Mists of Pandaria - Impact on Leveling

I've gone back to leveling my alliance toons a bit.  I keep thinking I'd like to get at least one, if not more of my alliance characters to 85, especially given the emphasis that the new expansion seems to be placing on the conflict between Alliance and Horde, I'm really hoping for some difference in content through MoP for the two factions - certainly more than we saw in Cataclysm where it was mostly limited to a few quests in Twilight Highlands.

I've put leveling the Death Knight on hold until 4.3 rolls around to take advantage of the reduced leveling time through Northrend.  So in the meantime, I'll try to get as many of my alliance toons to Outland as I can.  It may not be more than one, but we'll see.

As a casual player, I was very interested to see what would be out there for me in the new expansion.  I certainly like the idea of a new race and class to play, although I'm hoping Blizzard follows through with the idea of opening up more slots on any given server so I can continue to have one of each class on a particular server.

I think the new talent system will actually make leveling a little bit easier since it will reduce the points at which a decision needs to be made during the process.  It seemed like at each phase, the decision you will be facing will be more impacted by your personal style and how you'd like to level rather than the need to pick any particular talent at each stage in order to be able to level effectively.

No longer having to train for spells will also be a huge time saver.  Right now, in the quest path from 1-60 especially, there really aren't any points where you need to return to a major city anymore, so I can often end up going quite a while without picking up a new spell.  Eliminating that will help a great deal.  The only downside to this approach that I could see is if you're trying to level a profession at the same time, you'll have to return anyway.  Scattering profession trainers throughout the world would help a lot with that.

I think the simplification of the weapons slots for various classes will also make the decision making on gear while leveling much more straightforward.  Hopefully, Blizzard is able to take the time to tweak the quest rewards while leveling a bit to make sure there are enough wands and ranged weapons available for the classes that will now need those more.

Finally, the elimination of minimum range for hunters will make a class that already levels quickly even more formidable.  Combine that with the ability to designate any pet as tenacity, ferocity or cunning, and you should be able to grab any pet you want and make it do what you need.

Add On for Death Knight DPS

For those of you that like to DPS on your Death Knights, I just recently discovered a nice little add on that has helped a lot with my rotation, particularly on boss fights, and has had a pretty noticeable increase on my DPS. The add on is called CLC DK and is available on Curse.com and Wowinterface.

It functions very much like Shock and Awe, and addon that has been used by enhance shammies for quite a while. It basically suggests the spell to use next based on priority rankings right in front of you on your screen. It also provides a better graphical tracking of your runes and can help track various cooldowns including Pillar of Frost.

If you haven't used it, I'd urge you to give it a try. The only downsides is it seems focused particularly on single target, so it's not necessarily prompting you to hit pestilence to spread your diseases. I also haven't figured out a way to get it to incorporate Blood Tap or Empower Rune Weapon in its suggestions, but I'm thinking I might just be missing that at this point.

Ah - Fresh Meat!

So I love Hallows End. And not just because it has another quick and easy mini-boss with a chance to drop nice shinies. I fully expect this to be the second consecutive holiday where I get every nice shiny item possible on every toon except my main. That's the risk you run being an altoholic I guess.

No, my real reason for my intense love of Hallows End has to do with the number of resilienceless players flocking to the battlegrounds to get those honorable kills for the world event achievement. Yum. Fresh meat in da house. Easy kills, standing out in the open, just waiting for me to frost bolt them, slide my dagger in their back and then set them on fire. OK, that might have all been on different toons, but it's still all fun.

It looks like there are no less than 3 new pets that can be obtained this year from Hallows End. A Creepy Crate that's obtainable at the end of a quest line that starts in the Inn in Orgrimmar. Then there are two that are purchasable with the Tasty Treats that drop from the boss each day and that can be obtained from completing quests and from trick or treating at pumpkins in various cities.

Besides getting started on Hallows End, I've mostly been working on professions on my last two toons that don't have them - my priest and my warrior. I've started leveling herbalism and alchemy on the priest and currently have them both in the 400's. I picked those two to have the extra daily transmute cooldown - either for epic gems, truegold as well as living elements. All are nice money makers for me, but I'm expecting epic gems to be a nice money maker after the next patch drops.

I'm currently debating whether to do the same thing on my warrior or whether to just pick up two gathering professions to feed the others. If that is the route, it'll likely be mining and skinning as those seemed to be the two where I was running short early in Cata for leveling my crafters.

A Bit of a Pause

Not much to report lately. Things have been very busy at work, so my play time has been very limited. I've mostly been running instances on my death knight working on gearing him the rest of the way for PvE via 5 mans. He did manage to get his first piece of T12 the other day which was very exciting.

I've continued to do a decent amount of PvP and the mage and warlock are both in full Vicious now. I'll probably be working on the shaman and the priest next.

I'm also closing in on the 60,000 HK mark across all my toons which is pretty exciting.

I haven't been doing much Rift at all lately. WoW seems to have grabbed my attention again at least for now. Maybe it's all this talk of 4.3.

More Rift Leveling

On the World of Warcraft front, I've continued to run Coren Direbrew every day with the hopes of getting one of the mounts for my warlock. I've literally had one of the stupid mounts drop on all 9 of my other level 85's at this point, but so far nothing for Joar - the only toon on which I actually collect mounts. Oh well. RNG at its finest.

Beyond that, I haven't been doing much on the WoW front other than the occasional battleground or 5 man. I was toying with restarting leveling my alliance toons, but with the impending nerf to Northrend leveling, it seemed better to wait. I have started working on professions on my last two toons that don't currently have any. I'm likely going to do herbalism and alchemy on both just to have three sets of transmute cooldowns to work with.

On Rift, I've started focusing more on trying to get my Mage to max level before I pick up with my Cleric again. I did manage to run my first dungeon on the mage. Imagine my surprise when my queue actually popped while leveling. So I did a nice easy Kings Breach run. Didn't have anything that I could use drop, or get anything particularly good from the chest, but it was still a lot of fun, and really decent xp as near as I could tell.

So the mage is sitting at level 34 and getting ready to head to Moonshade Highlands.

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.

Balance Around 5 Mans?

It's clearly impossible for Blizzard to appropriately balance all of the classes around all of the various possible endgame activities. They struggle enough just with balancing things between arenas and raiding. My experience with my Death Knight over the last few weeks has made me wish that a little bit more attention might be paid to balancing the classes a little more evenly around the casual player that just likes to run the occasional 5 man instance.

Maybe the issue is that I just shouldn't be concerned with dps meters in 5 mans, as long as the dps is good enough and we're getting through everything, why should I care. But it bothers me.

I've been playing my warlock a long time. I would say I'm fairly skilled at playing a destruction warlock in a PvE environment. Even when the talent tree fairy moves things to the point where destruction is significantly behind affliction in theoretical output (as most would argue it is now) I'm still able to get significantly higher DPS out of my destruction spec than I am as affliction. There is a degree of muscle memory and inate understanding of the right things to do at certain times.

So I find it frustrating, that on my death knight - a character that I have played seriously in instances for about 2 weeks, I am not only able to eek out slightly higher dps than my warlock (who is better geared) - I'm able to embarrassingly crush the warlock. It isn't even close. On test dummies, in instances, while AFK in front of the auction house, my death knight is able to generate dps that is about 25% higher than my better geared warlock and massively more practiced.

As a caveat, I'm not talking about an enormous difference in gear levels here - it's about a 400 point different in GearScore and about a 4-5 point difference in average item level. The item level difference is less than you might think given the GearScore difference, but that's because I've still got one PvP item and one tanking item that I'm using on the death knight.

Not sure there is much that could be done about it since balancing things around 5 mans would then likely create offsetting imbalance at the raiding level. But it would sure help my poor warlocks self-esteem.

At least the death knight doesn't bring cookies and crowd control!

Some Serious Death Knight Love

So I've been running quite a few instances on my death knight lately. I finally gave up on the idea of trying to be an effective tank with him - it's just not in my genes or something. Instead, I managed to pick up a pair of cheap Gurubashi Punishers on the auction house and respeced to dual wield frost and it was off to the Chaos Orb collecting races.

I must say, I have really been enjoying it. I've been able to do really competitive dps with some pretty bad gear - starting off with 4 or 5 pieces of tank gear and 4 or 5 pieces of PvP gear. I've been able to replace about half of that it this point with Justice Point purchases and have enough orbs at this point to upgrade at least one of my weapons. Just waiting on my alchemist to finish up the Truegold for me. Unfortunately, I'm still way to cheap to just go buy the stuff on the auction house.

I managed to do 4 full troll heroics over the weekend without a single piece of gear dropping for me - although all I was really hoping for was the helm off the panther boss and the shoulders off of Daakara. I still need to grab the T11 chest piece for Justice Points and the Justice Point cloak (since I was brilliant enough to pick up the tanking cloak from the Thrall questline), but then should be in pretty good shape for rolling on the DK.

I also managed to grab the T12 chest piece on the warlock this past week as well. Just running for fun on the lock at this point. Might try a few instances as affliction and demonology. I've been playing destro so long, it just feels like it's likely to be more competitive for me because of the muscle memory.

So, with all that in place, I might work on running stuff on the priest next. I still need to unlock the Molten Front dailies on the priest - he's the last character that hasn't done the requisite quests in Hyjal. It would be good to at least get the necklace if not unlocking the rest of the vendors. He's already got an epic belt and boots and should be able to pick up a set of legs pretty cheap.

So that's been the story of the last week. I also managed to get the Alliance Death Knight to 71, but have been spending a lot more time than normal running instances on my Horde toons.

On to Northrend!

My alliance death knight made it to Northrend during this past week. This is the first time I've worked on leveling an alliance toon through Northrend and the differences are pretty interesting. the alliance definitely seem much more upbeat about things once you hit the shores of Borean Tundra than the Horde were. Valiance Keep is also a much nicer place than Warsong Hold - although you definitely feel more like an attacking army at war over in Warsong Hold.

I've also been working through Molten Front dailies on most of my toons. I have now completed the Molten Front on two characters - my warlock and my hunter - and am very close to having them done on the death knight. I've also started to finish up the quests in Hyjal needed to unlock them on my shaman. Once that is done, it'll just be the priest that still needs to unlock them.

I've been debating running some dungeons as dps on my death knight just to collect some Chaos Orbs. He's my max blacksmith, and it's just become very apparent to me that I just don't enjoy tanking. I'm not a huge fan of melee dps either, but seems like that's an easier route to accumulating Orbs since it's apparent they're not going to become BoA or tradable anytime real soon.

So for now, I'm trying to balance working on Molten Front dailies with leveling my alliance death knight. So we'll see how that goes.