I couldn’t stay away and spent a bit more time in WoW tonight, making it through a good third of the Icecrown quests. Icecrown is a lot more interesting than other zones since it uses phasing a lot to create the impression of a moving war front. You actually go out and liberate areas, setting up new bases from which new quest lines are launched, etc. There’s a lot more vehicle-based missions, too, and a lot of dailies.

I also hit 445 in blacksmithing, though all of the saronite recipes have gone green now, so getting those last five points is going to be…painful. I also hit 450 in fishing, which lets me…uh. Hmmm.

I finally got the Loremaster of Kalimdor achievement today, managing to squeeze eight quests out of Dire Maul (though I had to rerun each wing twice, since I wasn’t really fully prepared) and then the last two in Silithus. Now I just need to finish off all the Loremaster achievements for Outland and Northrend as well… At least I got these ones done before Cataclysm will potentially change everything.

I also just realized today that I paid too much for my artisan flying skill. I’d come to think of it as a Northrend thing, like Cold Weather Flying, forgetting that I could have gotten a faction discount on it back in Outland. Oh well, I’m up to almost 500 gold again anyway, and from here on out it’s all gravy.

I spent today continuing to finish off low-level quests in Kalimdor, finding a handful that I’d previously missed or skipped around the Feralas and Silithus areas, plus a few scattered around various other places.

I only need ten more quests now for the Loremaster of Kalimdor achievement. I’m rapidly running out of above-world quests, but I think I should be able to cover them with instance quests in Dire Maul and LBRS/UBRS. I hope so, anyway; I know where to find three more quests, but they’d be a horrible, horrible faction grind (reversing centaur faction in Desolace)…

Today in WoW I unexpectedly gained a new faction, as I got to non-hostile with the Sons of Hodir and could then do quests for them. I did a bunch and have now pretty much finished the Storm Peaks area as far as I can tell, and got the achievement for it (these zone quest achievements seem a lot easier to get in Northrend than they did in Outland).

In these later areas there’s also a lot more use of the ‘phasing’ tech, changing the spawns, NPCs, and available quests in certain areas of the maps as you complete quests. It certainly helps the feeling that things have actually changed because of you.

I finally got enough money in total, and now have the artisan riding skill and a new, faster (+280%) flying mount. And that also makes me poor, with 21 gold left to my name… That’s the major expense of my career out of the way, though, with the only major ones remaining being dual-spec specialization (another 1000 gold), and maybe the Kirin Tor rings (over 8000 gold, but of questionable value).

Instead of charging off to Icecrown though, I’ve headed back to the original lands to see if I can finish off the Loremaster achievements there. I still have to find 35 quests somewhere in Kalimdor, and hopefully this guide will lead me to enough. I’ve found a few in Desolace already, although three of them are part of a faction grind I’d rather avoid…

Jerky McJerkface was still around killing that quest guy when I popped in to check today, but I managed to sneak in a pull when the target spawned and he was distracted with some other spawns. That led me to doing a bunch of quests for some busty, blue-skinned warrior women, while still in disguise. There’s still a few more to go in that quest line, but I’m getting close to finishing up the quests in Storm Peaks.

I also did another tough fight, this time while controlling one of the worms that can submerge itself in the ground to move around. It took about five tries to learn how to avoid his ground smash attack reliably, but at least I didn’t die on each attempt.

I lucked out and found a few titanium veins today, though I screwed up one of them when I got attacked while mining and it vanished before I could finish the fight. Whoops. I got another point of blacksmithing, though I was hoping for more from the four attempts I made.

I’ve got 4600 gold now, and should almost certainly hit the goal needed for artisan riding before I run out of Northrend quests, plus a bit extra for the mounts themselves.

I headed back to Storm Peaks in WoW tonight to resume questing, but I had to cut one of the quest chains short because some jerk was killing a quest target over and over again. I’m not sure why they’d do it other than to deny other people the ability to do the quest, since they don’t drop any special loot like they would have back in EQ. I couldn’t even ask them to stop since they were Alliance.

Ah well, I headed to the northwest area and helped out the rock dwarves and Horde camp there, getting a bunch of lore about Ulduar in the process. There was a fight against someone named Valduran that turned out to be difficult for tanks like me since he continually spams spells, and I failed a few times, but finally got it on the fourth try with the right combination of shield bash and spell reflection.

I’m about half-done in Storm Peaks now, and along the way I managed to break the 4000 gold mark and now have four weapon skills at the 400 skill level. Just 1000 more gold to go for my last major expense…

Some network trouble prevented me from getting into WoW until later on tonight, but I managed to squeeze in the usual round of daily quests, and a bit of blacksmithing. I finally got up to 440 skill, with a mix of self-collected and bought saronite, and that let me buy up all the rest of the blacksmithing recipes at the trainer.

Most notably, that lets me start making Titansteel items. Or it would except for one thing: the lack of titanium ore. It’s a very rare spawn that I’ve only found maybe 10 of myself, and at the AH it’s going for 14-15 gold per ore. With 6 bars of titansteel needed for a weapon, that’s 18 bars of titanium, or 36 pieces of titanium ore, at a total of 522 gold. And that’s not counting the also-rare Eternal Fire needed. I at least have enough to make the shield tomorrow, when the cooldown on making another bar of titansteel expires.

But at least it’s still cheaper than directly buying the weapon at the AH; the last titansteel mace I saw was over 1000 gold. I do actually have enough money to just buy them outright, but I’m trying to make them myself partly just for the pride of doing so, and to help save up for an epic mount.

I did a handful of the starting Storm Peaks quests, but haven’t really gotten any nice upgrades yet. There was a rather nifty daily quest involving planting land mines to stop enemies rushing towards you, though.