It's been widely said, including by myself, that players in T5-T6 will not find upgrades before the late 80's and even Naxx.

Well, I was wrong.

I found my first good upgrade in Gundrak (level 75 instance in Zul'Drak) and then another one in the Halls of Stone (level 76 in the Storm Peaks). And these are not minor upgrades: the cloak dropped by the Maiden in HoS, which can be reached -- and therefore, farmed -- in 20mn, is better than Teron Gorefiend's cloak, which is one of the best melee cloaks in TBC.

I completely missed these upgrades because I didn't run many instances in the beta, so if you are 75 or above, you should start running instances more aggressively (the two Halls instances are absolutely gorgeous).

WOTLK early impressions

A few random thoughts:

• Good job on Blizzard's part for the scaling and respawn rate. I haven't encountered any big bottleneck while questing (except for the server queues, of course, which have sometimes reached 40mn).
  
  
• My guild is a raiding guild so everybody is crazy busy power leveling, even though we have no firm schedule to get back into raiding. Some of our players have been repeatedly flipping various instances for quick XP. We have a few 75-78 and most are lower. Quite a few of them took some time off and were probably playing close to non-stop over the weekend.
  
  
• Instance flipping *seems* to work well but I'm not 100% sure it's that much faster than questing. For example, I calculated that Drak Tharon Keep will net you about 100k XP in a half hour, which is the equivalent of four quests (80k XP + the killing involved). I think I can definitely knock down four quests in that amount of time, depending on the traveling involved. Anyway, I accept every single run I get invited to since this is precisely what I didn't get to experience during the beta. Oh and big hug to Blizzard for short instances.
  
  
• I am guilty of trying to level fast as well. First of all because I have played most of this already in the beta, so the novelty is no longer there, but also because I want to be sure I'm not left behind, even though reason tells me that none of this will be a factor in 2-3 weeks once all our raiders are 80.
  
  
• For this purpose, QuestHelper is nothing short of amazing. Not only has it worked flawlessly for 95% of the quests I've been doing, but it also calculates the best paths for questing and even shows them on your map. It doesn't account for quest follow-ups, though, which means that sometimes it will tell you to do A and then turn in B, while turning in B first might be faster because the follow-up to B will create a shorter graph. Really not a big deal, I'm absolutely baffled at how well this add-on works and I admit to feeling a mix of fascination and repulsion at the idea of implementing graph traversal algorithms in LUA.

Leveling a Rogue in Northrend

This article on WoWInsider gives some good starter information on how to get ready for the 70-80 grind, but I think the author is overthinking the problem.

Anyone with T5+ gear will be shredding mobs until 80, so you might as well pick an exotic spec and have some fun with it until the harsh reality of endgame raiding forces you back into a more sobering DPS dishing configuration.

I leveled Shadowstep+Cold Blood in the beta and I was chuckling with glee all the way to Icecrown. The sheer amount of burst is absolutely wonderful and two crits are all it takes to kill any mob with just three hits. I didn't even bother re-equipping my sword once out of stealth...

Selling pets for fun and profit

Out of curiosity, I bought a few extra pets with my Alliance character, which I then put up on the Horde AH. All these pets cost 0.5s and I put them up for 12g.

They sold within a few hours.

Intrigued, I bought more and slowly increased the initial bid and buy-out prices to find out how far I could push it... None of my auctions ever expired, they all got bought out. I'm talking about items bought for 0.5s that I am now selling for 40g. Crazy stuff.

I just make sure that I only ever put one kind of each pet (there are 4 cats, 3 moths and 3 owls) and as soon as one sells, I put up another one, just to maintain the perception of scarcity. Also, I'm probably going to start buying out any pet that I see on sale for less than 10g in an attempt to monopolize the market.

I'm guessing this is working well because transferring pets across factions requires either two different people or two accounts, which most players can't practically do. What most players have, though, is gold and an incomprehensible hunger for achievements.

I don't know how long this will last, but I have made close to 1000g over the past 48 hours just by spending a few minutes at a time at the AH, and this is probably the first time I encounter a money scheme that blows the Dailies out of the water.

Pet achievement

In my quest to complete achievements that require some effort, I recently decided to try to get 50 pets, which is quite a challenge since I'm starting with basically two...

So far, I have accomplished the easy part (stock up on pets that are sold by vendors) and I have rounded up 25 (still no Sinister Squashling though :-(). Now the hard part begins.

My next action items is to keep farming Dead Mines for the parrot dropped by the pirates on the boat. Cookie also drops a Siamese Cat but I already have it (forgot where I got it).

There's also another pet dropped by a rare in the Undead area, which I'm planning on farming.

Quite a few pets can be easily bought by Alliance characters, too. I have a 60 Alliance Priest, but she's parked on a different server and I don't feel like paying for yet another transfer, so I'm probably going to create a Human character, have her run all the way to Booty Bay, transfer some money to her via the neutral auction and then send her on a shopping spree (which might take a while since she'll be running and some of these pets are in remote areas, such as Darnassus). And then I'll sell the pets back to my Horde main via the neutral AH.

There are also two Engineering pets that can be used by non Engineers (the yeti and the toad), but they're a bit painful and costly to assemble, so I'll save that for last.

Another thing I need to investigate is whether I completed the three chicken escort quests. I'm pretty sure I did but I'll have to double check. The sad thing is that if such is the case, I probably destroyed the reward and I haven't been given the option to resurrect it from the NPC. Sigh.

Oh and of course, there are numerous web sites that have the full directory of pets (about 100 as of today), but I thought I'd share my findings so far.

Tenris Mirkblood and the incoming plague

We did the new Karazhan boss yesterday, it's a good opportunity to visit an area that nobody ever goes to (even as of today, I have never killed any of the animal bosses). The good thing about Mirkblood is that he drops a pet for all members of the raid and an axe that can be used as an air guitar.

Other than that, we also did the two Necropole quests (one of which requires a group). It's good fun, but probably painful on a PvP server. Once we had our objectives, we all flagged ourselves to rain some mayhem on our fellow alliances anyway. Also, it's worth hanging around longer to pick more Necrotic Runes since you can buy a cool summoning horn for 40 Runes (don't forget you need 10 more to turn in the quest). Oh and for 8 Runes, you can get the Argent Dawn tabard, which has an achievement of its own, if you're into that.

The quests end there, though, so a bit disappointing. Hope there's more to come.

Achievement frenzy

Did your guild catch the fever too?

Most of my guildies spent the entire night chasing silly achievements like exploring all of Arathi Highlands or completing AQ20 (they 4-manned it, I believe). I think I saw Onyxia die three times over a period of a couple of hours too.

I aimed for something a little more out of the ordinary: I went to SSC and I fished Lurker. Then I went to Stormwind to do some more fishing and I was planning on clearing the Stockades while I was there but I got badly pwned by the guards (now level 75, darn you Blizzard) so I had to give up.