I saw Upper Blackrock Spire for the first time last night. One of our guild was keen to get their Drakefire Amulet, so we gathered a motley crew of level 60-70 characters for an edge-of-your-seat life-or-death struggle against the forces of darkness… Well, either that or The Keystone Kops Do UBRS as, we charged around, pulled everything in sight and generally stormed through the place. Blue items dropped in cascades including a Manual of Eviscerate XI and Dal’Rend’s Tribal Guardian (oh, how I dreamed of Dal’Rend’s Arms ten levels ago), with everything somewhat heartbreakingly being turned into shards, except… Finkle’s Skinner! Almost totally pointless now; to skin a beast, you need (beast level * 5) skinning skill, so when the maximum skill was 300, the +10 skinning it gave was vital for getting leather and hides from beasts above level 60. With the upper limit for skills now being 375, there’s an extra five level “cushion”; still, you never know when you might need to skin a level 76 beast, and as it replaces a dull old regular skinning knife we decided it would be a shame to shard the entire contents of the dungeon, so I grabbed it.

After that, I wandered over to Shadowmoon Valley, as I’ve been working through the quest line that ends up with the Stealther’s Helm of Second Sight as a reward (hey, you know my hat fixation… and visually, it’s a major improvement over the lime green crash helmet that is the Helm of the Claw; stat-wise the Stealther’s Helm wins too, especially as I still haven’t picked up a meta-gem for the Helm of the Claw). Got a few items, found a group, killed a dragon, and home for tea, crumpets and a nice helm, huzzah! Just in time as well, as at that point my router decided that staying connected for more than five minutes at a time was too much like hard work, *sigh*