Ding!

Daelan hit 70 monday. he marks our 6th entry in the level 70 club. total played was about 9 days, 6 hours. we mentioned previously that we weren't going to follow our usual power-leveling plan and that we'd be taking time out for other things (crafting, in-game holidays, etc.). despite that, it still felt like we leveled pretty fast. the 60-70 part especially so. makes us wonder if blizz quietly tweaked the xp required per level so more people will be 70 when wrath rolls out...

when we first rolled a warrior, we had a protection spec in mind. swords, shields, heavy armor... that's what a warrior was all about, we thought. everything we read said to level as anything but prot, however. leveling prot was like leveling as a healer: slow and painful. so we went arms for a while (2-handed goodness!) and then fury after that (dual wield betterness!), thinking that we'd let prot wait until we were 70 or nearly so. all that changed with the new talents in patch 3.0.2.

we are happy to report that as of the patch, leveling as prot is no longer painful in any way. it's actually a lot of fun! we changed to a full protection build at 60, when the patch came out, and we have been extremely happy with it. our dps actually went *up* by almost 20% when we changed from our old fury build to our new prot build! now, we're sure our dps isn't anywhere near what a true dps build can churn out with the new talents, but we still mow down mobs nice and fast so we're happy. with our stuns, silences, abilities to break roots (the new human racial is a huge bonus here) and overall durability we do fairly well in pvp (rogues especially hate us) even with so-so gear. questing is cake; even soloing 2-man quests is easy now. tanking, of course, is much smoother. it wasn't too bad for us with just a few points in prot, but with a true prot build our threat ceiling is much, much higher; at level 69 we were holding agro on mobs easily even with another 70 warrior pumping out 1200+ dps. and can we just say how much being able to charge, in any stance, in or out of combat, breaking roots, 5 yards further and 20% more often rocks? it does!

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new (old) content

Daelan reached 55 seasons last night, but it was not a pretty process. we found a quest line in the blast lands that we'd never done before. we'd seen it, but back in the day it was a group quest (parts of it, at least) and since we hardly ever travel with a group we'd never bothered to do it. however, since patch 2.3 a lot of former "group" quests are now solo-able content (elites aren't elite anymore, etc.). so, we decided to give it a whirl this time. besides, it fit in nicely with the 2nd stage of our lvl 50 warrior quest (killing mobs in the same area).

so, we go around merrily killing mobs... and get ganked by a warlock (70; in full merciless glad gear, naturally). ok, fair enough. we were close to the road leading to the dark portal and it was an opportunity gank. meh. we rez and get back to killing and a short while later get ganked again. belf hunter this time. we had two mobs on us when she walked up, watched us work the mobs for a bit and then decided that we weren't dying fast enough or something. in goes the pet, we give the hunter a couple of token whacks and we're back having tea with the spirit healer. wonder if there's a frequent dier program we could sign up for... once again, rez and get back to killing (lots of mobs to kill) and we get a visit from a lvl 63 prot warrior. death by devastate spam. curse you cruel world! at this point we're just happy that the blasted lands is a fairly small zone; makes for shorter corpse runs.

we finally wrapped up that quest line only to learn that there's another one right after it (and one after that, too, according to wowhead). so we accepted, 'cause it was new content for us, and that's where the real fun began. back to where we were killing mobs, only now we had to carve a path right through the middle of them and into a cave they've taken up residence in. hmm, this is going to hurt. we make it about 1/2 way into the cave and then get an unlucky 3-pull (one was hiding behind a rock). we almost get things under control when a patrol catches us in the arse, we run out of health potions and we go down. meh, bad luck. run back, rez and clear the rest of the way into the cave and we find our quest mob and 2 guards. switch over to tanking gear and in we go! ... and down we go. quest mob has a 75% armor pierce ability and we picked up an add. ok, crappy start but we can do this. we run back, find a safe spot to rez and try focusing on the guards first this time instead of our quest mob (most of the damage seemed to come from them last time). our plan didn't quite go down the way we'd hoped and we took another visit to dead-ville. run back, rez and ZOMG RESPAWNS ON TOP OF U... dead. crap. we needed a break (and health potions), so we spirit rez and hop over to IF to train (we'd hit 54 earlier). quick stop in the AH for health potions and to look for gear upgrades (why in the name of all that's unholy is plate so gods-forsaken expensive on our server?! 150g for a green, level 50 chest piece?! ugh.) and we're back on the bird to the blasted lands.

we battle our way back into the cave, slice and dice the patrols (yes, we see you mr. I'm-hiding-behind-a-rock-waiting-to-eat-your-face-when-you-turn-around mob) and get to our quest mob; our decomposing skeletons still on the ground as a reminder of our less-then-stellar earlier attempts. tanking gear... check. defensive stance... check. houston, we are go! we go for the guards first and ignore the boss, use a health potion half way through the 2nd guard and then it's just us and ugly. it got hairy towards the end and we were down to 5% life with 1 minute to go on our health potion cooldown, so we popped our intimidating shout/bandage macro and prayed... "oh crap, he's immune to fear! ... but we're still bandaging ourself... ?!" we got a lucky break; ugly decided to try to repeatedly cast mana burn on us instead of ripping our head off and we got a full bandage in. smacked him around a bit more and VICTORY... and that was step one of that quest line. next few steps have us running off to azshara to go swimming or something. we're not sure if it was worth the aggravation and 1.5g repair bill, but it is new content for us and we got a war story out of it.

Continue reading "new (old) content"...

DING!

say hello to our newest 70. Zhered ding'd last night with a total /played of 9 days, 16 hours. conveniently, Z was questing in shadowmoon valley at the time so he hot-footed it over to wildhammer stronghold and sat patiently in front of the mailbox while we moved funds around.

remember that post we did a while back about making money? well, here's proof that it works: Z went first class and bought his epic flying mount, [Swift Blue Gryphon], within minutes of hitting 70. we didn't even bother buying the regular flying mount first. that's 6000g (800 to train expert riding + 5000 to train artisan riding + 200 for the mount). we also had to train our level 70 spells and gem out our new duds (pictured above). after all was said and done, we still have about 500g in the bank.

and now, we're off to start our kara key adventures...

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