Updates on characters

10-8-07
This weekend I concentrated on my Alliance account, so I can finish getting all of the characters to at least level 20. That opens up Engineering level 150-225 (165-240 for Gnomes, woot!), as well as 150-225 for whatever other professions the toons may have. My mage (Eng,enchant), priest (tailor,miner), shaman (Eng, LW), rogue (Eng, miner), and warrior (BS, Eng) are at least 20+ right now, and I burned up my well rested bonus on my warlock (Eng, Alch) to get her to level 18.
I need to get to level 20, so I can unlock the 150-225 skills (especially the level to make Frost Oil). My level 24 Warrior has the Snowmaster 9000 schematic, and I already picked one up for cheap on the AH, so once I get the Frost Oil recipe on my alchemist, I will be able to make one Snowmaster and use both of them to make more snowballs. Because my Warrior has the Snowmaster schematic, I’m going to hold off on powerleveling Engineering on him, until I can make a few of the Snowmaster kits and it will still give me a skill point. It’s already yellow when you learn it at 190, so I want to get some benefit out of making it.
This….is the bottleneck on Engineering? Alchemy has a 23 hour cooldown on the higher transmutes, Leatherworking has a 3 day cooldown on Refined Deeprock Salt using a Salt Shaker, and Tailoring has a 4 day cooldown on Mooncloth. I’m not sure if Enchanting has any cooldowns. But why have a freakin’ 24 hour cooldown on Snowballs? They aren’t used in anything EXCEPT the Snowmaster kit. You can have snowball fights with them, but that’s kinda pointless. 24 hours to be able to make something, 1 second to use it. At least the Heavy Leather Ball from leatherworking can be re-used, and you could have a game of Pass with it.
I leveled both my warlock and my paladin from level 15 to level 18 this weekend, doing the Defias chain quests in Westfall so I’ll have all 5 quests for the Deadmines when I finally go to them. My paladin was well stocked with bombs and target dummies, and she used most of them, and got killed at least 5 times, especially by those Defias pillagers/looters, since they group up. My warlock….not so much. I had 4 target dummies, and 13 Big bronze bombs, and I still have most of both. Warlocks and Hunters are great for leveling. I was taking on 2-3 enemies my level or higher, and always winning. I setup a macro for my warlock, because I was tired of having to stretch to hit Ctrl+1 to tell my pet to attack, then hitting the A button to fire off a shadow bolt. So, I borrowed the original macro I got from BRK
#showtooltip
/petattack
/Hunter’s Mark

And changed to:
#showtooltip
/petattack
/Shadow Bolt
So I just hit one button, and my imp and I both channel blasts of magic down upon our enemies! :) I should also make one to cycle through the DOT spells I use, since one is instant cast, and the other one was reduced by talent points to be instant cast as well.
It’s getting so much easier to level characters now. I know where all the quests are, and in what order to link them to maximize effectiveness. I’m no longer charging off to some new area because I have one quest there, I’ll save it until I actually go there, or not bother doing it at all. I’m probably going to do the quests in Bloodmyst Isle (Draenai area) with my warlock (since she’s going to Darnassus to level up Alchemy), just to see them, but I’m not going to bother with my actual Draenai characters, since they need to concentrate on building rep with Darnassus, and also getting their butts over to Westfall to get the 5 quests for the Deadmines. I’m going to have my Warlock skill up at Engineering level 225 by making parachute cloaks for all the other characters, since gnomes have that nice passive +15 to engineering.