Another weekend played, another 2 levels gained. Kyroc hit 57, and honestly, I wasn't even trying. I did lots of things whose primary purpose was something else than gaining xp, but which ended up leveling me anyway.
I started by looking for a zone where I hadn't done all the quests with Raslebol, and stumbled upon the Thorium Brotherhood in the Burning Steppes. At 55 I was already a tad too high for them, but did all their quests anyway. That netted me 500 reputation points for 7 quests (you get 700 points if you do them a bit earlier, but only 70 points if you do the quests at 60). Then I read up on them and found out that faction with the Thorium Brotherhood not only gives you smithing recipes, but also recipes for enchanting and tailoring. So I decided to grind faction with them now, instead of later.
First part of Thorium Brotherhood faction grinding is killing lots of incendosaurs in one big cave below the Burning Steppes. You need to hand in 2 of their scales, plus 1 coal, plus either 4 kingsblood, 4 iron bars, or 10 heavy leather, to get 25 reputation points. Being at 500 points and needing 3000, I thus needed 100 hand-ins, thus 200 incendosaur scales. They drop between 1 and 2 Whenever other people appeared to farm the incendosaurs in that cave, I switched to Raslebol and collected the kingsblood. Gathered about half myself, bought the rest in the AH, as somebody was selling them cheap.
Then I went to hand everything in and noticed a huge design flaw. You can hand the stuff in only one by one, and every hand-in takes 4 mouse-clicks. 400 mouse-clicks later I was friendly with the Thorium Brotherhood, and a good step closer to carpal tunnel syndrome.
The second part of Thorium Brotherhood faction grinding is easier, you just need 240 hand-ins of 4 dark iron residue from BRD. I already had some of them in the bank from my first BRD expedition last week. But now some guild-mates were looking for a place to go, they had quests in BRD as well, so we did a 5-man group to there. We did some quests, I attuned to Molten Core, and had a lot of fun. Plus got a lot of that residue, ended up buying the remainder cheap in the AH, and did another 960 repetitive mouse-clicks to reach honored with the Thorium Brotherhood. Ouch, my wrist!
In the end I didn't even really know why I did it. For the enchanting recipe I really want, I would need to be revered with the Thorium Brotherhood. For that I would need to hand in 2,400 dark iron ores, which I can't collect because I don't have mining, and which would be prohibitively expensive in the AH. I could instead hand in either 160 core leathers or 60 cores from Molten Core, which is even more ridiculous. You get maybe 1 or 2 of them for the whole group of 40 players on a typical MC raid, and a core sells for nearly 100 gold in the AH. I looked up the fiery core price, because I did get the tailoring recipe for flarecloth gloves from the Thorium Brotherhood guy in the bar in BRD. Nice gloves with fire resistance, but as they need 6 fiery cores, they are far out of my league. You practically need a whole guild working together to get one guy one piece of fire resistant equipment, and that isn't very realistic. So the whole thing ended up with me being again very much disappointed about the high-level crafting in World of Warcraft.
But of course killing lots of incendosaurs and going with a 5-man group to BRD netted me a good amount of experience points, and I made it to level 56. Grinding mobs of slightly below your level is actually quite a good way to earn experience points. If you can combine it with a quest to kill them, you can make over 20k xp per hour. The 5-man group to BRD only gained me around 12k xp per hour, but of course you get a lot more loot in a dungeon.
One activity I did for the first time with Kyroc this weekend was going on proper guild raids, one to Stratholme and one to UBRS. And xp-wise that doesn't do much. I clocked only 3k xp per hour. The xp for every kill are first divided by the 10 to 15 members of the raid, and then further divided in half as malus for being in a raid. A dungeon in 5-man mode is much better, because instead of a raid malus you get a group bonus.
Anyway, you don't go on a raid for the xp, but because it is fun, and for the loot of course. I got the recipe to enchant a 2h-weapon with +9 damage, a nice amulet giving intelligence and spirit, plus some minor items. General Drakkar dropped a dreadmist robe, which would have been much better than what I was wearing, but several people in the raid claimed dreadmist being warlock gear, and I didn't insist on rolling on it. At that point I wasn't totally concentrated any more, and totally forgot to touch the orb behind General Drakkar for the BWL attunement. Well, next time. I should have gone on that raid with Raslebol, to get the Onyxia key, but the group already had 3 other warriors and only 1 other priest, so Kyroc seemed the better choice. In any case, the chance to find loot which is still an improvement is much better for Kyroc, who is going to these places for the first time, than for Raslebol, who went there often enough.
I finished the weekend doing more quests, cleaning up my quest log a little, while the others of the guild were in Molten Core. That got me to level 57. Next stop probably Winterspring and/or Silithus. Or maybe I should go to the Plaguelands, there is so much left to do, and the end (level 60) is approaching fast.
In other news I had a closer look at the priest talent tree, and decided that I should have put points into discipline much earlier. I don't know why everybody says that for soloing priests should put their points into shadow. True, I use mind blast and shadow word pain in every combat, but the larger half of the combat is then done using the shield and the wand. And discipline has excellent talents to improve your wand damage, and to drastically reduce the cooldown of your shield. While the top talent of the shadow talent tree, shadowform, I'm not really using all that often in soloing. I use it when the fights are so easy that I never need to heal myself, but if the monsters are tougher, I'd rather be able to heal myself than to get a bonus to my shadow spells. Well, I don't think I'll respec now. As far as I know patch 1.10 is "coming soon", and then priests get their talent trees reworked, and thus get a free respec. And at that point I should be level 60 or very close to it, thus I am going to switch to some group-friendly holy build, not a solo build. Well, probably a build with the best-of-holy, and then some discipline talents to make the character a bit more rounded. I don't believe in blindly taking all talents from one branch of the talent tree.
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