Weeks 26-27: Breakthrough!

I did it! I pushed through the lack of motivation, with tremendous success (for me, anyway):

• Wildlight is now 83
• Lóthwen is now 37
• Enchanting is at 491
• Engineering is at 352
• Inscription is at 297

After I asked for ideas last time, Rades suggested the Midsummer bonfires for a big chunk of XP, which I'd resisted doing but knew I should, so on the very last day I pushed right until the festival disappeared and did about half of them. It took me up to 75 and I ran some random dungeons until I hit 76, at which point I decided to go questing in Sholazar Basin.

I'd forgotten how much I like that zone! The quests are varied, the Frenzyheart are hilarious and the Kungaloosh-making quest is fun. I ran random dungeons while I was questing and managed to hit 80 before I knew it! I can't really explain how much of a relief it was to be done with Northrend without having to do Icecrown or Storm Peaks again.

Having a max-level tailor was an absolute boon, as I could craft an entire Deathsilk set to replace my Wrath gear and by 81 I was completely decked out in Cataclysm greens/blues. The AH was kind to me too, and I won some good dungeon drops in my first few runs. Having a lot of crafted gear meant I could hold my own in terms of DPS too and I've not had a single snarky comment (unlike the first Wrath dungeon I did), despite still using the heirloom head and cloak. Mind-controlling adds like the Spiritmenders in Throne of Tides has been good fun too.

Shadow priesting has been really entertaining since I got Mind Sear - AoE, finally! - and I feel like I'm getting the hang of keeping my DoTs up, managing procs and temporary buffs, remembering to use cooldowns and all the jazz. When I hit 83 I could finally put a talent point in Archangel! WINGS.

My DK gatherer has been mining up ore for Engineering and that's at the cobalt stage now, which is great because I have cobalt nodes on Gatherer from back when I was mining up Jewelcrafting/Blacksmithing materials. There's some regret that I didn't have the drive to level it as I levelled the character, because I missed out on using some things that aren't as fun anymore, but that's a lesson learnt. Enchanting has taken care of itself mostly, with the help of my hoarded materials from other characters. I'm onto the Cataclysm mats but I'm not going to buy any because I'll eventually have enough if I'm patient.

My Frigid Frostling stood in the fires of the forge AND DIDN'T MELT. It demands I worship it as a God. This picture has no relevance to this post.

Lóthwen the mage has jumped up quite a few levels now that I didn't need the shoulder, chest and weapon heirlooms on my priest anymore and I didn't have to worry about losing their mog appearances. Playing as a fire mage has been good but I feel like I don't get enough time to do damage in dungeons before things are dead, so yesterday I sorted out an arcane spec for instancing. Hopefully that'll make things quicker and simpler!

Levelling inscription has been fun and simple, and I'm now focusing on getting to level 50 before the next Darkmoon Faire ends, so that my +5 points quest isn't wasted. The level restrictions on each stage of professions make sense but are sometimes a little annoying. I'll have to find the energy to take the DK back to Outland to gather herbs but I have a lot of pigments already from my hoarded herbs so it might be a minimal grind.

I'm hoping that I can hold on to this enthusiasm. Wildlight is so close to 85, and Lóthwen is the last professioned alt I needed to focus on. If I can just push through in the next month and get them both to max level, I can finally start on Loremaster with Ara!

Weeks 19 - 21: Mogging Heirlooms and Hellfire Peninsula (again)

Three weeks since the last update, huh? You'd think I was slacking or something but that isn't it at all. I've been...uh...saving the world. Yep. You wouldn't believe what nearly happened and how many marshmallows I had to eat to prevent it.

Quick update:

• Wildlight is now 61
• Enchanting is at 375
• Engineering is at 265
• Inscription is at 201

Wildlight has been getting a lot of time recently as I've been running dungeons with my boyfriend's alt which makes it less tiresome. Shadow is still a fun spec for boss fights but I'm getting pretty bored of Mind Flay followed by more Mind Flay. I have noticed that I'm getting to 3 orbs quicker now so it might be looking up, but I'm still wishing for an AoE attack (and to be honest, slightly concerned that I have might have one but not know about it because it seems like such a massive hole in my toolkit?)

About mid-50s I took Discipline as my second spec and have healed a few dungeons! It's pretty good fun - dropping a shield with a heal attached is a big improvement, and Divine Aegis is great - so I'll try to heal some dungeons every few levels and slowly cement my basic Disc knowledge ready for hitting 85. I made the mistake of never playing as a Resto shaman on Shiden and now I'm too chicken to heal on her without a full guild group :( but that's for another day.

The best thing about levelling my priest was picking up some really nice quest rewards and having a sudden inspiration to mog my entire outfit around them. Sure, it's just what I had in the bank so it's not perfect, but it's making me happy to log on and level her now she's wearing a pretty outfit!

If you're interested, the visible pieces:
Head - Vishas' Hood
Shoulders - Karna's Poncho
Chest - Xakxak's Lab Frock
Hands - Frostweave Gloves
Waist - Dawnspire Cord
Feet - you can't see them on Draenei but you might have to experiment on other races to find a match.

On the professions side of things I finally made the effort to level them a bit. Enchanting is now at the Infinite Dust stage so I'll be collecting materials whilst I'm in the 60-70 bracket before I buy anything extra. I have a fair amount stashed away so hopefully it won't cost me too much! Engineering is on the back burner until I can be bothered to go and mine up lots of Thorium on my gathering alt and Inscription is likewise in need of some herbs. If only I wasn't so lazy! The Darkmoon Faire is on this week though so I've grabbed 5 points in all three professions and saved myself another chunk of materials, so it could be worse.

That's about it for now! I have a few days off this week and I'm hoping to powerlevel Wildlight into Northrend at the very least (dungeons until 62 because I refuse to quest through Hellfire Peninsula again), so we'll see how that goes.

If you have a pre-Mists list, how is it going? Have you met some/all of your goals yet? I'd love to know :)

Weeks 15-17: Hitting a Levelling Wall

It seems like these updates are the only thing that I have time for at the moment. I want to do a big achievements roundup but honestly, it'll have to wait until I have a few hours to link everything up and give it the effort I want to. Real life crits hard, kids.

Quick update:

• Shiden is now 85!
• Wildlight is now 40
• Lóthwen is now 28
• Skinning - to 525
• Leatherworking - to 521
• Enchanting - to 299
• Inscription - to 196
• Engineering - to 155

Biggest news is that Shiden hit 85, finally! She's great fun to play and I've started running some normal dungeons with guildies to gear her up. I have to say, watching Elemental Overload proc on a Lava Burst and seeing two go shooting off at enemies is an absolute blast. Slightly nervous about trying out a Restoration spec so I'm going to gear up to about ilvl 378, reforge to suit needs and then start with normals while I put theory into practice. If I'm not a great shaman healer that's fine - the list only demands that I try healing everything once!

Skinning hit 525 without any effort whatsoever, but even with the Darkmoon Faire daily this month, leatherworking is stuck a few points below 525. I need to get out there and farm some Savage Leather, or just give in to temptation and buy it...I hope that profession material requirements are lowered at some point in the future because the sheer amount you need to hit each threshold often prevents you from making anything useful as you level. By the time I can make the leatherworking epics I'll likely have picked up better gear from dungeons with a lot less effort.

The problem with that final push to 85 is that it's killed my levelling drive. The next nearest alt is Wildlight at 37, with Lóthwen at 28, and both of them need to hit 85 so that I can max their professions. I can't muster up the energy for another two long, long grinds and have been bumming about getting Outland dungeon reps on Ara. Still, the list is a focus not an obligation and I'm not at the stage where I'm about to level when I don't want to. Fingers crossed that I can fit in the odd level here and there before I lose the habit! [Update: I did 3 levels on the priest tonight, and it was good fun. That might be because I'm at the bar fights and riverboats section of Thousand Needles, though!]

I'm conspicuously tall here.

In other news, I removed engineering as a second profession for Lóthwen because Wildlight already has it and there's no way I'm levelling it twice. Being a hoarder I have tonnes of cloth stashed away and I've decided to make her second profession tailoring. There are a couple of BoP recipes for tailors that are really nice so I want at least one cloth-wearing alt that can make the most of them.

Week 5: Everything Happened At Once

I am not lying when I say the last week has been absolutely full of happenings! I logged on last Tuesday to find an Orc Death Knight and finish Love is in the Air, finally snagging one in Dalaran after a guildie spotted one and summoned me (he was trying to taunt Alliance by staying just inside the Horde area, but I got LoS from a rooftop). That triggered the holiday achievement and then the whole What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been meta achievement! FINALLY. A whole year later and I have my Violet Proto-Drake, free Master Riding and a bit of a break when the holidays roll around again!

That wasn't the end of my day though - we'd scheduled an extra raid night to get Madness down as we were so close...Discombobulated downed Madness (10-man normal) last Tuesday after a lot of hard work from more than the 10 people in the group that evening. Hitting 8/8 normal mode was a fantastic feeling (we one-shotted it yesterday evening too, for a true farm kill). To top it all off, Maw of the Dragonlord dropped - twice! - and I was lucky enough to pick one of those up too. What a week!

After all that excitement it was hard to think about the bucket list but I rolled up my sleeves and this is what I got done:

• Morríghan is level 82
• Nefarna is level 13
• Skinning is now 338
• Leatherworking is now 246
• Inscription is 176
• Engineering is now 140
• Aralosseien has 7815 a/p

My pocket tank and other guildies were kind enough to run me through some normal Cataclysm dungeons, once I'd bought a couple of items to boost my ilvl (because of my heirloom head and cloak). I felt a bit bad cheating my way into them but after I discovered I was keeping up with other at-level DPSers I figured it was fine. Morríghan has gone from ilvl 188 to ilvl 245 in the last week - thanks mostly to crafted Redsteel armor - so she's genuinely qualified for two normals and can pull her weight in the other two. Huzzah! The chunks of exp I'm getting (with rested bonus) for these are far more appealing than questing alone so I'll be running dungeons here and there until I hit 85.

We finished running the worgen through their starting zone so Nefarna is waiting in Darnassus at level 13, soon to be sent to Darkshore. I've run that zone twice already though, and I have two other night elf characters waiting in the wings so I might get her summoned somewhere new like Redridge Mountains and see those quests now they've been revamped. I've gone for Destruction as my spec because I like the idea of raining fiery doom down on my enemies later on (I have no idea if this is efficient for levelling or not)!

The Darkmoon Faire took up a whole evening - ferrying all the professioned alts there to do the monthly quests takes time! With +5 to professions they're silly to miss though.

Finally, Ara got a buttload of a/p this week. We ran through 10-man normal ICC on Friday, as we were lacking some crucial people for a Madness kill. Our fantastic guildies who were raiding back in the day ran us through every achievement they could and we almost got them all! Getting LST and killing Deathwing didn't hurt, either. I'm hoping to write my LST thoughts up at some point soon :)

So, I'm not sure what to work on this week! The dungeon-only resolution for Morríghan puts her out of the running, so it comes down to shaman vs. low-level alts. I might just see what takes my fancy as I go.

What have you been up to this last week in Azeroth?

Week 4: Lunar Lunacy

I've not got a lot of Bucket List progress under my belt this week because I had Lunar Festival to finish up. The good news is that it's done, so only one part of Love is in the Air to go and I'll get my Violet Proto-Drake!

What's changed:

• Morríghan went from 80 to 81, finally!
• Wildlight went from 26 to 28 with a little boosting, also getting Enchanting to 225
• Luíseach finally maxed out Blacksmithing!
• Aralosseien got to 7495 achievement points

I actually finished level 80 by mining ore for raid gear gems. I don't really enjoy questing on Morríghan but she's darn efficient with a sword and it could be a lot worse.

Wildlight is stuck at 225 Enchanting now (until she hits level 35) so I'll probably send Morríghan off to mine some low-level ores and work on Engineering until it's at 225 as well.

The Darkmoon Faire is an absolute lifesaver if you're levelling professions. You can do the profession quests once per month and you get 5 skillups for very little effort. At the higher levels of professions, you're saving a lot of materials to do it this way (it would have taken 60 Elementium Bars otherwise to finish Blacksmithing) so all my professioned alts will be visiting the fair sometime next week.

Not a big week, and finding the five Horde race/class combos I need for Fistful of Love will take up some more time, but hopefully I can crack on with the levelling once that's finished!

Weeks 2 & 3: Slowly But Surely

So...there was no Bucket List update last week. I didn't get much alting time and I didn't feel like working on Loremaster. I was lazy, frankly, but it's my list so I can procrastinate if I want!

This week I'm enjoying having a big list to choose activities from and it's definitely making my in-game time more fun. Don't feel like end-game content for another night? Level one of my lowbies a bit. Don't have the energy to quest? Work on a profession. When all else fails, my flower-picking Death Knight gets sent to uproot those herbs and hack bits of ore out of rocks, mailing countless stacks of materials through the ether and into the hands of my professioning alts who store it in rapidly-overflowing banks for later on.

Before the list those alts were there, in the back of my mind, but didn't seem worth the effort despite the fact that I'd like a stable of level 85 characters covering all professions before Mists hits. Now I have the will to work on them and it's making me happier out of game too - days without a clear purpose really drag my mood downwards.

What I've achieved in the last two weeks:

• Aralosseien now has 7385 a/p
• Shiden hit level 50!
• Wildlight went from level 22 to 26, and got Engineering up from 100 to 135

Getting Shiden, my draenei shaman to 50 is long overdue. She's still wearing a few pieces of leather +int gear so I have my fingers crossed that some questing will replace those as the AH is bereft of level 50-60 +int mail.

Wildlight hit 26 so quickly I barely saw it happening. The OH did boost me through Blackfathom Deeps after a disastrous attempt via LFD but I think that 4 heirlooms and the perks of a level 25 guild are going to zoom me through content at a furious rate. I did toy with the idea of taking them off to see more of the zones but if I'm going to go for Loremaster on Ara I'm happy to save the lore surprises for her.

More importantly, Wildlight made her first pair of goggles - a snazzy pink pair!

I think I might have sparked a goggles addiction.