Clockwrkmage busts loose

9/5/08

I got off work early yesterday, so that allowed me to run through AH toons early, and actually think about questing. Clockwrkmage, my lvl 24 Gnome Ally mage, has been level 24 for probably 6 months. Since I’m getting a lot of my characters over the level 35 range on Daggerspine, I decided it was time to level her a bit, so I get her to 35 as well, and unlock 225-300 enchanting, since they’ll be needing higher level enchants as they level up. I flew over to Redridge Mountains, and started blasting the Blackrock Orcs around Stonewatch Keep and Illgar Tower. I took down Tharil’zun pretty easily, but I guess I hadn’t gotten a quest for him yet, since he didn’t drop his head. I then had the bright idea of taking on Gathll’zog and Blaze by myself. Not a good idea for a level 24 mage to take on a level 26 elite humanoid and level 24 elite dragonling by themselves. Bad, BAD idea! I wiped on them a couple of times, before deciding to take on easier prey.

As I was killing the Shadowhide gnolls, I partied up with a level 27 priest, and we worked pretty well together. He was very good at shielding and healing me, and I was dishing out the pain to groups of 3-4 level 26 gnolls at once, thanks to the crapload of Big Iron bombs, Solid Dynamite, Mithril bombs, and Hi-Explosive bombs (lvl 235 engineering) that I had saved up while camping the AH. I love being a gnome engineer, the +15 engineering racial really comes in handy. Hi-explosive bombs rival Goblin Land Mines for power, and you don’t have to wait the 10 seconds for them to arm themselves. Lil Timmy's Peashooter dropped while we were questing, and the priest was decent enough to greed on it, same as me. I won it, which was cool, since my twink Doomslinger only has the Lovingly Crafted Boomstick at the moment, so that’ll boost her dps by 1, which is good for a twink. After we both got our Shadowhide pendants, the priest had to leave, so I decided to go towards the Burning Steppes, as I had heard you could die there, and resurrect right next to an engineering vendor that has the Deadly scope recipe. Well, that got put on hold, as I was asked to join 2 warlocks dealing with the Blackrock Champions quest, along with the escort quest that starts in that cave. I really, really hate escort quests now, they take too friggin’ long, and there’s so much opportunity for a high level ganker to kill you, and make you do the quest over again. I led the party in damage against the mobs, bombs being dropped everywhere, and sheeping the casters on the outskirts.

With those quests done, I headed back up to the Burning Steppes, got inside the entrance, and promptly got killed by a mob. The ONLY spirit healer there is at the Fire Scar, which is conveniently located right by a HORDE Flightmaster, and the engineering vendor is in a cave a little farther back. I rezzed, bought the Deadly scope recipe, then began corpse-hopping down to Morgan’s Vigil in the south eastern portion of the map. I got the flight point, and flew the heck out of there. I turned in a bunch of quests at Lakeshire, and ended up at level 26 and a half. Not bad for a couple of hours of questing.