I have a confession to make. Besides my mage, I have several other L80 characters. A Death Knight. A Druid. And now a Shaman. So I have gotten used to leveling in WOTLK. I pretty much know how it works and have enough experience that I can do it pretty efficiently.
WOTLK is pretty fun to level through the first time. There is a lot of quest variety, and there is a bit more story to the whole affair which helps string everything together. But the fact is that it quickly gets boring through subsequent play throughs. Now, this is probably unavoidable. But IMO, part of the problem is still just the sheer volume of quests that have to be done. It's just daunting, and it gets worse with each new character you run through. And while the leveling speed actually increases as you go from 70 to 80, it's still just too slow IMO. A 25% speed increase to leveling would be a big help here and still not be 'too fast'.
Last night, I spent time with the priest instead of the shaman. I wanted to play around a little more with healing with it, if for nothing else to see if I liked it better. Things didn't really go as planned though.
The session started off on a bad note. I logged in, put myself in the queue for a random, and got into a dungeon (Nexus almost immediately). L80 DK tank, everyone else was 73...I figured it would go well. But I was having problems with the AOE damage on the first boss...my damned small mana pool caused me to blow most of my mana during the first two splits. Then I died trying to keep everyone else up; and then the tank started bitching that I wasn't healing him (after I was dead lol)...so he left. Then we went through 2 more tanks without even making a pull (tanks would join, then just immediately leave for whatever reason). So I left.
So, back in the queue I have to wait about 15 seconds before I get another group. This time its old kingom w/ a L80 druid and a everyone else 72 or so. This goes simple. Healing was a easy, but then the tank had 48k health and barely took any damage.
Even with that I STILL seemed to be having mana problems. Nothing major, but on boss fights my mana would get low real fast and it was making me nervous (even though the tank really wasn't taking much damage). This quite frankly worries me. I mean I understand that my gear was too shadow-oriented, and may not be all that good but damn!
So instead of 5 maning, I switched gears and went back to questing hoping for some better quest rewards to help me transition from dps to healer. The first thing I noticed was that questing with an epic mount in Dragonblight is a LOT faster. I got a level and a half yesterday, and could have easily gotten more...I'd say that epic flying increased my leveling speed by almost half.
I also picked up a few more quest rewards from 5-man quests, a healing necklace and belt. And I made myself a healing ring and a back piece. From questing I picked up a blue leg piece, blue healing hands and feet, and replaced a few greens with better greens. This increased my SP by over 100, gained me more than 1500 mana over what I was at, and increased my mana regen by about 100.
Hopefully this will help with the healing I need, but maybe not. With me hitting 74 yesterday (and almost getting to 75), a lot of mid level dungeons will now be open and the gear requirements will be higher. Still it's a good start.
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