I'd hit that!

The newest result of my alt-o-holic crazy has been leveling my shadow priest, Gwinaveer. Over the course of a few weekends, I was able to level her up through the Outland areas and she is now muddling around in Northrend. I will say that my recommendation for leveling between 60 and 70 is battlegrounds and heirloom gear. Alterac Valley is fantastic for experience. I managed just about 7k xp on every major NPC kill not to mention the xp acquired from honor kills. I know a lot of people will tell you doing random dungeons is the way to go, and that does help, but I managed to go up 4 levels in one weekend of battleground fun and that was without rested XP.

After managing to reach 70, I decided to pick up a cheap flying mount and see what Northrend had for me. Well, I soon discovered that a normal flying mount isn't the way to see Northrend. The pace is excruciatingly slow. I decided after a few days of trying to fly around in slow motion that I really needed to get my epic flying skill. I'm sure I wouldn't have wanted to push forward with this expensive endeavor if I already didn't have several 80's with epic flying and dragon mounts.

I decided that taking one of my 80's around to do daily's for gold just wasn't something I wanted to do. I just seemed like to much work. I'm sure people will disagree and recommend a plethora of quests that are not only interesting but will also give my extra gold for completing them, but I just wasn't interested in questing. So, I dusted off my 80 Tankadin and proceeded to farm ore in Ice Crown. I cleared out my bags, to make room and proceeded to map all the nods. My luck was just unbelievable. I set out on a Saturday early afternoon and by the end of 2hours of mining had over 2 stacks of titanium and about 12 stacks of saronite ore, not to mention all the eternals that you get as bonus items from mining. Now, I'm doing this on a toon that's really not seen any action in over a year. He has about a 5.4k gearscore which isn't too shabby, but I wear no PvP gear when I farm and I prefer to stay in my protection spec which makes me almost invulnerable to most mobs I might encounter while farming ore.

I bring all that up because the real fun, the truly exciting time I have been having is that I've been crushing a lot of horde while mining. Now other than the bit of leveling I have done with my shadow priest, I'm more of a casual pvper. I don't look for a fight and I usually try to go for the fast easy kills. For some reason, the horde ore farmers on my server aren't geared for pvp, nor do they even put up a fight and I have been consistatly kicking their asses. I suspect that a large majority are bots, because they don't put up much of a fight, nor do they even try to defend themselves. I have had several try to run away, but a quick hammer usually stops that from happening. They also seem to be desperate for the ore, because while I'm actually mining it they jump down and try to do the same, without even trying to do damage to me. They probably think that people on my server are scared of horde and that I would run away by they mere presents, but they quickly learn that is not the case. Fighting them is very close to shooting fish in a barrel with a grenade launcher. I've been mining for two plus weeks and in all that time, I've had about 2o confrontations, I've only died once and that was more or less a tie...(protection warriors are just as nasty as protection paladins, thank gawd for ardent defender. lol) I also tend to see the same horde players over and over, so I'm positive they must be bots of some sort. On occassions, like the protection warrior mentioned above, I have had to actually work at staying alive, but thats maybe less than 1% of the encounters.

The good news is that I gathered and sold enough ore to acquire the money for my epic flying also known as the Artisan Riding skill and purchase a Swift Gryphon. It makes getting around Northrend so much easier. I also used a bit of that money to advance my tailoring and enchanting, which are probably some of the more expensive trade skills to level up. I still run around collecting ore with my Paladin in the hopes of doing more battles with the bots of World of Warcraft. I'm pretty certain they are bots because if I was getting the thrashed around by a Paladin over and over again, I'd go hunt for ore elsewhere. I'm not a person to scare easily but I know that you can only beat you head against the wall for so long before you need to look for a new wall.

I believe that a lot of my recent plethoria of pvp victories and the abundance of good ore to sell is due in large part to a lot of people taking a break from the game. When I reached 80 with my first toon, you couldn't walk around Ice Crown without getting jumped by a horde. Recently, the Alliance has even managed to win a few Wintergrasps, back to back in one week, which must mean the horde have gone on vacation for a while. Oh, I'm sure when Cataclysm hits, we'll see an increase in Horde kicking the crap out of Alliance, but for now, the break is very nice.