I spent quite a bit of time as combat in.. TBC, around L40-50. Got quite bored of it. I like having a brainless mode and a challenging mode. “Big numbers” are 13k in i350 gear, hehe.

LVLs 80-85 net you A LOT of gold. I averaged around 5-7k on all of my toons during those times. On my warrior (herbalist/miner) I netted over 12k gold going from 80-85. With that kinda cash, you can go to the ah and buy ilvl 378 BOEs and crafted PVP gear till your heart’s content and within hours of hitting 85 can be in LFR.

I reached the point after 7 or 8 LVL 85s that I didn’t even worry about gear until after I hit 85. My last few after that I wouldn’t even use gold from my other toons to buy gear/potions/anything. Content had gotten so easy that you can breeze through it without needing any help from gear or otherwise.

I had FUN doing that.

I honestly wish there was a little more gatekeeping, particularly ‘skill with particular class’ gatekeeping. I swear if I see one more group that can’t handle sylvanas because of brain damage…

But I digress.

I think ‘subverting’ the system IS the system. You could only really afford to subvert it if you had a max level character ready, or you were extremely good at playing the auction house. In essence, only experienced players -can- subvert the system.

Reading through the comments I see a lot of people leaning toward a familiar blizzard philosophy of ‘bring the player, not the class’ though in this case, ‘character.’ In all honesty, this I think rubs against me harder than anything else. When Blizzard first implimented the plan, they took a -lot- of the uniqueness of certain classes away, a lot of those special abilities only you could bring to a group (battle rez anybody? bloodlust?) and divided them among others. Not necessarily bad, but I do think in fact it limited more than it opened and took a lot of a characters identity away.

What does that have to do with this? Classes still play differently enough to be a very big issue at end game. So you can do deathwing heroics on your moonkin eh? Doesn’t mean you can do them on your rogue alt because you’re bad at combo points. Subverting the system shows you understand the game enough to get a leg up, but it doesn’t necessarily take all the training time away. Ideally, that’s what leveling would be for, and I’d love to see more challenging/skill based leveling to make sure that while not everyone at 85 would be paragon level, at least I wouldn’t cry at getting Sylvanas in the portal because it’s one of the few fights one person has a -lot- of difficulty carrying a team.

The gating is perhaps one of the few things I enjoyed about Cataclysm, it just made me a sad panda they didn’t stick to their guns on difficulty, or how the gear progression would work (anybody else remember when the idea was that valor point gear would be purple and when it became justice point gear it’d turn blue?), or character customization (path of the titans T.T)

I might be coming across as elitist, and I hope that’s not really the case, I don’t expect everyone paragon tier, but end game is end game, you’re 85, you’ve mastered all the levels required of you prior, your character, at least in game experience is frozen until the next expansion. It’d be like going to a chess tournament, to learn your opponent doesn’t know how a knight moves. Sounds funny and advantageous in this case, doesn’t it? only difference is, uninformed/unskillful player in WoW is not your opponent, but your ally. In the former example, you might be sad that you didn’t get a challenge, but it’s easy enough to win and move on. The latter is a much more complex system, if you leave, you get called a traitor, kicking is a painfully limited option (can’t kick during combat, can’t kick in a row, if the person got kicked not too long prior, they’re unkickable for a bit.) Much of this is fixed with moving with a fixed group, which I find myself doing far more than not anymore.

It’s just sad that at 85 I can actually run into a druid tank in end time who thinks casting wrath over and over again is a viable tanking strategy.

Really really sad.

Painfully sad.

Knight to kings bishop.

Check.

I’ve leveled as combat, because that was what Cassie did and enjoyed it, but I think I have repecced other styles here and there for the fun of it. Since I had all of the heirloom weapons, a pair of daggers, the two swords, etc, I felt free to mix and match as I liked.