Maexyn
I threw caution to the wind and blew Maexyn's silk stocks on a tailoring levelling splurge and got it up to 180. I had been saving the silk for first aid and I'm still not sure that was the right decision. She still can't make anything useful for herself apart from disenchanting materials.
I also found some economical enchants and was able to get her enchanting up to a respectable 230 (no uldaman trips 
). The best enchant I found was the minor speed boost on boots. According to thottbot it is only an 8% speed boost but I found it to be noticable, it took the edge of the sluggish 'run' speed.
I ran her around the swamp of sorrows for a bit. The mobs there are now 35-37 and she struggled a bit, needing lots of health/mana breaks. I decided it was because I had been neglecting demon training so I took her back to Stormwind and got all available training on all four pets (imp/voidwalker/succubus/fel hunter). There was lots there, including a new rank of lash-of-pain for the Succubus.
I then decided to take her to upper Stranglethorn Vale as I thought it would be a lot easier and it definitely was, she was ruthless. She got into a full-on farming groove and was pretty efficient at it too. When the mobs are higher level they need two or three drain lifes to kill them and this eats into the mana reserves. Lower level mobs need as little as one drain life before shifting to drain soul and this can be sustained for many kills.
I read a tip about always using lowest rank drain soul simply to exploit the mana it gives back on death but I found that if the DoT's run out this can mean that the mob takes a ridiculously long time to die, especially if it is a runner. I switched back to rank 2 drain soul and this didn't hurt efficiency as I didn't need to spend mana on a debilitating final drain life that I'd interrupt with a drain soul, I could use just the drain soul to take it out.
I used the Fel Hunter a bit against the STV Medicine men as it is supposed to be good against casters. However, it didn't have it's spell interrupting talent, only a buff eating talent so it wasn't great. I'm not sure if the buff eating talent did anything, the new patch 2.4 combat log generates a ridiculous amount of information and I couldn't find it mentioned amongst all the noise (apparently it is only there to announce to the world that a nearby hunter has laid a trap). The Fel Hunter was ok but against these mobs it didn't really matter which demon I used. I still haven't tried the Imp, someone left a comment here about using the imp as a mana tank but Maex doesn't get the spell for grabbing the Demon's mana till level 40.
She dinged 36 so I trained everything, including demons, and also gave her a respec. I moved her points out of Nightfall, since I never used it, and put then into a more powerful Curse of Agony which is a mainstay. She rarely uses shadowbolt, affliction ftw.
Maesyn
Maesyn tackled Wetlands, simple gnoll-killing quests. She tackled it in Caster/Cat/Bear form, mainly pulling gnolls from the camps as caster, then killing them as cat. Those camps are a bit volatile so she trod carefully. I'm still a bit disappointed by the Bear's tanking capabilities, it struggles with two mobs. I've put heal buttons on the Bears action bars and they work nicely, they automatically switch it to caster. I have the same three heal buttons on the Caster, Bear and Cat action bars.
Maesyn dinged 22 and got the Cat's backstab ability, she can prowl up behind something and open a fight with a 220% damage hit. Sounds like fun. Got feral charge fot the bear too but haven't tried it yet. I don't know if charging, changing to cat and then backstabbing is viable, whether the cat has enough energy after a switch. Must give that one a go.
Pookypoo
Since I respecced him retribution a week or two ago I haven't run pooky but since none of the girls had 100% rest bonus I decided to take him for a spin as I was curious to see whether recent patches had made him viable. Back to Terokkar forest and my paladin skills were very rusty, I had even forgotten about the bubble.
He needed mana breaks every three fights which was still very annoying. However, once I got used to him again, the fights didn't take an unbearably long time. His attack vector evolved into:
- Judgement of crusader
- Seal of Command
- Spam Crusader Strike
The Crusader Strikes were ok, although they often seemed to miss, especially when they would have ended a fight. They usefully kept the Judgement of Crusader active so I didn't have to worry about refreshing it all the time.
Once the mobs were down to 30-40% health I found a very nice combo to take them out:
- Stun
- Judgement of Crusader
- Crusader Strike
- Hammer of Wrath
This was normally curtains, especially if Hammer of Wrath critted for 1500 (Maezyn was getting 1400 Aimed Shot crits at level 53 so I'm not impressed). If it wasn't curtains the mob had so little health that I only had to wait 3.5 seconds for the next two-handed swing, although that did seem like an eternity.
I'm going to have to try some mana-efficiency with him:
- run with Blessing of Wisdom rather than Blessing of Might.
- make up for BoM with buff foods, (cooked by Maevyn: why level more than one cooking alt?).
- after a fight use bandages to heal: faster than eating and uses no mana.
I bought Pook some new boots and got Maexyn to enchant them with the minor speed boost. Again it made a not-totally-negigible difference, running around is 8% less tedious.
Pooky is 2.5 hours from level 65 and I'm going to go for it. Here's my latest project:
- buy him a two-handed axe and get the skill up to optimum (about 20 ticks)
-
drop his crappy armoursmith specialisation (that cost me two hundred bars of thorium grrr) and take up Master Axesmith (which will cost 50g
but it's 100g from level 66).
- farm Motes of Air in Nagrand until I scream.
- buy Primal Air's in Auction House
- get him to level 65.
- make him a Skyforged Great Axe for about 10% more dps and a healthy chunk of crit and attack power. Follow the link and look at that thing, it's a must have.
I found a site that uses the armory and the WoW models to generate pictures of your characters. This, should it work, is how pooky is looking:
He got a plate lupine helm in a quest, it has lots of crit but is the most stupid looking thing because it doesn't cover his beard. This picture should update as he gears up, so keep looking for the Skyforged Axe to appear! The model for Maezyn has her horns all wrong but I guess its primary purpose is for posing with your epix.
Conclusion
Four characters and I love them all. I won't be able to get them all to 70 before the level cap is raised to 80. Will I ever get them all to the cap? Five level 80's! How to pay for five epic fliers? Can I do it? Stay tuned...
Peter's Moblog
I hate the new combat log. As soon as swstats was updated to 2.4 i went back to using SW_UniLog (part of swstats, elitistjerks.com/f43/t12008-sw_unilog/ ) which is filterable, searchable and very very fast. I don't use swstats for stats though, i use Recount ( which is superior )
The buff eating talent would be awesome against the STV Medicine men because it can eat the renew they put on themselves.
Thanks for that picture generator, i'll pass that onto my guildies :P