Daily Thoughts: After the Break

Fear not, dear readers, I haven’t forsaken you. I mean that in the original context of the word, not that I might have raised you from the dead with the Vyr’kul, in case you were wondering. Like so many these days, I’ve been a little bogged down with the holiday rush, family get-togethers, and, well….the Cataclsym! Oh the wonders if the end of the world.

So far, my paladin has reached 85, my warrior is gaining more rested XP at level 84, and my shaman is starting to feel neglected at 81. The rest of my toons have barely seen me do more than log in to start the rested XP process. Yes, in case you have alts at the previous level cap, you have to log into them once before they’ll start accruing rested experience. I suppose my death knight has seen a little love, but only because I need some enchants. There’s a fair chance he’ll end up being my 3rd or 4th 85 due to the need of having max enchanting and inscription.

Toons

Although my paladin is still fun, and will likely remain my main (though ret spec instead of holy as primary), my warrior is just blowing through the quests. At 84, even with stat deflation caused by leveling and very few regular dungeons under his belt, the warrior can still break 10k dps without too much trouble. Victory rush, which heals 25% of my hp after getting a killing blow, helps me keep on keeping on as if I had a pocket healer following me around *insert any cataclysm zone here*. Ret paladins damage just feels a little gimped in comparison, not really bad mind you, just mediocre. Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer for WoW) did put a blog post which, among many other things, comments that ret paladins dps might be low and could be buffed, along with a re-imagining of our mastery. To read about that and a great deal of future balance changes to come check it out. Other highlights include, shockingly, survival hunter damage nerf. Despair hunters, despair!

On the shaman, I’m dual specced elemental and resto. I haven’t gone into any dungeons in cataclysm on it so far, so resto hasn’t seen any action. I am enjoying elemental though. Good damage, low downtime. It’s very easy to figure out what to be doing as an elemental shaman while questing and out killing stuff, much easier to feel like I’m doing whats right than enhancement and my damage output is better, even with lesser gear. I’m pretty excited to take it into a dungeon, but I’ll likely queue restoration for the quicker times and practice healing.

Professions

So far I have a max level miner whose JC is at 504, another miner that’s nearly maxed with blacksmithing still under 500 and my death knights enchanting is maybe 480. I think the shaman has barely 10-15 nodes gathered for herbalism. Herbalism should level pretty naturally as the shaman does, but the crafting professions are pretty tough. I took the gold road to start and sold a ton of ore and gems in the first few days and have probably made 30k+ gold just from the ore and greens I’ve collected while leveling. With that, my JC should be a little higher than it is now. Just getting JC to 505 and BSing to someplace a little under 500 has easily cost me thousands of gold in ore I could be selling, and as a gold hoarder it’s been tough. With the cost of the ore, each level of blacksmithing is probably about ~250 gold. This isn’t actually spent gold, as I’m only using ore I’ve gathered myself, but I can clearly see the opportunity cost. Leveling JC after 500 is also slow going, as the only real items to progress are rare cuts you must have done dailies to acquire and the Fire Prism which takes something like 6 of each uncommon gem and therefore has a huge opportunity cost itself. As a result that is going slowly.

Archeology is a pest. It’s slow, it’s boring. It’s not nearly even as lore filled with things that are interesting as I had anticipated. It does however, at max level, have a chance of dropping Zin’rokh, Destroyer of Worlds, It’s awesome, best in slot pre-raid for any plate dps class, and is also bind to account. So my paladin gets it, then my warrior, then my dk. Cause it can. Oh yeah.