And so it Begins

Tom and Neve both dinged L80 this morning.

(My run of bad luck in BGs continues, as I couldn't win in AV on either toon.  All I needed was one win and I would have dinged L80 early in the morning on each, but nooo....  /grumble)

Anyway, time to take stock of what's on each toon:

Pretty, um... homely, right?

Although both of them finally left their Outland gear behind (Tom replaced his last piece the other day), both toons only have two items at iL187.  (EtA:  Tom now has three, since I replaced the heirloom Chestpiece with one from The Oculus he won this morning.)  The Wrath heirlooms are still much in abundance, and the vast majority of gear is in the 150s-160s range.  Admittedly, this is far lower than I expected when I decided to go with this experiment, but it's realistic.  If you're a new player to WoW and you've leveled up to L80, this is what you've got.  Unless you figured out how to work the AH, you don't have a lot of gold in the bank to buy the new Cata L78 gear, either.

As you can see, I'm not bothering with an Eternal Belt Buckle (on a low-end Wrath green?).  Nor do I have a host of enchants on the items, either.  Some of the items don't have the iLevel for it, and others --being heirlooms-- I'd rather not enchant at all.  On Neve, I enchant when I can and when it makes sense; I'm not going to dump strength enchants on items just because I can; I'd rather match it up with something she can use.  I also need to level her Enchanting and Tailoring more (and I don't want to talk about Tom's Engineering).

I did the initial Vash'jir quest or two on Neve, and while I was waiting on the dock outside of Org, a couple of guildies tried to talk me into buying some of the Cata greens.  "You're going to die a lot, Q," I was told.

"But that's the point.  I keep reading about how you can do it, and I want to see how well you can do it."

And yes, I won't lie:  that first Naga fight was nasty.  However, my problem in that fight was that I couldn't damn well see, because my character was zoomed in all the way to FPS mode, and I couldn't seem to zoom back out.  (FPS mode makes my head hurt, and I'd rather not play in a zone where I have to play that way.)  I'm going to try again later, to see if something simply got out of whack that only a full restart would cure.


EtA:  In the interest of full disclosure, this is what Q has on at the moment while he's waiting his turn:

He's a wee bit better equipped to start questing in the Cata zones.  His gear is close to as good as you can get without actually having raided in ICC, so he'd have advantages that a true newbie wouldn't.