On Silvermoon, the same epics I had on Velen cost a minimum of 250g, and upward of 650g. Insanity! I’m not paying that much for 5 levels of use. Oh, sure, sometimes you come across an epic or even a rare piece that lasts 10 levels due to its extra-special stats that make it worth passing up tons of other pieces of higher levels.

So, let’s set the stage:

You have level 70s who are doing dailies for easy gold, but you are busy leveling your lowbie, so your balance usually hangs around 40-100g. How much is too much to spend on an epic?

• Outlands provides a cornucopia of group quests at the end of long questlines that often reward you with blue, even some socketed, gear that is far superior to the regular AH greens.
• PvP is an option all the way through the levels, with varying degrees of reward value. You could arguably save up all of your BG marks for level 70 and get some working man’s epics right out of the gate.
• Rep rewards offer blues for Honored/Revered status throughout Outlands. The Hellfire Peninsula rewards for Honored will hold you over for several levels, so check out what the later rewards will get you and whether they are worth it to you, since those 5-mans only take 2 hours with a PuG or 30-60 minutes with well-geared guildies.
• Lastly, who can resist socketed blue gear from the 5-man instances that you will need to master in order to do them in Heroic mode anyway? There is some dang fine gear in there that puts the old Tier 0.5 junk to shame.

Personally, I’ve been indulging myself in as many quests as possible and running them all the way to the final Elite group quests. When I have a bucketfull of them, I look for someone in the area or hop on the guild chat or LFG channel to knock a few out for massive XP and shiny rewards. Some faction quests take you to instances for super rewards, starting in Ramparts onward.

On the nights that I have the time and patience, I run the instances for Rep, XP, and loot… all in one. You should be able to get 15-20g, another 20-40g in greens and vendor trashing, and a considerable amount of rep if you haven’t done all of the quests in the zone yet.

My personal favorite when I wasn’t leveling as fast was to play the AH a tad harder than normal and just buy my way into blue and purple gear. I’m making about 150g per day by questing, vendor trashing, herbing, and selling greens on the AH. I haven’t even been playing the AH because I hate Auctioneer Advanced for that, so I’m going back to the regular version to play for my flying mount coming up in 26 bars.

OMG! 132% until 70! /shudder

For lower level Horde characters intent on acquiring a mask – be prepared for either a looong ghost run from the Barrens or Ashenvale – or – you can make your way to Auberdine and let yourself get killed near (or on) the Azuremyst Boat. You’ll likely get murdered again once you get off the boat – so make sure to be doing this little jaunt ‘sans-gear’ or you’ll have a repair bill to go along with what could be hours of fruitless searching.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with Auberdine or which boat goes where. Simply find the inn and check out the pier. There are two boats that have historically docked here. About halfway out the pier is a ‘t’ junction – where the boats to Menethil Harbor and Ruth’theran Village have always docked. The newest boat arrives at the far end of the pier (there are signs – try to look for them if you’re running from the Auberdine guards!)

How to Find Them

There are a number of known spawn points that ring the island. With a high level main and an epic mount, you can cover a lot of ground quickly. Everyone else – best bet is to pick a region and camp the spawn points. Re-pop time on these guys is somewhere between 2 and 5 minutes – with the next bandit appearing at a new location after the last is killed.

Click on the map to see known spawn points and a suggested route to take to find these guys

Hordies that aren’t uber leveled are suggested to take an alternate routes anytime the path crosses too close to the Exodar

A simple macro can also help snuffle these guys out. Just create a new macro and type the following:

/target Blood Elf

Put that on an action bar somewhere and just spam the crap out of it as you race around Azuremyst Isle. If you manage to find one this way – stop immediately and start searching in a tight circular pattern until you either see his stealthed figure – or he ambushes you. Either works.

Anyway – I hope this has been entertaining and helpful. For those of you that are hard to teach or resistant to helpful tips – here are a few that I can’t stress enough.

1. These guys are on Azuremyst Isle – not Bloodmyst Isle
2. A mask won’t drop with every kill
3 Others are hunting these guys at the same time you are.
4. This might take minutes…it might take hours.

I killed elves on Bloodmyst Isle for over an hour one night thinking that the masks randomly dropped off the packs of blood elves camped behind Blood Watch. I gained a level in that time and gathered stacks of cloth – but no mask. A little google searching and some patience would have saved me that trouble.

I’ve Got One..Now What?

Wear it dummy! Give it to a friend – give it to a favorite 10-19 battleground twink! Or do like a lot of other folks are doing and sell that bad dog. Prices are variable these days so selling them is still a bit of a hit and miss thing. WoW Econ is showing historical prices on the Alliance side to be running around a 10G average over the month of November, 2007 – though your server economy will dictate. Back in the early days of the Burning Crusade, these cheese-cloth wonders would fetch as much as 25-50G. The fervor has died down somewhat, but you can still make a tidy sum selling to folks willing to pay well for RP clothes or who simply want a unique look on their latest alt.

Matching Robe?

According to some folks – there is another drop available on Azuremyst that makes a great compliment to the mask. The Silvermoon Robe Family are a fairly nice couple of cloth robes that would make any level ALT level 13-20 feel like the best dressed toon in Azeroth. The robe usually drops off of Fenissa the Assassin (rare mob) who can be found around the Vector Coil or Cryo Core (she stays stealthed, but you can usually find her fairly easily.)

Growl’s Experience Hunting The Mask

Growl has managed to nab 4 of these things. I haven’t managed to find one dropping in any one location more than I have the other – so I can’t recommend choice hunting spots. The best bet is to keep an eye out around the marked spawn locations and hope you get lucky. The drop rate isn’t spectacular – but it isn’t bad either. The real problem is finding the bloody belf where ever he happens to be on the map. I’ve circumnavigated Azuremyst for an hour straight and not seen the blighter before. Other times – I’ve had him start stabbing me in the kidneys when I least expected it. As usual with most rare drops and rare spawn in the game – your mileage may vary – and vary wildly.

Good Luck and Happy Hunting!

Thursday when I was done with all of my graphics stuff for the new theme, I started looking [read: drooling] over epics at or around level 40 that would go along with my being a tankadin.

I eventually found a nice shield that made up for the one Horde can’t get from an easy Badlands quest. I was quite pissed about that inequality, so I began drooling over an epic that appeared in the Armory upgrade search: The Green Tower. Anyone look at this one before? Wow! I can’t wait to get smacked by 7 things at once now. I still have yet to get ganged up since I got my plate gear, so I think it’s time to go after some spiders in Duskwallow Marsh.

Soooo… I was on the AH and confirmed that I still couldn’t craft what I wanted, buy what I wanted, or sell what I wanted. as far as armor goes. Moving on down to shields, up pops the Green Tower for 100g and a confirmed Auctioneer average of 119g on Velen. Um… hold on, Punitor, brb. Deadr has to buy me something. I can’t believe I was so happy about a little purple thing made up of ones and zeroes, but I was.

Have you ever had an epic weapon and shield pre-60 at the same time? Me neither.

I was beating Punitor until he put his game face on toward the end… like the last hall. Keep in mind, he’s level 42 . Boo yeah! He did an excellent job not getting whacked by doing too much damage, so /salute.

Then, this morning, by dinging 38, I was able to equip my enchanted Ardent Custodian. I started leveling up my mace skill from 140 and got it to 149 in one minute. I think I’ll be okay running SM again tonight like this. We’re using the same group and going for the Library to finish our quests.

I upped my graphics last night for some anti-aliasing 2xQ on my ancient nVidia 5500. It slowed things down to about 8 fps, but I got nicer screenshots last night and object seem to “pop” a bit more.

We went to Orgrimmar to run around doing some Brewfest festivities (I keep trying to call it “Beerfest”) and see if this new generation of festivals catches my interest more than the others. I don’t have a single item from any rep/ticket hording (pun intended).

We did the first ram run to get the deliveries from the road to Razor Hill, but I ran out of time doing the Dhrone’s Barking ram run. I got to all 4 flags and the timer ran out just outside the entrance to Org. I figured out a better path to take and should get it tonight.

For some PvP fun, as I ran out of Org, an Alliance 35 Warrior flagged me for a duel. I darn near had him several time. I swear he popped a potion because a warrior should not be able to regen health that fast. I had him down to 10% a couple of times. Dishonorable warriors are the worst.

We bought a Scarlet Belt off the AH last night and got a hankering for doing some SM runs with the guildies, even if we won’t finish it or need to fill out with a PuG. Lance, Phil? You in? I need more Scarlet gear, guys. I’m sure we can handle the Graveyard, and I think we can get a decent amount into the Armory with a main healer. I can stinking tank anything right now, as long as I can keep my health up, which is a tad hard when taking so many hits. WTB a Priest or Shaman.

I got Huntr into Hellfire Ramparts Sunday night. I’ve added a paladin a level or two above me to my Friends list because he’s always going when I’m in the queue. We ended up with a 64 hunter, 63 paladin, 63 rogue, and a 70 shaman to tank. Our only death was when the paladin pulled one of the guys leading up to the spiral ramp when we were sneaking by after downing Watchkeeper Gargolmar. We ended up taking on 7 at one time, but came out okay with no healer after 30 seconds. TWO Beastmasters FTW!

I was so excited when the last boss fell, I forgot to take screenshots because they both went down sooo easily compared to the others and from my past experiences in Ramparts. Hunter is sooo much fun.

I dinged 61 Monday morning before work. It opened up a bunch of new questgivers that had gray exclamation marks over their heads. Last night I blasted through about 20 quests and got another blue drop: Gauntlets of Purification. I debated amongst my toons and decided to not hold on to them until Paladr hits 61. I’m cashing out on them now while the getting is good. That’s two rare drops in one week.

What have you been up to on your realms? It’s a good time to catch up on your toons around the world. Feel free to post your Armory links and latest blog posts in the comments and we’ll have a big free-for-all sharing session about what’s the latest with the Gitr readers.