Mists of Pandaria Realm Firsts

It's time for me to ramble on for a while about the potential realm first achievements for the coming World of Warcraft expansion. I got a lot of my information this time around from an awesome blog I've just recently discovered: Kaliope's Crafting Blog. She's gone through all the professions on the beta and given rough ideas for what it will take to max them out quickly. I'm going to throw my own thoughts in there so you're probably better off just going to read her stuff. Now, I did get three realm firsts in Cataclysm (cooking, blacksmithing, inscription) so my thoughts hopefully aren't worthless but they should definitely be taken with a grain of salt since I have no hands on experience with the beta and haven't even really played the game at all in a year and a half. So... What do we have?

Level 90
- Uh... Play a lot more than anyone else?
- I believe Sky had 25 pre-completed quests before Cataclysm launch but I don't know how big of a boost it gave him. Maybe having one quest hub's worth of dailies would be a good idea? I doubt spending a lot of time flying around makes sense but you could cash in a bunch of Molten Front dailies, hearth to Stormwind, and take the airship to Pandaria?
- I thought storing up archaeology fragments would help but it sounds like the old stuff isn't worth any experience at 85. I did it before I looked that up so I'll try and see I guess?
- I guess it makes sense to stock up on things like flasks/food/enchanting scrolls/gems so you can buff up any upgrades you get as you go?
- My gut feeling is doing every dungeon once for the quest experience will help but that spending all your time in dungeons will hurt.
- Herbalism and mining nodes are worth 2/3rds of a monster kill. That's probably good enough to make it optimal to have those two tradeskills? I wouldn't go out of my way to mine or herb but if you run by a node while doing a quest it can only help to pick it up I would think.
- A lot of caffeine or a friend to tag in on your account are pretty much mandatory I think?

Level 90 Death Knight, Druid, Hunter, Mage, Paladin, Priest, Rogue, Shaman, Warlock, Warrior
- All the same as the above except you might be on less of a clock. Maybe a nice consolation prize if you fail at first 90.

Level 90 Monk
- Has to start at level 1 so will take even longer.
- Recruit a friend works, so you can get triple experience until level 80.
- Thinking about it more... The recruitee can actually give free levels to the recruiter. So theoretically if Robb got two characters up to level 80 he could instantly level my monk up to level 80. I'd still have 10 levels to go, of course, but that's a lead that likely can't be beat. It probably takes 20ish hours to get those levels with triple experience and 60ish normally... That's a stupid lead.
- There isn't a level 80 or 85 version. Just the 90.

Challenge Conqueror: Gold
- Be the first person to beat the gold standard time in every challenge dungeon.
- Really not something you can plan on getting quickly since you'd need a group of 5 people to hit max level, get enough gear to do the challenge dungeons, and then practice enough to beat them all in really fast times.
- Since we're focusing on challenge dungeons I really want this (on maybe 5 people at once) but it won't require doing anything differently I don't think.

Pandaren Ambassador
- Get exalted with all 9 of the Panda factions.
- Rep gains from dungeons have been taken out for this expansion so you need to earn all this reputation through quests/daily quests/Farmville.
- I guess the key here is to do every single daily for all the factions every day? They removed the 25 daily quest per day cap so this seems feasible?
- There may or may not be an item (Hozen Peace Pipe) which gives 1000 rep with every faction. You may be able to buy these?
- When I saw this achievement and saw that they took dungeon rep out I immediately thought that this achievement is Sthenno's for the taking if he came back to play.

Alchemist
- Apparently alchemy is going to a random learning system. When you make something you might learn a new recipe. Some recipes are better than others for leveling... So you need to get lucky and randomly learn those ones?
- The last few points either need a bunch of mining bars or a couple SoH.
- You may be able to do this with only like 8 stacks of herbs total if you get the right recipes? And 5 stacks of ghost iron or 3 hours worth of SoH...

Angler
- Fishing can be done anywhere. Average 5.5 casts per level the whole way up. So fish for a couple hours and hope you're the luckiest!
- Can potentially store up a quest worth 2 fishing skill.
- Optimal speed is to fish right beside the trainer in a major city. Taking a few minutes to get to Pandaria will let you get some fish for cooking.

Archaeologist
- All pre-MoP stuff is worth nothing in terms of leveling.
- As you gain skill the dig sites start spawning in harder zones.
- Rogues probably have an advantage because of vanish as a result?
- Feels like you should store up 200 of each token before you start making things in the hopes that you can spawn more things in low level zones?
- Apparently it only took 2.5 hours for Kaliope to get this done on the beta.

Blacksmith
- Requires a SoH to get a recipe to finish it off.
- Can be done entirely with the base ore. 25 stacks of ore. And one Cata shield spike!
- Seems a _ton_ easier than in Cata where you had to hit level 84 to get it done thanks to phasing. Here you just need ore and to farm for a couple hours for a SoH.

Cook
- Wow, did cooking change a ton!
- There are 6 different cooking skills. Your main cooking skill is the highest of these ways.
- Recipes require a ton of ingredients. Especially vegetables. Which you can eventually grow on your farm but will be very tricky for realm first.
- To finish it off you need vendor spices that you get via cooking dailies. You can do one per way, apparently. The spices are not BoP. So whoever gets realm first here will almost certainly be borrowing spices from friends or buying them on the AH should people be selling them.
- Kaliope said it took 20 hours of solid farming to get this... Seems extreme and I bet it goes to someone with cash instead.

Enchanter
- You can convert dust and essences back and forth to streamline things a little.
- Rods are gone.
- It seems like you just need to gather a bunch of mats and then make things. Nothing tricky going on at all.
- Looks like you need a little more than 3 stacks each of dust and essences? I don't know how this compares to Cata but it sounds pretty cheap.

Engineer
- Requires either 2 SoH or a couple rare gems.
- It sounds like engineers get lots of cool things but the leveling is a huge pain.
- Sounds like it needs close to 40 stacks of ore, so a lot more than blacksmithing.

Herbalist
- Just pick a bunch of flowers.
- Make sure you get a +10 skill item (like a gnomish army knife) so you can herb things ASAP.
- Probably involves trying to survive in a high level zone?

Jewelcrafter
- Rare cuts are learned randomly this time, one per day, instead of needing 3 dailies to get one of your choice.
- Jewelcrafter only gems are found when prospecting which is a huge buff compared to needing to spend daily tokens on them!
- You probably need 10 of the same rare gem to hit max. So you need to either get lucky and buy some or prospect enough ore to get them. Maybe this takes 30 stacks of ore. Maybe it takes 50. Who knows!
- Certainly it sounds like you can get this in a short period of time if you buy enough ore.

Leatherworker
- Like blacksmithing it'll take a SoH to buy the last recipe you use.
- Will take like 17 stacks of leather to go with that SoH. Presumably you can skin that up while farming the SoH?

Medic
- Make a lot of bandages.
- Sounds like the trainer teaches everything you need. So you just need your 6 stacks of cloth and a trainer. Sounds pretty easy.

Miner
- Mine a bunch of rocks.
- Same as herbalist. Just jump off the boat, run to a hopefully player-light area and mine a ton.

Scribe
- Also runs on a discovery system. Hopefully the one glyph you learn is orange until near the cap!
- Inscription makes all of the shoulder enchants now (no more rep grind!) so presumably you can level up a bit making stuff that people will actually use.
- Of course, the new glyphs will probably be worth a fortune as well.
- Sounds like you need less than 3 stacks of ink to cap. Which is what, 15 stacks of herbs? So more than alchemy, but you don't need a SoH.

Skinner
- Uh, kill some beasts. Skin them.

Tailor
- Also needs a single SoH to buy a recipe.
- Sounds like it takes 22 stacks of cloth.
- Again has a daily cooldown that requires you to stand in a certain zone. I haven't done tailoring ever so I don't know how annoying that is, but at least it sounds like you don't need that cloth to max out.


There are also a few guild realm first's...

Grand Empress Shek'Zeer, Sha of Fear, Will of the Emperor
- Kill the end boss on heroic of a 10/25 man raid.
- Nothing to prepare for beforehand, really. Just be the best raiding guild on your server.

Guild Level 30
- Recruit every idiot you can find and convince them to do quests?

Working as a Better Team
- Get all the professions maxed out by people in the guild.
- The Cata version of this sucked because it took 3 weeks to get the reputation to get credit. That's gone now, so this should just be a race to who can get all the things first. I feel like we would have had the Cata one if the rep restriction wasn't there (we did get like 5 of the crafting realm firsts, after all).
- Someone is claiming any given character could only count once? So despite having blacksmithing and cooking on Recolada I would only satisfy one of those requirements? I don't know what to think about that.


Some of these sound interesting. I can probably stick with blacksmithing and jewelcrafting if I'm willing to buy 60 stacks of ore. How much is a stack of ore going to go for? I could realistically afford to spend almost 4k a stack, but if it's anywhere near that price I'd rather switch to mining like I did last time. But if we're talking 200g per stack? I'll just be a buyer. I don't remember the prices at Cata launch but I don't think it was much more than 100g?

That said, I do enjoy mining and with no jewelcrafting tokens to start farming immediately I don't know that I want to hold onto jewelcrafting either...

Fishing into cooking is always interesting.

Heck, it's tempting to just play my rogue for a few hours to get inscription up. Getting the daily discovery process started there could be big money! (Though I guess the same is true of jewelcrafting...)

I would like Working as a Better Team but I don't know that enough people are coming back to get that one. Especially if we need 15 distinct people to cover every profession.

And then the daily quest rep grind is intriguing as well... Options, options...