Pre Panda Planning

As the new expansion looms closer, I'm starting to look at my roster of characters and wondering what I'm going to do with them. For the sake of planning, here they all are, listed in order of preference in terms of how much I play them, and pay attention to them.

I suspect pruning is necessary in the case of Rakshas - I fear he might have to go, as I don't enjoy the Death Knight class enough to play two of them. It's unfortunate as he is my second Alchemist (Transmute spec'd), but we have to do what we have to do.

Consolidation might also need to happen for my two Horde characters. They are currently on different servers, and I'm finding that US-Argent Dawn (RP) is a bit too slow and the AH a bit too dead for me to have much fun there - I've re-rolled the priest on US-Area 52 (PvE) to see how I like it - it is the third most progressed server in overall rankings, is in the New York server cluster giving me a latency of about 30 in Orgrimmar and much, much bigger in terms of population and activity. If I like it as much as I hope to, it will become my Horde home.

After I consolidate, I won't be rolling any more Horde characters, as between the Death Knight and Priest, I will have tanking, melee-DPS, ranged-DPS and healing covered.

My Alliance characters will, for the foreseeable future, remain on Moon-Guard, where I want to have another go at a Hunter and Shaman, both of which I have had a lot of trouble getting into in the past. I might even do the Resurrection Scroll thing for my wife's account and steal an 80 of one of those classes... tempting. Meanwhile, there is the Mage and the Rogue to get to 85. Hrm.

Ideally, I want to hit Pandaria with all classes at 85, 8 Alliance side and 2 Horde side. It'll also give me the leverage I need on the Alliance side to cap out all my professions (I'm just missing Leatherworking and Engineering right now.)

That is a lot of work, especially as I don't really enjoy leveling anymore... or so I thought until I started playing my Priest and man, Trisfal Glades is relatively fun to level through! I really want to play through the Forsaken Zones but didn't want two Forsaken, so I moved the Blood Elf after I hit level 5 and did all the quests starting from Death Knell. So far, so good.

Conservatively, I'd like to get all the characters I've got up to 85 at least, and maybe think about doing the Hunter and Shaman at some point when the leveling bug bites again. Ideally, I want to see this when I log into Pandaria:

How far will I get? We'll see how I do.

As for Innana, she'll finish What A Long Strange Trip It's Been later this month, with Children's Week and park me somewhere around ~10,500 Achievement Points which is respectable, even if that puts me a distant fourth behind three other Achievement junkies in my guild. I'd really love to knock out the old Wrath 25-mode mount achievements but those can be finicky to get together.

Then there are the remaining Heroic modes in Cataclysm to do... sometimes it feels like there just isn't enough time, and wasn't it just yesterday we were talking about Pre Cataclysm Planning?

Ah, well. We're all getting older!