Meet my level 86 pandaren monk! And I get the eyerolling, but I’ve been planning on switching my main to monk for weeks. All it required was some money (not much, due to recent sale prices) and some time to RAF a few pairs of characters in advance. Overall it took less than a day and cost less than $50, which is a significantly better investment *to me *than leveling a monk manually from 1-80.
Getting out of the panda starting zone took less than 2 hours. My journey from 80-85 took about 10 hours, and could have gone faster if I were more disciplined. Speed is important to people like me. I wanted to raid and do dungeons while leveling with my friends, which we accomplished today. =) I was able to heal three dungeons in a guild group, and it was fabulous. And due to the all-nighter I pulled last night, I will be able to keep up with my guildies as we level through Pandaria. I wouldn’t be having a good time if I were leveling a character with them that would later become an alt, or if I were stuck in Azeroth when they hit 90.
After I got to Pandaria, I leveled to 86 and spent a few hours banging out my monk’s cooking (I wanted to get the farm daily in before midnight). My priest had to fish at Halfhill for about an hour and a half to get enough Golden Carp (they only drop in open water). For reference, I needed around 30 golden carp to level my monk’s cooking from 1-525. It might take more for non-pandas though, due to the +15 cooking racial. I completed the starting Tiller’s quests on both my monk and priest, of course, to maximize my cooking awards and be able to make feasts for raids/challenge modes later. You can start those as soon as 85, you just have to get to Halfhill. So if anyone has any questions about how cooking or farming works, feel free to ask.
I’m *really *glad the MoP zones don’t have CRZ active right now. Because they’d be freaking CRZ-Y (heh). As it is, I experienced some wait times for quest mobs and item spawns, but nowhere near as bad as I know it could be. No server queues either, since we’re low-pop. And, although there are pockets of pvp here and there, I’ve been left totally alone since coming to Pandaria. While level from 80-85, I was ganked probably 10 times by sub-85 players from other realms. Never by another monk, though, and never by someone from my own server. This just further reinforces my dislike for CRZ.
Got my panda monk to level 20 today. In a surprise twist of fate, they brought back class quests! At level 20 monks can use an ability to teleport to a monastery in Pandaria and receive special training. It seems to be about how to better use the more skill-intensive abilities. This time (the first time) it was how to use the roll ability to get out of the fire in a combat situation – which is neat since it prepares new pandas for raids a bit. It also gives decent XP and a buff that increases exp earned by 100% for an hour. In addition, it seems to be a daily, so you can get 100% extra exp for an hour every day.
I tend to feel the same way. I make a point of leaving if I notice I’m competing with someone with a level-appropriate need for the resource I’m farming, even opposite faction.
Probably why all my toons are just above poverty line, even if they are all max skill-level (or will be).
(minor hijack: ganking someone to take the resource they’re gathering is, to me, a distinct kind of douchebag.)
In general, the new material seems more class-conscious or at least class aware.
Case in point: working the Pandaria initial zone for 85s, all of the quests awarded hunter gear for my hunter. When I try the experiment again with my priest, I’m sure it’ll be priest gear.
In other words, no quests with a selection of 4 completely useless items.
(I don’t bother with patch notes, so if this is documented… well, it may be a rerun, but it’s new to me.)
Tried pet battles last night, it was fun until about lvl 6, when I had start grinding levels to be able to challenge the trainer. I hate hate hate level grinding.
Really wanted to use my Phoenix Hatchling, but it’s an Elemental and most of the pets in the zones around Elwynn are Critters, which Elementals are weak against. I think the Clockwork Gnome is OP.
Horde-side quest Scouting Report: Like Jinyu in a Barrel. Another “cinematic/vehicle” quest. You’re stuck in a “looking through a sniper scope shooting bad guys” POV. You’re shooting bad guys to protect an infiltrator in the bad guy’s camp. The infiltrator moves from place to place in the camp, doing stuff, and you defeat waves so the infiltrator can more on. Presumably, after the last wave and the last phase of “infiltrator doing stuff” the quest would end and you get normal control of your character back.
In my run, at one point, the infiltrator wouldn’t advance and the quest didn’t continue. Bugged. Feh.
Wowhead’s advice is to relog. Great. I do this.
What Wowhead didn’t mention was:
The camp being infiltrated is a phased version of Pearlfin Village, a major Alliance quest hub. And if you log out while on the quest, when you log back in, you will still be in Pearlfin Village, but not phased any more. I died at least three times trying to get out, and wasted 30 minutes trying to find a GY not in the immediate vicinity, and then died a few more times after spirit rezzing at the only GY apparently available and being GY-camped.
Which trainer? I did the first three while leveling my pets.
They were challenging, and did require the same basic tactical planning as Pokemon (imagine that), but winnable even if slightly underlevel.
I haven’t tried the trainer in Stonetalon yet. I got tired of grinding pet battle and had captured about 10 pets to add to my collection. Good enough for the night, IMHO. Wound up with one level 6 pet and two level 5 (almost 6).
Actually, I had a win streak of 25. I had the next level of winning streak going too, but I impulsively tried a battle pet capture in Jade Forest. Of course, my level 6 Blue Clockwork Rocket Robot couldn’t defeat a level 23 Emerald Turtle. I withdrew, but at least I didn’t have to rez the pets.
Dammit. The Pandaria pets are adorable. I want one! I have to travel around grinding my battle team to that level!
Yeah. This is exactly like Pokemon. I wonder if any money changed hands between Blizz and Nintendo?
Indeed, wait for them to harvest the resource then gank them.
Yes this was something mentioned somewhere by Blizzard, loot is now spec specific. Which is good in one way, no useless items, but bad in another, no way of building an off spec set via quest rewards., my druid is feral/resto and has only seen +Agility gear so far. Though he hasn’t done much yet maybe this will change.
Yeah, I love the Peaks of Serenity. And it’s super neat that you get to port there so early! Yesterday I noticed some inconsistency in the xp buff, the same problems it was having on beta–buff sticking around forever with 0s duration, or re-upping it at the last second with a new quest and going from 2 minutes left to 2 hours left, etc. Those issues seemed to be fixed by the time I logged off last night, though.
Yeah, I *love *the way they redesigned quest loot. It means dungeon quests will always give you a spec-appropriate blue of the correct armor class, too! This feature is actually really handy if you are a hybrid with two specs that collect different gear. On my monk, I’m Windwalker (melee DPS) and Mistweaver (healer). So when I turn in a quest, I can just change specs to turn it in, which makes the loot change from agility/crit to intellect/spirit. It’s pretty great!
Slightly bad in another way, too: if you’re questing with an enchanter, disenchanting useless quest rewards was always a good source of mats. Now, unless you overgear the content*, you can’t start piling up dusts and essences until you start getting the next tier of quest greens to replace this tier of them.
Case in point: the opening quest chains in Jade Forest rewards you with greens that aren’t better, or significantly better, than Heroic 5-man purps from Cataclysm. After getting to more than 50% towards level 86, I’ve only replaced my cape and rings. And my ranged weap, because the the blue crossbow reward from Boom Goes the Doonamite* seriously outclasses my old Lava Bolt crossbow.
**Trivial hijack: More evidence of Blizzard’s unhealthy fascination with poop. The Horde sides with semi-intelligent monkeys and is reduced to flinging monkeyshit at attackers. Lok’tar ogar, indeed.
I’ve done a lot of pet battles, since I wanted to avoid the new zones till they thin out a bit. The trick I found to the trainer battles is to use your low-level pets to capture slightly higher level pets. Repeat untill you have enough high-quality pets of the right family to defeat the trainer. This is way faster than leveling the pets from scratch.
This strategy seems to work up to pet level 15, when any newly-caught pets of 16+ is deleveled to 15.
I have managed to keep one of my original pets (azure whelpling) pretty much at-level with my rotating cast of new pets, but leveling the rest of the pets I want to use will take ages.
Yes, stam and agility are the 2 primary BM stats. While leveling, you basically want feral druid leather. So do Windwalkers. Priorities for secondary stats are still being spreadsheeted (spreadshot?) over at EJ. The current wisdom is that, because gems award 2x the amount of secondary stats as primary stats, and agility is not currently twice as good as expertise or haste, you should gem for expertise or haste. By the time you get to 90, there should be a consensus.
I figure God and Country already know, but for anybody who doesn’t - don’t forget that the first full week (Sunday through Saturday) of each month, you can get a one-time, “plus five” quest for your profs. This is especially helpful when Blizz is being a butt about making you use a literal ton of mats to only get one point in your chosen profession. They are also worth DMF rep, exp and gold.
And I get the eyerolling, but I’ve been planning on switching my main to monk for weeks. All it required was some money (not much, due to recent sale prices) and some time to RAF a few pairs of characters in advance. Overall it took less than a day and cost less than $50, which is a significantly better investment *to me *than leveling a monk manually from 1-80.
