Yep, my Mage is going to be the next to 70, and the pace may pick up a bunch once I finally get the Netherwing rep grind finished with the Hunter and I can spend that time with the Mage instead.

BRD Quest Preparation

I’ve done all the preparing I can do for yet another BRD run with my guildmates in our wee casual guild - including finishing off the gathering required for The Love Potion quest whose best reward isn’t what the turn-in gives, it’s the fact that Mistress Nagmara can then be spoken to in the future and she’ll grab Private Rocknot and head out the back door of the Grim Guzzler, leaving it unlocked behind them for your party to progress through.

Otherwise, getting through “the bar” in BRD is a real pain - last time we headed in with a “level appropriate group” (nobody over 61, lowest was 52), someone accidentally aggro’d a Bar Patron after we had downed Ribbly Screwspigot and while the whole bar didn’t aggro on us and kill us then, later as we were plying Private Rocknot with Dark Iron Ale, we weren’t able to give him the full 6 before a patrol broke in through the back door and … then we aggro’d practically the whole bar, over and over, as we tried to get past there. The Patrol group didn’t dissapate after we wiped the first or second time as one would have hoped.

Preparing To Down Bael’Gar

I did the quest chain from the Searing Gorge that eventually lead me to A Taste of Flame, where I have an Altered Black Dragonflight Molt that is going to be used to encase Bael’Gar’s firey essence.

Plenty Of Potions

Since my Mage is now a 375 Alchemist, and my Hunter is my primary Herbalist and Fisher, potions are generally no problem to put together with a little bit of planning.

I watched the Auction House recently and bought some Ancient Lichen when it was selling for what I deemed to be a reasonable price (in this case, under 9g for 20 herbs), and then I brought my Hunter/fisher over to Garadar in Nagrand and fished the pools of Pure Water for Mote of Water. Twenty minutes of fishing out the various fish pools in the lake near Garadar netted me a full stack of Mudfish, Icefin Bluefish and a stack and a half of Mote of Water.

The Mote of Water combined with the Ancient Lichen make Elixir of Major Frost Power which is an Alchemist 325 recipe learned by a vendor-purchasable recipe.

Elixir of Major Frost Power is currently the ONLY frost-damage-enhancing potion that I’ve got on this Alchemist - there is a level 120 Alchemist recipe that one can get from the Winter Veil quests when they’re available (Christmas?), and I believe there are potion recipes available in AQ and Molten Core, but for a casual player, those big raid instances aren’t really realistic, and I’m still waiting on Christmas!

I made myself a stack of 15 of the Frost Power potions and then looked at the value of them - I could sell that partial stack for over 50 gold, and they used only 15 of the 20 Ancient Lichen I bought for 8g, plus my naturally-developed fishing skill.

Nice, but I think I’ll be greedy and keep them for boosting myself.

Tank? Or DPS?

I actually did the Bael’Gar preparation quest on both my 61 Warrior and my 56 Mage, and have now parked both the Warrior and the Mage in Blackrock Mountain and Kargath respectively, with cleared inventories, repaired equipment, and a sizable stock of potions and bandages and reagents as required.

One of the main reasons I have a family of toons instead of just focussing on one and getting her as amazing as possible is the whole aspect of “group flexibility” when with friends. I am lucky enough to be in a laid-back, casual guild with like-minded laid-back, casual adults who are low-stress to head into dungeons with. The biggest challenge is coordinating the run, but once we head into the instance, even if we die over and over, the run is generally a lot of fun and there’s very little stress.

Soo…. now I’ve finally got two toons very close in level (and will thus benefit from the same instances) and who both play very different roles in parties, and I’m looking forward to being able to bring out whichever toon works best for the party.

I do hope I can bring the Mage, however, as my Warrior has been mentally retired to the “play with to help others/farm mining materials” status for now.

We’ll see how it goes!

Tags: a taste of flame, alchemy, altered black dragonflight molt, ancient lichen, azeroth, bael'gar, bar patron, blackrock depths, blackrock depths quests, blackrock mountain, BRD, BRD tips and tricks, dark iron ale, Dungeons, earning cash, eastern kingdoms, elixir of major frost power, farming for cash, garadar, grim guzzler, icefin bluefish, instances, mage in dungeons, mistress nagmara, mote of water, nagrand, private rocknot, pure water, ribbly screwspigot, searing gorge, the love potion, warcraft screenshots, winter veil, world of warcraft, wow pics