Wednesday, November 12, 2014

The Countdown to Draenor

It is, as of my writing this sentence, less than 24 hours until the release of Warlords of Draenor (though it'll come even earlier if you're in Europe.) Having wrapped up Mists of Pandaria (and then some,) we're now heading out into WoW's fifth expansion, finally hitting triple digits in level and celebrating a decade of World of Warcraft.

What to do to prepare?

First off - if you want it and haven't done it yet, tomorrow will be the last chance to get your Garrosh heirlooms. While they might technically still drop off of Gary (I don't know for certain,) it will be significantly harder to find a group willing to go back and run that raid that was around for 14 months when there's a whole new world to explore.

But if you have yours already or if you're fine just picking up new weapons as you level (that's the camp I'm in,) there's still some stuff you can do to get ready.

First, I'd recommend doing a thorough inventory purge. Make sure you learn all your newly-classified "Toy" items and chuck out any redundant copies. Get that reagent tab in the bank and hit the beautiful "deposit all reagents" button.

If there are any side grade pieces you've been holding onto just in case you decide you'd rather have a bit more crit and a bit less haste, now's the time to hawk them for some gold. Take anything you're interested in transmogging but holding on to for similar reasons and put that in void storage (if you haven't filled the second tab yet.) Rings, trinkets, and necklaces are useless for transmog, so unless you intend to use them while leveling, hawk them to the nearest vendor.

Even with all the items classified as toys, there are still a ton of items that you'll want to stow or get rid of. The ones I recommend discarding are things like the buff-items from the Timeless Isle, any consumables that are "only usable in Pandaria" - really anything you really don't think you'll have a use for.

One thing you won't have to do is park people near their profession trainers. This time around, you'll pretty naturally get your training from easy sources. For any Gathering professions (including Fishing and Archaeology,) you'll simply get a scroll when you first gather the corresponding thing in Draenor that will raise the maximum on your skill at 700, effectively giving you Draenor Master in that skill (regardless of your current skill level,) though you'll still have to actually level the profession, of course. First Aid and Cooking scrolls will drop off of random mobs out in the world, and any production professions you have will be slightly more complex, with a quest item dropping off of a major mob in the first quest chain you get after you've established you garrison (the quest will also give you the blueprint for the corresponding profession's building.) If you plan on leveling up entirely through dungeons or something, you can buy the profession scrolls off of NPCs in Ashran, but there's not really any disadvantage to waiting for the quest, since as long as you have maybe an hour and a half (maybe more, given the rush of players out of the gate,) you'll be able to get that quest (how long it takes you to complete it depends somewhat on the profession, though they're all relatively simple ones.)

It's not a bad idea to make sure you have a decent number of Tomes of the Clear Mind - you never know when that Glyph/Talent build you have is better for raiding than soloing.

Also: Gold. Now is not the time to splurge on any big things at the auction house. You're going to need a fair amount of gold to get your garrison up and running (hopefully they've nerfed gold costs since I was playing in the Beta, because I don't know how boosted characters would be able to deal with it otherwise.) Aside from doing a bunch of daily quests, I've found that running Wrath raids is also quite lucrative. Cataclysm raids are still slow-going enough and tricky on squishier classes that it'll be a bit of a slog, but Wrath raids now are soloable by pretty much anyone, but are high enough level that the gear rewards are worth a lot to vendor. (Expect this to get nerfed barring some intentional gold inflation.)

Come back home: I don't know how exactly the breadcrumb quests will work - I assume there will be a city-wide quest as they've done for Cataclysm and Mists. Parking somewhere near the portals to Blasted Lands is not a bad idea either, given that you'll be heading through the Dark Portal to get to Draenor.

Get psyched: New expansion, guys! New zones, dungeons, raids! Also, some of the 90-100 perks are really cool. It's really close now.

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