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+--- Thread: Just Dinged 90! What to do? (/thread-14214.html)
Just Dinged 90! What to do? - Bolty - 10-11-2012
I posted this in the Stormrage forum, realized it got longer than I was originally planning, and figured I'd dump it out here too for anyone else to read.
Help! I just turned level 90 and I don't know where to start!
A dinky guide by Bolty, Super Nerd™
The reason this guide is helpful at all is because unlike in Cataclysm, there's literally too much to do in Mists of Pandaria once you hit level cap unless you're playing 10 hours a day. You have to pick and choose what to work on. If you're the OCD type, this is a nightmare. If you're able to handle logging off every day leaving a lot of possibilities still on the table, you'll do great!
Here's what you want to do in MoP once you've dinged 90, depending on what your focus is.
Very first necessary things to do:
1) Learn Pandaren flying. This will be at your temple, centrally located in Pandaria in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms. This zone is unlocked by completing a questline at the Temple of the White Tiger in Kun-Lai summit, if you missed it while leveling. Walk on up to the flight "vendor" there and purchase your flying license. Yay!
2) Launch your fireworks. You'll get some in the mail as a congrats for hitting 90. Why not celebrate?
From here on, you'll notice that there are just a ridiculous number of daily quests, quest pointers, and other miscellany. If you have no job, you can theoretically get to it all every day, but otherwise, pick your poison.
If your focus in the game is PvP, go pick up all the pieces of the Contender's Set that apply to your class/spec. Professions make these, and you can find them on the Auction House if you don't have a friend of the appropriate profession to dump all your excess materials on. Then start queuing up Battlegrounds to gain honor for the Dreadful Gladiator's set. The path is pretty straightforward and easy.
If your focus in the game is raiding, go start working right away on the Golden Lotus faction. This is the faction of Pandaren in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, and they'll offer you a range of daily quests to halt the Mogu invasion of their sacred land. You have to get this faction to Revered in order to unlock dailies and rep grinding for two other factions, the Shado-Pan and the August Celestials, so it's a "gateway" rep that you want to work on as soon as you can. These reps all offer you ways to spend the Valor Points that you'll accumulate via dailies, dungeon runs, and raiding for ilvl 489 epic gear upgrades.
The other faction you may find useful to start grinding up is the Tillers at Halfhill in the Valley of the Four Winds, so that you can "play Farmville" and start improving your farm for crop planting. That's important because cooking plays a big role in MoP - you cannot get the best food buffs in the game via feasts anymore, so there will be pressure on all raiders to bring their best food they personally made. The crops you plant will go a long way towards raising the cooking specialty of your choice matching your raiding role(s).
If you have time still, and are hungry for more dailies, the other Valor-gear grind rep is the Klaxxi - the fun-loving bug-men from the Dread Wastes. Building up that faction's rep will unlock access to other ilvl 489 epic items at revered level.
Note: Exalted reputation from any of these factions grants you merely "cosmetic" rewards (mounts, transmog gear, etc). Don't go crazy trying to max out Klaxxi once you're at revered and then miss out on building up Shado-Pan rep because you're out of time, for example. From a purely gear-reward stance, stop building these reps at revered and focus on others until you have everything you're looking for. Go back and build up to exalted if you're OCD like me and have the time.
For gearing, try some scenarios. Scenarios are essentially instanced 3-player quests, and you can do them via the LFD interface. The Arena of Annihilation scenario is popular because it's the fast-track for an ilvl 450 blue weapon and is a great place to start.
Try to get into a Sha of Anger group. This world boss spawns regularly in Kun-Lai Summit, and you probably saw him a few times while leveling. If you're in a raid for a kill and your raid got the tag, you'll score a bag with a chance at epic loot like in the LFR system. Hang out in Kun-Lai and you'll see groups forming over general chat. You can only get loot off this boss one time per week, so don't feel pressure to kill it over and over. There's a 2nd world boss - Galleon in the Valley of the Four Winds, but his spawn rate is very low and your odds of catching this guy are pretty slim. Not worth waiting for.
Once you're at ilvl 440, you can queue for heroic dungeon runs. Don't let the word "heroic" fool you - these dungeons are much more like the WotLK heroic dungeons than the Cataclysm ones. In other words, they're pretty forgiving, and you'll gear up fast running these either through the LFD interface or with friends. The goal here would be to get decked out in ilvl 463 blues dropped by the bosses all over these instances. This will get you into LFR raids for shots at some epic drops. If you're having trouble meeting the ilvl 440 requirement for heroic dungeons, don't forget about the Contender's Set gear mentioned earlier - it's "pvp gear," yes, but the penalties incurred for pvp gear are much less than in previous expansions. You'll basically just miss out on some secondary stats using this gear compared to the "pve" versions, so it's not a big deal to grab a few pieces just to boost you up for dungeon runs.
What about all the other stuff? There's a bunch of other things to play with, of course, if you have some additional time. The Order of the Cloud Serpent faction in the Jade Forest's Arboretum can be developed so that you can ride cloud serpents. You'll want to do this rep eventually because many of the cool mount rewards for raiding meta achievements are cloud serpents. If you're not eventually Exalted with the Order of the Cloud Serpent, you won't be able to ride them. Total bummer.
The Anglers faction is a group of fishermen off the south coast of Kasarang Wilds that is a great way to raise your fishing skill without having to "grind" it. Doing the dailies there gives you fishing skillups for quest turn-ins as well as some possible fishing skillups from actually doing the quests. There's some fun fishing-related rewards as you gain rep with them, too.
The Lorewalkers faction, located in the central temple between the two faction ones in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, is one you can max to exalted in one evening if you wish. You have to fly around Pandaria reading up on Lore objects hidden away in corners of the continent. Find them all and you'll hit exalted, gaining access to buy their flying red cloud "disc" mount. By far, this is the easiest faction to max out and is pretty much just for fun to learn more about Pandaren lore. Pro-tip: the "Lorewalker" mod from Curse makes this a pretty simple connect-the-dots task.
For more goofing off, there's Pet Battles - Pokemon-style casual gameplay that will start with your faction's capital city pet trainer. This is something that can seriously suck away all your playtime if you let it, so watch out!
As you complete dailies, you'll notice that you're piling up these "Lesser Charm" thingies. 90 of those can be turned in every week at your faction's temple in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, and you'll receive 3 Elder Charms for your efforts. Each Elder Charm grants you the ability to perform a "bonus roll" when a raid boss dies in LFR, normal, or heroic difficulty. You'll see this as a pop-up on your screen the moment the boss dies. Using a coin gives you a random chance to score loot that the boss is capable of dropping, even if the boss didn't drop that particular piece when it died. This is cool! You can have a max of 10 Elder Charms on you (the cap), so stockpiling is of limited use. It's recommended to burn them up on the highest difficulty raid you plan to get to. So, if you're expecting to play normal mode raids, I'd recommend you don't use the Elder Charms on LFR-mode raid kills...unless you're capped on Charms, of course.
Okay! Anything I miss? The key is to decide what your focus is and do those first. Trying to do everything will burn you out super fast.