After nearly eight years of covering World of Warcraft from the same old character, I’m taking next month’s Warlords of Draenor expansion as an opportunity to start fresh with a class I’ve never played before. Meet Prachok, the rapidly levelling Draenai Shaman.
My Mage, Rande, has served me well over the years. He started off undead. He switched to Alliance as a Worgen when the wolf-folk came into play. He gender-changed and became a female panda with the Mists of Pandaria expansion. He’s been through a lot. It’s time for him to rest.
Instead of getting Rande his last few levels to 90, I’m going to use the free level 90 upgrade offered with Warlords of Draenor pre-orders. All I need to do is get my new guy to level 60, use the upgrade, and bam — I have a set of cool armour, a free flying mount, some more gold to play with and my two primary crafting professions (plus First Aid) automatically maxed out.
I’ve never played a Shaman past level 20 or so in World of Warcraft. I’ve always figured the class was too complicated, what with all of the totems and the like. I’ve played some pretty complicated classes in the past — EverQuest‘s Bard, Anarchy Online‘s Bureaucrat — but that was when I had nothing but time. Now I need something much more streamlined and simple.
Luckily for me, the Shaman has changed greatly over the past few years. In fact, all of World of Warcraft’s characters have been pared down to the bare essentials. There is no skill training — you get skills at the predetermined level. They just appear on your bar. And there’s no real worrying about your class’ role. At level 10 you’re given three well-defined choices.
In Prachok’s case I went Elemental, because it seemed the most straightforward. I don’t want to worry about healing people (yet). I just want to hurt things in helpful ways. A quick search online showed overwhelming support for the spec for levelling up, so I went with it.
Not only are the various specs well-defined, there’s a cheat-sheet right in the interface. It tells me to do these things. I do them, and I seem to get by.
I’ve been levelling pretty quickly. In a little under a day — much of that spent dicking around — I’m already at level 38, thanks to the game’s handy Dungeon Finder.
I started levelling up by questing, doing the normal grind, but once I hit level 15 or so I started doing random dungeons and haven’t looked back. With a ripe queue I can level up twice in an hour. It’s kind of ridiculous, really.
But I’m having a good time. With the game’s Hallow’s End Halloween event in full swing, there’s plenty of side quests to distract me from levelling.
Plus I rolled my character on the role-playing realm of Moon Guard, home of the filthiest town in all of Azeroth, Goldshire, home of horrible people looking for passable role-playing sex. Sometimes I just sit there watching the chat roll by, cringing fiercely.
I’m mostly staying on task, and I should reach level 60 far in advance of Warlords of Draenor‘s November 13 release date. Well, if I can stop getting distracted by pet battles.
Are you getting ready for the expansion, or is World of Warcraft a cold, dead thing to you? Let us know in the comments.
Comments
19 responses to “How I’m Preparing For WoW’s Warlords Of Draenor Expansion”
Rerolled dwarf mage on Frostmourne for this expac. Much excite.
Also lol @ how broken the economy is on low level mats – I’m only level 41 and already have 2k gold from just picking up cloth/herbs/ore as I quest.
this is due to them allowing mining and skinning(and I think herbing) to be leveled from 1-600 just in pandaria so people are no longer farming low level mats to level up professions.
Started playing again last night after being gone since a month or 2 after MoP. Lasted till a few hours ago. Just the same old and while the new character models look nice they also look out of place next to all the 10yr old models of near everything else. Glad some people are still enjoying it but damn the game needs something new.
Yeah me too… They got my 15 and started a new Orc… But Durotar yeeesh…
Exiles Refuge is A newly formed Frostmourne Guild run by 10 year veteran raiders. We are currently recruiting for WoD Heroic & Mythic raiding, currently looking for:
* Leather DPS (Rogue / cat Druid / WW Monk)
* Healer with Offspec DPS (pref resto Shaman)
Pst in game (Battle Tag) Rethilgore#6790 for more info.
Nobody cares ^_^
It’s relevant to the article and you cared enough to reply \^.^/ have a great day.
It’s not reaaally relevant..
Like, I just read an article about a glow in the dark toilet.. It would be irrelevant for me to post about my mornings stool consistency.
Ofcourse, you already know this, you just clearly think that spam is an effective way to recruit quality people.
its relevant to the audience of the article
there are a lot of people getting back into wow for the expansion and I’m sure there is at least a few who are both looking for a guild and read kotaku.
And a trillion more pertinent ways to find one. Especially considering there’s about a bajillion of them around.
This is simply one avenue to reach out to people who may be interested. It seems you are not one of those people and that’s OK 🙂
In an Article about preparing for Warlords of Draenor. Which will by pure happenstance have readers returning to warlords of Draenor this is simply reaching out to the target audience.
Also when 1 friendly message becomes spam ill be sure to reach out and let you know 🙂
Enjoy your evening 🙂
well I’ve started to level a hunter but I’m gonna use the free boost I get on a priest
but other than that im using the time now to do transmog runs of dungeons ad old raids since there isn’t much point gearing up.
nice 🙂 try and get ur priest to 60 and pick up 2 professions tho (shouldn’t take long) and you get a free profession boost with it.
yeah but I really dont enjoy leveling as a priest that’s the hard thing for me, one of the reasons I want to boost it, might give it a try though, if I can get to 15 I can just heal my way through dungeons to 60 maybe….
Yeah you can burn through classics to 60 in less than a few hours. then just pick up profs and you can forget about it haha 🙂
I would recommend disc if you wanna try heal. It’s a pretty easy spec for newer players of the class.
If you plan on being DPS when you boost it just make sure to change your spec to shadow beforehand so you get spec appropriate gear set 🙂
mm probably gonna heal, I dont like playing as dps, I prefer the important roles of tanking and healing, but cheers for the heads up, didn’t realize the gear you got was based on spec.
disc seems like a lot of fun, my most recent memory of that was playing with a few mates in low level bgs one hitting people with Penance.
you merely have to get your character to level 15 and train yourself in 2 professions, choose your spec and then apply the boost. you will have 2 fully trained proffs, a (pretty average) set of gear based on the spec you choose, and full invetory/flight training with as bit of gold to train your proff skills 🙂
as a person who’s played disc for 4-5 years now, it’s great fun, but you may find holy much better in WoD, shielding and the utility from smite dps are being reduced quite significantly, so disc will probably need a few buffs before it becomes useful/strong again.
best of luck with your priest! (and try shadow in BGs, it’s really fun ^_^)
I’m preparing by attempting to not be interested. Don’t want to get sucked back in.
Played from Vanilla – MoP.. Don’t want to go back.
Sorta, I should probably go get my free heirloom daggers from Garrosh when I get the chance with the Horde guild I am in.
But saying that, I went back to WoW recently after taking most of the Mists expansion off because, well I got to 90 on my Alliance rogue & Druid, I PVP’d for a bit, got sick of it and left it there, which was December 2012. Came back about 4 or 5 months ago, ended up back in the PVP grind with a few mates, got to arena as well which was nice, leveled my mage & death knight to 90. Then decided to jump to horde for a while, now I have a 90 horde rogue, planning on boosting my hunter I have on the same server, when I bother to pre-order WoD.
I played a shaman main for part of BC, I then made a new shaman in mists. Shamans are boring as anything now. No more totem twisting and windfury sucks. I miss when enhance shamans were cool. Elemental was the only bearable spec last I played.