That’s right little Oracle guy, shinies!!!

After my unexpected shift back to horde, and my subsequent respec, I decided this Friday to try and improve my Death Knight a bit. I was basically wearing greens and the odd quest blue, with a single epic cloak I’d got from my one run in Nax months ago. Not really a DK cloak as such I don’t think, but it’s pretty decent. The following is what I’ve managed to round up Friday and the rest of the weekend when I’ve been around:

Sigil of Arthritic Binding – After looking up specs, catching up in Death Knight news and checking out the new Sigils, this was my first target. Basically it involved collecting 30 tokens from the PvP area in Grizzly Hills. As I had Friday off work I decided to do this mid-morning. Getting the tokens was pretty straight forward, some of the quests give 10 at a time, so it only took me 30 mins tops. One of them involved riding a torpedo and blowing up a ship, which is awesome.

Next I decided to see what I could do to improve my gear via Ah/badges (basically stuff that didn’t involve me putting any effort in). WoWLoot and WoW Insiders gear guides helped me here…

Pendant of the Outcast Hero – I was only a few badges short of the smexy trinket from my heroic badges, but I figured I may not be doing any for a while, so I picked up this neck piece. Not much else to say here, it was a significant improvement over my previous one, and a nice shiny purple colour. If only it had some Strength on it.

Vengeance Bindings – These I picked up off the AH. I can’t for the life of me remember how much I paid for them, but it really wasn’t very much. I think I had some rubbishy greens in that slot up until now, these are a pretty solid investment without stepping into an instance I reckon. Probably should have bought them sooner.

Titansteel Destroyer – Next was the big one, the weapon. I was toying with the idea of gathering the mats for this myself, as I know people who can craft it. However with my absence of luck finding titanium nodes, lack of frozen orbs, and general laziness, I figured I’d buy one instead. I managed to find one on the ah for just under 1500g, which I figured was a pretty good deal. And so began an epic afternoon of money making. I decided to go to Ice Crown, so that I could both make money and work on my Knights of the Ebon Blade rep (for Death-Inured Sabatons) at the same time. I ended up doing the majority of the quests in this zone (120/140 at the moment I think) and got the weapon from the AH, woo. I made just over 1,600g in a single day, which is by far the biggest day for me ever.

Signet of Bridenbrad – I wasn’t planning on this, it just happened to be a reward from one of the Ice Crown chains that was an upgrade over what I had in that slot.

Arcanum of Torment – Put one of these on my head piece. Nothing that exciting, but yeah, it’s still a gear improvement right.

By my standards, this is an epic weekend of upgrades, especially considering it was pretty much all done in a single day. The next two things on my list to get are:

Death-Inured Sabatons – about 4k rep left

Spiked Titansteel Helm – When I’ve made the money. I have about 700g right now, and the ones on the Ah are like 1,000g. I did see one for 750g though, so I’m holding out for one at a reasonable price.

I suppose the next step will be to start getting some enchants…

friends… apparently.

So after a month and a half of playing alliance (and actually frigging enjoying it!) I’m back horde side. I got online one day to a “how would you feel about playing some horde?” message from Dan, and knew straight away what would be happening. My closest gaming friends are flakes. I do not use this as a criticism of course, because I’m one myself, I will admit I was quite surprised though. I was genuinely enjoying playing Mage, I liked my Draeni, and was about as close as I get to being really angry/annoyed by something in an online game these days. That basically just means I spent 10 mins calling Dan all sorts of nasty names, then logger back over to my Orc.

Upon getting back to Horde side I was unsure of what to do. I hadn’t missed Death Knight that I was aware, and my Mage is only level 35 on Horde.

WHY OH WHY CANT I TO FACTIONS TRANSFERS!?

So I was umming and arring between referring a friend and trying to boost a Mage/Warlock up, leveling my Rogue (currently 70) or trying to get back into the Death Knight. I decided to gear up my Death Knight a bit and plod along with her until I made up my mind. First step was to try a new spec for real. I’d been Blood almost all of the time I’d been leveling DK, and 100% of the time since. I was tempted by Dual Wield, but it seems DW got nerfed a bit recently. Frost hasn’t interested me that much, so I decided to go with a cookie cutter (I think) Unholy build. I have to say I love it! My DPS is better, having a ghoul out 100% of the time is rewarding, and the rotation is much comfier than Blood.

So anyway, here I am, back where I was 2 months ago, but now with a level 72 Draeni Mage on another realm, whoop… I’m assuming I might actually be playing Death Knight for a while now, but who knows. I’ll just go where’s my buddies go. It’s interesting to see how different people handle these sorts of things actually, some seem to largely not care what’s happening, as long as they’re with the people they enjoy playing with. I’d put myself in this category. Others seem to have a massive emotional attachment to the investment they’ve made in a specific character, or maybe they just don’t like not being the one making the decisions. Either way I can’t imagine myself ever deliberately distancing myself from anyone I consider a friend due to an online game.

At least I don’t have to be friends with male Night Elves now…

Because I’m really bored, and can’t actually be bothered to log in and level…

Shatter + Ice Shards + Frostbolt + Ice Lance = good times (about 5,000 dmg @ lv70)

Frostbolt + Frostbite + Shatter + Frostbolt + Ice Lance = Brain Freeze + Fireball = dead mob

Precision + Frost Channeling + Improved Water Elemental + Arcane Concentration + Evocation + Mana Emerald = many manas

7 Shoveltusks + Frost Nova + Blizzard + Water Elemental (Freeze) + Blizzard (Cone of Cold = 7 x dead Shoveltusk

Ok enough, that really wasn’t going anywhere. Frost has cool combos for soloing though.

Yes, that is me surfing a flaming harpoon through the air. Epic does not even begin to explain. I think this may have been my favourite moment of… well life really. Maybe not quite, but you get the idea. I can imagine the moment someone though of this at Blizzard, people must have plotzed. I’m assuming numerous whoops and high fives followed. I can’t actually remember why I was surfing a flaming harpoon, I think it was just a way for the game to transport me back to one of the Alliance villages, but it really doesn’t matter.

Howling Fjord is pretty much exactly as it was on Horde; annoying. You have a fairly big zone, with like 3 or 4 little villages spread around it, and a few other random quest giver NPCs standing around by themselves in the wilderness. It has to be one of the more annoying places to level in the entire game. I don’t think I’ve found myself doing more than about 5 quests at a time the whole zone. I’m the sort of person who likes to pull up his quest log and see a big long list of

Quest of pwnage (complete)
kill 10 boars (complete)
kill 10 more boars (complete)
collect some boar liver (complete)
I don’t like liver (complete)
Your mum (group) (complete)
More dots! (complete)

and well, you get the idea. Howling Fjord does not offer me this. Having said that, the quests that it does offer at least attempt to avoid too much repetition, which makes it just about bearable.

Below are some random screenies that are at least semi cool moments from this zone. Luckily I’m at about 100/130 quests now, so I should be leaving pretty soon.

Yes I have an ugly UI I know. I’m intending on sorting it out at 80 once I cam remove a bunch of the leveling gumpf (technical term) I have.

One last thing, casting polymorph on a flying bird results in a flying penguin!

Admit it, you didn’t know penguins could fly did you?

Anyone who checks this blog (does anyone check this blog?) will have noticed a continued absence of updates for the last month or so. This is not to say that I haven’t been playing, more just that I can’t be bothered blogging about it. After leveling my Death Knight just a couple of months ago, it’s hard to be motivated to blog about the same levels again so soon. Even if the perspective is very slightly different when playing alliance. I’ll try and put something down though…

Schoz (yet another original character name there) the Mage is currently sitting at level 71, in the crap pot that is Howling Fjord. So basically since my last update *checks blog* I’ve done the vast majority of Outlands, and a little Northrend.

I won’t say much about Outlands, as its more of the same, everyone’s done it. I basically did the whole of Hellfire and Zangamarsh, skitted through Terrokar doing most of that zone, and dinged 68 after doing about 2/3 of Nagrand. I then decided to go to Netherstorm to do a few quests to upgrade gear and at least make a little dent into 68 before heading to Northrend. That didn’t last long, about a third of a level I guess, but I suppose it helped some. I decided to do Howling Fjord first again, just to get it out of the way really.

On the whole Outlands was pretty smooth. I kept putting all my points into Frost, so my survivability was excellent. I think I did once or twice during the whole of 58-68, and that was only due to being stupid. Experimenting with my water elemental has been good fun, I could quite easily kill 6-7 mobs without losing any HP. As it stands now, I’ve switched and added a few points into the Arcane tree in order to get clearcasting, quite how much this is helping me as far as mana goes I don’t know right now, but maybe that will become more evident in instances etc.

Planning on doing a small report on Howling Fjord next, then maybe some observations on Mage talents from my point of view. Just keeping things ticking over…