Grinding The Shattered World

And so we finally get to the home straight of the epic grind from 54 to 85, the much awaited Cataclysm content.

Ok to be fair I'd already done 2 or so levels worth on Hjaern the death knight so it was reasonably familiar to begin with. First stop Hyjal, lots of quests, lots of gathering (that's still a great XP earner) and remarkably not too many deaths.

A small tip I picked up a long time ago when leveling a lowbie alt was: do all the easy nearby quests for a bit - when you start having to run too far, switch to a similar zone. This works great with combos like Teldrassil/Elwyn or Borean/Howling Fjord. So I worked through Hyjal for a bit a then wandered off to Vash'jir then back to Hyjal (sure I've got no attention span).

It's super easy after that, go to Deepholm at 82, Uldum at 83 and Twilight Highlands at 84... and you want HOW MUCH XP? Yes the grind to 85 was miserable from 84 but it came eventually.

Well I'm a couple of months behind updating the progress here if I'm perfectly honest, Gwen's actually been raiding for about 8 or 9 weeks now and the last 4 of them I've been raid leading (read more at http://www.mmomeltingpot.com/2011/05/editorial-jumping-into-the-deep-end-with-raid-leading/). Now sat at 4/12 10 man normal it's very slow progress but we're getting there.

Now I've gotten the grinding tale out the way maybe we can get on with something slightly more druidy, or raidy or ranty... who knows?

The Grind: 68-80 When it all slows down

Yarg, power leveling though Northrend is not fast at all. 68 to 70 was fairly nice, just get to Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra, grab quests, complete quests, hand in quests and repeat - throw in some gathering and it soon passes.

It's when you get to 70 that things really start to slow up. From 70-72 I practically stopped questing altogether, maxed out my herbs and mining, picked up epic flight form and gathered my way through 2 levels. Wow that's tedious! Just keep going round Scholazar Basin and Wintergrasp (assuming there's no battles on), dive in, collect and run. It is as fast as questing with epic flight form and much much much more profitable.

At 73 I left gathering as a full time job and went back to questing roughly in the order of Dragonblight, Zul Drak the Scholazar.

Finally Icecrown, which is always quite fun anyway, it must be said the downhill slide to 80 was much nicer than the early to mid 70's, just knowing the end was in sight.

All I can say in summary is - power leveling though Northrend? Never ever ever again!

Next time: Cata leveling, learning to heal and gearing to raid.

The Grind: 54-68. Of Yeti death and moo

At last the final bell tolls, and for once it doesn't go “mong!” it goes “ding!”. That's right after many hours of sweat, tears, coffee, flower picking, mining, being ganked and mostly being lord high executioner to a million unsuspecting mobs – Gwen has made it to the lofty heights of level 85.

It took longer than hoped but possibly less time than expected. In this post I'm going to give a (brief) breakdown of how I got there as fast as my dainty little hooves could manage.

So in the last post I said I'd got to 64, well lets rewind a bit and see where we come from historically. I'd always like the idea of druids but never really pushed one very far, so back in the day when I discovered that actually healing was really cool I had a little druid sitting around the level 28-ish mark, respecced resto and hit up the all new dungeon finder tool with massive aplomb. And that was that I basically levelled to 54 in dungeons, the healing was a piece of cake – most of the Scarlet Monastery runs involved dropping rejuv and alt-tabbing to read stuff on the internets. Once in a while someone would do something interesting like pull half the wing at once which took a bit more effort and used up about half the mana pool.

By 54 I'd burned out and was sick and tired of running Blackrock Depths over and over again. So Gwen was shelved for ages until the request for a healer was raised. At this point I was back in there like a shot! A few more BRD runs (now dual specced into balance as well so could sign up for two roles) and a bit of Winterspring Yeti slaughter and it was off to outlands.

I hated Hellfire Peninsula the first time I went there and I hate it now and every other time I've been there in between. So as soon as 60 rolled around it was straight off to Zangarmarsh where it's soggy underfoot and the weird flying things go “eep” when lazerchicken lets loose some pewpew. There's good XP in that there marsh, also good herbalism which, having got flight form, was becoming an increasingly viable XP grinding method.

Leaving behind the squeaky things in the Marsh it was off to cull things that stampeded lots and generally made some variant of the word “moo” when they spoke. Yup, good old Nagrand. Again, lots and lots of herbs, plenty of quests and a plethora of mobs to fry. After that a quick tour of Blades Edge Mountains took me to 67, and Shadow Moon Valley (where nothing goes moo and everything is green) to 68.

Outland was a breeze and for the most part quite enjoyable (except HFP that is). In the next post we hit Northrend where suddenly everything gets very very slow indeed.

A Cataclysmic Return

Well here we are again, after yet another 11 month hiatus we have yet another Return to Azeroth. So where on Earth/Azeroth have I been? Well, being a father mainly. I must confess I also lost interest in Wrath of the Lich King after dragging my sorry dead cow ass up to 80. I think it all began with my first foray into WotLK heroics. I cranked up a bit of gear and ran through a few with my friends who were working on [Glory of the Hero] had already elevated themselves into the glorious realms of Kingslayer-dom. That having gone pretty well I pottered into the LFD tool and signed up for a random heroic, got a nice group, had a nice time and got helped through by some kind people. Great! Another! Againagainagain! Second group, we hadn't even begun when I got a “Lol DK ur GS sux, leave nao, my 78 shaman has better gear than u”... oh dear, what could I do except leave the group – I really didn't want this imbecile ruining my run by continually spamming recount data inevitably showing my dps somewhere between the tank and the healer (if I was lucky)...

So I sulked off, completely demoralised and spent the closing days of Wrath with a Herding Cats offshoot called Knew The Risks (KTR) on EU-Argent Dawn where we ran dungeons starting at the beginning using only DPS... as was rightly said – we knew the risks! It was fun and it also let me explore making some hefty gold which was something I'd only ever intended on doing.

With the launch of Cataclysm, I've gotten really really excited again. The old world (that's right kids, that's all there was when I started playing this game, actually can't remember the date now but I think it was just after patch 1.10) is amazingly redesigned, and you can fly in it... that does spoil my old hobby of climbing things that were never intended to be climbed: remember Ironforge Airport, ooh it was cool trying to get there wasn't it? Pah, that's nothing... get there and now climb the tallest part of the wall leading up to the mountain peak – THAT's climbing! I think my computer may have eaten the screenshots, maybe they're on photobucket, I will have a look and post them later if they turn up somewhere.

Anyway, that digression aside, old world flying is awesome for power levelling professions (more on that in a later post), particularly if you have some form of epic flyer.

I started into Cataclysm pretty fast with Hjaern my DK, and jumped in on the Herding Cats Sunday evening dungeon progression runs. As usual however family stuff meant missing a couple of runs and I found myself a very easily obtainable couple of levels behind. Well that wasn't much of an issue but then I got a /t from our raid leader asking whether she could make a “PITA request”... oh dear – what's it going to be?

Basically the group was still down a healer but all the DPS and tank spots were filled, did I have one somewhere I'd be willing to transfer? Well poor little Gwenddydd was still skulking at 54 on EU-Steamwheedle Cartel (A) so that meant: Faction Change, Server Change, Power Level, Gear Up... What the hell! Lets do it!

Faction change was easy peasy and went through almost instantly. Server change was pretty straight forwards apart form the fact my idiot bank (you know who you are!) decided to flag my card as potentially fraudulent because I'd tried to make 2 payments to the same website, I only discovered this in Tesco's the next evening while trying to buy baby food... grrrr. Well long story (and several angry phone calls) short, it eventually went through ok.

So, 31 levels, a hell of a lot of profession points to get and obviously gear to obtain when I get there it's a big challenge. Ten days in to the process (and not that much effort as yet) she's sitting pretty (as pretty as anyone who was a Night Elf and is now Tauren can be) at level 64 (level a day so far – not too bad – could be better) with some much better profession scores and a good deal more cash. I'm going to be upping the tempo a bit now I think as there's still a way to go and powering through Northrend might be interesting.

I'm going to save some of the levelling tactics for later posts but with a helpful guild behind me and Northrend rapidly looming into vision I'm hopeful of getting Gwen healing guild runs very very soon. Watch this space.

PuGtastic or PuGtarded?

Just a short post accompanied by some almost irrelevant pictures this evening. I wanted to post on an interesting topic that seems to have caused massive debate since it's conception - the Looking For Group (LFG) tool.

I can happily say I was dead excited about the new LFG tool - cross realm groups, teleport to dungeon, random dungeon selector and reasonably intelligent group selecting. What could possibly go wrong?

Well: people. I don't wish this to be a whining post full of QQ so I'll cut straight to my point: different battlegroups are very VERY different. I play on  two separate realms, Aeia and Gwen on EU-Steamwheedle Cartel and Ebitha on EU-The Venture Co. Go look up the battlegroups yourself... Now while no-one is free from what we once dubbed "The Pugtard Effect" I have found the chain running instances on Aeia and Gwen so much more pleasant than poor little Ebitha, to the extent that I had to change realm within 5 minutes of starting another WC run the other day. Lolboi's I can deal with, downright unpleasant human beings are another matter. Endless, endless lines such as "Teh Ghey", "WTF Tank, Ebay?", "gogogogogogogo" etc slowly wear you down - and you can guarantee they are the one's who'll ninja something. If it's not that it's some 12 year old in heirlooms - the following is pretty much and exact conversation I had in /p with a warrior tank in RFC (lets face it we were level 15) while playing Romm as a healer.

PuGtard: *Links Recount Data* Lol I win!!1
Me: Nice heirlooms
PuGtard: I'm not wearing heirlooms
Me: ...
PuGtard: I has more DPS tahn you cos, maybe you suck?
Me: Or maybe because I was your healer? Or were you too busy being uberpro to notice that.
PuGtard: *homophobic remark*
Me: [link to heirloom]
Me: [link to another heirloom]
PuGtard has left the group

To be honest he was lucky to just be humiliated and not reported but I'm not in the business of reporting people unless they are complete bastards or gold spammers.

TVC itself is a nice server, the others in the group seem to be otherwise - I'm hoping this isn't going to hamper progress for Ebitha. I'll end this rant with a pic of Ebitha in full pewpew mode in Wailing Caverns.

Classic Raider: AQ40

What a busy weekend! I will confess my game time has been pretty low due to an excess of spring sunshine but that hasn't stopped a me cranking up a few bits and bobs. Thanks to a very friendly guild on EU-Steamwheedle Cartel called <Sixty>, Aeia had a fun friday night in the generally forgotten Temple of Ahn'Qiraj (AQ40). More after the break.

Meet the family

What's going on here? Why is that elf staring at Rag? Where's Romm? Where have I been? In other words... WTF?

Ok confession to make - I've been slack at updating the blog, I'm not going to make any excuses - I'm just slack. Although it has given me a couple of months to address my return to Azeroth and where I have been going with it. After all this was an experiment in rejoining the World of Warcraft after a break.

Well I have been playing plenty in the last couple of months and we shall have a look at where we're going with it all after the break. WARNING: Girlie elves a plenty will follow... don't say I didn't warn you!