So my plan for leveling and gearing my priest up mostly worked. The leveling process in the end was a pretty big headache. It felt like it took far too long and I ended up doing more quests than on my rogue. Not sure if there’s an experience discrepancy between the two classes, but I had to do more quests. Of course, my rogue received some help in killing a bunch of rares so that might’ve contributed a few million experience points but the numbers felt way off for my priest for some reason. Regardless, I ended up doing 75% of Townlong Steppes rather than my usual 25-50% and finished up in Dread Waste.
Of course, upon hitting 90, I immediately went back to town to do some gear prepping. I ended up at the 459 ilvl mark with crafted goods and managed to grab the cloak from Ahune to give me the magical 460. That was a nice ticket into Mogu’shan Vaults. Of course, I grabbed some coins from the treasure room scenario but ended up getting all gold from my first run. Kinda frustrating considering that there’s quite a bit of good drops for a priest in the first half.
So what are my feelings now upon seeing her at 90? Outside of some talent rearrangements, I think she suffers from just bad gear. It’ll take some time to build up that gear but hopefully I can get enough in the next day or two so she can output better damage. I’m fortunate that priests are easier to gear than other cloth and leather based classes and the fact that I already had a good Inscription weapon ready. But pushing into the next raid group is going to be a challenge unless the drops start falling out faster.
Either way, I’m pretty happy that I now have 10 level 90s. It’s been a lot of work and I don’t think I’ll bother leveling my monk. If my monk was level 85, I might consider it but it’ll take a few weeks of solid, non-stop leveling before she can catch up. I really don’t want to put that level of effort and prefer to concentrate on taking my current toons to the next level with regards to LFR, gearing, their farms and work on elements like Pet Battles. I think it’ll be interesting with all the different toons that I have available and I can start making assessments in styles and DPS (since that’s what I do).
The other thing is that I can relax a bit. I was worried that I would miss the Ahune/Summer event and struggle paying a hefty price on the Auction House once again in trying to gear my priest up. Fortunately, everything fell into place and I can sit back and start focusing on each character, bringing them up and really putting my plan of industrializing their farms to work.
I’m somewhat excited for these opportunities as I’m a bit ahead in terms of the expansion of where my guys need to be. I used patch 5.3 exactly for what it’s worth, which is mostly leveling and playing catch up. So if they decide to announce the next expansion for Christmas (which I doubt), I’ll still be ready, having a good 5 months of preparation time to do more with my toons compared to Cataclysm.
On a side note, one little trick that I started to do with my priest (and my rogue to a degree) is that I would use my Death Knight, who is reasonably geared, to clear out mob heavy zones. It’s not entirely like power leveling but I found this technique to be really useful. One of the things I would find frustrating is an area with just too many mobs that would overwhelm and kill my toons. Although I might need certain mobs for quests, having too many would frustrate me to no end. So I would have my death knight fly above a zone, clear it out if things became too cramped, then switch back and forth until I felt comfortable again. It’s a nice, simple technique if you’re not fortunate enough to have friends or guild members helping you out.