autobottrixter

Andrew and I took Thursday and Friday off so we would have a full long weekend to play through the new Wrath of the Lich King content, and we managed to accomplish all our major goals for the weekend. We got Meridith and Plagos to level 72, we got to tank/heal some new instance content on Meganna and Tyrelys, and we got our Death Knights out of their starting area and up a couple levels (his to 59, mine to 60). Some thoughts on the expansion thus far...

I'm glad we did the whole midnight opening thing. It made the whole thing more of an event, and goodness knowns I need more events in my life. We got to GameStop just after 10 and there were only a couple people there, but by the time midnight came there were easily over a hundred people in the store. By now people have almost certainly heard about GameStop's poorly-timed credit card processing outage, so I'll just say it was fortunate we were near the start of the line and had paid the whole thing off in advance. We were the first ones there to have Collector's Editions waiting, which was reassuring as I had been hearing reports of some game stores not having enough CEs to meet preorders. We grabbed some Wendy's on the way home and got to installing. The Collector's Edition artbook has slightly higher production values this time, bound as a proper hardcover and not...well, in Transformers fandom we call the binding of the Burning Crusade artbook "UK annual style". This has a proper book jacket with an embossed Frostmourne underneath. Classy!

Thursday morning was kind of like Christmas: I only got about 4 hours of sleep, but once I was awake (at about 7:30) I couldn't go back to sleep. I had to get up and open my presents and play with my new toys! That new toy being...Dariahn, my Death Knight. I roused Andrew and we spent the new few hours killing helpless peasants until our Death Knights were redeemed and went to become productive members of Horde society. We walked and RPed the journey from the entrance of Orgrimmar to Thrall. It was awesome. I'm enjoying the class just as much as I expected to. There were complaints that it was just a lot of button-mashing, and it's a powerful enough class right now that you can get away with that, but if you try you can come up with some very nice rotations. I believe it's a class that can be elegantly played if one tries, and I suspect if Blizzard decides to nerf them it'll cull a lot of the people who rely on the button-mashing. I expect to see the majority of them forgotten with time either way, just because right now they're the New Shiny and not everybody's playstyle meshes with tanking/melee DPS. For now I'm wary of doing anything with other DKs who are not people I both know and know are able to take advice, just because I've heard horrible things about DK PuG aggro management. I do ultimately want Dariahn to be another tank, though I realize it'll be kind of redundant for me. I may at some point choose favorites between him and his sister, but I may just as much not. I just enjoy tanking. The only thing I dislike about him at this point is that he's stuck in old content, but I'm working on that.

He's specced Frost. This has nothing to do with my amusement with the word "frot", or any previous statements regarding the term "specced Frot". It is simply proper for an aspiring MT.

We're making use of having two pairs of 70s to explore both ends of Northrend, but the majority of our efforts by far have been with Meridith and Plagos, because they are technically our "mains". And yes, I was reminded that I hate leveling a mage. I swear the only way I managed it before was by befriending warriors. By Friday night it was reaching a point where I was absolutely not having fun at all, so after spending the morning doing a few Borean Tundra quests on Meg and Ty we went to lunch and discussed things and he respecced so we could have a felguard. That helped immeasurably.

Howling Fjord is absolutely breathtaking. I actually had to nudge my video settings down a little because I was starting to get the New Glasses feeling of everything being too sharp and detailed and overwhelming. I have the Bejeweled add-on set to autolaunch when I get on a flight, and I found myself almost always turning it off just to watch the scenery. I love the vrykul, I love the Forsaken archetecture, I love the scenery OMG the scenery!

You notice the Apothecaries get more depraved the further inland you get? By the time you get to Venomspite - Venomspite - they're turning cats into oozes and enslaving gnomes.

I haven't seen a whole lot of Borean Tundra yet since we've been focusing on the squishies. It isn't nearly so pretty, but tundras are not traditionally prettier than fjords. Saurfang needs to just clean the floor with Garrosh already. He needs a beating. The business with the fog is really awesome, and the NPCs make it seem especially horrifying.

That last boss in Utgarde Keep? He hits really hard. And I may have to make a habit of running instances with Meri before I run them with Meg, just because the tank is generally expected to have some idea what they're doing.



So my verdict is "Absolutely worth both the time off work and the new video card." I'm all ready to be off work now. Please?