Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Testing the 85-89 leveling nerf



Oh my short attention span! After spending last week doing 115 quests in Dragonblight for Loremaster, I needed yet another change of pace. I can only take the dreariness of Northrend in small bites. I greatly enjoyed playing my feral druid, though, making me hopeful that she will eventually make it to level 90 some day! I also enjoyed meeting some celebrities at the Wyrmrest Temple, although I don't remember Krasus being such a giant in the books. He looks like he could just about palm little Chromie there in the background!


So yeah, something new. With 5.3 and the rise of dissent within the Horde, I finally felt like it was time to play the Horde storyline again. My tauren death knight seemed like a good choice, since I can imagine her being a warrior for the Horde but perhaps having some qualms with Garrosh's heavy handed leadership. So I did a little reading on Icy Veins, reorganized her action bars, and sent her to Pandaria to journey towards level 90.


First off: OMG death knights! Even being rusty on the rotation and having never really understood rune management, she is a killing machine (ha!). Nachtmystium is the first of my toons to be able to kill rares while leveling, which aside from the XP nerf for Pandaria leveling, as provided her with even more XP. So she got to level 86 before she finished the whole Riko and Kiryn storytelling questline, and to level 87 before she hit Halfhill. I was thinking of finishing all of the Kun Lai quests with her for Loremaster, but since she's already halfway to level 88 and hasn't finished the second quest hub yet, I think I'll just send her right into Townlong at 88. In summary, she's made about a level each day (2-3 hours playing each day), with questing and a couple of rares and dungeons each level. I would say that's a pretty significant acceleration of the leveling process, although we'll see about the last two levels.


Although I don't play the WoW TCG, I pick up a pack of cards every time I go to a discount store because I like the artwork. I got the above card the other day (picture from the WoWTCG Browser), and it really gave me the backstory for beginning to play my death knight again by helping me to make sense how the tauren culture and the history of a death knight could be combined. The flavor text says "I hear the cries of our ancestors, for I walk between worlds, between lives." I imagine Nacht, despite her killer death knight instincts, still having a strong allegiance to the tauren and their way of life. She'll eventually recoil at the treatment of her people and the other races of the Horde by Garrosh, and his destruction of the the world to fuel his war effort. Despite her transformation, her ties to the tauren are strong, and her allegiance lies with them and their ways. She'll be fighting for her people, and if it involves undermining Garrosh's Horde, so be it.

No comments:

Post a Comment