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!

Someone in WoW has managed to hit 1 MILLION gold in a total of 6 months. Honestly, I dont think in the five years that I’ve been playing this game, I’ve amassed even close to that much. Here are his personal stats as to how he did this.

* Averaged 46,080g per week in profit
* 1500+ active auctions at any one time
* Largest single day gain: 51,781g
* Largest single day loss: 18,254g
* Single Iceblade Arrow sales: 16,374g
* Rare and epic spellthread profit: 81,313g
* Gold earned from GDKPs: 28,312g
* Gold spent at GDKPs: 71,210g
* Vendor pets profit: 19,448g
* Largest profit from a single item: Ring of Rotting Sinew 9,512g
* Largest % profit from item: Plans : Titanium Razorplate 3,308%, 80g to 2,646g
* Most expensive item purchased: Deathbringer’s Will 17,000g
* Most expensive item sold: Mechano-hog 15,210g
* Gold lost to AH 5% fee: 64,712g

That is just a silly amount of gold to have. My question to you guys is, what is the most you’ve ever earned? What item did you sell?

I can honestly say that when I first stepped up into Blackwing Lair, I was pretty knowledgeable of Molten Core, taking down bosses such as Magmadar in my sleep.  That said, I felt like I was very knowledgeable about raiding in WoW.

I was wrong.   Very, very wrong.

Razorgore was not only the first boss, but the first MOB in Blackwing Lair, and even his mechanics were something I’ve never seen before in the game.

But i’m not here to write about the mechanics of Razorgore…then the title wouldn’t make sense.

Vaelastrasz had one of the most fun mechanics I’ve ever played in raiding.  He had a spell called Burning Adrenaline which would increase your damage by 100%, your attack speed by 100%, and your spells became instant cast.  How awesome is that?  Imagine being a pure DPS class and you’ve been hit with Burning Adrenaline, you become so overpowered you’d think that it was unfair to even put this spell in the game!

….I mean, there’s also that whole “lose 5% of your max health every second” bit, but it’s still pretty cool.

The craziest part about this spell was that he not only cast it on a random mana users throughout the fight, but also on the current tank every 45 seconds.  That meant that tanks had to have a rotation on when they became Main Tank while the other slowly withered away.   For those who weren’t tanking but had mana to spare, they needed to get to a safe zone to be at, because upon death, they will explode and do 4,376 to 5,624 AoE blast damage.  But if you were being healed, you should have enough health to get a few good nukes in.   Of course, rogues never got hit with this spell (and they damn sure don’t need it).

On top of this intriguing little spell is another ridiculous ability,Essence of the Red.

This debuff is cast on the raid at the beginning of the encounter and lasts for three minutes. Restores 500 Mana per second to mana users. Restores 50 Energy per second to Rogues and Cat Form Druids. Generates 20 Rage per second for Warriors and Bear Form Druids.

It essentially means players have infinite mana/rage/energy for the fight. Circle of Healing. Being a holy paladin at the time, it was time to go crazy with Holy Light and Flash of Light. Add Holy Shock to the mix and you’re pretty much all set to go in terms of healing.

Oh, you should also keep Fire Resistance Aura on, because of Vael’s passive Fire Nova spell.

Killing Vael will grant you access to your Tier 2 belt as well as these items:

Pendant of the Fallen Dragon
Dragonfang Blade
Red Dragonscale Protector

Personally, I had both the Pendant and the Shield back in Vanilla WoW. Both were awesome items for a Holy Paladin.

Keep Tuning in for more Raiding to the Past!

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!