Build your own legendary

I wrote this post some time ago now. I’d been inspired by WoWInsider posting Blog Azeroth shared topics to go and check Blog Azeroth out. I had a brief look at the site and resolved to go back and investigate it further as soon as I could (which I did). Anyway, I looked at the list of old topics and one jumped out at me.

Legendaries are a tricky thing; make them too easy to get and they aren’t legendary anymore, make them too dependant on rng and it’s frustrating as you feel helpless, make it too grindy and that’s not legendary really that’s just dedication. There’s also the sense of entitlement that people feel, that if it’s too dependant on skill, too hard except for the elite, then people feel excluded, like they never had a chance at all.

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First pair at 80

I’m sure I’ve seen that wordpress has something called an aside, where you can post little snippets that aren’t real posts. Anyway, this is just an update of my recruit a friend experiment. I’ve successfully dungeon boosted a shaman and a paladin up to level 80. The /played time is a little over 1 day and 11 hours. This is probably about 12 hours longer than my last RaF experiment took. As the /played time at the end of that was 23 hours and something.

I’ve been thinking about why it took about half as long again to dungeon boost as opposed to running in the LFG with RaF. With the LFG you go in lots of different dungeons and there’s quests in all those dungeons. I went in a fair few, and I learnt while doing it what ones I needed to hit when, but I didn’t go in as many as I would have in the LFG. You also get the bonus xp for completing a LFG dungeon which I didn’t have. Plus I looted everything, and solo looting is going to take more time than group looting.

However, if you divide it up per character it took only 18 hours to get to level 80. I remember seeing adverts for guides which said you could do it in under 5 days. 18 hours isn’t 12 hours per character but it’s still very fast – much faster than regular levelling. Plus I have a guild bank full of cloth and enchanting supplies. When I’m done running my second pair through I’ll see if I have enough enchanting supplies to level enchanting again. I want enchanting on my new monk for disenchanting purposes. If I don’t then I’ll get my tailor to use some of the cloth to make things to disenchant. Any materials I have left over I’ll hopefully be able to sell in early days of Mists as lots of people will be levelling new professions.

That’s another thing, I got a lot more gold this way than running the LFG. All the gold that dropped I got (even though it was split over three characters), I got all the gold from vendoring all the vendor trash. I didn’t need to send any gold from my main character to these new ones and I’ve managed to buy the mount training for level 20 and 40, flight training for Outland, and then cold weather flying for Northrend. I have enough gold on both to get a flight masters licence as well, plus a fair bit left over.

To me the extra gold, the enchanting mats and cloth, plus no gut churning stress of mucking up and wiping the group because playing two characters at once is hard, is worth the extra 12 hours it took. I learnt a fair but about where to go, and when, boosting the shaman/paladin pair. We’ll see how long it takes me to boost the warlock/druid pair.

Cataclysm Post Mortem

Cataclysm is the only expansion that I’ve played from start to finish, it’s the expansion where I came into my own as a player. It’s an expansion that gets a lot of bad press, and it’s true that it had it’s bad points but it had a lot of good points too. I’ve looked back on Cata raids, and I’ve written my bucket list, this is looking at the whole of the expansion. What worked and what didn’t, from my point of view of course.

When I started Cataclysm I had one level 80 (my mage), a level 65 paladin, a level 30 something warrior and a level 15 (or thereabouts) rogue. I had maxed out tailoring and I think I just managed enchanting as well. I had the other professions in varying states of disarray. My rogue was a leatherworker back then, my warrior was a skinner and my paladin a miner. Those characters don’t have those professions any longer, I’ve shuffled them about.

Now with just under eight weeks left in Cata I have 8 level 85’s, by the time Mists drops I’ll have 11 or 12. All my professions are maxed out with alchemy, tailoring and enchanting being maxed twice over. I’m getting the mats stocked up to level enchanting for the third time when I roll a monk, that disenchanting ability is very useful. I’ve moved guilds three times, the last move meaning I’ve also moved realms, I call Bronze Dragonflight home now as opposed to Argent Dawn. A lot has changed over the course of one expansion.

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Mists Beta: Protection Paladin in August

I decided it was about time I had another good look at protection paladins. The beta is winding down now, so I wanted to get a good look at the spec changes that will be live in just a few weeks. I wrote about my first look on the beta, and about prot pallys, in April. I’ve not written about them since as, in all honesty, I’ve not taken a good look. It’s long past time where I need to do that as in just a few weeks this’ll be the new reality.

So let’s compare what I wrote a few months back and see how much, if any of it, is still valid.

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Choosing that perfect race/class combo

I want to have a max level of every class. Right now I have eight out of ten classes maxed out, leaving three still to go come Mists. I also want a horde, and I’m currently levelling on RaF experiment Mark II, so that makes five. However, even if I wasn’t planning on leveling anything else it does intrigue me about how people pick their combo. How I pick mine and how someone picks there’s will be different. What factors come into play?

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Mog My Closet: A Robe For All Occasions

It’s no secret I don’t like dresses. My friend who introduced me to warcraft said long before I realised my mage shouldn’t be my main, “if you hate dresses so much you shouldn’t play a mage”. Anyway, I’ve discovered some of them look alright, or at least they do when modelled by my paladin, maybe my mage makes everything look ugly. This isn’t a standard transmog set post, more a collection of robes from the hundreds that are available, or in other words when I wind up laughing at my own jokes.

I put this together some time ago and then never got round to formatting this post properly. It’s been sitting in drafts for a while so it’s time it got posted. I have lots of saved posts ready to go right now. Let’s have a fun one today.

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Why Mists of Pandaria is a big deal

I am super excited for Mists, I really am, and I’ve been thinking about why I’m so excited. I remember being excited for cata but I don’t think it was the same level of excitement. Whether that was because I didn’t know the game as well (I’d started the January before so been playing less than a year), or whether cata just wasn’t as exciting, I’m not entirely sure. However, Mists is exciting and not just because it’s giving us an escape from the Dragon Soul, which eight months in is a little stale.

I’d been giving this some thought one night when I couldn’t sleep. I pulled my phone out and watched the Mists trailer from 2011, I then went looking for the same trailers for Cata, Wrath and TBC. That’s when it struck me about why Mists is so exciting.

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Shutting the door behind you

There’s an expression in English which is basically when you’ve got to the top, rather than holding out a hand helping others up as you were helped, you shut the door behind you so you’re the last one that can get there. On the eu forums there’s a nearly 200 page thread and WoWInsider got in on the act as well. The topic? The age old argument of casual vs hardcore. Now I’ve covered this a bit before and said something similar to what the indomitable Matt Rossi said. We’re all different, and with a large player base we’re as different as can be. There is no one universal truth, everybody has their own truth influenced by their experiences, and so we’re all right and we’re all wrong.

However, if I was just going to rehash the ‘please can we all just get along’ this would be a very short post.

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The Direbrew Dilemma

For the last three days, since September 25th became the day, players have been speculating on what would happen to Brewfest. Well, last night the blues posted their answer which was that it was going to be upgraded for level 90. Now Brewfest starts on the 20th so Coren Direbew would be inaccessible for five days, it ends on the 5th giving players 10 days to kill him. The catch is you have to be level 89 in order to queue for him, meaning those 10 days aren’t kill opportunities but levelling time. As blizz have stated that they want people to stop and smell the roses, and won’t allow flying until level 90 to better facilitate this, there was predictable outrage at this mixed message.

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May we live in interesting times

A few days ago I posted my new cata bucket list. I posted it a day after I’d written it and the day after that I’d done what I could of it. The rng items and the argent tournament obviously take time and are a daily errand so not those. That left me wondering ‘what now?’ which is precisely what I was thinking when I wrote that list. Now one of my flaws is that I’m a tad impulsive and I’m not terribly patient. Run before you walk syndrome if you want to call it something.

The two months between now and Mists, and my need for a goal, led to me pushing ahead with a plan that I wasn’t supposed to enact till Mists.

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