It’s December 7th, which means Cataclysm is here! Cataclysmic!
There’s tons of new content, so what should you do first?
If you’re not planning on starting a new character (and who are we kidding, everyone’s gonna at least try out a new goblin or worgen), then there are a few things you should keep in mind when exploring the new content.
Guild Perks!
Some of the new guild perks are pretty sweet. The first one for example grants 5% more xp from killing monsters and killing quests. You get this for just being in your guild.
How do you get guild perks? That’s easy. Guilds are like characters now, and they gain XP based on the actions of its members:
- XP earned by members from quests (regular ones or daily quests). This is a direct XP gain for your guild as well (1XP gained by a character means 1 XP for the guild).
- Killing dungeon and raid bosses in a guild group (i.e. 80% must be from your guild).
- Certain guild achievements (like achieving mastery in one of every crafting profession for example, or for fishing in 10,000 pools).
In addition to the nifty guild perks (which are pretty nifty in of themselves), your guild can also unlock access to certain new items (including new craftable stuff useful for groups and xp boosting heirloom items that occupy new slots-head/cloak). Once your guild unlocks an item’s availability, your character still needs to have enough reputation with your own guild to buy it (which should be no problem if you’re playing normally).
Just keep in mind that your guild XP is capped at 6.2 million a day. This is to encourage smaller guilds in competing with larger guilds. If you’re in a smaller guild, you might want to maximize your guild XP by alternating between mains and alts so that XP gain is just around that 6.2 million daily cap. But I don’t think it’s a big deal either way. Smaller guilds will just take slightly longer to reach max guild xp than larger guilds.
But Cedric, enough about guild stuff, what should I do first?
- Set your hearthstone at Orgrimar/Stormwind. For level 80, your starting quests will take place there. Dalaran is now just another city now that its best feature, its portals, are now gone.
- As soon as you get to the city, you will immediately get a quest marker. Click on this and a picture will appear of an NPC asking to meet with you. Finish this short quest (which has a cool cut scene).
- Go to the jobs board (or whatever you want to call that thing in front of your faction leader’s place that offers quests). There will be two options, one to go to Hyjal and one to Vashj’ir. Accept them both.
- Before leaving the city, GO TRAIN. Train your old world flight skill (200gp), any class skills you missed, and your professions.
- DON’T FORGET ARCHEOLOGY!
- For the two quests, I would choose Hyjal first. If you follow the quest chain, you’ll get to a point where you see a gnome standing next to an orc. He’ll offer you a quest to go check out if Ragnaros has indeed risen and wants you to accompany him in his digging drill machine. Accept, click on the digging drill to the left of his platform and you’ll be transported outside the new Blackrock Caverns Instance.
- Grats! Now you can que up for Blackrock Caverns! Oh, I forgot to mention. You need to physically discover new instances now before you can que up for them (with RFC and Stockades being the exception for the opposite factions).
