So I’ve managed to do it again, stop playing World of Warcraft for a long period of time.  This time I’ve been off for just shy of three months.  After pinging 70 with Kronas I got bored of playing and took some time off for a while - but that’s all changed.

I started playing again last week and since then have levelled Hurn up to 35, half way to 70!  I confess though that my motives were to get him to 35 so as to be able to max out the tradeskills, especially enchanting, to 300.  This will allow me to disenchant high level items that I’ve not been able to until now, and hopefully provide a bit more gold via selling the enchanting materials at the auction house.

Anyway, that’s all for now, but I’m hoping it wont be too long before I’m enchanting and tailoring with the best of them.

I’ve spent a bit more time today writing a parser to extract character skills from the armory, allowing secondary skills to be collected.  All the tradeskills, including secondary skills, should now update to reflect the current skill levels for each of the characters.

At some point in the future I will hopefully parse weapon skill, talents and reputation to allow full character profiles to be built.

I’ve sinned yet again, it’s been a good while since I touched this site even though I’ve been playing quite a bit.

I have recently finished writing a parser which pulls in armory data on all the character profiles here on HighlandRaiders.co.uk.  The bar at the top of the page should now update as I level each character up - including the main tradeskills and their current levels (I’m still looking for a way to pull in the cooking, first aid and fishing levels though).

Other new additions to the site are profile pages (provided via www.mmoguildsites.com which are also updated via the armory - I hope to, at some point in the future, build a custom version of these profiles using the data I’m pulling in from the armory but It’ll probably be a while before I can bother myself to write a parser for that data.

So this probably means less updates from myself as there’s now no need for me to update levels and tradeskill information - possibly not a good thing for this site, we’ll see.

I’ve reached level 66 with Kronas now and have eventually hoarded enough gold to buy my epic mount, [Reins of the Swift Stormsaber].

I also went, after getting my mount, and ran Zul’Farrak to get [Carrot on a Stick] which I never got when I ran the instance at around level 40. So I have a new epic mount, +100% speed, [Carrot on a Stick] and [Mithril Spurs] on my riding boots to give me a speed increase of around 112%.

Questing will be all that faster now.

So from the 18th of this month through to the 31st it’s Hallow’s End. There’s loads of seasonal quests mostly to do with the Headless Horseman who’s going around and setting fire to all the villages in Azeroth.

It’s quite a fun part of the game where there’s buffs galore, turning players into pirates, ninjas, ghosts, bats, diablos and loads of other things. This is just a post to say: Happy Hallow’s End.

The image to the right shows Golan with a Jack ‘o Lantern on his head, I think it looks particularly evil on a Dwarf.

So it looks like, via the PTR 2.3 patch notes, solo questing and grinding is getting a major boost pre level 60.

I suppose it makes sense with The Frozen Throne looming as Blizzard will want as many level 60-70 players out there as possible to buy the expansion, and I doubt many pre-60 players will consider it straight away.

Experience: The amount of experience needed to gain a level has been decreased between levels 20 and 60. In addition, the amount of experience granted by quests has been increased between levels 30 and 60.

There’s some other rather nice changes:

Useless lowbe cloth agility and strength item bonuses are being replaced with something more relevant to casters:

Low Level Cloth Items: All agility and strength on low-level cloth items has been replaced with other stats, usually bonus spell damage, but also sometimes other stats beneficial to mana users.

And finally a new guild bank system allowing large bank spaces to be purchased and used by an entire guild (rather than having to use a banking alt):

The Guild Bank is a shared repository for an entire guild and will be accessible through new NPC?s called guild bankers. The Guild Bank will allow players with the appropriate permissions to store items and money for use by the rest of the guild. Permissions to withdraw and deposit
money and items are controlled by the guild leader through the guild controls menu. The Guild Bank is divided up into separate tabs so that the guild leader may restrict access or group items into distinct categories.

Up to 6 purchasable tabs each containing 98 item slots

Permissions to view/deposit/withdraw per tab

You may use your Guild Bank withdraw limits to pay for item repairs (now enabled on all merchants)

Transaction logs of the last 50 actions in the bank viewable on a per tab basis

I smell some banking alts creating there own one man guild and using it as an extended bank rather than for use for an entire guild, but who knows maybe Blizzard will stop this happening by putting a lower limit on the number of players required in a guild to enable the guild bank.

So if everything stays the same throughout the PTR testing phase these are some of the things we can expect to see in Patch 2.3.

So I’ve been questing a bit more and dinged 63 earlier on today. It didn’t take too long with a full bar’s worth of rested XP. Also doing quests in Zangarmarsh is great as there are a lot of mobs eavenly spread out and they all seem to be level 61 - 63 as far as I’ve seen. The quests overlap quite a bit so it’s easy to go out and do 4-5 quests before returning to complete them and pick up more.

I met up with a friend to do some of the Hellfire group quests, mainly just to get [Bladefist's Breadth]. Between levels 62 and 63 I managed to pick up some fairly decent hunter rewards from questing: [Expedition Repeater] and [Expedition Forager Leggings] (which I’ve replaced on hitting 63 with [Felscale Pants]).

I finally got off my arse and levelled Kronas from 61 to 62 last night. I only had 1/2 - 2/3 of the level to complete and was fully rested.

It took me a total of 4 hours to level up - that’s 8 hours of non-rested time (or thereabouts). All the quests I did were situated in Hellfire Penisula, mostly around level 63.

Once I’d dinged, I completed the quests I was on and hearthed back to Shattrath City where I ported to Stormwind. Picked up the level 62 talents, and upgraded my legs and shoulders armour.

So it’s around 16 hours playtime from 61 - 62 (probably a bit high), meaning it may be something similar from 62 - 63.

Nice thing is, I made about 50G in the process. Well back to the questing.

Karnta was the second BC character I created she is a Draenei female Hunter and is now at level 30. I played, similarly to Duxun, straight through from 1 to 20 before stopping, following the same story-lines on Azuremyst Isle as I went through with Duxun.

Karnta has her talents wholly in the Beast Mastery tree as this helps with levelling - I’d forgotten how much at lower levels. Levelling a BM hunter is a joy and is too simple - hunter’s mark, pet, auto-shoot, arcane shot, loot, next! Once Karnta hit 30 I learned Intimidation which should make things even easier.

There’s nothing much left to say apart from Karnta has Herbalism and Mining as tradeskills and will support the production tradeskills of the other characters.

Duxun was the first character I introduced post-BC, he is a Draenei Shaman and my first real experience of that class.

I’ve levelled this alt up to 20, straight through from level 1 with no interruptions. It was a fairly easy task and the class itself didn’t add any hindrance - it was rather enjoyable with the well thought out Draenei story-line starting in Azuremyst Isle. Shaman plays pretty much like a paladin however with the use of totems rather than auras and blessings.

I’ve been moving Duxun up thorough the Enchantment talent tree and it seems to go well with levelling, allowing two-handed weapons at level 20 as well. I’ll report more on the dynamics of the class versus other classes in a later article.