The Cataclysm is almost upon us

29 hours until Mists of Pandaria goes live and all that is wrong becomes reality. Stupid pandas...

I was preparing my main toons for this apocalypse and realized there are only 2 things that need to be done to really be able to enjoy the leveling process without too much stress:

-clean out your bags
-clean out your bank

This should be self-explanatory but unless you have a vendor mount like the mammoth from Dalaran, you'll find yourself filling up on grey and white items really quickly.  Those of us that haven't been leveling alts have probably forgotten just how quickly bags can fill up.  And even if you have that mount, you want to sell just about everything that you find outside of grey items. Sell on the auction house, I mean...  Remember that there will be people on every server going for "server first profession" stuff, and even if they're not, millionaires will be looking to level their professions as quickly as they can.  To put it into perspective, I was selling stacks of embercloth for 250-1000g faster than I could put them up, and volatile fires and earths were going for 100-500g a piece during the first hours of Cata's launch.  And now everyone has more gold than they had back then, so... yeah!

And your bank? That's for all the crap you don't know what to do with.  I don't know how you play, but my bank fills up with lots of items that I'm keeping for possible later use.  Most trinkets that I get as quest rewards go in my bank because I can't know when I'll actually need that extra hit, or haste, or mastery and I can't predict what gear will drop for me.  Most pieces of gear go into my bank, in fact, if they're sidegrades, for that same reason.  So a big bank is definitely a plus.

I spent about an hour trying to decide if any nostalgic items can be destroyed and sold (answer: no, I kept them all) and then transferring 100 things into void storage.  My bags are now almost empty and my bank has only 2.5 full bags in it.

I don't know if I should keep my pvp gear in the bank or just vendor/disenchant it, but I guess I'll keep it for now. If it turns out to be totally useless over the next five levels, I'll keep the pieces needed to transmog into it and that's all.

And finally, the only other possible preparation is to clean out your bank alt.  Make it easy to send things and to open all the letters you'll be sending. The less time you spend shuffling items around, the more time you have to sell them and get back to leveling on your main.

I suppose you could stock up on things to level even more efficiently, but that's not a big worry for me. Leveling isn't difficult, it doesn't matter if I have 300 more intellect or not, but I guess buying some food/water could make sense, since Warlocks have lost all self-healing abilities out of combat...

It's a really weird time in WoW right now, lots of people are playing to finish leveling alts, but dungeons and raids are composed of very strange toons: either very new ones in terrible gear or very experienced ones.  I'm guessing the latter are those that are coming back from dormancy and trying to learn their class before pandas...

In any case, one more day, and then my work just announced that I have Tuesday off, which made me lol, because it has never worked out so well for me at a wow launch. Yay.

Pandaria delenda est