My Panda Monk has finished with Azeroth for at least 2 expansion. I have levelled to 58 with a full compliment of professions, in an attempt to prove or dispel the levelling issues that are believed to exist in the game now that the levelling speed is supersonic.
My chosen professions are:
- Mining
- Herbalism
- First Aid
- Fishing
- Archaeology
- Cooking
The zones I quested in to reach level 58 were:
- Pandaland Starter Zone
- Elwynn Forest
- Dun Morogh
- Loch Modan
- Wetlands
- Arathi Highlands
- The Hinterlands
- Western Plaguelands
- Eastern Plaguelands
- Badlands
- Swamp of Sorrows
- Blasted Lands
After hitting level 58 my professions looked like this:
- Mining - 256
- Herbalism - 360
- First Aid - 319
- Fishing - 145
- Archaeology - 283
- Cooking - 244
The requirement for mining Fel Iron Ore in the Outlands is 275, so in terms of hitting the mark it fell slightly under. The Blasted Lands was too busy for levelling on Thorium ore. I was able to quickly level this by flying to Ungoro Crater and riding round the outer rim which is the shape of a bowl with mountains all the way round. The zone was predominately Thorium which has changed from vanilla when Mithril was the dominant ore. Smelting of Thorium also produced the occasional skillup.
Herbalism
Herbing is the biggest winner from this little exercise which means I am almost 10 levels above were people started the original TBC expansion. Blasted Lands and the Outlands share a number of herbs due to the cross-pollination through the Dark Portal.
First Aid
An abundant amount of cloth at all levels made levelling relatively comfortable. The big win was the number of Humanoid mobs in the Blasted Lands, which dropped a bountiful supply of Runecloth. There was no real bottleneck and the process was fairly natural. This of course would not be possible if you levelled Tailoring at the same time.
Fishing
Naturally the biggest loser in terms of progression was Fishing, I levelled to 100 which I believe is the minimum requirement for fishing from pools. I did a few dailies to up the level and fished in a number of Greater Sagefish pools in the Eastern Plaguelands.
Archaeology
283 fell slightly short of the requirement for being able to view Outlands digsites. I visited 3 additional digsites due to Dwarf and Troll both deciding to offer only Rare items and I need 100 fragments. In the end I was well over the requirement at 317, with 4 digsites available in Hellfire Peninsula it should be relatively easy to reach 375 in 10 levels.
Cooking
Probably the biggest disappointment is cooking which suffered severely with recipes being in the hands of Vendors and not Trainers. I choose not to deliberately seek out vendors with the exception of the Quest Recipe vendor in Stormwind. Early on Cooking was not a problem but there was a real problem around 200 when I was probably killing more humanoids than beasts, which is why Cloth was not a problem and food was.
I visited the vendor in Booty Bay who sold 6-8 Fish recipes, so in order to get over this hurdle I will need to fish for Spotted Yellowtail before I can train the recipe requiring Bear Flank which I have a few stacks of.
With a few minor detours I could have levelled to 300 and increased my fishing in the process, but for a new player this would be a real problem, and in my opinion the vendor recipes should be given to the Trainers instead of being issued all over Azeroth.
Summary
Whilst not being a million miles away from the objective of hitting 300 on all skills, I did choose the easiest professions with the exception of Skinning.
I think it would have been impossible to level Blacksmithing, Tailoring, Enchanting, Engineering and Jewelcrafting on the resources available.
Leatherworking with Skinning would have been ok and Herbalism and Inscription or Alchemy would have been acceptable choices.
Ultimately there are consequences to levelling at supersonic speeds. One is never completing a zone and the other is professions lagging behind. If I had done some instances en route I hate to think how disjointed the process would have been.
You took the route of the informed. Starting by the dwarf/gnome starting areas was how I caught herbalism up. Start near SW and you are screwed. Once you get deeper in you will have less problems unless you want thorium and look to ungoro for it which is a bot heaven.
ReplyDeleteYou must have gotten lucky with cloth, but then again, you must have killed things. lol I was playing catch up with herbing and mining that I had no cloth what so ever.
As a note, unless they changed it, you can fish 100% catch rate from pools from skill level 1.
There are also other factors as someone on my server that play at night is telling me he has no problems what so ever but during the day he can't find anything. So he just does not quest during the day any more. Too many people on.
If you want to level in the CRZ world you need to do it on off hours. Once I started leveling my panda at different hours I was able to catch up on herbalism and mining and actually did my first quests, ever, since level 20, this weekend now that I am 50.
I leveled 30 level just my herbing and mining to catch up. You believe that crap? Each time I would catch up to a zone I out leveled that zones quests.
It does not balance out until around level 50, then life gets better. As long as you do not need the rare ores in BC. If so you better have VERY deep wallets, that adimantite (spelling) goes for roughly 100 per ore on my server.
The old world is just screwed, completely.
Lets not even get into the fact of places like the burning steeps. The ore there is gray and gives no skill ups, but the mobs you kill, are higher than your mining level to mine? Make sense? The ore there is gray, yet herbalism of the same level is still 75 away from picking the herbs there.
There is no rhyme or reason to their design.
I agree entirely that it is all screwed up, and if you tip the balance in one place it will break in another.
ReplyDeleteMining is absolutely terrible to level even on a quiet CRZ, until I hit Blasted Lands.
Blizzard has made the professions a joke to level properly and a large part of that is down to CRZ, and the weird thing is, that the zones have more people in them than most of the Capital cities.
The Horde could drop a mana bomb on Ironforge and nobody would notice for a week.
I will give an update in a couple of days time when I have finished with the Outalnds.