I wanted to write a quick littlie program at lunchtime today. So I got into the Xcode IDE (integrated development enviroinment) on my Macintosh and began to write it.

I noticed off on the side the Activity window of Xcode that a Documentation Set download had bgun. My eyes bugged out when I noticed its size. It is 646 MB -- huge!

I remember one day back in the 1990's, my C++ IDE - which was very advanced and large for its time - was 100 MB. That was for everything: compilers, editor, assemblers, debuggeres, linkers - the whole shooting match.

These are just some data files that tell how to program the Mac and the source code for some sample programs.

Things have changed so much. My first computer had an operating system that was only a few kilobytes. I think the OS, which they simply called the monitor, and a Microsoft BASIC interpreter included with it, together both fit in a 16 KB ROM chip.

On my first fulltime programming job, our programs were limited to 2 KB apiece. We had to abbreviate every command and function to is first letter to save space. Variable names too, were typically forced by convention to be just one or two letters long to save space. Comments were frowned upon beacause they were part of that 2 KB, but I still put them in when I judged it essential.

That was one reason I moved on from that job so long ago. I determined that making programs that solved problems of any size and complexity would be confounded by those very limitations i just mentioned.

The job I took when I left there is the one that set me down the road to doing the type of programming I do nowadays. Where you can write a program that you and other programmers can easily understand. And writing it that way does not give the computer heartburn either.

Technology has changed a lot in computers. Some things about it never do though. The techniques, the mechanisms, the paradigms, the metaphors, the APIs, the operating systems - they do change. But the principles that are bound to the way people are, they really do not change that much.

I decided to take a long, long break from World of WarCraft.

The reasons are many but here are some of the major ones.

1. I have accomplished the goals in the game that I set out for myself when I first started playing.
2. I have a level 80 character. I cannot get to a higher level.
3. My 80 has an epic for every slot - in fact, a couple epics to choose from, in some cases.
4. I have fully explored Northrend on my 80 - got the achievement.
5. I have fully explored Outland on a couple of my characters - got that achievement for more than one.
6. I have Grand Master or Master status in most of the professions: enchanting, tailoring, skinning, leatherworking, herbalism, and alchemy.

I have a bunch of alternate characters. Lately, I have gotten sick of doing the same quests over and over.

Yes, there are generally two zones you can work in for the same range of levels, and several more that would work almost was well. I have leveled quite a few characters up into the 41-80 level and have a few newer characters in the 10-40 range too.

However, the content is not new to me at those levels and I am kind of burned out on questing and

The alternative of using PvP (player-vs-player) battlegrounds as a way to gain experience points (XP) and go up in levels is a wonderfully refreshing alternative. I really enjoyed doing this recently. At a certain point, you just get tired of these hostile bug, demon, and undead infested PvP (player-vs-environment) zones and instances.

In the past, Blizzard kind of disparaged doing PvP in battlegrounds (BGs) as a primary way to progress your character. However, these reasons have become progressively obsolete since I started playing WoW a few years ago. In fact, once you reach level 51, you begin to get access to the really big battlegrounds. If you play well in them, and your team does well and wins - you can get to the next level fairly quickly.

From the very start of the game, I gravitated towards the professions - primarily the crafting ones. My feeling, looking back, is that this slowed my leveling progress down a lot. Multiplied by a lot of characters, that is a lot of slowness.

The previous week, I did much of my questing in the plaguelands: Western Plaguelands (WPL) and Eastern Plaguelands (EPL). These were places I long desired to visit a couple years ago, as I peered enviously at them from a fence with my level 40-ish at the time, main character.

I finally did get to visit them and they were pretty neat. Somewhat gothic gothic dungeons, deadly animals, undead monsters and insane knight cultists resembling a band of crazed knights templar scattered about here and there.

Going there over and over got boring and turned early fascination into ennui. However, when I went there recently, more often than not, I formed a party with someone else. In most cases, I was helping them with my slightly higher level character or greater knowledge of the area as a player. I was able to make it easier for them and more fun. Turning something that could have been very frustrating or even impossible to do alone into something they could be happy doing and proud to accomplish.

I encountered several players in their late forty and early fifties levels in the past couple weeks who reminded me so much of myself as I so gradually leveled up from one to about 70. It took me about that long for the right way of WoW to sink in. Then, when WoLK came out and added Northrend and levels 71-80 I finally realized, you need to work with others and form teams to get things done in WoW. Otherwise, you just waste so much time and get stuck such inferior gear - which slows things down even further.

So I helped them. I showed them how working together, even as a party of just 2 or 3 individuals, our characters of different classes could really mesh together, and quickly accomplish things with ease that would have been harder if we each tried to do these things alone.

Combat firepower and swordplay was not the only thing I contributed. I showed them where to get quests so they could accomplish a couple of them at once. I showed them which quests to get that they could do right then and which quests they could do letter when they had the right level and enough time and party members to tackle an instance.

Last but not least, I introduced 4 or 5 players to the Alterac Valley Battleground just as they reached level 51, in most cases. This helped them gain experience faster than they ever had before outside of an instance, I am pretty sure. And, it was way more fun for them. Every one of them expressed how much fun it was. It is a nice respite from grinding levels by fighting against NPCs. In Alterac Valley and some later BGs, there are actually NPCs that are on your side and help you in combat.

The gear rewards you can get from all the battlegrounds ranges from quite nice to extraordinarily excellent. So I showed my cohorts of the week what that gear was and where to get it from, once they had earned enough battleground marks and PvP honor points. I expect most of them will go from their current levels in the mid-fifties to level 68 - and Northrend - very quickly.

One nice treat for me was that for one or two of these people I met, I was able to do something I had wanted to do for a long time. Use my priest and paladin as their healer. Plus, I used a newly gained paladin ability to mould myself into a zone escort/guide.

Paladins learn the Crusader Aura ability in their mid-60's. When turned on, that aura causes their mount and any other mounted players to race across the ground at a fantastic speed. Being already on epic fast mounts, thanks to the change this year that lowered their level requirement from 60 to 40, we zipped from the west end of EPL to the location of the flight master in the east end in no time at all. Virtually all the monsters that would have dragged us into time consuming fight after fight were left howling and barking as they tried to catch up with us, until they gave up their impossible chase.

I like the fact that WoW taught me how to work with other people in a way I had not done before. Even though the items you are sharing are just data in a program, the experience of enabling other people to do things easily that would have been quite difficult without your help was wonderful. I would like to do more of that now in real life instead of a computer game.

I have helped other people at work, one or a bunch of peers, at various jobs, from about my second year in my profession onward. Outside of work - not really, though. I am going to think about volunteering to do stuff in my community a lot more seriously than the passing though I had given it in the past.

I do not plan on resuming playing World of Warcraft anytime soon. I hope, instead, I am able to find something I can teach people that they will enjoy. Something they can use in real life to accomplish goals that really matter. And maybe, in the spirit of quickly accepting help from other people that I finally learned - and even imparted to others - in WoW, they can teach me a thing or two too!

I have a feral druid now. I have had a tauren druid for a few months. I really had not played on it much and it was only level 6 or 7 for the longest time. A few weeks ago, my druid, which was the only character I had on that realm, joined a new guild. The week after I joined, one of the guild members lavished a lot of very useful armor and an extremely nice 2H axe on my character. She did it on her own initiative and I was bowled over by her kindness. Leveling that character in its combination of grays (meaning poor quality) and whites (meaning common quality) was quite painful. In WoW, the clothes - and the weapons - make the man. You can customize your character slightly through the use of talents by virtually all of a character's power and survivability comes from statistics that get improved by values added by its gear. Thanks to the generosity of my guildmate I was able to increase my druid's level from a few levels below 10 to level 14 quickly and painlessly. At level 10, when you can finally start to specialize the class of your character, I chose feral combat - as opposed to balance or restoration. I shied away from feral on my first druid. When I started WoW I was strongly biased towards creating non-melee characters. For the most part, I felt that fighting at a distance was the way to go. The old adage keep your enemies closer was not for me. Over time, I have broadened my perspective and I think both play styles are fun, effective, and survivable. The reasons and mechanics behind this are very sound. Melee characters are way tougher than say casters who wear cloth armor. So even though they are in the thick of things, they are not in much more danger than the casters and hunters that are attacking from a distance. One setback on this druids realm is that buying gear was incredibly expensive. Even, and in fact, probably especially, low level gear and materials was extraordinarily expensive compared to prices I see on other realms. I wanted a way to enchant the gear for my druid as well as supply him with some jewelry. So what I did after dinner was create a pair of blood elves: a paladin who does mining and jewelcrafting, and a mage who does tailoring and enchanting. In a short time, I got both characters up to level 5 and beyond. Level 5 is when a character is allowed to chooes a profession. From my main, I sent them each golds, gear, elixirs, potions, bags, and some meat to cook. And they quickly became very prosperous. Leveling them was in no way a struggle. My impression is that blood elf characters level a little faster than new characters of other races. Their starting zone seems a little easier and the surroundings are a lot more pleasant. I started playing World of Warcraft a couple of months before the Burning Crusade expansion set came out. BC expansion is what introduced the blood elf race, along with the draenei, into the game. The first night it came out, I was amazed how a couple hours after midnight, blood elves started appearing in the zone surrounding Undercity. At first, I just saw level 7 blood elves. By dawn, they were over level 10 and less than 24 hours after BC debuted I was seeing a lot of blood elves in their midteens in not just the vicinity of UC but also in The Barrens, especially at The Crossroads. Blood elves are tough players to beat in battlegrounds. I am not a fanatic about playing against other players in BGs by any means. However, I do appreciate it as a swift way to get great gear in a semi-predictable amount of time. I also find it sharpens my skills. Whereas playing against PvE NPCs can allow for all kinds of sloppiness, or at least fail to reveal where quick reactoins and sharper thinking could have saved the day - playing against other players in PvP makes a lot of these shortcomings painfully obvious. One of the benefits of playing a role playing game, especially an MMORPG is that it teaches you to think really fast. So, I believe everybody should do some battlegrounds on their character once they are comfortable with it and know their class and how to play it pretty well. BGs are how you get really good, so there is no need to wait until you have perfected your game play on your character. That will come, in part, by doing player vs. player combat in the BG. You learn both from the enemy players trying to kill your character, and from the friendly players fighting along side your character, and hopefully sometimes healing and protecting it. And in many cases, you are able to do the same for them. World of Warcraft, like any MMO, is about teamwork. Quite a lot of the opportunities for teamwork first become available in batltegrounds. This experience, combined with the experience of doing 5 man parties in dungeon instances - as well as the occasional group quest - is what prepares characters for doing 10 to 40 man raids at level 60-80. I had noticed that blood elf paladins and mages were particularly deadly to my Alliance characters in BGs. So, in part, that is why I chose those 2 classes for my 2 blood elf characters. I both wanted to have and needed to understand their deadliness. The answer, it turns out, is pretty simple: magic. Blood elves are a little resistant to harmful magic spells cast on them. They are also able to silence all enemies within 8 meters of them and regenerate a small percentage of their maximum mana using an Arcane Torrent spell. That spell can be cast every 2 minutes. That sounds like a long time but any battleground lasts several times that and typical battleground times are something like 10-25 minutes. Now you know that if you are a caster, you need to keep a distance from blood elves. And also, that you will have a little harder time killing them than your melee counterparts on your team will have. Having a melee character on your team tank a blood elf in a BG while you cast spells from a distance should be extremely effective, however. Just avoid soloing them close up, if possible, unless you are a melee class character. Well, that wraps up what I learned last night. At last, a piece of the puzzle of this game has fallen into place.

Experienced a problem in WoW with a the normal outfit being missing from the list in Outfitter's UI, and the gear associated with each outfit I had defined was skewed. Basically, almost every outfit was off by one. I was using a beta of Outfitter 4.8. Now, the official 4.8 release is available for download.

Details of what is in this new release: Outfitter 4.8

I think the author of this fine addon is to be commended. He spotted a need and filled a gap in WoW functionality with his addon. He had been updating it for years. He gave it away for free so to give other folks more enjoyment and less hassles. Not only that but he continues to amend it. Not only is he adding new features all the time. He is also incorporating support for new features and new programming API's added to the game itself by Blizzard. He seems like one of the nicest, most conscientious developers around. I think this guy should be up for some kind of an award or something. The name of the programmer who makes Outfitter is John Stephen.

For me, levels 30's and 40's are a pretty dull grind in WoW. Things really start to take off when my characters are hitting level 50-52. I get great new abilities at level 50 - from class trainer and by spending my 40th talent point. I get to start enjoying Alterac Vally at level 51 and my first win there gives me a very nice hand weapon or wand, and at level 52 I can do a class quest that gives me a powerful weapon or trinket that is especially well-suited for my class In the past couple of weeks, I leveled both a balance druid and a discipline priest to level 51+. Each time, upon reaching level 51 I took my character to Alterac Valley. Everyone should do this when a character reaches 51. There is an important Alterac Valley quest chain that one needs to pick up from an NPC stationed next to a certain bank. For Horde, that bank is the Ogrimar bank. For Alliance, that bank is the Ironforge bank. The reason it is these banks in particular is that the cities these 2 banks are found belong to the 2 races that are the primary opponents in the battle for Alterac Valley. As soon as a character reaches level 50, it will be offered a chance to go to the Plaguelands - specifically, to see an NPC at a camp in the Western Plaguelands. If you like creepy places or want the opportunity to eventually learn to tailor/leatherwork/blacksmith a piece of high-stamina armor, then it can be fun and rewarding to get started earning faction with the Argent Dawn in the Plaguelands right away. Getting revered reputation with Argent Dawn is also the only way to get to learn to make anti-venom that is powerful enough to work on level 36-60 poisons. While not crucial for most characters, this is a very nice thing to do if you are a Priest because you are the only healing class that cannot cure poisons with a spell. Also, if you are a Rogue, you really depend upon being able to stealth. So rogues will want to learn to make this Powerful Antivenom from Argent Dawn as well as do the quest for Thorium Brotherhood in Searing Gorge that gives the Louffa reward they can use to remove Bleed effects. Once you reach level 61, these two items become of little or no use to you. So earning them as soon as your character level is high enough is the way to go. While the quests are easy at much higher levels, in addition to getting very little experience doing them, you are going to be disappointed the rewards are no longer of much help to you. Another neat thing about reaching your level 50's on a character is that you can easily pull your own weight in Maraudon and Sunken Temple as soon as you hit 50. Plus, in your low fifties you can get very nice level 50's gear from running Blackrock Depths and Scholomance if you party with some higher level characters. Maraudon is a nice instance because by doing the quests there you will earn a huge amount of faction reputation with the Cenarion Circle. Once you arrive in Silithis, that will enable you to buy high level (around skill level 275-300) patterns from that gang. Sunken Temple (ST) is also a vital instance. One reason is that the level 50-ish class quest for all classes is a chain and at some point in the chain you are sent on an errand to collect 6 colored feathers (2 each of 3 different colors) from some trolls that live there. At level 58, of course, your character is allowed to walk through the Dark Portal in the Blasted Lands, instantly transporting he/she to Hellfire Peninsula in Outland. Once there, incredible gear that is significantly better than almost anything but the epic drops in pre-BC Azeroth is readily available as both drops and quest rewards. The patterns/recipes available in Outland are likewise better than what as gone before. So for all of these reasons, hitting level 50 and then continuing to gain levels from there on will greatly reward a player. Although it used to take a long time to get through the 50's, it goes fast these days due to changes made in various patches that have come out in the past couple years or so. If you have already gotten a character into its forties, I hope this information I have presented motivates you to reach level 50 as qiuckly as you can - and then guides you to quickly taking advantage of the opportunities that opens up for you. With the fast ground mounts becoming available at level 40 instead of 60, reaching level 50 and continuing to level throughout the 50's, is much easier in WoW 3.2 than it has ever been.

According to wow.com, today patch 3.2 is going live. http://www.wow.com/2009/08/04/breakfast-topic-whats-the-first-thing-youll-do-in-patch-3-2/ http://www.wow.com/guide-to-patch-3-2/ People have been looking forward to this patch for a long, long time. The thing in 3.2 that most people have been anxious for is cheaper prices for mounts and riding lessons. See the Mount and Riding pages at wowwiki.com for complete lists of how much - or now, how little - these things cost. http://www.wowwiki.com/Mount http://www.wowwiki.com/Riding The regular ground mounts are practically free with the advent of WoW 3.2 - and are available to any character who is level 20 or higher. The total cost for Mount+Riding for regular mounts drops to only 5 golds. If you have not saved 5 golds by level 20 then you probably need to get the Auctioneer addon and start saving some golds! http://www.AuctioneerAddon.com/ If one has many character level 40+ alts of different classes - and one does not have tons of gold to spend - some priorities will have to be set on which characters will get their fast ground or regular/fast flying mounts first. Druids, Paladins, and Warlocks get their mounts virtually free. Paladins and Warlocks still need to buy their Riding lessons, however. Not sure if Druids need to pay for Riding lessons or not but in any case, I am almost sure that all 3 of these classes will get the mount itself for only 16 to 20 golds. So, all other things being more or less equal, characters of these 3 classes should probably be given priority as you rush to capitalize on the at last affordable fast ground mounts. These are the so called epic (purple quality) ground mounts. Death Knights, of course get epic mounts to begin with in wow. Like everything else they have upon completing the level 55-58 Death Knight questing grind, they receive their mound/riding doing quests in their little Death Knight temporary pocket universe. This happens before leaving it for good around level 58. This is why Death Knights should not cut corners on doing all their class quests before doing the final one that takes them to Light's Hope Chapel for a huge battle that frees them to go forth into the outside world. The next way of saving oodles of golds is one that all classes can take advantage of in WoW: PvP reward mounts. PvP epic mounts are purchased with battleground marks. There are two paths you can take to obtain these mounts. Either (a) 50 Alterac Valley marks gets you a ram (alliance) or frost wolf (horde), or (b) 30 marks each for Arathi+Warsong+Alterac. If you love Alterac Valley because lets say your side wins all the time, then you will probably prefer (a). However, if you enjoy all 3 of these BGs - or you prefer a different species/color mount - then (b) might be more to your liking. There are lots of other ways to get mounts for golds or various types of PvP tokens such as BG marks or items you get for doing world PvP in places like Nagrand. Look at the WoWWiki.com Mount page for details of where/what they are and how much they cost. The two ways listed above are simply likely to be the most popular or practical, now that 3.2 has made epic (fast) mounts obtainable at level 40 - long before one ventures forth to Outland or reaches level 61. Hope this information proves useful to you. If you have questions they will surely be answered far better by glancing at the Mount and Riding pages at WoWWiki.com than by me. For the curious, here are the higher level mounts I have now and plan to get in the near (or almost near) future: Now: warlock - fast ground (2); hunter: regular ground (3); rogue: regular ground (2), shaman: regular ground (1), druid: regular(1) ground. Soon: rogue: fast ground (1); warlock: fast ground (1), regular ground (1); hunter: fast ground (1) and then regular flying(1); warrior: regular ground (1); death knight: regular flying (1); priest: fast ground (1); paladin: fast ground (1) Later: warlock: fast ground (1), regular ground(1); hunter: fast ground(1); shaman: fast ground(1); mage: fast ground (1) I have a lot of other characters of various classes which are not getting new mounts anytime soon. This is generally because I just do not have enough gold to spend on them at the moment, they are too low level to need a better mount, and I simply do not rely very much on their gathering profession at this time. For me, flying mounts are not a priority until characters are a high enough level to buy Cold Weather Flying lessons - and I have tons of gold accumulated to pay for it. Cold Weather Flying lessons and fast flying mounts, while cheaper than before, are still very expensive in WoW 3.2. Fast riding mounts are a priority because they help you get many, many quests done faster and with less dying. You are going to outrun pursuit a lot more of the time if you have a fast mount than if you are running or riding a regular mount. They are also going to get you to instances faster - and that means more instances run per week. So a fast mount will help you level faster - and also quickly pay for itself - for characters you use a lot! One thing, however, which is nice for those who finally get a regular flying mount is that even though they remain slower than the fast flying mounts - the regular flying mounts are far faster than they used to be prior to WoW 3.2 arriving. There are places in Outland and Northrend that are simply not accessible unless you have a flying mount.

At noon today the local Fox broadcasting affiliate stopped transmitting its programming in the NTSC analog form that has existed unchanged for half a century.

The digital ATSC format which is purely digital is now the only format that programming is provided in within the Uniated States.

So far, despite the hype, I have not seen any new broadcast networks appear in my area thanks to digital television. Instead, I have seen existing stations add one to three new channels.

For me it was no change at all because I started watching television in digital form half a decade ago. I have not watched analog form TV for the past couple of years.

What digital television means to me is that I get a bigger, clearer, sharper, more detailed picture than I did with analog television. Also, when I watch a TV show on my computer, if it has been recorded so I can view it later in case I am busy when it airs - my computer does not have to perform complex analog to digital conversion when recording.

It seems like a nice change. The analog format had extreme limitations compared to what was possible. The digital format puts the USA on par with the rest of the world in terms of state of the art television broadcasting.

World of Warcraft's login screen indicates that the game will be down extra long today. They are going to give an update later tonight.

It looks like the game servers will remain down until around midnight tonight.

The special bags that hunters bought or crafted for holding their arrows or ammunition seem to be dramatically less useful with the advent of World of Warcraft 3.1.

The bags have not gotten worse. Rather it is the need for them that has tanked.

Ammo and arrows used to stack in units off 200 per slot. Now it is 1,000 per slot. So almost all the ammo I used to need a 16 slot bag for will almost fit into 3 slots.

There is no more speed buff from bags eiher. It used to range from 10 to 15 perscent as your bags got larger - and more expensive.

Instead, all huners have a 15 percent speed buff at firing. So, that advantage too is lost from the bags.

It sort of looks like Blizzard wants Hunters to stop buying custom bags for the stuff they are firing - and leatherworkers to stop crafting it. I was just about to go farm 30 special feathers in Outland so my night elf hunter could craft a 20 slot quver for itself. Having read the release notse, I think I will save myself the trouble and simply equip a new general purpose bag in its place.

Same goes for all of my hunters, I think.

This is a pretty big change. Small in most ways and mostly a welcome one, I think. However, I pity anyone who just spent a lot of money or effort getting their hunter big, expensive quiver or armor bag. Sounds like their efforts were for naught or their golds were wasted.

The World of Warcraft Launcher applcation today presented the release notes for the WoW 3.1 patch. That pretty much cinches that the 3.1 patch is going live.

One surprise was that all talent points are being reset. Soounds like for all characters. Would have been nice to get a heads up on that so old ones could be snashot as a guide while setting them up again.

Not sure yet how many WoW addons will be disabled due to the new version. Suspect there will be some.

The patch size has apparently undergone a last-minute file size growth from 710 MB to 742 MB. Relatively small increment but the overall size of this patch is pretty staggering.

One can see why Blizzard switched from centralized server download to a distributed peer-to-peer type. The former would have hardly been practical for either economic reasons or technical performance considerations.

Noblegarden holiday in the past has always been a one day long affair on Easter day. Big part of the WoW player population lives outside the USA and Europe now. The hunt for eggs containing low-level foods would have been rather boring for all the level 70 and 80 characters.

So now the Noblegarden holiday is a week long affair. No doubt it will contain a lot more content to hold people's interest.

I have been kind of bored in Northrend after hitting level 80. It has been kind of repetiitious. I enjoy exploring new areas. There are instances I have not been to yet but to some degree you have to work your way up to them by playing some other ones over and over to get there.

The week before the patch came out, I played up an Alliance night elf hunter and human death knight to decent level.

The death night is level 64 now. I had not played him in so long I had forgotten I had an epic sword in his main hand. He is a pretty effetive fighter in PvE. In battlegrounds, being pure Blood talent spec - he does tend to kind of get owned though.

I scored really good gear for my night elf from AH and BG PvP rewards just as it turned level 60. And I included a couple quests that give really good weapons among its initial questing in Outland in the early sixties. It is pretty deadly in PvE.

Like the death knight, I really have not focused on equipping this hunter for battlegrounds. However, it has a couple of pieces from BGs so it was kind of tearing things up sometimes in AV at level 60. No illusions that it would be any kind of a force in BGs while it is level 61-69, however.

I would like to get this pair questing in Northrend on their respective realms as quickly as possible.

All my alliance characters are hurting for bag space so I would probably make upgrading bags a pretty high priority for them both. Caught a lucky break on my original realm last week and equipped my top two characters there each with a 20-slot Frostweave bag. Someone put 3 in the AH for slightly under half the usual price. Too much of a bargain to pass up and I knew that buying two of them would pay for itself quickly as both characterse leveled.

My higest level Alliance warlock is level 57. Very close to dinging level 58. Kind of hoping that Scholomance and Molten Core runs are in his future.

Right now he has a couple of decent pieces of gear but his staff and most of his armor is tragically out of date. It should have been replaced many levels ago. However, I guess I was doing the wrong quests with him, not hitting enough instances, and not doing enough battlegrounds.

Once he has better gear and a few more levels under his belt, something that doing quests in those instances will undoubteldly help - I think he will do great in Outland. My night elf hunter on his realm will probably do even better. So, I plan to have it lead him - leveling up and passnig him down drops and fancy armor kits as they rise.

That hunter is also going to supply him with a steady stream of greens, probably mostly crafted ones, for him to disenchant. I want him crafting bags with his tailoring and enchanting at Outland levels (greater than 300) as quickly as possible.

The WoW 3.1 patch download seems to be at 99 percent now. So I gues I will be able to assess what 3.1 is like and how much I work I have ahead of me with talent points and addons shortly.