Mists: Helpful Hints to Start

Gearing:
Raids will be opening this week and just like last expansion we are short on healers at the start so we will most likely be starting next week or the week after but that doesn't mean there is a reason not to try to be raid ready even if you are not starting to raid right away.  Thanks to a change by blizzard getting ready just got easier.

Justice Gear No Longer Requires Reputation:
You needed to be honored with the big 4 (Shado-Pan, Klaxxi, August Celestials and Golden Lotus) to buy justice gear.  The problem is that you will only have Klaxxi at honored to start, for most.  The other three you will not get there easily and need dailies and you need golden lotus revered before you open the dailies for the other two which means it would be a pretty long grind to be able to open justice gear for someone that was not on every day.

Thus, for those part timers and alts, there is reason to rejoice, you can now buy your justice gear without a reputation requirement of honored.  There is now no excuse what so ever for not being item level 440 and ready for heroics to gear up for a raid.  Yes, you could get to 446 or better with quest and mob kills only, but those 450 justice items will help for those that do not want to stalk rare mobs and finish all quests.  This is huge.

Pet Battling:
I've not done much of it yet but I've done enough to figure out on my own what a rare looks like.  At level 1 at least.  I caught a bunch and noticed if they are under 150 life they are most likely poor, around 150 most likely common and around 155 might get you an uncommon.  To get a rare you would need to look for something higher, like 158 or 160 even.  One problem with that.  I figured it out on my own, no help from outside.  Not like there is anything wrong with that but when I went to westfall to fight some level 3s I had to start the process all over again on figuring what life was what level of pet.  It could be a lot of work.

Addons Make Pet Catching Easy:
So, like anyone else, I was looking for an easier way to keep track of things.  I looked online for a list of the life totals to guide me so I did not need to go through the process of catching and figuring it out on my own each time I level up and move to a new area.  Enter addons and lots of good ones.  Pet Battle Count immediately caught my eye and I suggest you check it out and over at wow insider I read about Pet Quality Glow today and figured I would mention it here as well in case you did not read that post.

There are a bunch of new ones to help you out.  Pet Battle Teams is a must have if you are like me and plan to level up a few pets all at once.  I can't even begin to say how great this addon is, even more so if you have what seems like a million pets and forgot which ones you started to level.  Being there is not sort by level option you have to go looking for them and that is not fun.  This makes finding them easier and makes designing specific teams for specific types of battles easier.  Download first, ask question later.

Farming:
Many people might not realize that farming can be a very profitable thing.  Have you seen the requirements to making the new feasts for raids?  They are insane aren't they?  Well, not really.  If you have your farm up and running you can surely make feasts left and right like they were nothing even with those seemingly huge requirements.  Let us not forget all the other benefits of having a farm.  You can get meat, cloth, herbs, ore, enchanting materials and even pets from farming.  Nope, not kidding.  It is worth doing, it is a quick grind and it is actually relaxing and fun to some extent even for people that might not normally like those sorts of things.

Farming Can be Overwhelming:
Yes, it sure can.  There are a lot of farmers out there and what they like and who they are can get confusing.  Sho might be at the market one day and hunting Hozen the next.  They are not like your old time NPCs that are where they are always with no sense of NPC progression.  In a throw back to the apple lady these NPCs have personality.  They all have things they like and they do move around from time to time.  Icy Veins has a nice and to the point guide for the tillers and I suggest if you are interested you give it a look.

It will tell you who likes what items, where to get the items, who likes what foods and what the quest progression is.  It will make it easier to get everything done and know what stacks of food you might want to hold on to and which ones you can sell for 1000 gold a stack while some people are still paying stupid gold for food they could easily get themselves.

A few tips for the up and coming farmer:
1) You can throw out you shovel, watering can and bug spray, they always reappear on your farm.  So if you need them, pick them up and use them and throw them away again.  It will save you some bag space.
2) As you get reputation with the tillers you can buy things from gina that will remove the need for those at all.  Besides being quests that are worth doing anyway, they will make farm management easy.  No quest marker will appear, you will need to buy them farm upgrades first to get the quests.
3) If you want easy valor, do not rush friendships.  You can turn in food every day to all 10 tillers and get 5 valor points each effectively making that 50 super easy valor per day.  Great stuff for alts if you ask me.  But once you reach best friend status you lose that ability, so do not rush them if you want to get your 50 easy valor from them.  BTW: I put in a ticket about it, hopefully it is an oversight on their part and they won't stop giving them but don't expect it to change.
4) When you reach a new reputation level with the tillers always check your farm for more quests that will open more spaces.  8 is better than 4 and 12 is better than 8 and 16 is better than 12, this should go unsaid. Also check with gina to see if there is a new farm item you can buy that will start a new quest line.
5) If you are on a PvP server, your farm is your best friend.  It is a phased area for you and you only.  Run in and you are safe.  Hide there and jump out on others unexpected like.  The farm brings PvP to a whole new level but the sad part is it brings ganking to a whole new level as well.  All good has bad in it I guess.

Dailies:
Oh my god there are so many of them.  Even someone like me that loves to quest can get easily overwhelmed.  Where to go and what to do and which ones are worth it can really be hard to decide on.  Not to mention some of the ones you might want to do don't seem to be there.  What is an elf to do?

Dailies Explained:
Dailies are for you only this expansion.  I do not know how deep it goes but I have had many guild members doing a set of dailies that were different from mine.  I believe it is like the fire in the skies thing in the molten front where you get it every other day and there are two sets of dailies available each day, at least that is how it seems at the moment.

This is good for a few reasons, it will keep questing areas split between people, so not everyone is doing the same thing every day.  Some are harder because of spawns and having half the people doing them is a good thing.

Hint: If you want to quest with someone have one of you skip one day and you should be put on the same cycle after that.  Not 100% but it seems that way right now.

There are many quest groups for each faction and it should give you a nice mix so you will not suffer from quest burnout like could easily happen if it were the same quests all the time.  Lets just hope they do it better than they did in cataclysm when I once had canal crabs 10 days in a row.

Now to all those asking why they can not find the August Celestials and Shadow Pan daily quests I have the answer why they are not appearing for you right here.  You need to be revered with golden lotus first before you open up those dailies.  Once you get revered you will get quests that send you to those two hubs to open up their dailies.

This is a quality design because if you were doing all the dailies from the get go, by the time you get revered with golden lotus you will be exalted with the cloud serpents and klaxxi meaning that you would basically be replacing two quest hubs you no longer need to do with two fresh quest hubs you now need to do.  This is amazing design by blizzard to help extend content and keep people from burning out, I wish others would see it for what it is instead of complaining about it.

Valor:
Anyone that wants gear wants valor.  And the good news is that valor comes from everywhere now, well, almost everywhere.  We all worry about the valor grind from the get go and now you can get your valor in ways you have never done so before.  The following is a quick guide for where you can get your valor.

Valor Points Falling From the Sky:
About the only place you will not get valor points are them falling from the sky, but you will get them from the following.

Fishing: You can fish up three different rare fish each day if you fish enough, each worth valor when you turn them in, and of course reputation with Nat.

Challenge Mode:  When the time comes and you are ready to give it a try you can earn valor points doing it.  Even better is the fact you do not need to get a gold to get valor.  Just finishing it should get you a bronze and some valor, a little more at silver and even a little more than that at gold.

Scenario:  Not a really effective way to grind valor as they seem to take longer than running a heroic does but at 30 valor for the first one each day and 15 each one that follows, it is not a horrible way to get a few and it might even give you a good reason to run with some guild mates that you normally don't.

Hidden Areas: There is a stone statue in the north eastern area of the dread wastes with two glowing runes on the ground.  Grab a friend and have them lay on one while you knell on the other and kill the statue when it comes to life.  Woot, quick and easy 5 valor for every one in the group.

Elite Mobs: Kill Kunchong in the dread waste and enjoy another free 5 valor every day.

(I found these both, the hidden area and elite mob dailies, and some others, on my own, if anyone else knows of some that can be done daily like these please post so I can put together a full list as I have not seen any mention of either of these anywhere and I think a list is needed.)

Dungeons:  At 90 and with a 440 item level these will be the grind of choice for many, at least when gearing up.  As always, they offer a decent way to get some valor but not as decent as they used to.  If you wish to max running dungeons only like in cataclysm get ready for a long time, a very long time before you reach cap.  It won't be do a few and be done like it was.

Dailies: Questing for valor, the single best addition to the valor grind ever.  There are more dailies than you can shake a stick at in mists and now most of them offer valor points when doing them.  While I do not believe it is possible to max doing dailies only during a week I am sure you can get really close if you don't.  It makes for a nice and easy way to grind valor, 5 minutes or 5 quests at a time.

Capping out:  If you cap out 1 character now then every other character on that same realm gets 50% more valor.  This makes it easier to get valor on alts as well as gives you a reason to work on your main first to help the others.  Tip:  For those with tanks, you can random up a tank and easily cap valor and then make it easier for your non tank main to cap out.  So who you do first might really make a difference.

Reputations:
I am a reputation collector.  Any faction introduced I want to max out so in that effort I look at which ones I need and put them in order of how to go about it.  Hint: Best friends do not count as reputations.

How Much Do You Love Me:
Getting the big 4 to revered should be the objective of anyone that wants gear and it is really straight forward.  Klaxxi and golden lotus will be the only ones you can quest with out of the four to start with.  You will get klaxxi revered before lotus and once you get lotus it will open shado-pan and august celestials.  Those are the four that matter most when it comes to gear, but what about the others.

Lorewalkers are the ones I get asked about most, usually from someone seeing me on my flying disc mount and asking where I got it from.  Do you know how hard it is to explain to someone that whispers you how to get reputation with this faction?  Impossible and even more so when a compete moron keeps asking you to show them where the things are.  You try as nice as you can to tell them that they need to find things in the world and you will get reputation and that you can not tell them where they all are as there are too many of them and they are all over.  You tell them that they would be better just looking it up online and they still keep asking you, but show me a few so I know what I am looking for.

This reputation is annoying because people refuse to accept me saying it would be best for them to look it up because it is impossible to explain where to find them all in whispers.  Not to mention, I am not about to type it all out for some stranger and waste an hour of my day because they are too lazy to open google and type lorewalker reputation in google.

For those of you that are wondering, or those of you that got these whispers, give people this link.  If they insist on bothering you to help them, tell them to go play in traffic. Seriously, I do not understand why people need their hand held for things like this.  I've already stopped riding the darn thing because of people that refuse to look it up themselves and keep pestering me to show them where they all are.  I am too nice of a guy to say F off, but I sure as hell think it. /rant

Lorewalkers are also a nice faction for people that do archeology because it allows you to shuffle the map one a day, with purchase of an item.  It also allows you to jump from one dig to the next instantly, with purchase again, of course.

The tillers are worth getting up if you want the mounts or want to get more from your farm.  The anglers are another good one that will take time but at exalted you will be able to buy books that can teach your other characters fishing, for a hefty fee of course, but it will surely speed up leveling fishing if you wanted to.  As I mentioned earlier, friendships from members of these factions mean nothing when it comes to reputation.

The cloud serpents are a very netherwing like design of a quest hub that gets you a baby could serpent you raise to be your own and race it for a mount and achievement and of course some valor points.  You can find eggs to help speed along building reputation, does that sound familiar?  You can also use your professions to get dailies that will speed things up, does that sound familiar? 

The black prince is for the legendary quest line that all classes and specs can do.  Do not worry too much about reputation with him however, seems nearly everything you kill while doing golden lotus and klaxxi quests give reputation with him along with many other things, so getting his rep up will be easy enough.  Not to mention, he doesn't sell a darn thing so outside of the quest line that will require you to get raid drops anyway, there is no need to rush his reputation, it will come in time and by the time you move on to the honored part of the quest line you should be there already just from killing your daily quest mobs.

Panda reputation can be gained for each faction as well and they can be earned the same as any other main member faction is earned, questing.  Doing the dailies in SW and Org would be the best way to start off for people that already have done every quest in the game, like me, or do the tabard and low level dungeon thing, but I have not looked into that one yet myself as there are so many other more important factions.