For The Paladin

The Benefits of Dungeon Leveling

For World of Warcraft players, the clock is ticking to the Cataclysm expansion.  The entire world will change with Cataclysm, but for now there are some important benefits that you’ve got to take advantage of while you can.  Right now dungeon leveling is the perfect way to reach level 80 quickly and efficiently, and that could all change when Cataclysm arrives.  The new expansion will completely reshuffle the WoW world, and some of those old Classic and Burning Crusade dungeons will disappear.  You’ve got a limited time to experience these dungeons, and instance leveling is the perfect way to do it.

There are many reasons instance leveling helps you reach level 80 much faster than traditional solo questing and grinding.  The most basic reason is that you gain experience much faster.  You don’t have a lot of down time when you’re leveling through the dungeons because you’re pretty much killing mobs nonstop.  You don’t have to spend a lot of time running to a new area in between levels because the dungeon finder takes you right to your instance.  In most cases, you’ll also spend a lot less time dead and running to retrieve your body.  This cuts back on your down time even more, making leveling a breeze!

Dungeon leveling is also much easier than traditional solo quest leveling because you have many more opportunities to get even better gear.  There are three ways you’ll have access to better gear through dungeon leveling.  First, the gear you receive from doing the quests that are located inside the dungeons is far better than almost anything you’ll get from solo questing.  Blizzard wanted to make the rewards for dungeon leveling even more appealing than solo power leveling because running instances is more difficult.  This is why the gear you earn as a reward for doing the dungeon quests is so much better than the gear you get for doing solo quests.  Blizzard also granted twice the experience for completing dungeon quests, as opposed to solo quests.

Whenever you’re instance leveling, you also get the chance to kill a lot more bosses and elite monsters.  These unique creatures will drop much higher quality gear, which you will never have access to if you don’t learn all about dungeon leveling.  The third way you can get better gear by dungeon leveling is the special bag you get upon completion of your first random dungeon of the day.  The contents of the bag won’t always benefit your character, but sometimes they are exactly what you need.

Another great thing about instance leveling is that it gives you a chance to explore areas of the game that you can’t go into when you’re power leveling on your own.  Of course solo questing certainly has its place, but you’ll need four other people to go into the dungeons and take advantage of all they have to offer.  After all, you’re going to run across a lot more elite monsters in the dungeons, and they give a lot more experience than just killing regular creatures.

Looking for the best strategies to level your character from 1-80 in record time?   Check out Dugi’s Dungeon Leveling Guide!

Better Rewards from Instance Leveling

Do you ever wonder why some World of Warcraft players seem to have the best gear, even as they’re leveling their new characters? It’s probably because they spend their time instance leveling instead of running solo quests all the time. Instance leveling is the new way to get your character from level 1 to 80 in record time.

Better Gear

Of course it’s pretty obvious that dungeon leveling gives you much more experience in a shorter amount of time, but there are plenty of other benefits from leveling this way too. One of the best things about instance leveling is all the great gear you have a chance to get. Most of the gear that drops in the instances will never drop on monsters you kill out in the world. The gear that drops off of the dungeon bosses is always top of the line also, which means you really can’t do better than picking up your gear in the dungeons.

Another way to get better gear is by completing the quests associated with each dungeon. The rewards you get for completing these quests are always better than the rewards from solo quests because Blizzard considers dungeons to be more difficult. It’s like a win-win scenario because you get twice the experience and even better gear, simply by dungeon leveling as much as you can.

Monetary Gain

There’s also the monetary gain associated with instance leveling. You’ll earn a lot more gold by leveling this way because you’ll kill more monsters in a shorter amount of time. More monsters means more gold and vendor items to loot.

You’ll also have access to more items that are rare or useful enough to other players to sell on the auction house. If you don’t know how to use the auction house, learning while you’re dungeon leveling is the perfect time. If you’re not a tailor, you can sell all those stacks of cloth you’ll get, in addition to any other materials for various professions. There is simply a much wider variety of items that drop inside of dungeons, and instance leveling is the perfect way to see more of these items.

Time to Explore

One thing you will notice when you begin dungeon leveling is that WoW does not include maps with most of the Classic and Burning Crusade dungeons. This can be a bit of a pain, but thankfully some of the new dungeon leveling guides include these maps so you’ll never get lost again.

If you already have at least one level 80 character, then you should try dungeon leveling for your next one. It gives you a chance to explore areas of the game you might not have played before and kill unique monsters and bosses that you haven’t seen yet. Dungeon leveling puts a whole new spin on the game you’ve been addicted to for years. Remember, you can’t use the dungeon finder until you reach level 15, but those first 14 levels will just fly by on the solo track!

Hey guys, I’ve been really busy with finals and such and haven’t gotten around to playing/blogging for a while, but with the semester over I will be back to my normal routine. Sorry for the lack of posts this week.

Ghostcrawler (WoW’s Lead System’s Designer) recently talked about Cataclysm’s overall leveling improvements:

1. The gain is every level. You don’t have to reach certain milestones for your Shadow Bolt damage to increase. One of the scaling problems we have currently is that any spell without a level 80 rank starts to fall behind. Imagine Shadow Bolt just has 85 (free and automatic) ranks.

2. We changed the level at which you get abilities, in some cases dramatically. Currently, you get showered with abilities at low level, many of which aren’t even useful when soloing. By sliding these around we have every class to where you get an ability about every odd level. There are still some dry spells for some classes, but then you have talents and other things that fill in some blanks.

3. Related, the spell book tells you at what level you will get future abilities so you can plan accordingly. In addition, when you ding, the UI tells you not only about newly available spells, but also systems and mechanics not tied to your class trainer, such as the ability to train riding, dual spec or use Dungeon Finder. It’s pretty sweet. Our UI team is kicking some major booty for Cataclysm. Source

Personally, I’ve given up on leveling characters for a while. I thought that I was going to be able to level my warlock (who’s 68 at the moment) before the summer came around, but for me it’s getting way too boring. Hopefully these improvements will at the very least create a new experience when it comes to leveling in World of Warcraft.

I finally managed to get rid of that nasty virus, and now that I’ve reinstalled windows and installed and patched WoW I’m back in the game. So far I’ve gotten to 40 frost emblems and while I know it’s not enough to get any T10 pieces (which cost anywhere from 60 to 95 badges, which is a lot for someone who isn’t raiding ICC), I can say that my gear is improving thanks to the massive amount of triumph badges you can collect from doing 5-6 instances in a row.

Speaking of frost emblems, what piece should I get first? Click on my armory and let me know what you think!

Blizzard stated today that in the new expansion; Cataclysm, raid lockouts for 10 and 25 man raids will be the same. What exactly does this mean?

Quote from: Nethaera (Source)
We’re continuing to refine the raid progression paths in Cataclysm, and we’d like to share some of those changes with you today. Please enjoy!

We’re designing and balancing raids so that the difficulty between 10- and 25-player versions of each difficulty will be as close as possible to each other as we can achieve. That closeness in difficulty also means that we’ll have bosses dropping the same items in 10- and 25-player raids of each difficulty. They’ll have the same name and same stats; they are in fact the exact same items. Choosing Heroic mode will drop a scaled-up version of those items. Our hope is that players will be able to associate bosses with their loot tables and even associate specific artwork with specific item names to a far greater extent than today.

So it doesn’t matter whether you’re doing the 10 man or the 25 man of a raid, the item difference is between the normal and heroic versions of the raid. Personally, I think this is a great way to separate the casual raiders from the hardcore raiders and allows the hardcore to keep getting the best of the best gear while still keeping content open for those who don’t have the time to raid more than once or twice a week.

How do you feel about this upcoming change? Do you think that this will help or hurt the game?

Recently, I had gotten an invite from a RL friend to raid in a 10-man Trial of the Crusader as a tank. The problem was that because I was the Main Tank (and because I was given Raid Leader status to find another 6 people to raid alongside us), I was given the privilege of being the Raid Leader.

Now let’s get one thing straight. I can take orders no problem. I can also play my class pretty well and know all of the fights for all raid bosses up to Ice Crown Citadel. But ask me to lead a raid to downing a boss? You’re better off finding someone else to fill that position. Which leads me to this post: What does it take to be a good Raid Leader?

Communication

Obviously, communication is key. The ability to communicate with your raid and to make sure that not only they can understand you, but that you can understand them. All of the successful raids I’ve been in have had a Raid Leader who was constantly talking on Ventrilo, making sure that everyone was ready to go before each boss battle, tossing out bits of information here and there throughout the fight, and always keeping our spirits high when things weren’t looking so good. So make sure that if you plan on leading a raid, having good people skills is a major skill to have.

Strategy

How are you supposed to kill a boss without knowing what the boss does? Read up of course! While it’s important for the Raid Leader to know the strategies, it’s also important for the raid to read up on them too. In the case of “OH NOEZ I FORGOT TO READ THE STRATZ!” at least your Raid Leader can let you in on the information that your class is required to know in order to defeat the boss. I will admit that at times I would be thrown into a raid where I had no idea what was about to happen, but the Raid Leader was always there to show me who I was healing/where I was standing/what I was doing when a certain event happens.

Preparation

What do I mean by preparation exactly? You should be well prepared in game as well as out of game. In game, being stocked on all the necessary pots/buffs/enchantments is key not only in maximizing your DPS/Healing, but it also gives you that added bonus for your characters when their gear is lacking (but if you’ve ever raided before, you should already know that). Out of game, it helps that when a Raid Leader has set up a few hours to raid on a certain day, they are around for those hours uninterrupted. Raiding can be serious business when it has to be (just look at the top 10 raiding guilds in the world, do you think they got there by casually downing bosses?), and it takes a certain kind of focus to accomplish something as epic as a world-first kill. Rest assured, this post isn’t exactly about that, but even for raiding on a casual scale you need to focus and you need to be prepared to sit through wipes, especially if your raid is a PUG.

Anyone else have any good key components to being a good Raid Leader? Leave a comment or shoot me an email!

~Baros