1-20 over the weekend.

This past thursday i had an inclination to stop doing heroic badge runs or queueing up for northrend dungeons in general. So that meant no 74 DK (who's just been irritated at the AH lately, especially the gem market), no 77 lock topping meters, no 80 resto drood, tank drood, dps DK or tank pala to collect more triumph badges. nope. i decided to go through the lower levels of eversong and ghostlands, again. i dug through my storage drive (i think its drive E) and found joana's belf guide. i didnt follow it too closely until i hit ghostlands, but it did streamline my quests. anyway, one of my bank alts is a paladin whose days consisted of opening mail, sending out mail, and putting junk on the AH. He was my misc and junk alt. as opposed to my level 1 rogue who handles stacks of cloth, ore and outland/northrend gear that i cant seem to sell off on the AH. anyway, this pala-junk-bank-alt sent most of his items to a new alt, or sold enough of his junk to free up abotu 60 bagspaces and off he went to quest.

right around level 10, i stopped and decided to level up a profession. enchanting. no worries. there's about 50 mails waiting in his mailbox full of low level JC rings and necklaces. he also found a few items on the AH to DE, all for about 1 gold each. but it was well worth the gold, as it became mats for enchanting. i got him from 1 to 125 enchanting skill all by re-enchanting a bracer about 60 times. the first 75 skill points came from disenchanting. which is nice.

after i realized that i couldnt skill up past 160 enchanting without hitting level 20, i decided to continue leveling. i enchanted my boots, cape, chest and weapon, then ran out and finished half of the quests in eversong to finally reach ghostlands. This is where i busted out the leveling guide and simply followed the questing guide. i also remembered from my first pala, that there's a resurrection quest at 10 or 12, and i'll get my blood knight tabard and spear at level 20. so keeping that in mind, those are the only things i needed to do that's different from the quest guide.

one quest that the guide had me skip, but i decided to do anyway, was to get supplies from silvermoon city. This was a delivery and delivery quest where i had to take a taxi to the city and deliver a bill of lading. then return (by taxi) with another package to tranquillien to finish the quest. me in my hurried, vision-blurred state, decided that, after dropping off the bill, training, equipping new equipment and checking the AH for possible gear, decided to hearth to tranquillien. now for the next part of my quest, i had to talk to the dragonhawk master outside of SMC. instead, i thought i could just return to tranquillien and turn in the quest there. yea... so i had to hang on to my quest for another two levels because i did not want to return to the city again. stupid quest. i know it is designed to help a beginner understand that they can use a taxi. but making them use it again to return? in a way saying, "i know you were ignorant about taking a taxi, so here it is. oh and you can use it to go back if you want, here's a quest that kinda forces you to visit the taxi masters, even if your best bet is to hearth."

other than that complaint, i basically went through levels 10-20 in a few hours of play (with a few breaks lasting several hours, thanks to the girlfriend wanting to go out, etc). but she does keep me sane and balanced, otherwise i would be playing non-stop. so upon turning in the troll's head, i dinged 20. it felt like a long ride, but it wasnt. actually, it felt a lot faster than when i last leveled in ghostlands. this was mainly because the last character that hit ghostlands was my warlock. or was it my mage? either way, it was one of my squishies that got entangled in the quest to save ghostlands from the plague. my mage is a forsaken, so you can see how well she would have fit into that scene in ghostlands, where there's a mix of forsaken and bloodelves out to save the zone from what was left over of arthas' march through silvermoon (you can play this in the Sylvanas Windrunner campaign of Warcraft 3 after Arthas kills his father. he marches north through elven lands, through the city, and all the way to the sunwell in order to rez kel'thazud and summon archimond. as i can gather here, the scourge consisted of all undead "life" including any human, elves, or whatever else. So it is not far-fetched, actually, to see that the forsaken should have some elvish traits. my undead mage should feel right at home in ghostlands, and she did. i should make a background for her which included highelf ancestry, helped sylvanas defend against the scourge and died fighting, only to be returned as scourge. then, freed from arthas only after sylvanas broke free from arthas' control. something like that. yea that would rock.

so anyway, back to my leveling. i found the guide to be an excellent way to plan my routes. in picking up the quests, i only know enough to do what i have to do now. but i dont know what i will pick up later, or even where the followups will lead me. so with the guild, i was able to pick out all the quests i needed, then run a circuit through an area and return to turn them all in. the pick some more quests and run through another circuit of the map, completing every quest i picked up, plus some that are picked up along the way. guides do rock, but if you're going through a certain area for the first time, you might want to skip the guide and actually learn the story. i leveled up two tauren druids and, although the 1-20 path was not as quick as my belf, it was a great experience learning tauren lore and culture. this is true for my orc, gnome/hunter, human, and night elf as well. tho, my alliance characters have long since been retired.

Also, i did try using the dungeon finder twice. once at level 15, where i was sent to ragefire chasm, which took about 15 minutes to complete, and wailing caverns at level 17, which took about 45 minutes to complete. i was lucky to have been with decent groups, and so we breezed through the content pretty quickly. i've never actually done any of those instances with a group. but by the pace of it, it seemed pretty easy. i guess it was tuned down several patches ago. i did remember that happening, and where the outcry was due to "shadowfang" having essentially a zero chance at dropping after that. going through wailing caverns reminded me of my human mage, who spent several days there at level 35 learning how to best use his tricks. also, he needed to enter it to fish deviate fish since someone said they were good money makers. bleh. gold per hour on those things suck. it also reminded me of the many times i've ran people through it, pulling half of the instance, then aoe-ing them down, with swipe that attacked 3 people at a time. remember that? i learned where to jump to buy me time to heal up before the acutal aoe fest. nowadays, i cant do that anymore because the mobs were given some kind of anchor point somewhere. i jump, they reset, game sucks. anyway.....

my third dungeon didnt count. i zoned into VC and Smite as just about to die. i didnt even want to roll on the sword that dropped because it felt cheap to do so having not even contributed to the kill. we wiped twice on the way up to VC. i helped the tank figure out that there's a quest for defensive stance. also showed them how to jump on the wheel of the ship to reset aggro should anything go wrong. we ended up killing the last three bosses and then zoning out.

so there you have it. a weekend filled with no emblem runs. nope. not one. it was a nice change of pace and a good way of learning how to play a paladin again. actually, since they changed the mechanics (you know that 3.0 patch thing where the fighting style changed), i am just sticking to seal of righteousness, judging, then auto-attacking. it was a little more involved before, and a little confusing at first. today's pala's are a lot easier to play.

post-20, i am thinking of getting SoComm, putting on a 1hander and a shield, and seeing if i can do multi-mob killing as ret. so far, i can handle two mobs without a shield. but when there's a third mob hitting me, i die pretty easy. i do not mind trading killing speed for survivability, but i am not sure if 1h+shield will make it annoyingly slow killing speed (to the point where killing one mob at a time is faster). hopefully, with Seal of Command, killing speed will be quicker than Seal of Righteousness. i'll experiment.