Level 71: Freshmen Again
I thought about doing the "10 Things You Will/Will Not Miss from The Burning Crusade Now that You are in Northrend" blog, but I realized:
- It's too soon to really know what those are since I've only been in Northrend for a few days
- For the last year of The Burning Crusade, I was mostly concerned witnTier 5/Tier 6 raiding. For the first several months of Wrath of the Lich King, I'll be busy leveling and gearing my main.
- They are in a strange place and they don't know where everything is
- They're taking classes that require much more self-reliance than their high-school equivalents
- They're not the coolest/most experienced people in the school (teachers do not count as people).
- They don't have the advantage of being the only people with cars (no flying mounts yet!)
I made all these wonderful plans (and blogged about most of them), but of course none of them panned out. So I've revised my strategies.
Do Interesting Quests: I'd originally planned to rush to Dragonblight and power-level there, away from the madding crowds, but working on the Loremaster Achievement for Kalimdor, I realized how much of the Warcraft stories I'd missed by skipping certain quests.
In Northrend, I wanted to do the first two instances with my guildies. We're well-geared enough that we would not be farming them for drops. So I wasn't sure I could come back and do them in 2009. I went to the starting zones to pick up the dungeon quests and breadcrumbs for later zones, and got distracted. I oozed Captain Adams' Vrykul prisoner. Couldn't just leave him hanging after that, ya know?
The Nexus quests in particular are a long way from Valiance Keep ("Valiance" is not a word! Is Valor Keep trademarked or something?!).There's a lot of really amazing stuff in those starting zones!
- The Kvaldir: Viking Raiders who can't be seen unless you're in the mists with them, who turn back into sea-water when they die
- Baby murlocs!!!
- The Cultist/Traitor questlines from Valiance Keep
- Learning how to be an evil robot! And bluffing dwarves who make robot noises!
- The lame Nesingwary lackeys (I remember them camping the lousy young tigers in STV!!!), and that hypochondriac, Harold Lane
Explore: I've only got the achievement for the first four zones so far, and I'm still discovering places in all of them. But it's time for me to move on. I've found the path from Borean Tundra to Sholazar, and once I got to Dalaran, I hiked through Dragonblight to Moa'ki harbor and took a turtle boat and there I was back in Howling Fjord! I need to take a break from questing to look around some more. I'm being careful to ignore quest-givers so I can still pick up bread-crumbs. Besides, those flight-paths are convenient! The Dalaran cooking quests will give me an excuse to wander around some more.
Dalaran itself has been fun to poke around. I found an elixir in the Underbelly that turned my warlock into a walrus. By the way, Lower City drama has followed us to Northrend: Jedaar and Asric are still arguing in a bar in the sewers!
Cro Threadstrong and the apple lady apparently couldn't leave their jobs in Shattrath.
Be social: Sure, most of the quests are solo, but there are not only some group quests, but if you're going after a named mob, there's usually a queue for it, so /invite the waiting people from your faction to save everyone time and stress. It's a chance to meet new people and get to know your server better.
Some of my guildies are powerleveling in exclusive groups with relatives and particular friends, but I've had a chance to run instances with some folks I haven't seen much of. It's getting tougher as we're all different levels now, and it will get worse over the holidays. I'll be out of town for about four weeks - that's most of December and late November.
Planning on Raiding... Eventually: Yes, the first Karazhan raid team in my guild were our first level 70's, but within a month, two of them had quit WoW, we were running multiple groups through Karazhan every week, and those groups always needed extra DPS because someone couldn't make it. By the time we got serious about King Maulgar, everyone had a chance to gear up and raid.
I've seen several of the announcements of the first of various classes to reach level 80 on Kul Tiras. Some of them are from Sunwell raiding guilds, but not all. Why would hardcore raiders be especially good at raiding? We have some very serious solo players who have leveled multiple alts and known exactly what they're doing. The first level-80 toon in my guild belongs to a person who's had three different mains (the first of which is a Scarab Lord). In fact, I think the only thing slowing down most of our hard-core soloers is the desire to level a Death Knight from 55 to 80 before they go to work on their mains!
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I won't be getting the xpac for another week or so. I preordered it from amazon, but had to have it sent to a family member in the US since Amazon won't ship electronics like dvds or games outside the country... of course now I see that I could have ordered it online which would have been faster, but oh well..
Anyway, I love being a 70 now.. err.. when 70 was max I mean. But I realize I missed a lot on my way to 70. I agree with what you said about missing a lot of the warcraft stories. Taking it slow and steady is sometimes better than other things. I'm going to work on gaining rep while I level this time around. If I can hit 80 in a couple months I'll be happy.Posted November 18, 2008 at 06:39 AM by Belthezor
