Getting Accliminated

With my addons working I could post some of the crafting materials on the auction house. That helped both with the inventory space problem and hopefully will help me rebuild my coffers. Next up, I knew I needed to do some dailies.

All These Buttons!

The game can be intimidating for a returning player. I didn’t even remember what half my buttons did. I leveled as Retribution, and pretty much as soon as I hit 85, I stopped playing him. First thing I did was turn on verbose tooltips. Then I went through and looked at what each button did.
My next thought was to go whack a target dummy. I was pretty terrible. My friend who sent me the Scroll directed me to icy-veins.com. This is a very nice resource for all classes and specs. At least now I knew what I was supposed to do.

The first daily I did was the cooking daily which involved flying all over Orgrimmar and picking up crawfish. That was when I realized I hadn’t trained my cooking since Wrath. Oops.

I had a couple of quests in my log that were introduced with the major patches. I had done them both on my Hunter and Warrior. One was the troll quests in Stranglethorn, and the other was the Thrall quests in Hyjal. Both quests were very different this time around as I was practically the only one doing them. It took a little longer for the Thrall quests, but I managed to get both of them done without dying too much. I got the epic cape from the Thrall quest and picked up the Retribution one.

Blast from the Past - Ice Crown Citadel
While I was out doing the Troll quests, the guild was putting together a raid. They were going old school and doing ICC25 because one of their members, a Death Knight tank, was working on his Shadowmorne legendary quest. They invited anyone online to go including myself.

It felt really weird to be back in ICC. It felt even weirder to not be tanking. I may have burned out a bit on tanking before I left WoW, but I definitely miss it sometimes. We cleared up to Blood Queen but couldn’t kill her before everyone got mind controlled. I’m sure my DPS was sub par.

Tank?

With everything changing in just a few days, I don’t see where it benefits me to try to learn to tank again right now. Once 5.0 ships, I can start working it out with everyone else. I’ll be recording all the information I gather and decision I make on the blog. Hopefully, people will find it helpful, even though I feel like I’ve gone from a guy who could write the guide to the guy who needs the guide. But honestly, even when I was blogging full steam, I really just collected and syntheized information which is much the same thing I’ll be doing now.

If I stay for MoP, I think I’ll level as Prot/Ret and then just see what the guild needs. With another tank added to the game, I wonder how the tanking mix will work out. Once I hit 90, I see what the guild needs. Tank spots are ususally pretty tough to come by, and my schedule will be decidedly more casual now.

Goals 

There’s two things I’d really like to do before my free time runs out. I’d like to run the new End Time heroics, and I’d love to see Dragon Soul, even if it’s on LFR difficulty. I'm building my Ret set because I figure it will be easier to do Dragon Soul for the first time as a DPS rather than as a tank. The problem is my gear isn’t good enough to queue for the new Heroics and the guild isn't running them.

I had a completed quest in my log for killing a boss in Stonecore, and I needed to turn that in at Therazane. I couldn’t even remember if Therazane was a current reputation. I checked and saw it was. I was close to Revered with them. I was at Honored with all the other Cataclysm reputations. I saw a bunch of dailies to do and figured I should give it a go. I had done the dailies many times on my Hunter and my Warrior so I knew basically what to do. By the time I was done, I was revered and picked up some new gear.

The next thing I did was go open the Firelands dailies. I’m pretty sure you can get some nice gear from them, and I had never done those on my Paladin either. The dailies would help the my lack of gold as well.

Comments

Jawn said…
The End Time heroics are pretty easy compared to the first few tiers of dungeons. On my alts, I just buy some of the high ilevel blue pvp gear, stick it in my bags, and I'm good to queue. You might be a bit of a drag on the group your first time through, but you'll gear quickly, even just from quest rewards. If you don't equip the gear, you can probably sell it and make a lot of your money back. Of course, you say you're low on gold, so you might not have the funds to cover the initial purchase. It's worth a quick trip to the AH anyway.
Ardent Defender said…
Had a good comment post, but Internet ate my post posting on my IPhone :(

Anyway was going to say just about everything you said above other than crafting and doing a Raid pretty much mirrors exactly my experience since restarted playing now almost a week. Just haven't logged in everyday.

Did pickup a Cloak doing Thrall Hyjal epic quest and doing Fireland dailies you can buy 2 Epic i365 from the vendor guy there at entrance to Fireland cave there from the troll guy. Can't remember what the 2 pieces were. My mind is not in that detail of a mood after not playing for almost 2 years as Protection. Haven't even tried Ret yet. He'll I don't even remember which button that is on my action bar. Barely remember what the first 1/3 of them are.

On my Hunter played around for hrs in Hyjal and picked up that Bird Spirit beast flying way high overheard above the Spirit of Malone statue. That was fun and lots of falling death for a few hrs trying to figure out. In the end I tamed it. That was fun even feeling like a noob hunter again.

Yeah fir a guy that once could almost write a Paladin guide to Protection and Ret, almost find myself in need of reading one myself at this point.
Unknown said…
As others mentioned you can buy or have crafted pvp ret gear that is ilvl 377 I think.

Also a nice tool for upgrades and reforging that I enjoy is:http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/gear

For rotations I like to use this to get a feel for what I should be pushing:
http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/ovale

Happy travels!
Ken Bowen said…
Welcome back Honors! Glad my favorite paladin blogger is donning the shield again.

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