Oops I did it again

Is it just me or did Freya get kinda hot over the course of the expansion?

When I first fired up WoW I knew exactly what class I wanted to play. I wanted to be a druid. I wanted to be the class in the game that could do everything. Artorin was my main from the moment I started playing right up to the end of Burning Crusade. During this time I came to realize that while druids could indeed do everything... there were some classes that just did it better and that I enjoyed playing more.

The result of course was my druid being on the back burner and only now, more then a year later, he has finally hit level 80. Being able to find groups quickly as a healer is what really drove me to finish off those last few levels. I really enjoy healing and the changes that I originally protested (mainly nourish) I've come to love. Yesterday my druid hit 80 around 5:00 PM. I then spent the next 7 hours going from regular runs to heroic runs. I leveled entirely in my BC epics from tier 4 and 5 content and only at 80 started replacing gear. All I have left to replace is a trinket and my gear will be all 200 up. He has the emblem of triumph idol and enough emblems to pick up the tier 9 shoulders.

I'm kinda sad now though... I like being able to say I have 8 80's! For some reason 9 80's just doesn't have the same ring :(

Now to level my deathtard to 80... I still have a good 7 days left of my holiday it could happen!

Adding a Challenge to Leveling

I was reading a post from Tobold today and after thinking about that and talking to my wife a bit, I noticed a trend in WotLK. I mentioned earlier how I'm a bit burned out playing my rogue through the same zones I've done multiple times before. The same can apply to my Warlock and to a lesser extent my druid. I'm mostly leveling my druid through PvP and healing the occasional instance.

Thinking back, when leveling most of my characters, I've hit this road block around 74-75 every time except for on my hunter who was my first character to 80. Why? Well Blizzard had a great idea about adding in multiple leveling paths in WotLK. You had two starting zones, Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra, which if you did only one could get you from 68 to 71/72 or from 70 to 73.

From there you head into Dragonblight. Dragonblight is interesting because it takes quest lines from both zones and streamlines them into an obvious progression through the next two zones. You start in the Walrus people harbor thing which connects the two zones, which leads you to stars rest, which leads you to Wintergarde keep. Which then sends you to grizzly hills which sends you to Zul'Drak. Now you can of course choose not to follow the quest lines exactly. You can spend as much time in any of the zones that you want or even head back to the starting zone that you skipped over. In fact I did that on my hunter, starting in howling fjord and then going to Borean Tundra.

In Dragonblight I did the Wintergarde and Wrathgate quest lines and the goblin quest hub to the north of the zone. After that I was 76 and headed to Sholazar.

My other Characters however, would go through dragonblight/grizzly hills or Dragonblight/Zuldrak and lastly even grizzly hills/Zuldrak. But it was always these same zones. With the same quests. And absolutely zero challenge. My challenge came in soloing as many of the group quests as possible but even then, there are only around 3 or 4 of these per zone.

Blah Blah Blah

Ok I have a point in all of this. You see WotLK has a natural progression that gets really old really fast. After you have done the quests the first time there is nothing new to gain from doing them again aside from experience. There are two starting zones and two 80 zones and one that you can't start till 76. Not being able to start Storm Peaks and Icecrown made a lot of sense.... when you couldn't fly before 77. Sholazar being a lvl 76-78 zone never made any sense to me though. You don't need a flying mount for any of the quests (save a few in the northern part) and you can easily access the zone from the south.

In Vanilla WoW you often times would end up accepting quests that were designed for 4+ levels higher then you. Those quests were designated in red text. In WotLK I can't think of one quest you can pick up that is red. All of the quests are gated for the appropriate level... which effectively means you can't skip ahead of your level to quest.

My friend Kobeck is leveling a Warlock horde side and he remarked that he always seems to be stuck with red and orange quests. You know what? He is never without a challenge as a result of this. Why can't we do the same thing in WotLK? I've done every quest in Northrend at least once, so there is no challenge in the actual quest... why can't I try these quests at a lower level?

Gasp??? You mean I might miss an orange mob? Oh no! That mob won't die in 3 casts! You mean I have to attack a mob from stealth instead of just running up to it and stabbing it in the eye???

Tobold sort of said that he thought experience gain for taking on tougher challenges should be rewarded. I agree. But you know what? I don't care about leveling faster I just want to have a little bit of a challenge. So let me do the quests earlier and keep the experience the same and we will call it even.

I think you should be able to take Sholazar quests at 74, Stormpeaks at 76, and Icecrown can stay the same... maybe that way I will actually get to do some of the Icecrown quests while leveling instead of hitting 80 doing Sons of Hodir dailies...

Mutilating Leveling

I'm in love with the idea of having a level 80 rogue. The subtlety and deadliness all wrapped up in a dual wielding fury that is the rogue class is just awesome. So why don't I have an 80 rogue yet? Well... they conflict with my play style or at least with how I want to play the game.

When I'm leveling any character I enjoy a mix of questing, grinding and especially instancing. Rogues are pretty powerful at soloing and have many tools to help survive and avoid damage. My favorite by far of all the specs is Assassination. I love mutilate and everything about the spec. So naturally I want to level Mut spec.

So what's the problem?

The problem is that WotLK instance involve Aoeing through the trash as fast as possible to get to the bosses. Rogues have one of the best AoE's in the game called Fan of Knives. Great right? Except... you don't get the awesome aoe ability till level 80. That means while every other dps in the game is aoeing.... I'm sitting there stabbing a trash mob in the ass.

My single target dps is pretty strong and on boss fights I'm usually top 1 or 2 in dps... but the rest of the time I feel like I'm wasting my energy(no pun intended). I'm running around like crazy busting my ass to kill stuff, while the rest of the group is aoeing and sipping tea.

Its infuriating to me. It shouldn't be I know... but you see... I have this epeen... and I like for my epeen to be bigger then the other epeens around me. My epeen doesn't feel very big when every one else around me is aoeing and I can't.

So switch to Combat.

Ok yes... I can do that. In fact for around half of my time between 70 and 75 I've played as combat. In instances is fun being able to pop blade flurry and see my dps fly up. I'm never topped when I play as Combat. Can't lose right?

Well sure that covers instances... but questing as combat is SO FREAKING BORING! My ring finger is going to fall off from pushing sinister strike TWENTY BILLION TIMES.

No. I simply can't stand questing and soloing as combat. If I wanted to stand in somethings face and beat on it I would just stay on my warrior.

So now you see my problem. I want to solo and quest as mutilate but I can't stand instancing without an aoe. I'm kinda meh about combat in instances but can't stand questing.

Maybe the answer is dual spec... but I don't really see the value in this because once I get to 80 I will be mutilate spec and will stay that way. With FoK I'll never have any need to be combat again. Especially since they are nerfing throwing specialization.

My plan

Well I am speced Mutilate and I don't want to go combat again... this means I'll likely be staying out of instances till 80. This means the last 4.5 levels I need are going to be BRUTALLY slow because I can only do the same quests so many times before I need to take a break and do an instance. At this point I don't think there is a quest in Northrend I haven't done at least twice now so I'm finding this level range to be extremely difficult. I have both my rogue and druid at 75 and I simply can't find the will to quest at all.

I'm so sick of seeing Zul Drak, Grizzly Hills, and Dragonblight that leveling in those zones seriously makes me want to vomit.

TL:DR Give rogues FoK earlier so we don't have to be a liability in the days where everything is aoe snoozed through.

Mmm Tears

So in case you missed it, Blizzard announced they are lowering the requirements of mounts. The standard 60% speed mount will be available at lvl 20, the 100% epic mount will be available at lvl 40 and your standard flying mount will be available at level 60. The speed increase for the standard flyer is being increased from 60 to 150%. Epic flying and cold weather flying remain the same but this still has a huge impact on the leveling game.

While being bored at work I decided to assault my brain with some mindless dribble that is comments on wow.com posts. I was not disappointed.

Everything from demanding gold back, to blizzard is making the game too easy, to charging that the next step is giving mounts to level 1 characters or simply starting everyone at 80. Mmm drama. So what is my take on all of this? Well as an altaholic I should be thrilled right? Well to an extent I am... but since I only have one character that will fully benefit from these changes (and likely will be at least 30 by the time the change goes through) . Even though I have paid for epic ground training on all but one character, flying on 6 characters, and epic flying on 2, I don't feel slighted in the least.

There has been a lot of talk on blogs about how WoW is in decline and people are quitting WoW because it is too easy or because they don't want to level another alt. Well people don't think about all of the new players coming into the game. WoW's subscription numbers have been rising and you don't honestly think they are all level 80 now do you? I recently got my wife into playing and deleted my 22 warlock to create a druid to play with her. After leveling her to 48 I deleted the druid and remade a warlock.

The reason I mention this is because I noticed there were a lot of low characters running around. What I noticed was that there were a large number of characters in the low level zones. Sure maybe not as many as you would see in icecrown but still a decent amount. Also I'd say about 1/3 of the players we ran into were actually leveling their first characters. Indeed this trend followed into outlands where the instance groups typically only had one or two death knights.

These changes that Blizzard made help not only the new players progress faster but also get people leveling alts more. Ideally this mix will help train new players so that when they get to 80 they aren't entirely useless. Overall though this change doesn't affect the difficulty in the game. This change is purely in decreasing the time it takes to level by reducing travel time. There were a lot of complaints when the mount requirement was reduced from level 40 to 30. This turned out to be an awesome change because it made getting groups for instances like Scarlet monastery for alliance viable.

I remember the long hauls on foot to get all the way to scarlet monastery while the rest of the party sat around in battlegrounds or stormwind, because they didn't even have the flight plan for southshore, and it would take them too long to get there. Lowering the mount requirement made it easier to get people to make the journey to the stone. Now this change may make other instances more viable as well such as wailing caverns or shadowfang keep. Additionally I can relate recently to having to make the barrens run on my baby warlock for the succubus quest. On a mount that run would have taken half the time!

Does that decrease the difficulty of the quest? Because it took less time to run? Was it hard for me to auto run to the barrens for 20 minutes? NO! Having a mount at a lower level doesn't suddenly make the quests easier to actually do. The mobs are the same level, have the same abilities, and the same drop rate. This just makes it easier to get back to turn them in.

The faster new players can level through the content the sooner they will be there to heal/dps or tank for you. This is another reason why when you are in a group with a new player you should take a little time to explain what they are doing wrong in a way that doesn't cause them to quit. You don't want that noob dpsing in a heroic? Well maybe he wouldn't be a noob if you had showed him to use aspect of the hawk instead of aspect of the viper when you were with him on an alt.