Ding! Level 80 #9! Mission Accomplished!

Well, I finally managed to hit 80 on my rogue today. As is typical for my leveling path these days, I did it on the Sons of Hodir chain. This one wasn't nearly as efficient as some of my others, coming in at 6 days, 15 hours. That being said, he is a maxed engineer at this point, which takes a little extra time.

Looking back, I've gained a total of 274 levels to date in 2010 and 427 since I started writing this blog more than a year ago. With those kind of numbers up, it hardly makes the 45 levels that I'll have to take on post-Catalcysm seem all that intimidating, or even if you make it 130 to include my Goblin Warrior plans!

So, I'm going to work on leveling my gathering professions so that I've got an adequate source of supply for my crafters come Cataclysm, finish lockpicking on my rogue, and maybe work a little bit more towards Loremaster on Joar. Not sure if anyone has noticed, but the new Zalazane quests all count toward Loremaster of Kalimdor, which is a huge help!

And, when I have the time, will likely start working on acquiring a little bit of gear for my toons that aren't already geared. I'm sort of leaning towards PvP gear since it looks like the extra stamina will really help come Cataclysm.

Ding! Level 80 #9! Mission Accomplished!

Well - it's been really busy at work lately, so it took much longer than I planned, but I finally managed to get this

Almost Done

My playing time is going to be somewhat limited this week for various reasons, but I did manage to power through and get my rogue to level 78 over the course of the weekend. So only two more levels to go. And I can put on my bomber jacket, fly onto an aircraft carrier somewhere and stand there and look all happy under a big "Mission Complete" banner.

So the question then arises of what to do next. I do have some very short-term projects that I'm planning to work on - first is finishing leveling lockpicking on my rogue. He's currently sitting at a paltry 135, but has 7 bank tabs full of various lockboxes and junkboxes that I've accumulated. Should be fun. The main piece of work is going to be getting from 135 to 175, and then I think I can power mostly through on boxes from there.

Then, it's off to the land of gatherer, where I have several different gathering professions that I want to level up. Mining on the paladin and rogue, skinning and herbalism on the mage. On the priest, I'm currently debating - I'm thinking about setting him up as another alchemist to have a second transmute cooldown available. That's just been too good of a money maker for me in Wrath. Of course, there's no guarantee that will continue to be the case in Catalcysm. Seems like I need to do some quick research on how alchemy currently looks on the beta.

After that, I will likely alternate between gearing up various toons and finishing work on Loremaster on Joar. Loremaster seems less pressing now that it's more clear that it is still going to be out there come Cataclysm, but will likely still get some attention anyway.

I'm leaning towards focusing on gearing the mage and disc priest next. I was debating the hunter, but I've tried playing it on the beta, and the new focus mechanic just doesn't feel quite right to me. Will likely also finish the holy pally as well.

Then, I have an alliance death knight working his way through Hellfire. I've never seen the Alliance side of Outland or Northrend, so if I completely run out of things to mess around with, I might drive him the rest of the way to 80, just to see things from the Alliance side.

PvP Fun

So, as is clearly typical of someone with too many alts, I can't decide....

I've been working on the rogue a little bit lately, although given that I've got at least 6 more weeks until Cataclysm, there doesn't seem to be much of a rush. I have managed to get him to level 73, leveraging the Call to Arms battleground weekends a lot for the extra xp.

Part of it too is that I've now done the Northrend quests so many times, I just can't seem to get motivated to do them once again.

So, I've turned to PvP for entertainment and have been having a blast. Just running battlegrounds, but having a great time nonetheless. I've dusted off my hunter, who is glad to be doing something other than sitting in Dalaran transmuting gems for me. I even flew him up to Icecrown to get him a big scary spider pet!

Strangely enough, I still really enjoy healing in PvP - perhaps because there are so few healers Horde-side in my battlegroup - you really do feel like you have the ability to influence the overall tide of battle. My druid is currently the best geared for PvP and does quite well, and I'm working on gearing up the Paladin and the Disc Priest as well.

My warlock basically has all of the PvP gear that you can get without stepping into arena's, so while he is still a lot of fun to play, I tend to be more focused on the toons that I can still gear up. I'm thinking the order from here on out will be druid, then paladin then disc priest then maybe either finish up the hunter or work on the mage.

Wintergrasp on my server continues to be an exercise in masochism. It seems like the Horde wins only about 25% of the time, and then it tends to be in the middle of the night. My son keeps suggesting that I server transfer to a realm where it is more of a faceroll for Horde (or faction change on my own server I guess) but honestly, the overwhelming odds make it that much more fulfilling those few times that we actually do win. Plus, if the new balancing schemes for World PvP in Cataclysm actually work, the constant losses due to being massively outnumbered should go away.

So, that is the plan. Finish the rogue, gear up through PvP, and finish those last few gathering professions before Cataclysm.

That's a Lot of Quests

So my son asked me this weekend how my quests I thought I had completed across all of my toons. I knew the number was likely quite large. I have almost 3,000 just on Joar, and I typically see the 1,000 quests achievement flash up on most of my toons before hitting 80. So I decided to do some armory work this morning with the servers down and see where I stood on quests and honorable kills.

So here is where we stand - 11,001 quests. That's just such an awesome number I'm tempted to never do another quest again just to keep it there. Or maybe just do 110 more so I leave it at 11,111. Either way, that's basically Seeker almost 4 times. Yikes.

Joar is the most with 2,633 with my druid second at 1,387 and my paladin in 3rd at 1,233.

On Honorable Kills, I have a total of 31,203 across my various toons. Again, Joar has the most at 14,137 with the druid again being second at 6,895 and the Death Knight actually comes in third on this one at 5,570.

Crazy.

Ding! Level 80 #8

OK - this post is actually a bit late as I managed to hit 80 on my shadow priest on Friday night. I actually did a lot of the Call to Arms battlegrounds on Friday evening in order to push him over the finish line. I have dual spec on the priest and have found that discipline is extremely powerful for PvP healing.

I now just have 9 levels of the rogue left to go, and probably two months to do it in. So I may slow down a bit and focus on gearing some of the toons from my existing 8 80's that aren't already geared. Basically, only 2 of my existing 80's are geared enough to be able to run ICC - my warlock and my druid.

The results of my guild poll were very heavily in favor of working on my shaman next, so I started that process and am also working on gearing the pally as holy a bit. There can be a lot out there on the auction house that would let you gear a lot of these toons very quickly - so I'm trying to avoid that temptation wherever possible. Seems like a bad idea to spend a lot of gold on gear that is likely going to be replaced by quest greens in a few months.

So - that is where things stand at the moment. I'll still work on the rogue a bit when my play situation doesn't allow me to run instances, and other than that, will probably be fairly randomly focused on gearing.

Ding! Level 80 #7 and July Leveling Update

So, I managed to get the Shaman to level 80 last night just in time for the end of the month. After making the switch to elemental at level 72, I never looked back. I will say, I do somewhat wish that I had make the switch a little bit earlier as things seemed to move much faster as Elemental. Mana was not much of an issue as higher mana pools and clearcasting kept things manageable. (I bought two stacks of Honeymint tea once I hit level 75, and never ended up using all of it). So I didn't notice any major different in downtime from enhancement. The one thing that I did notice versus enhancement was that things died A LOT faster as elemental. Generally getting three-shotted, and typically two-shotted once I got Lava Burst at 75.

I will caveat this by saying that part of the difference may have been that I was using a BoA caster staff (although not a particularly good one - Staff of Jordan from Wintergrasp) versus no BoA weapon at all for enhancement. So having dual wield BoA's may have made an enormous difference in how fast I was taking things down as enhancement.

Interestingly enough, my levels per day for the month of August were identical to July. I managed to gain a total of 27 levels in 31 days, for an average of 0.87. This brings my year-to-date average to 1.08, and I'll definitely get these last two to 80 sometime in September.

I'll be switching to the shadow priest next since he only has 3 levels to go and then will be finishing up with the rogue. So my plan after getting this last toon to 80 is to spend some time leveling a handful of gathering professions and then working on gearing a few toons up. So the question that I'd like to pose for everyone is which toon should I gear up next, and should it be PvE or PvP?

- Hunter?
- Mage?
- Discipline Priest?
- Resto Shammy?
- Rogue

(notice I'm leaving gearing the prot pally off the last as I'm assuming everyone would pick that if I put it on the list - and I will working on gearing him as well, so never fear!)

Let me know what you guys think!

Bangin' 'Em Straight Out!

So, after the clear failure of my little rotational leveling experiment, I've decided to just bang out these three remaining toons. So, I'm hard at work on the shaman at the moment. He's a Lava Bursting machine and is currently at level 79 and about 6 bars in towards 80. So expect a follow up post shortly.

I'll be working on the priest next. He's currently sitting at 77 and doesn't have far to go. I'll then be picking up the rogue, with all of his nice new engineering goodness, and driving him to the finish line.

After that, I've got about 5 or 6 gathering professions that I want to level across my various toons, and then I'll probably focus on gearing a toon or two. Haven't decided which one yet. For some reason, the answer that I get mostly commonly from my guild is to do the hunter. When did hunters become popular again?

So we'll see. I may work on gearing one through the dungeon finder and another one or two through PvP. We'll see how that goes.

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!