Leveling to 85 in Deepholm and Twilight Highlands

Happy New Year! The last two weeks have been a busy period with my grind up to 85 and a few instance runs.

Deepholm
After hitting 82, I went off into Deepholm hoping to snag some nice quest rewards. After questing out almost the entire zone, I got a Blacksoul Polearm which is a lovely 381 polearm. I also got the Leggings of Fragmented Hope and Worldbinder Signet from quests.

This zone is very nice and the quests are pretty cool, but for the gear-obsessed it is very important as you only unlock the Therazane faction 10 quests or so from the end of the zone. This faction has a nice ring for level 85 and various shoulder enchants, so it should be on your list to grind up to exalted.

The Stonecore & The Vortex Pinnacle
After finishing Deepholm I was a fair way into level 83, so I decided to tank the level 82-84 instances of The Stonecore and The Vortex Pinnacle. As I have considered earlier, there are some nice loot items in these instances, but really I want to get a first look at them, before I have to tank them in heroic mode. Unfortunately by this point the guild had moved onto heroics, so I read up and entered the Dungeon Finder. Surprisingly both went well, The Stonecore is a lot of fun and the bosses are quite different, whereas The Vortex Pinnacle was mostly tank-and-spank fights with some small frills. Having run each one, I was level 84 and ready to hit the final zone for what I hoped were some awesome gear upgrades.

Twilight Highlands
The Warlord's quest board sends you to Twilight Highlands at level 84, and it is well worth going there. Even if the starter quests are actually in Orgrimmar and Aszhara!

Twilight Highlands is home to the Dragonmaw Clan for Horde (and Wildhammer Clan for Alliance). Luckily it takes only a few quests to unlock the Dragonmaw Clan, however apart from the quests, there was one big reason for me to quest in TH. The Torth-Slayer's Staff is an item level 333 staff, which means it will get you into heroics, and after 176 out of 384 quests it was mine.

I was expecting some other rewards, and there is the Shocktrooper Hood which I am using, but the other leather feral item is Garona's Finest Leggings. Now given that I got to honoured with Dragonmaw and bought Leggings of the Impenitent far before I could get Garona's leggings, I decided to leave Twilight Highlands once I'd hit 85 and go grind some rep elsewhere.


The Grind
Now at level 85 there is a whole load of reputation grinds to do. I have a tanking head arcanum to get, a weapon from the Tol Barad faction, exalted shoulder inscription to grind for, plus a couple of exalted items from Guardians of Hyjal and Dragonmaw. I also have to run instances on heroic to get drops, reputation and justice points. So there is plenty left to do for a grind.