Thursday (4 Oct) - The Trek to 90

Thursday (4 Oct) - The Trek to 90

Wild and family are not the only adventurers taking on the challenge of the Mists of Pandaria. In fact, they are well ahead in tackling the goal of reaching the new maximum level of 90. Here are two of those stories.

First, Wild family friends Sis and Lao talk about getting started on the grind:

I know I am a miser, a cheap skate, a penny pincher, and squirreler. And last night it showed. Lao needs Ghost Iron to level her engineering but Lao is not a miner, she is a flower picker. Yes, I know that this does not complement her other career but in early pvp the Lifebloom buff (of haste and health) helps quite a bit. To help out Lao’s engineering Sis became a miner and for the most part this has not been an issue since Sis was an 85 (top level at the time).

Now the expansion is out and Sis is back to being a low grunt that has no flying mount in the new area. This means Lao has two options: suck it up and buy the Ghost Iron (for around 330 per stack) or farm it. Now Lao did just get a tax free gift from Happy, which at current prices would be 46.875 stacks. But Lao does not want to blow her money on “lower end” engineering items, these being items that will level her up to about 565 to maybe 575, out of 600, when Sis can farm the “lower end” mats. 

Because of this Sis got sent out to The Mists yesterday. Sis was not very sure if this was a good idea. A) Her gear is in a very sad state, having not been improved once she hit 85. B) She has not been played since hitting 85 (which was over a year or three ago). C) Her demons have not been in action for just as long and they too might have forgotten how to play. And D) with the new expansion spells and stats have changed, so even if she used the 1,2,3 rotation on her bar, there are now missing spots and changed spells since she last cast them.

None of this would override Lao’s (and my other toons) miser attitude. Out Sis went.

Sis aggroed everything! And if she was not pulling it her void walker (who seems to have gotten senility in his old age and now randomly wanders around) was. This is where it became obvious on how much skills Sis had, more likely how dumb down the game has become, because some how she did not die.  Still she was able to get 18 bars (36 ore) to send over to Lao in just the first starting area. This took about an hour.

The math still has to be tabulated on if this is worth it. Does Lao make that much with just questing/dungeons? No idea. Some quests give just XP, I think the average is about a 10g reward, plus any gear upgrades she gets or sells. Sis will probably be sent out a few more times. The new area has yet to kill her and she has yet to get herself killed.

By the way, Lao, who got a head start on sisterly Sis, is already level 88.

Next up is the pair DB and Sin:

Sinstar started her trek to 90 yesterday. She started out queuing for dungeons, and while waiting she started the quest chain that brings her to Pandaria. The queue was taking a little longer than expected for a healer so she asked in guild chat if anyone wanted to join. She got two dps friends to come along, though the queue remained about 9 minutes. She complained about that time and the DPS complained for them alone it is over 30 minutes! She ended up getting into the dungeon and it went by so quickly that she didn’t even get warmed up. She ended up running each of the two pandaran dungeons that can be run at 85 about 8 times total and all but one were cake walks. I will explain the other one below.

As for the leveling process, Sin got in a flow where she would queue for a random battleground and a random dungeon at the same time, and while waiting she did a few quests. The random battleground (BG) queues were pretty short, and as soon as she would get out of the BG she would get into a dungeon straight away. While in the BG the Looking For Group (LFG) queue is paused, but it is almost like it counts the time in the bg as waiting time so the LFG pops as soon as she leaves the bg. She also found that even with level 89s in the bg she isn’t outmatched as a healer. She was top horde healer in each of the three BGs she ran (2 wins and one loss) and was over 6M total heals in all three. She only died a few times as well, even with only pve gear on. I would recommend the double queue technique for fast leveling! Sin got to 71% to 86 by the end of the day. Also, just as a quick note from Sin to Wild, dps in kitty form as a healer works pretty well with 100% of intellect converting to agility. Sin was killing mobs while questing faster than others that were around that were dps classes/specs. It works.

Now, for a quick blip about the bad dungeon run. It was a Temple of the Jade Serpent run (in my opinion the harder of the two available at 85) and it was a group of 5 level 85s. The start was rough, with the “tank” (a deathknight with less health to start than Sin) running straight into the first group of mobs, hitting them a few times and then standing there doing nothing. The mobs quickly aggroed on everyone else and Sin was spreading heals all over like wildfire. It turned out the tank was “super drunk” and he didn't have any of his tank gear on and also wasn't in blood presence. That was just the start. Also, not only was the tank useless, but all the dps were as well. We sort of stumbled through the rest of the content very slowly with Sin going low on mana a number of times because she was healing so much and the tank wasn't holding aggro. Somehow we managed to make it to the last boss, but we finally got to the point that Sin couldn't keep everyone alive with all of the damage going around. She pulled out all of her stops including tree of life, gulping mana potions, innervate less than a minute into the fight to get more uses out of it, etc. We wiped twice. The third time someone gave instructions to the group and with a little bit more coordination we were able to bring the last boss down. It was a challenging run to be sure and it really allowed Sin to flex her muscles, but no matter how much healing a healer puts out, you can’t push a square through a round hole. Gladly we got it worked out.

Just as an aside, Sin’s overall HPS on the last dungeon run were over 19k. In every other dungeon run she did the highest she got was 11k and the lowest was 7k. The group where she was at 11k was a pretty bad group as well, so just imagine how bad a group is when it calls for that much healing and the healer does 4k more HPS than the top damage does DPS (15k)… Hopefully she never runs into any of those guys again! For a little perspective on the DPS, in every other group Sin was in there was at least one dps in the 25k+ dps and there were a couple dps in the mid 30s as well. The only people under 20k normally were the tanks. So a whole group at 15k or less is really bad luck!

Wild read the reports above and admits there might be a twinge of envy ... and maybe even a slight warming to the idea of getting back into the mainstream of quest, dungeons, and raiding. But it's only a "slight" warming ...