So begins the more difficult phase of a magician's life when they have to start researching spells (and gathering the components which will be random drops off of critters my level or higher, oh joy). That means I'll need to do a lot of hunting tougher critters (which means exp, but more risk).

The worst part of today was my misadventure into Blackburrow. Almost all of the gnolls con green to me, so we were pretty much on 'I won't kill you if you don't attack me' (my level 16 pet makes short work of most gnolls). So I was walking around, getting jumped very rarely, and got a little too cocky after cleaning out a room of 3 greens and a blue so I decided that a room with a pair of blues and a pair of greens would be doable. Well, it was a bad pull, my pet only aggro'd 3 of the 4, so I was unable to heal my pet or take care of the one who was attacking me (and very shortly I had all 4 attacking me). So I died, deep down in the bowels of Blackburrow. Normally, this would not have been a difficult corpse recovery, but my machine locked up 4x on the way from Qeynos back to Blackburrow to do my corpse run (very frustrating after the 3rd time when you only get 10 min down the road and lock up). Finally I managed to get into Blackburrow, work my way down to the depths (in fact a train of 12 ran past me and just ignored me and my pet) and retrieve my corpse to a safe spot so I could loot it. Once the looting was done, I just gated back to Qeynos (rather than work my way back up through the tunnels).

I'll probably go back, just for the training aspect (it's a fairly easy dungeon) of learning how my pet will path in these situations and learning how to work in close quarters. In the meantime, I plan on hunting the plains of Karana (hoping to get those random drops for my spell components).

Vorish of Morell-Thule, High Elf Mage lvl 16