So, in celebration of getting to 80, I went ahead and Explored the world 🙂
Now here’s my dilemma. I’ve been working my way through Northrend, and hit 80 while finishing off Grizzly Hills. Now, do I continue the questlines in nrend or do i just go straight to the new cata zones?
I looked around and here’s pre-cata advice for finishing Northrend after 80:
If you’ve done the run to 80 before you shouldn’t do every quest in the zone; only the ones that will help you later.
Do Howling Fjord first, do the initial zone quests up to the ones that unlock the Utgarde Keep dungeon quests. Then do the Ka’luak quests in full.
Do Borean Tundra. Do Coldarra in its entirety to unlock the Nexus dungeon quests. Do Ka’luak quests until you get to Revered (or close to it, there’s easier ones in Dragonblight), and do the quests that lead up to and include finishing Temple City of Enkil’ah.
Run Utgarde Keep and Nexus at least once WITH the dungeon quests.
Do the majority of Dragonblight. The Goblin quests in the north area are optional, but nearly all the quests are important for something (Kirin Tor, Wyrmrest Accord, Ka’luak, Wrathgate).
By the time you do all those you should be Honored with Kirin Tor and Wyrmrest Accord, and Revered with Ka’luak. When you hit Lv.76 go to the Ka’luak vendor and buy a blue chest, and go back to the vendors for all three when you hit Lv. 78.
After that I recommend skipping Grizzly Hills and Sholozar Basin and hit Zul’drak for the Argent Crusade and Ebon Blade rep, both of which are in the lower areas. You could optionally unlock the Drak’Theron keep quests in Grizzly Hills, and probably a good idea to do the same for the flight point in Sholozar. If you intend to do Frenzyheart or Oracles, then stop by in Sholozar.
Once you hit Lv.77 go directly to Icecrown and do the quests to unlock Crusader Pinnacle and Shadow Vault, and start up the Argent Tournament quests. Then if you think you need shoulder enchants later go to Storm Peaks and do the entire Sons of Hodir questline, but only that. By then you should have enough dailies unlocked to not have to worry about anything else.
However, as the level cap is 85 these wont be as much of a gold bonanza – instead i could go straight to Hyjal, finish the zone, and then go do Firelands dailies for epic gear and better flying mounts. And then I can always return to northrend to finish off the Lich King.
What’s the better strategy here? I don’t even know all the pros and cons of each, so help educate me…
UPDATE – I just went to Hyjal, did three quests and got a sword that doubled my DPS. 0_o
Assistant Greely suggests rewarding yourself by playing a goblin to level 20. 🙂
The quoted advice is very much about skipping as much as possible in the race to “endgame”, a style of play I’ve never had any affection for. I think the story-based PvE content is better in Wrath than in Cata, and since it will all be trivial if you try to do it later, I’d at least do most of Storm Peaks and a good chunk of Icecrown.
Doing all of Hyjal once is nice, unless the Twilight Proveditors have gone missing again (which blocks all progress through the zone), and Deepholm has a nice variety of things to do. Uldum is half-quest, half-movie; I consider it a failed experiment in making the player into a passive spectator for second-rate fanfic, and would cheerfully skip “those” quests if they didn’t block the other content in the zone. Twilight Highlands is good, although there are a few passive quests to get through there as well. Vashj’ir has some obnoxious phasing, and is painful for melee and annoying for everyone else, with only one quest chain that I actually look forward to. By now I’m relatively sure they’ve fixed the crippling bugs in the quest chain to open the instance; I was stranded for 40 minutes the first time, although at least I didn’t drown. The third time I ran a character through, it worked fine.
(I’m not kidding about Assistant Greely, by the way. No relation)
-j
I am definitely a PvE story-focused solo player in general. However, just one hour in Hyjal and I’ve more than doubled my DPS and have a really major upgrade to my armor. Should I stick with Hyjal now? Or should I complete teh Icecrown storyline instead?
I basically have two storylines to pick from – thats the main question. Either way, I can still do teh quests later, right? But I am seriosuly tempted by the gear… I’ve been at a major disadvantage in gear for most of my alts career.
Stick with Cata zones. You will level to 85 before finishing those, even. As you progress from 80 to 85, you will notice your dps actually go down. Attribute attrition starts to kick in very heavily especially at 84 and 85, when you start needing more and more +whatever to compensate.
If you did all the solo PvE content in Wrath, you’d still replace most of your gear before finishing Hyjal, so yeah, it’s awfully tempting to skip to the newer stuff. As a non-raider who started with vanilla, I’ve experienced the new-expansion gear-replacement boost many times, and it’s a lot of fun, until you recalibrate your expectations of what “good” armor and DPS are. It’s just there to allow casuals to survive against the much-tougher mobs that were needed to keep hardcore raiders from just blowing through the content in a day.
There are some really good quests in Cata, and some good stories, but also an awful lot of crap; I get the feeling they were stretched so thin that they used absolutely everything that the content team came up with, no matter how derivative or repetitious, and they definitely overdid the phasing, vehicle quests, and uninterruptable, unskippable, “let’s watch a movie” quests.
If you keep going in Cata, I would suggest going through all of Wrath on a second character (perhaps a DK, although leveling is so fast now that it’s not much harder to start from 1 and see the redone zones), doing all the major storylines in Storm Peaks and Icecrown. They’re worth it.
-j
Jeffrey – what do you mean by “attribute attrition” ? please explain, it’s new to me.
J – I do have other alts, my next highest ones are level 40 druid nelf and a lvl 60 belf DK. I also have a nelf paladin on another server, at 30. But the thought of leveling any of these to 80 gives me heartburn. I’d rather just focus on my main and have him do everything lore related.
What i am tempted to do is just switch back and forth (boredom dependent) between Hyjal and Zuldrak and basically do the two storylines in parallel. Is there any reason that doing Hyjal first would preclude full enjoyment of the Icecrown storyline? I don’t want to miss out on content. I am assuming Northrend is in a stasis, unaffected by cata – though I am aware that the invasion of Undercity questline was removed before I could get to it. I want to make sure I dont miss out on anything like that again.
I’m also pleased my druid alt got to see Archdruid Staghelm in Teldrassil. I guess he isn’t there anymore… am about to go rescue him from the barrows in Hyjal now 🙂
No, since you already know most of the ending (and the later parts of the major story arc happen in instances), doing Cata content won’t spoil the stories in Icecrown or Storm Peaks, because there’s very little crossover. There just won’t be a lot of challenge to the quests themselves, except for some that were designed for groups.
I understand the desire not to go through it all again. Of the five characters I had at level 60 before the first expansion came out, three of them are still standing in the first zone of BC, waiting for me to ever want to play them again. The other two are at 83 and 84, respectively, so none of my original characters actually made it to 85, just a DK, and a warlock that I originally created as a whim while waiting for BC to come out (I think I got her to level 50 wearing nothing but jewelry).
I did run through a lot of the refreshed old-world content on a new character, but gave up in disappointment at level 48; most of it just wasn’t different enough, and a lot of the new stuff had the same flaws as the higher-level Cata content.
-j