Project Lore

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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