Into the Dark Portal

as we mentioned previously, our shadowpriest, Zhered, finally hit level 60 (61, now... yes, we're that behind on posting). perhaps the best part was that it was an exploration ding and it caught us completely by surprise.






we've read different accounts regarding whether it's faster to do 58-60 in outlands vs. the old world. some folks swear by hitting outlands at 58 and grinding your way to 60, some say go at 58 just to gear up from the first few quests in hellfire and then finish leveling to 60 back in azeroth, some say just stick it out in azeroth until 60. we're firmly in the latter camp (especially since the xp changes that went in with patch 2.3) so we kept Z questing in the plaguelands until he hit 60, wrapped up the few quests that we had in progress, dumped the ones we hadn't started yet and headed off to outlands with a new mount and an empty quest log.



so far, outlands has been treating us well. only ganked twice in the time it took us to hit level 61 (would have been 3 times, but the 70 hunter that tried it failed epically and we made it back into honor hold before he could seal the deal. /golfclap), our spell damage has more then doubled just from the first round of gear upgrades (from +100 even to a hair over +200) and we picked up our first dps trinket (we've macro'd it to our Vampiric Touch key so we 'remember' to use it all the time).

remember that little side-trip to outlands we took at level 56 to train master herbalism? it's paid off big-time. by the time we made it into outlands, our herbalism skill was already up to 357. that means we can herb pretty much anything we're likely to come across from now on. this is a much nicer position to be in than we've been in with mining in the past, where we entered outlands with 300 skill and had to pass up things like adamantite veins for several levels because we didn't have the skill, yet. if we level another alt up (gods have mercy!), we'll definitely use this strategy again.