Ding! Level 90 #2

So I finally managed to get my second character to max level yesterday, slightly more than 3 weeks following the release of MoP.  Obviously a much slower pace than I was on following the release of Cataclysm, but this clearly has as much to do with the prevalence of dailies at max level in MoP rather than any real difference in leveling speed.

The final played time to 90 for the Death Knight (from 85) was 23 hours, or about 5 hours faster than my first character (typically because of less competition for quest mobs).  Interestingly enough, this was also about 2 hours slower than it took from 80-85 on the Death Knight, but that may very well be because I also leveled both of this professions to max concurrently this time around.

I also managed to hit revered with Golden Lotus on my warlock yesterday which now unlocks two whole new sets of dailies with Shado-Pan and August Celestials.  I haven't yet finished up Tillers or Cloud Serpents, so I expect its going to add a significant chunk of time to my dailies regimen, which currently takes around 2 hours and 15 minutes.

Today will be the first time doing the full set, so I'll try to provide an update here later on the total time investment.

Note that I could theoretically stop doing Golden Lotus at this point, which is the most time consuming of all them, because having reached revered, I've unlocked all of their valor point gear (none of which I actually need anyway) as well as the other two factions.  However, I'll probably keep going in the interest of getting the mounts and achievements and the epic piece that comes as a quest reward at the end.

The hunter is up next.

Blood Death Knight Leveling in MoP

I've now gotten to the point on my warlock where I can get his set of dailies done in about 2 hours each day, which now leaves me with a little bit of time for leveling other toons.

I'm also starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel on some of the faction dailies.  I'm about 3 days away from Revered with Golden Lotus and probably 4 days away on Klaaxi.  At that point, since I'll have unlocked the Valor Point gear with both of those factions, I could stop with their dailies and focus on the newly unlocked Shado-Pan and August Celestials.  I'll also likely be completely done with Cloud Serpent and maybe Tillers by that point.

If I'm looking at Shado-Pan correctly, it'll take me about 3 weeks to get them to revered.  At this point, it's too hard to tell on August Celestials.

So I'm making additional progress on the Death Knight, who is just a few bars from 88 at this point.  I'm leveling as blood - after having tried a significant amount of time on both frost and unholy, I've finally stopped fighting the inevitable and just given in to leveling blood.  I'm basically an unstoppable unkillable machine.  Sort of like a ret pally with swirly bones.

I'm also loving the new level 87 Death Knight ability, Soul Reaper.  After getting my diseases started along with a Death Strike to get shields up and heals a goin', when I'm down to one blood rune, I'll usually pop Soul Reaper.  And usually by the time it runs it's course, the mob is down below that magic 20%, so it is taking them out with a 60K+ hit, critting for over 120K.  It's really a thing of beauty.

It's a different approach to leveling than the warlock, as I can definitely run in and pull a pretty large set of mobs and watch them all fall dead at my feet.

I also went to Kun-Lai right as I hit 87 rather than finishing out Valley of the Four Winds and Krassarang.  While the final scene from those two areas is fantastic, the higher xp in Kun Lai is definitely worth the switch.  Especially since I've already seen the conclusion there once - if you haven't finished the whole Stoneplow series, I recommend going back and finishing it up.  Think Wrathgate.

I've pretty much decided the hunter is going to go next in an attempt to unlock some of the transmutes, followed by the Paladin.

Dailies Dailies Dailies Dailies Dailies...ugh

So many freaking dailies.  I've been doing them for just a matter of a couple of days, and I'm already exceptionally tired of it.  Each day, between Golden Lotus, Klaaxi, Cloud Serpents, Tillers and Anglers, it's a good 2-3 hours just getting the dailies done.

Add in any heroics or scenarios at all, and it's become ridiculously time consuming.  The thing that has me really concerned is that I'm not yet Honored with Golden Lotus or Revered with Cloud Serpents or Klaaxi, which will unlock even more dailies, and then once I hit revered with Golden Lotus, it'll unlock two whole new factions that also have their own dailies that I need to do.

It's created a serious delay in my ability to level other characters.  I'm about two weeks from release and at this point in Cataclysm, I already had my second character to max level.  My third would follow about a week later.  I'm nowhere near that point with this expansion.

I'm hoping once I unlock Honored with Golden Lotus and can craft epic gloves and chest for myself, that'll give me enough iLvl to queue for LFR.  At that point, I might decide that I no longer give a crap about valor point gear and just stop with all the dailies.  I'd really like to get a 463 trinket out of heroics because right now I'm still rocking a 437 item there, so that would help a ton as well.  We'll see how that goes.

Played Time to 90

So I forgot to include in my post earlier in the week about my first toon hitting 90 - my total played time ended up being 28 hrs to 90.  That compares really favorably to my first character that I leveled to 85 in Cataclysm, which took 35 hours for the first character out on launch day.  That's not exactly a speed leveling time as I was enjoying the scenery, generally reading the quest text and also leveled both of my professions to 600 and got my farm started.

In Cataclysm, I saw approximately a 40% improvement in leveling time from my first character to my most efficient and with all the remaining characters after launch day / read the quest text character being within about 10% of each other in total leveling time.

If that carries through to Cataclysm, then I expect the remaining toons to take somewhere around 18 hours each.  We'll see how that pans out though.

I've started on the Death Knight next, although I'm still spending the bulk of my time on dailies and heroics on my Warlock, trying to get him geared up for LFR when it releases in another week.  The biggest difficulty so far seems to be Trinkets.

First Character to 90 and Post-90 Gearing

So I managed to hit level 90 on my warlock yesterday.  Overall, the leveling process in MoP was extremely smooth for me.  It wasn't even remotely about speed leveling as I was enjoying reading the quest text and also managed to get both tailoring and enchanting to 600 pretty easily over the course of leveling.

Interestingly enough, looking at the process going forward, it seems that there is still plenty to do at level 90, so unlike previous expansions, I'm probably not going to jump right in to leveling my next character.

My first task once I hit 90 was sort of a selfish and silly one, but I grabbed Pandaria flying and immediately set about grabbing all the various books and scrolls needed for Lorewalker rep.  The whole process took maybe two hours, but at the end of it, I had a nice styling new flying saucer mount.  Watch out Malygos!

It's then been quite an effort to sort through all of the dailies that are available and which ones I really need for advancement.  From a professions standpoint, August Celestials and Golden Lotus seem to have what I need in terms of profession recipes for this character, and then I'll need to add Shadow Pan and Klaxxi to have access to the full suite of Valor Point gear.  All of these only need to be at revered.  The additional rewards at Exalted are basically just mounts.

Then there are several other factions with dailies available including Tillers (which will allow me to upgrade my farm), Anglers (fishing gear and mounts), and Order of the Cloud Serpent (a must for jewelcrafters, but basically just really cool mounts for me).

The only other interesting factor her is that you have to have your Golden Lotus rep to revered before you unlock the dailies for either Shadow Pan or August Celestials.  It looks like I've probably takes about two days to get to Honored with Golden Lotus.

I also managed to run my first heroic on Joar - got Siege of Niuzao Temple.  No gear dropped for me, but it was a quick and easy run.  So it looks like it will be a lot of dailies and heroics for a while until raid finder comes out.  Will be interesting to see if it's enough to keep me from hopping into leveling on another toon.

Ding! Level 85 #12

So I managed to hit 85 on my alliance hunter finally today.  My total played time to 85 was 3 days, 19 hours which is without a doubt an all-time record.  Clearly the nerfs to the Cataclysm zone leveling time had a big impact here as I suspect it decreased my time through Uldum and Twilight Highlands by probably 7 hours total.

So I'm going to go back into the rotation and continue working on the other 8 toons for the next 10 days or so until MoP drops.

I'm still also working through what my rotation is going to be for the toons to get to 90 once MoP releases in a little over a week now.

Here's my current thinking:

Warlock
Shadow Priest
Death Knight (these three are the toons that I currently tend to raid / run dungeons on the most, so I think it makes sense to get these three to max level the most quickly)

The non-gathering professions covered by these 3 include Tailoring, Enchanting, Alchemy and Blacksmithing.

I think the next set is really going to be profession driven, so here's what I'm thinking for the next group:

Paladin (jewelcrafter)
Hunter (alchemist as well)

Shaman (inscriptionist)
Druid (leatherworker)

then the last 3 are just all gathering profession toons, so what I'm thinking will be:

Mage
Rogue
Warrior

I'll then probably go ahead and do a Horde panda monk before switching to my alliance toons, where I will likely do Hunter and then Death Knight on the Alliance side.

Ding! Rift Level 50 #1

So my mage finally hit level 50 on Rift yesterday.  Total played time to 50 was 3 days and 5 hours, which makes it one of the fastest times to max level of any MMO that I've played recently.  Compare that for example to 6 days and 5 hours for SWTOR and times that tend to be around 4 days for now for WoW.

So now I'm tasked with figuring out what to do with this character now that I've leveled them.  I don't have any of my professions maxed, so that seems to be a good first step.  There are also two pretty interesting epic quest lines that I've gotten started on.  I'm not yet geared enough to do expert dungeons, so I'm left waiting for normal dungeon random queues to try to gear up for experts, while I sell off stuff from my gathering professions to try to get enough gear to qualify for experts.

All in all, it's quite a bit to do.  There are also several factions that have daily quests that eventually can reward mounts and nice enchants at various rep levels.

Cataclysm XP nerf with 5.0.4

Just wanted to put up a quick post here to confirm that they xp nerfs for the Cataclysm zones are officially in place as of last weeks patch.  I had parked my hunter prior to the patch in Uldum at about 3.1 million xp, which had him a little more than half way there before, but after the patch, I logged in to find him just a quest or two shy of dinging 84.

So I quickly knocked out a few and then he's off to Twilight Highlands, which show around 5 million xp to 85 instead of the normal 10 million.

I've mostly been messing around with my various toons and their new talents and glyphs lately though.

I've been really pleased with my destro spec on my warlock.  Significantly less to manage in terms of buffs and cooldowns and if I time my embers and chaos bolts right on damage vulnerability phases (Black Blood on Zonozz, after lightning or ice on Hagara) I can really put out some ridiculous numbers chaining 4 quick Chaos Bolts together.

I haven't had the chance to try too much on the shadow priest at this point, although I'm anxious to try that as well.

I've also been playing a decent amount of Rift during patch times for WoW and have my mage just a bar or two from 50 at this point.  I still need to go back to do professions for the mage, but I'm anxious to see what expert dungeons are like.  I'm debating finishing up my Outfitter skill.  While it does give you the ability to make some nice gear, it seems to be avaiable pretty cheap on the auction house.  So I'm debating just using gathering skills or maybe Apothecary and just use plat to buy whatever gear I need.

Mostly PvP and a little Rift

So for the past week or so, I've mostly been doing more PvP across my existing level 85 toons, trying to get several of them honor capped before the patch dropped yesterday.  I managed to get 5 of them fully honor capped, so should have a nice amount of new gear to purchase.

It's also put me to almost 74,000 honorable kills across all of my toons:

Here is where they all stand:

Warlock - 29,479
Druid - 9,227
Shadow Priest - 7,925
Mage - 6,806
Death Knight - 6,332
Rogue - 5,182
Paladin - 3,969
Hunter - 3,379
Shaman - 1,003
Warrior - 622

Total:  73,924

Of course, I'll be grinding out full sets of Cataclysmic gear on at least 3 of these toons before MoP just for fun, so I expect those numbers will go quite a bit higher over the next month before MoP.

I've also gone back to playing a little Rift lately and have managed to get my mage up to level 47, playing a combination warlock / necromancer spec.  My next highest toon is my cleric that plays primarily as shaman and is sitting at level 25.

Cataclysm Zone Leveling XP Nerf

So my alliance hunter managed to make it to Uldum potentially just in time for a nerf of the xp required to level through the Cataclysm zones.  So what's a concurrent leveling altoholic to do.

The rest of the alliance army is sitting in the mid to high 30's, so it doesn't really impact them. It hasn't been verified for sure if these xp requirement changes are going to go into effect with the pre-patch next week or with the ultimate release of MoP a month from now.

However, just in case, here is my plan for my hunter:

The leveling through Uldum (83-84) used to take 5.2 million xp and will now take 3.469 million xp.  The push from 84-85 through Twilight Highlands used to take 9.2 million xp and will now take 4.6 million.

My plan for now is to continue to work my hunter through Uldum for the rest of this week and get him slightly under that 3.469 million xp level that should theoretically be required for level 84 after the nerf.  That way, if it does go into effect with the patch, I can do one or two more quests in Uldum, level and then move on to Twilight Highlands.

I've also continued to do a decent amount of PvP on both my warlock and my shadow priest and have moved my overall total on my main server to 71,578 HK's.

I also managed to make a full pass through the rest of the alliance army and get part of the way into another pass, so here's where all the toons of the alliance army now sit:

Hunter - level 83
Druid - 36
Mage - 35
Paladin - 34
Priest - 33
Rogue -34
Shaman - 34
Warlock - 38
Warrior - 32.

I should be able to get the hunter to 85 pretty quickly after the pre-patch drops, and then I might actually work on driving one more toon to 85 before MoP hits - probably the warlock.

I'm back

After an entire week away from WoW, I'm back at it as of yesterday.  Given my time away, I really haven't made much progress from what was described in my last post.  I've managed to move my Alliance Hunter from level 78 to level 81, and he's now getting close to being done with Hyjal.

I've also done a decent amount of PvP and have now passed the 70,000 HK level on my Garrosh toons, and am currently sitting at 70,314.

I'll likely do a little bit of Deepholm on the hunter before switching back to the other 8 alliance toons.