Ok, my mage is now 79. Since I have three characters at 80 and very soon a fourth, you can probably conclude that a) I have no life or b) I should be pretty good at levelling by now. Since I’m Alliance and can’t be Undead (hur hur hur) I shall go with b). So, the following is my guide to getting to 80 smoothly in Northrend since there are actually some choices as to which zones you want to do. There are supposedly two zone paths to 80, one from Borean Tundra and one from Howling Fjord. But based on my experience, there is actually an optimal way to go through.

First off, it is really easy to level in Outlands now since the last patch reduced the experience needed. I would recommend getting to at least 70 in Outlands because you can easily reach that by the time you hit Nagrand, and you will be coming back to Outlands anyway to buy your flying mount (the ones in Northrend are very expensive). So you might as well hit 70 and buy your mount first so that you’re all ready to use it when you hit 77.

70-72 Borean Tundra
First off, I highly recommend that you start in Borean Tundra (BT) rather than Howling Fjord (HF), for many reasons.
1) The boat goes from Stormwind, and arrives at Valiance Keep much faster compared to taking a flight to Menethil from Ironforge, and then taking a sightseeing tour of the Fjord.
2) If you care about achievements, BT has the D.H.E.T.A. quests and associated achievement. HF does not have any similar mini-achievement.
3) The geography at HF includes many many hills and ravines, which are a pain since you don’t have a flying mount yet. Travel time going from quest hub to quest hub is much longer.
4) The Kaluak questline opens up faster in BT, and easily enables you to start the daily Preparing for the Worst. The Kaluak area in HF is half a map away and requires you to do a lengthy pre-quest running a fair distance away. Just getting down to their area also requires waiting for a lift.
5) There is a lengthy series of pre-quests to open up multiple quests in the Nexus. These should be done as soon as possible so that you have them ready in case you manage to find a instance group. In contrast, the 2 quests for Utgarde Keep have no pre-requisites and can be picked up just outside the summoning stone.
6) Coldarra has a Wyrmrest daily called Drake Hunt.

Doing all the quests in BT should easily bring you to level 72.

72-74 Dragonblight
From Borean Tundra, head east to Star’s Rest in Dragonblight (DB) as there should be a quest leading you there. Dragonblight is preferable to Grizzly Hills (GH) which is the similar level equivalent for the following reasons:
1) DB has the quest chain to unlock the Wyrmrest daily Defending the Temple, as well as many quests giving Wyrmrest reputation. GH has no useful reputations.
2) DB also has more Kaluak quests including the 2nd daily, Planning for the Future which involves kidnapping those lovable Wolvar puppies. Again, GH has no useful reputations. The Kaluak quartermaster is also in Moaki Harbor (they sell a nice chestpiece at 76 and a nice weapon at 78 for most classes).
3) The questline for Veteran of the Wrathgate is also in Dragonblight. This is pretty much a must-see in terms of the storyline and “omg cinematic”.
4) If you’re a mage, Star’s Rest has the quest which teaches you how to port to Dalaran.

However, you will probably find that there are some quests that can only be picked up at 75, and you’re stuck at mid-74. Never fear, as you can easily hop on over to GH once you run out of easy quests in DB. If you can find a group for Azjol-Nerub or Ahn’Kahet, they are easily doable at this level range.

75 Grizzly Hills
Yes, yes, GH has no useful reputations. But there are a series of easy quests on the left side of the map, including some that lead in to Drak’Tharon Keep. There are also some dailies that give 10 Venture Coins each, 30 of which can buy a pretty good relic item (libram, totem, idol, wand, sigil). The ret pally libram and resto shaman totem are both very very usable at 80. You can also gank (or be ganked by) some Horde/Alliance who are trying to do the dailies if you’re bored of bashing NPCs.

After reaching 75, head on back to DB and finish off the remaining quests.

75-77 Zul’Drak
Story-wise, you will miss out a bit on not having completed Grizzly Hills, especially if you missed out going to Drak’Tharon Keep. But why Zul’Drak (ZD) instead of Sholazar Basin (SB)?
1) ZD has a TON of Argent Crusade and Ebon Blade quests. It also has the Argent Crusade daily Pa’Troll, although it isn’t really worth doing at this point since you don’t have a flying mount.
2) ZD contains another instance, Gun’Drak. SB has no instances.
3) ZD has the Amphitheater of Anguish, which is Ring of Blood Mk 2. Similarly, there are several nice weapon rewards that are still usable at 80 if you can get a group for this. It’s easily doable by 2-3 level 80s and can be tanked + healed by a BM hunter pet.
4) The quest Ragemane’s Flipper rewards one of the best tanking weapons for pallies/warriors until a heroic drop.
5) SB is a farming/herbing/skinning heaven. If you are on a PvP server, there will be many many many level 80s flying around mindlessly farming. They may be bored. Or after a few hours, everything looks like a Titanium Node. Including your head.
6) SB is literally, the furthest possible point you can get from Dalaran. This is because there is no flight path that goes through Wintergrasp, which is right smack in between Dalaran and the Basin. Any flight to/from Dalaran involves you touring Northrend.
7) Oracles and Frenzyheart reputation are not very important. Their gear is largely replaceable, and also require the associated reputation to wear. Besides the achievement of getting exalted with both, there is no real point to getting exalted as both trinkets are pretty useless at 80. There is a low chance to get a nice mount from the Oracles (my pally got it on the first egg *kek*) but given that the egg takes 7 days to hatch… you can easily do this at 80.

After hitting 77, you should go buy cold-weather flying at Dalaran for 1,000 gold. This speeds things up immensely, especially if you have epic flying, which I highly recommend. 6,000 gold is chump change in WotLK, my pally recently got the achievement for getting 10,000 gold from quests.

77 Howling Fjord
This is when you should fly over to HF and romp through the Kaluak quests on the western side of the map, picking up the flight path at Westgard Keep in the meantime. Being able to fly makes doing these quests a breeze. There are also 2 quests which have decent blue trinket rewards.

For players who intend to do Northrend Loremaster or want to reap bucketloads of gold from questing, I recommend finishing off the rest of HF now as well. At this point, all quests in HF are still green, hence they give full experience. However, by about 78-79 some quests start to turn grey or the mobs involved in the quest turn grey. Finishing off the zone at this point will enable you to reap the full benefits in terms of gold and experience compared to coming back at 80.

77-79 Storm Peaks
Now there is a choice between Icecrown (IC) or Storm Peaks (SP). If you are, or plan to be, an Incriptionist (Scribe) then you can skip SP if you wish and go straight to IC. If not, then go to K3 in SP to open up the Sons of Hodir dailies through a ridiculously long questline. The dailies themselves are a pain until honored reputation, after which they become bearable and a decent source of gold. You can stop at honored for the shoulder enchants since the exalted versions aren’t really all that much better. Once you unlock the Sons of Hodir dailies, you can also pick up 2 quests that lead into Halls of Lightning.

79-80 Icecrown
The Argent Crusade encampment starts you off on a questline that gives what is likely going to be one of your trinkets going into heroics. From here on, a lot of quest rewards are very usable at 80 until you replace them with heroic or reputation gear. There is a lot of Argent Crusade reputation, including another daily. Once you unlock the Shadow Vault, there are also Ebon Blade dailies and many many many Ebon Blade quests along the western edge. The Admiral questline has decent gear, ending with some nice neck choices.

You should easily hit 80 midway through Icecrown (or near the end, if you didn’t do SP).

Grats on 80, time for heroics
All these zones are fairly close to Dalaran, where you should have set your hearth once you are able to. This lets you easily get to a bank, and portals back to capitals for training. GH,SB and HF are further away from Dalaran than their counterparts as well. Every day, you can go in a line from Dalaran to Wyrmrest temple, to Moaki Harbor, to Unupe Stand, to Coldarra, doing Kaluak + Wyrmrest dailies. At 80, Aces High! also opens up at Coldarra for more Wyrmrest reputation and practice for Malygos.

First off, I’m gonna insert the obligatory “you need all 3 roles of tank, healers and dps to work together to clear an instance”. This is undeniably true, although in certain kooky cases you can use a pet to tank or get by with no heals. But since I have 3 level 80’s of each type, I’d like to put down my thoughts on what it’s like to play each type of character in WoW today, especially since a lot of people like to complain that their particular role is the hardest.

DPS
My dps character is my ret pally. Frankly, dps is the easiest class to play in order to meet the minimum requirements, i.e. doing enough damage to kill the boss in a timely manner. A dps class only needs to pay attention to 2 things: themselves (cds, timers) and the environment (bad stuff on the ground). There is ultimately no excuse for any dps class to not see any avoidable damage. In TBC, dps was a bit more difficult to play due to many dps classes also being expected to do crowd control. I remember in Shadow Labs or Magister’s Terrace, my warlock would be expected to seduce one target, banish a demon, fear another, and dps the primary target. In WotLK, you just /cast Rain of Fire, taking a page from the “they are cc’d if they are dead” book. DPS characters also form the largest pool in any group/raid, and their contribution is towards a common target. This means there is less individual responsibility and their mistakes can be covered by others and are often unnoticeable.

However, in WotLK the focus has also shifted squarely onto dps in that they have been made more accountable. Because it’s so easy to just dps, the really bad dps players no longer have any excuse. Many fights also require a certain amount of dps (admittedly, its really easy to reach this level) rather than being able to plug away indefinitely.

Being REALLY GOOD dps can be also be much harder than being a good tank or healer. Several dps classes have very complicated rotations due to the multitude of new skills, some of which have quite interesting mechanisms. This can technically be more difficult to play than a tank/healer which tends to have more simplified mechanisms. Unfortunately, there is simply no requirement for dps to be at the top of their game now. You can get by and do better than average dps as long as you have half a brain and don’t do things just because “I like it that way”.

Healer
Healers have to pay more attention than dps in that they have to pay attention to : themselves (cds, mana bar), the health of all their targets, and the environment. Healers also need to know how to prioritise (I’m quite bad at this, all health bars look the same to me). Tanks come first, followed by healers (themselves), followed by those dime-a-dozen dps. Decisions by healers also have a more meaningful impact. When a dps has to choose between finishing their cast and moving out of void zone, its quite a simple decision (hint: the answer is move because no one cares about you finishing your fireball). For a healer, if the choice is between healing the main tank at 20% and moving out of void zone… its not so easy.

Healers also work as a team, and can cover for each other even though it is usually better to arrange targets beforehand. In that sense, healers have it harder the smaller the group because their “team” gets smaller and smaller. However, despite what I’ve always read about healers getting the blame for wipes, I’ve never actually encountered this. There are always many other factors involved that I can use as excuses 🙂 e.g. dps didn’t move out of aoe in time, tank undergeared etc etc.

In WotLK, since almost every class has aoe heals and mana is not really an issue, the technical aspect of healing has become much easier. There is no downranking, so healers basically have very few buttons they need to push. On my resto shaman, I basically keep up earth shield, spam lesser healing wave everywhere and riptide periodically. If there’s aoe damage, I spam my good old chain healzorz in a whack-a-mole fashion. Unless I’m standing in bad stuff, I don’t have to really know or care about what the fight is about and what the boss does (unless its Loatheb). Of course there is a difference between a good healer and a bad healer, but in raids it can be made up by the rest of the healing team. The major stumbling block in healing isn’t the raw throughput, its the global cooldowns. Having one healer who may be incompetent but can be told to “just keep person x and y up” is of huge benefit to other healers since they can concentrate on using their time to save other people.

Tanks
I don’t know if our guild is an aberration, but in WotLK there has been a sudden wave of people who all want to play tanks. Tanking in this expansion has been made much more appealing due to the fact that all the tank classes do much more damage now, to the point that they can regularly outdps poorly-played dps characters.

However, while many people may want to tank… the harsh reality is that many people can’t. Playing a tank well requires the player to possess in-depth knowledge about game mechanics and encounters that goes beyond what is readily available in the game. For example, a dps class can easily figure out what is their main damage increasing stat (e.g. spellpower, strength). If they are not at the hit cap, so be it their dps will suffer, but its not the end of the world. A tank that is not at the defence cap, however… is not going to have a pleasant experience. Tanks need to know about threat and aggro tables. They need to know about line-of-sight pulls.

So not only do tanks have to look at their own cooldowns, and the environment (bad stuff), they also have to lookout for the environment of the raid and understand the strategy well. The middle of the fight is not a good time for the raid leader to tell the tank “move it to the left! no, your other left!”.

A classic example can be seen in Vault of Archavon. Archavon will occasionally bounce like a gummi bear to a random raid member and start farting in place. A really bad tank will run forward and start tanking him in the cloud, oblivious to the damage. An average tank will run forward, tank him, move back a few steps so that they personally are out of the cloud, but leave Archavon (and all melee dps) standing in the cloud. A good tank will see move Archavon such that his rear arc is clear for melee dps to stand in.

This is compounded by the fact that a tank’s job is essentially a solo job. No one can “help” you tank a boss. An off-tank can help pick up the boss, but by then it’s already painfully obvious that something went wrong i.e. you’re dead. But on the bright side, playing a tank means that you can make a very significant contribution to the success of a group.

So which is more fun?
It’s no surprise why there seem to be very few tanks, followed by healers, followed by the plethora of dps. It’s also because every single class has a dps spec, whereas a priest is never going to be a tank and a mage is never going to be a healer.

I personally find all 3 roles very fun. I love tanking but sometimes it can be stressful. Dps is easy and relaxing, but sometimes its too easy and I can’t do anything about tank-fail. I personally love healing on my shaman as well, but somehow a lot of people can’t get past Big Number Syndrome and the fact that the numbers are green instead of yellow takes away from their enjoyment.

However, I will always recommend that players should try out each role. I really think it improves your understanding of how WoW works and makes you better at whichever role you end up playing the most.

Last night, our guild attempted to do OS + 1 drake up for the first time. It was a spur of the moment decision by the raid leader after clearing VoA 10.

It was full of fail 😛

I would imagine that our experience would be pretty common among the many casual guilds that now proliferate in WoW. Our raid leader suggested this because he had heard from our friend Psin that Sarth + 1 drake is quite easy, and apparently he had also pugged it before. However, in practice we never got past 10 seconds of Vesperon landing.

Was it because the encounter is too difficult? Many casuals who are happy with the direction Blizzard has taken with WotLK would probably say the difficulty of raids in TBC was just too high, and they don’t have the time to play 8 hours a day to get gear etc etc etc.

Why did we fail Sarth + Vesperon so horribly? As I see it, there were many reasons. After the first 2 wipes, me and my wife could clearly see that there was no point in continuing, and all the subsequent attempts proved us right. And no, it wasn’t gear. So, here’s my own post-mortem of the fight.

1) The biggest reason why we failed was because frankly, “we were not prepared” Our raid leader’s strategy was “pull it and try”. He’s the sort who does not like to read and plan because its too much effort. When told that we have to practice and read up to do Malygos-10, his response was “ok lets not bother with that”. So no one in the raid knew what was happening, the Vesperon tank didn’t know where he should tank him or when Vesperon landed, people didn’t know whether they should enter the portal, etc etc.

2) No attempt was made to correct mistakes. After each wipe, we just rezzed, buffed up, and pulled again. This is like running headlong into a brick wall, hoping that eventually the wall is going to break before your head does.

3) We were not a team, we were a group of 10 individuals. This is related to point 2) in that we did not work together to find out what was going wrong and how to correct it. No one talked about what was causing problems for them, no one offered tips or ideas.

4) Many people were not focused. It was obvious that certain people were doing other things at the same time, such as reading comics, working on job applications, doing some work at home. After a wipe, some people would go afk and say “just tell me when we’re pulling”.

5) DPS was poor for the level of gear we had. As we are a casual guild, we have quite a few players who quite simply do not seem to know what they are doing. There is a fury warrior with 4 piece t7 doing 1600 dps. I did that as an elemental shaman in my quest greens and blues 5 mins after reaching 80. My wife’s warlock did that level of dps at level 76. Another ret pally with naxx-10 level gear was hovering below 2000. However, its hard to tell them how to improve because in a casual guild, they are more likely to just stop playing. Besides, it works in Naxx so obviously there’s nothing wrong with the way they are playing, right? Right???

*Edit*
6) We tried this with 2 healers. In retrospect, 3 would have been a lot more comfortable, compounded by the fact that a lot of people weren’t focused and were taking fire wall damage. But this isn’t as immediately solvable and lessens in importance the better the raid plays.

These are problems that are in a sense inherent within the culture of a really casual guild. They are not easily solved simply by playing more i.e. they were unsuccessful in TBC raids not because they didn’t have time, it was because they didn’t want to be successful.

So now our guild officially fails at sarth + drakes, and it’s unlikely that anyone will think about improving so that we can kill them. After all, it’s optional so average people like those in our guild aren’t “expected” to kill them. Not that I really mind, because frankly I don’t care about killing sarth + drakes either. But should Blizzard nerf sarth + drakes so that we, and other casual guilds like us, can down them too?

That’s what they did with Naxx after all, and that was a good decision right? Instead of asking us to improve, they should lower the difficulty to suit us since we’re paying customers!!! *rolleyes*

We all know gnomes are the master race. I just realised that for all of my character classes, any class that can be a gnome already is one. My warlock is a gnome, my unloved death knight is a gnome, and my mage is a gnome. If my druid, pally or shaman could be gnomes, I think they would be.

I took my mage Piupiu out from cold storage at level 54 a couple of weeks ago. She was parked in Tanaris transferring items between our Alliance and Horde bank characters. I got motivated to level her to see for myself exactly how difficult mage dps can be at the end-game, due to the larger than average proportion of absolutely terrible mages we met. So I used the bajillion Stone Keeper’s Shards I had saved up on my druid and pally, and bought her the heirloom staff and shoulders. The ones bought with Emblems of Heroism are technically better since they have better stats and not resilience, but I had much better things to do with my emblems and the Shard versions are pretty awesome anyway (the shoulders also have the +10% experience bonus which is what matters).

Despite being quite weak compared to my warlock, she’s now 71. She powered through Outlands going through only Hellfire, Zangarmarsh, a bit of Terrokar and Nagrand without the group quests. It’s really hard to kill elites that can’t be slowed without a tank (the water elemental dies in 4 hits). Northrend is so much better, especially since she can actually get respectable gear easily.

The end result?

It’s another pengu! Can’t wait to get my pengu pet with her as well. Should give her the Polymorph: Penguin glyph as well keke. I’m going to keep this set of armor around so she can run around looking like that at 80 as well.