Because the internet needs another gaming blog.

I’m currently working on levelling my Blacksmithing skill in World of Warcraft which means I’ve been revisiting many of the old zones to mine the materials I need given that I’m completely broke and unable to buy them off the auction house.  These are the same materials I previously gathered while levelling my Mining skill but didn’t keep because “I wasn’t really going to work on Blacksmithing anyway”….  I guess I should have known better.

Late last week my Blacksmithing hit skill level 300 which meant I could now go to Outlands to farm materials, which in turn meant using my flying mount to search for nodes.  Farming life is so much easier with an epic flying mount.

I was flying around Hellfire Peninsula in search of Fel Iron when a call came out from a fellow Alliance player asking if anyone could do anything about two level 60 Horde Death Knights that were camping his corpse.  I’ve been there before, and it sucks, so I figured I’d help the guy out.  Death Knights are definitely over-powered, but being 20 levels higher than them, I figured I wouldn’t have any trouble with them at all.

I arrived on the scene and sure enough, the two DKs were circling the Alliance guy’s corpse, waiting to gank him once again.  I swooped in, popped my Feral Wolves and killed both Death Knights in a little less than five seconds.  Just for a further kick in the pants, I killed them again after they rezzed.

The player who had been corpse camped couldn’t thank me enough and kept gushing about how powerful I was.  Little did he know that I routinely get thrashed when going up against equal-level Horde players.  I wasn’t about to tell him that though, because sometimes, it’s nice to feel like a hero.

I’ve never been a slave to in-game achievements since they’ve been around.  It’s just never been anything I’ve been too concerned about and as a result, I’ve never focused on achieving them.

World of Warcraft introduced an achievement I was interested in however, and this past weekend I worked towards the World Explorer achievement and my character can now be known as <Ordeth the Explorer>.  In short, I’ve now explored every zone in the game, which wasn’t incredibly difficult, just time consuming.  Fortunately I’m typically a little obsessive compulsive when it comes to revealing the in-game maps, so most of the zones I had been in while levelling were already fully explored.  When I set out to get the achievement I only had a few of the Horde zones to visit along with a few points in various other old-world and Outland zones.

One thing I kept thinking of while doing this was how well done most of WoW’s zones are.  You can certainly tell that a lot of thought went into each area.  I also stumbled upon a few areas that don’t seem to serve any purpose, perhaps intended for something that was never implemented or something yet to come.

Despite this achievement though, there’s still one area I’ve never been to… Wintergrasp.  I’m going to change that shortly.

When I first started playing World of Warcraft, I figured I’d play it for a month or two just to check it out, and then quit.  A year later, I’ve got a level-capped character and have just started an alt which will more than likely keep me in the game a while longer.  To think I was so close to cancelling my account just a month ago.

My approach to WoW to this point has largely been a solo experience.  I’ve got friends in the game, on the same server no less, but from levels one through eighty I could probably count the number of times we’ve all grouped together on one hand.  Most of the times we grouped was to run some lower-leveled friends through an instance or two as quickly as possible.  Not once have I run through a dungeon with a full level-appropriate group.  As a result, while I may have played WoW to the level cap, I’ve never felt as though I’d truly experienced it.

A couple weeks ago I sent an email out to my “email buddies” with a simple question: “Would you have any interest in starting new characters, on a different server, with rules about only being able to play them together as a group?”  To my surprise, everyone was on board.

After some discussions, we’ve settled on a weekly level cap which is designed to keep us all roughly the same level, and to keep the instances relevant.  We’ve now got characters on a different server from our mains, our own guild <Peed in the Moonwell>, and one instance run (Ragefire Chasm) under our belts.  Actually, two instance runs as we ran it twice to accomodate all our members.

I’m having fun with WoW again.  Damn.