Level 69

Well, I guess I'm completely under the spell now. Probably a good amount from 70 but I'll hit it this week whether I want to or not. I've seen about half of the 5 man instances so far and I've had some fun in each of them. Soon enough I'll have a flying mount (but not the epic one yet, I'm a bit from that joy).

My friend and I went a bit out of order on how we hit some of the zones. We went from Zangermarsh to Terrokar and ignored Blade's End even though Zangermarsh tried to send us to both Blade's End and Terrokar. From Terrokar we went to Nagrand, which was a little too high for us at the time but as we were duo-ing all the quests we more than held our own. Now both of us have only the last Wanted: quest left in Nagrand with no other quests to find, so I made my way to Shadowmoon Valley to pick up quests (figuring that would be the next zone we duo) and then ran up to Blade's End to start soloing those quests.

My general impression of the zones so far? Well, Hellfire Peninsula where you start is okay, but nothing mind blowing. It gets extra points for being the first zone and doing a good job of making you feel under siege when you first zone in. For the most part it's nothing amazingly different than the "old world" but I guess that's fine as there was nothing wrong with the old world. They took some time to make a few unique quests, but a lot of the quests were similar to things we've seen before.

Zangermarsh...hate. The thing is, the zone starts out so well. The landscape is amazing, you quickly gain rep with Cenarion Expedition and find some cool rewards, the Sporeggar are kind of cool. Then the quests really start to tax your patience. So many quests that involve going from one end of the zone to the other, so many quests that involve horrible drop rates, so many quests that just aren't in the same area and make quest stacking next to impossible. I have spent significantly more time in this zone than any of the others, and about 1/2 way through questing there I couldn't stand it any more.

Terrokar Forest is again okay. I really like the Bone Wastes area and the feel as you go into Auchindoin, but the rest of the zone feels like "generic forest area #3" with the added annoyance of those warp stalkers who seems to follow you on your mount forever. The druid place where the mana bomb had been set off is kind of a weird waste (fight a giant moth! Tell your friends!) but it led to a couple cool quests. The main thing Terrokar has going for it? It's laid out fantasically, quests stacked on top of each other if you take the time to find them all before starting out, it's your first experience with the Ethereals (who I dig) and it feels like you finish up there long before you hate the place.

Nagrand is really good. I like the alien feel of the zone, I found myself staring at the floating islands in the air and just admiring the look. Tons of ogres, and the ogres are always fun. The quest where you are creating war between two factions is at it's best when the two dumb ogres show up to help you plant the bodies at another ogre camp. That was a quest I would have found insanely annoying if not for the top notch work on the ogres talking to each other. The Ring of Blood was there, which is one of my favorite bits in the game so far. Also the Jump-O-Matic quest which is a fun diversion.

I won't make a final judgement on Shadowmoon Valley. I will say that entering through the demon army was very cool, and the "siege" feel of the zone is well done. Unfortunately, my general impression so far is that it's Blasted Lands 2.0. Hopefully that ends up not being the case.

Blade's Edge...love. I'm not done with the zone yet, but everything about this zone I love so far. I love entering through the cave, with a "kill spiders" quest on the way in to keep you from mounting up and ignoring the cave altogether. I love that all the quests in the first town send you to 1 of 2 areas, and the follow up quests all seem to go to the same place as well. I liked growing the elemental guardians (although I wanted to see them go rip some wolves up or something). I got to Toshley's Station and loved everything about that place. The inside jokes, the gnomes on fire, the fact that you can pick up 4-5 quests and then go talk to the clone guy who will slingshot you right over to wherever you need to be. The idea of being dropped into an area, questing and then riding back (1 way travel ftw) kept me from ever getting annoyed with travel, the quests were mostly unique, the gnomes were funny. What's not to like? Cap it off with the fantastic final quest of spinning the weather vane during your slingshot to the next quest area which I actually laughed out loud at, and so far everything has been peaches here.

I haven't even mentioned the landscape which is my favorite landscape in the game. It actually feels foreboding, it feels epic. I'm at my 3rd flight point so far in the zone and have had nothing but fun exploring and questing. This zone is exactly what they should be striving for.

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.

Level 66

Dinged 65 and 66 over the weekend in Warcraft. I played more than usual, but I felt like a good part of why I progressed two levels was soloing the Terrokar quests. That place just feels like condensed experience. While questing in Zangermarsh I felt like that zone dragged it's feet horribly. Too many quests asking you to run from one end of the marsh to the other, not enough quests happening in the same place. Terrokar questing is just laid out intelligently, and you're able to solo everything until you get to the Bone Wastes. So when my buddy was on we quested together in Nagrand (really all we finished was the Nesingwary quest line, but that is a LONG quest line), and when he wasn't online I either worked on Scryer/Consortium rep or quested in Terrokar.

I also ran Mana-Tombs for the first time. That makes 5 BC instances that I've run, and each of them I've only run once. It's interesting as I've had set people that I run instances with for so long, and I'm making a concerted effort to LFG all of the instances now. Heck, the people I ran with before would probably have no interest in helping anyhow but I'm interested in watching how different people play. As expected so far, most of the LFG groups are pretty poor as far as knowing how to play their class but you get an occasional gem in there. I'm really impressed with the new LFG tool and I've come to the realization that the only thing holding it back at this point is too few people bothering to use it.

The last boss in Mana-Tombs dropped his ring which was actually a minor upgrade for me. I wasn't going to roll as there was another rogue in the group who it would have been a huge upgrade for. He'd already gotten his blue in the run (leather boots) but I didn't think anybody else would be rolling on the ring and I figured I'd rather help him get a huge upgrade than worry so much about a minor stat upgrade for me. In the end, we had to grab a hunter close to the last boss and I realized he'd probably roll on it (he did) and a not very good warrior also chose to roll on it (he won). This was the same warrior who started the run by announcing he didn't like to tank and would only do it if "forced" to. Not only didn't he like it, he was really bad at it.

Again, kind of a culture shock after being in a guild where everybody naturally gravitated towards the most effective raid specs without being asked. The other rogue in the run was pretty bad too, he seemed to think he was a damage king but I was a bit too busy worrying about cc'ing the mobs that our non-tank let run to the healer to notice his damage.

World of Warcraft

What leisure time I do have lately I seem to spend in World of Warcraft. A few hours after the family goes to bed, a few hours to claim as my own leisure time. Use Google Talk to chat with a friend as we play together, taking the internet for granted in the fact that I'm chatting real time with a buddy in Ohio for free while we play a game real time together from opposite ends of the continent. Really amazing if you stop and think about it, but something that we just don't even think about any more.

I can remember in college when I first had my taste of what the internet and computers would actually mean. A friend of mine had bought Doom, and a few of us were amazed by it but it wasn't necessarily anything mind blowing. Another friend bought it, lugged his computer over and they connected the computers with those old coaxial network cards. Suddenly this kind of fun game literally blew my mind. The fact that the guy running around on my screen was actually my buddy on the other side of the room astounded me. Within a few weeks everybody in our group of friends had bought a high end computer (hello, student loans!) and we were having a network party every couple of weeks. Doom led to Heretic (which led to Hexen) which led to Duke Nukem 3D, which led to Descent, which led to Warcraft, which led to Command and Conquer, which led to Rise of the Triad, etc. We were insatiable, I don't think I ever bought so many games in such a short period of time and every purchase was based on how many players the game supposedly supported (never mind that actually connecting via network in most of these games was complete hell at the time, we never complained about that part).

Anyway, enough of the tangent. Pre-expansion I was a "casual hardcore" Warcraft player. I was in a high end guild, I've seen more of the content than most WoW players but not as much as the truly hardcore. The guild I was in had 15-20 people who were truly hardcore, putting in massive hours and raiding the 25 man instances on nights when nothing was scheduled. I was showing up for all the scheduled raids, but that was 2-3 nights a week and for maybe 3 hours on those nights. 12 hours a week was about the most I put into the game which I was pretty comfortable with. The only thing I wasn't comfortable with was how regimented it felt. So as we got near the expansion I made the decision it was time to part ways with the game. My best friend had stopped playing, and while I intended to still play online games I needed to get away from the game that I was playing on a schedule.

Fast forward to now. My friend and I try a few other games and realize that the other games out there don't actually appeal to us all that much. He starts talking about the expansion. We make the decision to come back and force each other to be more casual (our personalities lend themselves to being hardcore even if our lives don't have the time/availability for it). 2 nights ago I hit 64, he hit 65 last night (He spends quite a bit more time than I do) but we're both having fun. I'm a little bit uncomfortable with even hitting 70 as I'm not sure how either of us will handle it when we run out of Outland quests and I'm already yearning to see the inside of instances. Sad, really.