Productive alts

I've gone a bit mad with my alts since the last time I posted. The Darkmoon Faire, at the start of March, reminded me that it was a great way to easily level up not just profession level but actual level, so I attempted to take all my alts there (I'm nothing if not complete!) Quickly I realised that some of them needed to do some preparation work, because you can't see the Faire profession quests unless you're at a skill level of 75 in that profession. In most cases this meant I had to spend quite a while on their archaeology, but Gattara (my death knight) also needed some remedial mining and skinning - death knights are a bit of a special case with gathering professions, because when you start the profession you need low-level stuff, which is easy with low-level characters because you're in those areas anyway. But death knights start at 58 so they don't encounter any mining or skinning (or herbs, for that matter) they can actually do. The result: Gattara spent hours, a few weeks ago, running round Elwynn Forest and Duskwood. Not fun, but it's done now - and the archaeology still took longer, because of all the travelling! And I learned what a PAIN it is to do archaeology without a flying mount...

Where we're up to now: They didn't all get everything to skill level 75 in time for the March Darkmoon Faire, but they were all ready for April. In between, I got obsessed with getting them all through all the cooking and fishing dailies. They've all either totally finished in both Stormwind and/or Ironforge or have only one or two quests left. (I'm not taking any to Darnassus till Stormwind and Ironforge are totally done - too much travel! Although Mabel's been there for a while - she's done all the dailies, but she's just hanging about to repeat the Darnassus ones until she has all the recipes. Why Darnassus? Because the cooking quests there involve far less running for my other characters - since she's a mage, it's easier for her to pop to Ironforge to check what the daily is than it is for any of the others! Iolanthe and MadMargaret had maxed out everything and done all the dailies ages ago, so they've not done much. Oh, except MadMargaret hadn't maxed archaeology, but she has now. Iolanthe has almost done all the archaeology there is to do - the only achievement she has left is the one to get 20 rare thingies, and she's on 19, and will have 20 quite soon, if only the Nerubian sites will spawn. (Talking of spawning, I got really irritated the other day when I had to get 15 fossil fragments for each character for the Darkmoon Faire. Some of them already had 15, but most didn't... and would the fossil sites spawn? NO, THEY WOULD NOT. Argh.

But I almost forgot the fishing! I realised that Iolanthe and MadMargaret didn't have their Oceanographer and Limnologist achievements, so I did those a few weeks ago. And I realised in the process (a) that neither of them could complete the achievement until the summer bass reappeared; and (b) that if I was to do it with any of my other characters at any point, it would be much less frustrating if I took them all to get the winter squid before it vanished. Well, they've all caught the winter squid now, but it was harder than I thought - the areas where it spawns are relatively high level, and some of my characters died a *lot* getting to the sea! Plan A, which I thought was brilliant, was to take them to Loch Modan, run into Badlands, go to Fuselight and port to Fuselight-by-the Sea. But this plan had to be abandoned when I discovered that the cataclysm had put a huge canyon between Loch Modan and Badlands and you can't now run from one to the other! Oh well. So I had several corpse runs in the Blasted Lands instead. (Eastern Plaguelands would have been less fatal, but Blasted Lands was a lot nearer to where they were. Although I did take one to Swamp of Sorrows by running along a long path from Burning Steppes which I never noticed before - it goes right down the side of Redridge Mountains but you can't get to it from there.)

Hopefully by next month all the cooking and fishing will be done and I can get back to actual questing! But this is still fun :-)