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.

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.

Below is the list of quests I have been using to level from 6 (around which you should be leaving the start area) to 10 (the upper level range for Elwynn).

Rundown of the Quests

Below is a quick rundown of what each quest involves, where it will take you and the mobs you’ll be grinding.

Batch 1

These three quests will take you South of Goldshire and into the Fargodeep Mine. You’ll be grinding level 6-7 Kobolds here and it shouldn’t be too hard to do, dependant on your class you will breeze through this or do so at a moderate pace without any problems.

When you’ve been through the mine you should have the majority of the [Large Candle]s and [Gold Dust] required. Grinding the mob outside the mine will fill the rest of the quota. From here it’s back to Goldshire to hand in.

Batch 2

Once you hand in the candles quest you’ll get the Shipment to Stomwind one, I always do this straight away as you’re right next to Stormwind and it gives a good buff for the rest of the questing, I always take [Oil of Olaf] for the armour buff.

Batch 3 + 4

Hand in the Fishy Peril quest to Dughan, collect the rest of the quests and head off down the road. The Jasperlode Mine is another easy quest if you take your time. You’re probably about level 7 now and will be facing level 7-8 mobs, including the wandering bears and wolves. My tip is to head straight to the Tower of Azora and head North from there. You can get away with only a few encounters.

Actually doing the quest is easy, get about half way through the mine and you’ll see your message saying it’s complete, then just wander back out. This should take no longer than 5 - 10 minutes meaning there’ll be no respawns on the way back if you’re lucky. Don’t hand this quest in yet — it’s a long walk back and forth to Goldshire.

Batch 5

You’ll have collected this quest when you handed in the Fishy Peril one, it’s simply a quest to talk to Guard Thomas. Just follow the road from the Tower of Azora to the river where Thomas is standing.

Batch 6

I’d recommend going to the logging camp and picking up the two quests there before setting off on this one as they can somewhat overlap and it saves walking back again.

Just head North up the river for this one, you can avoid any wandering wolves easily, if not it shouldn’t be anything you can’t handle.

Find the mangled corpse and hand in the quest, accepting the next part at the same time.

Batch 7

This one is more tricky, you’ll have to swim up the river and walk round behind the murloc camp, it saves getting ganked. At this stage you’re probably a high 7 or low level 8. You will be taking on mobs of level 8-10 and in some cases they pull in twos.

Taking a friend along for this one can help if you’re one of the low armour or health classes. You’ll need to carefully pull the murlocs away from Rolf’s corpse, especially watching out for wandering murlocs or pulling by accident due to fleeing enemies.

Once you’ve cleared the two murlocs next to the corpse you should be able to hand in the quest and accept the next one. Whilst you are around this area you may see some wood piles which are for A Bundle of Trouble, pick up any if you can.

Batch 9

This can be a long drawn out affair. Killing the prowlers and bears is simple enough if you take your time and heal up, bearing in mind that these beasts are level 9-10 and you’re probably 8-9.

Finding the wood is the main problem as it is scarce and a lot of people seem to do this quest making it even scarcer. Doing this in a group could land you grinding there for half an hour, but that’s all good XP.

Once you’ve filled up on wood and killed all the beasts you can head off to hand in the last quests we’ve done.

Batch 10 + 11

Head back to Goldshire, hand in Deliver Thomas’ Report and get the Westbrook Garrison one.

Head along to Westbrook and hand in, you can then get the Riverpaw Bounty quest and the Hogger ellite quest.

Batch 12

You’ll be grinding level 9-10 Gnolls here, some of which sit in camps of 3-4. Doing the bounty quest is soloable if you stick to solo targets, i.e. stay away from the camps. Doing Hogger however is tough as he is a level 11 elite which probably puts him 1-2 levels above you and also due to the fact that he is an elite spawn.

Getting help with this is preferable, either a few other same level players or a higher level player who is passing by. Grinding the mobs can be useful before you go for Hogger as it reduces the chance of adds being pulled which is not something you want if you can avoid it.

You can now hand in the bounty quest at Westbrook and head to Goldshire to hand in the Hogger one.

Batch 13

You may have pinged 10 now but there’s a few quests left if you haven’t, or if you want to complete the entire Dughun/Thomas chain.

We head off towards the logging camp to hand in Cloth and Leather Armour that you will have gotten from Dughun. On the way take a right off the road to kill some Defias members to get [Red Linen Bandana]s for the Red Linen Goods quest. You may have to grind around Blackwell Pumpkin Patch if you’re not getting the drops.

Once you’ve handed in these quests you should be level 10 or nearly there. If you still need XP it should be easily grindable on the level 9-10 mobs around the logging camp.

I always do the level 10 class quest straight after doing these quests and try to upgrade my weapons and items at the same time, it is quite a turning point in the game, that is all the class specific stuff starts to come into play like pets and talents.

Anyway, that’s about it for the initial push, I always tend to level in Elwynn as it seems more tightly packed than Dun Morogh or Teldrassil.