I’ve dinged 79 today and now am officially on the final stretch. And experiencing heavy burnout. I don’t even want to start up WoW, let alone quest.

I don’t even know what to do when I ding. I guess professions, crafts, reputations, in that order? I’d definitely like a baseline resilience set as fast as possible so I can start doing what I enjoy, which is battleground and arena PvP with friends. I’m looking forward to spells and abilities balancing themselves out so I can have fun playing my healers once again.

I don’t think I will powerlevel professions instantly as soon as I am 80 – as usual I like to bid my time, look for deals, and make a profit while leveling professions. This pays off in the end, remember, if a profession is not making money while leveling and after you have leveled, you should probably drop it and get another one.

As far as reps go, I’m keeping an eye on the Wyrmrest reputation as that seems to yield the healing enchant, and the Horde Offensive reputation for the new Sta/Resi enchant. Not looking forward to said grind as Haomarush isn’t the most populated of servers, so getting into PuGs is always difficult.

EDIT: Wow! I’m linked at Out of Mana! Thanks, Megan!

Have I mentioned how the leveling grind is killing my soul piece by little piece?

I’ve hit the midway point yesterday, and while I am looking forward to obtaining Cold Weather Flying, thus making questing that little bit faster with minimum travel time involved, I think if I do one more quest, I will scream.

I mean no. Just no. It’s tedious, and no matter how much variation is involved, it’s boring. Not to mention that the zones are crowded, and I hate questing in crowded zones, competing for mobs. Thankfully there are very few gankers since most people want to just quest and gtfo.

To be perfectly honest, this might be the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. I can feel a burnout coming onto me. It doesn’t help that I feel compelled to level, compelled to not fall behind the crowd. This is a game, and it’s meant to be entertainment. And leveling 70-80? Is not entertainment.

It’s not like the grind ends once you are 80, anyway. There’s the grind for reputations so I can obtain the enchants and items I need. There’s the grind for badges so I can get good enough gear to raid. There’s the grind for PvP gear so that we can stomp lesser geared people and work our way up the rating ladder.

Speaking of rating ladder, I’ve lost Rinny the rogue, my arena partner on my priest. He’s rerolled gnome warrior on Ravencrest and is doing the leveling grind the same as me. As he doesn’t know when he will be leveling his rogue or whether he will be doing it at all, that means I’m down an 2v2 mate, and a good, skilled, and nice one at that.

I’m sort of considering migrating Luminaria to Ravencrest so Rinny and I can get to play together again – however, I have three reasons against that, which are my three best friends ingame whom we always play together. Ironically Rinny won’t xfer to Grim Batol for the same reason, he has two very good friends who play on Ravencrest, one of whom is in a Sunwell guild and has no option of leaving.

I guess I could level yet another character on Ravencrest, but I’d probably die during the process, so that’s not an option. Also, I’d like to wait and shamelessly roll a FoTM character that syncs with a warrior if at all possible.

Speaking of FoTM, I’m wondering how popular and strong DKs will be in arena and battleground PvP once level 80 ladders establish themselves. From the looks of their abilities it seems like they counter druids pretty nicely, which may mean that priests and shamans will be on the rise. Given that both can abolish diseases, and the fact that priests got more mana regen options and shamans got a HoT plus curse removal, the reign of druids over small bracket arena may finally be at an end.

That plus the Lifebloom nerf really hit druids pretty hard – the cost of my Lifebloom was increased 50% and it heals for much less. After 3.0, my priest was much more survivable in battlegrounds than my druid, even though I had more of a reliance on casted heals and wore cloth. My druid 1. Ran OOM fast, 2. Didn’t heal for nearly as much. I finally specced 10/0/51 Imp ToL and Wild Growth, and started running around in tree form spamming heals.

If that’s the direction Blizzard wants druids to take, I’m sorry to say that it’s boring, and the completely defensive playstyle feels like being a paladin with HoTs. If you’re caught casting a Cyclone or Roots in caster form, you die, and you can’t afford to anyway because your teammates are dying and your full stack of HoTs can barely keep them up.

Anyway, this has all been said by people who are much more accomplished than myself (and there I went off on a tangent again). With a 70 of each healing class, I’m prepared anyway.

Now to get to 80 and resume work on those Conqueror titles…

I went to a midnight opening. It was great fun, and I’ve been pushing to level pretty much ever since.

Our server has already had the server first etc achievements, with a human warlock on Alliance side and tauren druid on Horde side getting them. I’m nowhere near such stuff – about 30% into 73, and really, the leveling is killing me so far. Really, really not looking forward to getting 5 characters, 4 of them healers, through the soul-sucking grind that is 70-80. Re-grinding reputations, leveling up professions, having to re-establish my little brood at 80. So much to do, so little time.

I’m using Levitate so much more now that I’ve had it glyphed. Had great fun jumping off cliffs/mountains/anything I could find in Howling Fjord and keeping it up in the Tundra.

I’m really contemplating an Armored Brown Bear. On one hand, I have so much gold. On the other hand, I didn’t make so much gold by spending it on stuff that is less than strictly necessary.

Speaking of gold, I’m looking forward to the market establishing itself and its trends at 80. Things are so shaky now that no one knows what to buy and what to sell. AH is mostly flooded by stuff that people are making to level their professions. Not a good time to be making gold, unless you’re doing Inscription.

I should make a DK to be my Inscription bot.

Did I mention how horrible leveling 70-80 is?

And that’s Wrath so far.

We’ve had sort of a guild explosion on Dramarush. Basically, trusted member of guild founds his own guild, which will supposedly hardcore raid in Wrath (Love Vendor does not endorse hardcore raiding), and promises leadership positions to people in our guild. People leave. Dramaz ensue. Guild asplodes. To get away from it all I have been leveling my night elf druid on Grim Batol, tanking it up, and she’s almost 70 now.

Although after 3.0 I am not pleased with the direction feral tanking has been taking. So the target limit on Swipe has been removed, great – the old 15% threat in Bear Form talent has also been removed. That means if you are Swiping to AoE tank, you are simply tanking via damage you deal. That can be surpassed by other damage dealers, or even heavy healing, relatively easily. The Maul glyph is godly where multitanking is concerned, and Berserking helps a bit (although a shorter cooldown would definitely be appreciated), but they can only do so much.

Warriors from what I see really do excel at multitanking now, with Shockwave and the new Thunderclap. I haven’t yet tried my paladin (ret is simply too much fun right now to want to be anything else), but I’m not even decided about being prot at 80.