Be Prepared for WotLK: Leveling

The Wrath of the Lich King expansion is upon us, and for many it means leveling our character to the new level cap of 80. It's been ages since I've done any leveling, and just a week ago I took and leveled all my alts at least two levels, just to get a hang of leveling again.

So here's a quick post with some tips for leveling:

Spec and gear for the most damage

Forget healing. Concentrate on Damage!

You should be geared, and Your talent points should be distributed, to maximize you damage (and thus maximize your experience/hour for example).

For example, I will be very dark shadow priest as soon as the expansion launches, as shadow talents improve my damage output the most.

Get some questing addons

Two I use the most are:
LightHeaded
- Tips directly from Wowhead to aid your questing
QuestHelper
- Calculates the most efficient path to do the quests you have

And to take these two to a whole new level:
Cartographer 3.0
- Maps and notes
TomTom
- Waypoint arror deluxe

Don't forget to have fun

It's new expansion! so enjoy it, don't let it swoosh by too fast :)

Achievement Hunt: Two new videos

As I posted before, I'm heavily into the achievements. I love'em. Rigth now, they keep me busy and they keep me in the game until the expansion comes out. I should probably be leveling some of my Alts, but getting the next (and next, and next) achievement is just so addictive and fun!

I have noticed that some of the achievements are pretty hard or so into detail that they are pretty hard to do without guide, so I look up achievement info from Wowhead achievement pages.

The guides and instructions are great, but it's fun to show things on video as well, so I just posted two youtube videos showing how to do couple of the achievements I did yesterday. One being for the Quests and The Burning Crusade: Blade's Edge Bomberman and the other is The Lurker Above for Fishing (and Accomplished Angler).

Check them out if you need help on doing those:

WoW Achievement: The Lurker Above (Fishing)

WoW Achievement: Blade's Edge Bomberman

Do subscribe to my videos if you like, as I'm posting some WoW videos every now and then.

Quick note to other WoW fishing enthusiasts, if you haven't found El's Extreme Anglin' yet, go there now :) It's the best place for any kind of WoW Fishing info, and even that it's concentrated on fishing profession, it's one the best WoW sites in general because of the superb quality in all aspects.

Gone Fishing.

I didn't play WoW between the 2.4 patch and just-launched 3.0.2, and during those months several of my old WoW friends have moved on, and some of them I miss already. Happily, I'm in active guild (and they didn't kick me out or anything) and my friend list is not totally gray (everyone offline), so I won't turn too lonely in game :)

But that wasn't what I planned to write about as the new patch 3.0.2 brought a load of new features to the game, which will keep me busy too..

Hail to the WoW Achievements!

I had a post earlier this year about What kind of bartle player you are?. This of course refers to the Bartle Test, which categorizes players depending on what their interest in game is. I was somewhere along achiever-explorer-socializer-killer lines, in that order. And at least the achiever part is dead on..

With the new Achievements in 3.0.2, I started rethinking the whole thing, and realized that I must be quite a bit on the "achiever" side, as I immediately started checking the achievements and planning how I can start working my way towards the more difficult to reach achievements.

So I'm doing all kinds of odd things around Azeroth and Outlands, just to get achievement unlocked, couple of points and possibly a mount or title at some point. Some couldn't care less about the achievements, but for me, they're something to work towards, keep me busy and feel that I achieve something. Even that I don't actually achieve much, but anyway :)

At the moment, I'm concentrating on fishing - for those who know me in-game, no big surprise :) The Accomplished Angler achievement for title of "Salty" is what I work towards. The achievement requires a murloc-ton of running and fishing rare fish in hard to reach places, including raid instances SSC & ZG and opposing capital - Orgrimmar for me. Before I had no reason to go and bug Hordies in any way, but now I have a reason. Fish.

After I get the fishing achievements done as far as I can pre-expansion, I'll turn my eyes on Cooking and start pursuing the Hail to the Chef and title "Chef" to go with the "Salty" from fishing one.

Heck, when the expansion is out, I might even try to shoot for the Realm First! Grand Master Angler, but I think it might be really hard and would need me to get the game as soon as possible.

That pretty much describes the game experience for me, there's always something to look forward to. At some point I might (again) get bored, and take a break, but I don't see why I wouldn't keep playing/returning to WoW every now and then. When the expansion is launched and level cap is opened, the leveling start again and the brand new gear will be there to be looted - so again, there will be something to look forward to.

So WoW is quite a bit about achieving and pursuing something. And at the same time exploring things you've not seen or experienced before. But one can't deny the social aspect of the game, the friends you have in the game can also be the reason you keep returning to the game.

Perhaps that's what has made WoW so popular - something for everyone.

Back in WoW: 3.0.2 Patch is Here.

Those darn Wrath of the Lich King ads and the Blizzcon news I ran into. It's been 7 months since I started the break from WoW. But I couldn't resist too long.

I'm back in WoW.

Yes, I resurrected my account and installed the game to my repaired laptop. So I enter the game just when 3.0.2 patch enters the realms, so I handily avoided everything between 2.4 and 3.0. And a month before the new expansion. Just in time to get myself ready for the level 70-80 grind (Bye bye Holy Priest for a while, welcome the good'ol Shadow!).

There's loads of info about the new patch and such around, here's the one for Priests: Patch 3.0.2 Priest Survival Guide by Dwarfpriest.com. btw, I was so glad that the dwarfpriest blog/site was still around, and bigger than it was when I last visited, helped me a lot to read all that info while waiting for the patch downloads after install. So with such quality info I'll probably survive my comeback.

Anyway, I picked up the little things from 3.0.2 patch notes. And it's the little things that matter the most :)

Macros and key bindings are now saved server-side so there is no longer a need to reconfigure them when logging in using another computer.

- So good! I wish this had been around already, so I wouldn't need to reset every macro I ever had. But for the future, very nice.

Once a vanity pet or mount is learned, the icon will disappear from within a player’s inventory and reappear in the appropriate tab under the pet tab under Character Info. Say goodbye to your vanity pets and mounts taking up bag and bank slots!

Lost pets and mounts (one time quest rewards) can be recovered by visiting a stablemaster.

- YES! at least 10 or 20 slots freed from bank and bags. So good.
- And if the other one means that I can get the pets and mounts I had to delete to free some space in bank, it gets even better.

There was also some info/news about Badges of Justice and Battleground Marks being stored in the new "Wallet", freeing even more space in the bank - but I didn't find this from patch notes.

Of course there's a whole lot of class changes, new talents trees, addon problems/downloads/installs and all that which makes your and my head hurt.

But I don't stress about that right now, I have to learn the game again. It took a while to remember how to move the toon like I did 7 months ago with the camera/mouse (mouse right-button pressed worked). But I figured it out, so maybe I'll survive. And I got Pitbull unit frames and Clique setup already, so maybe even some healing when I get into the game after patch is out in EU servers.

But before that I'll be attending the preview of all previews today, Max Payne the Movie.