Month: November 2010

Four weeks today I shall (servers permitting) be sat at home levelling my tankadin with SWMBO back in our tag-team Paladin wrecking ball.

Roll on the arrival of our new firey overlord and I look forward to kicking his arse.

There have been many words written in the period prior to 4.0.1 and since on heirlooms, how they should have been bought before the grand restructuring of the badge currency system.  How many players are going to be dropping them onto their newly minted Gobrgen to get to 85.

I have to admit I’m sat here wondering “why“.

Let’s have a look at this, yes the end game is where the pretties are, the purples, the new raids and so on.  However this expansion also has a different element to both the previous ones.

The Burning Crusade brought us Outland and the two new starter zones, Wrath gave us cold feet, Northrend and the DK starting zone.  Both gave us a pile of new 5-man and raid content, Wrath let a lot more players into the raid content than ever before, this rocked.

Cataclysm is giving us a stack of new zones, dungeons and raids.  The biggie however is the reworking of the Vanilla world, the questlines have been tweaked, left alone or completely ripped up and replaced depending on where you are in the world at any given time.  So I have to ask myself, “why do I want to rush through this?“, to a large extent we’re getting a new game at level 1.

I admit I might slap on the heirlooms as I step through the portal into Outland and keep them on through Northrend, this is content which I can now do in my sleep.

As for the new levelling (80-85), at current tuning for a level 80 stepping into the new zones I’m reckoning on being at 85 halfway through Uldum.  For those of us rocking T10 gear it’s not going to be replaced until we’re well into Deepholm and for those in 264/277 heroic stuff then it’s entirely possible that it’ll be still be good well into Uldum and beyond.

So, enjoy the new quests, it won’t take long to get to 85 on your capped out toons.

Above all, speaking as a tank & healer, please remember where your CC is, the game is no longer about how much AoE you throw out.

As the team is aware numbers are currently an issue, this combined with the arrival of the big dragon in a few weeks means I’m going to re-assess our current plan.

I am going to make the last formal “let’s try and get a raid together” for the 28th of November.  This takes off any pressure as we hit levelling time and removes the whole “everyone is off partying / drinking / being social in the real world” until well into the new year when the credit card bills have landed and we’re all looking for something to do which involves very little spending of extra money.

From there the aim is to resume in 2011, I reckon the 30th of Jan is a decent date.  A certain person will have ten level 85’s by then and I’m sure there will be at least a few more in the guild.  The plan at that point will probably be the new dungeons, possibly heroics if we have enough 85’s and working on Ulduar.  Yes I want to see that dead on my Paladin.

If we have enough people online during the hiatus for the normal slot there’s nothing stopping us going to kick something in the shins.

So, Team Pirate, what say ye?!  Does this look like a plan.

Well it’s starting, the twilight cultists have moved into Stormwind and starting to kick up a fuss.  It’s a nice little quest chain, a decent pile of gold and we’ll all need more of that come Cata with the new flying skills (~4500g combined), levelling our skills up to the new cap and naturally buying new shinies for our mains to get onto the raiding treadmill.

So, we have approximately six weeks of this to go, I’m reckoning four weeks until 4.0.3 drops and the world changes at which point there will no doubt be further chains to set the post shattering scene prior to the launch itself.

In other news we have further proof that all the faction leaders are more epic than our flawed moron of a leader, Varian.  Varian is in Stormwind.  All the others are also in Stormwind, as well as being in their normal prime locations as well.

So, who’s up for hitting Ogrimmar and taking out all the leaders in a single attack?