I will be spending much of this week in game prepping my new raiding toon for the expansion, so I'm here to offer my own series of insights into what I'm doing to get ready for Cataclysm.
Quest Stockpiling
My warrior spent most of her night in storm peaks and icecrown, faithfully grinding away at missed quests from the 70-80 push. I was actually very happily surprised to find out that I missed quite a few quests in addition to all the dailies in these areas.
It's never too far to look ahead into the future, so my long long term thought is that come cataclysm I'll hand pick out all the group and elite quests from 85, and get them as densely packed as possible for the 85-90(?) push. That is far, far too ahead in the future, however.
Something a little more current
No surprises here. The screenshot is pretty poor quality (I was able to get 17/25 completed tonight, despite what this shows), but it gives you an idea of my strategy.
Unfortunately this character is my "new" main, so she's not a Crusader. That being said, the plan for Dec 7th is to log out right in the middle of icecrown. First step is Ymirheim to turn a couple stragglers, then a quick flight to the ship floating (hopefully) right above. From there it's another quick flight to the tournaments grounds to turn in the argent dailies. After that I'll be hopping from gryphon to gryphon: Frosthold -> K3 -> Brunnhildar Village -> Dun Niffelem.
Based on my quest count that will put me at 24 or 25 quests exactly. With each quest coming in between 20-30k xp, I'm ballparking my efforts at bringing in just around 600k xp within 10 minutes of loading up.
Is this worth it?
Short answer: Absolutely.
Long answer: Still absolutely. If you're like me and have limited time to play, this will help you keep up pace with your other guild mates, or even get you ahead of the curve if you can get your play time in early. Even if you're a player taking the week off to level, and I know enough of us do that, there's really no downside to doing this anyway.
Let's take a look at some quick math, courtesy of this excellent short article from warcraft guru.
XP to level 80-81: 1,686,000
XP to level 80-85: 19,561,400
Now, assuming you accumulate enough quests within a reasonable area (2, maybe 3 zones) that are all of the storm peaks/icecrown variant, conservative math puts this at bringing in 500k experience over a 10 minute period. Let's toss out some quick statistics to put this into perspective. That equals:
- 3,000,000 xp an hour
- 29.65% of the way to level 81
- 2.55% of the way to level 85
- A pace, that if continued, would level cap you in just over 6 1/2 hours
No matter how you look at it, this is significant. Even if your plan is to log on at 12:01 and beat everyone to Deepholm, taking the time in advance to do this is faster than any quest planning you'll be able to lay out in Hyjal or Vash'jir. My time investment on this entire endeavor is projecting to be about 2 to 3 hours, between travel time, quest selection, and actually completing the quests. In terms of "cost" this is putting me back between 2.5k - 3k in terms of the gold I'd otherwise be making per hour.
For me, being able to keep myself that much further ahead of the crowds, 3k gold is well worth it.
In Closing
Tomorrow I'll be featuring a post discussing some other things to stockpile for Cataclysm, both in terms of monetary and leveling gains. Stay tuned.
In the meantime - if you have any different questing stockpiles planned out for the expansion, please feel free to share!
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