Level 80 Recap for 2009

Last year, Dougal, Velocity and Khitsune all made level 80... but I never got around to posting an update, so here it is.

When I switched Dougal to BM, I originally had been thinking it would be neat to have a (solo PVE) hunter without a tenacity pet, I guess mainly to see if it could work. I tried speccing a silithid to fill the role of tank, and things went well enough until I started solo'ing Stratholme; I was repeating the 45 minute Baron run in hopes of getting Rivendare's Deathcharger, and so I wanted to be able to take down as many mobs as possible in one go... well, my silithid and SB were fine for maybe 5-10 mobs, but that was about it, unless I was being super careful. So I finally decided to give in to tradition and get myself a tenacity pet.

Enter Tremor the cthulhoid nightmare worm from Northrend - as an exotic he fit with the rest of Dougal's stable of uber-animals since I'd dropped Frenzy the purple hyena (SB, chimaera and silithid), and not having tried a worm before it was a nice opportunity to acquire one.

Returned to Strat for more grinding and sure enough, I was now able to solo twice as many mobs as before thanks to the worm's toughness and especially thanks to its thunderstomp... lesson learned! After that, the Baron runs went a lot faster, and within a few days I had myself a nice new skeletal nightmare steed to complete Dougal's Tim Burtonesque spook theme.

Velocity was upgraded to dual spec when patch 3.3 introduced the new spirit beast Arcturis, and I got him last month. Velocity has since leveled Cloud up to 80; I speced him to be as close to tenacity as a ferocity pet can get (charge and boar's swiftness are fine but I refuse to get him dash, just seems goofy to have it on something that big).

When trying to decide on a good lore backdrop for Cloud, I checked out Native American mythology and found an interesting bit pertaining to bears - in some NI cultures it was believed that when a bear hibernates, its spirit leaves its body to wander the woods during the winter months... so I decided Cloud was an unusually curious and precocious bear who lost track of time and wandered too far - by the time Spring came, he had forgotten where his body was, and it died before he could find his way back to it, leaving him stuck in spirit form, wandering mournfully until he was taken in by a kindly night elf with an affinity for spirit beings...

Velocity's other notable achievement was to acquire a pet voidwalker - during a hiatus in Dalaran she gradually located the various tomes of arcane magic tucked away in bookshelves around the city, and from their pages, pieced together the incantation that would teleport her to the study of Archmage Vargoth, who rewarded her with a Kirin Tor Familiar.

The Familiar is quite large for a noncombat pet, and IMO looks pretty cool alongside her frosty themed gorilla Wendigo...

Nowadays Velocity is staying at Brunnildar Village doing the daily for Reins of the White Polar Bear - after trying this for the better part of a year I have a lifetime supply of yeti cheese and snowballs but no reins. Try, try again...

Last but certainly not least we have Khitsune; I have spent more time on her than any other single character, and as a result she ended up with some pretty decent gear and achievements; after making exalted with Argent Crusade she received the epic chest gear, a pony for her Argent squire, and gained access to the heirloom vendor at the Argent Tournament, and after some rep grinding in Stratholme (having a portable bank came in handy there!) she pushed her rep with Argent dawn up to exalted as well, gaining her the Argent Champion title.

She also made exalted with Oracles, gaining herself an epic grinding trinket (she no longer runs out of mana unless I try really hard to make it happen), and as a final bonus she was lucky enough to get the Reins of the Green Proto-Drake on the second try!

Since then I have been continuing to do the Argent dailies with Khitsune when I can get around to it; my hope is to build up enough badges to equip a new generation of toons with self-scaling twink gear when Cataclysm comes out; currently I've reserved names for a goblin hunter and a tauren paladin.