Pushing to 80, /fail along the way. . .

Leveling on PvE is a completely different, relaxing, fun experience. My biggest annoyances come in the form of getting to ore nodes too late and finding someone mining them, or getting to an area and finding all the quest mobs dead. I can live with that. As I mentioned to someone in game the other day "I'm prot, I don't die". I am about 2/3 of the way to level 74, and I have to say, this is the most fun I have had in the game ever. Yes, I'm lacking a tailor (mage is only 36, burning up rested XP on pally has been my priority), so bag space has been an issue at times, but all in all, it has been my best experience in the game. I am really excited to get to level 74 because I have a few pieces of the tempered saronite set ready to go and the blue crafted 1h sword in my bank (and it is a beauty). I will have almost a full set of blue tanking gear, provided I can get a Nexus run in, which leads to my next point. . .

I have been trying to run Nexus for most of the weekend. I hit 72 a few days ago, hit 73 on saturday. A lot of people run Nexus at 70, it is an intro-level WotLK dungeon. I've gotten numerous whispers asking if I could heal it, to which I always reply "no, I'm a tank." I FINALLY got into a group to run it last night around midnight. EPIC FAIL. I had a bad feeling running anything with 2 deathtards and a fury warrior as DPS, but I figured I'm desperate, I'll give it a shot. Almost 4g in repairs and no boss kills later, I left the group and went to bed. That wasn't even the worst part of the run. One of the death-n00bs fell onto a ledge in the vortex area, the healer fell with him, and a good 20 mins was wasted with them whining about being stuck. While I agree that was poor game design, we kept telling them just to strip down, jump off, and run back in, how hard is that? It looks like I am going to have to rely on charity from some 80's to just run me through to get this stupid gear, is it too much to ask for some tank and spank fights? I don't even mind adds, but when my screen gets all bright and I have nothing to click on, I have no idea whats going on.

Anyways, that really was more of a minor annoyance than anything. As other players aren't trying to kill me, and most of the gear will be obsolete within 3-5 levels anyways, I don't need instance gear. I definately want it, and the shoulders look better than the ones I'm wearing, oh well, we shall see how that goes.

On the crafting front, I hit 400 blacksmithing on the weekend, and it's everything I always hoped blacksmithing would be. Not only can I make viable tanking gear for myself (not just green stuff, but blue stuff too), even the green gear sells, and everything sells for more than mats! Adding to my considerable giddiness, they did a much better job tiering things so I'm not having to make 27k of one item just to get to the next tier.

On other characters, I have leveled my warrior a little bit, re-specc'd him fury, can't wait to get titan's grip, it looks like a lot of fun. I did just remember, I forgot to do inscription research yesterday, oh well. My mage is coming along nicely, been leveling with rested XP. I really love mages, hands down my fav caster in the game, the easy transportation is an added bonus. My DK is 65 and has the adamantite set waiting at 66-67 and some ragesteel shoulders at 70. I can't wait to run him through northrend mining and skinning everything in sight. Lastly my lonely shammy. I am picking up more tricks to playing the shammy and I regret not giving them more of a chance sooner. I look forward to getting him to Outlands and crafting the badass purple LW set. Although I love pallys (it doesn't get more epic fantasy than a knight in armor smiting demons and undead), shamen (shamans?) have a unique flavor and a lot of tools at their disposal. In short, so many characters, so little time. They'll all be there eventually.