Deathknight Death Grip

There is nothing more "unfun" to me than running back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, just trying to get in to a dungeon. Dungeon runs are generally fast experience in comparison to straight mob grinding and sometimes even better experience than questing - but only if you can get into the instance.

Deathknight Gets Some Love

During the PUGging downtime, I still ran a few PUG groups, but tried to keep all of the runs before 2 PM, since that was when the instance servers started giving significant queuing problems. Evenings were near impossible so I didn't even try.

It was at this point that my Deathknight got some leveling love for the first time in months. She had languished at level 62 for months and months, and then suddenly over the span of a couple of days had zipped up to level 65 or 66 while I burned off the full amount of rest bonus she had, grinding through Outland quests.

Of course, the fact that Patch 3.2 also lowered the level requirement for obtaining a flying mount was helpful - with my Deathknight being just one of a well-established family of toons on the realm, she was easily supplied with the ~800g it took to train and upgrade to a flyer, and from there, zipping around in Outland doing quests was OH SO MUCH easier.

It was during this time that I found a real love for my Deathknight. I actually started enjoying questing and killing and pushing myself right to the very edge of my health with almost every pull. I started to properly get used to my Deathknight skills when dealing with both casters and melee.

Dual Spec: Unholy Tank, Blood DPS

The majority of my toons that are 50+ have dual spec already, and I stand strongly by its value to my hybrid leveling characters. Even if I don't have any gear differences between the different specs yet, I find it valuable to be able to swap out between a DPS-focused spec and one that was more focused on mitigation than damage.

I've selected pretty much pure Blood as my Deathknight DPS spec, and a mix of Blood, Frost and Unholy for my Tanking spec (Unholy having the most points). The Blood spec has gotten more practice, that's for sure.

Sure, I've tanked 10-15 dungeon runs from as far back as Blackfathom Deeps on the Paladin that is leveled up to 55 now, but in terms of real tanking experience, I'm pretty new to it.

Why Starting Tanking In Northrend Is A Bad Thing

If this were my first character through the game and I had limited experience with dungeon and raid groups, taking this long to get into tanking would probably be a pretty bad thing.

My gear would reflect the lack of experience, my ability to hold aggro on multiple targets would be weak, and I wouldn't know what a bad idea it is to turn your back on instance mobs in order to try to run after one that got away.

So, if you're new to the game and new to instances, strongly consider going in as DPS instead of either Heals or Tanking, because if you screw up then the rest of the group isn't scrambling to make up for it quite so much.

Why Starting Tanking in Northrend Is A Good Thing

For someone like me who has hundreds if not a thousand dungeon runs under my WoWbelt and who has been raiding 2-3 times a week with solid teams for 2 years, waiting until the current expansion content to tank an instance isn't such a big deal.

In fact, I'm more familiar with the Northrend instances now than I am with the Outland ones, even though I ran all the Outland instances on three level 70s many, many times.

The reason I'm more familiar with the Northrend instances now is simply that those have been the instances I've been in the most LATELY.

So, starting tanking there is a good thing, because I'm already freshly familiar with the dynamics of the instance, and also, I've got my Resto Shammy at 72 that is still healing the very same instances. If I have troubles with tanking an instance, I can hop over and heal the same instance and use that perspective to improve my tanking strategies.

Blacksmith Hooks Me Up With A Tanking Set

Deathknight and the Lich King

When I was 69, I started to look ahead towards Northrend gear upgrades to replace my Outland and even DK starting area gear, but found that there really wasn't much in the Auction House.

I turned to a friend who was a Blacksmith and was very pleased to find that there's an excellent tanking set made purely of Cobalt Bars that can be crafted and worn all at level 70!

So my friend crafted out eight pieces of gear for me, and shipped them back along with the extra Cobalt Bars that were left over. I then took the bits of gear and applied various Stamina enchants and Armor Kits to all of them, and now I'm all ready to go!

Once I level up from 69 to 70, that is!

Stay tuned for some newbie tanking adventures at WoWGrrl.com :)

Related posts:

1. Deathknight Level 70 Tanking Gear Set
2. Forms of Travel Around Northrend
3. Tanking Practice in Hellfire Ramparts

AOE Questing

My Frost Mage was my Raiding Guild raider in Burning Crusade, whereas my Holy Priest was only a PUG raider, and my Hunter really only did heroics. But when it came time for deciding on what my Raiding Guild toon would be for WoTLK, a number of things came together to let me know it was time to release the Mage and embrace the Priest.

The Mage is now just a muck-around toon for me - he's not advancing very quickly, but has recently, at 75, achieved the status of Exalted with the Kalu'ak, so he too, now, has the fancy-ass Mastercraft fishing pole like my Priest and Hunter do as well.

Frost Mage Spec Is Awesome In Northrend!

Before WoTLK came out, I struggled with one thing with my Frost Mage spec - the fact that I couldn't have a good AOE spec while at the same time having a good Raid spec.

Even when the talent trees were changed in 3.0.2 just before the second expansion came out, I didn't have enough points to have a semi-decent AoE spec while at the same time doing decent raid damage.

Leveling up a few times in Northrend sure fixed that problem! It's great! Now I have my base 70s raid spec but I have extra points to play around with for AOE while I level, and since I'm not yet to a raiding level, I don't have to worry about perfecting my spec yet.

Learning The AoE Farming Skill

I started practicing the AoE farming technique in Frost Spec around level 42, when I was in the Pirate's area on the shores of Tanaris.

I watched a level 42 Frost Mage and his Pally buddy gather up 8 Pirates at once, and while the Pally tried desperately to hold the targets in his Concecrate, the Mage did his AoE farming thing (blinking, blizzarding, frost nova'ing, cone of cold'ing, not in that order) and in no time flat those 8 Pirates, some 2-3 levels higher than the Mage, were dead.

Mage AoE Strategy: Iceblock

Then I got a whisper from the Mage: "Why r u not aoe farming them?"

My initial response: "Cuz, uh, I'd never thought about it..."

My next response was to finish our quest while I opened a browser window to look up this particular player's spec.

After our quest was done, I ported to a city and respec'd, using this guy's spec as a model, and then I headed back to Tanaris.

Practicing Mage AoE Skills

As it turned out, Tanaris with those Pirates was a little bit too much for me with my beginner AoE skills. At the time, I didn't even know ANYTHING about the technique at all, other than what I had watched, and obviously with the quick deaths I was experiencing, I was missing something key.

(feel free to check out a quick 54 second clip of me AOE farming the Rhino's in Borean Tundra through my Facebook Fan page)

After three quick deaths on three different attempts, I backed off and decided to take my practice to somewhere a little more reasonable.

Outside of Grom'Gol Base Camp is a great place, with the Raptor families hung out together in close proximity.

In Dustwallow Marsh there was a great place to practice, too, with more Raptors that were lower in level than the Pirates in Tanaris, but higher level than the Raptors outside of Grom'Gol.

How AoE Skills Help Now

Blue The Rhino Killer

For example, I refuse to purchase Rhino Meat for when the Dalaran Daily Cooking Quest is "Mustard Dogs!", despite the fact that I complete the quest on four different toons whenever that particular one comes up.

What I do instead is practice my Mage AoE skills by venturing to a well-populated area of the game (in terms of Rhino's), and mowing down everything in sight for about a half an hour. I end up with more than enough Rhino meat for weeks to come.

The only thing that would make it better was if my Mage or a friend of mine who could join me were a Skinner, and could benefit from the tons of dead Rhino's I leave in my wake as I keep my AoE skills up.

But ah well, can't have everything I suppose... :)

Related posts:

1. Practicing the Frost Mage AOE Grinding Strategy
2. Back With The Pirates Again – Frost AOE Grinding
3. Yay For Mustard Dogs!

One of the things that is unique about Northrend is that there are many more forms of travel available to a player than there used to be - while Outland had some flying/touring quests that put us on some neat flyers from which to see what it wanted us to see, and there have always been regular flight paths from place to place, Northrend takes it another step further.

In Northrend, there are Ferries and Lifts of various sorts, designed to make certain parts of your travel easier or quicker, or in some cases, just to let you enjoy the scenery in a more relaxed way than when you're actually "driving" your own character.

Turtle Ferry In Dragonblight - "The Half Shell"

The Half Shell - Parked Turtle Ferry in Dragonblight

The roaming Turtle Ferries are named Green Island and The Water Walker, and they roam from Howling Fjord on one end to Borean Tundra on the other.

My first contact with it was when I was roaming around Moa'ki Harbour, doing one of the Kalu'ak dailies. I had to laugh and take a picture when I realized it was, indeed, a big-ass tortoise chasing a dangling CARROT of all things.

The boat, however, is as slow as a ... tortoise, so if you're looking to take a ride, do it for the scenery, not for the quickness of travel. It's a great way to get from one Northrend starting zone to another once you've finished the first, however!

Ancient Lift In Howling Fjord

Riding The Ancient Lift in Howling Fjord

Players on the Ancient Lift are free-roaming, which is good at some points in your quests around there where you need to get to the top of a bluff but cannot climb the bluff from the ground. Hop on the Ancient Lift and hop off at the right time and you're all set!

The Very Coolest New Transportation In Northrend

Not getting into the player-built mounts which are a whole different topic, and staying on the topic of in-game transportation from one place to another which allows appreciation of the game scenery since one is not "driving" the transport...

The one new type of transportation introduced in Northrend that I think is the very coolest is one you can only see by dying in certain places.

Dying in Icecrown will create this effect, which means returning to Halls of Stone or Halls of Lightning in Ulduar after a party wipe is a grand place to see this effect...

Ghost Gryphon in Icecrown

Related posts:

1. Getting the Deathknight Ready for Northrend Tanking
2. Battling Your Inner Turmoil
3. Northrend Alchemy Discoveries

When I got to the counter to buy, the cashier asked me the same question twice (about their special in-store card, about which I always respond "no thanks") and then corrected herself on the second time, saying that some of her co-workers had called in sick that day and they were going to be short-handed.

I asked her if her co-worker played World of Warcraft, but she didn't know. Obviously she's not a player herself, or she would have caught my reference ... sick on the day of the Xpac release...

My First Views of Northrend

By the time I got on with the expansion at about 10:45 AM, there was already a level 60 Death Knight in my main's raiding guild. Nobody had hit level 72 yet (in our guild), but considering it's 1.5 MILLION experience points to get to 71, that wasn't superbly surprising.

I hadn't been in the beta myself, and hadn't watched any kinds of videos, so I didn't have a clue about where anything was, except for the Zeppelin towers that had been introduced before the xpac released. I chose to enter Northrend for the first time via the Zeppelin outside of Undercity.

Before the flying boat left dock, however, I saw a familiar call-out on the LookingForGroup channel (which I'm always subscribed to by using the addon AlwaysLFG) - LF1M (looking for 1 member), healer for Nexus and g2g (good to go). I whispered right away, saying how I was just entering Northrend for the first time and had no clue where I was going, but I was a well-geared healer ready to rock the new dungeons.

So it turned out that I landed in Northrend and was able to grab the flight path, and then the summon came in for one of the first new instances... and that summon took me to the other side of the map, closer to where the Orgrimmar Zeppelin would have landed me.

The Nexus - Utgarde Keep - The Nexus

My first dungeon run was with a PUG, because guildies were already involved in everything they were doing when I logged in. Shortly after I started my PUG, five guildmates completed Utgarde Keep and got the achievement for it.

The second and third runs I did were part PUG, part guildie - 2 DPS and myself as a healer from our guild picked up a DPS Warrior and a Warrior to tank for us, and we headed into Utgarde Keep and then stayed all together for the time it took us to get our butts over to The Nexus for a second run with the same solid group.

The dungeons themselves were easy for us, as expected... considering I'm wearing 2 pieces of Tier 6 gear and my guildmates are better geared than I am, and we were effectively in a "regular" dungeon when we were very much used to Heroics. I'll eventually venture in with my lesser-geared toons and will be able to better judge the true "difficulty" of the instance for people who aren't all decked out.

The most difficult part was even taken care of for us, because the tank, or in the case of the second and third runs, the DPS Warrior, were already familiar with the routes through the instances, having played in the Beta test. For Utgarde Keep this wasn't a big deal, but The Nexus was twisty and turny with many hallway options at some points, so I was very glad to be the healer and just play Follow.

Gear Quality From Starting Instances

As expected, the gear ROCKS in these new instances. I was looking at the first blue drops and wondering if it was an upgrade from my gear that was picked up in Mount Hyjal and Black Temple back in Burning Crusade. The off-hand I picked up had better stats for sure, and the rings that were quest rewards were about equal, too.

This gear will be a BIG upgrade for most players, a fact which will provide great joy!

Despite the niceness of the gear, we actually disenchanted a couple of blues... mainly because we were three clothies and two plate-wearers and mail and leather kept dropping!

Training Up Professional Maximums

This was expensive. I came into Northrend with over 300g and spent it all, and had to send myself more money to finish the job. There were a billion new recipes in all but First Aid and Fishing (as expected) and I was glad I had money saved up.

...

But for now it's time to get back to leveling! I'm less than a bubble away from 71 :)

Related posts:

1. Hunter Pre-Raid Gearing Guide
2. Warrior Tank Pre-Raid Gear Guide
3. Restocking The Leveling Toons