World of Warcraft: Preexpansion Things To Do

When I started playing World of Warcraft again a couple weeks ago I had a few things I wanted to try to get done before the expansion hit next week. The three main ones were to level mining back up on my death knight, hit max level with my rogue, and complete the crazy legendary cloak quest that dominated the entirety of the last expansion.

I needed to level mining (again) because I'd dropped it for the better challenge dungeon bonuses provided by engineering. They got rid of all profession specific bonuses in this coming expansion so there's not really any pressing reason to keep engineering around. I like having a gathering profession to go with a crafting profession because sometimes I like running around in a circle picking stuff off the ground and I like to avoid the insane material cost at the start of an expansion when leveling my blacksmithing. They may have taken the realm first achievements out but I'm still going to level blacksmithing pretty early on. I'll probably be able to make a fair amount of cash selling pvp gear to people as soon as they hit max level. This took some time but was easy and fun and is now done.

I wanted to level my rogue because he's my main way of making money. He's my glyph maker and I want to be able to make any new glyphs and the new Darkmoon Faire cards as soon as possible. That'll probably require farming up some herbs on my own and he'll need to be max level to pull that off. This also took some time, and was less fun because a lot of quests are annoying for whatever spec my rogue is (AMBUSH!), but it was still fairly fun and is also now done.

The legendary cloak quest now looks like a pipedream. I missed a week or two of raid resets in the middle thanks to being hacked and moving and not having enough gear to pug the newest raid zone and that's set me back too far. This isn't something I can just throw more time at since it requires drops from raid zones and I can only try to get a drop once from each boss each week. I didn't really want the cloak other than it wasn't going to be possible to get it when the expansion hits. Pugging the raids was fun, and I may still keep trying in the hopes of getting super lucky and going on a streak of lucky drops, but I've pretty much given up on this happening.

So what now? I can level more alts to get access to more professions? (I miss having a jewelcrafter, for example.) I can farm up achievements by running raid zones from previous expansions? (I assume I can solo them now.) Apparently Blizzard is pretty serious about continuing to add actual Pokemon content to the game with crazy boss fights and the like... So maybe I should get on that? I've been playing it a bit while waiting for raid queues to pop and it's been pretty fun.