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!