Author: Joe

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.

This past week was Thanksgiving so I didn’t do much gaming, which means that it was terrible timing for me for the shattering to happen. (The shattering is the event leading up to the next WoW expansion, which comes out December 7th). I’ve avoided posting about WoW for this long despite how much I play, but I figured this event (and the associated changes) was worth a post.

I had several things left to do before the shattering changed the world and made them impossible/more difficult, but I did manage to finish the ones that I was most worried about. I finally got my ZG tiger mount (after farming for over a year and a half) a week and a half before the shattering removed ZG, but I didn’t manage to take the time to use all the coins and bijous that I have in my alt-guild bank (I intended to get another character exalted with the Zandalar Tribe, but since my main is exalted I wasn’t too worried about it). I also managed to finish farming Bloodsail Buccaneer exalted on November 16th, but I was about 2k rep short of repairing my Booty Bay rep to exalted (the rest of Steamwheedle was exalted) when Knot (of the Free Knot repeatable quest) was removed by the shattering.

Besides changing the world the shattering also updated the achievements to include the Cataclysm achievements, updated the old world quest achievements, and generally reorganized a few things. I went from having every achievement category except pvp and raids (and feat of strength of course) completed to only having world events completed. Only world events can currently be completed due to Cataclysm not being out yet, but most completed quests from classic got wiped and replaced by new versions (or completely new quests), so despite the fact that I’ve got loremaster for both classic continents I now don’t have the individual zone complete achievements (which are new).

Since the quest achievements are the main ones that I can work on before cata (I still have no great desire to pvp for what I lack there or put together achievement raids) I’m working on those. It’s pretty much just a time sink since they mostly did a good job on the questing flow, but I have gotten stuck a couple times where I couldn’t find the last quests I needed (temporarily at 92/100 in azshara, gave up looking in ashenvale at 74/80). They really did a good job on a number of the new quests. My favorite so far was the goat blaster in Badlands for pure entertainment (launching the goat infestation off the cliffs surrounding the town), and the final quests in Stonetalon Mountains were my favorite for lore.

Other new achievements that can be worked on include “loot x gold”, the new fishing achievements and daily quests, and the new cooking daily quests. The achievement for looting 100k gold would take some serious raid farming (if I try to do that the same way I did 25k), or I can just give it time and assume that everything in cata will drop more gold to speed it up (I’m at 64k since WotLK came out, so I should have it easily within 2 years without trying if I can be that patient). The cooking quests should be done for the tokens more than the achievement since cata recipes can be bought now with those tokens. Hopefully I’ll have all the ones I need to level cooking before cata is out, but I never got in beta and haven’t looked too closely at them yet to figure out which ones I’ll level with. Realm first max cook would be wonderful, but not likely to happen since I’ll be focused on first druid to 85. Fishing dailies don’t give a token type reward, but perhaps there’s something in the bag it gives you that’s worth trying to farm for. I’m just doing that for the achievement currently, but I’m also trying for the “fish up every type of fish” achievements as far as I can get without going to cata zones.

Since Booty Bay and Bloodsail Buccaneers are opposing factions most things that give rep for one take away from the other. Despite the fact that they made Bloodsail rep easier to get with the shattering I’ve been careful not to damage it. I was very pleased to discover that the Booty Bay quests in Swamp of Sorrows had no impact on rep, and that the Gadgetzan quests in Badlands increased all Steamwheedle rep without damaging Bloodsail. I was doing all the questionable quests on my paladin first to see what the rep would do (I don’t trust wowhead or the other sites to be accurate yet), which meant those zones took a good bit longer than just the quest counter would indicate. I have had to skip quests in southern Stranglethorn that wanted me to go kill Bloodsail pirates, and I didn’t even bother going to Booty Bay since alot of their quests were directly against the Bloodsail and would impact that rep if anything does. That zone can wait till I’ve finished the rest of the achievements, which will probably be sometime after Cata comes out.

Besides quests I intend to have rep for the Bilgewater Cartel (the new horde faction) to exalted before Cataclysm. With the introduction of city tabards for rep (and the availability of the goblin tabard before the goblin race is available) that will be easy to do in heroic dungeons, but there were a bunch of changes around a month ago so my druid is only feral dps currently. Since the queue time is terrible for dps I used to queue as a tank, but I haven’t set up that spec or my action bars for it yet and the changes are enough that I’ll have to think about it (probably not the spec, but the rotation and action bars for sure). I’m still sub-optimal as dps (though far above the people I was grouped thanks to my gear) between being used to solo questing and not experienced enough with the changes to be able to maintain an optimal rotation without thinking about it. It also doesn’t help that even mobs in heroics die so fast now that combo points are hard to use, but some other classes are affected negatively by quick target switching too.