Heirlooms… the anti fun

Awhile ago I started a 2nd priest to level up (the reasons are explained in that post).  I kept leveling and did an update on it, but I didn’t make it much farther past that.  I got to level 30, got ready to take my screen shot, and I still looked the same.  That wasn’t the only downside though, I was face rolling everything.  Granted I knew my class far better than someone new to the game did but the heirloom gear put me REALLY far ahead of the game.

In fact, it was making the game less fun for me.  There was no challenge.

Flash Forward…

Lich King Thoughts & Leveling

I ding’d 80 about 6 days after the release of the expansion.  The leveling was relatively easy and very streamlined.  I was very happy with how it went and most of the quests were enjoyable.  A very notable one was in Grizzly Hills when you break a guy out of a village only to find out the village’s humans are actually worgen.  You hop on a horse w/him and he steers while you lob fire lamps and choose when to make the horse sprint.  Super fun to do.

The dungeons were definitely something different though.  I was suprised at how easy they were and wondered why it was so.  After checking around I realized I wasn’t the only person who thought this and Blizzard replied to the masses….I went looking for exactly what they said but I can’t find it.  Basically they said that if its easier then people will do it.  They are leveling dungeons and that’s what we want people to do them for.  They harkoned back to how most people just skipped TBC dungeons because of the difficulty.  IMO the difficulty wouldn’t have existed if tanks could have AE tanked like they do now.  *shrug*

EDIT:  I found the Blue post.

We wanted to make sure players actually ran the level-up dungeons and we wanted to make sure players didn’t hit the introductory raid content like a brick wall. Those are both good things, in our mind.

We certainly know how to design encounters that you can’t just AE tank and AE dps your way through. In the meantime, it’s nice that the instances are being seen by more than just a small percent of players.

I tried my holy leveling spec that I listed a few posts ago and it worked quite well.  Much better then I had expected and it still allowed me to heal a dungeon if I needed to.  The leveling wasn’t as fast as I wanted though as I was shooting for realm first so I switched to shadow around level 72.  Still being in mainly healer gear kept my spirit quite high and made spirit tap amazing.  I only had to drink if I was chain killing 3+ mobs at a time.  Vamp touch & SWP killed most mobs up until 75 when I had to start applying devouring plague or add a mind flay to the dmg on the mob.  This still wasn’t any issue on my mana pool adding these spells to the mix.  I found Dispersion to be quite lackluster.  You might need it in raiding but certainly don’t need it while leveling.

Speaking of endgame, I’ve already downed 10man Sartharion and cleared the spider wing in 10man Naxx.  I’m looking forward to doing these places on the 25man.  I’ve also been hitting the heroics HARD.  Some of them have been VERY hard, while others have been cake.

RE: Leveling Holy

Alrighty, the xpac came out and I was to busy to write back!  I couldn’t help it!

The spec was working fine, I killed shit and regen’d mana fast n’ shit like that.  Was super kewl, problem was I wasn’t killing fast enough.  I respec’d shadow while wearing my healing gear and found that I could totally unload on mobs and have almost no mana troubles.  ATM I’m still that way, I’m fixing to ding 78 and I’m just grinding mobs as a totally efficient way of leveling.  Vamp touch, SWP, and if they have more then 10k HP I do a mind blast.  Rinse and repeat.  Now I have to get back to leveling….

Leveling Holy

Wrath of the Lich King is less than two days away now.  Leveling has become a big wonderment on my mind.  I was thinking I’ll just switch to shadow and level up that way but I still wanted to be able to heal a group to do a 5man as I go up the ladder.  I figure it will be a lot easier to get a group if I’ma healer as most will spec out of that to grind faster.

The question is how to spec for efficient leveling while not gimping my healing?  The first couple of specs I tried went deep holy and deep disc, keeping the main healing talents (coh or penance) while trying to switch some of the healing strength talents (rapture, spiritual healing, etc.) for damage ones (searing light, imp. mana burn, etc.)  Then I got realistic.  The five man dungeons leveling up aren’t going to take any amazing feat of healing talents.  I decided to spec for LOLsmite.

30/28/3

The three into shadow is what really makes this spec.

Spirit Tap 3/3: Gives you a 100% chance to gain a 100% bonus to your Spirit after killing a target that yields experience or honor. For the duration, your mana will regenerate at a 50% rate while casting. Lasts 15 seconds.

At the moment my spirit is 598 spirit unbuffed, that makes it 1196 after killing a mob, that is some SIGNIFICANT mana regen.  I have also picked up divine spirit from the disc tree which will add additional spirit.  I don’t forsee having to drink much if at all while leveling up.

I have one last Black Temple raid tonight, full clear, before I get a chance to respec.  I really can’t wait to test drive this and see how it does.  I did something slightly similar in Beta on a friend of mines priest (who wasn’t as geared as mine /strut) and it was quite successful.  Will update tomorrow on how it goes!