And it’s time to dip back into WoW yet again thanks to another timed event. This time it’s the “Love Is In The Air” festival, and I managed to complete the Horde gift collection part and a handful of achievements tonight. A lot of the achievements for it just depend on random luck in what you get from a gift you can only attempt once an hour, though.

I also still need to track down a dwarf hunter for the rose-petal-sprinkling achievement, but everyone’s staying in their home cities for the event. Shattrath, Gadgetzan, and Booty Bay were all deserted.

I played a bit of WoW tonight, finally finishing off the Loremaster of Eastern Kingdoms achievement and doing a handful of Netherstorm quests. None of them were particularly exciting though, and I felt like I was getting a bit bored again, so perhaps my return to WoW was a little premature.

Oh well, there’s still plenty of other games to play. And by plenty I mean way too many, of course…

Today’s WoW session was a mixed bag of things, starting out with leveling an alt a bit. I don’t really intend to play them a lot, but it might be useful to get them to the point where they can do some mid-level crafting.

After that it was back to the Outlands, where I gathered enough adamantium ore to claw my way to 350 blacksmithing, which later on in the day let me make some nifty new cobalt armour for myself. After finishing off a few quests in Terrokar and Blade’s Edge (mostly in areas I can now fly to), I headed off to Netherstorm and started working on the quests there.

I only got a handful done before I got the itch to try and get fishing up to Grand Master level, so I headed back to Orgrimmar and fished for a bit. I even managed to fish up Old Crafty, for an achievement, so I then headed to Northrend to see what I could find there instead. In the end I wound up with six or seven stacks of good food items, a blue dagger I caught on one cast (no stats or sockets, though, but worth a bit of gold), and made it to 350 skill.

And then it was back to the Plaguelands for a bit, originally just to finish off one quest but I discovered a handful of other quests I hadn’t finished and worked on them for a bit. I’m now only 8 quests away from the Loremaster achievement for the Eastern Kingdoms…

It was another day spent in WoW, and I managed to clear out three dungeons this time: Sunken Temple, Wailing Caverns, and The Deadmines.

Sunken Temple I actually had to go back and do a second time, since I ran across the big boss but he wasn’t attackable, and I hadn’t realized that something else I did later on made him attackable; I thought I needed to start a quest line elsewhere or something. Ah well. I’d done Wailing Caverns before, but it was so long ago that it apparently didn’t record it as an achievement. And the Deadmines is really an Alliance dungeon, so there wasn’t much to do but rush through and kill the boss.

I also finished off a bunch of other miscellaneous quests, primarily around Blasted Lands. I’m now within 35-45 quests of finishing off the Loremaster achievements for Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms. It might still be out of my reach though, if a lot of the remaining ones are for high-end raids or PvP. This list of easily-missed quests should come in handy.

Continuing on with the Great Dungeon Cleanup, I finished off Uldaman tonight. There was really only a single quest left, but it was annoying since it required entering the instance twice and flying all over the place in between. At least the instance part is fairly short. I also took the opportunity to knock off a handful of other overlooked quests while traveling around, as well.

Next up, Sunken Temple. That’s probably as high as I’ll be able to go by myself until I gain more levels.

I didn’t really feel like starting anything new, so I wound up back in WoW last night, and I took the opportunity to finish off the Blackfathom Deeps and Gnomeregan dungeons and prepared for Uldaman by finishing off the quests that could be done just outside the instance.

It was actually the first time I’d been to Gnomeregan, and the layout of it is a bit confusing at first. I managed to stumble into the end boss earlier than expected, skipping a big chunk of the dungeon, but it seems to be meant mainly for Alliance players anyway. I’m still missing one quest for there, since a ring I need didn’t drop, so I’ll have to come back at some point

And since I still had some time to kill this evening, I popped back into WoW just to take care of the Zul’Farrak quests I had queued up. They were, unsurprisingly, fairly easy at my way-too-high-for-it level, though the pyramid fight did get a bit hectic just due to the constant stream of enemies.

That completed seven quests in my log, and I only picked up three new ones as chained quests, so I’ve freed up four quests slots, at least.

And of course, right after I say I’m taking a break from WoW, I go and spend all day today in it… It was the start of the Lunar Festival event though, and these quests are only available for a limited time, so I had to do them soon anyway. I wound up getting all but two of the achievements for the event, and those will have to wait until I’m level 80 anyway since they involve Northrend.

And along the way I wound up picking up a couple pieces I needed for the quests in Zul’Farrak, so I’ll probably head there first whenever I return in earnest. I’ve still got a half-dozen or so quests to finish up there, that have been in my quest log for ages now, and it should be easily soloable.

I popped into WoW briefly today, just to buy a new mount after the 3.0.8 patch went live:

Unfortunately it’s a bit taller than my wolf mount, so I get caught on doors and arches more often. Oh well, I’ll mostly be sticking with the wolf anyway.