Thursday 27 August 2009

Come with me if you want to Level

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I'll be Back, the famous words uttered by Ahrnuld in god knows how many movies.

Well, I'm back, and my blog is with me.

As I've said before, I write this blog mostly at work. I've had a little time off for the summer, and when I have been at work it's been pretty hectic, so I just haven't had time to write.

I never actually stopped playing the game. What I've done is take my new Human-Paladin, 'Smythadin' to the lofty heights of level 74.

Now I don't claim to be a power-leveller, and I know that Blizz have been nerfing the levelling speed for a long time now. But by rolling a new toon I've found out just how much.
With only 5 days played he reached level 73. WTF is going on with that??

True, Paladins probably are over-powered at the moment. By levelling as a ProtPally I can massacre an entire army of mobs and come out at the end with full mana and full health. And by an army... I really do mean an army. There's been times when there's been 15-20 mobs!

I've played a ProtPally before, and I thought he was OP then, but these days... Oh My God.

In those usual moments, in solo play, where you acidentally pull extra mobs by getting too close, or with fears, or mobs runnign away it's usually an 'Oh Shit' moment. But with this toon I actually get slightly excited, it adds a little bit of challenge. And the only thing I really have to worry about is my frame rate, with all those numbers flying up my screen.

I tried tanking Old Kingdom with him the other day. It's actually my first time tanking in a group in 2 or 3 years, so I was a little nervous. It takes a lot of concentration to stay aware of what's going on with loose mobs, and controlling CD's to silence casters etc... but it's pretty much exactly what I expected it to be.
Bolle provided me with a few good pointers, mainly about mana regen, divine plea, and the Seal & judge combos. And all that did was serve to make me even more imba.

We wiped once on the Old Kingdom run. On the apostles. I can safely say that it was the DPS fault, since in that encounter lack of DPS on the adds means the boss enrages. She did, Bolel healed his little ass off, but I still went down. Second try and it was all good.

The speed with which this toon has levelled is astounding me. And add into the mix that I've also been levelling my Mining skill, and spent hours playing the AH to level JC'ing, only to decide, once I'd reached around level 300, that engineering was better. So splashed another 1.5k and another few hours on the AH and I'm now a 354 engineer. And, as a bonus, I no longer have to go to IF to use the AH... Nice.

Now all I have on my to-do list is to get some more practice in tanking instances. And sort some sort of addon / macro to mark targets for me. As it slowed me down quite a bit having to do the whole right-click menu thing on the mobs last time.