Thursday, February 22, 2007

Level 67, and the Ring of Blood

Weird. You know, I don't even have an experience bar while I play Warcraft. I don't want to be looking forward to gaining levels, I don't want to get stuck in that loop where I keep playing because I'm only 50k xp from levelling. Because of that, I honestly have no idea how close/far from levelling I ever am. If I knew how much experience was needed to go from one level to another, I could probably estimate how close I am, but I've purposely not done that.

With that bit of background, I was shocked when I hit 67 last night. It seems like I hadn't done much questing, and I actually dinged while I was out grinding leather. Rest xp certainly helps a massive amount, but I still thought I was probably a few days out. I'm not dreading 70 like I once was because I'm now committed to trying to finish all of the Outland quests (and I'll probably need to if I have any dreams of getting an epic flying mount).

I did run through a few quests last night. First, we did the escort quest which rewards you with the Miniwing pet. That was actually pretty fun, although my friend (Warlock) and I picked up a level 70 priest who was needing it so it wasn't exactly a close fight. Following the suicidal bird is fun, and I enjoyed it when he flew down to another platform and forced me to play Mario to get to him. The new pet is cool, and I haven't been seeing them around which is fun.

My buddy finally caught up to me on a couple of quest lines, so we also finished the one which ends in Shattrath City with the birds attacking you. This was possibly my favorite part of the night as my friend started the quest without warning me (he was low mana) and during the 2nd wave of birds he started cursing in Google Talk because his cat had jumped on his keyboard and minimized the game. Because of this, the next wave (3 birds) showed up before we had those 2 birds down. When he got the screen back up, he immediately sacrificed his void walker to try and stay alive while I did everything in my power to try and get all the birds down before the final "avatar" bird showed up. They were almost all down when the avatar showed up, my buddy died at pretty much the same instant, and then I tried to solo the avatar. I died after doing everything in my power, with the avatar at about 800 hp. It was hard to fight as my buddy was cursing his cat the whole time and I couldn't stop laughing.

We then headed out to Nagrand as I'd read about the Ring of Blood quest chain and it seemed entirely too good to be true. I had found the starting point of the quest earlier as I'd been grinding ogres for warbeads for Consortium rep, but never accepted because it said (5) players. He and I went there, begged for more people in general, ended up with another rogue, a 67 warrior and a 70 pally. The pally was from one of the better known guilds on the server so I had high hopes. We ended up one shotting all of the Ring of Blood bosses, and everything I'd read was correct. About 85k xp, about 50 gold, some pots and a blue weapon which is my first weapon upgrade in the expansion. Still weird going from purple to blue.

To finish up our night together (he went to bed while I grinded leather) we completed the jump-o-matic quest. Again, both of us were laughing hysterically on Google Talk as we both continued to miss that nest and continued to take large chunks of fall damage. That's one of those quests that you finish and just think how amazingly fun quests can be when it seems like the design team decides to let loose a little bit.

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