Update: 65 and counting!

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Just a quick recap of the last week or so:

1- I ran the group through the Slave Pens and Underbog, twice each. Then I ran them through Mana Tombs once. They are all around 35-40% into level 65.

2- I am at the point where I will be mapping out their abilities once again, so as to be ready to have them react to situations as they occur. I lost one or more members of the group a few times in Mana Tombs because I didn't have any healing mapped to anyone except the hunter's pet. The group's DPS is also not as efficient as it could be, although this isn't an issue with the hunter power-leveling the group. Still, it's as good a time as any to get the attack rotations down.

3- Now that they are level 65, I took the opportunity to train the alts for Grand Master in any professions that they have. The only professions I was unable to train were leatherworking and inscription. The paladin's leatherworking is only at 329. The Underbog provided lots of mobs for him to skin, and this allowed him to raise that profession from 314 to 329. Still, he needs 21 more points before he can train the next tier. The priest began leveling Inscription only recently, and is at 185/225 right now. The only delay there is in gathering the herbs for the mid-level recipes, but that isn't so bad.

4- Gear drops have been "meh" so far, with fair amounts of DPS mail and leather drops, as well as DPS weapons. Running a group that consists primarily of a tank and three cloth casters has its disadvantages, I guess.

5- I am still kicking myself for procrastinating so long in making a Zapthrottle Mote Extractor. It's an engineering device that can extract motes of [element] from small roving clouds in Outland zones, as well as crystallized [element] from clouds in Northrend zones. This makes it a cinch to farm these items in relatively large amounts. For example, if I am mining, I can probably get 4-6 crystallized fire in 30-60 minutes, depending on how lucky I am at locating Titanium veins. In that same time, I can farm ten times that amount (no exaggeration) by using the Mote Extractor on the numerous steam/fire clouds in Sholozar Basin. Same with primal air in Nagrand.

6- I created my own guild! While it's really nice to have a guild bank for easy access and trading of items between characters (and I've already bought four tabs, sigh), the real reason was to stop the continual requests to join a guild. Thanks to the ease with which anyone can create a guild in WoW, I found myself constantly being asked to either help create a guild or join someone's freshly-created guild. Pitches such as "wanna join? We have a level 73, four 70s, three 60s, and a couple of 30s!" are apparently supposed to get me to want to join your guild? Ugh.

Aside from that was the simple "wanna join my guild?" or "looking for a guild?" whispers that I'd get. Look, I don't mind being asked, and many of them were polite. It's just that I'd get asked every day... often by the same people I'd already turned down two or three times! And let's be honest-- does anyone really want to join a guild that recruits in this manner? I don't. If you're sniffing around for people to add to your guild, you're building a guild that has very little chance of getting anything done. If that's the guild you want, that's great... I'm not really interested in being a part of it. Not the first time you ask, and not the ninth time you ask.

Anyway... for next weekend I'm considering trying the Ring of Blood in Nagrand, seeing as the area (and in fact, the entire zone) was practically empty at prime time last Sunday. In the meantime, the alts soak up rested exp, so that they can continue to get about a third of a level per instance run.