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!

It's Over Nine Thousand!

This weekend between bouts of Turkey and Stuffing floating in an ocean of butter, I took the time to grind out a bunch of low-hanging achievements and a profession that has been hounding me since Cataclysm launched and crossed the Nine Thousand achievement points line.

At first I just went for the easy stuff - getting Pilgrim got me well within striking range. After that, the cooking/eating/drinking achievements easily finished with purchases from the Auction House, a bit of cooking, and a little help from a guildy who cooked up all the cookies for You'll Feel Right As Rain.

After that, I grabbed an easy rep grind over a couple of hour or so to get two achievements and a pet, and then win-traded my way to another achievement over at the Argent Colosseum. Jumped off a cliff and bandaged myself for another.

After that, being so close to the end, I just began to grind out Archaeology as I had never finished it, stalling in the 300-range somewhere, and began to rack up the achievements until the finale when with five points left to go, I racked up three in a row, all adding up to the big one.

All done. Now I'm kind of looking at that number and wishing for a 5-digit number, especially with how many achievements I haven't ground out (a few meta 25-man stuff from Wrath, a few more Holiday things yet, several PvP ones, etc.), it shouldn't be difficult at all to hit 10k points. But I can take it in a more leisurely fashion. With the buff Archaeology is receiving in 4.3, I might even go back to get some achievements from there - I rather enjoy a few of the rare items you can get from there.

It was surprisingly relaxing to spend a few hours doing a low-stress activity like this. I do hope we see some kind of account-wide achievement tracking ability in 5.0 as I do hate being on an alt and not being able to prove that I know what I'm talking about when I'm trying to PuG something. Plus, a few of the really hard PvP achievements are very difficult to duplicate multiple times and if I have it on any one character who's not my Paladin, it's really aggravating to try and duplicate that.

Anyway. If 4.3 hits tomorrow, the relaxing down-time will be over and it's nose to the grind stone time. I'll need to cap Justice and Honor next week on at least two characters for PvP gear and start getting Valor and Conquest capped again.

Home again, home again, jiggety jig.

Woah!

So, I was going to write about how awesome it is to raid right now in the buffed post-patch period and how much I'm enjoying raid-tanking as a Paladin right now, but, then, I saw this...

O_o

I was a finalist in the Blizzard 2010 Global Writing Contest!

I came this close to winning the contest! So exciting! Eeeek! I wish I could go to BlizzCon to meet the other writers and staff and stuff. But still - wow, this is the highest scale recognition of my writing so far.

I think it's a sign of some sort... but regardless, I'm so giddy and excited right now.

No Time

Just when I'm so close to wrapping up a bunch of stuff in game, is when work and personal life are piling up to make it impossible for me to even log into game.

Aargh.

But even now that the official date for Cata has been pushed to Dec. 7, I don't know that all this content will sit around and wait for me to finish it. So... before Deathwing devours us all, I need to finish up at least the following on my Paladin:

• Get at least 35 Exalted reps (and finish up the Z'G grind - only need 2 more solo clears!)
  
• Start working towards 3,000 quests done so I can pick up that title
• Start collecting more Heroic Kills for that title
  
• Finish up Glory of the Raider (10)
• Finish up Glory of the Ulduar Raider (10)
• Finish up Glory of the Icecrown Raider (10)

That list could be achieved in one week if I did nothing but just sit down and play for a week!

But lately, I'm lucky to be able to get on twice a week to raid... I was hoping to hit Cata with more than 100k gold, but I'm sitting on just 54k and I doubt I'll be able to double that in a couple of months. Bah. My virtual life is slowing down!