the price of progress

back when we started Daelan we joked about how we should have named him "Moneypit" due to his taking up two crafting professions instead of the usual crafting & gathering profession combo. we didn't realize just how true that was until we got deeper into blacksmithing. now, we've leveled other profs before - tailoring to 375 twice (mmm... frozen shadoweave!), engineering to 375 once, alchemy and enchanting to 300 (back when that was the cap). it's an expensive process, especially if you don't farm your own materials. none of those experiences prepared us for leveling blacksmithing, however.

horrendously expensive doesn't begin to do blacksmithing justice. we assumed that the costs would be similar to leveling engineering since they use most of the same materials. naturally, we were very wrong. the mithril stage wasn't too bad; only needed a couple hundred bars for that. once we got to thorium we hit a wall, though. to get from 265 to 300 blacksmithing you need on the order of 500 thorium bars. five hundred! a stack of 20 thorium bars averages about 26g on our server (ore is even more expensive). so, for just the thorium alone, that's about 650g to get to 300 blacksmithing; we haven't even started using outlands materials, which is where the really expensive part of the leveling process begins. a good chunk of those bars (150ish) goes to buying blacksmithing plans from the thorium brotherhood. this makes it that much harder to recoup some of your costs as you have fewer crafted items at the end of it to show for your investment.

luckily for us, we have a few 70s in our stable who are miners. we went out and did some thorium farming this past sunday. for 4+ hours we did nothing but run a mining circuit around WPL and EPL. we ended up with 320 bars plus a bunch of odds and ends (gems, arcane crystals, tons of dense stone and a handful of greens from mobs that got in the way). we can't imagine what it must have been like for blacksmiths back in the pre-TBC days when all the mobs were the same level as they were. definitely would slow the process down having to fight your way to every thorium vein... anyway, 320 bars for 4+ hours work (and let's be clear: it was work, not play) seemed a bit tedious so we bought the rest of the thorium we needed to get to 300 blacksmithing off the AH.

next up, getting engineering to 300 (we're at 280-something now).

money. pit.

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new (old) content

Daelan reached 55 seasons last night, but it was not a pretty process. we found a quest line in the blast lands that we'd never done before. we'd seen it, but back in the day it was a group quest (parts of it, at least) and since we hardly ever travel with a group we'd never bothered to do it. however, since patch 2.3 a lot of former "group" quests are now solo-able content (elites aren't elite anymore, etc.). so, we decided to give it a whirl this time. besides, it fit in nicely with the 2nd stage of our lvl 50 warrior quest (killing mobs in the same area).

so, we go around merrily killing mobs... and get ganked by a warlock (70; in full merciless glad gear, naturally). ok, fair enough. we were close to the road leading to the dark portal and it was an opportunity gank. meh. we rez and get back to killing and a short while later get ganked again. belf hunter this time. we had two mobs on us when she walked up, watched us work the mobs for a bit and then decided that we weren't dying fast enough or something. in goes the pet, we give the hunter a couple of token whacks and we're back having tea with the spirit healer. wonder if there's a frequent dier program we could sign up for... once again, rez and get back to killing (lots of mobs to kill) and we get a visit from a lvl 63 prot warrior. death by devastate spam. curse you cruel world! at this point we're just happy that the blasted lands is a fairly small zone; makes for shorter corpse runs.

we finally wrapped up that quest line only to learn that there's another one right after it (and one after that, too, according to wowhead). so we accepted, 'cause it was new content for us, and that's where the real fun began. back to where we were killing mobs, only now we had to carve a path right through the middle of them and into a cave they've taken up residence in. hmm, this is going to hurt. we make it about 1/2 way into the cave and then get an unlucky 3-pull (one was hiding behind a rock). we almost get things under control when a patrol catches us in the arse, we run out of health potions and we go down. meh, bad luck. run back, rez and clear the rest of the way into the cave and we find our quest mob and 2 guards. switch over to tanking gear and in we go! ... and down we go. quest mob has a 75% armor pierce ability and we picked up an add. ok, crappy start but we can do this. we run back, find a safe spot to rez and try focusing on the guards first this time instead of our quest mob (most of the damage seemed to come from them last time). our plan didn't quite go down the way we'd hoped and we took another visit to dead-ville. run back, rez and ZOMG RESPAWNS ON TOP OF U... dead. crap. we needed a break (and health potions), so we spirit rez and hop over to IF to train (we'd hit 54 earlier). quick stop in the AH for health potions and to look for gear upgrades (why in the name of all that's unholy is plate so gods-forsaken expensive on our server?! 150g for a green, level 50 chest piece?! ugh.) and we're back on the bird to the blasted lands.

we battle our way back into the cave, slice and dice the patrols (yes, we see you mr. I'm-hiding-behind-a-rock-waiting-to-eat-your-face-when-you-turn-around mob) and get to our quest mob; our decomposing skeletons still on the ground as a reminder of our less-then-stellar earlier attempts. tanking gear... check. defensive stance... check. houston, we are go! we go for the guards first and ignore the boss, use a health potion half way through the 2nd guard and then it's just us and ugly. it got hairy towards the end and we were down to 5% life with 1 minute to go on our health potion cooldown, so we popped our intimidating shout/bandage macro and prayed... "oh crap, he's immune to fear! ... but we're still bandaging ourself... ?!" we got a lucky break; ugly decided to try to repeatedly cast mana burn on us instead of ripping our head off and we got a full bandage in. smacked him around a bit more and VICTORY... and that was step one of that quest line. next few steps have us running off to azshara to go swimming or something. we're not sure if it was worth the aggravation and 1.5g repair bill, but it is new content for us and we got a war story out of it.

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