Saying goodbye to Outlands

I am determined not to let my professions lag behind me on my journey through Northrend, however unlikely it will be that I can keep them synchronised with my level. First, I need to get them to a stage where I can train to the grand master level and thus gather and craft Northrend materials. With my death knight as the miner for her own blacksmithing as well as my warrior's jewelcrafting, both of which crafts can fuel enchanting, getting my mining skill up to 350 was incidental to boosting my crafting skills.

Indeed, in the process of trying to increase only my death knight's blacksmithing skills to a reasonable level for the Outlands I reach a mining skill of 375 and head to train in Howling Fjord just so that I don't miss out on further gains. With a fair amount of concentration I am also able to raise my blacksmithing and enchanting skills to 350. All that is left is my jewelcrafting.

It seems that my two choices for getting my jewelcrafting skill up to the level of a grand master are to obtain some expensive materials to make adamantite jewellery or to increase my reputation with the Consortium to get my hands on a decent gem-cutting design. Adventuring solely to get Consortium reputation is a disappointingly flat experience, so it is lucky that a friendly guild alchemist is available to make a mercurial stone for me, an item essential in the crafting of adamantite jewellery.

With the mercurial stone in my possession I send Gnomesblight out to mine more adamantite, mining being much easier now that I have the flying mount, only to destroy the ore she brings back so I can reclaim the adamantite dust. With the dust I make mercurial adamantite, which I infuse in to some smelted adamantite to make a few pieces of expensive jewellery. Thankfully, I have just enough material to increase my jewelcrafting skill to 350.

It seems like after all the hassle of having to mine and smith my death knight's way from zero skill to grand master level I can finally wave goodbye to Outlands and move to Northrend. That would be the case except Sapphire still needs a runed adamantite rod for her enchanting needs. Blighty has made the basic rod but the materials needed to turn it in to a runed rod include one primal might. Again, I am lucky to have the friendly alchemist who can also perform the transformation of primals in to primal might. This leaves me with one final task in Outlands: gather one of each primal.

I send Blighty out to gather the primals, thinking that I could opportunistically mine any ore that I happen across. This seems like an excellent plan until I try to gather the motes of water needed and I remember that water elementals are immune to frost damage. Being a frost-specced death knight this presents a little bit of a challenge, but is overcome with liberal use of my blood and unholy runes. I collect all the motes needed from the elemental plateau, except for motes of mana, which I pluck from mana wraiths in Netherstorm. Needing only one of each primal makes the task relatively quick and it is not long before I have a primal might and, subsequently, a runed adamantite rod.

There is no holding me back now, I am Northrend-ho!

Posted in Gaming |
Tags: gnomesblight, jewelcrafting, professions, sapphire, world of warcraft