Let's go SHOPPING!

Between work, end-of-school-year stuff for the kids, and my country's 500th anniversary to plan.... no wait, did I say that last nit out loud? Anyways, things have been busy. So I only got to spend a short time with Aeven last night. Rather than going a-questing in Howling Fjord, I took her shopping.

First stop, she hit Bartleyby Armorfist in HF and picked up a Layered Bone Shield. After that, it was a hearth to Dalaran, where she found a nice little Dalaran Cudgel to replace her venerable Ancient Bone Mace. Then off to Ironforge, where she got her big brother Laenshield to slap on an enchantment or two... Greater Defense for her Heavy Draenic Breastplate, Major Stamina for her Heavy Draenic Bracers, and Defense for her new shield. All told, +40 stamina and +42 defense rating. Round that out with Superior Potency on her new beat-down stick for +65 attack power, and she was quite the happy camper at the end of the day.

In the meantime, while she's not using them, she's been collecting quest reward gear and tucking it away in the bank. My goal is to level her to 80 using only common gear, but while that may cut it for regular questing and dungeons, I don't think it will work out too well while trying to run Northrend heroics. I may give it a try - just to see how things go - but there will definitely come a point where I'm going to need to gear her up, and I want to be ready for when that day comes.

On an only somewhat unrelated note, her mining (417) and skinning (429) are both coming along quite well. I'm planning on getting both to 450, collecting and stashing away bars and skins along the way; then she's going to drop skinning, and power-level Engineering.

Looking over some engineering leveling guides, I think that she's got most of the materials she'd need to level available in the bank already. The raw mats that she's lacking, I can farm up easily enough, or just buy off of the auction house. There are over 145 white items craftable by and engineer, including wonderful toys like Cobalt Frag Bombs and Saronite Bombs, Explosive Decoys, and Gnomish Flame Turrets. Not to mention health and mana injectors, bots, and a host of other nice little goodies.

I'm looking forward to playing around with high-level engineering toys - I had started off leveling engineering on my first character, but eventually dropped it in favor of jewlcrafting. I've always felt like I was missing out on something, and pretty soon, Aeven will give me the chance to see if that was true or not.