Lo-Quality WoW

Yeah, I’ve been slacking on this blog. It’s easy when this is essentially an exercise in writing for me since I have no audience. And I felt I would just write a long general post covering the past week than trying to split everything out as I usually do.

Let’s start with last weekend. My main tried to get into a few raids but to no avail. Since I was stymied there, I decided to play my Paladin for a bit. I managed to give her a decent workout, going from level 30 to level 34 in a few hours. She does have the heirloom shoulders but I didn’t get her the chestpiece or a weapon. But her leveling was a combination of the changes made to the lower level leveling system, accidentally going to a higher level area than I probably should, and a better understanding of the Paladin play style.

As to the first, Blizzard has done changes over the past year or so to make leveling the lower levels easier. Some people hate it, others loved it. I’m sort of on the fence myself. My hunter and warrior ran through a lot of the lower level stuff, so I did have the grind that so many other veteran players did. And because I’ve been through that, I’m fine with it being easier for my alts to get up in levels. Does it cheapen the experience, hard to say. I just make do and enjoy the differences I have to do when playing the different classes.

The second part, was because I accidentally took my paladin over to Dustwallow Marsh for some reason. It wasn’t until I had run through several quests that I realized that a lot of the quests I was doing was actually orange for me. Which meant I was tackling mobs much higher than I normally would and reaping the experience benefits of such.

Third, I started to understand how the Paladin class works. Most of my classes are fast dps ones, relying on taking out the enemy as fast and as hard as possible before it could kill you. My hunter, rogue and mage are all in that mode. Even my warrior, while not as specific, the way I played her had much of the same mentality. But my Paladin? I realized that her fights are fast and dirty. They’re paced, careful fights. This was most readily apparent when I was ambushed by Mor’Ladim in Raven Hill Cemetary.

Now Mor’Ladim is one of the elites I ran across generally early in each of my other characters careers and often ended up with my characters dead. So I have a special hatred of him. So when he started attacking my paladin from behind, only at half hp and mp from the previous fight, I thought it was more of the same. But instead of panicking, which I’ve done before, I calmly faced him and started kicking off all my damaging spells. When my health got low, a quick lay on hands brought me back up. Another heal here or there and I just plain wore Mor’Ladim out and kicked his butt as a level 30. If I recall correctly, my hunter couldn’t solo kill Mor’Ladim, an elite lvl 30, until he was around level 35 or so. Most of the others, much later. So taking him out with my paladin and an even level taught me quite a bit.

So other than roaming around, picking up the Explore Duskwood achievement, and killing elites, my paladin has just been trying to hit as many quests as she can. For now, I may just follow the formula of letting her rest and then spending a few intensive hours leveling. We’ll see how that works out. She did get the 250 Quests Completed achievement at some point. (As a comparison, my hunter has the 3000 Quests Completed achievement.)

Also getting some play time was my mage this past week. For awhile, myself and another guildmate were racing to see which of our mages could hit 80 first. I lost, with his mage hitting 80 a few days ago while my mage is currently half-way through 79. And that’s with my mage sitting on the bonus xp from having the heirloom chest and shoulder pieces. Oh well, I only have myself to blame.

Last time I spoke of my mage, she was sitting at 75 and rummaging around Zul’Drak. At 76 she moved on to Sholazar Basin, which included the always fun Nessingway quests and gained the The Snows of Northred achievement. 77 and half of 78 had her going through Storm Peaks, primarily working her way through the quest chains so that she can start doing Sons of Hodir rep. The rest of 78 and 79 was spent in Icecrown. Again focusing on the quest chains so that I could get the Crusader’s Pinnacle and Shadow Vault flight points. That’s my normal operating pattern actually. Try to get the FPs and those chains and then worry about getting the rest later. It’s much easier when you don’t have to travel to one FP and then spend minutes trying to get across the zone to where the quest is.

My play with my mage has been mostly leveling focused although I did take her to a Wintergrasp and an Alterac Valley battleground, winning the former but losing the later. She also got the Wintergrasp Victory and Know Thy Enemy achievements, again one the former, the other the later battle. I always had trouble with my warrior in BGs since I’m just not used to having to do hand to hand combat in PvP. My mage was easier since she’s ranged but I had to keep remembering that it took fewer hits to take me out. I’m too used to taking a hit or two with my hunter and then turning around and dishing out the damage. With my mage, it’s “Huh? I’m hit…oh I’m dead.”

I also took my mage over to the Argent Tournament grounds. My warrior and hunter were already 80 when it came out so I never knew what level you could get there with. With my mage, it’s not much different except I seem to die before my mount more often than I did with the other two. Maybe I’m doing something wrong? Either way she currently has her Argent Aspiration achievement and I’ll be working on her various valiant ones in a few days.

The only other thing of note was that my mage got her mining up to 450, meaning she can now mine Titanium Nodes, which I had been finding lately. There’s actually a couple of pretty populous spots in Icecrown for mining and I keep getting distracted by them as I fly here and there for quests. There’s a reason why the PKT refer to it as “crack”.

The rest of the week was spent on my hunter. The only raids I got into were Vault of Archavon ones, primarily because of the new boss. This time, on the 25-man with the Agency, we took Koralon down in one try. I even got some new PvP pants out of it. The 10-man was similar, although there was a brief moment of panic in the raid when the leader had said “okay, we have a tank and two healers, let’s go!” Fortunately the tank talked some sense into him that we really needed two tanks. It became apparent that he had been thinking of only fighting Koralon and skipping Emalon and Archavon and he thought the tank would be okay with the meteor fist attack. The rest of us overrode him and took out all three bosses. I mean, why skip the other two bosses, it’s not like people couldn’t use the badges or even some of the gear.

My hunter did go into various heroics again since the daily now gives you Emblem of Triumph. This included two runs into Utgarde Pinnacle, a Nexus and a Gundrak run. Since it’s been awhile for each, I didn’t quite remember what happened in each fight at the start but I quickly settled down and we didn’t really run into any problems.

One of the interesting things though is the fact that nowadays, a lot of people are doing heroics who have Naxx or Ulduar gear, particularly for the daily heroic reward. Which means that the dps in particular, tends to put out quite a bit of damage. Practically every fight was a new speed record for me. It’s funny when I got the message “New record 31 seconds! Old record was 1 minute 42 seconds!”

We did actually try for achievements on a few of the runs. Oddly enough, the only one I managed to earn was the Split Personality achievement, and that was more chance than anything. We hadn’t talked about it but somehow all three dps targeted a different image with the tank running around hitting them all and we managed to nab that achievement.

At some point, when I couldn’t figure out what to get with all the Champion’s Seals I had been collecting with all the dailies I had been doing. Then I realized I had 24 tabards! Hmm. Yup, 50 less Seals, I have one more tabard and pick up the Twenty-Five Tabards achievement, which oddly enough, earns you another tabard! I know you can delete the tabards and have them count but I wish they had some sort of “closet” system so you can keep them around and switch them out easily. Especially the ones that give you additional rep in Heroic dungeons. That would be a nice feature.

And that was most of my week. Still hoping to do a few more Ulduar runs and maybe finagle my way into a Trial of the Crusader at some point. I need a newer melee weapon with some additional hit rating since I’ll probably be losing some more as I upgrade my gear further. Anyone have any good recommendations?