How to Be Prepared (tm) for an expansion: Part 1

The overall look

Are you leveling a new character once December 7th rolls around? Take stock of your heirloom gear. Log through all of your alts - yes, ALL of them - and see what they've got. Mail it all to one central character (I use a bank mule for this) and then redistribute it as needed.

Take into account how often you actually play said alts, if you're ever going to level or twink them...and if need be, delete accordingly. I went from 50 characters (the account-wide cap) to 26. Every toon I tossed was under level 30 and a duplicate of something I already had above 70.

Take stock of your higher-level characters too! Will the Cataclysm recipes make maxing their professions easier? Then you don't need to worry about getting up to 450 before then - save your gold and use it on something else.

Do you know what toon you're leveling to 85 first? If not, or if you want to level several concurrently (hi, I'm an altoholic) make sure they have what they need to make the questing and instancing process as quick as possible. Stock repair money, convenient buff food, elixirs or flasks (hey, we get new ones anyway), and anything else you consider a necessity. In my case, it's pygmy oil by the stack and cooked deviate fish.

Got a bucket list? Double-check it and make sure you're satisfied with your progress.

How are you on gold? Do you have stockpiled crafting mats sitting around that you won't use up in the next three weeks? Sell some now, or hold onto them until after Cata and sell them when people leveling worgen and goblins start powerleveling professions.

Last and most important - how are you doing? Are you interested in playing until we get new content? If not, consider taking a couple weeks off. Volunteer at your local pet shelter and hug kittens or walk dogs. Learn the basics of a new language. Walk a mile every day (climate permitting). Or pick up blogging... :)

Alts, Alts, Everywhere

Jah and I are going a little alt-crazy at the moment. The ease of acquiring heirloom gear and the ease with which one can level up have contributed, as well as getting a tad tired of our mains.

For myself, there's:
-Jabberwocky, my 80 resto/feral druid. She's pretty decked out from heroics and pickup Naxx10 runs, and I just recently shelled out the 1,000 gold to get her dual-spec in Feral for grinding out Northrend Loremaster.
-Rinhoel, the Obligatory Death Knight. Nearly 61. Thinking of powering her up to be another tanking toon. I <3 Blood spec.
-Einmal and Rhetannie, also known as "The Girls". Respectively a 59 mage and a 59 rogue, and the fruits of my foray into RAF dual-boxing.
-Happybubbles, the level 7 bouncing priest of *doom*. Eventually she'll be a BG twink.

Jah has his own little stable going:
-Kante, his 71 DPS warrior. Not sure if he's Arms or Fury at the moment - they keep swapping the talent trees around so much x.x
-Hoyvakt, the 69 Deathmoo (Tauren death knight). Currently taking Howling Fjord by storm.
-Jahow, 61 hunter and his original toon on the server before transferring Kante and rerolling to Soleine.
-Jandi, 61 mage - one of his RAF experiments. (Looks almost exactly like Einmal.)
-A multitude of sub-50 things he thinks are not worth mentioning. He says he's not sure what, precisely, he wants as his next alt...so he's just slowly leveling one of everything up to 60.

I sort of have a plan. Most of mine have gathering professions, with vague plans for level 80 specs and production profession choices to mesh with their intended roles nicely. Rinhoel, for example, is probably going to end up as either a Blood-spec tank or DPS and will thus have Mining/Blacksmithing instead of her current Mining/Skinning. Jabs (Jabberwocky) is a maxed-out Mining/Jewelcrafter, mainly specializing in tank and healer cuts. Ein will probably end up with tailoring and skinning, and Rhe will probably end up with skinning and leatherworking. I think Bubbles is already an engineer, for PVP fun and rockets.

I think the next one I level will be Rinhoel - after I'm done amusing myself with two dual-specced 80s who have access to a ridiculous number of dailies, funding the next alt's epic flying mount, re-gemming and re-enchanting Besh's tanking gear to within an inch of its life...

Non-alt news: Versus the World completed Heroic: The Antechamber of Ulduar in one night, starting with a one-shot first kill of Kologarn (if you don't count the two hours we spent on him last week >_>) and ending with a stress-soaked, eight-attempt kill of Auriaya at EXACTLY 11:00 PM, our scheduled raid end time. Hopefully, later today will see us down Ignis on heroic for the first time and then waltz into the Keepers of Ulduar section for some fun with Thorim and Hodir. To keep the QQ to a minimum, I'm just going to say that I'm not happy at all with how warrior class mechanics are going, and it's ever so tempting to main-swap to one of the other plate-tank classes.

The living are here and standing on top of your dead, stinky corpse.

After lots and lots of AOE farming densely populated areas of the EPL with a level 65 prot paladin helping, I hit Honored with AD and got my Naxxramas attunement out of the way to start doing oldschool tier 3 content with VTW. Unfortunately, all of our healers bowed out do to RL constraints. (All two of 'em. QQ.) C'est la vie, we'll go back soon anyhow.

Versus the World also made our first official (second overall) foray into Zul'Aman, stomped Nalorakk's face in, and called it for the night due to internet issues. Then someone said "Hey! We should do Kara for badges!" Then they nominated/forcibly volunteered me to lead it and MT it, and I found myself at the helm of a Kara clear with:
-One geared main-tank. (Me.)
-Two undergeared offtanks. (Two rockin' feral druids.)
-Two geared-the-hell-out healers.
-Various and sundry DPS.

Then after Opera we had to do some reshuffling and ended up with...
-One MT
-THREE offtanks (prot pally, feral druid with DPS gear, feral druid with tanking gear)
-THREE healers (two resto shamans, one IDS/holy priest)
-Various and sundry DPS.

Nightbane took for-fucking-ever. It was hilarious. Aran was almost a disaster, since we actually got to the point where he did the poly-drink-pyro combo, and SURVIVED... Then we decided to call it after Chess and do Netherspite, Illhoof, and Prince later this weekend.

So, that's my tanking news for this week. I tanked half a pull of Naxx trash (the first group in the abom wing, if anybody cares), got my Sun Eater (yaaaaaay!), main-tanked and led Kara for the first time. I think I'm 22 badges away from my badge tankpants. (Omnomnom expertise!) I like having measurable improvements on a regular basis.

On the topic of alts, Jah and I decided it was worth the cost of a new account to set up two RAFs and start powering secondary toons up to 59. Right now we both have mages on our main accounts, then I've got a rogue on my RAF and he's got a paladin. I've been playing with a mage on the premade PTR (and getting exploded three ways into next year with them on the copy PTRs) and really like what I see, so I decided to make it one of the toons I'd take into the expansion along with Besh, Jabbers, and at a later date, Mandar and Brangwyn.

Since this is mostly turning into a place for me to keep track of my goals and progress on various toons, tomorrow I'll devote a blurb to WotLK Checklist 2.0, now that I've seen beta.

I hold the line, aggro is mine o/~

That crazy little symbol up at the end of the title is supposed to look like a quarter note. I'm not sure if it does.

Anywho, Jah's warrior (formerly Nargle, now Kante) is going to be full-time deepz since it's looking more and more like I'll be a regular on VTW's tank roster. (That's me over there! FEAR THE COW.) I OT'd the last two guild-run Karas and picked up a Panzar'thar Breastplate, Boots of Elusion, Shermanar Great-Ring, and the Choker of Discipline. This brings me up to:
-14k armor, or 57.15% physical damage reduction.
-515 defense. Yay overcapped!
-16.7 Dodge
-17.83% Parry
-22.69% Block (with successful blocks stopping 292 damage)
-13,812 HP completely unbuffed - over 14k with Commanding Shout up, finally!
-I've gone from 400-500 TPS average to 550-700 TPS average, spiking up to 1,000+ TPS on heavy-hitting bosses where I can spam Heroic Strike.

And...a grand total of 39 badges. My dilemma is whether to buy the Gnomeregan Auto-Blocker right off the bat to ditch one of my horrendous pre-BC trinkets, or save up for my original plan of Girdle of the Fearless/Sunguard Legplates/everything else. (Still working towards the theoretic 'best' set maximizing stamina, expertise/hit, and finding gear with high raw avoidance stats.)

I'm a little annoyed that I'm going to miss out on our first Gruul's attempts due to work, but I'll get a chance eventually. Meh.

Regarding the beta: I've satisfied myself that prot will still be amazing for tanking and be semi-workable for leveling, as well as druid healing still being fun. I'm pretty much done with my beta account except for the occasional respec-and-grind test. Trying to keep as much of it new and interesting when it hits Live as possible...

Reading Unbearably HoT's writeups of the Refer-a-Friend nonsense tempts me to scrape up an extra whatever dollars and powerlevel-transfer two alts on Sen'jin. However, to use the jargon my Econ professor has stuffed into my head, the opportunity cost of an RAF account + 2 new 60s + a Zhevra mount for my moocow is somewhere around a week's worth of groceries for dinner and lunch money. And since I'd rather be able to eat for a week than have easymode 60s right now, looks like that won't be happening anytime soon.