A neat little feature in WoD is the ability to “hire” a bodyguard from one of your followers.  Now, there are only 5 per faction and they are set in stone.  You can’t miss them.  Each has their own perk, unlocked through faction with that specific bodyguard.  You gain 10 faction per kill, no exceptions.  It only works in the wild, so no dungeon runs.  And you need 2,000 kills to unlock the perk.  They also scale to your level, and have some decent skills.  Pretty good support actually.

I opted for Leorajh, as he comes with the ability to launch garrison missions in the field.  I already have a mailbox, a quick hearthstone to the garrison and repairs anywhere.  The summon a friend requires another person with you… so pretty useless out in the wild. Important note. While you can get a bodyguard to max faction earlier, you can’t complete the quest that unlocks the skill til 100. And even then it’s by knocking out a boss in a level 100 zone.

The hiccup here is the 2,000 kills.  My monk played the most out of MoP of all my characters.  From 1-100, including the bodyguard work, he’s amassed only 30,000 kills.  My rogue is sitting around 150,000 but he has way more hours in.  Anyways, 2,000 is a LOT.  I thought perhaps through normal play I’d see some decent progress but after a week, running the 1000 apexis dailies in a raid, I wasn’t making a huge dent in that number.  In comes Google.

For a while, 1hp critters gave you faction.  There was a neat spider spot in Talador that was just ripe for this action.  That got squashed a week or so ago.

Instead, through of all things archeology travels, I stumbled upon a neat spot in Gorgrond.

Stoneshard Grubling

Now, in this 1 location there are 3 distinct spawning areas of these grubs.  A single run through all three will get you about 70 kills.  They respawn pretty much as fast as I could kill them.  I did the last 1,000 kills in less than 10 minutes.

The first 1,000 kills were done in Talador, at the Burning Front.

Burning Front

This place spawns demons, non-stop.  There are a few NPCs who can tank for you.  The mobs, while weak, still have decent hp so it isn’t a single shot deal.  If you’ve invested in the Artillery for this zone, then that works pretty well.  This one moves along at about 50 kills a minute, more if you’re lucky.

So yeah, neat feature. It’s time-gated, so my optimization subroutines kicked in.  The ability is sweet, the extra damage and healing is welcome and it’s nice to have a sidekick.

A funny thought occurred to me.  Blizzard’s trolling Wildstar, or at the very least, making fun of everyone who says 40 mans are the best.  I say this after having gone through a Molten Core 10-year anniversary run.

Now, I did MC back when it was cool.  Roster boss was a pain but sheer bad play was another one.  I can clearly remember dying multiple times to the core hounds, or the crazy respawn timers.  All of that glory is back if you want it. It took the group a solid 3 hours, with only 2 people leaving while it was underway.  I got my mount and lucked out on an ilvl 640 helm.

For those saying that LFR beats the roster boss, I disagree.  LFR, if anything, is a perfect example of the roster boss from the 40 days.  In those raids, you had a solid core of 20 carrying 10, with the final 10 more a hindrance than anything else.  LFR is exactly this.  A hunter pulled Shazz by accident.  A knockback into a pair of hounds wiped as well.  Mages who didn’t know they could decurse caused 2 wipes.  Players who honestly said “I don’t have any AE abilities in my bar” were a ton of fun on the hound packs.  It took the tanks a fair bit to understand that they couldn’t all taunt, which made many of the enemies spin around and AE the entire raid.  Every boss was a 1 shot deal but Shazz was the only one who took us to town (see decurse comment).  All told, out of all the 15 or so wipes, I would only consider 1 that wasn’t caused by someone doing something drastically wrong.

To compound this, the ilvl requirement is rather low in my opinion.  The difference between 615 and say, 630 is significant.  When I queued for LFR, it was by chance as I saw the option up.  I checked the eyeball and it indicated a 30 second ETA.  I found this interesting as most queues for DPS are around an hour.  When I actually got into the raid, I got assigned to heals.  And the raid leader since my name was the first alphabetically.  Hah!

I healed to the best of my abilities but clearly my gear was pretty crappy.  Monk healers are pretty crappy in terms of burst healing, though they apparently scale quite well.  After having healed as a shaman, woo, what a difference in a high damage raid.  I kind of like the mechanics of a monk healer but there are certainly some additional tweaks that are needed to balance out the good heals from the bad.  Let’s just say that of all the healers, I think the monk would have the hardest time overhealing anyone.

The fun part of the raid was that there were 2 core groups of raiders in the field, both from different servers than mine.  The banter was great.  It was a drastic change from typical LFR chat.  I really found myself chuckling at some of the stuff being said.  Tanks were smart, heals were smart.  DPS generally avoided the bad stuff.  In a raid where 1 bad move can wipe 39 other people, you can find some tough spots but here for some reason, people were good.

Now, would I want to spend another 3 hours doing MC?  Nope.  I have my mount.  I’m good.

Previous to WoD, if you played a second specialization (outside of mages, hunters, rogues and warlocks), you needed a 2nd set of gear.  Tanks, DPS and Healers needed different stats and you ended up with a full 2nd set of gear in the bag.  Leveling up this was even more ridiculous, as you’d hit cap and not have a single item for the 2nd spec.

WoD turns that around a fair bit.  Regular armor has multiple mail stats that vary depending on the spec in use.  So my monk is either Agility or Intellect based, depending.  This applies to the helm, chest, shoulders, legs, arms, wrist and feet.  I found this out the hard way, let’s say.

In order to run heroics you need to pass silver in the proving grounds.  Very similar to the Guardian challenge in TSW and in my opinion, the 2nd best thing MoP brought into the game (outside Flex raiding).  There are bronze, silver and gold runs for tanks, dps and healers, in increasing difficulty.

I had leveled as physical DPS, so the dps proving grounds were extremely easy.  I was geared, knew that I needed to interrupt and could move around to avoid stuff.  Simple cakes.

I mentioned before I wanted to try healing again, what with the DPS queues being stupid.  So I reset my macros and tried healing again.  Of note, I did heal as a monk on MoP, just not often.  I knew the rotation and the buttons.

I still failed bronze.  Badly.

I didn’t really understand why.  My skills were set up, my UI tweaked a bit.  I was pressing the right buttons.  So I tried again, and failed once more.  I started looking at the amount I was healing and realized it was quite low.  I looked at the gear quickly, sure enough my chest was Intellect as were other pieces. Try again, lose once more.

Frustrated at this point, I went over each piece on my character and noticed a big chunk was wrong.  Necklace, 2x rings, 2x trinkets, cloak and weapon did not have Intellect.  I was running at half power, at least.  So I looked at my handy treasure map, found a few intellect pieces I could collect, bought a weapon on the AH and went to work.

I passed silver without any real issues on the next attempt.  My healing normal healing throughput was what I was getting as a crit before.  Astounding difference in power and it just started going together.

So yeah, the proving grounds did what they were supposed to do.  Make me pay attention.  Lesson learned.

I think last night was my first full session at 100.  I mentioned previously that I was sort of dropped to my own devices when I completed Nagrand.  So what did I do?  I installed some mods.

Ok, not so fancy sure.  But this was a fresh install of WoW a month back and I didn’t really do anything that merited a mod.  This time, I opted for a few items.  Curse has all the mods listed, or a link at least.

• A full UI replacement.  There’s not a lot to be said here than I think this should be the new default WoW UI.  It seems every game today allows the end user to manually move the elements around and ElvUI does that and more.
• I’ve had this mod since Vanilla.  I have a long history with fishing.  WoW’s is the simplest implementation and casting in my garrison is great.  I’d have to triple check but I’m pretty sure I have 4 characters over 500 fishing.  I won’t bore you with the math about how many casts that took.
• DeadlyBossMod.  Eh, don’t really need this yet.
• HandyNotes + WoD treasures. This updates your map to show the location of treasures, points of interest and the rare spawns. There’s a fun part about discovery, certainly.  Then there’s the “where the hell is that box” part of it.
• This gives you a popup anytime a rare is spotted near you.  I used this with my Hunter to find rare pets.  Works great in WoD since there are dozens of rares per zone.

So that stuff took a bit to set up.  But it’s good now.

I then focused on my garrison followers.  WoWhead has a good guide on it.  I had already collected 20 or so, so this was more of a stragglers issue.  In particular Leorjah who is practically hidden and the Archmage Vision (throwback to the TBC version).  In the process, I hit ~30 followers so I had to de-activate quite a few.  Considering I like some of the companions, that’s an odd choice to make.  So my thought process on hiding them is as follows:

1. Focus on green-ranked followers
2. Is one of the traits tradeskill based? A tradeskill I won’t use? (skinning).  Hide ‘em.
3. Do they have traits that increase success, XP gained, reduce mission time or are a bodyguard? Keep ‘em.

I now have a few at level 100.  One in particular rolled great and has half mission time, double garrison rewards.  In a play session, I can get 2-3 missions out of him due to the short times, so I can collect ~200 resources.  Actually, I think I made about 1000 resources in 2 days because of that guy, combined with work orders on the mill.

This process had me running around the zones, finding folk and other rares I had missed.  I found some other treasures, completed some archeology (maxed now) and stored those results in my garrison.  Of really cool note, the back of your keep has a room built just for archeology finds.  That is amazeballs.  They are pre-slotted, so you can’t move them but it’s something.

Two particular notes to close off for now.  Archeology was/is/will be a pastime tradeskill.  Every other tradeskill interacts with some other feature (fishing is actually a big deal again) but not this one.  There’s some pretty cool lore and you get some items for the garrison.  What’s a little bugger is the way the zones work.  As an Alliance, I had 3 digsites in Frostfire – which is a massive pain to get to the first time and there’s only 1 flight point for the entire zone.  Eh.  Nagrand has digsites in the level 100 zones, where enemies have about a million hit points and you dig under them.  Since archeology dig sites are manually placed (I mean literally, someone picked the exact spots) there was obviously some logic applied here.  Why a flavor skill would put you in a heavy combat zone is beyond me.  As a monk, I send my cat to distract the enemies while I dig, then run away like a coward.  Works great.

The second part is a note on the music.  I typically play games with the music and sound are near equal levels.  Sound is a cue for action and there’s a certain rhythm to it.  WoD is a bit different in that the music has been updated but none of the sound has.  The speeches given by characters are still at near full level but the sounds – mounting, combat, clicking – are all disabled, while the music is full blast.  And there’s different music all over the place, 4-5 tracks per zone at least.  The garrison has one for the keep alone.  I am incredibly impressed.

I hit 100 sometime over the weekend.  A week to clear “all” the content for leveling and I’ve upgraded my garrison to level 3.  When I completed Nagrand (which had a pretty neat cinematic) the final quest just dropped progress forward.  It was an odd feeling, sort of like hitting the finish line and then a lack of fireworks.  I was expecting some breadcrumbs to lead you to the other features.

The zones themselves are pretty well done.  Spires of Arak is my favorite zone as the lore is interesting.  Skettis has always piqued my interest and this zone does a super job explaining what happened to make them as they are.  Plus, there are next to no orcs in this zone.

The one I liked the least was Talador.  It was like a rehash of TBC and was more of an homage than actual progress.  Using a Shredder to attack hundreds of orcs wasn’t a whole lot of fun.  The garrison artillery skill was pretty cool though.  I went through Tuurem and didn’t notice til the end.  I spent the majority of my time in TBC within Terrokar, as it was the final point of leveling, was the central hub and had level 70 content as well.  I came out feeing “meh”.

Nagrand is an odd one.  There is a lot more vertical movement in this zone than I expected, in particular in the middle of the zone.  The elemental plateau was neat, as well as Oshu’gun.  That I took down the earth element lead in 10 seconds seemed pretty stupid to be honest but the story was solid.  The final quest taking on Garrosh was neat.  Also, the solo arena section was pretty cool, somewhat similar to the Brawling Guild.  The garrison buff that I took was a mount that I could use in combat, which is essentially a zone-wide speed boost.  Maybe there’s more content at 100, with what I hear about hunts.  Overall well done.

If I was to rank, favorite to least, it’d be something like this:

1. Spires of Arak
2. Shadowmoon Valley
3. Nagrand
4. Gorgrond
5. Talador

What to do at 100

Well the first thing is to keep the garrison going and the missions.  I am running short on resources to update the buildings I have and still have an empty slot.  But that makes sense if there’s a long game.  I have an odd issue with the gathering garrison nodes.  The way the game works with these items is that you no longer need mining or herbalism.  Skinning can only be done in-field, so that still has some use.  Fishing is the odd one out, since it’s used for cooking and alchemy.  I have so many herbs and ore, I don’t know what to do with them.

The daily quests in the garrison are broken outside of the dungeon runs.  I say this in that the progress is for each takes a while and heavily contested.  If there was open grouping it wouldn’t be so bad but the way it’s implemented now is very poor.

Treasure hunting is neat but only 1 time.  There’s some interesting acrobatics involved to find some of them.  Rare hunting is fun too, with some interesting rewards.  It’d be better if the rewards reset on a weekly basis though, would keep people in the zones a bit more.  I mean that the rewards themselves are neat but of such low ilevel, that once you hit 100 there’s not much point to go back.  Timeless Isle worked because of the meta game, you gained faction/currency for something else.  The zones need this – and not just Nagrand.

I’ve yet to run a dungeon.  The first few weeks of an expansion are all about tweaking the content.  I think I’ll wait another while before giving it a shot.

Overall Impressions

The leveling experience of WoW 2.0 is pretty good.  My Timeless Isle gear was replaced pretty quickly and my monk had a good power curve for the entire process.  I took my time, did all the quests I could and really enjoyed the scenery.  I appreciate the lack of flight, it makes the world seem busier.  The open world content works well, with rares everywhere, treasures to find and things to do.  If they can make that content repeatable, then it’s gold.  The plot/story is confusing at times but decently executed.  There’s a heavy saturation of Orcs but that’s expected.

I took the time to read all the quest text, which certainly stretched out my adventure.  I think the first time through it took about an hour for the intro quest up until I had a level 1 garrison.  I did it the other night with an alt in about 20 minutes, just to have the resources generate.  I can see how people got to 100 so quickly, and really, I sort of feel bad for them.  There’s a ton of good work and the data motivates your character.  I’m thinking the writers had a lot of Game of Thrones viewing because main characters just dropped dead in every zone.  Understanding why they did is kind of core to the game, no?

Garrisons are a neat feature that has a fair amount of potential for the “long game”. That said, this is the first expansion in a long time that is so alt-unfriendly because of the garrisons.  I realize this must be something that’s hard to balance in terms of power output.  The old MoP gardens were just resource farms, simple an just made gold.  WoD’s garrisons actually give you tangible power rewards and sharing that across a slew of alts (I have 5 that are 90+) would “break” certain parts of the game I guess.  The social aspect of garrisons is also lacking.

But I guess the final question/answer boils down to, is it fun?  And the answer there is yes, 90 to 100 is fun. Lots of fun.