WoW Monkey

Shadowshiftr has finally hit 74. What I’ve found interesting is .. I’ve yet to move out of the two starting zones. It seems one major difference between this expansion and that of previous years is Lich King seems to have made the leveling process WAY more open and diverse.

Over the past two days, I’ve only managed to see only but a fraction of the overall new content. I’ve run Utgarde Keep many many times with my fastest run being a mere 19 minutes. I’ve run The Nexus twice and Violet hold once. I’ve done a good part of the quests for both Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra but have not finished either zone entirely.

Yet, I’m already 74. More after the jump

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What is better? Questing or Instancing or a mix

I think traditionally it was accepted that instancing was not quite as good xp-wise as straight grinding. However, with the release of The Burning Crusade, many people had abandoned the pre-BC traditional leveling methods of endgame and moved to grinding the last few levels before 58 on the buzzards, boars or other fast spawning mobs outside of their respective home towns in Hellfire Peninsula.

With Lich King, once again Blizzard has made us question our methods of doing things. Especially so when the objective is to level fast. With The Lich King, Utgarde Keep has been proven to be quite a nice trade off when it comes to grinding XP.

So much so that today when I managed to get 5 runs done, I did nearly half a level from 72 to 73 doing nothing but Utgarde Keep. The fastest run being a very speedy 19 minutes.

To level fast, all that is required is a group of compentant people — a healer that heals well, a tank that can maintain aggro and dps that don’t pull said aggro off of the tank and can keep the pace up. Moving fast and pulling multiple packs of mobs is also quite key to pulling it off. Looting, or stopping to drink, only slows the pace down and ultimately leads to less experience gain.

So, for those who want to level fast, instances far outweigh the benefits of questing or quest-grinding.

Fun times! Fun times indeed. So what’s on the agenda today you might ask? Utgarde Keep, Questing and more Utgarde. Starting to really like Utgarde actually — with a good group the place is easily do-able in about 30mins or so and is a good xp for time tradeoff.

So, I ran Utgarde Keep a few times early today just to get a feel for the instance and see how fast I could get it done with a PUG. Truthfully, I enjoy PUGs. The reasoning behind it, is that with a PUG you get a complete group of strangers who know nothing about eachother’s play style and it adds a new element of challenge. Even more so with a new instance, the challenge not only becomes whether or not the instance can be done, but whether or not the team can work together. Besides, any tank who is able to tank a shitty pug, can more than tank a guild run

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Level 80 is an amazing benchmark to hit so soon after the expansion pack. Many many congratulations to Nymh. Many commenters on WoWInsider and other sites were completely and utterly shocked that someone would be able to hit such a mark so soon. But, there’s more to it than meets the eye. More after the jump.

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So, I’m sure many here are eager to get on their feet and go questing/grinding and get to 80 as soon as possible. In order to best optimize the experience of getting from 70 to 80 in Wrath of the Lich King the easiest method I’ve found is to utilize the great guides that exist. In this post, I’d like to compile a list of guides that are free on a number of topics from a number of sources to provide the readers of this blog with as much choice as possible.

First on the list, there’s the always excellent guides written by James over at wow-pro.com.

http://www.wow-pro.com/wiki/70-80_wotlk_leveling_guides

Next, Swagvault appears to also have written up a series of guides which you can find at the following URLs:

70-72 (73 , 74)

Borean Tundra

Howling Fijord

74-76

Dragonblight

77-79

Zul’Drak

79-80

A Few Choices

WoWInsider and WoWHead are excellent resources as well. I’ll be adding more links here as I find them but if you know of any other (free) resources or guides be sure to leave a comment.

So much to do, so little time!

Needless to say, I got lucky, managed to find a local shop that had the game and grabbed a copy. Unfortunately, I had class. So, first impressions, having not played the beta, wow. Just wow!!

From the boat to the dock at Valgarde, a very nice intro into the zone, and while I’m sure I’ll get tired of it eventually, there was quite a bit of effort put into this place. I’m happily surprised.

Questing/Grinding/Mobs/Etc:

Firstly, I managed to go the wrong way (and subsequently wasted a fair amount of time). Not having played the beta at all, I wasn’t really sure where any of the quests are, so having to use wowhead.com constantly kinda sucked. But, all in all everything was pretty straightforward. The first thing I noticed was the interaction between mobs. Right off the bat, two mobs were fighting amongst themselves, which really added a nice bit to the environment.

Utgarde Keep:

I have to admit, I was a bit worried about setting foot here for the first time. All in all the instance is amazingly long, detailed and FUN! Awesome place, really! We made our way fairly slowly upward toward the end and generally speaking, didn’t have much trouble. None of the people in the group had any prior experience other than reading the strategies briefly, but that didn’t seem to hinder us too much.

So, 500k into the level and moving along pretty fast, a LOT faster than i’d expect, hopefully tomarrow i’ll run UGK a few times to get some more practice/gear/etc.

All in all, The Lich King expansion to World of Warcraft has met and exceeded my expectations thus far.

Oh, and screenshots. Lots of screenshots!!

I needed a break today. Not entirely sure if it was the weather, or the four levels of grinding/questing yesterday that did it, but yea.

So, nothing really of note today. I worked on a few old questlines I had sitting in my quest log for the longest time. I also went to Lower Black Rock Spire and started the questline there for the key, solo. I have to admit, that was fun. I had never really raided much pre-BC so a lot of the content I had only experienced post 60. And even then, I hadn’t really done much of it.

Not really much else to report here other than that. Maybe tomarrow will be more productive.

Yea, I’m a bit late on this post. I didn’t get much done directly related to Shadowshiftr today, however, I did work on an alt. Yes, I do realize I need to stay focused — and believe me, I am. The reasoning behind playing the alt was to try to get him closer to 68 before LK so I could spec his alchemy which would directly help Shadow.

So, what did I do today? Several normal ramparts runs, and quested him from 58 to 61. I don’t think there’s any way for me to get him to 68 without playing him constantly until the patch hits. So, back on the backburner he goes.

For those who are curious, here’s a few screenshot of him at 60 with his two new wolf friends:

What did I do today to help prepare myself for the task of being able to tank WoLK content?

Shattered Halls, Heroic, in under 45mins.

So, what better way to enjoy the day than to spend it with guildies and a good friend of mine tanking probably the easiest SHalls Heroic I’ve been in. Actually, would be kinda unfair to say it’s been the easiest, since I had never been there prior to today on Heroic mode. Then again, being able to do it in 45 minutes I think really managed to shock a few people.

Did i mention I did it in 45 mins!!!!

LoL, sorry, bit proud of it!

And, of course, screenshots:

I guess I didn’t learn my lesson with yesterday’s raid PUG. I guess in some respects it’s my own fault for joining another PUG so soon after the last one. But, needless to say, some people really need to l2play.

Today I joined a PUG for H.BF. Usually, even with a group that does so-so DPS, Heroic BF is generally a place which I don’t mind pugging. Not today though — we managed to find 2 decent dps, a spriest and a hunter (yes a good hunter, imagine that!) and one SHITTY rogue. Actually, saying he was worthy of the term “bad” or “shitty” would be giving him credit. So much so, in fact, that when he wasn’t dead, he was either hitting a target the tank and other dps wasn’t on or I don’t know where.

Now, generally, I don’t even mind someone who’s a bad dps coming along for a free ride so long as he or she doesn’t affect the rest of the group. In fact, I’m usually the last person to say anything. Today, however, I just couldn’t handle it.

The rogue, dies. Over and over and over. Several times, wiping the entire group with him. Eventually, enough is enough, we decide that we’re better off trying to 4man the place rather than keeping him along.

So, he gets kicked!

We downed the 2nd boss and onward with 4 people in the group just fine, but I thought I’d post some of his tells here for your amusement (see screenshots).

Other than the setback that was the rogue, we did quite well. While the run itself didn’t go quite as smooth as a guild run (and really, when do PUGs ever?) I was fairly pleased with the overall run.