Gearing Alts for LFR

So I've started the bat shit crazy process of working through gearing all of my alts through various levels of LFR.  I've currently got 8 toons working through various stages of LFR, with 2 toons already geared enough for the new raid coming out in 5.4 (warlock and priest), 2 toons working their way through Throne of Thunder (Mage and Druid), 2 more working through Heart of Fear and Terrace of Endless Spring (Hunter and Death Knight) and then the final two working through Mogushan Vaults (Paladin and Shaman).

My poor paladin just can't catch a break.  He was one of the first 4 to get geared enough for LFR in general, but can't seem to get a drop in MSV to save his life.  Poor guy is just stuck there.

My rogue and my warrior are both geared enough for heroics at least but I haven't really had the time to start gearing them up for LFR.

My monk just hit level 68 and is heading to Northrend.  He's hoping just to hit level cap before the next expansion hits.

For most of these characters, I've been gearing them strictly through random drops.  No running dailies for valor gear.  A lot of them have finished the leveling process at Revered with Klaaxi so they've had access to at least belt and pants from there.  Add that to the 522 neck from Shado Pan Assault, and it's a pretty good way to spend valor early on for some quick ilvl boosts.

Before 5.3 dropped, I was also going after rares on the Isle of Thunder trying to get keys for Elder Charms, but now the Isle of Thunder is a ghost town, so there's really not many options for that any more.  The Isle is now a neglected hulk, hanging out with other neglected zones like the Molten Front, the Argent Tournament and the Isle of Quel'Danas.   They get together for canasta every couple of weeks, talk about their gall bladder ailments and discuss old times.

So here is the current ilvl parade for my ultra casual group of LFR raiders and wannabes:

Warlock - 512
Priest - 500
Mage - 492
Druid - 482
Death Knight - 479
Hunter - 473
Paladin - 468
Shaman - 460
Rogue - 449
Warrior - 440

Gearing More Alts for LFR

It seems odd not to have posted in a while, but there just isn't really anything all that interesting to talk about at this point.  I've continued to work my various toons through the Throne of Thunder instance.  My shadow priest managed to get a new weapon out of there on his first run.

My warlock on the other hand, has killed Horridon a total of 10 times, and used his bonus roll each and every one of those times, and still hasn't gotten the weapon to drop. I've also got 7 total Dark Animus kills without the weapon dropping there either.  I have something like 4 different off hands available to use with that weapon at this point...but no weapon.

Ah RNG gods, I hate you.

So I have two toons that are running through ToT, two more (mage and hunter) that are working their way through HoF and ToES to try to get geared for ToT and a total of three that are working their way through MSV (druid, death knight and paladin).  The mage only needs one drop (or some quick August Celestials rep after this patch) to be geared enough for ToT, but the hunter is a bit farther away.

I've also started working on heroics on both the rogue and shaman in an effort to get them geared enough to start running LFR.

Finally, my monk is still working his way through Outlands and is sitting at level 63, still pounding through Hellfire Peninsula.

World PvP

And now for something completely different, I went ahead and moved my shadow priest over to a PvP server and have been participating in a decent amount of World PvP.  Raiding each other's shrines and capital cities, battling on the Isle of Thunder.  That kind of thing.

It's something that I haven't really done before at all, so it's been a nice change of pace.  There seems to be a huge amount of drama between the various guilds on the server that do a lot of World PvP, but it's more entertaining than anything as long as you try not to get too caught up in it.

I'm continuing to run LFR each week on my warlock and am anxious to see the final wing of Throne of Thunder when it opens up later today.  I'm just hoping there's no Durumu equivalent where the whole raid dies at a certain point in each fight with everyone left wondering what the hell just happened.

New LFR Wing

So I tried the new LFR wing as soon as it was released last week.  Like most people, I found the Durumu fight to be utterly frustrating.  My group finally got it down after accumulating 8 stacks of determination.  We essentially burned him to the point that the 4 or 5 people that were actually able to see the safe spots on the floor were able to get him the rest of the way down.  After a quick poll, we determined that those five people were all running very current machines with super upgraded graphics cards, so they were somehow able to make out the purple discs of death, within the purple smoke on the purple floor and find the spots where none of that stuff was. 

The rest of us just got to stare at our release buttons.

Primordius and Dark Animus ended up being totally fine.  Of course, no gear for me, but that's OK.  It's just fun to see the content.  I'm really hoping Durumu gets fixed somehow.

In the meantime, I've been doing more PvP on my shadow priest.  I've moved him over to an actual PvP realm to try my hand at some world PvP.  So far, that's going pretty well, and I'm finding I still enjoy the PvP side of things a lot.  Especially after the frustrations of LFR.

My monk is still stuck in Outland and not feeling any love at all.  I will finish him up at some point, but no big rush.

Maybe a Little More Focus Would Be In Order

So I know have a total of 5 toons that are geared enough to at least run Mogushan Vaults in LFR.  Two of those 5 characters are also geared enough to run the new Throne of Thunder LFR wings when the first of them is released later today.

On top of this, I've been working on gearing up two more characters to be able to run LFR - my druid and my death knight.

It all raises the question with me of why I am bothering.  It's really quite daunting, especially when you consider that making it over the hump to 470 and then 480 is either going to require multiple weeks running MV LFR and getting some lucky drops, or running lots of dailies in order to unlock all the valor gear that could be used for upgrades.

At a minimum, it seems that I'd need to get to revered with Golden Lotus, Klaxxi, August Celestials, Shado-Pan and Dominance Offensive in order to get access to all the possible upgrades.  Now I could focus each toon on just the faction that they absolutely need, but in a couple of cases, those are definitely gated behind Golden Lotus.

So I'm thinking about working one more toon - probably my mage - through to being ready for the new Throne of Thunder LFR and maybe not worrying about the rest for now.  Of course, there is always the option of working the pally through to that level since, as a healer, he's going to have shorter queues for LFR anyway.

So I'm debating.

The seven toons currently in progress leave me with only three that I haven't touched at all - Shaman, Rogue and Warrior.  I'm comfortable leaving the three of those on the bench for now.

Gearing Up for 5.2

So I was really hoping that by introducing a new raid Tier and a new faction, that 5.2 was going to eliminate the need to grind out dailies for all the original MoP factions in order to gear up.  As I'm analyzing the gearing path for most of my level 90's, it doesn't look like that's going to work as planned.

Granted, it's still possible to get fully geared for the Thunder King raid without doing any of the dailies and getting faction rep.  You just need to grind out heroics until you pass the magic 460 ilvl to let you do Mogushan Vaults, and then run those two wings enough times and be lucky enough with drops to boost your iLvL to 470 using the 483 items that drop in there.  Will likely take several weeks.

Then you're adding 3 more wings to run every week, to boost you those last 10 ilvl points to 480.  It's certainly possible, but getting the factions to revered so that you can spend some of your valor points on 496 gear will certainly help get you there faster.

I managed to get my Pandaren Monk to level 60 last week and safely ensconced in Outland.  And then I sort of got bored with leveling, so I went back to gearing some of my existing level 90's for LFR.

At the beginning of the week, I had three toons already geared for LFR - warlock, shadow priest and paladin, with the warlock and shadow priest also both being geared enough to run the new Thunder King LFR when it comes out.

I decided to work a bit on the hunter and the mage.  As it turns out, I got extremely luck on the mage on a Sha of Anger run, grabbing not only the boots, but also Tier Pants, and that was enough to put me over the edge with the Mage.  My luck continued in LFR that evening as I had both chest and shoulders drop for me, so managed to add four nice upgrades in about 3 hours.

On the other side of the coin, was Mr. Unlucky.  My hunter.   I managed to run about 8 heroics over the weekend without a single upgrade.  My hunter is still rocking green head, back and waist as well as a 350 Arena of Annihilation weapon.  And yes, I know I could just go buy 3 pieces of crafted PvP gear for those 3 slots and take care of the difference in a heart beat, but at this point, it's almost become of a matter of principle.

I did start working on the dailies on the hunter as well, and he's just a day or so away from Revered with Klaxxi.  At that point, he can buy the belt, and that'll put him over the edge.  But for now, it's just a bunch of frustration on the hunter.

In any case, all these other toons will likely go on the back burner for a bit as I start working through the new faction dailies on the warlock and shadow priest to get ready for the first LFR wing to release next week.

Loving that Windwalker Monk, and Level 90 #10

So I managed to finish off my shaman last week, getting them to 90 right about on average at 21 hours.  So I've now started leveling my new Pandaren Monk and have managed to get him to level 44 in just a couple of days.  The experience boosts that come with the Monk class are a huge help.  Probably doesn't hurt that I have him completed kitted out in heirloom gear as well.  So if I'm doing the math right, he's getting a 50% xp boost from the monk dailies, a 25% boost from guild perks and a 50% boost from heirloom gear.  So we're flying through stuff at this point.

I also managed to finish archeology on my warlock.  The changes to that profession now with 5.1 have made that a lot easier.  It took just an hour or two to go from 485 to 600.

I'm still working on getting the Spear of Xuen for my monk.  I've done about 7 pandaren artifacts so far and no luck yet, but I'm going to keep at it.

My plan is to try to get the Monk to 90 before 5.2 drops, but we'll see if that's really possible.

Most Efficient MoP Leveling Path - It Doesn't Matter

So I just finished leveling my warrior from 85 to 90.  This time, I tried what I'll call "the really long way." This involved fully questing out the starting area zones, and not moving on to the next zone until each was done.  As a result, I ended up hitting 90 early on in Townlong Steppes rather than in Dread Wastes.

Interestingly enough, my played time from 85 to 90 for this particular character was almost exactly in line with all of my other characters, and actually toward the faster end of the range.  The warrior came out with a total played time to 90 of 20.5 hours, which makes him just slightly slower than the hybrid level and a half method that I used with the rogue, who finished at 20 hours, and toward the low end of the range of the other characters who varied from 20.5 hours to 25 hours played.

So the definitive answer in terms of what the most effective and efficient leveling path to 90 is in MoP seems to be to do whatever the heck you want.  It honestly doesn't matter.

Well played Blizzard.  Well played.

I have one more character to level to 90 before starting on my Monk and that is my Shaman.  He's getting pretty close to level 87 and is getting toward the latter portion of Valley of the Four Winds.

After that, it's going to be time to Monk things up!

Here are the played times for each of my characters that I've leveled 85-90 so far:

Warlock - 28 hours (started on launch day, so always slower)
Death Knight - 23 hours (changed as soon as leveled)
Druid - 24 hours (changed as soon as leveled)
Paladin - 25 hours (started as shockadin - probably slowed him down)
Hunter - 22 hours (changed as soon as leveled)
Rogue - 20 hours (hybrid - stay a few bars past level)
Mage - 25 hours (changed as soon as leveled)
Shadow priest - 20.5 hours (changed as soon as leveled)
Warrior - 20.5 hours (fully quested out each zone)

Now to Try the Really Long Way

So after the leveling results from my rogue, I've decided to do the next character, a warrior, what I'll call "the really long way".  My plan is to fully quest out the early zones.  I expect based on what I've heard from others that this will result in me actually hitting 90 somehwere in Kun Lai province, or possibly the very early sections of Townlong. 

We'll see how it goes though.

Just one more toon after this though and it's going to be monk time! 

New Leveling Path Results - the Long Way Isn't - Ding! Level 90 #8

So I managed to get my rogue to level 90 today, so have the first set of results on the delayed leveling route.  This involves staying in the earlier zones a few bars longer than you otherwise would before skipping to the next zone.  So I stayed in Jade Forest until about 6 bars into 86, stayed in Valley of the Four Winds / Krasarang until just a few bars from 88, stayed in Kun Lai until half way to 89, and stayed in Townlong until 7 bars into 89.

For my previous 6 toons, not counting the character I started on launch day (always slower), my leveling times have ranged from 21 hours to 25 hours played time from 85 to 90.

For this character with the slightly delayed leveling approach, his total played time to 90 was 20 hours.  Imagine my surprise to find that doing it the "long way" actually resulted in a faster leveling time.

I'm now somewhat curious as to what the speed would be to totally play out each of the early zones.

A New MoP Questing Path

So I've been hearing a lot of chatter lately about the potential benefits of a different questing path than the one that I've been using in MoP.  My strategy with my seven previous characters to date that I've leveled to 90 is to immediately switch to Kun Lai upon hitting level 87, then immediately switch to Townlong Steppes at 88 and Dread Wastes at 89.  There is a substantial difference in the xp awarded per quest in each of those zones, so in theory, everything should go much faster taking advantage of the higher xp quest turn ins.

The counter argument that I've been hearing is that the quests are so much harder at those levels for the gear that you have, that it takes quite a bit longer to complete them than it would if you just stayed in the earlier zones, so the average xp or the xp per hour that you're getting ends up being lower.

So with character #8, my rogue, I've decided to try the other approach and go "the long way".  This is going to involve fully questing out Valley of the Four Winds and Krasarang, which should get me to the point where I'm just a few bars from 88.  Then going to Kun Lai and probably questing there until I'm probably almost half way to 89, then switching to Dread Wastes when I'm about 30-40% in towards 90.  My average leveling time from 85 to 90 on my first 7 toons ended up being between 21 and 25 hours, so it'll be interesting to see if the rogue falls significantly outside of this range.

The next character up after the rogue is my warrior, so if the results from the rogue aren't conclusive, I'll give the same approach a try on the warrior for additional data.