Top Of The World

I was originally going to choose The Carpenters, but I found this instead, which oddly caught my eye.

Professions now need research. Traditionally this has been the preserve of Alchemy and Inscription, but it is now firmly in place in Jewelcrafting, instead of the usual daily grind to purchase all the gem cuts. between 3 and 5 days to get a gem cut. It was a long and winding grind for the Jewelcrafters, and to be quite honest they deserved the profits that they made in the last 2 expansions.

At present I have a maxed out scribe with plenty of glyphs to discover and a maxed out jewelcrafter. These two mark out my daily midnight routine of research and discover, and over the weekend they ran out of materials for doing their daily research. I could of course have bought some ore off the Auction House but I am far too cheap for that. My Shaman found stacks of Ghost Iron Ore in Jade Forest in the process of exploring all 4 Archaeology digsites. Every time I completed a digsite it put the next one in Jade Forest. Being the completionist that I am, I was forced against my will to continue until the digsites had moved to a different zone. 3 hours, 15 Digsites and a lot of bags filled to the brim with Ghost Iron Ore, I decided to stop. Now you would hope that might fill my research needs for some considerable time but I think that is only going to last a few days with a cost of 3 rares each day, that is going to require a fair amount of feeding.

I did send the uncommon gems to my alchemist but the reagent required for the transmute is 2x Golden Lotus. I have not had much luck finding this herb, and I am guessing that with large amounts of people able to gather by flying around, I am going to be all out of luck. The cost is prohibitively expensive at 200 gold per herb on my server. The obvious answer to my predicament is to start levelling my gatherers so that I can fly around looking for rare herbs.

The game is now moving away from the easily found ores and herbs, and the race is now on for the high end materials.

I did however get  a nice reward for doing Archaeology in the form of a very feminine looking umbrella, which goes well with my butch Draenei Shaman. It is bind on account so my Gnome Mage and Warlock can all make good use of it when levelling.

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Grinding for ores distracted me once again from levelling my Hunter to level 90, so Saturday and Sunday where designated as Levelling my Hunter nights. After Friday's post, I was keen to move out of Krasarang Wilds, and into a new zone more suited to my level. I also decided to finish the area but was rushing the zone. I have managed so far to remain spoiler free in term of what to expect from each zone and was delighted with the climax returning to The Valley of the Four Winds and the attack of the Ik'thallick on Stoneplow. The saving Stoneplow storyline is epic and congratulations should go to the team that worked on these quests.



The Ik'thallick attack on Stoneplow

Moving onwards to the Kun-Lai Summit, I started to replace gear. I have moved from iLevel 397 to iLevel 404 and suddenly the relative power is starting to return. At level 89, I feel stronger than I did at level 86, and this only going to get better.

Kun-Lai Summit is a definite slow burner and after the standard fare of the Alliance advanced post, we move into much better questing areas in the form of the Kota Basecamp, One Keg, and Zouchin Village.

I enjoyed jumping on the Hozen with a giant Yeti so much that I did the daily afterwards so that I could stop at One Keg without finding some other convoluted passage to pickup the flight point.

The real classic piece of storyline comes in the guise of Lorewalker Cho and the Raising the Thunder King storyline. This is how Harrison Jones should been without the cutscenes and stupid Nazi humour that Blizzard used in Cataclysm.

I am poised at Level 89 with only 30% left to go, and have been amazed at how quickly it is possible to level when you are in the groove. Cataclysm was easy to level from and 80-82 and then got longer and longer until you wanted to destroy the Wildhammer Clan with a Mana Bomb.

5 Levels for an expansion, seems to be perfectly judged in terms of levels and zones. I can now concentrate on levelling the next character or choosing to do a mound of dailies, or even questing right up to the final zone to get my gear upgrades. Expect a ding tonight, the first of many.