Well I keep wanting to write something and post a pic of my characters, but as usual i don't write at home where my pics are, and I don't have pics at work where I usually write my posts.  So pics can wait I guess.

My paladin is now 61, and happily questing in Outland.  I kept him protection, and I love it to no extent.  The new spell that is just awesome is Hammer of the Righteous. Armed with that, and the gear upgrades that you get from some of the first quests in Outland, I can take on 5-7 mobs on a time, and they all dead in seconds.  If mobs are undead or demons - of which there are plenty here - things go down even faster.  So in shorts questing and leveling here for a protection pally is quick, painless and fun.

I've also slowed down and actually read all the quests.  Originally, when I level my lock through Outland I felt it was too quick, and I would rarely read quests completely.  With my pally there is no rush.  I will quests as quickly and efficiently as possible, but I will also take my time to read quest, and perhaps complete some of the quest lines to the end.

Anouther big achievement is getting my Blacksmithing to 300.  That was quite a quest.  The amount of materials you need to squeeze the last 40 levels of Balcksmithing is amazing.  On top of it the fact that ore is now so scarse!  It seems all the newly minted Death Knights are all doing something related to ore - black smithing, engineering or jewelcrafting.  The places where I would usually be able to mine Thorium and Mithril are now swamped with death knights running around and ninjaing your nodes right from under your nose.

Here are some extra tips I've learned in blacksmithing.  When it gets really expencive to make things to get points, make things that are orange.  Because it realy sucks when you make something that is yellow skillup color and it reaquired a bit of mats, and it gives you no points.  So what's the risk there?  Well at some point I was really upset because i crated 8 mithrill pants and got no skill up!  That was about 100 mithril bars!  So from then on I started to make things that were orange, even if they were alot more mats, at least I knew exactly how much it's going to cost me to make things for each point.