Rejuvenation

I underestimated the Burning Crusade and Blizzard in general. TBC has securely rejuvenated my interest in the game just by the shear amount of new content there is. It’ll be a few months before either of my two 60s hit 70. Not to mention the time I’m spending leveling up my blood elf paladin. In fact, that has pretty much all I’ve done so far. But before I elaborate on my TBC exploits I have to give respect to Blizzard.

Ouch! It took over an hour to log in Tuesday night

Blizzard has surprised me with the uptime Cenarius has been enjoying. Sure the queues the first 2 nights were insane, but I didn’t imagine that there’d be a queue at all on account of the server being completely down. The initial reaction to the queues were met with irritation amongst most of the server, but I embraced it. It shows just how far Blizzard has come in terms of understanding their 800lb gorrilla and the ravenous hordes that’d be clamoring to play.

In response to the excessive queues Blizzard has opened transfers from Cenarius and it seemingly is having an effect on the queues. Tonight when logging in at 6pm PST I was met only with a queue of 330. ~15 mins later I was back in Azeroth with my blood elf paladin.

My netherwhelp will go everywhere my paladin does.

I picked up my collector’s edition at my local EB around 12:12am or so Tuesday morning. There was actually a much larger turnout for the midnight release than I anticipated. As I drove into the parking lot I was amazed that a substantial line had formed along the storefronts next to EB. Fortunately though I made it back home around 12:20 and by 1am had TBC installed, patched, and my account upgraded.

Sunstrider Isle floored me with just how beautiful the zone was. Even with the expansion being a mere 3 hours old in the states by the time I zoned in, there were elves just about everywhere. Unfortunately a lot of noobish stupidly named elves dominated most of the zone, but this much I anticipated. Around level 8 I decided that even withstanding the beauty and freshness of the zone that I had enough. I made my way into Silvermoon and took the Orb of Translocation to Undercity.

Why would I subject myself to the dullness of the UC starting zone? I have an undead steed to earn afterall! At level 13, Aiom is sitting just a mere 31k rep away from being exalted. Still a very tall order even with the unnerfed rep gains. I imagine a lot of cloth turn-ins will be required as I near 40, and that there’s a very good chance I’ll have to wait until 60 to get an undead steed. At least getting a headstart on this project means less competition for quest mobs ^^;

And that sums my TBC experiences as limited as they’ve been. I haven’t even stepped foot into Outland yet. Maybe this weekend I’ll make it a point to do so, but I’ve got a lot of work to do with my paladin. Both blacksmithing and jewelcrafting are sitting at 1, and I haven’t touched my mining druid in quite some time.

But I’m not concerned with getting everything done at once. I want to soak things in and truly enjoy the experience. It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.

Stability

With the expansion less than a week away, it’s with growing anxiety that I begin to wonder how many of us will be able to enjoy the expansion a week from now. Blizzard’s track record with stability with major content patches has been shoddy at best, so one can only expect more of the same come Tuesday.

In a way, it won’t really matter for me. I have so little time to play, I probably won’t notice too much. Hopefully by the weekend things will have settled and I might get a chance to dig my teeth into the expansion content.

Threshold

Here we are at the dawning of a new year which means that there’s only 15 days until the Burning Crusade destroys work productivity, relationships, and a sense of the outside world. I mean, who needs to deal with high gas prices, traffic, and political bullshit when you can be pwn’ng mobs in the World of Warcraft?!

Okay, so I’m being a tad sarcastic, but in all honesty I’m really looking forward to this expansion. The renewed focus on smaller “efficient” groupings to progress as opposed to resource hogging 40 man encounters should make the new end-game far more enjoyable. Along with the expansion comes a new project that my rogue Nevik has already started; exalted with Silvermoon. Why? Because riding a chocobo is cool!

It’s been a long time coming, but finally Nevik has a wolf.

It’s almost ironic that as soon as I hit exalted with Orgrimmar, I decide I want a different mount to ride upon ^^; But at least the expansion will also mean a cheaper training cost for riding 150. The final grind for my wolf mainly had me loot-whoring in AV since the increased Org rep from 5 blood. Spillover rep for Silvermoon already has me sitting at friendly with Silvermoon, now I just need to hunt down all of the BE quest givers that 2.0.1 added.