Cataclysm came out last night at midnight pacific time. I had the electronic upgrade so I had it downloaded before they flipped the switch and I just had to log out of the game fully and log back in. That’s the first problem: it took me 25 minutes to log in because everyone who plays wow on US servers was hitting the login server at the same time.
Anyways, I didn’t get realm first druid to 85 (I was an hour and a half late). I think my biggest problem was that half way through the first zone I went to (there are two starting zones for the expansion) it refused to give me the quest to go to the next area and the people there wouldn’t give me anything to do since I hadn’t been sent. I ended up going to the other starting zone, but that put me in the most crowded part of the zone (I’d been ahead of the wave in hyjal) and it took a while for the story stuff to happen. I figured that put me back by about an hour.
By 83 the same druid that beat me to 80 by 15 minutes had a solid lead, and I was about tied with the next two druids. The whole thing was going pretty quickly and I didn’t figure I could narrow the lead that Powerdruid had, so I ended up taking things a bit slower and watching all the cinematics instead of skipping them. That made everything make more sense, but had it been closer or at least more drawn out I might have been able to make up time by skipping everything. I really think I’d have preferred it if it had taken a few days instead of 17 hours (for me, the fastest couple people were well ahead of me), but this means I’ve got a few days off work to catch up on my sleep, get started on things, and work on random stuff. I did end up getting second druid to max level again, and I’ll probably try for the realm first for maxxing a profession tomorrow.
My biggest problem was that my allergies have been bothering me in my apartment, haven’t figured out what’s causing it yet. Giving Talore a bath with shampoo designed to reduce allergens helped a bit, but not enough. Staying at home for a few days wasn’t expected to help that, but I figured I could open the balcony door for fresh (cold) air. Talore vetoed that, so long as I had a slight breeze blowing through she was running around frantically wanting to attack something. She didn’t feel cold or shiver, but she wouldn’t sit still unless I was holding her down to pet her. Allergy medicine (at least what I have) was out since it makes me sleepy and I was already committing to staying up for most of 24 hours with only a short nap beforehand.
The expansion itself was pretty good except for the crowding in vashj (can’t do anything about this for launch night) and the broken quest linking in hyjal. They added a few cave models (they generally have a small set of cave models so no matter where the cave was an experienced player could step inside and instantly know his way around) which are confusing for now but soon will just be part of the now slightly larger set of cave models.
My main criticism on the quests is that the breadcrumb quests (the ones that tell you where to go next) are required for the next area, you can’t just find the place while wandering around and start their quests. I also noticed that just questing through the zones didn’t level as far as I expected. When I hit 85 I had just done the last quest in the quest chain in the top level zone and had completed (as far as I could tell) the previous zone too. Just seemed to be cutting it a bit close for quest leveling, though there were a couple other out-of-sequence quests I found later.
I haven’t tried the dungeons yet (I’m short on sleep at the moment and I always level by questing), but I’ve heard good things. I do like that you have to have been to the outside of the dungeon to be able to use the looking for group tool, but I don’t have a clue where a few of them are yet.
I’ll probably come clean this back up when I’ve gotten some sleep, and I’ve got a draft post from late last week that I’ll finish at some point too, but for now I don’t really trust my ability to write coherently on a 3 hour nap yesterday that’s the only sleep I’ve had since Sunday night.