More Holy Downtime.

So I got Ulushnar, my new Draenei Paladin up to lvl 32 last night and I'm going to continue grinding levels with him as much as I can atm. I am well aware of my own propensity to become bored with levelling, so I've employed a couple of tricks to keep moving.

1. I give myself deadlines and goals. This can be as simple as "I will get to level 32 before I sleep tonight" or a vague as "I want to be questing in Outland by the middle of April" or "I want to tank Karazhan by the end of May". Most of these goals aren't make or break, but they do keep me aware of the bigger picture whilst I'm working up the enthusiasm to kill another Turtle.

2. I used a Levelling Guide. This has been something of a revelation. It tells you what quests to do and where to get the best XP/hour whilst playing, cutting down on wasted time running back and forth. For example, I had to kill Turtles for a quest last night. It reminded me to save the meat from them since I can use it for a later quest in a different zone, which prevents me having to grind the turtles there. I wouldn't reccomend the guide to a first timer though, since it really doesn't leave you much chance to immerse yourself in the lore of the world, or really "smell the roses" as it were. However, as someone

Talent spec has proven to be interesting. Most people reccomend Paladins focus on the Retribution talent tree whilst levelling, since that gives them the best damage. After playing around a bit, I've decided to instead focus my talents in the Protection tree, which as the name suggests, is more defensively-focussed. So instead of running around with a large 2-handed weapon, I'm instead running around with a sword and shield. Whilst my damage output is often a fair bit less, I'm able to reduce a lot of the incoming damage quite considerably. I've often seen myself ending a fight with 3-4 opponents with a nearly-full health bar.

The single-worst thing about levelling a Paladin is the lack of decent gear for them before about level 60. Whilst we can (and often do) use similar gear to warriors (lots of Strength, Stamina and Armor), we use Mana to power our abilities, which often do some magical damage. As a result we also need Intellect (to give us some mana to play with) and Spell Damage/Healing (to boost our heals and our ability to hurt things). Luckily, when I get Ulushnar to Outland, this problem will be sorted to some extent, since there's a lot of quest items and instance drops that mitigate this problem successfully.

And I've only got another 28 levels until I go there! :)