mage just hitting 80, I've finally got some data to look at that I wanted to share. Interestingly enough, the mage will actually be the "purest" set of data that I've got to work with. Both the shammy and the priest spent some time as Auction House alts prior to me kicking off their leveling plans. The rogue is somewhat pure, but has been leveling engineering along the way which will add a few hours to his time.

So interestingly enough, the initial set of data is not good for the rotational leveling plan. The mage finished at a played time of 6 days, 6 hours and 22 minutes. This compares to the paladin, which I leveled straight through at a time of 6 days, 4 hours and 33 minutes. Interestingly enough, even aside from what I had hoped were the benefits of rotating leveling to maximize rested xp, I expected the mage to do slightly better than the paladin for two primary reasons - never having to wait for a zeppelin because of teleports and being able to make your own food and water on the run.

So, score one for the benefits of leveling straight through!

Ding! Level 80 #6

Woo hoo! Hit 80 on the mage just a little while ago! Now off to the shammy!

I will likely work on gearing up the mage for PvE as soon as I hit my goals on the other toons. This toon just continued to be tremendous fun and do really crazy dps, so I'm very anxious to see how it does in heroics. But, for some reason I'm in a big hurry to get the rest of these toons to 80, so she'll have to wait for a while.

I've also managed to get my inscription basically maxed on my shammy, so now it's just engineering that I need to finish up, and it's currently at 395. Just waiting for some reasonably priced Cobalt.

I switched back to Enhancement on the shammy. Was getting tired of the caster thing, so thought it would be fun to go up and smash things in the face for a little while. I might switch back again at 75 once I get Lava Burst. Enhancement takes a lot longer to kill things, but seems to be a lot more survivable with less downtime.

The added length of time that it takes to burn things down I would think would drop the xp per hour, but we'll have to see.

Stay on Target

I just realized that this is my 100th blog post. I don't know whether to celebrate or be really afraid. That's a lot of posts about what most would consider a pretty mundane topic of leveling.

This past week has really been about the rogue and the shadow priest. We took a bit of a long weekend this past weekend so that slowed my leveling a bit, although my numbers for the month are still holding up pretty well. I managed to get the rogue to level 71 before switching to the shadow priest.

The rogue continues to be the most challenging of these remaining four toons in terms of overall survivability and leveling speed. I guess part of the issue is that the mage, priest and shammy either take no damage at all or have self healing abilities. The new Recuperate ability being given to rogues in Cataclysm will be a huge boon for leveling rogues.

As I work on finishing him off, I may switch to leveling him in battlegrounds. I have found that particularly in the 70's, if it is a Call to Arms weekend, the xp per hour from doing the Call to Arms battleground is usually slightly higher than what you get from pure questing. And if you're in a battlegroup where your faction dominates so that your win ratio is well over 50/50, it should be as much as 10-20% higher than questing.

After getting the rogue to 71, I then switched to the Shadow Priest and managed to get him to level 77. I've tried doing some battlegrounds on him as well. I've tried as both shadow and discipline. While I've heard great things about Discipline for PvP, I'm not finding it to be as much fun as I thought it would be. It's possible though that it's because I'm geared more for Shadow, so I'm running out of mana way to fast. Something about just bubbling everything in sight that just isn't all that personally satisfying.

I have been really pleasantly surprised by how good the shadow priest's dps has been in instances, though. And that was even before picking up Mind Sear at 75. But it still is substantially less xp per hour, so I'm really just doing one a day to get the Triumph emblems.

So we're still on Target for early September. Current forecast is for September 7th, and I've been knocking out 0.94 levels per day so far in August. I'll be switching back to mage once my realm comes back up from its extended 24 hour maintenance on Wednesday and I likely won't stop until I hit 80 on the mage!

So Close I Can Taste It!

So after my entry last week, I picked up the mage and really powered through a lot of the Northrend content. The mage continues to be an absolute beast with frost spec for leveling. In addition, I also picked up dual spec and added an arcane spec to give that a whirl in instances.

Tremendous fun overall. So far, it's not an enormous increase in my overall dps in instances though. I do a lot more dps on boss fights, but my AoE damage is lower because I lose all of those awesomesauce buffs to blizzard that comes with my frost spec. So overall, it's a tie. But Arcane is just so much fun. Missile Barrage is one of my new favorite things in the world!

I managed to get the mage all the way to level 76. She's basically done with Dragonblight and headed for Grizzly Hills.

After the mage, I went back to the shammy, determined to give my new elemental spec a try. While it's not nearly as much overall fun as enhancement, I have to say that the mobs are dying a lot faster and I actually have less mana issues with elemental than I do with enhancement. Clearcasting rocks! The only downside is I don't have Lava Burst yet, so my lightning bolt finger is getting a little tired. I miss my wolves a little bit, but my fire elemental and earth elementals have agreed to bark at me once in a while to try to make me feel better.

So, I think I'll be sticking with elemental for the duration.

I'll be moving on to the rogue next and see how far I can get him for the rest of this week. So here's where we stand now:

Joara - Frost Mage - level 76
Joarvyk - Shadow Priest - level 74
Joarbek - Whatever Shammy - level 72
Joarstab - Combat Rogue - level 68.

Soooo close....

July Leveling Update

So with July behind me, there will likely only be one more of these updates before I hit my goal of 9 level 80's before Cataclysm.

The release of the beta in early July clearly took its toll on my leveling progress. I managed to gain exactly 27 levels during the month of July, or approximately 0.87 levels per day. This brought my average for the year down to around 1.1 but even at that pace, I'm still predicting to hit my goal in early September!

Last week I switched to the Shadow Priest at one point and managed to get him into Dragonblight at level 74. He continues to be an excellent leveling toon. It was also an Alterac Valley weekend this past weekend on my server, so I took advantage to add a little spice to my leveling mix. From what I have found in the past, particularly if it is the holiday battleground, it is very possible to maintain xp per hour levels in excess of 500K doing Alterac Valley (and that's with a 50/50 win loss mix). The priest is fun in battlegrounds as both shadow and disc so I did a little bit of both.

I'll be picking up the mage starting today, and we'll see if we can drive her a little further past the priest before Thursday or so. Then it will be off to the Shaman starting on Friday or so.

So here is where we stand:

Joarvyk - Shadow Priest - level 74
Joara - Frost Mage - level 71
Joarbek - Elemental Shaman - level 68
Joarstab - Combat Rogue - level 68

I've also gotten some questions in early posts about my professions and suggesting that one task after I hit this goal might be maxing out all my professions. It dawned on me that I actually haven't mentioned it much here, but I've actually been doing that all along. I have two crafting professions left to have all of them maxed out across my various toons. Those two remaining are inscription and engineering and they are currently being leveled by my shaman and rogue respectively. Both are at level 350 and ready to be leveled through Northrend (oh - and I've already got the mats to finish both off).

I've also laid out gathering professions between all my toons so that I've got two gathering slots feeding each crafting slot (or at least I will once the warrior gets leveled).

So here is the profession mix:

Warlock - Enchanting and Tailoring
Death Knight - Mining and Blacksmithing
Druid - Skinning and Leatherworking
Hunter - Herbalism and Alchemy
Paladin - Mining and Jewelcrafting
Mage - Skinning and Herbalism
Shaman - Herbalism and Inscription
Priest - Herbalism and Mining
Rogue - Mining and Engineering

Into the Home Stretch!

I managed to get my Rogue the rest of the way through Outland yesterday and have him now safely parked in Warsong Hold in Borean Tundra - all ready to get eaten by big undead spiders out in the quarry!

So all four of this last set of toons have now made it to Northrend and are ready for the final push. I did pick up dual spec on the rogue so that I could try an assassination / mutilate build for running instances. I wasn't finding it particularly effective for leveling, and actually wasn't noticing any difference in my dps in instances either. The primary difference for leveling is you lose some of the AoE capabilities that you have with combat in both Blade Fury and Killing Spree. It is also to your advantage to start all of your attacks out of stealth to get Overkill going and that just takes a little longer. While it doesn't feel quite as rogue-ish, combat has a lot more ability to just walk up and start smacking guys around. So I guess that's 1000g down the tubes for nothing!

I'll be picking up the priest starting today and hope to get him a few more levels before switching over to the mage next week. I've still been debating just doing them one at a time from here on out, but then there's part of me that thinks it would be pretty cool to have four toons all hit 80 within a week or so of each other, so I'll probably stick with the current rotation for now.

Another Toon Hits Northrend

I did manage to get one more toon safely established in Northrend this past week, with the Shaman being the latest to join the club. It now remains just for the rogue to make the final push. He's sitting at level 65 and questing through Terrokar Forest, so I'm really hoping to get him the rest of the way by the end of the day tomorrow.

I've also been messing around on the beta a fair amount and have started to level a couple of toons through Hyjal and Vash'jir just to see the content. The quests so far are remarkably well put together and its very easy to follow the quest chains and breadcrumbs through both zones. The quest rewards seem very good, especially if you're hitting those zones in quest greens and blues from Northrend. It's hard to tell on some of them how good they will be because the mastery stat isn't fully implemented yet, but I did manage to get a staff for my warlock that was a clear upgrade to the Seethe / Shriveled Heart combination that he was rocking.

I've also had a chance to take some initial attempts at two of the new instances - Blackrock Caverns and Throne of the Tides. It looks like both will require some significant nerfing before release if players coming straight out of Northrend are going to have any hope. I have seen a ton of groups wipe time after time with the entire group being in full T-10 / ICC gear. The mechanics of the second boss in Blackrock Caverns in particular seems to get the best of everyone - it seems that folks haven't had to worry about standing in beams since Outland!

In any case, I'm trying to balance continuing to work on leveling my toons with experimenting with the beta. It is getting harder and harder to remain focused on the pre-Cataclysm stuff with so much new goodness out there to try!

So, as a general update. Both the mage and priest are sitting at 71. The shaman is sitting at 68 and has just started questing in Northrend. The rogue is sitting at 65 and will hopefully be visiting the shores of Borean Tundra within the next day or two!

And The Leveling Slows

So both my priest and my mage are now slogging through Northrend, and I had forgotten what slow going questing through there can be. In reality, because I've been leveling these last four toons simultaneously, I haven't really done much questing in Northrend since early February. While I love how the quests fit together so much more nicely, particularly than Azeroth, I had forgotten how much slower it goes.

I'm averaging somewhere right around 450-550,000 xp per hour questing on both toons, so it's actually a pretty decent pace of a level every 3 hours or so. There are some areas where I can get it up a little bit higher than that, which helps. I tried a few instances on my mage just to make sure that nothing had changed about my xp per hour calculations on Northrend instances and it still consistently drops my xp per hour down to around 300,000 while running instances (and that is generally with rested xp - if you're running without rested xp, expect something even south of that).

While I tend to go back and forth quite a bit, I have to say that right now the mage is probably my favorite and if I had to pick just one to finish the rest of the way, it would probably be the mage. Maybe it is because my original main was a warlock, so the style of play just feels familiar. But I believe it is because of the speed at which the mage just tears through everything in sight.

I've also been distracted by all of the news and information coming out about Cataclysm and tinkering with the new 31 point talent trees. I do think almost all of these changes are going to be a huge benefit to people leveling toons from scratch as the new abilities granted, particularly on what are normally considered good leveling specs, are all things that can make a big difference at early levels. The only one that I'm not so sure about so far is Intimidation for Beast Mastery hunters. I've actually taken a look at the Survival tree, and given some of the interesting new talents in there, there could actually be a case made for leveling as Survival rather than Beast Mastery, utilizing traps to handle multiple mob pulls.

The thought of a bunch of level 10 warlocks running around with their Felguards just seems crazy. And getting Mangle at level 10 as a leveling druid. Be still my heart! I'm also very curious to see how the Holy Power feature works out for Paladins. Having some extra burst while leveling always helps. Plus, it's always fun to have more to keep track of and more buttons to push. I might have to start over with a toon from each class on the alliance side just to experience the thrills! (This is where the men in white coats show up to have a little chat with me).

So, as an overall update, the Rogue made it to level 63 in Outland. My Shadow Priest is at level 71 and is almost finished with Borean Tundra and my Frost Mage is at level 70 working her way through Borean Tundra. I'll be heading back to the Shaman later in the week for the final push to Northrend on the Shaman.

Still on track for some time in late August or early September to have all of these done.

Rogueing Through Outland and Real ID thoughts

As planned, I did manage to get about 5 levels into Outland on my rogue and he's now sitting at level 63, starting to work through Zangarmash. Combat still tends to work very well as long as I only end up pulling 2 mobs or three at the most. Any more than that, and I can still use Vanish to get me out of trouble, but I've still had to corpse run once or twice, which I'm never a big fan of. As it turns out, the xp per hour for corpse-running is the lowest of any WoW activity!

I've actually debated shelling out the gold for dual spec, particularly now that I have access to Envenom and doing a second spec with Assassination for running instances. Given how squishy this toons can be and how careful I have to be with pulls even while soloing, it might actually make it so that using instances more for leveling is more competitive on an xp per hour basis than it has been with some of my other toons. I haven't actually pulled the trigger on that yet, and I'm going to go back to working on the Shadow Priest and other toons for a while, so it may be a while before I get back to that again.

Now that the whole firestorm has subsided, I wanted to add my two cents on Real ID as well. Part of what I think we all sometimes tend to lose sight of is that ActivisionBlizzard's mission is not to create or provide an enjoyable positive gaming experience to all of us. ActivisionBlizzard is a public corporation, and at the end of the day, they have a fiduciary responsibility to make money for their shareholders. They're not a not for profit or charity dedicated to improving the lives of gamers. They have to be focused on profit.

Now that's not to say that creating an excellent product and a positive gaming experience can't be part of that. There are two obvious ways for them to continue to increase their profits. One is to grow their subscriber base, and the more people that love the game and tell their friends about it, the easier that is to do. The second way is to sell more to your existing subscribers. So, we've seen sparkle ponies and pets you can buy and character customization and other features that many of the players want and are willing to pay more for.

From a business and financial standpoint, the Facebook connection is not an unreasonable one. The key demographics for both WoW and Facebook are very similar and it's pretty reasonable to assume that the average WoW player is also a heavy Facebook user given those demographics, so building a connection between those two would seem like something their customers might reasonably want.

I think the part that they missed in this calculations were the obvious privacy issues and the fact that part of what makes the game enjoyable is the escapism and the ability to be someone else. While we may enjoy both, we're playing WoW to get away, and we don't want a connection between WoW and our real world. In some ways, it's a lot like New Coke (I know - I'm dating myself here). While everyone may have thought it tasted better in all their panels and surveys, there was still a huge backlash, because what they thought might be better and what they really wanted were two very different things.

If you read ActivisionBlizzard's annual report that they sent to their shareholders last year, you'll see that they lay out 3 Core Principles that they operate by.

• Focus their Resources Against the Largest and Most Profitable Opportunities
• Deliver Compelling Game Experiences to Customer, and
• Continuously Improve Operational Discipline

In that same letter to shareholder's they laid out the following about Battle.net and why that would be a key part of delivering a compelling game experience to their customers:

Blizzard Entertainment’s ongoing support of its online community is a great example of this. Blizzard expects to launch a new version of Battle.net®, evolving it into the industry’s premier online gaming destination. The service will offer advanced communication features, social networking, player matching and digital content delivery. Battle.net is designed to keep players connected to their friends no matter which Blizzard game they are playing.

While I think they viewed this as something that would delight their customers, they clearly overestimated gamers interests in having their virtual identities linked with their real world identities and may not have fully considered the potential legal exposures. Remember, maximizing your return to your shareholders isn't helped if you get sued by a bunch of people if they get stalked or attacked by nuts that you revealed their real names to.

So, it's a balancing act for Blizzard. Maximize shareholder return, and continue to delight your customers. It was definitely a misstep this time around.

Mage heads North - Shammy and Rogue Power On

So, just returning from a bit of vacation and back to working on leveling my various toons. I did manage to drive the mage into Northrend before leaving for vacation. Since returning, I was able to get the Shaman a little further into Outland - from level 64 to level 66. I've now gone back to working on the Rogue for a little while.

Since the rogue seems to be squishiest of all of these last four toons, I'm working on trying another questing path through Outland - at least for Hellfire Peninsula. I've always hit those demon camps up above Thrallmar pretty early on in Hellfire, and while it's doable, it's probably not the easiest approach, so I'm going to work on hitting Spinebreaker and Falcon Watch a little bit earlier and maybe come back to the Forge Camps later on. We'll see how that goes. I will probably work on the rogue until the early part of next week - likely won't actually get him all the way through Outland, but maybe a few levels.

June Leveling Update and Northrend Ho!

So June was a pretty productive month from a leveling standpoint. I managed to gain a total of 36 levels across my various toons for a total of 1.2 levels per day. This puts my average for the year at 1.15 and puts me currently on target to finish getting these last four toons to 80 by August 27th. Of course, the Northrend levels will likely take somewhat longer and that combined with various weeks for summer vacations I expect will push that date into mid-September by the time its all said and done.

Of course, with the Cataclysm beta just going live yesterday, if Wrath's timing is any indication, I don't expect a release date until sometime in November for Cataclysm. So I should be more than fine.

I did manage to finish getting the Shadow Priest to 68, so he became the first of the "Joar Final Four" to make it to Northrend. I may be able to get the Frost Mage there this week as well, although I'm leaving for a few days of vacation on Sunday, so that's going to create some significant delays for the Shaman who would have been up during that time period.

Shadow continues to be an excellent leveling spec. I have actually dual-spec'd the priest as Discipline in the hopes of every now and then queuing for a battleground, but so far, the length of the queue has always outlasted my patience.

So here is where we stand with the final four:

Joarvyk - Shadow Priest - 68
Joara - Frost Mage - 64
Joarbek - Elemental Shaman (at least for now) - 64
Joarstab - Combat Rogue - 58

Once these four are done, I'll have nine toons at 80 with one slot saved (a goblin warrior) to level through the post-Cataclysm world.