WoW Journal - 16-February-2007

I hit level 69 last night with my priest, only 779k xp to go until 70. That made me think about "time to 70", at which point I realized that I had stupidly forgotten to write down how much /played time I had on the day the Burning Crusade came out. I know it took me over 13 days played on that priest to get from 1 to 60, but then I spent an unknown amount of time, around 20 days, at level 60. And now I can't say how much time I have /played from 60 to 70. Doh!

What I do know is that my usual playing sessions during the week are 3 to 4 hours, and during one of such sessions I usually make about a quarter of a level. That would make every level 12 to 16 hours long, and the total time played from 60 to 70 something between 5 and 7 days. Which would fit with my original estimate of 40% of the time from 1 to 60, although that estimate was based on a lot of false assumptions.

I did two runs to Steamvault, the level 70 5-man dungeon in Coilfang Reservoir, this week. Nice enough, and I got my Cenarion Expedition reputation up to revered. That got me the key to access Coilfang Reservoir dungeons at heroic difficulty, which is something I'd like to try. But I've read that to do that all 5 group members need the key, so it will be difficult to find a group. Revered with CE also gave me a design for a jewelcrafting trinket, but my skill is still stuck at 355, and I can't learn that design yet. Stupidly I would need several rare drop recipes (at 200+ gold each) and lots of rare blue gems (at 50+ gold each) to level up jewelcrafting. There don't seem to be any accessible level 350 recipe. I don't mind the recipes to be hard to get, but I wished there was a targeted way to get them. Kill this boss mob of that dungeon and get the recipe. But it doesn't work that way, the recipes are rare random world drops, and there is absolutely no way to "hunt" for them, except for camping the auction house.

Well, I'm planning to reach level 70 this weekend, and finally get my feet off the ground. It will be interesting to see Outland from above, and to be able to reach all the remote corners. More practically I think that flying is the only good way to gather ores, which I could then prospect to hopefully find some more rare gems and get my jewelcrafting up. I guess I'll need to buy some of those expensive rare recipes, the game is giving me no choice here.