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And so we arrive at Northrend, able to take the quests and explore the new zones. We've talked about faction rewards and instance gearing for shamans in Northrend before, and for the most part that still holds true. Here's a look back at the posts about the various five man instances and zone rewards:
Dragonblight and Azjol-Nerub
Grizzly Hills, Zul'Drak, and the Troll instances
CoT Stratholme and Halls of Stone/Lightning
Utgarde Keep, the Oculus (spelled correctly, but really, if I misspelled it what's Sacco gonna do, arm wrestle me? We all know how that would go) and the heroic versions of Utgarde Pinnacle/The Nexus.
The only real changes in terms of 5 man instances are the introduction of Trial of the Champion and Heroic TotC, and to my astonishment I've never done a gear list for shamans from TotC. That really is kind of astonishing. It's possible I simply lost track since I was in the middle of a vast discussion of Ulduar gear when TotC was on the horizon, but it's still a pretty big oversight. With another set of new five mans dropping alongside the Icecrown raid in patch 3.3, TotC/Heroic TotC 5 are instances any new 80 should be running to get geared up in anticipation of 3.3. So we'll talk about that gear today.
Before we do though: if you have a main who can pick it up for you, get the Tome of Cold Weather Flight as soon as you can. If you can get it, it makes the starting areas much quicker and gives you the option to cherry pick out quest hubs faster than before. (This is doubly true if you have access to an epic flyer but even the upgraded regular flyers are faster than regular epic land mounts and can also skip right over obstacles.) With this ability, doing both starting zones (which I highly recommend even if you have heirloom armor and weapons you won't replace... remember, all that stuff vendors or DE's and you can still use the big XP for the chains) has never been easier, and that means that you'll be more likely to be max level before you start Icecrown and the Storm Peaks, meaning that all those quests will be gold in your pocket. With both heirloom chest and shoulders and some luck on rested you can easily be 80 before finishing up Zul'Drak, especially if you do both Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord.
Questing in Northrend is about as well designed as questing has ever been in WoW. The designers learned from their experience with classic and BC, and as a result, I can't imagine why anyone but the most die hard would entirely avoid it. But if for whatever reason you want to avoid all quests (perhaps this is your ninth or tenth alt) you most certainly can level without questing. In fact, leveling without doing a single quest has never been easier. You can of course chain run instances, but if you're also weary of that (or you can't for one reason or another) then there's always PvP as well.
