Cataclysm: Day Two Results

Getting down to the wire with the all important first level cap. Things are slowly starting to turn towards a more strategically focused route rather than an all out rush to 85. Here's a quick look at day two, which was a bit different.

Raiders of the Lost XP

Hoo boy - uldum. Quick level update - I'm now a good 6 million XP into 85, only 3 million to go which I will assuredly polish off tonight after work. Some brief, and potentially relevant notes from leveling yesterday:

• Uldum has a lot of cut-scenes. Like - a lot. All in all though, it was still a very valuable 83-84 zone and I was able to level to 84 in 4 hours and 15 minutes. I didn't complete the zone - as soon as I hit 84 it was time for twilight highlands.
• Once again - the two leveling dungeons in Uldum are very much worth running. Both provide excellent XP quest rewards, and progressing through them was pretty quick for me in your run of the mill pugs. On a whole, much easier on average than stonecore.
• You can get a friggin camel here. It's worth getting friendly and snagging the tabard for this reason alone.

About twilight highlands

Now this was painful. For those that aren't aware, there are a series of quests in stormwind that lead you into the actual highlands zone. You actually get about a full bar of level 85 XP completing the chain. This would be all well and good, if it weren't for a particular set of quests involving a certain NPC in stormwind keep that needs to be talked to twice. Once at a time. And being in a party doesn't work. Despite everyone's best attempts to form a line, this turned into your run of the mill free for all. Very frustrating. I definitely advise trying this on an off peak hour, as I was fighting with about 15 other players at this time when try for this.

Another potential contender for annoyance of the expansion comes in the form of this expansion's ring of blood style event. Gurgthock is back this time with the affectionately named "CoC" - a 5 man outdoor arena event that is similar in style to its predecessors, but with a lot more lag time. Long story short - expect a lot of competition and a lot of waiting here. I've personally avoided it - for me waiting 15 minutes to complete each step of the chain isn't a valuable use of my time.

These two annoyances aside - highlands has thusfar been an excellent zone to level in and I expect will finish out tonight with limited problems. I found the tail end of Uldum to drag a bit, and I'm well into level 85 at just under a 3 hour clip. I'm expecting to ding tonight in just under 5 hours, which would put my leveling clip at something in the realm of 17 hours total.

Not a world record by any means, but a decent enough pace given the crowding on my server. This brings me to my future plans:

What's next

As referenced yesterday, my playstyle is about to shift. I'm going to back off on the main for a bit. I'll still be devoting time on her to running normals and heroics for gear, but the other half of my weeknights will be spent burning off rested XP on my two gatherers (herbalist and miner).

The goal will be to only level while under the affects of rested XP, meaning i won't have another 85 for a couple weeks, but overall each should level at a faster than 17 hour pace. By my rough estimates, if I can trim this down to 15 hours per character, I'll have 3 level 85s in 3 weeks if I can devote 10 hours a week to my alts - which should be very, very doable.

The failure of the expansion thusfar has to be jewelcrafting. I've yet to capitalize at all on my intentions. There's still 5 days left in "release week", so overall I've got a ways to go, but I'm definitely hoping to make some progress in that area shortly.


That's it for today - if anyone is out there not grinding - lets hear your thoughts on your first two days of the expansion. Any pleasant surprises or disappointments? What are you trying to focus on as the first weekend of cataclysm draws near?