I finally hit level 60 in WoW over the weekend, so now it’s off to the Burning Crusade areas. I could have headed there at level 58, but a lot of other people have mentioned that they felt that was a bit too soon and too many enemies were orange or red at that point. I’ll be glad to have Shattrath and its portals back as a home base, anyway.

Along the way I did most of the major quests in the Winterspring and Silithus areas. I also spent a while farming in Hinterlands trying to get the last robot chicken quest, and I didn’t have any luck the first time but did manage to get it on another pass through on the way to some other quest turn-in. There are still a lot of old-world areas I never really got around to doing, though: Azshara, the Plaguelands, Desolace, The Burning Steppes, the Blasted Lands, and even Stranglethorn. I’ll have to come back later for faction and achievements.

I also finally finished off the armoursmithing quests, so I can make special armour now. I’ve only made one item so far, a set of Earthforged Leggings that were a bit of an upgrade from my old ones. There’s plenty of faction-specific blacksmithing plans, but it’s probably not worth worrying about them until I get to the WotLK areas or they’ll just become obsolete fairly quickly.

And this is the point where it will definitely slow down, as I will no longer have the help of the sub-60 xp bonuses they added a while back.

For the first day since I resumed playing WoW, I failed to gain at least one level tonight. It wasn’t entirely unproductive though, as I gained four more exploration achievements (and would have had a fifth had a suicide run into the Draenei newbie area worked) and got the flight path points to Felwood, Moonglade, and Winterspring.

I think those will be my next hunting grounds anyway, before I finally move on to Silithus. Or I might just skip Silithus entirely and head straight to the BC areas once I hit 58.

I know I’ve said I will be slowing down, but I wound up gaining two levels in WoW tonight, putting me at 54. A lot of it was from turning in a whole bunch of Un’Goro quests at once; I first went there tonight, and I think I’ve done most of the quests in the zone already, with just a few stragglers left.

I’m also finally making a decent amount of money, with 60 gold left in the bank even after buying a couple more bank slots. I’m probably going to need it for keeping blacksmithing up…

I hit level 50 in WoW last night, after gaining three in a single day. I’m still nowhere near caught up to where my priest is, but it’s at least closer to being able to go to the BC areas.

I don’t really have much else to say though, since it’s largely the same old areas and quests that I’ve done before. I’ve found and done a handful of new quests, either ones I missed before or couldn’t complete with my priest, but nothing particularly special. There are so many quests that it’s not really worth detailing them all.

The main difference this time around is in how I play, since the warrior is of course fairly different from the priest. He can’t really pull singles out of groups, but he’s tough enough that he can tank two to four (depending on level) enemies at a time. He doesn’t have movement-restricting abilities or ultra-high damage finishers to deal with runners, but a well-time Concussive Blow can prevent them from getting too far. Unlike the priest, who had to just let enemy casters do their thing, the warrior can interrupt their spells, so I have to keep an eye on what they’re casting. When taking on singles, I can often just charge right into the next battle with no downtime, whereas the priest was often waiting just to recover health and mana after each fight. And of course, I have to worry a lot more about equipment, since all of my damage and defense comes from it.

I also finally got my mount yesterday, and it’ll be well worth it, though it took every last gold piece I had. It’s too bad Tauren can only ride kodos this early, though; one of the goals I had for my priest was to get enough faction in Orgrimmar to ride a wolf instead of the usual undead horse.

Although QuestHelper was nice, I switched over to Carbonite and I think I’ll stick with it. QH’s problem was that it got too confused by things like tradeskill quests, constantly telling me that the first thing I should do is leave the zone and go to some merchant, even though it wouldn’t really help with the quest, and messed up the pathing of the others. Carbonite seems to be much saner about things like that, and has a few other nifty features as well, like making it clearer which areas in a zone you still haven’t mapped yet. It replaces the world map though, which is sometimes nicer for things like seeing Carbonite’s info, but sometimes I want to old world map back.

And now that I’ve hit level 50, I think I’m going to take it a bit easier, and take some time to work on some lower level quests (for faction and achievements, if nothing else), map exploration, blacksmithing, etc.

I hit level 46 in WoW tonight, for a total of 10 levels in one week. That’s just a little faster than expected, though I’ll probably have to slow down a bit; I can’t keep spending every spare moment in it!

I explored the rest of Feralas and did bunch of quests there, but nothing too exciting. Then it was off to Tanaris with an old buddy, to do some more quests there. I still have plenty more to do in that zone, but I then wandered around a bit to clean up some other loose ends like getting artisan cooking, mageweave and runecloth bandage skills, a few miscellaneous dangling quests along the way, etc.

And now I have yet another series of blacksmithing quests to do, this time needing a ton of iron…

WoW marches on, with the completion of some more of the Badlands quests. I also amassed a fair bit of iron ore and worked on blacksmithing for a while, getting it up to 213 and the artisan training level. That leaves me a bit broke again, though…

I took a small detour to Stranglethorn Vale to finish off a couple quick quests there. I’ve been trying to avoid Stranglethorn since it was always a horrible place to level when I originally played. Maybe it’s not so bad now with fewer people around. I also did a bit of wandering around for some copper for another quest item, and got the achievements for exploring Tirisfal Glades and the Badlands.

I seem to be running out of quests in the Badlands area though, so I’ll probably head off to Feralas next.

Unsurprisingly, I’ve spent the last few days in WoW doing a bit of catching up. I’m already up to level 42; six levels in three days isn’t too bad… I’ll probably take it at a bit more leisurely pace from here on, though.

I finished off the blacksmithing quests in Orgrimmar that had been bugging me for a while. I had to collect a lot of tin for them though, since I couldn’t afford to buy it. Tin seems rather difficult to find, but I had fairly good luck in Thousand Needles. And I also finished off some other miscellaneous quests to try and get rid of some items that had been clogging up the bank, though in my hunger for quests I seem to have found a few more…

I eventually decided to go with a standard protection build, and switched over to using a shield and a single-handed sword. Though fights do take slightly longer now, I can definitely survive a lot better as well, often only losing a small bit of health and being able to charge right into the next fight.

I gained a lot of my levels doing all of the quests that I could in the Arathi Highlands and Dustwallow Marsh, and now I’m working on them in the Badlands area. As usual, I had to run through some Alliance zones in order to get there, but I made sure to explore them along the way so that I could get the achievements. I will have that Explorer title one day…

Alright, fine. Tonight I reinstalled World of Warcraft, reactivated my account, and upgraded to WotLK.

The curiosity about the new expansion finally got the better of me, and it looks like I won’t be spending any more time in Tabula Rasa after all, so what the hell. I don’t make any guarantees about long-term longevity or such, though. Hell, it might take me another year just to finish off the Burning Crusade areas.

I’ve still got a lot of catching up to do, though. All I’ve really done so far is installed a few mods and finished off a couple quests I was still in the middle of.