Struggling to level blacksmithing

So 25% through level 69 and got hit a bit of a wall. I’m fully rested to 70 now, but I just can’t find the motivation to finish off those quests. So I decided to level up blacksmithing. I got it to 350 some time back in level 67 and thought I’d make a final push.

A guildie has been having the same problem with finding enough recipies to level up and he suggested I get the honored with cenarion recipies, the adamantite weightstone and grinding stone. So flew over to swamprat post and headed south to the Cenerion stronghold. Picked up the 2 recipies and headed back to Shattrath to portal back to the undercity.

(By the way, if anyone reading this is levelling blacksmithing, please please please go to undercity not orgrimmar. The distance to anvil – AH – post box – anvil is so much shorter.)

So anyway, made it to the undercity auction house, bought enough mats to make 10 weightstones and off I went. Now this is where I’m hazy, but at some point halfway through they went green and now I have 156 blacksmithing skill. This is gonna take some time I tell ya.

Made an arcanite rod and a fel iron rod for my brothers priest and then waited for the hearthstone to be ready to take me back to the outlands.

How I love Patch 2.0.10

So a quick refresh of whats coming up in the next patch for warriors:

The rage normalization equation has been adjusted to grant more rage. The typical warrior should see an increase of 15% to 20% in their rage generation.

All warriors had their critical strike chance adjusted upward slightly (about 1%).

“Thunder Clap” is now useable in Defensive Stance. In addition, the tooltip has been adjusted to indicate it causes additional threat.

The cooldown on “Victory Rush” has been removed, and it can now be used up to 20 seconds after killing an enemy.

“Unbridled Wrath” has been modified so that rather than a fixed chance to grant rage, it has an increased chance when using slower weapons.

So now all I got to do is wait to go test it out. A bit sad they couldn’t get the snare breaking with charge and intercept but apparently it requires a rejig of the mechanics.

I’ll keep you upto date on how this affects Haaz.

Offline again!!! – Update 2

Ok, so now it all up and runing again. However, I did find out last night that contrary to my previous whinging, you install the original disks and then burning crusade disks straight after and you are at 2.0.0 with the expansion packs installed.

I noticed that it took longer, I suppose its got more files to overwrite.

Anyway, I hope I never have to write about this subject again. Anyone reading it must be well and truly bored of it by now.

So today I entered the fray, and conscious that Haaz has been pretty slack in dealing damage to the enemies of the horde, he immediately set out to take out some high profile bounty.

Offline again!!! – Update 1

So I am 25% through loading the main warcraft game. Then I have to patch it upto 1.12, then to 2.0.0, and then about 4 patches upto 2.0.8 and then done.

Oh no I gotta instal Burning Crusade somewhere in there.

Broken record anyone?

If anyone does come to this post and thinks wtf is this guy on, I need help not a flippin update on his real life issues, well I have one bit of advice. Copy the contents off all your 4 (or 5) disks into a folder called “wow cds”. Start at number 1 and go to number 4 or 5 depending how many you have. If it asks you if you want to overwrite click yes. Then when you are done hit the installer icon. It does it faster, trust me.

Anyway back to my mind numbing issues.

I was kinda wondering why the Burning Crusade disks just didn’t contain all the patch info upto 2.0.0? There probably is a really good reason, like making someone have original disks. But wouldn’t they need the original disks to upgrade to world of warcraft?

So many questions and so little answers. Who has these answers. Write into “haaz wanna know, c/o orgrimmar inn, orgrimmar”. I don’t think orgrimmar needs a postal code.

WOW, I am 50% through since I wrote all this. Maybe if I keep writing crap the install time will speed up. And if it doesn’t, it’ll numb the pain of American Idol my wife is intend on keeping up with.

Only one grumble though, why does my install only wait until I’m level 68 with full rested bonus to play up? Sucks. I hate warcraft, I’m never gonna play it again.

Yeah right.

Gotta be undead, surely

Kinless has taken the challenge and he is a real life human paladin.

So the challenge has been set and here are the results…..

Gnome Warlock Gnomes are strange little things. Fascinated with gadgets and shiny things, gnomes are often plotting and planning – but are pretty smart, despite all the explosions.You’re a creepy, creepy warlock. You delight in the darker things in life – such as setting people on fire, and delight in the macabre. You’d probably fake your own death just to freak people out by getting up from the casket at your funeral. Find out your real-life WoW race and class at QuizGalaxy.com

YOU WHAT?!?!

Actually, after spilling my drink I sat down and thought about it.

I am rather small at 5′3″. I’m an engineer by trade, so blowing things up is a speciality. Plus I only really play as undead, so I suppose a warlock is the closest you can get to pure evil.

Haaz on the crusade

Here are some pictures to prove Haaz has been doing his bit for the horde.

Dressing up as a box to infiltrate the demon legion. A typical day for Haaz who since stepping into the portal has disguised himself no less than 4 times. However, someone left an old fish in the bottom and it was hard to fight the smell AND listen to the legions important communications.

Killing Maladaar. Normally Haaz killing someone wouldn’t even make page 21 news, but someone had to put him out of his misery. Red armor is soooo last summer.

The Hardware Store

All good raiding guilds need to get supplies and I heard there was a new hardware store opening up in town. Might get Haaz to sit outside and wait for opening day. 

Offline again!!!

Ok so my computer has been playing up again. Tried to log on the other day and patch2.mpq is showing as corrupt. Using the Blizzard repair tool didn’t seem to help so uninstalled it and went to bed. Luckily I saved all the patches I downloaded, so it shouldn’t be as much of a headache next time.

Next time is looking like saturday, possibly friday night if I can leave work early enough as I think I’ll need a few hours.

I’m kinda getting annoyed as it works when I am busy, but give me a free day or two and something happens. My guild start on Karazhan this coming monday so I’ve got to push for 70 and then that attunement pretty fast. It looks like we are starting intially as a sign up for the raid. I notice that a lot of other guilds are making teams up that raid together. Lets just hope I can get to 70 before the next expansion because I really want a chance to roll on The Decapitator

70 Here I come

So with warcraft back up and running I’m now back on target to hit 70. My original guess was mid feb, and with 2 levels to go, and a week offline, I wasn’t far off.

The good thing with being offline for a week is I’m now nearly 150% through rested, so it makes that grind to 70 much easier.

So back to my update, didn’t get much done myself. Started off boosting a paladin in our guild through RFD and then helped a friend new to the game finish off those annoying quests that hang about in everyones quest log. Then my brother logged on so I spent some time hanging with him until he hit 61. So its 9pm and I start my own levelling.

Going to try and get some pictures up up soon.

Forgot how long patching took

6 hrs in and I am only just installing the Burning Crusade on my computer.

In case you were wondering about my earlier post, it was my warcraft that needed a full install. My brother coped pretty well with putting disks into a drive and pressing ‘ok’.

Right, where to begin. Last night I got home from work and had finally had enough, and put world of warcraft CD 1 into the drive and hit go. CD 2, go. CD 3, go. CD 4, go, zizzz zizzz thurp, (not responding). Twice I tried to eject CD 4 and try again. Twice it didn’t work.

So I tried the full install again. I remember I had a similar problem when I first installed on this computer. I tried a full install agains. Nothing.

 Went round to Elliots house and picked up his copy “dude my disk 4 isn’t working, lend my your install disks”. Got home, but was too tired to carry on. So today I tried again, but with Elliots disks. Same problem, CD 4 not loading correctly.

So… to cut a long story very short, I copied all the files over to my computer and then installed from the hard drive. Then 400+mb patch to get to 1.12.something and then 630+ to get to 2.0.1. I am now on CD 3 of 4 of the Burning Crusade. I’m hoping I had the foresight 2 months ago to save all the post BC patches somewhere.

 71% through CD 3, pleeeeease work. 

Guide to tabards

Anyone collecting Tabards? I’m certainly not, however here’s a useful little link over to wowinsider which has a nice little tabard guide.

Not much to report

Having a few problems with my PC at the moment, so not much to report. I hit 68 last weekend, and not logging in all week will probably help my to hit 69 soon.

Good news however, my brother returned from his extended (enforced?) break and I bought him the Burning Crusade as a birthday present. Can’t wait for him to hit 70 so we can start our 2 man arena team.

Anyway, I hope to have it installed tonight so lets see what that brings.

 Edit: Here’s a picture I call brothers in arms. Welcome back Elliot.

Ding – Hit 67

I kinda got stuck the last few days. I was at that point where I couldn’t get the level 67 quests in Area52 or Shadowmoon Valley and but high enough that me and some guild mates had hammered through all the quests in Nagrand. I think the problem was lack of instances. I’ve only run about 4 of them, and each of them was no more than 2-3 times.

So I had to go back to Blades Edge Mountains. I skipped the horde quests and went for the cenarion ones instead. I got some pendant, killed some walking birds, then negotiated peace with some human loggers and hit 67. Well not quite, apparently the loggers don’t want peace so Haaz had to cut some heads off.

Dinging 67 meant shadowmoon valley, so off I went.

This areas pretty hard to solo just on the sheer spacing of mobs. There is a lot of downtime just because you’ve had to fight about 4 adds.

After powering through about 25% of this level I got a guild invite to the crypts in a DPS role.

We had a lvl 70 tank, healer and hunter, plus me and a lvl 69 mage. I think it was done in less than an hour because our healer was just about to lose the buff from a pot he consumed right before we went in.

Something dropped that any other time I would have needed straight away. I think it was +50AP and chance of killing a mob to receive upto 900 health back. Pretty sweet, except my crit rating has been freefalling since the expansion. I think I’m down to about 22% crit chance now. I have the +crit trinkets equipped to keep that @ 22% so that would have ruined it. So I greeded instead.

So good times all round? Not quite. I went back to Nagrand to finish off Durn the Hungerer who has been terrorising anyone that visits the giant white rock in south Nagrand. While I was there I noticed that I had not finished up some quest line, killing some more ogres. So I ran through that quest line until I reached the part where you have to plant a flag in their dead bodies. Me being me i’m quite forgetful, so i kept killing them and then intercepting into the next one.

This meant I had to go back and plant a half dozen flags which is where the problem occured. Because there were quite a few of us on the same quest they were spawning at the same point, and it just so happened that I planted a flag right on the fresh corpse of someone else’s kill.

I thought for a moment ‘is that possible, would blizz make it that I can just let someone else do the hard work and then me steal it?’. Apparently they did.

But before I could type /say sorry, I got the following:

[xxx] says: WTF!!!
[xxx] says: stop stealing
xxx spits on you
xxx laughs at you
[Haaz] says: sorry
To [xxx]: I was sorry until you spat
[xxx] stfu you little bitch

It continued like this for a little while. I asked him why he spat and why he was annoyed but he kept insulting me. Not that insulting me was that much off an issue, but I was annoyed that he wouldn’t listen. I can appreciate that everyone is a little wary, even of their own side stealing kill etc, but hey, this guy is in our servers no.1 guild, don’t they have a rule about these things? (actually they do, I checked). So, not so good times, some guy things I’m stealing his kills.

Nagrand nearly finished

Yeah I know it says Nagrand, but todays comments are really a whine about Blades Edge Mountains. Is it me or does that zone suck really bad?

I think I hit 66 before deciding to trek up there. I made it to the first horde town and found about 3-4 quests. I then found the next horde town and also the cenarion refuge area. So about a total of 10 quests all in all. So I thought i’d save myself some time and look them up. I find 2 to be bugged in some way. Great start. Then I see that not many are together. Great.

I think the thing that bothered me the most, is I was running around the area and it just bored me. Nothing was exciting, nothing stood out. The quests sucked, and I soon found another one with a 1/100 drop rate. For those who care its the one where you have to collect 4 wings. I checked on Allakhazam and most people seem to have a drop rate problem. Quest dropped.

So anyway, I logged on when I got home from work and decided to go back to Nagrand. Now Nagrands a bit of a strange one. At first I hated it. It reminded me of the barrens, and I really hate the barrens. Whatever character I level I always fly them back to Tirisfal Glades to level them up.

Anyway, we were talking about new content not old stuff. So at first it kinda sucked, but the more time I spent there, the more I decided it wasn’t so bad. The north of the region could have been thought out a bit. It looks like some developer got bored of creating new content and stuck some more ogres for everyone to grind.

The throne of elements is a pretty nice place, but its the south that makes the place. Floating islands with waterfalls, giant crystals and alien type markings, town full of easy grind material, the list goes on.

I had a few quests, mostly group ones. So off I set with a random dude and my man Draith and came back with Breastplate of the Warbringer.

Its an upgrade for me, and replaces my old vindicator breastplate which I used for 5 man or raid off tanking. 3o Def, 45 stam, +30 to hit.

Did I mention I hated Blades Edge Mountains?

Hoodoob the Hunter

Like most poeple that play this game I have a multitude of alts spread across different servers, all at different levels, all different classes and all different proffessions.

So before the Burning Crusade I thought I’d have a cull and delete a load. For no other reason than to save my sanity. I went about the annihilation with the precision of jack the ripper. Anyone below level 5, off with your head.

I delted all my twinks on an old server my mate used to once be on. But not before handing out over 100g to random passerbys. I tried to be fair. I started off asking them if they were new to the game, or if this was just an unwanted alt. If they seemed to be newish (I didn’t bother weeding out the good liers) to the game, I gave them 10g and a few presents.

Out went my only paladin, 20 levels worht of experiance in mob killing lost with the press of 6 letters. D E L E T E.

I kinda lost the plot a little when we logged onto my brothers account and deleted all our ‘joint’ characters except Haazgoth, my first ever character.

So now I am left with 5 characters, most of which are currently on Mazrigos, 1 is on a server that always seems to be up when mazrigos is down so at least I can play and the rest exist only to launder naff stuff through the auction house.

I sound like an addict.

So there is Haaz, the great warrior, and his merry little altish friends. Of these, Hoodoob is prehaps my favourite. There is also little Tarlok the paladin, and the unfortunately named zgbanker who now has no purpose.

So back to Hoodoob the hunter. He’s on full rested now, so I went up to ashenvale and hunted down the Laughing Sisters. Easy 350xp a kill, with no down time, and no use of pots. I’m hoping to make 30 with him by the time Haaz hits 70.

The Burning Crusade so far

I’m pretty happy with my progress this weekend. Started at 64 and am now halfway through 66.

 Most of my levelling was in Nagrand with the help of a guildmate (cheers perla) and with rested xp. We burnt though all the quests in the south and then joined up with Liska and Wite to do the orge quests in the north.

 Last night i teamed up with Giantcrab and together we busted through some Blades edge mountains quests.

 Before the great server crash of 4th feb, I went down to Hillsbrad to help boost a friends alt and noticed a huge number of alliance wondering around slaying people. I guess they thought there wouldn’t be much help around, with everyone on their mains up in the outlands. Being a high level horde on a PVP server, I felt it was my duty to help.

 And so I did.

And so it starts….

I decided to start my own warcraft blog, mainly as a way for friends and guild members to catch up with what i’m doing.

It all started when I was reading through Kinless and remembered back to my old warrior levelling days. It made me chuckle and then I realised how his blog has revived so many good memories. I hope you get the same from this.