Peter's Blog

Life as a Level 70 Farmer

Flying is fun, although you only realise how slow the normal flying mount is when you take a griffen ride. An epic would be nice.

I decided to level up the bow skill with some easy grinding on level 66 Ogres in Nagrand, specifically the Warmauls in the north-west as I didn't get much competition. I've collected enough Obsidian Warbeads to convince the Kurenai to sell me the BRK approved leather shoulders which are certainly better for dps than the Pauldrons of Surging Mana which do absolutely nothing for dps apart from sustain it with a mana dribble. I'm keeping both pairs of shoulders to help me switch between dps and farming mode.

Have found occasion to attack camps of level 71-72's and am happy to say I can kill them in less than 30 seconds. They are tough, Tiddles needs lots of healing but they are doable. Found mana thistle in the camps, not too keen on having to kill three level 71's for a single sprig but what else can I do?

I've started grinding Skyguard rep, I found Skettis and did the bird egg bombing daily quest. It's quite easy although I have been dismounted from the flying mount by the angry birds and plummeted to my death. The graveyard is nearby. I may go for the Nether Ray mount although they are pretty ugly things. The epic bird mounts don't look as nice to me as the snowy ordinary mount. At the least I would like the Skyguard cape with the slow fall facility to avoid the plummetting.

In other news, I got enough halaa tokens to buy the one 18 slot bag they will give me, although it'll take a lot of juggling stuff out of a 16 slot bag to replace it with the 18. I can then use the 16 in the bank to replace an old 10 or something I am using there.

Pet News

While grinding the ogres I found Corki in a cage which led me to another level 67 elite that I couldn't burn down before it had killed Tiddles. Ok it's a three-player group quest but it bothers me that I can't handle it. I've decided I need a tanking pet, something tough with all it's talent points spent on health and armour rather than things like dash and claw.

There were two candidates that were available at levels 69-70: Scorpids and Warp Stalkers. The scorpids have better armour than Warp Stalkers (+10 over +5) but Warp Stalkers have the awesome Warp ability where they warp to the target monster instantly. I decided this ability would give the stalker the potential to be a good tank/farming pet. The scorpids have a scorpid sting facility which has recently been nerfed to uselessness and I don't think they can learn dash which makes them pretty hopeless.

I flew to Skettis and the first Warp Stalker (Blackwind Warp Chaser to be precise) was a level 70: great no levelling needed so I just grabbed it (freeze/tame, no probs). I trained it with max rank Growl and took it to the Firewing place to grind signets for Aldor rep, easy level 63 kills but it was nearby and it would give us time to bond.

Oh, it is wonderful the way he warps into a fight, he's there before I've let go of the mouse button. I've called him 'Blink'. Another nice thing about the warp ability is that it's cooldown is only 15 seconds so it's normally available for the next fight. Fighting two casters, he will even warp from one to the other once the first is killed. I'm getting nice 1200 steady shot crits now the bow skill is 349 and the new shoulders have upped my crit to 15%.

I had my first play with 'Misdirection'. I set misdirection on Blink, then did an aimed shot at a melee mob. It worked! 900 odd damage and the mob ran straight at Blink. Easy pulling!

I compared Blink's stamina/armour stats to Tiddles and he is actually a tiny bit lower in both numbers because his loyalty is still minimum and I haven't trained him in Greater Stamina and Natural Armour. My plan is to train him in ONLY these and no dps abilities as there are not enough talent points for both.

I don't really think this will help him tank a tough level 67 elite but it will help. Incidently, I walked over a level 65 elite earlier in the quest chain. Twice. And the first time I didn't realise he was elite when I started the fight.

Professions

I'm mulling over whether to switch professions around. Swapping Mae's Alchemy with Pook's Mining makes big sense. Mae has the flying mount and can farm herbs and ores easily, Pook sits in ironforge and can make pots and transmute and I can save his blacksmithing for if I ever run him again. Mae has huge herb stocks, probably over half the mats I would need to get pooky up to level 350 where he can transmute.

The only downside to the plan would be that I wasted the Sporeggar rep I ground to get the primal earth->water transmute. I wouldn't want to have to kill 450 naga with a paladin to get it again. That would take weeks.

I could start off by dropping Pook's mining and training him in alchemy and enjoying double transmutation bandwidth.

Respec for Maevyn

I decided on a respec. You can always check Mae's latest spec through her portrait at bottom right but I've followed my heart and: wait for it: swapped The Beast Within with Scattershot! This makes her a 40/21/0! I did it mainly to try out scattershot and see how good it is. I just have a feeling that it would be more useful in day-to-day farming/grinding/trying to kite elites than The Beast Within which is only(!) 10% more ranged dps and immunity from snares. I still of course have Bestial Wrath and the Big Red Kitty effect and 50% more pet dps is not to be sneezed at (mental note: can I use it help pet hold agro?). As with all these things, I can always respec back if I don't like it. I'm sure Beast Within is a great PvP talent but I don't PvP.

I have used Scattershot twice on level 65 spiders because Blink was not totally holding agro: methinks he will be needing some dps talents in order to maintain the attention of whatever he is fighting. Whereas before I would spam Disengage I used Scattershot and it is very effective: it Just Works and the monster immediately starts wandering aimlessly, giving you four seconds to get back to range and send the pet back in.

It has some other small advantages: apart from being able to blast something that is right in your face instead of lash at it with a raptor strike, it will be great for finishing off runners that run through the Hunter dead zone.

Scattershot stops Mae/pet from fighting as any damage breaks the disorientate effect so I have to remember to explicitly reengage (e.g. why is she just standing there? SHOOT IT!). It also makes a nice breather in which to drop a freezing trap and conveniently the pet won't keep fighting and break it.

The respec cost 20g plus a g or two to retrain Aimed Shot back up to rank 7. Really annoying how you have to do this on each respec but now I have misdirection I want Aimed Shot to partner it.

Group or Forever Farm

Following on from a comment here from Nibuca I did some research into daily quests. Apparently to get the lucrative Ogri'la (Shangri'la for Ogres) I have to do some five man group quests. I find it annoying to be forced into grouping for these things, there is already enough content that I consider academic without these artificial barriers to make me socialise.

I'll contemplate finding a non-raiding guild with people in a similar situation. I had an invite a few weeks ago from a guild called 'The Nearly Deads' and I like the name. I told the guy I don't raid and he said they were casuals and that was ok.

Without grouping it seems the only way to get exalted with the Skyguard and a Nether Ray mount is to repeat the egg bombing quest once a day for the next 114 days. Absolutely not worth it. The Nether Ray has a vile looking face, all sharp teeth, and there's no way I will be commuting to Skettis every day for three months to do a less than exciting quest. I'd rather ride a regular epic mount.

Another moan: apparently we won't be able to fly for the first eight levels in the next expansion. They say this is to make people explore the land properly but methinks it is to make their level design easier. Sod you, I'm going to grind to level 78 without leaving the starter area and then fly everywhere SO THERE!

Blade's Edge

Decided to continue questing in Blade's Edge Mountains. First quest, killing six spiders, netted 9 gold. Kerching. The Blades Edge map looks like a rat maze, if you didn't have a flying mount it would take you about an hour to get from one corner to the other.

Hacking Project

The TBags addon dumps a complete inventory/bank listing into a .lua file that would be very easy to parse and do things with. It only needs an application...

More Blade's Edge

It looks like I'm drifting back into a daily blog habit but I'll try to keep it brief and general, no minutae.

Continued questing in Blade's Edge and it was kinda fun. Level 65-66's are pretty easy to kill and it was one sided and each quest gives about 9 gold. I've cleared lots of space from my bags and have been auto-looting and all the spider parts, lynx teeth and whatever all add up to gold. From two quests and vendoring I made maybe 30g in a 45 minute session. The flying mount helps at cheating in quests where otherwise you have to fight your way up to a tree house and you can just fly away afterwards. This emphasises my point about Blizzard's problems designing the next expansion, they are stopping you from flying up till level 78 because it is easier to design quests where you have to fight your way in and you can only have so many caves and buildings. Incidently, my current plan would be to level up as much as possible by grinding in Outlands before travelling to any new area, simply to avoid the crowds after release day.

I was killing so quickly that my mana was vanishing so I went back to Pauldrons of Surging Mana and Aspect of the Viper and mana stopped being a problem. I know they changed the mechanics of Aspect of the Viper in patch 2.2 but I haven't been using it enough to see what the difference is. I have also been contemplating issues like finishing a fight early with an Arcane Shot so that Mae stops 'casting' a little earlier and hence gains a little more mana before the next fight. However, it's hard for me to get over the fact that Arcane Shot costs twice as much mana as a Steady Shot.

By the end of the session Blink had got to loyalty 2 and had 60 odd training points so I decided to put them into max rank Claw and Cobra Reflexes, two dps talents. My original plan was to have him nothing but tanking talents but I feel a bit of dps will help him hold agro. I put talent points into both Bestial Discipline and Go for the Throat so he should have a nice focus pool to fuel his Clawing. I haven't trained him in Bite at all, I don't think he needs it and I want his Warp available, it is so nice for going from one mob to the next during a big fight. Blink is proving to be a great pet, I think I prefer him to Tiddles simply because of the warp. The only problem with warp is that sometimes he warps off to defend me from something and I have trouble finding him and I have to use the minimap.

Mae's bow skill has stalled at 349 but that seems good enough for 1100 crits against level 66's. With Blink clawing away they maintain about 400 dps according to DamageMeters, 500 if the crit dice roll a few sixes. Reminds me to look at scopes.

I think I'm going to carry on questing for the moment, go through Blades Edge, Netherstorm and Shadowmoon. All the advise I am getting is to do the group quests to get into Ogri'la so I'll see what I can do.

Elite Soloing Progress

Killing level 65's in Blades Edge got a bit boring to decided on something more challenging:

• Soloed level 67 elite 'Gutripper' for the Nagrand Windroc mastery quest.
• Soloed random level 66 elite Gronn wandering around Nagrand.
• Soloed random level 67 elite Talbuk for the Nagrand Talbuk mastery quest. Blink died at the end but Damagemeters recorded 545 dps over the course of the fight.
• Found two 66 elites guarding a 67 ordinary in Blades Edge. Fighting two at once, killed first but Blink died while finishing off the second. Ressed Blink, then killed the second one before the first respawned. Used aimed shot on the 67 and got biggest crit ever, 2300! The setup looks like a group quest target so I might be back.
• Blink died fighting level 67 elite Queen of the Elekks.
• Blink died fighting level 71 elite tree in Skettis. These tree's are supposed to be a herbalists paradise, remains to be seen.

It was after all this that Blink hit loyalty level four (two more levels to go) and I'm still training him up in Greater Stamina and Natural Armour. Since there are not enough points available for max rank of both I'm torn as to whether to max out one or the other or to compromise. However, respeccing a pet talents is not expensive so I might just experiment.

If anything I am tending to overheal Blink in fights: it is not obvious when Mend Pet runs out so to be safe I spam it a bit. WTB a Mend Pet monitor addon.

A Use for Alchemy

Some research told me of the existance of the Fel Mana potion, a pot that gives a beefy mana dribble over 15 seconds but with -spellcast and -healing debuffs. This would be a nice hunter pot since neither of those stats matter to a hunter (+healing doesn't effect Mend Pet so -healing shouldn't either). Thottbot indicated that the recipe is a Bind on Pickup that you get grinding the guys at Eclipse Point in Shadowmoon Valley. I fancied some grinding so I went there and the recipe dropped in 15 minutes or so: nice, level 360 blue, if I can find some nightmare vine it may well push my alchemy to the cap.

TBH running out of mana during a fight isn't a big problem to me, I only attack elites on full health/mana and the pet dies long before the mana runs out.

The Eclipse guys also drop Signets for Scryer rep so I may spend some time here. The only annoying thing is the Eclipsian Dragonhawk fire breathing bird things that fly about as it is a waste of time and ammo killing them (XP isn't an issue any more and this changes your perspective). They would make a nice looking pet, I think I've seen them about but I'm addicted to Blink's Warp.

Buff Rotation Macro

Finally set up my buff rotation macro:

/castsequence Uniting Charm, Terokkar Tablet of Precision, Bestial Wrath

I bound it to the \ key and can bang it during a fight for whichever buff is up next, I can even bang it twice for Bestial Wrath + one of the others if the cooldowns are right.

I didn't put Rapid Fire in here since it's cooldown is three minutes minimum (if I invested some talent points) which would make the cycle time for all the buffs three minutes as the cycle would stall at Rapid Fire until it's cooldown was up, even if the other three were available. By leaving it out the cycle time is two minutes so I have easy access to 48 seconds of goodness in every two minutes. It's just a way of mapping three buffs to one key, I can still trigger them individually if need be, albeit with mouse clicks. If I were to use it for regular grinding I have to be aware of the mana cost of Bestial Wrath.

I may be able to include Rapid Fire in the mix by using /castrandom instead of /castsequence and spamming the button until it found a buff that wasn't on cooldown. Have to try that, see if the random element makes it fun or annoying (probably the latter).

Maevyn

On the great BRK's recommendation, I installed Kharthus's Hunter Timers. This solves my two Hunter peeves in that it displays timer bars for both Mend Pet and Feed Pet so I have no trouble knowing when either has expired. Armed with the Mend Pet bar I was able to kill a level 72 elite tree. It dropped five felweed, two motes of life and a green, not too shabby.

Some research indicated that the quests for Shatterred Halls attunement would yield Honor Hold rep so sent Mae to the place in Shadowmoon Valley where she can kill a blacksmith guy and get a mould for a key. She managed this and plucked some Nightmare Vine while she was there. The place is just to the left of the entrance of the Black Temple. She then flew to Honor Hold, did the quest turnin and was rewarded with enough reputation to be Honoured by Honor Hold and hence was able to buy the recipe for the Elixir of Major Agility: +35 agility and +20 critical strike for one hour, and the ingredients are modest too (Felweed, Teracone).

At this point I couldn't think of what I wanted to do with Maevyn so I rolled an alt.

Maexyn

Maexyn (pronounced may-zin) is a female gnome warlock with green hair. I decided on warlock as another pet loving dps class. In six hours I got her to level 13, tailoring 60 (clothy classes are advised to get tailoring), skinning (for the $$$) about the same. I like skinning. Need plenty of bag space to hoover up the drops and then the leather but it makes it more worthwhile killing beasts.

Warlock notes:

• Nice farming character, get into routine of two DoTs, a blast and wand to death, can kill things in 10 seconds or so (not including initial casting).
• Went through highs and lows. At level 11 she easily soloed Vagash (level 11 elite), easier than paladin or hunter, yet I gave up in disgust after dying three times to pairs of Skullthumper Troggs. The two would daze the voidwalker, then attack Maex. I'm still not sure how she is supposed to handle this situation. It wasn't nearly as big a problem with Maev. It wasn't totally hopeless, managed to clear entire camps of Troggs and those Loch Modan mouse things.
• Compared to Hunter, kinda annoying how spells take time to cast. On the other hand, none of the spells so far have cooldowns.
• Voidwalker is a crap pet. Tackling three similar level mobs is a challenge, harder than hunter. When the warlock gets personal agro things get nasty, what with the cloth armour, spellcasting interruption and all.
• Warlock has a channelled pet heal spell which is pretty useless. During a fight it only slows down the rate at which the pet loses health, it doesn't give enough healing to make the health go up, and the warlock would probably be better occupied by running away.
• The only crowd control, Fear, takes time to cast and only works on one mob, and you have to target it. Combined with the chances of the feared mob picking up adds it isn't totally useful. I did manage to summon a fresh imp while a mob was feared. The imps are very fragile, pretty much disposable.
• You need soul stones to summon a voidwalker and they don't stack in your bags!
• The pets get random meaningless forgettable names that you can't change to something ill-fitting like Beryl or Kevin. My Imp is called something like Chuckup and the Voidwalkers name start with Th.
• It's true: the voidwalker is always getting in the bloody way.

In conclusion, at level 13 Hunter > Warlock > Paladin.

Pookypoo

Maex got stuck in a cave, she was dead and couldn't res because there were too many troggs around. What to do? I decided to cheat and logout Maex, login pook, run him into the cave and wipe out all the troggs. Plan worked smoothly, Pook consecrated and one-shotted them all, even gathered Maex a stack of linen. She used it to make everyone Red Shirts.

I hearthed Pooky out to Shattrath, then portalled him back to Ironforge. He was standing there right in front of the Paladin trainer and I thought, sod it, and respecced him to protection. He's now 13/42/0, solid protection and enough holy to heal himself without interruption. TBH I was kinda ashamed of him being retribution and I hate the three-kills-and-a-mana-break style of play. I have had my best times with him as protection and I feel like giving it another chance. My thinking is I can level him up by finding some AoE spots and just grinding. I am also inspired by reader Galoheart who levelled 1-70 protection all the way (kiting with Avenger's Sheild!). In honour of Galo, Pooky is now 5/5 Ardent Defender. Galo is Horde but nobodys perfect.

I sorted his gear to get him more protection stats: stamina, strength etc, including the complete Fel Iron Plate armour set, then back to Hellfire to level up his one-handed axe skill as his best one-hander happened to be an axe that I think dropped for Maev, and his skill was woeful, about 170. At first it was taking him five minutes to kill level 58 hellboars, and then mainly through judging rightteousness, but with a bit of patience the axe skill became viable and he could kill a boar in 30 seconds. He finished the session by grinding on level 63 orcs. 40,000 XP/hour, crap by Maev's >100,000 XP/hour standards.

I'm going to focus him on a one-hander plus Seal of Vengence for now. It seems effective enough and can only get better as his axe skill improves.

Maexyn

Ran Maexyn for a while, back in the Troll area in Loch Modan, trying to cull Stonecutter Skullthumpers and Seers. This time I was trying Curse of Agony on adds as a way of handling multiple mobs. Didn't work, still drew agro. The Stonecutter Scouts are the most annoying they stand and lob axes and they have a huge agro radius.

Was fighting two or three when another player came running in begging for a Fear and drawing three troggs with him. After ressing and putting him on my ignore list I didn't have a lot more success: it's hard to get into a rhythm when you are worried about a random plonker causing problems. I gave up for a while, hoping he would go away.

Pookypoo

Ran pooky for a while, Terokkar forest killing Worgs for their tails. It takes about 25 seconds to kill one. He was doing ok, didn't die (well he is protection) and I could gather two or three Worgs for some AoE although it still wasn't as productive as a hunter. He was maintaining 60,000 XP/hr. Grinding as protection is asking for tedium but after a while I found it too boring and went back to Maexyn.

Maexyn Again

Back to the troggs, the annoying rogue had gone so continued. Killing single mobs is ridiculously easy but things rapidly get messy with multiple mobs. Cleared a group of three, only surviving because she dinged 14 mid fight which topped up her health and mana. Went on to be done in by the damn Skullthumpers again: usual story, stun pet, beat on Maex.

Got fed up with dying so I took her back to Ironforge for class training. Maybe level 14 training will help in fighting level 14 Troggs? Got next rank Corruption which seems to cause double the damage of rank 2 and I invested the new talent point in making it instant cast. However I was terminally disillusioned and stopped playing (!). Maevyn didn't have nearly as much trouble with these troggs. I'm tempted to send in Maezyn to remind myself what a level 13 hunter is capable of.

You may observe from the bottom right panel that Maexyn's Armory profile is working now (75 skinning already???). Characters under 10 aren't listed but for a few days the armory was giving an error for her when she was level 13.

I'm getting a nice collection of Mae?yn characters now. Coming soon, Maecyn, Maesyn, Maemyn (rogue?). Probably not Maetyn though.

Maevyn

My favourite character is Maevyn but I'm at a bit of a loss what to do with her. I can't be bothered with the remaining Outlands quests, I'm not that fussed about getting an epic flyer and I'm still unable to fit into a raiding schedule.

All I did with her yesterday was to transmute some Arcanite

Had to update one of my production Ruby on Rails applications. I've taken the time to install the Subclipse plugin into Aptana and it's oh so smooth now I can develop my application on my work pc, editing and debugging, check the changes into subversion from within Aptana, check the new version out onto my server and rock away.

My application had to do a huge long database query, returning 19,000 records in a .csv file. I had some problems with Apache deciding that the fcgi process had timed out and throwing a 500 error. To resolve this I altered the file /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/fcgid.conf thusly:

<IfModule mod_fcgid.c>
  AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi
  SocketPath /var/lib/apache2/fcgid/sock
  IPCConnectTimeout 120
  IPCCommTimeout 120
</IfModule>

It was the IPCCommTimeout setting that did the trick, it defaults to 20 seconds.

What with such a large recordset I had to introduce paging to the web application so the results can be previewed in something more snappy than a 19,000 row table. I used the will_paginate plugin to implement this and it was unbelievably easy. With the plugin, the changes amount to changing the query for your recordset to something along the lines of:

@posts = Post.paginate( :all, :page => params[:page])

and adding the following to the bottom of the view to get the next/prev/page 1|2|3 business:

<%= will_paginate @posts %>

That's it, the first of 600 pages is thrown up in a few seconds.

Maezyn

I have left Maezyn, the Draino hunter on haitus while I was more motivated to get Maevyn to 70. As I mentioned in the last post, I felt like running her against the damn Stonecutter Troggs in Loch Modan as a direct comparison with my efforts with Maexyn, both characters being level 13,

Ok so I am more experienced with a hunter but she only died twice, once because she had no bandages available (!). Bad situation to be in, one health point left and rooting through bags for a bandage. She wiped out most of the Stonecutter camps. She could boogie with the Skullthumpers, I was dropping into kiting tactics when they stunned the cat, Wingclip, jump backwards, Arcane shot.

The lower level Troggs, level 11, she could kill in about six seconds, she seemed much more powerful than Maexyn but this may just be my hunter experience coming out. She has my grinding macro set up:

/petattack
/castsequence Hunter's Mark, Serpent Sting, Arcane Shot

which makes her pretty ruthlessly efficient: no mana problems here.

At the end of the session she was level 15. I enjoyed it, level grinding with a hunter is what I like most in this game.

I'm still focused on making her a Markswoman as opposed to Beastmistress Maevyn. I'm hoping to do more kiting and suchlike, build up more actual playing skill this time. While she is running with a cat for now (nice looking cat too) I am thinking of getting her a nice boar to take to 70. I'm looking for a black one. The cat did very well considering I haven't bothered to train it in claw or bite, but I want a boar for the charge ability. Charge, Gore, health and armour, boars have it all.

I'm looking forward to level 16 as she already has a Lil Timmy's Pea Shooter in her bags ready. First she needs to level her gun skill to something higher than one...

Must admit that female Draino's have got the moves. Even the way she does swings a pickaxe when mining is alluring. Not sure about the hooves though, and the blank white eyes are just creepy.

Conclusion: I <3 Hunters

Boaring

As promised I've set Maezyn up with a little black boar. A scan of the wonderful Petopia (perpetual thanks Mania if you're reading this) told me the best option was a level 11 Longsnout from Elwyn Forest so I equipped Maez with a level 14 gun she had, bought an ammon pouch and bullets and set off.

I found a boar and decided to abandom my cat, Pook, since I only plan to level one pet up. I trained the boar easily enough and fed him up. I haven't decided on a name yet, maybe another Beefy?

I tried him out on the local gnolls and accidently started a fight with Hogger, a level 11 elite. I was worried at first since my gun skill was still very low and a fresh pet, only just trained with rank 2 Growl but it didn't turn out to be a problem, Hogger went down.

The rest of the Gnolls were level 9-10 and grey so I decided to press on to Westful for serious level grinding.

The gun skill improved very rapidly and was soon viable.

Fighting level 14-15 Harvest Watchers was more of a challenge as the Boar didn't hold agro very well, Maez's first arcane shot was enough to pull agro. I actually exploited this as a chance to practise kiting. It is still my intention to level Maez as a Markswoman and I almost want to get agro and learn to deal with it. The main problem with kiting is the initial getting space between you and the mob, more of a challenge at these levels without Aspect of the Cheetah. It's a matter of spamming Wing Clip and then turn and run once it hits (about a 50/50 chance).

I kinda like Westfall, something about the bleakness is restful. I'm normally glad when I've finished there though.

Skinning

Running Maezyn around Westfall I got really hooked on skinning, killing things just for the light leather. It's a great gathering profession because you can run with the minimap on tracking and it only adds two seconds to your looting if you shift-skin and keep plenty of free bag space. I was killing things just to skin them. With the aid of the TBags addon sorting my inventory I am becoming skilled at destroying vendor trash while running to the next kill. Tbags always puts this trash in the top right corner:

It takes time to get used to it but things are grouped consistantly: top left is ammo, top right is free space and vendor trash, the row below is quest items and the rows below that are profession materials, food ingredients and buffs and pots at the bottom. I've been using it so long now that I just know where to look for things. Green drops? Centre right. Bandages? Bottom left. Wonderful. If I could have just one addon it would have to be TBags.

Since my mining was lacklustre (skill 6) compared to skinning (75) I decided to bin mining and take up Leatherworking. It made sense since, for example, I could convert all the leather scraps I had been vendoring into even more leather. I did this and had enough leather on me to powerlevel into the fifties mainly on armour kits.

On to Lakeshire and more questing and skinning. I went wild on the boars and dragon whelps, as my skill increased I got more leather (maybe two pieces per kill) and I started getting medium leather drops. From the whelps I was getting dragon scales which I presumed could make something good.

As a side note, I'm not sure why the whelps dropped money (like a humanoid) but could be skinned (like a beast). What do dragon whelps spend their money on? And why would one be carrying a recipe for roast pork? Maybe the fire breath and the neighbouring boars explain this one.

At the end of the session my Skinning was at the 150 cap and I had to train to expert to raise the cap to 225. I had enough leather to get the leatherworking to 87, making things like gloves and ammo pouches that didn't use a lot of leather and vendored for copper.

When I researched what the whelp scales were used for there was this and this okish items for a level 15 character. Maezyn is now level 18. The whelps were levels 17-18. So lets think about this, to get the mats you fight equal level mobs and the reward is something that you can use youself if you want suboptimal gear or sell to players a couple of levels below you.

Or just vendor stacks of light leather easily for 1g50 apiece.

/disillusioned

Then again:

• It's not like hunters struggle to level with sub-optimal armour
• I'm aware that it's Blizzard's way of motivating people to use the Auction House and drive the economy

Can't wait to start skinning in Nagrand though

Not One but Two Screenshots

Here's Maezyn and Beefy her boar