The major recent event in WoW was the arrival of Hallow’s End, so of course I had to go and rack up a bunch of the associated achievements. Some of them just depend on blind luck based on what you get from the treat bags, though, so it might take a while to get them all.

My mage is also up to level 30 now, hunting around the Tarren Mill area. I’m kind of torn between leaving him there and picking him back up when Cataclysm arrives, or continuing on to at least Outland so that I do Cataclysm from the start with a completely new character instead…

I mostly played my mage in WoW last night, getting him to level 28 and finishing off most of Stonetalon Mountains.

But the real action was on my warrior, where a convergence of pets finally got him the 50-pet achievement. It was a bit sooner than expected thanks to the unexpected arrival of a penguin in the mail for doing the battle.net conversion, finding another alligator reward in a fishing daily, and the hatching of the Jubling egg. That still left me one pet short, so I bought a mechanical toad off the AH, netting the achievement and the reward of a skunk pet. That’s five pets in one night with hardly any effort needed…

There’s another reward at the 75 pet mark, but that one will be tougher. I’ve already got all the easy ones, and although I know of another 28 or so pets I could get, it would cost a fortune to buy them off the AH.

Though I intended to continue on in Gothic tonight, I wound up spending most of my time in WoW, of course. I did make a good amount of progress though, getting my mage to level 27 and, more importantly, raising his enchanting skill to 230. I’ve run out of essences and dusts though, so from here on it’s going to be more expensive and/or slower…

Lately, most of my time in WoW has actually been spent on my mage alt. Over the weekend I managed to get him from level 19 to 26, and raised jewelcrafting to 217 and enchanting to 136 (enchanting’s a bit of a pain to raise). It’s strange because he’s simultaneously more boring than my warrior (just cast Frostbolt over and over and over…), but more interesting because I can’t approach situations the same way by just barging in like I would with the warrior.

I didn’t neglect my warrior entirely though, managing to complete the zone quest achievement in Zangarmarsh, collect a few more aspirant tokens at the Argent Tournament, and finally got around to socketing some of my equipment. With the boost of a few gems, I finally have a defense rating of 536 on him, which is good enough to avoid crits in non-heroic dungeons (I need 540 for heroics).

I spent most of my time in WoW tonight working through some of the Auchindon dungeons, to try and clear out some old quests. I forgot that Exarch Maladaar was the boss of the western area though, and he’s pretty much impossible for me to solo right now due to his ability to clone me and summon help.

I did manage to work my way through the eastern dungeon for the first time, completing a couple of quests there and getting the key for the southern one. I couldn’t make it all the way through the south dungeon since one of the mid-bosses was too tough, but I did make it deep enough to get a book for a Nagrand quest and resume that quest chain.

Unfortunately I don’t think any of them counted towards zone quests that I still need for achievements…

I took a bit of a break from the usual daily routine today and went around collecting some pets, picking up a couple cats, a couple of wyrmlings from the Blood Elf newbie areas, a worg from a quest in LBRS, and a giant frog from the Darkmoon Faire (though the egg for that one won’t hatch for a week). I’m still about three pets short of having 50 total though, which would get me a skunk pet as a reward.

And since I was fooling around in LBRS anyway, I picked up the pieces of the attunement quest for UBRS and finished it off as well. There were other quests I could have done in there along the way, but I didn’t really have room in my quest log. Oh well, it’s an easy enough area at this point, so I’m sure I’ll be back later.

Things remain calm in WoW, with the recent highlights being more work on collecting Brewfest tokens (I’ve picked up the pink elephant pet as well), and working on some old zones and quests.

I’ve picked up the achievements for completing quests in Netherstorm, Terokkar, and Dragonblight now, but a few quests still elude me in other zones. In Zul’Drak I think I’ll need to do the Amphitheatre of Anguish fights, which will need a full group; I have a long quest chain I still need to finish off in Nagrand, which should get me close to completion there; in Blade’s Edge it looks like I’ll need to do some tough miniboss fights; and Ironcrown still has a bunch of tougher group ones I need to do.

And I’ve also been working on miscellaneous other achievements, like picking up mounts and pets, cooking recipes, etc. I’m getting close to finishing off the cooking and fishing achievements as well.