You Could Call it My Preseason

Back when Cataclysm first dropped, I was in the middle of leveling a Draenei Paladin and the original Nevelanthana. Both were in Outland at that point, so I decided to rechristen their leveling process the Convoy to L85. Complete with a song from 1975 filled with CB radio lingo:

Doing both toons, it took me from December 7, 2010 to January 19, 2011 for them both to ding L80 and then head for Cataclysm zones. Getting to L85 took a bit longer, the first week of March, but still that was also not going totally gangbusters either.

Mists was a bit different. I decided on Azshandra as my new main not too long before Mists was released, and I leveled her all the way straight to L90, mixing up Battlegrounds with questing out in the field. That misadventure took from August 2012 until June 2013 to complete. Of course, I was also heavily playing SWTOR and LOTRO at the time, so that also contributed to the slowness in leveling.

Why do I mention these things? Because I have a history of not rushing out and heading straight into the new expac. That contributed to my thought process in deciding to start from scratch in Mists with a new toon --Az, in this case-- because I figured there'd be no way I'd enjoy the chaos up in Pandaria. 

Looking back on it, I think the only time I logged in for a brand new experience and actually followed through on it was the release of WoW Classic itself.

The scene in Teldrassil on Myzrael-US,
August 2019. I wonder how many of
those toons are still being actively played?

I logged in, looked around, got a few screenshots, and then logged for a couple of hours, figuring that there'd be no way in hell I could complete any quests with that crowd around. (Plus it was dinner time.)

Hmmm... I do recall checking out the Cataclysm pre-patch on the night it went live, but I also recall making a ton of gold on Neve porting people back to Orgrimmar from Dalaran.

So imagine my surprise when I was heading to Zul'Farrak to farm some greens there to disenchant* and my questing buddy --who I was grouped up with-- said "we're kidnapping you".

***

Now, you have to also understand that allergies have been killing me all week, and I finally gave in last night and took some Benadryl, so I wasn't exactly in a very lucid state. Still, my brain completely fizzled out when suddenly two more people popped into our group and they decided on running Utgarde Keep.

"Uh... I was actually feeling tired, because I took some Benadryl."

I believe somewhere in the responses to my declaration was my questing buddy saying she was having none of that, and since she'd already joined me in Zul'Farrak I began waking up because I had a hard time keeping up with her and killing things.

So, away to Northrend I went.

I told my questing buddy on the ship to Valiance Keep that "this doesn't count" as far as me going to Northrend. I only collected a flight point --force of habit-- and then we did the same for Howling Fjord and away we went.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this I completely woke up and briefly thought about fleeing --the old fight or flight response to a surprise-- but I suppressed it. My questing buddy was looking out for me, and I'd be a pretty damn poor friend if I went and hid.

Although I'll be completely honest in that when I switched my Details meters from Threat to Damage, I wanted to hide from embarrassment: Deuce was barely doing more damage than my questing buddy, who was healing on her Disco Priest. 

The warlock, who was also a good friend, was doing about 80-85% of the damage in every single fight.

And it's not like Deuce is totally undergeared, as she has the full Brutal set from running Alterac Valley, plus the PvP Staff. None of those pieces are terrible, and they fit in roughly with a range from T4 through Zul'Aman to T5 gear from TBC. So, roughly middle of the pack epic gear but with Resilience, that classic PvP stat that keeps a body from being one shot in Battlegrounds. The difference was that the warlock had at least T5 --and in some cases T6-- gear, so he was running with easily some of the best stuff out of raids in TBC Classic. You know, stuff I would have had a shot at getting if I'd not had to drop progression raiding back in January.

Which then reminded me that I was once again on the outside looking in, and that I was essentially being carried through this instance.

So in the span of an hour, I went from surprised/stunned to reluctant to grateful to happy to embarrassed/humiliated. 

***

Oh, how was Utgarde Keep itself?

Like riding a bike, really. After a few minutes you remember the cadence. 

Although to be fair, I know more about interrupts and how things tick for a Frost Mage than I did back in 2010-2011, and that probably cost me a bit on the damage meters. I would interrupt and use Spell Steal to keep the additional damage off of the tank, who, being a Bear tank with a lot of T5-6 gear himself, didn't really need the help.**

I'd have completely enjoyed myself if it weren't for that constant reminder that I was not pulling my weight. Even the mage table is totally useless for Northrend, since the mana and health pools are so much larger than those found in Outland.

Someone shared a couple of quests along the way, and I accepted the first one strictly from muscle memory and then I realized what I was doing. I then refused the second quest and deleted that first quest from my log. Not until I officially go to Northrend will I do any quests up there.

And that concluded the first night in my "preseason" before I officially head to Northrend. 

I was extremely happy to be back in Outland by myself this morning.

*Long story, but in order to progress in Tailoring, after a certain point you need items such as Imbued Netherweave. To make THAT, you need Arcane Dust, which is found by disenchanting TBC Classic greens. But in order to get to the Enchanting level to disenchant THAT, I need to get to 275 in Enchanting. Deuce, being 230-ish, needed to get up to 275, which meant targeting green gear for disenchanting so I could then turn around and use FOR enchants to raise my skill level. And to find the green gear that would disenchant properly, the best places to look are in Uldaman and Zul'Farrak.

See? Clear as mud.

**It's still good practice, though, like using Frost Nova and then Deep Freeze to keep a caster in a mob from healing/casting.

It Takes Diff'rent Strokes

Well...  Two down, one to go.

Both Tomakan and Neve dinged last week.  For the record, Tom crept ahead of Neve the past few weeks while she spent some of her time farming for Frostweave, but I didn't really look at it as an Alliance v. Horde competition.

The primary concern I had with this experiment --could a toon go straight into Cata without stopping to farm Northrend Heroics-- was answered well over a month ago.  Of secondary importance was the amount of difficulty melee DPS and ranged DPS would have in making it through Cata, and after that how different the stories each faction would tell.  Now, I'm not completely finished with Twilight Highlands, but I'm far enough along that I can draw some conclusions.


Melee or Ranged DPS:  Who's got the harder time?

The answer for that is that it depends on the zone.

Some people love Vashj'ir, some people hate it.  But for ranged DPS, it's possibly the best zone out there.  The added third dimension to the zone means that ranged DPS can zoom in and attack at odd angles, negating the advantage that melee DPS would get having to grind their way through a particular area.  Sure, your average toon will have a flying mount by then --and zones such as Deepholm and Twilight Highlands pretty much demand one if you want to get to certain areas-- but with a flying mount you still have to land to attack.  in Vashj'ir, the underwater vertical dimension effectively allows ranged DPS to attack from the air.  You don't have to clear out all of the nearby enemy to prevent from being caught from behind, but instead you can use the WoW equivalent of surgical strikes to take out the enemy.

For melee DPS, there's a lot that Vashj'ir has going for it as well.  Plate DPS will find a lot more useful drops in Vashj than in Hyjal, which can be vital in getting your toon Cata-geared.  At the same time, Deepholm seemed more tailor made for melee than ranged DPS.  For a Ret Spec Pally with the Holy Wrath Glyph active, any place with boatloads of elementals on it is a real bonus, and Deepholm was filled with them.  By comparison, Hyjal, Vashj'ir, and Uldum didn't have nearly as many elementals to work with.

After having read the above, you'd think that by omission I must be ragging on Hyjal and Uldum, but that's not the case.  Both zones were pretty much DPS-neutral, not favoring either one.  Hyjal had more tank Plate drops than Vashj, so if a tanking offspec were of vital importance to you, Hyjal is the place to go.  Uldum had one or two quests that were much easier on Plate DPS than on a squishy Mage --The Pit of Scales being the biggest offender, particularly if it's bugged*-- but in general I felt that Uldum was pretty much DPS-neutral in terms of difficulty.

Now Twilight Highlands, that's another story entirely.

If you leveled through Northrend back in the Wrath days, you know that once you dinged L80 --typically in The Storm Peaks-- things weren't bad at all in Icecrown.  Quest greens didn't hold you back much, and the real difficulty came in trying to solo the mulit-person quests.  That was when you needed the T9 set.

Therefore, if you were expecting history to repeat itself upon venturing to Twilight Highlands, you were disabused of that opinion almost immediately.  It was more along the lines of:  "Ding!  You're L85!  Now go to back and start over!"

For people who never experienced what it was like to start the Cata leveling process with Northrend green gear, this had to be a kick in the nuts.  And the Horde's initial Naga quests are particularly brutal to squishy mages, as the waves of them come in so damn fast that you can get completely overwhelmed before you knew what was going on.  Once you get past the initial quest chains, however, the zone becomes pretty DPS-neutral.  Where Twilight Highlands shines, however, is in the story.


"Thundermar ale is 220 proof; I don't know how that's possible."

The story is similar for both factions throughout Vashj'ir, Hyjal, Deepholm, and Uldum.  With Vashj, the story is the same, but the quest givers are Horde or Alliance.  The other three have the faction neutral questgivers, so the story is almost exactly the same.  Then you get to Twilight Highlands, and things suddenly diverge.


The Horde and Alliance stories emphasize dealing with the new additions to each faction --Dragonmaw and Wildhammer-- and the struggles each leader has in exerting control.  The Dragonmaw are initially run by Mor'ghor, last seen on the Netherwing Ledge, and the younger Dragonmaw under the direction of Zaela chafe under his demon-tainted rule.  Once Zaela leads a successful revolt, she then has to consolidate power against the drake riders who think the Wildhammer are the greater threat.  On top of that, the Horde has big issues --as in Wyrmrest type issues-- by aligning with the Dragonmaw.

The Alliance, by comparison, has a slightly more mellow route through the Twilight Highlands.  First, you have to fight off a Horde attack --thanks, Garrosh!-- and then you settle into trying to unite the independent Wildhammer clans.  I know that Blizz basically lifted the stereotypical Scottish blueprint and stuck them on the Dwarves, but after a while the quests devolved into something like having Robin Williams describe golf.  You go rally the clans, but then everything falls apart because the clans can't stand each other.  So you try to arrange a political marriage, and you can guess where this whole thing is going.

Well, the divergent paths of each faction really brings Twilight Highlands to life.  And I haven't even gotten through the Red Dragonflight portion of the program yet!

***

Heard around Azeroth:

Warrior:  LF Port to Dal
Neve (Me):  I can do that.
[Warrior invites Neve]
Neve (Me):  Um, you're in Dal.
Warrior:  Oh.

Tomakan (Me, during the Cursed Landing quests):  There's something incredibly satisfying about killing 1000 Gnomes.

[Quintalan is helping a couple of people look for a rare spawn in Deepholm while he's finishing up the questlines]
Priest:  Did you find anything yet?
Quintalan (Me):  No.
[Quintalan pauses to acquire another quest]
Priest:  Did you find it?
Quintalan:  No.
[Q completes quest, gets another quest]
Priest:  Did you find it?
Quintalan: Look, you don't have to ask each time I pause.
Priest:  kk.  [10 seconds pass]  Did you find it?
Quintalan: /facepalm

Warrior:  LFM Ring of Blood
Priest:  Wrong location.  You want Outland.
Warrior:  LFM Ring of Blood
Priest:  What level are you?
Warrior:  L84
Tomakan (Me):  You can solo Ring of Blood at L80, much less 84
Warrior:  Tried it.  Didn't work.
Priest:  Just what did you try?
Warrior:  The one here.  The Ring of Blood.
Priest:  That's not the Ring of Blood; that's the Crucible of Carnage.
[One minute passes]
Warrior:  LFM Ring of Blood
Priest: ...

***

Convoy to L85 Update:

Tomakan:  L85 and in Twilight Highlands
Nevelanthana:  L85 and in Twilight Highlands
Quintalan:  L84 and in Uldum


*You know you've got a bugged quest event when you're out of the Pit and taking damage for no visible reason whatsoever while you're still drinking.

Hyjal vs. Vashj'ir - Brief Thoughts

Okay, Quintalan isn't exactly undergeared going into his first Cata zone, so I was prepared for an easier time.

I wasn't prepared for the Elites stuck in the middle of those burning areas when you're searching for the staff parts.

Q was wading in, taking 2 of those non-elites at a time, when Holy Wrath pulled another piece of "trash" over.

"Man," I thought, "that one's hitting hard."

The other two trash disposed of, Q turned his attention to that new elemental and... 

"Elite.  Oops."

During the corpse run, I reminded myself that I should still take a page from Neve and Tom's playbook and go easy on the trash pulling.

***

When I got to the portion of the quest chain where you had to escort Fandral Staghelm through the Emerald Dream, I was amused.  "Well, well, well.  Both he and Magatha are on the outs.  Good."

***

While I know I'm only partway through the zone, one thing that strikes me from the drops so far is the abundance of tanking gear.  Most of the Plate drops in Vashj'ir were DPS and/or Healing related, so I got used to gearing up quickly.  Hyjal, however, is more tank friendly.

Great news for tanks, but not so great news for melee DPS.  I'm not big on reforging Cata green gear --I'd rather save my money when I know the next zone will have gear to replace it-- but let's just say I'm glad that Q started with better gear than Tomakan did.

***

Convoy to L85 Update
Tomakan:  L83 in Deepholm
Nevelanthana:  L83 in Deepholm
Quintalan:  L81 in Hyjal

Interactive Drug Trips of Vashj'ir Past

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed being a Naga.  That whirlwind attack is plenty nice too; every time I heard that whistling noise I thought of Ginsu knives.

 

They even split Kvaldir!  Now Available at L78!

As an aside, I still think a group of renegade Naga could be a good fit for the Horde or at least a Neutral installation, but I'm not exactly all the way through Vashj'ir yet.  So who knows?

I had mixed feelings playing the Battlemaiden's questline, however.  In that old conundrum you'd find in The Frozen Throne, who do you root for:  the group aligned with the Lich King (Kvaldir), or the group aligned with the Old Gods (Naga + surprise guests)?  Either way, the mortal races lose.

In general, both the Horde and Alliance quest lines are alike.  There are a few minor differences, namely with the minor sideshow stuff from Goblins/Gnomes, but that's about it.  The tone of the characters, however, is completely different.  The Horde characters are out for blood, while the Alliance characters have their words tempered a bit.  In the 'defend the ship' event, the Horde Captain yells "Make 'em bleed!"  The Alliance Captain doesn't say anything quite so memorable:  "For Stormwind!"  On the flip side, having the Draenei Earthen Ring member talk about having to run and hide her interest in Shamanism rings far truer than a Tauren, and the Dwarven Earthen Ring member saying "Ugh, an Orc... This will take some getting used to" made me laugh.

Finally, between the second and the last of the Battlemaiden sequences culminating in "Visions of Vashj'ir Past", both toons got themselves geared up enough to qualify for the first of the Cataclysm regular instances.  So by the time you're through with the Shimmering Expanse you're instance ready, with almost all of your gear replaced by new Cata greens.  It's not always optimal --Tom was wearing some tanking shoulders for a good while-- but it's far better than what you're equipped with coming out of Wrath as a fresh L80.

I'm planning on taking Quintalan in the opposite direction to Hyjal and see how the regearing process goes over there.  Naturally, he's going to have a lot of advantages that Tom and Neve didn't have, but that's the breaks.


Convoy to L85 Update
Tomakan:  L82 in Vashj'ir
Nevelanthana:  L82 in Vash'jir
Quintalan:  L80 and being used for farming Frostweave in Icecrown

EtA:  For the Paladins, so far I've only seen one Relic drop in Vashj'ir, and it's a Holy Spec Relic given you by the woman who sends you out hunting for her lost items.  That means for you Prot and Ret Spec Pallys whatever Relic you've got on when you start up Cata will probably still be with you throughout Vashj'ir.  In Tomakan's case, it was an old Relic he picked up in one of the Tempest Keep instances and promptly forgot about.  I don't believe Tom encountered a Relic at all while running the Wrath 5-mans, and the point of the exercise was not to go out buying stuff but instead just keep on truckin'.

EtA:  A Ret (kinda Prot) Relic finally dropped in Vashj'ir, right before the end of zone.  For Prot Pallys, you might want to pass on the Prot gear that is an alternate, but that's your choice.

Under the Sea Plaguelands

If you want to know my opinion of sending the two guinea pigs straight into their first Cata zone --Vashj'ir-- I think the title pretty much sums it up.

For those of you who were around on WoW prior to Cata*, can you remember what it was like taking your first toon at ~L55 and making a mad dash for Light's Hope Chapel?  The Eastern Plaguelands was the scary zone in the Old World (sorry, Silithus and Blasted Lands), where it seemed the waves of Scourge were unending and you had to go at a crawl to reach the one safe place in the entire zone.  Oh, and it sucked if you happened to be on the road at the same time as the Scarlet Courier; you'd have been better off just running into Plaguewood naked instead.

Of course, all things being equal, some toons were more equal than others at dealing with the challenges of the old Eastern Plaguelands.  Paladins were custom made for the zone, while Cloth wearing toons suffered the most.

In a very real sense, that's what I felt when Neve and Tom swam out into Vashj'ir for the first time.

Neve, as a Frost Mage, has the built in advantage of a minion. 

Boy, did she need it.

My experience leveling with her in the Old World (pre-v4.0.1) came in handy.  The mantra "nice and slow" was vital to her survival.  She could handle one 30-40k HP enemy at a time, but two made her sweat.  She had very little recourse for healing during a battle, so she had to rely heavily on damage mitigation using her shields.  Because the Naga were a) all over the place and b) prone to aggroing on her, she was forced to stand and fight a lot.  The shields she had were often exhausted before their cooldown was over, so these fights became a DPS race.  Afterward, the Conjured Mana Strudel was steady part of her diet.

Still, she didn't die at all until the "defend the ship" event.

A Cloth wearer like a mage is often a sitting duck in a melee style event, and Neve was no exception.  She survived multiple attacks by one Naga, but two at once were almost too much.  And three...

After that experience, things became a little easier.  She finally started to get a few Cata greens, and her health (and firepower) jumped 3k.  In fact, the only time she died after that was when the rare Lady Ya-Ya (yeah, I know, a nod to Lady Gaga) spawned right behind her.

Tomakan, by comparison, has built in healing, and is surrounded by nice, hefty (if puny by Cata standards) Plate.  And when Art of War procs, Exorcism will deal 10k damage at a pop.  He found the going quite a bit easier than Neve did, and he didn't die once.  Okay, I don't think the elite giant catching you from behind should count, but that's just me.  I did follow the same rules that I laid down with Neve:  one enemy at a time, switch out damage (Ret Aura) for protection (Protection Aura), and go slow.  I'll admit I was a bit concerned that Tom would have it harder than Neve because she could get more damage in from distance than he could, but he made up for it in better armor protection and higher spiky damage.

Now, I think both toons are getting their Cata legs under them, and while they aren't going to be knocking on the door of any instances soon, I'm more confident in their ability to survive in the Cata zones.

So the question I posed, "can you survive in the Cata zones going straight from Northrend after dinging L80?", is so far a yes.  Now, the "will you die a lot?" question is still out there, but we'll see.  A corollary to all this, "how long will it take you to be instance ready?", now that's a head scratcher.  I suspect it'll be after all of Vashj'ir is complete, but I don't know for certain.  Even with the Cata greens I have, I don't have a high enough iLevel to get into normal Trial of the Champion on either toon, so that gives you a feel on how far I have to go.



*Okay, that's just about everyone, but you never know.

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.

Time for a Convoy

I think it's time for an experiment (of sorts).

Quintalan is basically sitting around Dal, cooling his jets, while I've been leveling Tomakan and Neve.  I could send him straight into the Cataclysm zones, but I've been reluctant to do so.  It has nothing to do with being put off by the Great Cataclysm Race, but a realization that if I push ahead with Q I'd shelve these other two for a long while.

There's also a bit of a daredevil mentality at work here.  Just how hard is it to hop on an 18-wheeler and drive a toon straight up through L85 without stopping to farm heroics?

I've read online a lot of "you can go straight to L85 without stopping, but it will be a bit harder," but exactly how hard is "harder" the posters kind of left blank.  When you ding L80, you typically have a bunch of iL187 and iL200 gear, with a mixture of lower level gear thrown in.  This is especially true if you've been leveling through instances like I have, and you don't get those questing gear drops to round out your equipment.  For example, I only recently replaced Tom's cloak; he'd been using something he picked up circa the last two Scarlet Monastery instances all the way through L66 simply because he didn't get a DPS type cloak to drop that entire time.  (Well, one that he won in a roll, anyway.)

What this means is that it's entirely possible Neve or Tom could ding 80 and still have a residual piece of BC gear on them.  And those are the toons I'll be taking straight into the Cataclysm zones.

Okay, I'll eventually get around to getting Q to L85, but right now I've got a good thing going:  leveling Tom in the early morning, and Neve in the lunchtime (or late afternoon).  I figure to ride this convoy straight to L85 and see what happens.  I'll make a point of taking a gear snapshot of each toon once they ding 80 and see how things change over the Cat leveling experience.