Status update!

My monk finally blew past my paladin and she's lvl 90 now. So that ended the long, painful grind of leveling and begun the long, painful grind for gear and rep.

While there were definitely some good gear out there to be gotten from completing quest chains, that's not me. I'm all about instances, so I slammed those and finally, this past week, got every piece of gear at ilvl 450 and above. The only one that's not above is my alchemist trinket.

That's good enough to get back into some raiding, so this week with the guild, I jumped into some LFR and got 4 new pieces of gear out of it. It was pretty nice to raid again, even if LFR has serious nerfs and most of the mechanics can be safely ignored. Either way, our raid lead explained many of the mechanics as we went along and some of them were pretty interesting. So I look forward to encountering them in a real raid.

In the meantime, I've been helping guildies get leveled and geared. One of my real life friends is still struggling to 90, so I spent several hours blowing her through instances. Another one was trying to get sufficient gear to make it into that LFR group, so we spent the better part of two days doing nothing but heroics and I picked me up a pretty decent set of healing gear along the way. The two of us switched off between tanking and healing (both monks), and I realized something embarrassing: I'd leveled all the way to 90, spent several weeks at that level and had never once realized that I had a ranged AOE threat building ability. It completely slipped by me that I had Dizzying Haze. I'd always charged in and used Keg Smash and Spinning Crane Kick. Never had a problem.

After hitting 90, I also went ahead and leveled my Alchemy/Herbalism. I've gotten my cooking up, and still haven't really started Archaeology, First Aid, or Fishing.

The transmogrification feature is also new since I quit. I hadn't really looked at it too much, but most of the helmets for monks are UGLY to put it nicely. So I finally did get a nice looking Samurai style helmet I like. I need to sit down and really explore some other options.

I did go back last night and start playing my original character, the priest. I have a few friends that play alliance, so it would be nice to be able to play with them, so I think I'll finish up that character at some point.

Random fact: I still have a level 5 rogue that was the first character ever created on my account. I didn't create it. My ex-girlfriend did when she was getting addons configured for me. I've never deleted it. She long since quit playing, but when I popped on my priest, she was online. We chatted for a bit. Can't believe that was 5 years ago. Can't believe I still have the little rogue.