The Daily Grind: Rep Priorities

Dailies - love them or hate them, they're an integral part of the Wow end-game these days. What I'm finding in Pandaria as opposed to previous expansions and content patches is that the sheer number of daily quests available is really quite overwhelming, especially for a casual player.

**Updated for patch 5.2, March 5**

I dinged 90 on Aoifen the other night, so it was time to ask the rather bewildering question - what next?

Goal setting

My goal is to heal heroics and eventually LFR raids on Aoifen. To do that I need a plan to upgrade my gear a little.

The first thing I did after dinging 90 was go to the AH and drop some gold on a set of Contender's Wyrmhide PvP gear to (hopefully) make me slightly less squishy while being ganked doing dailies. The joys of PvP realms, eh?

I'd like a few more pieces of healing kit before I go into heroics - the PvP gear is better than my quest greens but it has no spirit or haste and isn't really meant for PvE healing.

On average, I'm getting roughly 8 hours play time a week. Last night it took me two hours to complete my farming (on all toons), Tillers dailies and Golden Lotus dailies, and I only did the ones at the Golden Gate. So, what to do? The only thing I can do, as always for those with limited playtime, is to prioritise.

Let's take a look at the Pandarian factions to evaluate their reputation-based gear and other rewards.

If you'd like to know more about Resto gear or Balance gear, my full lists may help.

Justice Point Gear

Justice point gear no longer requires an honored reputation. Almost everything except the new Operation: Shieldwall and Dominance Offensive trinkets can be purchased from Quartermasters in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms and from Commander Lo Ping at Niuzao Temple:

• Pendant of Endless Inquisition - 1250 - Jaluu outside the front of Mogu'shan Palace
• Pressed Flower Cloak - 1250 - August Celestials Quartermasters in Shrine of Two Moons or Shrine of Seven Stars
• Vestment of the Ascendant Tribe - 2250 - August Celestials Quartermasters in Shrine of Two Moons or Shrine of Seven Stars
• Sudden Insight Bracers - 1250 - Klaxxi Quartermaster Ambersmith Zikk, Dread Wastes
• Wandering Friar's Gloves - 1750 - Jaluu outside the front of Mogu'shan Palace
• Brambleguard Leggings - 2250 - Rushi the Fox at Shado-Pan Garrison, Townlong Steppes
• Sorceror-King's Seal - 1250 - Rushi the Fox at Shado-Pan Garrison, Townlong Steppes
• Arcane Badge of the Shieldwall (A)/Dominator's Arcane Badge (H) - 1750 - from Operation: Shieldwall (Alliance) / Dominance Offensive (Horde)

Faction gear and other rewards

Golden Lotus
Need to get to Revered to unlock August Celestials and Shado-Pan dailies.
Honored: Leven's Circle of Hope
Revered: Whitepetal Shouldergarb, Mistfall Robes
Exalted: Riding Crane mounts

Klaxxi
Honored: Links of the Lucid
Revered: Klaxxi Lash of the Harbinger, Wind-Reaver Greaves
Exalted: Amber Spine of Klaxxi'vess, Reins of the Amber Scorpion (mount)

Shado-Pan
Honored: Sagewhisper's Wrap
Revered: Snowdrift Helm, Scroll of Revered Ancestors
Exalted: Shado-pan Riding Tiger mounts

August Celestials
Honored: Clever Ashyo's Wristbands
Revered: Boots of the High Adept, Ogo's Elder Gloves
Exalted: Reins of the Thundering August Cloud Serpent (mount)

Operation: Shieldwall (Alliance) / Dominance Offensive (Horde)
(new factions added in patch 5.1)
Honored: Band of the Shieldwall (Alliance)/Dominator's Band (Horde) or
Loop of the Shieldwall (Alliance)/Dominator's Loop (Horde)
Revered: Statue Summoner's Treads (Alliance)/Treads of Rejuvenating Mists (Horde)
Soothing Straps (Alliance)/Bambrick's Striking Strap (Horde)
Shock-Charger Medallion (Alliance)/Static-Caster's Medallion (Horde)
Heartwarmer Medallion (Alliance)/Cutstitcher Medallion (Horde)
Exalted: Grand Armored Gryphon/Grand Armored Wyvern mounts

Shado-Pan Assault **New in 5.2**
Neutral: Mender's Battletags
Friendly: Hearthfire Armwraps, Soothing Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault, Ring of the Shado-Pan Assault  or Signet of the Shado-Pan Assault
Honored: Dreamweaver Drape, Gloves of Enduring Renewal, Trousers of Waning Shadow
Revered: Raiment of Silent Stars , Martiean's Splitleaf Girdle
Exalted: Heartroot Shoulderguards

Tillers
Revered: The ability to grow consumables of all sorts on the farm, eg. Motes of Harmony, herbs, ore etc.
Exalted: Black Riding Goat mounts

Order of the Cloud Serpent
Exalted: Cloud Serpent mounts

Lorewalkers
Exalted: Flying Cloud mount

 

Priorities

So, what to work on first? Aoifen is already Honored with the Klaxxi and almost Honored with the Shado Pan through quest lines in Townlong and Dread Wastes. I don't think it's worth finishing the quest lines just for the rep, since I wouldn't be getting Valor Points at the same time. I may finish them for story purposes in any case!

I think it will be important to get Golden Lotus to Revered first, then see what needs upgrading from that point on. I'll probably only work on one set of dailies a session to keep my sanity a little. It's going to take me a while, but I'll get there.

Did you have a plan in mind for attacking dailies? Do you have any advice for a new 90?

Progress Post: Kingslayer

It's been a week now since we took down Mister Lich King for the first time (or as one of my guildies likes to call him, "Fat legs").

I am pretty sure that the absolute joy at getting this fight down wasn't just me - the previous week we had been struggling to get into the second phase, two of our long-standing guildies had left and things were looking uncertain. Then we called in an old guildy who had done the fight to help us out with our strategy. Suddenly, things clicked into place, and we were getting into the rhythm of the fight. This did wonders to boost our flagging morale, and the next  night of attempts, the King was slain.

Honestly, for those who are still working on normal - if you can get through the second phase with Val'kyrs and Defile worked out, you've got it covered.

Two of our guildies who were on breaks came back to us as well, so we're (hopefully) back to a full team.  Tonight sees us starting off on hard modes, with an immediate goal of getting LK down again to get titles for everyone. Wish us luck!

Personally, I was extremely satisfied with the way things turned out.  Killing the Lich King was my main goal for this expansion, as I got Leesah to level 80, chose a guild to join and helped to push through progression. Of course I'd love to give him a go on heroic as well, but that's not so important as completing the storyline, in my opinion. Now that goal is reached, everything else is a bonus!

I'd like to extend my congratulations to all the other guilds who have completed ICC in the last couple of weeks, either on Normal or Heroic!  For those still working at it, I wish you the very best of luck.

Then there was dancing:

Progress Post: Explorer

Time for an update.

Leesah, my Druid and my main, has been getting more chances to raid lately. We have been splitting our two raiding nights between pushing to use extended IDs to get some progression done, and running the "second" team (mostly made up of alts) in order to get a few more people geared up in case we need them for the main team, and to let more people have a go in guild runs.

With the 30% buff in place we took down Putricide for the first time, and the previous week to that got our first BQL kill as well so we're 10/12 with one solid night put in on Sindragosa.  Personally, I think we should just keep one raid ID locked to Sindy until we get her down, but being a casual guild means that the second gear-up run must get a go.  It's mildly frustrating but.. that's the way it works. Most people in the team are determined to get LK down before Cataclysm, but they are also committed to not leaving anyone who wants to raid out of the action. Unfortunately I'm not sure we're going to be able to have it both ways.

Aefa, my Mage and "main alt" has been benefiting from the extra badges gained through the alt runs in ICC, and has also been going along to some 25-man pugs. She has dreadful loot-luck, but is still having great fun pew-pewing as frost.

In her spare time, she has been exploring the nooks and crannies of Azeroth. I had done some of the exploring while doing the Flame Keeper run during the Midsummer Fire Festival, so it was just a matter of running around and clearing up the remaining zones. She enjoyed seeing the sights of the world and now has an amazing holiday snap collection - expect to see some of that soon!  But for now, she's back to the front lines in Northrend.

Balindah, my Shaman, is almost seasoned enough to be heading to Northrend herself. She has been delayed in Outland the last week or so trying to get her Mining and Jewelcrafting skills up to a respectable level before presenting herself to the Masters in Borean Tundra.

I'm finding that Enhancement is awesome for questing, but ye gods, melee is hard work in instances isn't it! At some stage I'll buy her a second spec and try her hand at healing.

In real life, I've been busy and unwell at the same time, so the blogging has suffered - I'm sorry about that.  There's just not that much to talk about except for the Cataclysm Beta, which I'm not involved in, and Starcraft 2 which I probably won't get because I'm rubbish at rts games!

BA Shared Topic: Burnout

The Blog Azeroth Shared Topic for last week was about dealing with pre-expansion burnout. I know this response is a little late, but better late than never, eh?

My guild is small and casual. Many of the 10-man core team have children, so we don't start raiding until 8pm server time so that bedtime can be properly taken care of. A few others in the team live in New Zealand, so we don't tend to raid past 10pm because that's midnight for the Kiwis. We raid ICC on Wednesdays and Mondays.

That's four hours of progression raiding a week. Time is against us, for sure.

For this reason, I don't feel bad that we haven't got to the Lich King yet. Each progressive raise in the Warsong buff has helped us get a little further in our allotted time limits, but even at 20% we are only 8/12. I haven't even seen the BQL or Sindy fights yet.

It's been a little frustrating for me coming from a larger guild on the EU server I was on, where we did progression raiding 3 nights a week, sometimes more. I considered looking for another guild, but I really like the laid-back culture of this group. I always have fun raiding with them, even if we don't get as far each night as I'd like.

Our main problem is that we're losing people, and we didn't have many to start with. Because we only get the first 6 or so bosses done each week, that's a LOT of the same content over and over again. People are starting to take breaks, to lose interest. If we can get everyone together and on time we do well, but if core people are missing we have to bring in other lesser geared and inexperienced guildies, or call the whole raid off.

For the last couple of weeks, the officers have decided to take a different approach - a progression break. The raids this week have been for people who don't normally raid with the core team, to help gear them up a bit so we can bring them in for our progression runs if we need people. The rest of the spots have been a chance for the core raiders to bring their alts along.

I healed on Leesah for one of the nights but the other times I took Aefa in for a look-see. Apart from the rep-ring I don't think I picked up any gear at all, but it was fun for a bit of a change. We had some people there who hadn't seen many of the fights, as well as tanks who needed to learn the tricks, so it was still a bit of a learning curve.  The first week we downed up to Festergut and Rotface and were all very proud of ourselves. This last week we had slightly lower dps overall, and while we got Saurfang down, we struggled with the two farting nasties and just went and cleared the rest of the trash instead.

This week coming, we are back to a progression week. It will be interesting to see how it goes. If we have a really good night with our top dps there we can get 7 bosses down in one 2-hour session - we've done that before.

The raiders that aren't on WoW-breaks agree that we'd all really like to get Arthas down before Cataclysm, and I don't doubt that we have the ability, with practise, but the stars are going to have to line up for us to get that far.  If it's the 30% buff that allows us to get there in a faster time so we can have a crack at it, so be it.

How about your guild? Have you downed Arthas? Are you losing raiders to burnout?

Progress Post for May

Time to catch up with what's been going on. Things have been so busy around here that I need to catch up with things myself!  Every now and then you just need to take stock and reprioritise, amiright?

Leesah
Leesah is my main raider, and although her original main spec was healer, my guild seems to be blessed with too many of them, so I've been going to ICC-10 raids as Moonkin. The only times I've been able to heal are random heroics and the odd 25-man ICC pug I've been to. 

 For this reason, and also due to some amazing loot-luck, Leesah's Moonkin gear is now substatially better than her Tree gear. This makes me slightly sad - I enjoy Moonkin, but deeps is what I have Aefa for, y'know? Leesah's a healer, and she misses healing. We just seem to have a lot of people with heal spec only. I'm not really whining to anyone I guess - at least I am getting to go to raids and I'm still enjoying them no matter what role I have.

Our raid progress is slowly... progressing. Because of our mixed timezones and busy members, we only get to raid for about 4-5 hours a week, and that's not a lot of time for progression.  We've recently got Blood Princes down for a second time and had a good few goes on Dreamwalker, but unless we get most of the core team in we rarely see past Saurfang on the first night. I know this frustrates a few of the other members as well but it's tough pre-xpac times and we have to take what we can get. 

Our officers have actually just announced a progression break for a couple of weeks so we can take a few non-core toons in to gear up a bit, to fill roles that we miss from week to week (tanks, mainly).

Aefa

Aefa is sitting at that difficult teenage level between getting all the Triumph gear she needs and being just under five thousand gearscore so no-one will take her to ICC pugs.  I've been trying to get into HoR and PoS to get those elusive drops, but no luck so far. I also tried to find a TotC run this weekend but no-one seemed to be doing any, and I don't know the place well enough to organise one myself. 

Aefa did manage to go to a VoA25 last week and ended up with the Sanctified legs (before Leesah had any Sanctified pieces, /facepalm), so that was a nice addition. The guild raiding progression break means that I might be able to take her along to guild runs though, so that will be a nice frost badge haul even if no gear drops.

Aefa's recently taken up studies into Arcane magic, although she doesn't like it as much as the Frost school - she may switch back again soon. The big numbers frighten her and she seems to die a lot more than before.  All the study means that she hasn't done much exploring lately, as much as she'd like to be out in the fresh air. In her spare time she has been helping the Netherwing dragons out a bit, which is why she's in Shadowmoon Valley in this shot.

Balindah
Balindah is just about to ding 50.  For me, as soon as a character hits Outlands I suddenly play them a lot more and they are more likely to reach level 80, so I'm pushing on with Balindah and hoping she can last the distance with her spikey heirloom shoulders. 

Hopefully soon she'll stop getting Sunken Temple as a random as well! I am enjoying trying out the melee side of things - it's been a while since I've played a melee character. I'm always shocked by just how little you can tell of what's going on when you have a face full of mobs, and targetting seems to be really tricky, but there's some things to work on!

She's finished up the quests in Ferelas and has since traveled to the Hinterlands, one of my favourites.

Angelya
I've retrenched Angelya from her banker duties and put her to work in Tirisfal. Armed to the teeth with priestly heirlooms, she'll hopefully blaze a trail of shadowy destruction across Azeroth.  

Either that or she'll just continue slacking in Undercity.

Aixa
Allow me to introduce my new banker, Aixa. She lives in Orgrimmar and is on hiatus from her career as a rogue, while she makes the team a few pennies.


If you're wondering about her outfit, she's wearing the Formal White Shirt, Haliscan Pantaloons, Soft Wool Vest (from troll/orc starting area quests) and Simple Linen Boots. I need to get a new belt for her actually. Any suggestions? :)

Gladiys
I also recently created a Death Knigget, because I rather enjoy hitting things with a big sword from time to time. It's excellent stress relief, I find.

Gladiys has barely made it to Hellfire Peninsula, where if I'm not careful she'll get more screen time than Balindah. Perhaps I will get a tank to level 80 one of these days after all...

Sadly I've been neglecting my SAN toons. No excuses, I just haven't remembered they're there, so I haven't played them. One of these days I'll get to them... Perhaps when the event for Gnomeregan starts.




So here's a question for you, readers. 
Have you become more of an altaholic now that End Times are upon us? I know I certainly have!