Kalimdor Calling... and Other Travels

There's one thing no recreation of Vanilla WoW can bring back, no matter how faithful it is, and that's the ignorance of being a truly new player. I recall that when I started playing the game back in 2006, Elwynn Forest alone seemed huge to me. Then I realised that it was just one zone of many. Then I realised that there was a whole other continent waiting for me... well, you get the idea.

This time around, I know almost exactly where I need to go. I say "almost" because while I achieved Loremaster pre-Cataclysm, I "only" did so on Horde side, and even that was several years ago by now. I haven't been truly surprised by any of the content I've encountered on Kronos (yet), but there were definitely a few "Huh, I'd completely forgotten about that" moments.

For example, it had been quite a while since I last had to buy a book from a special vendor to train my secondary professions past 150. It was quite a trek over to Ashenvale to get the Expert Cookbook. With what little money I had, I bought a spare to sell on the auction house and I managed to sell it with a markup of 100%. Yay, arbitrage! A similar scenario played out when I had to wander up to the Arathi Highlands to learn expert first aid, and again I was able to make a tidy profit off the journey.

I also encountered my first Horde player while travelling. As I was making my way along the mountain road from Loch Modan to the Wetlands, I was suddenly faced with a "skull level" tauren druid in travel form coming my way. I froze like a deer in the headlights, but he just looked at me for a moment and then moved on. I don't know if he didn't want the dishonourable kill or just didn't care to gank either way. One mustn't forget that not everyone on a PvP server is necessarily out to kill the opposite faction non-stop.

Quests feel like they are all over the place by this point. There are half a dozen zones that contain mobs of the right level somewhere, but there only ever seems to be a small handful of quests that are in the right level range, so I'm constantly travelling round and round.

Finally of course, I'm dealing with the absolute insanity that is the paladin class quest for a levelling weapon. (This being Vanilla, I can't currently see my reward, but I've been reminded that it's Verigan's Fist.) Its instructions are so long that I received a "note" item in my inventory that's six pages long. Do you remember when quests used to give those? For this class quest, a blacksmith that works in Ironforge asks you to bring him supplies from the elite ogre area in Loch Modan, wood from the Deadmines, tools from Shadowfang Keep and some other thingamajig from Blackfathom Deeps. Considering that an instance run takes about two hours, and that's without even taking the travel time to places like SFK into account, wanting to complete this quest means that you're looking at about 6+ hours of play time just to finish what is essentially a single task.

It feels insane... but of course there is a certain pride to be had in completing your class quests. What kind of paladin would I be if I couldn't gather some simple blacksmithing materials? So far I've managed to get the stuff from the ogres and the wood from the Deadmines. (For my second run I healed and it went much more smoothly... just don't tell anyone that I stood at the back wearing a dress; it's very un-paladin-like.) Shadowfang and Blackfathom worry me a little because they are both in fairly remote areas where people don't often go - but on the plus side, levelling being fairly slow means that there is plenty of time for an opportunity to present itself before I completely outlevel the content.

(On a side note, I have now outlevelled the "real" Isadora - my first ever WoW character, whom I tried to recreate here - because back then I switched to playing a night elf priest on an English server fairly early on. Now there is definitely something very new about this journey.)

Levelling Through Southern Pandaria

Sorry, I couldn't think of a nice alliterative title including "Valley of the Four Winds" and/or "Krasarang Wilds", so I gave up on that particular little game.

While I had received some recommendations about which zones to prioritise in terms of story, my pet tank and I had decided long ago that we were going to do ALL THE QUESTS anyway, so we might as well just follow the natural zone progression as it happened.

This meant that our next stop after the Jade Forest was the Valley of the Four Winds. It's quite a beautiful and serene zone, though the wildlife messed with my head a little. Previously the game conditioned me to expect certain mobs to be hostile and others to be neutral, but in Pandaria those expectations all seem to get turned on their heads, as I keep running into things like peaceful crocolisks while getting mauled by swarms of aggressive moths and hostile birds.

Anyway, the quests were reasonably entertaining but honestly a bit dull at the start. Help this farmer. Now help that farmer. Now help another farmer. Didn't I already do some variation of all of this in Elwynn Forest back in 2006? Chen Stormstout and his niece Li Li made for amusing company though, and things picked up as we progressed through the zone.

Then we got to Halfhill and learned about Pandaren cooking. Yikes! I like cooking, but this whole system with the different ways seems unnecessarily complicated to me. Then again, maybe I'm just jaded, knowing full well that this is another convoluted system whose only purpose seems to be to provide busywork for one expansion and which will be swept under the rug and circumvented completely once Warlords of Draenor comes out.

Also, we got a farm! I thought that I had read somewhere that you couldn't unlock your personal farm until level ninety, but either Blizzard has changed that since then or I misread and what I was reading was only referring to some features being unavailable until max level. We just kind of stumbled across the whole thing by accident as we were doing the regular quests around Halfhill, and it turned out to be pretty fun. The farm is one of those features that I'd heard nothing but good things about, and I can already tell that it really is a fun little mini-game.

Once we hit level eighty-eight, we also decided to try and duo the first two Pandaria dungeons, Temple of the Jade Serpent and Stormstout Brewery. The former didn't give us any major trouble, but where duoing instances had started to feel kind of slow in Cata, doing so in Pandaria was like wading through molasses. Just killing the Sha of Doubt must have taken us something like fifteen minutes. Stormstout Brewery was even worse, and some of the trash leading up to the last boss in that one gave us serious trouble as well. We eventually managed to down it with a mixture of kiting and quick corpse-running, but when the last boss wiped us within a minute with some bubble ability, we were too dejected to keep trying. We just did it again through the dungeon finder, and with some proper dps it was a piece of cake - though funnily enough, the boss didn't blow any bubbles at all that time around.

After the Valley of the Four Winds we continued to Karasang Karasarang Krasarang Wilds, which ended up being kind of the opposite of the previous zone for me in so far as I thought that the first hub was really fun, but after that it quickly devolved into a series of boring kill-and-gather quests. The saving grace came in the form of a quest that sent us back to the Valley at the end and which I thought was just a breadcrumb to direct you there in case you had gone to Krasarang first, but actually it turned out to be a full-blown little chain that tied up the stories of both zones in one epic finale. That was some seriously good stuff.

After the Stormstout Brewery we gave up on trying to duo any more dungeons while levelling and just queued for some randoms, which got us into both Shadow-Pan Monastery and Gate of the Setting Sun so far. Fortunately they were easy enough to understand even without having done the lead-up quests to them. We also found them reasonably challenging in our gear and actually wiped once in each.

We hit ninety after having completed three zones worth of quests as well as five Pandaria dungeons, just as we were entering Kun-Lai Summit. In a way 85-90 took us longer than I had expected, but looking at our pre-Panaria levelling for comparison, our levelling speed didn't actually slow down that much. I guess I just expected the last five levels to have been nerfed even more than they have, knowing how Blizzard does these things...

Wholesome Levelling

Levelling continues to go well for our little worgen duo and they are almost ready to go to Outland. In a way I'm almost surprised by how well we are doing. We started out with nothing, on a server where we'd never played before... and while I had quite a blast levelling alts back in Cata, the old world revamp hasn't been without its issues. I had alts that outlevelled whatever content I was doing way too quickly, and where seeing everything go grey just sapped my motivation to continue. Trying to level professions as you go turned into a veritable nightmare - I'll never forget the human hunter I had who spent more time farming grey mobs for leather than actually doing quests, until I eventually abandoned her in frustration. More than one attempt at levelling as a duo died in the early levels when one character was a miner or herbalist while the other one wasn't, as the experience gains from gathering made it bloody impossible to comfortably stay around the same level.

We managed to avoid the latter this time around by having me go herbalist and my pet warrior going miner, but even that hasn't been completely without its issues, as I keep shooting ahead ever so slightly and had to train myself to ignore a vast majority of nodes to avoid making things even worse. If there's any rhyme or reason to how much experience you get from gathering from any given node, it's certainly not apparent to me. Within the same zone I would run into one "green" (slight chance to skill up) herb that gave me fifty XP per pick, and another one that gave me five hundred. Why? Who knows, it's not as if the latter were particularly rare or anything. Meanwhile the ores seemed to almost always be of the (roughly) fifty XP variety, which is why we got out of sync quite frequently.

On the plus side, we never really outlevelled our regular quests too badly, despite of the gathering experience, running every dungeon except the Deadmines at least once and doing the cooking and fishing dailies every day. We were always ahead of the levelling curve, coming into each new zone about five levels late, but by that point experience gains had generally dropped off to such a low level (without stopping completely) that we could comfortably continue completing quests without having them turn grey on us (with the possible exception of the first couple of zones we did - it's very hard to make it through all of Darkshore's over ninety quests without outlevelling any of them for example).

Due to us almost always working on green difficulty content, our levelling speed has been relatively sedate and keeping our professions up to scratch hasn't been too bad either. There are massive amounts of mining and herbalism nodes in the revamped old world, so our alchemy and blacksmithing haven't really been starved for materials (though Goldthorn is still hard to come by for how much of it you need to level up).

The secondary professions have been a bit trickier. For example you move through the "cloth tiers" quite quickly at first, and then end up getting nothing but Mageweave for twenty levels or so (or at least that's what it felt like), which makes keeping up with first aid a bit awkward. I expect that we'll be okay though, assuming that they haven't removed the Runecloth drops from early Outland or anything. Cooking is mostly fine as long as you make sure to save any and all meat drops you come across for later, as you'll often come across a particular kind of meat at the wrong level in respect to your cooking. Keeping up with your fishing also helps immensely of course.

Speaking of fishing, I was very surprised to see that you don't actually need a fishing pole to fish anymore now... and my first gut reaction was to be annoyed at yet another instance of unnecessary simplification of the game, but I soon found that I actually quite like this change. The "stick with a piece of string attached" graphical effect is quite cute, and it's nice not to have to worry about changing your equipment if you're only just stopping at a pool in passing. The fishing hat, pole and lures can still come out if I actually sit down at a dock to fish "properly" for ten minutes or longer.

Archaeology is the one profession I haven't been able to keep up with, as much as I would have liked to. My pet battling has also fallen behind, despite of my initial enthusiasm for it. I believe that neither would be impossible to keep levelled as you go along, but you'd have to focus heavily on travelling around to dig/challenge random pets and neglect other parts of the game in the process. I suppose Blizzard designed these features more as something to do at endgame than as an alternate way of levelling, but I suppose it's good that the option is there for those who want to be really hardcore about it.

We've only really been focused on completing all the quests in each zone we decided to tackle (we went for the Darkshore -> Ashenvale -> Stonetalon -> Desolace -> Feralas -> Thousand Needles -> Tanaris -> Un'Goro path) and doing all the dungeons. After my last post we only did Uldaman, Scholomance and Stratholme via the dungeon finder and had no more issues with unpleasant people in those runs. I had forgotten that Scholomance was also redone for Mists of Pandaria and was therefore a bit confused while trying to keep up with the new story in the usual dungeon finder rush, but it was just about bearable. Dire Maul, Razorfen Downs and Zul'Farrak we decided to tackle with just the two of us and had no issues with any of them, except for dying a few times to the guard captain in Dire Maul North, as his combination of fear and summoning of hard-hitting adds was still pretty painful at the level we went in.

Currently we're planning on finishing up our business in the old world with a quick dungeon finder run of Sunken Temple and an extended tour of Blackrock Mountain between just the two of us. Then it's off to the Dark Portal to see how the Outlands will treat us. As much as I loved the Burning Crusade, I remember the transition from Cata questing to Outland being pretty jarring the last few times I tried to level an alt.

Pilgrim's Bounty and Cooking

Cynwise said something funny in his guide to this year's Pilgrim's Bounty: "doing those first 350 points any other way is just silly". I have to admit that at first that comment actually stung me a little. Why is it silly? I love cooking (in game; in real life I'm terrible at it), and have done so pretty much for as long as I can remember. I remember being a level six noob with barely half a clue about anything in the game and eagerly cooking up Herb Baked Eggs and Kaldorei Spider Kabobs. At around level thirty or so, my friend who was wisely levelling her cooking and fishing in sync gifted me a stack of Sagefish Delights one day and I was like, OMG, eating these gives me an mp5 buff? Crazy! I also have fond memories of winning the recipe for Runn Tum Tuber Surprise in Dire Maul East and being told that I was extremely lucky.

I've always loved cooking for how it was a profession that benefited from almost everything I enjoyed doing in the game anyway. Explore and find a vendor in a remote location who sells an interesting recipe, hoard anything that might look useful to find out later that you can turn it into a tasty meal with the right recipe, quest to raise your cooking skill beyond 225, and so on and so forth. It always felt very engaging to me, and to this day I've maintained one to two tabs in my private guild banks that are devoted to nothing but raw cooking materials, gathered in one place to redistribute them to alts for later use.

However, looking at it honestly, I had to admit that I've really been struggling to level cooking on my new alts whenever I tried. With the new levelling system, you zoom from one place to the next and past many zones so quickly that you might never even see many recipe vendors, and you end up killing fewer mobs that might provide you with raw materials as well. Having alts "help each other out" seemed to have a very limited effect too, as I found it hard to keep track of who needed which recipes (Altoholic is supposed to track that in principle, but for me at least its profession tracking has been buggy for ages), and somehow pretty much every character seemed to run into the same skill point humps, needing stacks upon stacks of the exact same raw foods and I never had enough. As much as I used to love it, it had become annoying in its current incarnation. It worked when levelling was slow and had you traipsing all over Azeroth, but in this brave new world... not so much.

So I thought what the hell, might as well get it done, and so I've been spending a good chunk of the past two evenings cooking up Pilgrim's Bounty foods on various alts. (I still have a couple left, but we'll see whether I get around to them tomorrow.) I didn't just level my cooking either; basically I did the following things on all of my characters:

- I did the quest line that sends you back and forth between the cities to deliver different foods to different places.
- I ate at a Bountiful Table to complete the Share a Bountiful Feast quest and did Sharing is Caring while I was at it.
- I completed each of the dailies at least once, which was easy enough since I was cooking up lots of food to level my skill anyway, and got the Pilgrim's Progress achievement on the side.

If there were other people at the table with me, I threw food at them for "FOOD FIGHT!", but I didn't hang around to wait if nobody else was eating. Fun fact: even though I've been participating in this holiday in some form or another ever since its inception, it took me until this year to figure out how this achievement actually works. I used to think that it was just a random chance whenever you hit the button to share food. D'oh.

I also got The Turkinator on lots of characters, though not all, as I didn't fret about it if I had a streak of bad luck. As long as I got enough turkeys to do my cooking I was happy.

I only did Pilgrim's Pouch on one or two characters as I considered getting to the Exodar too much of a hassle in addition to the repeated back and forth for the quest line (most of the alts that needed skilling up were Alliance). This rang particularly true after I tried to take the portal to the Exodar from Darnassus one time and accidentally sent myself to the Blasted Lands with my hearthstone on cooldown. Arrrgh.

However, even without such mishaps these little adventures turned out to be quite a time-intensive endeavour, with each character needing about an hour to complete the whole tour, mostly due to travel time and the time it took to gather sufficient amounts of turkeys. It was all pretty relaxed though, and I watched some tv on the side and went AFK while on flight paths. Missing the boat over and over again also gave me happy flashbacks to my newbie days, though I never fell into the water.

The only thing that really got on my nerves was, funnily enough... people standing in the fire. Seriously, you don't need to stand in the cooking fire to use it! I noticed that it was mostly max-level characters in raid gear who were doing that, which then made me wonder whether it's some kind of subconscious way of being rebellious? An "I have to move out of the fire all the damn time, this one's not hurting me so I'll stand in it all day long" kind of thing? The thing is, I don't really care whether they stand in the fire in their raids or not, but being audio-spammed with incessant "oof oof oof" sounds gets annoying really quickly. This then got me thinking whether bad stuff on the ground wouldn't be easier to avoid if it always made your character make that sound... you might find yourself moving out of sheer annoyance, or else your guildies would at least yell at you for the same reason. (I vaguely recall a bug in DBM during ICC I think it was, where it kept making a warning noise on Blood Princes even if other people were moving with the shadow prison debuff... you bet that had me shouting at them!)

Pondering profession dailies

The one thing that I've spent more time on than anything else since Cataclysm release is not exploring, instancing or working on my professions, it's doing the new cooking and fishing dailies in Orgrimmar. I currently do them on five characters per day, usually before getting started on anything else.

I'm really grateful for the new fishing daily in particular. I've talked about my personal history with fishing before and how it didn't really manage to hold my interest until I started doing the Shattrath fishing daily. The problem with that was that I still had to level to seventy without having much motivation to fish, and starting the profession from scratch every time one of my alts reached the Burning Crusade level cap was impractical and tedious.

With the new daily being available as early as level ten, it's easy to get into the profession right from the start and work on it on the side as you level up. You'll still gain levels much faster than you'll gain fishing skills, but with any luck you won't be as utterly unprepared for any later fishing endeavours as you used to be. Let's not forget that just completing the daily will grant you skill-ups as well, regardless of how much fishing you had to do for the quest (if any). This is particularly valuable in the later stretches of the profession when skilling up by even one point takes quite a lot of casts.

If you're rolling an alt on a new server, doing the fishing daily at level ten can also help your financial situation, as the random reward bag has a pretty high chance of containing a Swiftness Potion, which tend to go for at least one gold if not more on most servers. For a level eighty-five that's nothing, but for a level ten who is trying to pay for his training with nothing at his disposal but a few silvers worth of quest rewards, getting a whole gold or more from a simple daily is a nice boost.

The one negative thing I see about this new fishing daily is that it won't hold the interest of anyone at the level cap once they've maxed out their fishing, because there is nothing interesting about the item rewards themselves. A gold for a Swiftness Potion is about the most you can hope for, which is absolutely not worth the time it takes to do the daily for a level eighty-five character. If you're still after a Weather-Beaten Fishing Hat or missing one of the croc pets from Crocolisks in the City, you'll have to do the fishing dailies in Shattrath and Dalaran, both of which are rather out of the way for max-level characters now. I kind of hope that Blizzard will add a new max-level fishing daily somewhere in a later content patch.

The cooking daily also suffers from the problem of trying to appeal to both levellers and max-level characters at the same time. Mind you, I never had a lot of problems levelling cooking before, but with how fast and smoothly you zoom through the low levels these days, it's probably harder because you don't get to see as many zones with vendors selling recipes and won't kill as many random mobs for useful meat drops. There have also always been certain level ranges where it's harder to skill up than in others (250-300 for me, mostly). Either way, getting extra skill-ups from doing the daily helps.

However, the Chef's Awards for completing the daily are decidedly "meh" for low-level characters, as all the recipes that you can buy with them require a cooking skill of at least 450. While cooking skill isn't restricted by character level anymore, it's unlikely that you'll be far ahead of the "intended" skill range on your average alt, especially with the aforementioned factors making levelling cooking something that might not happen as easily on its own anymore. You can't save up awards for later either as they are capped out at the very low number of ten. You can buy the recipes early and build a stockpile in your bank for later, but that's not really ideal either. Your only alternative way to spend them is the Crate of Tasty Meat, either to stockpile meat instead of recipes, or to sell the contents for gold.

I don't want to scoff at that because it's certainly got its uses... but I just find it odd that the quest itself is very obviously designed for low-levels (as you won't face anything worse than a level 11 thief) but the rewards are very much aimed at high levels. As a result, putting their Chef's Awards to good use is a clunky process for lowbies, while characters at max level get encouraged to repeat a completely trivial level ten quest over and over for weeks in order to gather all the new cooking recipes. It just doesn't sit quite right with me.

In summary, I enjoy both of the new profession dailies and I think that they are fun as well as a great help when it comes to skilling up your secondary professions. However, I also think that trying to aim them at low-levels and characters at the level cap at the same time wasn't really the best idea ever and I would have preferred it if they had introduced separate dailies for different level ranges. Maybe in the next big patch.