Gundther Goes to Northrend

Waaay back in January Svenn posted a poll as to which class to level next; Warrior won and Gundther was promoted from banker to alt (“once a tank - always a tank” I suppose). As Inno alluded to in his guest post, Svenn has been quietly leveling Gundther between raids and real life commitments…not quite the fast grind to 80 he envisioned back in Jan.

Anyways, this being the 7th toon to make the march to 80, Svenn decided to level a bit differently. A lot of the inspiration for this came from Vidyala, frequent commenter and mastermind behind the Pugging Pally. While Gundther hasn’t limited himself solely to PuGing instances, he’s done far more than he would have otherwise.

At 40 he dual specced to Prot as promised, but quickly found that tanking Fury in defensive stance was more than enough for the pre-outlands instances. Having skipped all but Ramps and Blood Furnace as far as instances go in Outlands, Gundther was ready to jump back into the que upon hitting Northrend. Unfortunately, the full set of craftable cobalt tanking gear that Svenn made, required him to be level 70 to equip. 68-70 flew past and, armed with the quests for UK and Nexus, Gundther entered the que as a no kidding tank for the first time.

I would love to say that, that 1st run was flawless but, the truth of the matter is unfamiliarity with the warrior’s tanking tools made for a few silly mistakes. Even so, it wasn’t that bad (having tanked on the Pally, druid, dk, and even on the ‘lock makes for pretty good muscle memory as far as setting up pulls, etc.). It is a good thing I like UK, as the random dungeon finder proceeded to que me for it 5 more times in a row. In fact, all of lvl 70 was spent in UK; Gundther isn’t sure how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie-pop, but he is sure it takes running UK 6 times to ding 71.

With the new baby keeping me busy, I have had limited play time, so Gundther has been queing for a random each day (hence the UK 6times) which has pretty much been the extent of my online time. This has made for some slow leveling, but has the advantage of piling up badges at 2 a day. As well as netting some fancy blue gear.

So, Gundther is lvl 72 now, sitting on a heap of rested xp and it will probably stay that way for the foreseeable future, creeping along 1 random dungeon at a time (at least until Finn starts a decent sleep schedule). For far more entertaining stories involving leveling through LFG be sure to check out Vid over at the Pugging Pally and remember, “always look on the light side of LFG!”