Now that everyone has hit 70 I’ve been able to slow down a lot and get round to doing the things I need to get finished before I start the grinding seriously, so I spent most of the long weekend doing that, and then logging out and ignoring WoW for the rest of the day to hopefully recharge my energy for the next push.

The first thing I did was decide to get Nuaaki up to 300 herbalism so as to get past needing to herb in Azeroth and be able to pick flowers in Outland so as to avoid wasting all those nodes in instances and the ability to skin bog lords for motes of life that are needed for primal mooncloth. Overall it took me about 5 hours to get from 1 to 320 and I made about 150g from selling the herbs such as gromsblood, dreamfoil, etc so it was a very worthwhile exercise and I believe infinately easier than the mining skillup is going to be for Smara next weekend.

After that I spent a few hours a day on getting quests done to try and finish off all the zones and leave myself with just dailies and instances to try and cut down on the number of decisions about what to do each day when I log in. The first thing I did was finish off Netherstorm quests..well not entirely, I still have to kill Nexus-King Salhadar since he kicked my ass the first two times I did him. I’m not sure exactly what the problem was I was having but I think I was tanking him too close to the casters and they kept getting caught in the aoe/frost nova he has and then once I got knocked back it was hard to get back in range and taunt him off whoever he had agro on before they were dead, but I think I have ideas for him again after one or two more upgrades.

Thinking about that, and then the times I had trouble in ramparts, I have noticed I really have trouble in fights now where the mob does a knockback and agro-wipe since after they knockback Smara they will go after the closest character and that will invariably be a caster who then gets their ass handed to them before I can get Smara back in range for a righteous defender cast…I think I need to be thinking a little faster and maybe frost-nova and back out with them which means I will need to re-add secondary movement keys for the casters and bind frost nova to a hotkey so guess I’ll take that into account when I redo my UI and get instance macros done this weekend.

After finishing up Neterstorm I headed to Shadowmoon Valley and dropped 4500g on 5 flying mounts for everyone and started off questing there, with the goal to get all those quests finished this week in between GTA4 sessions. I got a fair few of the Wildhammer Hold quests done so now it’s just finish off the ones left there that I haven’t done before such as Path of Conquest and Truncheon’s line (basically the ones that need a group for) and move on up to the Aldor camp for their quest lines for extra Shat’tar and Aldor rep before I need to worry about instances and fel armaments for faction with the groups. After that I will only have the Og’rila, Skyguard and SSO daily quests to do which should be about 200g per character for ~90 minutes work a night, which will mean around 30 days for enough gold to buy epic flight and the CE hypogriphs for all 5 characters (though this excludes money made from each instance run), so thing are looking reasonably good if I can keep up the grind.

Looking at instances and loot drops today, I can’t really see the point to doing instances below CoT level now as none of them really have loot drops that will be an upgrade for any of my characters and don’t give faction unless on heroic so I think after I run them once or twice to finish off the quests associated with them I’ll just not worry unless they are the normal mode daily. Even de’ing the drops only gives me a small prismatic shard so I’d need to run the entire instance to get one large prismatic shard while I’d get that from de’ing a single boss drop in a CoT+ level instance for the same time investment so there isn’t even really an incentive to do the lower instances for those which is a shame as I actually like some of the lower instances, but sadly this isn’t about doing what I like it’s about doing what improves my characters in preperation for WotLK so that has to take precedent.