Before the Mists lift.

As we move toward the end of Cataclysm and the start of Mists of Pandaria, it’s time to get a few things sorted out prior to launch in a couple of months (guesstimate, of course). There are already umpteen posts out there about how to run down the clock in an old expansion and prepare for the next one, so I won’t repeat that here.

What I will tell you is what I’m going to be up to, as there might be some people out there who want to get involved in similar things and I see no reason why would couldn’t do a bit of spotting for each other. :)

In any event, I’ve pretty much cleaned out all my bags and liquidated everything that I’m not going to be using again. My toons have the professions I’d like them to have maxed out, so I may as well make some gold out of it. To date, I’ve managed to rack up about 11k gold just by selling old junk that was gathering dust; if that doesn’t hit you with the potential of an auction clear out, nothing will.

I’ll be needing some gold.

As already hinted, I’ll have to get a reasonable sum of cash so that I can mow down some of the costly achievements and have a head start on any potential legendary-weapon gathering I might get involved in. The thing is, I’m crap at farming gold. Well… Not “crap”, just “not interested”. Truthfully, there aren’t that many things that I actually want gold for outside of repairs and enchants, and I’ve never really understood why there are people out there with multiple toons sat on a million each.

What are you going to use it for?

That said, I could do with a cheeky 100k or so because the last of my “General” achievements all cost ludicrous amounts of gold. The mammoth from Mei Francis, the hog, the pet and mount meta achievements… Added up, I’m looking at somewhere along the lines of 30/40k gold. Sadly, I’m not really that clued in to how to make it. I suppose I could go out and farm ores to sell, but how much would that really net me? Probably not much. Dailies are about 200g a day and I hate them. So, erm, no. Five-mans are boring me to death now, so it’s doubtful I’ll be spamming them to liquidate justice points.

I’m whinging about this, of course, but it’s because I don’t want to scour the Internet looking for probably time-consuming gold making guides (or, worse, real cash demands). Added to that, I suspect those who work the economy or auction house are already sat on 20/25k before doing so – I’m on about 6k I think. Maybe I can farm and sell to double that up, then start looking at playing the AH for the rest.

We’ll see.

Current raid content.

Aye, I do want to wrap this expansion up properly. I’ve done practically no Dragon Soul on heroic because it’s a poor raid, but I reckon my guild could get me through it without too much stress. I really want to finish off Ragnaros on heroic, given the hassle it caused me while working on it; but I do fear that the nerfbat and gearing up will combine to make the event a bit underwhelming. Also, I don’t get where all this love comes from for the encounter.

I’ll go on record saying I hated it.

Fifteen minutes into the fight, one bit of lag or slight misjudgement from anyone, it’s rez and rebuff time as a Geyser goes up. I actually think that, in many ways, heroic Ragnaros contributed to my hugely negative feelings toward the game at that time. We were raiding it 25-man at the time, with geared and practiced players starting to “have plans” on raid nights all of a sudden. Alas, the new players we got in were nowhere near the quality required for such a tight encounter and that just led to each night being an exercise in failure management.

The worst part was that a lot of the new recruits weren’t really to blame. There were just starting to raid at the highest level, weren’t really geared for the hardest boss in the game’s history, and hadn’t put the time in that most of the raid had. It just made for a pretty caustic environment all told, and I think loads of people will know of what I speak.

Anyway, I’m off topic. I wanna get this expansion’s content done, including heroic Ragnaros. I think I can do that.

Achievements.

That really only leaves achievements, of which I have a decent haul already. I’m approaching the 12k mark as things stand, and I can easily surpass that prior to the expansion launch. But then again, that’s not really a challenge. I need to make failure possible!

I’ve a ton of WotLK raid achievements to do, pretty much from every single tier. I’m not sure how many can be easily managed depending on how many players I can get to join me, but that little lot is probably worth upwards of 500 points in and of itself. From the five-man perspective, I can wrap them all up tonight – I just have the one from Jin’do to do, as well as “Eclipse” from the Archbishop in Hour of Twilight and then I’m done.

Most of my other panes are doing well, with the notable exception of peeveepee. I have some fishing ones to round out, but they’re notoriously dependent upon RNG and as such might see them being skipped (I’ve no idea how much time I’ve spent on them already). I have about 200 points worth to land from quests in Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, bearing in mind I did Loremaster during WotLK itself. I could do, say, a zone or two every night and be done relatively quickly.

I’m thinking of doing Frostbitten and the other “find all the rares” in Outland that I can’t recall the name of. Depending on who else is doing them, they could be really easy or really hard so we’ll have to see. I’m in Northrend on a daily basis anyway as I desperately try and land the blue proto-drake from Skadi the Ruthless, so finding an AddOn that pings a rare mob shouldn’t add too much to my list of hassles.

I could even fish up a turtle while I wait!

Yeah, got to love that two birds with one stone thing.

Thinking about it, I’m not sure if I should bother with PvP. I’d need to farm a bit more gear if I wanted to give myself a decent chance of getting a good chunk of them, and I’m honestly not sure I can be bothered. I could spend a weekend in each battleground and farm out the ones I almost have, I suppose, but do I enjoy PvP enough to do it? Probably not.

Besides. With my gold-farming, mount chasing, questing, fishing and raiding to do prior to Mists of Pandaria, it won’t be easy finding the time. Meh, we’ll see. I suppose I don’t want to leave old BG achievements lying around when a new expansion lands.

Let’s set a target then, shall we?

Let’s go for 12.5k nerd points prior to the next expansion and consider it a success should I get there. With Diablo 3 and SW:TOR requiring some of my time, I reckon that’s achievable without absolutely busting a gut.

And I think that’s about it. If I get through all that, I’ll consider myself ready to rock.

What are your plans for stuff to do prior to Pandaria?