Maevyn
On the great BRK's recommendation, I installed Kharthus's Hunter Timers. This solves my two Hunter peeves in that it displays timer bars for both Mend Pet and Feed Pet so I have no trouble knowing when either has expired. Armed with the Mend Pet bar I was able to kill a level 72 elite tree. It dropped five felweed, two motes of life and a green, not too shabby.
Some research indicated that the quests for Shatterred Halls attunement would yield Honor Hold rep so sent Mae to the place in Shadowmoon Valley where she can kill a blacksmith guy and get a mould for a key. She managed this and plucked some Nightmare Vine while she was there. The place is just to the left of the entrance of the Black Temple. She then flew to Honor Hold, did the quest turnin and was rewarded with enough reputation to be Honoured by Honor Hold and hence was able to buy the recipe for the Elixir of Major Agility: +35 agility and +20 critical strike for one hour, and the ingredients are modest too (Felweed, Teracone).
At this point I couldn't think of what I wanted to do with Maevyn so I rolled an alt.
Maexyn
Maexyn (pronounced may-zin) is a female gnome warlock with green hair. I decided on warlock as another pet loving dps class. In six hours I got her to level 13, tailoring 60 (clothy classes are advised to get tailoring), skinning (for the $$$) about the same. I like skinning. Need plenty of bag space to hoover up the drops and then the leather but it makes it more worthwhile killing beasts.
Warlock notes:
- Nice farming character, get into routine of two DoTs, a blast and wand to death, can kill things in 10 seconds or so (not including initial casting).
- Went through highs and lows. At level 11 she easily soloed Vagash (level 11 elite), easier than paladin or hunter, yet I gave up in disgust after dying three times to pairs of Skullthumper Troggs. The two would daze the voidwalker, then attack Maex. I'm still not sure how she is supposed to handle this situation. It wasn't nearly as big a problem with Maev. It wasn't totally hopeless, managed to clear entire camps of Troggs and those Loch Modan mouse things.
- Compared to Hunter, kinda annoying how spells take time to cast. On the other hand, none of the spells so far have cooldowns.
- Voidwalker is a crap pet. Tackling three similar level mobs is a challenge, harder than hunter. When the warlock gets personal agro things get nasty, what with the cloth armour, spellcasting interruption and all.
- Warlock has a channelled pet heal spell which is pretty useless. During a fight it only slows down the rate at which the pet loses health, it doesn't give enough healing to make the health go up, and the warlock would probably be better occupied by running away.
- The only crowd control, Fear, takes time to cast and only works on one mob, and you have to target it. Combined with the chances of the feared mob picking up adds it isn't totally useful. I did manage to summon a fresh imp while a mob was feared. The imps are very fragile, pretty much disposable.
- You need soul stones to summon a voidwalker and they don't stack in your bags!
- The pets get random meaningless forgettable names that you can't change to something ill-fitting like Beryl or Kevin. My Imp is called something like Chuckup and the Voidwalkers name start with Th.
- It's true: the voidwalker is always getting in the bloody way.
In conclusion, at level 13 Hunter > Warlock > Paladin.
Pookypoo
Maex got stuck in a cave, she was dead and couldn't res because there were too many troggs around. What to do? I decided to cheat and logout Maex, login pook, run him into the cave and wipe out all the troggs. Plan worked smoothly, Pook consecrated and one-shotted them all, even gathered Maex a stack of linen. She used it to make everyone Red Shirts.
I hearthed Pooky out to Shattrath, then portalled him back to Ironforge. He was standing there right in front of the Paladin trainer and I thought, sod it, and respecced him to protection. He's now 13/42/0, solid protection and enough holy to heal himself without interruption. TBH I was kinda ashamed of him being retribution and I hate the three-kills-and-a-mana-break style of play. I have had my best times with him as protection and I feel like giving it another chance. My thinking is I can level him up by finding some AoE spots and just grinding. I am also inspired by reader Galoheart who levelled 1-70 protection all the way (kiting with Avenger's Sheild!). In honour of Galo, Pooky is now 5/5 Ardent Defender. Galo is Horde but nobodys perfect.
I sorted his gear to get him more protection stats: stamina, strength etc, including the complete Fel Iron Plate armour set, then back to Hellfire to level up his one-handed axe skill as his best one-hander happened to be an axe that I think dropped for Maev, and his skill was woeful, about 170. At first it was taking him five minutes to kill level 58 hellboars, and then mainly through judging rightteousness, but with a bit of patience the axe skill became viable and he could kill a boar in 30 seconds. He finished the session by grinding on level 63 orcs. 40,000 XP/hour, crap by Maev's >100,000 XP/hour standards.
I'm going to focus him on a one-hander plus Seal of Vengence for now. It seems effective enough and can only get better as his axe skill improves.
When I feel like struggling I run Pooky.
Peter's Moblog
WRT Warlock: *evil chuckle* Sometimes it's just nice to be overpowered.
My warlock is 100% Affliction. She is only level 39 but she's the bomb. There's a talent in Affliction that takes the cast time of your corruption down to instant. At level 39 I have 4 instant cast offensive spells.. and I -never- run out of mana because I can life tap during combat.
Normal combat: Sent pet on mob. Cast Immolation (has a cast time.. usually time it so VW gets to mob just before Immolation goes off). Run away from mob to get max range. At the same time cast Corruption, Curse of Agony, Siphon Life and then lifetap twice. (DoT up the mob and then refills my mana bar) Turn on mob and Drain life. (refills my health bar). When the mob gets to 5-10% life, Drain Soul. (through talents in affliction drain soul also gives me mana back).
End fight at full health and full mana. If VW is low, have him feed on shadows (a skill you have to buy from the demon trainer). I've found bandages to be the best thing ever (for times when the mob dies before I'm back at full health). I've pretty much stopped using food, water, health/mana pots.
Re: fights with 2 mobs Send pet on one. Dot that one up. Redirect pet to engage mob 2. Dot that one up. Drain life on mob 1.
As affliction spec I can actually drain life from mobs faster than they can hit me. It's called "drain tanking".
If they run at you.. you can try fear juggling one while killing the other... if it's a demon/elemental you can banish one while killing the other.
Because you have instant spells you can also kite them. Thouhg that's easier when you get Curse of Exhaustion (later levels) which makes them run slower. CoE, dot, dot, dot while running.
At level 30 I was able to kite kill level 38 fire elementals for the warlock robe quest.
Re: VW At higher levels VW gets a skill to hold aggro on multiple mobs. I'm not sure what level that is. Check with your demon trainer.
I agree pet heal is pretty useless. The best way to use it is dot up the mobs.. and then do the pet heal. Ideally the mob will die before your pet does. If not.. Drain Tanking!
WRT: Soul stones I set 10 bag slots aside for soul stones. I use the addon "necrosis" to manage this. Necrosis has a setting where you can tell it that if you gather more shards than 10 it should automatically discard the additional. Very nice since I try to get a shard off every kill (for the mana regen).
No help here. More annoying since you're a gnome too. Just remember that you rule their world and you could banish them in an instance.