That’s right, it was one year ago today that I rolled mister Shao. The hunter dwarf that is my avatar in the game of the World of Warcraft. So lets take a look back at what’s he’s achieved in that time, as well as a progress update of what he’s been doing since we last checked in.

1-60

•       Most of the levelling to 70 progress was long and drawn out affair, taking two thirds of the year where. I had little time to play – at best an hour a day, and even less time to update this blog. For that reason I made slow progress of content. Levelling almost entirely solo, with very few group quests or dungeons run with other people. This was down to my play style, and the lack of other players at my level, but also because of recent patches at the time that had made a lot of the content a lot easier. Shao is also a bit of a loner, and has had trouble finding a good guild – more of that another time.

70-79

•       The amount  of play time I could fit in to a day has increased dramatically since my ex-girlfriend and I split, and also this coincided nicely with the launch of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I launched myself head first in to this, reaching level 80 after about two weeks – not the fastest person ever, but also much quicker than a lot of other people. Again, most of the content aside from a some of the harder group quests was done solo mode. Primarily because of how great beast master talents and pets became in patch 3.0.2.

80

•        Shao has now spent over 5 days playtime at level 80, so what has he actually achieved? Gear-wise, not a lot. end-game content-wise, not a lot. He’s seen every instance apart from Obsidium Sanctum, but he’s not run them frequently or often enough to have gotten a lot of epic gear – but what he has got has come easy.

  

•   Onyxia’s Lair Entrance
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  More recently he’s been doing achievement content. Old world dungeons, the lunar festival achievments, and some rep grinding. Lets look specifically at what he’s done in the past week or so.

1. Dire Maul  – My other characters had been to dire maul before, but it’s never been a massively popular set of instances, probably because it’s tucked away, or probably because it came to the game late (patch 1.2 if i remember correctly). There’s exactly two reasons why people still go there. 1) Warlock epic land mounts. 2) paladin epic land mounts. My other character never got his lock mount, which was a shame because it’s fricking awesom, but i had been there 3 years ago. It was nice running the content from start to finish, and oddly, and there were a couple of nice aspects about it that i’d not seen before.
1. Gordok Ogre Suit -  a quest that will give you a item to turn yourself in to an ogre – or at least wear an ogre suit. It’s a one-time effect, although you can create more suits using a reagent found in the instance. For those looking for a longer stint as an ogre you could always save up some UDE points to get the Carved Ogre Idol.
2. The above ogre suit is used in a unique mechanic i’ve not seen employed elsewhere. At the end of the instance, you have to kill the Gordok King – and in doing so you, or your group become king of the Gordoks, all the MOBs you didn’t kill become friendly, and you are given a reward based on how many you killed before killing the king.  The more you kill, the worse the reward.
   The interesting mechanic is that the king resides at the end of the instance, and you have to get past them all to be able to even fight him. :-)
2. Zul’Aman – again, i missed this instance due to missing a year of burning crusade. It always looked cool because of the way the bosses wear animal outfits, and the drops reflect those outfits. Other than that the run was pretty dull, we were far too over powered, and did the instance incredibly quickly.
3. Gnomeregan Exiles Rep = exalted – my long drawn out quest to get all reputations to exalted isn’t going particularly well. Currently I’m working on the four main alliance races, with Dwarves, Humans, and now Gnomes there already and a couple thousand rep missing on the other two. Oddly, I’m only going after the status for achievements and mounts, I’m really after the cat mounts from darnassus.
4. Molten Core – another oldskool instance that i’ve never been able to run, and still couldn’t run on my own (the mere fact it requires a player to be in a raid doesn’t help). Pretty unremarkable instance.. lots of giants, elementals, naga. Pretty epic feel about it. The only thing i took away from this run was the achievement, and an Ancient Core Hound pet… a lot of hunters are using core hounds, but the orange ones can only be found in Molten Core, and are therefore pretty rare. More so because there are few beastmaster hunter’s in game at the moment.
5. Black Wing Lair – BWL is much like MC above, in that i never got to go there, and in fact i originally quit WoW shortly after BWL went live – a time when i was playing another hunter in the mid-40s. The two instances that i was familiar with in blackrock were some of my favourite from a design, and imagery point of view. I used to love running them back in the day with my warlock, because they were challenging, and not like any other instance I’d run up until that point, so I’d always wanted to progress enough to get to MC and BWL. The run was pretty straight forward, and of course a lot easier than with a group of 60s. I only rolled on three items. Ancient Petrified Leaf (which leads to an interesting quest), Dragonstalkers Spaulders, Head of Nefarian (which leads to this quest, which allowed me to take Master Dragonslayer’s Orb). Oddly, my rolls were good yesterday, taking two 94s, and a 97 to take all three items.

   Lord Victor Nefarius’ throne
    

6. Onyxia’s Lair – after all the hype of hearing about onyxia, and her lair, and going through the attunement (back when you needed to), i was a little disappointed. A server restart was scheduled in just as we all got there, none of us had done it before and decided to give it a whirl anyway. It took us a matter of minutes. Very easy, very disappointed. Interestingly i did this instance before BWL, and an item i need for the Ancient Petrified Leaf quest dropped, and i didn’t roll for it. Doh!