Ding, Level 100 #2

So I managed to get my 2nd character to level 100.  While there was considerably less time spent dicking around with my Garrison on this particular toon, there was still a relatively fair amount of Garrison time involved, so my total time to 100 was still not quite as fast as I think I should be able to achieve.  I ended up with a total leveling time to 100 on this character of 17 hours and 51 minutes, so about 7 hours faster than the first time through.

I'm not really planning to work on gearing this toon for endgame just yet.  I want to get the hunter leveled first, and will also be doing some LFR on my warlock once it releases this week.

I also did a Molten Core run with my guild this past weekend and managed to get a new head piece and the new core hound mount.  It naturally goes a little more smoothly with a full guild group, but we managed to clear it in just a little over two hours with only one wipe in the process, so not too bad all considered.

I've been also getting started on follower missions on my warlock as well.  He's maxed out on his number of followers, at least until he gets his barracks to level 3, so we're just leveling for now.  I need to go finish the quest line in Arak because there is one particular follower in Arak that I want to grab to round out my collection. But I'm only at something like 30 patrol missions, so I've got a ways to go before I need to worry about expanding my follower collection much more.

Not really getting much of value out of my salvage yard at this point, but closing in on the achievement that I need to upgrade that to level 3, so hopefully that'll help.

I did go out and grab a stable on my death knight and am working on the daily quests for the various mounts.  We'll see if the DK is the best character to be doing that on.  Certainly in terms of taming the mounts, the speed boost from Unholy Aura helps a lot.  Not sure how he's going to fare on the individual fights though.

The hunter is up next for leveling, and I'd like to get him done as quickly as possible too as I'm a little bit more interested in starting to play him through on the end game.

Initial Pre-LFR Gearing Strategies

So I managed to finish up the legendary quest chain on my main at this point and I'm happily sitting at a 623 ilvl, so well in excess of the minimum needed to queue for both Molten Core and the new LFR wings when they come out in another week.

Having gotten Joar to this point, and as a fairly casual consumer of raid content, I wanted to share the gearing strategies that I used for Joar to get him to the point where he could access the content I wanted with a minimum of work.

Note, that if you're looking to do cutting edge raiding, this almost certainly isn't the best approach as this is focused on getting to a minimum acceptable ilvl and not maximizing your ilvl.  One other point is that this didn't involve the purchase of a single BoE or crafted piece.

So here are the handful of recommendations.

• If you quested through most of the zones, you should have more than enough rep to purchase two ilvl 615 trinkets in Ashran.  They cost about 600g each at Honored rep.
• This is a very short term garrison recommendation, but as soon as you get your Garrison to level 2, get yourself a War Mill up and running.  This will increase the chances of getting upgrades from quest rewards and the level of those upgrades.  
• After you've done this, be sure to move on to Nagrand as soon as you can and quest all the way through Nagrand.  You can pretty easily accumulate a handful of ilvl 630 gear this way.
• Start the legendary questline as soon as you hit 98.  Get that Skyreach quest out of the way before you hit 100 and while you're still earning xp from it.

For the rest of my gear, everything else came from other drops that I got while doing the four heroics that you need to do to complete the legendary questline.  

In other developments, I'm also making pretty good progress on my death knight, who is now sitting at level 94 and is working his way through Gorgrond.  I'm suppressing my urge to tinker with my Garrison as much as possible, focusing instead on leveling speed this time.  Although with a new mine up and running, that's making it somewhat difficult for my miner / blacksmith death knight.

He's been extremely easy to level as frost so far.  My hunter will be up next, followed after by my paladin, who is my jewelcrafter.

Leveling Speed with Garrisons

So I can now confirm with some data in hand, that if spending a lot of time in your garrison messing around with all the fun stuff on offer there, it will significantly slow your leveling time.  My warlock finally managed to hit 100 on Friday, about a week after the expansion release, with a total leveling time of 24 hours and 30 minutes.

I will note that that is still significantly better than my first character leveling times in both Mists and Cataclysm, but it is more than double some of the better leveling times that I've been hearing about from others where a 10-12 hours speed run seems to be about average.  Some of that time was the result of server issues in the first week, but a lot of that is just a result of the distraction provided by my Garrison.

I've now started the process on my death knight, and the plan is to run him straight through as quickly as possible, so I'll report back on what the next few toons look like.

In the meantime, on my main, I went off and grabbed the Silver Proving Grounds achievement and started on the legendary quest line.  So I'm working on the daily quest for Apexis Shards and running normals to try to get the ilvl to queue for heroics.  Once I turn in the Apexis shard portion of the legendary questline, I'll start saving those up for gear next.

I've also managed to upgrade my Garrison to level 3 and am just working on some of the other buildings at this point.  It's mostly just a matter of saving up enough Garrison resources at this point to get the other buildings in place.  Once that is done, I'll probably start follower missions in earnest.

The current plan for Joar's garrison is

Small buildings:

Tailoring - matches a profession
Enchanting - matches a profession
Salvage Yard

Medium Buildings

Lumber Mill - extra Garrison resources
Trading Post - extra resources

Large Buildings

Barracks
Workshop - access to extra bonus roll token

I'm also working through Hexweave Cloth as much as possible and am getting pretty close to having enough to craft an epic, so that should help with my ilvl.  Enchants are selling well, as are glyphs, so that's keeping my cash flow up pretty well.

My guild has a Molten Core run scheduled for early December, so I'm probably going to wait and do that as a guild run rather than just trying it at random.

Distracted by Garrisons

So my earnestly laid plans of getting my Garrison set up and then leaving it behind, to quickly level to 100 were quickly waylaid by a nasty habit of messing with my Garrison.  So I'm sitting at level 96 instead of 100, but I've got upgraded Tailoring and Enchanting buildings and an upgraded mine.  And I'm amassing tons of ore to send to my blacksmith and jewelcrafter and engineer.  I've got almost a dozen followers, 3 of them epic.  I've done a bunch of different Garrison missions with my followers and gotten some cool stuff out of that as well.  I'm cutting down trees for my lumber mill and hunting down seeds so I can get my herb garden up and running.  (Note to self, need to find an addon that shows my herbalism notes even if I'm not an herbalist).

I'm running across various zones search for just the right follower.  So I've now got the appropriate followers to assign to my tailoring and enchanting buildings, so I now I need more followers to go on missions, since those guys now have other tasks.

I'm not as close to 100 as I thought I would be, but I'm having fun with it.

I've not gone the goblin route of trying to make as much money as possible in the early days of the expansion.  In part because I'm already sitting on a comfortable cash pile, and also because, with my Garrison pumping out a steady supply of resources for all my various professions, I really don't think I need it.  Stuff is getting churned out for later use.

I do want to run my inscriptionist through pretty quick so that he can start cranking out new glyphs because that is typically a pretty lucrative market for me, and I'm probably going to want the Darkmoon Card trinket at least on my main.

So we'll see how it goes as I continue to level alts.  I think the next one will be a bit easier to go all out with, so I may have a little bit better data on leveling speed.  My one after that was supposed to be of the official "faffing with Garrisons" variety, so I may just swap that with the plan for my main.

Bagged, Tagged, Planned and Ready to Roll

So the launch of Warlords is rapidly approaching.  I've been scurrying around this week acquiring Grummlepacks, Onyxia Hide Bags, Dragon Hide Bags and a few Royal Satchels so that all of my toons have plenty of bag space for leveling in Warlords.  Of course, I've never had an issue with running out of bag space while leveling in the past, so not sure why I think I'm going to have issues this time, but best to be prepared.  I don't know if we'll be seeing the same volume of random toys and cooking related items that seemed to drop all over the place in Pandaria, but I've always got bank alts set up to accept transfers of any needed excess goods at the first opportunity.

I've also had the time to plan out what I think my Garrison layouts are going to be for each toon, as well as my initial thoughts on leveling order and the leveling approach to be used by each toon.

So here is what that little plan looks like:

	Small plot	Medium plot	Large plot	Leveling approach
Joar	Tailoring Emporium	Barn	Barracks	Questing skip ahead
	Enchanter's Study	Lumber Mill	Mage Tower
	Storehouse
Joardk	The Forge	Barn	Barracks	Questing - complete zones
	Enchanter's Study	Trading Post	Stables
	Storehouse
Joarshot	Enchanter's Study	Inn	Barracks	Garrison Focused
	Alchemy Lab	Lumber Mill	Armoury
	Storehouse
Joarbek	Scribes Quarters	Trading Post	Armoury	Questing - skip ahead
	Storehouse	Lumber Mill	Barracks
	Salvage Yard
Joaridan	Gem's Boutique	Barn	Barracks	Dungeons / healing
	Enchanter's Study	Trading Post	Mage Tower
	Storehouse
Joarfu	Enchanter's Study	Inn	Armoury	Garrison focused
	Storehouse	Lumber Mill	Barracks
	Salvage Yard
Joarvyk	Alchemy Lab	Trading Post	Mage Tower	Dungeons / healing
	Storehouse	Lumber Mill	Workshop
	Salvage Yard
Joarnak	Enchanter's Study	Barn	Mage Tower	Questing - complete zones
	Storehouse	Trading Post	Workshop
	Salvage Yard
Joarwyn	Tannery	Barn	Barrcks	Dungeons / healing
	Enchanter's Study	Lumber Mill	Stables
	Storehouse
Joarmama	Enchanter's Study	Inn	Armoury	Garrison focused
	Storehouse	Lumber Mill	Barracks
	Salvage Yard
Joarstab	Engineering Works	Inn	Stables	Questing - skip ahead
	Enchanter's Study	Lumber Mill	Workshop
	Storehouse
Melric	Enchanter's Study	Trading Post	Mage Tower	Questing - skip ahead
	Storehouse	Inn	Stables
	Salvage Yard
Melpar	Enchanter's Study	Trading Post	Mage Tower	Questing - complete zones
	Storehouse	Barn	Stables
	Salvage Yard
Meloar	Enchanter's Study	Inn	Armoury	Garrison Focused
	Storehouse	Lumber Mill	Barracks
	Salvage Yard
Melwon	Scribes Quarters	Trading Post	Barracks	Dungeons / healing
	Storehouse	Lumber Mill	Workshop
	Salvage Yard
Melardin	Enchanter's Study	Trading Post	Mage Tower	Questing - complete zones
	Storehouse	Barn	Stables
	Salvage Yard

So I think that gives me a reasonable start to the plan.   Everyone is cleaned out and freshly stocked with supplies and more than adequate bag space. Everyone with crafting professions has the corresponding plots.  The toons that are my big money makers generally have access to a trading post in their Garrison (although may have to bulldoze at least one Lumber Mill at some point).  I've got a plan for my Garrisons that gives me a look at basically all the buildings available (except for the PvP building, which I'm still debating about adding to a toon or two later on).  And I've also spaced out the toons that I plan to level via dungeons to make sure that I don't drive myself completely insane.

Once I start getting a few toons to max level, I'll then need to decide if I want to start jumping into LFR or focus on playing around with my garrisons etc.

Historical Data on Leveling Times

I will once again be tracking my leveling times for the variety of Joar alts and, consistent with prior expansions, using a variety of different approaches:

• Straight zone play throughs
• Dungeon leveling
• Zone skip aheads
• Garrison centric leveling

I will admit that because of personal issues going on, I did not manage to participate in the beta at all this time unfortunately, so I don't know much beyond what I've read about what I'll be facing.  However, I gather that there will be leveling options that are a little bit more garrison centric than straight questing options, so to the extent that I can design different leveling paths under those scenarios, I will do that and report out the data.

I thought I'd also recap the data that I have from the last two expansions.  For MoP, my average leveling time (from the prior max level) was around 23.1 hours played and there was no significant difference between any of the above approaches.

In Catalclysm, my average time to max level was 24.7 hours played.  In that case, the characters that used a dungeon based leveling approach were slightly longer.  While that average is higher, there are two unrelated factors that may have been specific to me in both those cases - one is going into Cataclysm, the full set of toons was not as well geared as they were going into MoP, so that may have impacted the leveling time, at least initially.  I also chose to have my first toon leveled for that expansion be my paladin instead of my warlock, because I wanted to try to have a healer first.  Playing through a toon that wasn't my main and trying to get gear that was healing focused, undoubtedly affected my leveling time, and as a result (combined with launch date general slowness), my time on the paladin was significantly higher than anyone else (35 hours in total).  If you back that out as an outlier, the average time on Cata drops to 23.4 hours, or not wildly different than MoP.

I've gathered from what I've read in various places that the time from 90 to 100 is going to be significantly shorter this time around, but I've not actually done it myself yet.  We'll know for sure next week.

In the meantime, with 16 toons to level, I'll be assigning four to each of the groups above, which should give me a somewhat reasonable indicator under each approach.

Ding! Level 90 #16 and more Pre-Warlords Preparation

So I finally managed to hit level 90 on my alliance paladin on Sunday, giving me 16 in total.  Not many compared to some, but I'm pretty happy with the total all told.  It's interesting that is really only 3 more max level characters than I had at the end of Cataclysm and one of those is my boosted character from the pre-order.

That leaves me with 6 more alliance characters that are still in the leveling process, and all of those are sitting in the mid-50's (except for the monk, who is in the mid-20's.).  Despite the lack of focus on leveling new toons in MoP, most of those same alliance toons were in the mid-30's at the end of Cataclysm, so I did make a little bit of progress on them.

I'll probably continue to work through them all a little bit between now and when Warlords drops next week, in addition to my gold making efforts.

I'm still finding that most of the old standby professions from MoP are still producing decent profits.  For some reason, people on my server are still continuing to buy crafted PvP gear, which I don't understand at all, but as long as people keep buying it, I'll keep selling it.  Glyphs aren't selling as well as they did before the patch given all the changes, but it is still a dependable source of income.  Enchants continue to sell extremely well.  Gems have tapered off a bit after the immediate post-patch gold rush - they're back to around the same general level of profitability that they were.

So my banks are all cleaned out, my reagent tabs organized and filled, my toy boxes stocked.  I have a few odds and ends pieces of gear that either need to be sold or put into void storage, but by and large, I think I'm ready.

I was debating running around collecting additional bags for my variety of toons for leveling, but for some reason, bag space has never really been a big issue for me while leveling.  I tend to ship things that need tending to off to alts at the first available mailbox, vendor things regularly and keep a ready stream of disenchanting going.  Assuming a lot of the random crap that you tended to get in MoP will now be toy box eligible and that there won't be zillions of random food items for your farm dropping like they tended to in MoP, I anticipate it will be far less crowded than it used to be anyway.

Most of the times that I had bag space issues tended to be if I was trying to assemble multiple gear sets, but I don't anticipate that being as much of an issue this time around as it used to be given the changes to stats brought by the patch.

That being said, I may go grab a quick Onyxia bag and Grummlepack on most of my alts as those are pretty easy to get.

Woot! On Headless Horseman Kill #551 Finally!

One seriously happy warlock

So after way too many years of trying and a total of 551 Headless Horseman kills, the mount is finally mine!

I will also manage to pick up both pets today, so mission accomplished.

Upgrades and My Continued Assault on the Headless Horseman

So I've gone back to my annual ritual of desperation and futility and have been running the Headless Horseman every day on all 15 of my max level toons.  This is an activity that I've been doing for several years now, and I started this year's Hallow's End having already attempted it 400 times.  As of last night, that number of attempts is now up to 440, and if the 0.5% chance on Wowhead is accurate, that means there is only an 11% chance that I'd run it that many times without getting the mount.

That makes me incredibly special and unique in a way that is seriously starting to piss me off.

I've still only run the Blasted Lands quests on one toon since I've now become preoccupied with the Headless Horseman.  However, the upgrades from Horseman rings as well as heading out to Townlong Steppes to buy upgrades has resulted in a little bit of ilvl movement on my characters since my last update in early August.

So here is where we stand as of today:

Warlock - 554 -> 560
Shaman - 535 -> 537
DK 529 - > 531
Hunter 523 -> 528
Mage 519 -> 525
Monk 516 -> 524
Priest 519 -> 521
Paladin 513 -> 521
Druid 513 -> 517
Warrior 512 -> 515
Rogue 508 -> 514

So I still need to finish cleaning all that Timeless Isle gear out of my bags and get my heirlooms reconsolidated in one place, then run the Blasted Lands quests on a few toons that could use the upgrades.  I'll have plenty of time to get all that done once the Hallow's End event is done.  I'm also probably going to work on getting the pets since I'm waiting in queue anyway.

And, if I have time left over, I may continue working on leveling the alliance army.

You Are Not Prepared!!!! for 6.0

Actually, I am sort of prepared, but that makes for a really boring blog post title.  So there are a number of things that I plan to do tonight once 6.0 is up and running, after of course making sure as many of my addons as possible have been updated.

• Sort through my various alt banks and make sure everything is appropriately deposited in the new toy box.  Wowhead has a list of things that can go in the toybox, and combining that with the ArkInventory cross toon search feature has me well prepared with a good list of how to get that done efficiently.
• Go play through the new launch event in the Blasted Lands.  I honestly might give this one a day or two before I jump into it, just to wait for the crowds to die down a little bit.
• Run the new UBRS instance.  I should be able to grab a guild group for this one.
• With a total of 15 toons geared at least somewhat for raiding, I'm probably not going to go to the trouble of optimizing more than a handful for raiding at this point.  I'll likely try Siege again on a couple, but not enough for it to be worth going through a big optimization effort.  Sorry Mr. Robot.
• I'd like to jump into some of the older raid instances that have been made more solo friendly to see how that feels.  Thorim.  This means you.
• I've been very focused on my alliance paladin lately hoping to get him to 90 before the next expansion drops (he's currently sitting just slightly short of 82).  Despite that goal, I may go back to leveling folks a little bit at a time just to get a feel for some of the class changes and how those may impact me for leveling come WoD release.
• I may make a few trips to the barber shops / plastic surgeon guy to see if I like new face options for any of my characters.  It seems like an odd thing since I'm generally only looking at their back sides, but I figure I'll take a look.
• With 522 gear now purchasable for gold from the Shado-Pan Assault vendor, I will probably buy a few upgrade pieces for toons that can use them.  I probably should have prepared a list for this.  

I think that's about it for my post-patch to do list.  Once all of that is done, I'll probably go back to leveling my alliance toons for the next month or so.

Paladin on to Cataclysm and a Permanent Drop From the Weekly Checklist

So I managed to get my alliance paladin to level 80 last night, which means he's heading for Mount Hyjal.  I was briefly thinking about going the Vash'jir route because I haven't done it in a really long time, but then I remembered that I'm not completely insane.

I managed to get through Northrend without doing a single dungeon more than once, other than the requisite 2-3 passes through Utgarde Keep from levels 68-70.  So that was all good.

He's looking to be in pretty good shape for hitting max within the next week or two, so in plenty of time for WoD.  Doesn't look like my poor alliance shadow priest is going to be as lucky, but that's okay.

I also managed to cross something off my standing weekly to do list permanently.

Thank you Onyxia!  It'll be weird not seeing you every week.  Enjoy the break from my Chaos Bolts.

I also solo'd the Zul'Aman speed run and managed to get the Amani Bear mount as well, so all in, it was a good week for new mounts for the Joar empire.

After 6.0 drops, potentially next week, I'll be starting the process of cleaning out my bags, and potentially planning the various garrison buildings that I'll be targeting for my various toons that I'll be leveling for WoD.

I'm also debating my leveling order for WoD.  I'm pretty sure Joar will be first, then some combination of death knight, shaman, paladin and hunter, but haven't decided for sure on any of those yet.