The Insta-90 Choice is… Death Knight

I went out and pre-ordered Warlords of Draenor because… well… because I wanted to play with the whole insta-90 thing and I didn’t want to just lay out $60 for the pleasure with nothing else to show for it.  At least I have the expansion queued up for some time this year.  This is what you get with your insta-level:

• Boost to level 90
• 150 gold
• 4 Embersilk (22-slot) bags
• A stack of 20 food items
• Full set of spec-appropriate Item Level 483 (blue-quality) gear
• If a boosted character was already level 60 or above, their existing Primary Professions and First Aid are bumped up to level 600
• A faction-specific flying mount—a traditional Wind Rider for Horde or Gryphon for Alliance
• Artisan flying—that’s one rank below max flight speed
• Northrend, Kalimdor/Eastern Kingdoms, and Pandaria regional flying skills trained

I chose my level 68 Death Knight so as to get the primary professions bump as well.  I pulled the trigger and ended up with a level 90, fully equipped DK.

Tokarev, Level 90

Of course, that list of what you get is general.  The details can be… interesting.

I didn’t bother to read any descriptions about the process or watch the video, I just did it and found myself standing at the flight point on Timeless Isle all geared up and with 102 free bag slots.  The starting location was no doubt a prompt to go get some even better gear, which I promptly did along with finding a crystal of insanity. (The cave was full of people doing the same.  I’d love to know how many fresh 90s there were this week.)

But 102 free bags slots?  Out of 104 total?  Where did all my stuff go?

Oh, it was in the mail.  Blizzard unburdened me of all my past worldly possessions and set them aside in a locker for me.  I guess, of possible options, that was a decent choice.  At least once I figured it out.

And on the unexpected front, I did get my primary professions boosted to 600, giving me max skill mining and jewel crafting.  What I did not get was any of the recipes along the way.  And the price of getting them… just the Pandaria ones that you can train… is a lot more than the 150 gold then give you.  Fortunately, I already had a pile of gold on my DK, so I trained that up, though I still have to go out in the world and find a good portion of the top tier recipes as drops.

Not the worst thing in the world, but it does put the question of the target audience in mind.  If you were a brand new player enticed in by the insta-90 scheme and only had that 150 gold… well… I guess you wouldn’t get the profession boost so it wouldn’t matter.

Now I just have to figure out how to play my DK.  I had been leveling him up as a tank, so blood spec, which was easy enough in The Burning Crusade.  But for the boost I opted for frost DPS spec, since you have to know what you’re doing at level cap to tank.  The insta-90 process gave me the choice of spec.  Now I have a dual wielding DPS DK and have to figure out skills and glyphs and what not.  But at least I know where to go and what to do with him.  He is already stuck into faction with the Tillers and the Cloud Serpents.  We will see if I have the fortitude to bring another melee DPS into LFR.

So far, so good I guess.

I also plan to take advantage of the freebie insta-85 boost over in EverQuest this weekend.  We only have until the 26th for that.  I will be interested to see how the two compare.