Project Lore

Thanks WSU.edu and Mark J. Berry

Trade Chat and General Chat are certainly odd beasts. I consider Trade Chat to be one of the most mistreated features in World of Warcraft, as it is hardly ever used for its purpose, facilitating the buying and selling of goods. More often than not I simply ignore the channel all together in an attempt to save my intelligence and sanity.

General Chat, well, that can be forgiven for its missteps into the immature comments or pointless rants. As I roam around Azeroth grinding away at one thing, or the other, I tend to watch General Chat very closely. My eyes will tune into that block of text in the lower left of my screen out of sheer boredom, hoping that a fun or exciting discussion is going on. General Chat's conversation, nine times out of ten, will be a LFG message, a looking for this or that question, or someone begging to be saved from a camper. Yet, like Pavlov's dog, I always come back for more.

While conversing in general, I try to be as helpful as possible. That can get me in trouble though. Help one newbie and you run the risk of them chatting you up for small facts or discoveries till the end of time. Worse still, other newbies bugging you. But, when you are bored, you are bored and I don't mind the distraction.

While on my Priest the other night I found that needle in the haystack gem. I was joking around in GC in Terokkar Forest when I noticed a name I recognized – although slightly modified with an accent - from my former hardcore raiding guild. After feeling each other out to see if they were who we thought they were, we each found a new addition to our 5-man instancing group for Wrath. Score! The only drawback, it seems that they decided which character I will be leveling first for me, the Priest.

What role do you play in General Chat? The helper? Wiseass? Know it all? Annoying person with tons of questions?  Player with numerous ASCII macros? Ever get anything positive out of it?

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So this is it, there is less than a week left until the new WoW expansion changes our whole world. Some of us may be fully prepared to head into Wrath of the Lich King, but I’m sure there are many, like myself, that still have lots of preparation to do. Personally, I have been utterly neglecting the preparations I need to make to be ready for WotLK. With our guild up and raiding again, my thoughts have been directed toward BT progression and not into cleaning out my bank… but we are reaching the point where I need to get things in line to make the boat ride to Northrend as comfortable as possible. First thing is first. I just started going through my overstuffed bank and started getting rid of all the mats and consumables that will be rendered completely obsolete next week. Being and enchanter and engineer I’ve got more dust and gizmos than I know what to do with. I’ll kill two birds with one stone by clearing up some space and getting some much needed funds to help smooth over the leveling process. That takes me to the next point. I’ll need gold. I know I will make some along the way, but leveling professions, learning to fly in the cold, and buy BoE epics is going to be expensive. The more funds I have the better, and right now my funds are dangerously low. Then I’m going to have to take a hard look at my quest log. It’s high time to finish up those last quests that have been rotting in my log for months… either that or drop them. All I know is that when I hit the Fjord, I will want as few quests sitting in there as possible. At last I will soon have to tweak my spec for leveling, make sure I know what gear will be best for the process and park my toon in front of the boat the night drops. It should be a fun process, and I need to make sure by toons are ready to start the next chapter in there digital lives!

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My fellow blogger Bastosa recently posted a nice article on the grind to level 80. It will be interesting to see how well the 5-man instancing team sticks together. From my previous experiences, running with a group of friends over and over caused us to become a bit competitive.   One evening, we called it a night after a few productive hours of grinding XP.   Well, we woke up to see that our Mage had stayed up all night to get three levels higher.  It wouldn't have been the end of the world if he wasn't six levels higher than the lowest person, and refused to come back and help us. The Mage's overly competitive nature basically killed our group. Bastosa's logic – that a group leveling together in instances should create skilled raiders down the road - is sound nonetheless and I hope it works out for them. For me, I will be going the same route as a few of the commentators, questing and exploration. Here is the major difference though, I will be leveling my newly acquired level 59.99 Priest instead of my faithful Rogue. Thanks to the Refer-A-Friend benefits, my buddy and I managed to level up a new set of alts to level 59.99 in under three days playtime. For the moment, we are both enjoying our never-before-played class and do not feel like stopping. By the time Wrath of the Lich King drops on November 13th, my new Priest should be 70.  At that time I hope to have enough experience under my belt as a healer – yes, also my first healbot - to begin healing in all of the new 5-man instances. Heck, if all goes well and I ding 70 with time to spare, I will probably start a tank on that server.  People always need a tank.  We have to burn those extras hand me down levels somehow. This isn't to say that I am abandoning my Rogue. I have been roguing since day 1 and have no intention of stopping. Yes, there have been ups and down through that time. Rogues were overpowered to begin with, causing us to be nerfed left and right. C'Thun was incredibly annoying as a dagger Rogue.  Gruul is just annoying, and I still have little group utility (that will change with the Echoes of Doom patch). It would be nice to say that I will try to co-level the characters on my main server.  Trading back and forth to get the most benefit from Rested XP, but honestly, that is just a pipe dream. So what about you guys? Sticking with your main? Taking this opportunity to switch your main? Re-rolling Death Knight?  Or experiencing the new content with an alt first? Bastosa, best of luck to you and your group. Be sure to update us when you ding level 75. I can't wait to do the Heigan dance again – the pull to him...not so much.

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If you are anything like me, you want to get to level 80 as soon as possible. Sure I understand that some people would like to sit back, smell the roses, and enjoy all that Northrend has to offer. But for me, this game is all about the end game! I'll save the roses for my rogue alt. I want to start raiding as soon as possible, so myself and my fellow guildies have spent some time recently discussing the fastest way possible to get into Naxx. I don't want to do any stupid 48-hour marathon power-leveling or anything, but let's just say I won't be wasting any time. There are a few options, but the one I think we have settled on is pure instance grinding. Being a tank, this would be ideal. First of all, it prevents me from having to respec Ret, which is the last thing I want to do. It will also allow us to learn all the new class skills and abilities in a group setting, which will be valuable down the road.  I'm sure we will poke our heads out of the instance portals from time to time, grab a quest or two, and see what the countryside is about, but I think that the XP from the instances will get us where we want to go fast. Add on the quests that are in the instances themselves and we should be leveling in a hurry. In order to get this dialed in, we are wanting to put together a team of 5 people that will basically level as a unit, make sure we stay close in level, and just hit the 5-mans over and over until the final ding. I imagine it will take more than a couple  runs through each one before we are ready for the next,  but its not like we haven't run every heroic into the ground already. I doubt anyone will mind. I know there are others in the guild with the same plan, so hopefully it will be easy to hook up with one of the groups and go straight into the 10-man scene at 80. Now this is certainly not the only way, just my way. I know people that are going to quest from sun up to sun down. I even know a few that plan on filling their quest logs with 25 completed quests in SMV beforehand and hope to get a level or two off the turn ins when Wrath goes live. In the end I think it comes down to doing what you enjoy. I enjoy group play, so that is my route, what is yours?

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As I've said earlier, I've been bringing my alts, a druid and a priest, up to (hopefully) level 60. Currently, you can find them in STV leveling. It is very annoying, but it's hard to ignore the number of quests there. The pages quest ended up giving me about 32,000 xp at level 37. That's a lot considering all I had to do was get some pages out of the guild bank. I'll probably leave the area when I finish this stupid crystal quest to find a new hang out. Stupid goblins. Other than the massive amount of XP I'm getting, not much has changed in STV. It is still gank central, which is one of the reasons I'm going to leave for a few levels. I'm not the best dual-boxer in the world, far from it. So whenever anything happens to my priest, I either use Power Word: Shield then heal or just fear. That's the extent of what I can do. I don't have any hotkeys set up for offensive spells. So if anyone targets my priest, he goes down quickly unless I can manage to get whatever it is to attack my druid. It's fun with mobs when there are fewer than 4 of them, but not so much with other players. I am just terrible at defending myself against pretty much anyone, which is too bad. My abilities basically extend to logging on Juggy to take out the stupid, stupid horde. I guess I could use a few tips from anyone out there with druid, priest, or dual box experience. I feel so helpless!

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So you have finally hit level 70 on your alt, or perhaps it is your main.  As you begin to run the 5-man content while trying to get into Karazhan and doing PvP in between it dawns on you that most of your gear lacks enchantments.  Whatever shall you do? Most players will quickly look-up what materials are required for class-appropriate enchantments, only to be shocked or annoyed at how much the enchantments will cost them.  For this discussion we will focus on weapon enchants, generally the most expensive and often the most important. Being a melee class character - a Rogue to be exact - Mongoose is the best enchantment, its tooltip reads "to occasionally increase Agility by 120 and attack speed slightly."  Yum.  But here's the catch, the materials are expensive, costing:

• 6 x Void Crystal
• 10 x Large Prismatic Shard
• 8 x Greater Planar Essence
• 40 x Arcane Dust

Not to mention the fact that you have to find someone to do this for you, which may cost you a little extra. Well maybe Mongoose is a bit nuts, after all you did just hit 70 and are likely to replace your gear soon.  So how about Executioner which will allow you "to occasionally ignore 840 of your enemy's armor."  Not to shabby in this day where bear tanks easily have over 16,000 armor.  Materials for this one?  Not much different:

• 6 x Void Crystal
• 10 x Large Prismatic Shard
• 6 x Greater Planar Essence ( - 2 GPE)
• 30 x Arcane Dust (-10 AD)
• 3 x Elixir of Major Strength (+3 Elixirs)

This begs the question, to enchant or not to enchant? The benefits of such should be readily obvious, you get a boost in selected stats but at what cost?  A character in my predicament, just hit 70 with some basic Karazhan and PvP gear, will easily replace much of their gear in a the coming weeks.  So should they waste all of those mats on a high end enchant?  Probably not and the drawbacks aren't horrible. Lower stats mean lower DPS in my case, or lower healing or crappier tanking in other cases, but not matter what the reduction is by an incredibly small percentage.  Of course, we cannot forget the endless ridicule that may ensue fromguildmates or persons in your party.  Avoiding the constant teasing could make the decision for you. There is one other route, a compromise of sorts.  Instead of getting a high end enchant like Mongoose or Executioner on my Emerald Ripper - an item easily replaced - I will get a medium grade enchant.  Therefore I have SOMETHING which will help me avoid some ridicule while gaining SOME stats but not "wasting" obtuse amounts of gold on mats.  One could argue that I should just save that gold to put into the high end enchant later, but then we get into a vicious cycle and I hate those.  As for my Merciless Gladiator's Shiv?  Well, it won't be replaced nearly as quickly as the Ripper, so Executioner it is. This was my first post here at ProjectLore.com.  Was it good for you?

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So Tigole, aka Jeff Kaplan, confirmed on the official Blizzard forums that leveling from 60-70 is going to be faster once WotLK hits, similar to the way that 20-60 is now faster than it used to be. This is a great example of how Blizzard is really listening to its community. The acceleration from 20-60 came long after BC was released, but it was embraced by most of the community. Blizzard improved the questing process by leaps and bounds in the Burning Crusade, but players still had to get through the long grind to 58 to see most of the new content. This time, Blizzard is allowing players to have an easier time through older content to get to the shiny new stuff. I can't wait to see what kind of new quests they're going to have in Wrath of the Lich King, and this is just one more improvement to help keep my attention. This may also make more people consider rolling Death Knights right away. Genius!

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So I've been leveling an alt. Now I will say that I have a lot of alts. Mostly from starting a character before I had a 70 and just losing interest before they were done. My first character was a Troll Hunter. I got her to 31 before the Burning Crusade... Well then of course we all had to roll Draenei, so I started a Paladin. After getting him to level 52 I realized I just didn't like Pally that much. I never wanted to Tank, I hate healing, and the melee DPS just wasn't kicking it. So I started what was to become my main, a Night Elf Rogue! Now that I have a full level 70 I've been wanting to level another. So I started a Druid... but I hate leveling again! So where is the fun? Is the fun seeing how fast I can level? Maybe trying to find quests I missed on my first go? I just don't know. So please if you have an opinion on how to level an alt without gouging your eyes out with boredom... comment here and let me know. - Dr Dark

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A druid is a shapeshifter whose abilities change based on what form he is in. The strength of a druid is flexibility. A druid can be a death-dealing spellcaster, an offensive and defensive melee hybrid, or a mobile healer. This flexibility is not without compromise. To maximize its effectiveness, each role requires focused talent point allocation and equipment, so a druid generally chooses one of these to specialize in at any given time. However, the druid willing to devote the time and bag space to several sets of gear will be capable of switching roles from encounter to encounter.

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Yes. I am leveling a mage... again. Why you ask. Well I suppose it's a few different reasons. 1. My guild split up and that sucked. 2. 'Old' content is still fun. 3. I can do it better the second time around. This time I'll actually pick a quicker path and use addons to help me. For the first 30 levels or so of my first character, I had no idea about addons. None. Now they are so essential to game play, especially in end-game encounters, that I can't believe I did 30 levels without them. So go get some addons and level up a new toon. You now you want to

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