I thought you guys might like to meet that smexy Space Goat staring provocatively from my header image. Okay, perhaps provocative isn’t the word, but she’s my cute little Wagglebum. That.. sounded less creepy in my head.

Those of you who’ve followed me for any length of time, either on Twitter or through this blog, will know that I’m a bit of an altoholic. Perhaps less so this expansion (would you believe that I’ve only managed to get 3 of my characters to 85 after my seven level 80s in Wrath?) but even so, I do like to mix up my World of Warcraft play time a little bit and trying different classes is a great way to go about that. I even post about them a lot, heck, they have their own category!

So for ages I’ve been missing the blue side of the fence. The red side is great, don’t get me wrong, I do love my Blood Elves and their great and terrifying city and my insane little Goblin folk and the cow people, but I’ve always been a little more blue than I am red. (Is this sounding like some kind of communist vs. capitalist thought chain to anybody else?) My characters on Terenas have pretty much been abandoned because I don’t feel like I have a place there any more. The server itself feels.. off and poor little Soupdragon is left on her own at level 82. So when I mentioned on Twitter that I felt like playing Alliance side one day and Rel popped up all, “Come play with me and Wabby!!” I was like.. well yeah why not? And as weird as I find their overpriced and max-level-epic-lacking auction house, Ghostlands seems like a pretty nice server as far as servers go.

I didn’t take too long to decide that it was time I levelled a Mage. I’ve always been kind of drawn to the class but it’s one of those that I get really into for a few levels then something shiny grabs my attention and it’s left for a while.. rinse and repeat, so this time, I’m going to do it and I’m loving it. She had to be a Draenei. Duh. *waggle* And she had to have my name. As I’m playing her a lot at the moment, she has her own part in the sidebar where you can see what she’s upto and she’s featured in the header because.. well Blood Elves eyes are closed in my version of WoW Model Viewer and that looked stupid so yeah.

I do already have a Mage at 67 on my main server but I.. I don’t like my main server. It’s a PvP server, which I can’t stand, it’s full of the type of people you really don’t enjoy grouping with.. basically, Vashj EU is that server. The one that when you get somebody from the realm in your random dungeon finder groups you can’t help but think, “Oh god, not somebody from that server.” You know the ones I’m sure. But myself and Dan have a bunch of our characters there so you know. Still, I don’t enjoy levelling there very much or playing there so it’s doubtful that Twylite (another reason I don’t really play her) will ever get much further than 67. So Jaedia the.. well I was going to say third but if you count other MMOs I suppose it’s more like Jaedia the 7th, was born.

So anyway, the first order of the day was of course to get the feck out of the Draenei starting zone which by now I hate with a bitter passion and then rustle up enough gold to get by on this new server. Rel had invited my Mage into his guild, Harvest Moon (of which I’m determined to get to level 25 FOR TEH LIONS :3 ..that and I’d love to help get a few more members for the 10 man team and maybe some friendly social folk), and a couple of his lovely friends offered me a little help. I didn’t really want to ask for gold because that’s easy enough but bag space I was struggling with so they sent me a few bags. <3 That was a massive help. And then I went off and sold the Moongraze Tenderloin recipe for 500g, a couple of moths, a few cats and a Moss Agate or two and hey presto I had 800g before I’d made it to level 30. I’m down to 400g now but that was the whole point of making the gold in the first place.

I had to question Twitter on what to spec because I’m now a bit clueless. It was always Frost before and I’ve been semi-absent from the game for so long I just wasn’t sure. The general consensus seems to be that Frost is great for solo play but Arcane is fun as hell especially in a group situation and considering I do use the random dungeon finder a lot while levelling, that’s what I went with. It is pretty damn fun, especially now that I’ve talked myself out of using Arcane Missiles unless very oom and am actually able to keep up on the meters a little now. And the grouping is.. unusual. I’ve had to deal with the very silent, the very bad, the very weird (see: picture of horny guy in Gnomer), and the rare group that’s actually been a little friendly. At 34, nearing 35, I’m getting to the sort of level where you bump into folk who would like to run a few dungeons with the same semi-competent group and I’ve had a couple of those now (even if one of the tanks was called “Battyboy” and the other turned out to be stoned according to his friend).

I’ve also had to look at actually levelling professions as I go. I tend to find it easier to do that than pick them up later on. And instead of taking the easy option of dual-gathering professions and sell the results, I picked up Tailoring and Enchanting. So considering my lack of heirlooms, that’s clearly led to a lot of focus on getting my Robe of Power. I probably didn’t need to, sure, but once I decided I was going for it, I was bloody determined even if it did mean buying a bunch of 20g stacks of Wool and Silk. I mentioned the scary Ghostlands auction house, right? Well I finally completed my robe last night and ran a couple of dungeons and she is totally badass. I’m really enjoying this Mage and her transmog set is going to be fab!

An early idea after playing with MogIt