So I tried doing Nalak to see if I could get anything or even a rare. Nope. In fact, just as I was about to take on Goda, I got summoned for the Nalak encounter. Afterwards, I eventually got into a Galleon group and once again received nothing. Somewhat disappointed I decided to return to the Isle of Thunder to see if I could spot any rares. Lo and behold Goda was there. I was fortunate enough to get a small group together and got a key to the treasure room. Then I went and picked up several Elder Charms and turned my attention back to Terrace of Endless Spring.

I had some really weird luck there in terms of loot. I got a few repeat drops, including some tanking bracers, the shoulder token, the DPS strength ring and the two handed axe. But I did manage to get my belt and a new tanking necklace so I was pretty happy there. After looting the Sha of Fear, I immediately hit Wrathion to pick up my gem. I did some reforging, got a belt buckle and crafted a few gems for my new belt. Afterwards, it was time to test this all out and see how much I could hit.

At first, I tried picking on some low level creatures in the Jade Forest since I needed to grab a few Jewelrycrafting recipes. But it turns out that I was doing far too much damage to really see how much I improved. Instead, I decided to hunt rares again. Found one guy in Krasarang Wilds (the guy in the little boat) and nuked him down. I think it was pure bliss when I saw a tasty 230k+ crit show up on screen from my Obliterate. Looking at Recount, I noticed I was doing a little under 90k. Considering I don’t have a lot of the newer Throne of Thunder pieces yet, I thought that my DPS was fairly respectable. In fact, all day long I was in the top DPS spots, if not first, most of the time.

Tomorrow (or rather later tonight), I hope to do some Throne of Thunder on my death knight to see what kind of DPS I can push out as well as hopefully acquire a few items. Good stuff.

The post World of Warcraft: Pushing Forward on the Death Knight appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

Although I was tempted to get him started on dailies, I thought better of it. I noticed that you can probably do 1 1/2 toons with regards to dailies. Probably, you could do more but it’s mentally very taxing to run the gamut. The minimum you should focus on are the Tillers, or at least working on your farm to get motes (especially for crafting professions). I think outside of running Sha of Anger, I’ll probably keep him on the sidelines for a while until I have a few more level 90s.

More of my focus is going to be gearing my druid since she’s closer to getting into Heart of Fear as well as my hunter. My hunter now is at ilvl 480, so he’ll meet the bare minimal requirements of getting into the next LFR. For my paladin, I’ll probably just run Terrace of Endless Spring in the hope of obtaining a weapon. It’s pretty hopeless but a friend of mine managed to secure his weapon for the first time. So I’m praying that I’ll get it in the next run or two.

In the meantime, I think I’ll level my shaman. One thing I did learn just recently was that enhancement shamans are pretty much shafted with regards to gear. Crafted gear in particular. I’m a little miffed about the situation as I prefer playing enhancement over elemental. So I’ll have to figure out what to do when the time is right. Overall, it looks like I’ll be force to use suboptimal gear when starting out with a dagger and the 450 weapon from the Arena of Annihilation. Beyond that, I don’t have a lot of great hope in pushing him forward quickly for the current patch. However, with the 458 crafted gear coming out, I might be able to just get a few pieces here and there then purchase whatever is needed to get the bare minimum for Mogu’shan Vaults LFR. That said, I might do other things with him since he is my primary enchanter and has max level enchanting already. I hope to build rep so that he can eventually receive the high end weapon enchants. But that might be some ways away.

The rest of my classes will end up fairing better. All my spellcasters already will have an epic weapon, which is great. If I switched my shaman to elemental, I could use that as well. But I probably won’t since I’m not as familiar with elemental as I am with enhancement. I heard that elemental had some issues soloing in Mist of Pandaria. I’ve had a lot of problems initially with my boomkin and it wasn’t until I obtained better gear that she started to do okay for herself. I imagine that elemental has the same issues.

If I manage to level my shaman to 90 soon, I’ll probably switch over to my warlock or warrior. I am somewhat interested in playing a spell caster outside of a boomkin since it’ll be my first class that I’ll craft my own cloth gear. I’ve heard good things about warlocks but haven’t had an opportunity to give mine a try since Cataclysm. I haven’t decided whether to go demonology or afflication. But a lot of people have said that the new demonology spec is a lot of fun. At least, I’ll have a good weapon by then.

The post World of Warcraft: Death Knight at 90 and Moving Shaman Up appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

That said, the other major issue I had in being somewhat hesitant in leveling my death knight was getting occasionally frustrated during the leveling process. Having already gone through every quest a few times, there’s nothing really new to excite me. More than that though there are certain areas in the game that I completely dread. But in a few instances, I pretty much was ready to throw my keyboard against my window.

Most of my frustration revolved around choosing a leveling spec. Since I primarily DPS, I went with frost especially since I geared him more heavily during Cataclysm. While the gear lasted up until Kun-Lai summit, some areas were tougher as a pure DPS class. Areas with high mob density would slow me down since I would attempt to maneuver around mobs to avoid unnecessary fights. Yet in some instances there wasn’t any possibility to avoid them. More than once I found myself running back to my corpse as the mobs ganged up on me and I found that my death strike wasn’t doing enough to keep me alive.

As I moved into Kun-Lai summit, there was one area I knew which had some nasty high density mob action. So I switched over to blood, having selected both DPS and tanking gear as I quested. Lo and behold my problems instantly went away. Not only was I surviving with ease, I could bypass certain quests several times faster due to the fact that I could group up mobs without worrying about dying. My DPS did take a slight hit but overall I found myself progressing faster because I no longer worried about survival.

That leads me into the theory that tanking specs tend to go a bit further because of the survivability factor. Part of the problem is accidentally pulling mobs or being quickly overwhelmed. While a DPS spec can down mobs faster, I feel that the overall time in comparison is comparable because you have less down time either healing yourself or resting.

Now, this may change a bit depending on the class. For instance, at one point, I ended up switching my pally from protection to retribution in the middle. I think his damage output wasn’t high enough and that I still saw him taking a fair amount of damage. I might have to experiment with this a bit when I get the chance to level my warrior. I did level her mostly as protection back during Cataclysm and found the spec to be loads of fun.

Regardless, this is primarily for leveling. Once I hit 90, I’ll switch back over to frost for gearing since I don’t want to enter instances as a tank.

The post World of Warcraft: Tank or DPS for Leveling? appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.