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.

Romm's Progress

I have been concentrating so hard on writing about addons for World of Warcraft here that I've completely neglected to report on Romm's progress through Azeroth. He's obviously been pretty busy leveling up and getting his trade skill's sorted out. I'm going to talk about trade skills in a later post, this topic is a going to be a bit fluffier today - hooray!

After the jump, a few experiences of a Bovine Druid who only seems to come out after dark.

WoW Addons: Part 2

 

So yesterday we took a look at the new improvements to the core UI in World of Warcraft from patch 3.3. I realise there's a whole heap of things I didn't mention and screenshots I didn't use for example the new quest log panel which now has move of the look of Bayi's Extended QuestLog had when I used to use that. Also there's quest colouring for difficulty ranges (this option is turned off by default - you can find it in the interface options menu).

Let's have a look today at some nice little addons to make our lives in WoW much easier. Now addon configuration can be a complete pain in the proverbials, especially if you are in the habit of getting a bit carried away. My advice is first go and get the Curse Client then think long and hard about which aspects of the UI you'd like to improve.

In the true parent style of "do what I say not what I do" (hell I need the practice with the first one on it's way) after the jump we'll leap into installing addons with reckless abandon.