You just hit level 90 maybe finishing Townlong Steppes on your journey. The game opens up the doors and you have far more options now since you no longer are in the tunnel of gaining experience. What should you do?
This post is geared towards newer players or even players interested in figuring out some routes once they hit level 90. The minute you hit level 90, you should probably return to your faction’s town in Vale of Eternal Blossom and immediately get the flying mount ability. Leveling through Pandaria will net you quite a bit of gold. If you haven’t spent it on anything and have been hording it, you should definitely invest in flying (if you didn’t up until this point, you might encounter some issues getting the next levels of flying).
Once you get your flying in order, I suggest focusing on picking up gear if you have the gold from the Auction House. If possible either craft or buy items for your class. As someone who has several alts and has done a lot of work on professions, I tend to craft my own stuff. Since several of my toons have maxed out farms, I use them for getting Motes of Harmony. Most of the mats are stuff I’ve already picked up in the past so it’s generally a matter of having enough Motes. Otherwise, if I see a reasonably priced epic on the Auction House, I’ll prioritize that first.
I already went through a cheese gearing guide in the past. I suggest reading that to get some basic gear out of the way. Once you have some reasonable gear, reforge your items so that you’re near raid ready. Use guides like noxxic.com to make sure your most important abilities are capped. Depending on your class, you might struggle a bit trying to cap things like hit and/or expertise. But make the effort as best as you can, especially if you get basic PVP gear.
Next, try to get in a Sha of Anger group early on in the week. Even if you lack Elderly Charms, at the very least you can get the boots. If you’re super lucky, you might be able to grab pants and/or gloves with a re-roll. But I’ll assume for now that you won’t have spare coins. With a few potentially good gear upgrades, you have a few choices.
First, more than likely, you ended up leveling towards the end of Townlong Steppes. I suggest people who are around level 89 to do this path as opposed to Dread Wastes since Dread Wastes mobs tend to be higher level and quite challenging at 89. Assuming that you took that path, you can make a goal in completing the Dread Wastes or start hitting heroics with your PVP/etc. gear. The thing about Dread Wastes is that if you manage to complete the zone, you can get 3 pieces of 450 PVE gear (shoulders, belt and boots). If you did the Sha of Anger, the boots can go towards an offset item (like for a protection paladin as opposed to holy or retribution). Or you can sell them.
By doing this, you can get a few additional stats that will give a little bigger edge than pure 450 PVP gear. Here, you might find yourself between ilvl 450-455+. At this point, you’re still under for LFR but enough to get into heroics. My suggestion is to ask yourself how confident and familiar you are with heroics. If you’re up to it, start heading into heroics to grind out your gear. If not, then you might consider starting your dailies grind.
I tend to do the upgrade prior to running the Dread Wastes and dailies runs in that the mobs are just a little tougher and will require you to output more damage and have better survivability. Certain classes and specs may have an easier time but it never hurts to have that extra edge.
As you start your dailies run, pick up the Elderly Charm Maker weekly quest under your faction’s Vale of the Eternal Blossom town. Your goal is to hit the minimal of 90 points of lesser charms a week. That way, when you are ready for LFR or if you manage to get into a Sha of Anger or Galleon run, you can improve your chances for loot.
With dailies, you’ll want to find a good route. I tend to do Order of the Cloud Serpents, Dominance Offensive, Tillers, Golden Lotus, Klaxxi then Anglers at the start. You definitely want to do Golden Lotus as much as you can to open up the August Celestials and Shado Pan factions. If you lack the reputation bonus, then doing the Golden Lotus from the start is critical since the grind is long and arduous.
But you should take some caution when you begin your dailies runs. Figure out what you can/cannot handle. Be patient if you find you are dying and re-examine how you are playing your class/spec. For instance, I found that using a boomkin initially was really tough. I think I made a horrible miscalculation in gearing a boomkin rather than feral for doing dailies. Part of my motivation was to get the BoA epic staff from Inscription so that I would be able to hand it off to my alts once they reached sufficient level. However, in certain instances, playing a boomkin was challenging whereas going in as feral could have made things far easier.
That said, as I geared up my toons, the dailies gradually became easier as I discovered a good rhythmic pattern to them. I didn’t force myself to be a completionist with dailies and took on the approach that if an area was too difficult, frustrating and/or time consuming, it would be better to skip it and use the time for something else.
If you have crafting as a profession, you definitely want to work on the Tillers. If you have a gathering and crafting profession, you might want to focus on hitting revered so you can plant Songbell seeds as much as you can. Otherwise, you’ll probably want to do a mix of Songbell seeds and your crafting profession’s required mats (unless you have a lot of money or friends and decide to use the Auction House as the source for getting materials).
My suggestion is that once you have the farm, make sure you continue to plant seeds every day. Use that in conjunction with the cooking profession. I find that by doing this, it helps motivate me into using my farm on a daily basis as much as I can. Although you can plant any seeds you like, I tend to switch off from vegetables to Songbell seeds when I hit revered since Motes of Harmony are a pain and necessity to harvest as a crafter.
Also, if you are a crafter that has a daily component such as an Inscriptionist or Tailor, make sure you complete those as much as possible. Alchemist might be one of the harder ones in that you need to supply your toon with Ghost Iron bars. But the good thing is that the payoff over time is very high.
Another thing you should do is to work on your fishing. The fishing dailies to me can be the best and worst. They are the best because I find them to be the most relaxing. They can be the worst if you have a low fishing skill level and get the ones which require you to fish up things from the river. My recommendation is to gather up fish from ponds as you level. The Jade Fish ponds to me are great since some of the cooking recipes require them. If you hit 90, you can then fly around finding additional ponds. The great thing is that even with a low fishing skill, you can always can fish from ponds. So all these things will slowly begin to work with each other over time.
Once you start getting enough reputation and valor with certain factions, start planning out your gear upgrades. If you’re a single role type of class like a hunter, don’t bother buying any ilvl 489 rings and necklaces. This is because you’ll eventually get one of each from hitting exalted with the Klaxxi and Golden Lotus respectively. With 5.2 coming up soon, you should be very frugal in spending valor points. I would go as far as to suggest not spending any (unless you’re on the border of getting into the next level of LFR) and just wait until the price reduction of valor gear.
Now, my approach is very LFR and gear oriented. I did not talk about PVP, pet battles nor gold gathering. Pet battles are also an option but I felt that they don’t have as big of a place at 90 compared to some other end game goals you might set. Gold farming is tougher if you decide to go the route of playing the auction house. If you need gold, you’re better off working on dailies since the output for gold there is quite high (around the order of 600-800/day).
The last thing to consider at level 90 is whether or not you want to do it all over again. In other words, working on alts. I made a decision in the previous expansion to have one of each class maxed out to 85. So for me, the grind to 90 isn’t as arduous as starting from scratch. However, it can get boring/tedious quickly but the advantage is that all the quests are pretty fresh in my mind. As I hit 90 on subsequent alts, I find myself doing things faster and more efficiently. One small thing to consider is that with patch 5.2 coming up, your justice points will be converted to gold. If you’re sitting on a mound of justice points, consider trying to hit 90 asap so you can make any last minute purchases before your previous work is reduced to almost nothing. This might be very significant if you can get a piece of justice gear just to help you out a little or even an heirloom item.