Welcome to the last post of the second month of my thematic experiment.  December was kind of a crazy month, like it always tends to be, but I enjoyed writing about World of Warcraft. I think some people actually enjoyed reading my WoW posts. I don’t want this site to be a purely  WoW based site so I am going to switch topics on January 1, 2011. The experiment moves on. I did make another decision though.

I am going to write two WoW entries a week. Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday I am still going to write on my months chosen theme but on Wednesday and Friday starting in January I am also going to write a WoW blog entry.  For ease of navigation I am sorting these posts in a different category called “TreePunch” so when you go to my page and look at the top you will be able to select any of my categories and see just those. If you hate my WoW stuff click the Thematic Experiment button, if you don’t want to read any of my stupid shit about my version of the real world, click on TreePunch. Simple as that.

Thank You guys again for reading my stuff and all of your encouragement. I hope January can be even better.

So I know I missed Saturday’s blog. I figured since it was Christmas Day and I would have pretty good excuse. I was busy. Holidays are crazy for grown up (well grown upish) women. I was cooking and cleaning and putting on earrings. Oh yeah I had a broken kitchen faucet for all of this too.  I had a fabulous Christmas Eve and Day and it was totally worth it. Thank you Welch and Walker families for having me and making it great. Anyway, time for business.

So I have a plethora of level 80 characters because Wrath of the Lich King was the alt expansion pack. (Alts are characters that you play that are not the character you focus most of your attention on or raid with. That toon, character, is called a main.) Everyone leveled seventy billion alts to max level with varying degrees of skill. I had planned to level my hunter or shadow priest to 85 first after my druid until I started running heroics and realized what mages are like at 85.  Yesterday my mage hit 85 and it is flipping cool.

A bit of back ground is in order here. I started this game playing my mage. I played all of original WoW and half of Burning Crusade with her as my main.  Mages are a damage class that also has some pretty good crowd control and they make free food and water for their groups. I was really good at crowd control and being a vending machine and sheeper but I was pretty bad at damage. In Wrath of the Lich King crowd control became irrelevant almost immediately and soon so did being a vending machine and I lost the two things I was good at with my mage. Hodareynn, my mage, went into a box and I only played her when I needed something mined, cooked, or fished up.

I started running instances in Cataclysm on my druid and I grouped with some good mages and some bad mages. The good mages made me realize how awesome I could be on Hod again.  Our crowd control, referred to as sheep even though very few mages’ polymorph spell take the form of sheep anymore, is useful again. I love sheeping. I don’t know why. We got some cool new spells like frost ring which turns all enemies that enter it into blocks of ice and flame orb.  Hod is out of the box.

I ran my first instances on her last night. The first one went really well. I had a great group with a tank that used my sheep and knew what they were doing. I loved it. I was a sheep machine. I would turn an enemy into a monkey and it would stay that way until the tank popped it. Beautiful. I did pretty good damage too. Then I ran a second instance.

Sometimes you run instances that are so bad that you just have to write about them. I was lucky in one respect, they were so bad that I knew beyond a doubt that our fail was not just because I was playing my mage poorly. We had a new tree druid healer and he hadn’t quite figured out the new healing so he was struggling big time.  Our tank would mark crowd control targets but he would mark the wrong things. In instances you want to crowd control the enemies that shoot magic from a distance. This tank was marking crowd control on the enemies that would run to the tank and hit them. To top it off, we had a damage paladin who would run in front of the group and pull groups then hit the crowd controlled targets repeatedly so we couldn’t cc them again.  I spent the entire run trying to save the healer. My damage sucked and my sheeps never stayed sheeped. Atleast I was a good vending machine.

Pygmies

That’s right pygmies.

Blizzard is freaking brilliant. The soft, pasty skinned, badly socialized, dorky players of the World of Warcraft felt like they waited for ages for the release of Cataclysm and I, for one, feel that it was worth it.  The first two expansions were super cool; new races or a new classes, new lands, lore, newish mobs. This was all super cool but the Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King have nothing on Cataclysm.  It is fairly evident that Blizz worked really hard to make sure that they really changed up the game. I have said this all before so I won’t repeat myself, much,  but I do want to highlight a few of my favorite new things.

Peacebloom versus Ghouls technically came out with patch 4.0 but I think it counts.  PvG is a mini game in the Arathi Highlands that asks a player to fight off undead using flowers. It is a direct take off of  the Pop Cap game Plants vs. Zombies and it is awesome.  The player has to plant  various plants with different abilities on their lawn to ward off the undead trying to break into their house wanting to eat their brains. Nothing more awesome than saving the world with gardening! My only complaint is that you can only  play the game once. If you need another fix you have to go get the Pop Cap game on the interwebz. I guess that is only fair.

In the new zone in Uldum the Blizzard developers let their creativity go crazy with two things: Harrison Jones quest lines and pygmies. Harrison Jones is an Indiana Jones spoof character. He is an archeologist that leads the player through the various temples in the zone. He gets players blown up, shot at, attacked by zombies,  nearly crushed by falling debris. In other words, HE IS AWESOME.

Pygmies are new mobs in Uldum. They are small humanoids with huge heads and hands that make have a great battle cry when they attack you. Make no mistake, I got my ass handed to me a few times by some pygmies, but I died laughing. They are also part of the best daily quest ever: Thievin’ Little Pluckers. A farm owner asks the  the player to take a mallet and beat down the pygmies that are stealing from his trees.  There are groups of three pygmies standing on each others’ shoulders trying to steal from the trees and you have to smack them with the huge mallet. Whack-a-Mole with the crazy pygmy battle cry, what is not to love?

Also new with Cataclysm is a new string of dirty hippie quests. The druids have massed in Hyjal and they want to save the world and they want your help. There are many standard quests like killing the evil dragonkin or harpies (I love killing harpies) like Blizz has always put into the game but they add a new level of tree hugger with quests like rescuing panicky bunnies and squirrels from fire or save the hatching turtle eggs from the bad men  waiting to corrupt the newly hatched baby turtles. One quest has you leading mostly dead baby fawns from fiery fields and another has you climbing trees and rescuing scared bear cubs from trees and throwing them onto a trampoline.  They even get players to try and redeem an evil satyr. Okay. Okay. The quests where kinda cute and quite funny considering that I enjoy making fun of the touchy-feely nature of the druids. (I know I play one, but I am not the hippie druid, I am the cynical rebel druid gorram it.) So, yeah, pretty genius on blizzards part.

Now I am off to do real life stuff. In case you guys didn’t know, tomorrow is Christmas Eve. I leave you with this thought: OOOOOGGGGGGAA BOOOGA (pygmy battle cry)

So most of the new serious players have at least one character to 85 and have begun the process of gearing those characters.  Hooray for heroics!

In WoW there are these things called dungeons or instances which are zones that five player enter into to work together and kill everything and steal the stuff from the dead bodies. The stuff is called loot and not all loot is created equal.  Different kinds of characters want different things with different bonuses or made of different materials. All instances have a loot table, a list of gear they can drop, so in order to get what you want you often have to go back to the same place multiple times.

There is also two different versions of each dungeon: regular and heroic. The heroic version of a dungeon is the same basic dungeon made more difficult. Heroics offer better loot and other perks over the normal versions so people generally want to start wanting to run heroics as soon as possible.  Sometimes people just should not be running heroics just because they can.

All of Warcraft has certain basic mechanics (aspects of the game) that stay the same throughout the game.

Crowd Control: Most classes have some form of crowd control, or cc, which makes a mob unable to attack the group.  Every mob that can be cc’ed means one less mob to be hitting the group trying to kill them. It would make sense that a group would try to cc everything they can. Its a great theory but sometimes the practice is a  little different. Some people have no clue what abilities they have and what they can cc. For example: I had to tell one player that he could in fact turn beasts into sheep and render them harmless for a short period. This particular mechanic has been in place for at least five years.

Now when the group is ready to fight a mob that has been cc’ed  the tank or someone else who is designated to break the crowd control damages the mob and makes them active and angry again. Great theory, not so much a reality all the time. Some people are completely incapable of not hitting targets they are not supposed to hit or they think if they hit it the tank or healer will save them. I am almost to the point where I let these people die. You break it on purpose you tank it….. without heals douche bag.

Don’t Stand in Shit: This is another major mechanic of the Warcrack. If a monster throws something on the ground it generally not there to help you.  Standing in poison, fire, falling rocks, or whatever tends to mean you die. This is a pretty universal mechanic throughout the game.  I am guilty of this one sometimes, as are about 99% of WoW players, but the difference is that I move as soon as I realize I am standing in stuff.  I have had people stand in stuff and take tremendous damage then get mad that I didn’t heal them through it. If you continue to stand in fire, you die.  A good example of this is a tank we had in one instance decided it would be okay to stand in the huge inky black clouds of death and that I should just heal them through it. I let them die then we removed the tank.

If A Mob Casts Something You Can Interrupt, Then Interrupt It: Mobs often have abilities they cast (take time preparing to hit you with) and many times these abilities can be interrupted. These abilities can cause damage, make the group run around in fear, heal the mob and make it harder to kill, or any number of things. Almost all classes have interrupts and should use them to stop this stuff from happening.  Many times it is vital to success that these things get interrupted. Know what you can interrupt, when you should interrupt, and do it.

Your Survival is also Your Responsibility: I’m a healer, my job is to try my best to keep the group alive. This does not mean that I should be expected to heal someone through stupid. This goes hand in hand with Don’t Stand in Shit. First of all, every class has survival abilities that either heal them or reduces the damage they take. Every player should know theirs and use them.  If you are dps in a boss fight and the tank is taking huge damage realize your healer is busy and you should probably take a healing potion, bandage, or do anything you can to restore your own health or otherwise keep yourself alive.  Simple as that. Also, after a fight, if you are low on health and the group is waiting for the healer to get mana eat some freaking food to restore your health. A good example of this is one group of mobs throw axes and stick them into random players heads that damages that player for a large amount over a set amount of time.  When this happens and we are in combat it is my job to heal the player through it. If the group goes out of combat it is no longer my job. THERE  IS A FREAKING AXE IN YOUR HEAD, EAT SOMETHING DUMB ASS.

If you are low on health do not go running into groups of mobs. It seems like a simple concept but, like crowd control or not standing in something, some people cannot seem to grasp it. I was in a group where someone died because they played stupid and did not eat after I brought them back to life. When the tank pulled the next group this player ran right in while at half health and died again. This happened two more times before the player finally typed “why do I keep dying.” I wanted to type “Sorry but I don’t heal stupid.”

Please do your fellow WoW players a favor and research your class. Know what you can do and what you should do. If you don’t, pray you don’t get a healer like me that believes it is her responsibility to let your stupid ass die.

So if you remember back to my lengthy ramble from Thursday there are still some professions to cover. First the last three crafting professions.

Inscription: Inscription uses “inks” made from ground up “flowers” to make items. One of the items they make are called glyphs. Players use glyphs to change their abilities and personalize their characters. Scribes also make something called scrolls which provide players with bonuses or “buffs.” Scribes can make cards that combine to make super cool stuff and other items. Inscription is a pretty cool profession but I try not to think about it too logically. I can’t fathom how one would use a scroll or glyph. Do you scratch it into your skin like some sort of messed up tattoo or is it a words to shape energy type of thing? I mean I get making pants. I guess I shouldn’t look too hard into the logistics of a world where I can turn into a tree.

Enchanting: Enchanters use materials they get from breaking up crap no one wants to bespell items to give them bonuses. It is expensive and a pain in the ass to level but it saves a whack ton of money and everyone will love you in groups when they get the crap that drops turned into materials to enchant the stuff they do want. Like inscription, I try not to put too much thought into how this actually works.  When I start to follow that rabbit down the hole I try to remember I play a character that can turn into a bird and it helps me suspend reality.

Alchemy: Alchemists turn flowers into magic potions that do stuff. Mostly these potions either heal, restore mana (magic energy), or buff a character.  Alchemists can also turn somethings into other things, which is sort of the definition of alchemists. So alchemists are kind of chemists and drug dealers at the same time. Everyone wants what they brew up.

Gathering professions are the second type of Primary professions and entails going out into the world (of warcraft) and gathering the crap you need for the crafting professions. I love gathering professions.

Skinning: This should be pretty self explanatory. Skinners cut the skin off of dead animals so crafters (namely leatherworkers) can use them to make stuff. It is somewhat gruesome but most skinners I know feel like they are somehow cleaning up their messes. Once you have killed an animal, what is the big deal about taking its skin? Besides it makes the mob disappear therefore destroying all evidence of the murders.

Mining: Miners fly around and find nodes of metal ore and gather them. They then turn these ores into bars. They also gather other things like gems from these nodes. Half of any realm is a miner so at any giving time there is eleventy billion jackwagons flying around and are willing to ruthlessly screw you out of a mining node. Because of the high population of miners , ore and bars don’t sell for much but it is more convenient to have one if you plan on leveling blacksmiting, engineering, or jewelcrafting.

Herbalism: Herbalists fly around and collect the various herbs of the world. Flower pickers are not quite as cutthroat as the miners but they can get quite nasty. Scribes and Alchemists use the flowers that herbalists pick.

Generally in the World of Warcrack certain aspects of the game get all the glory. Everyone talks about leveling, questing, raiding, or pPvP. (Player versus Player- when you kill other players as opposed to computer generated elements. I might make a short post later about PvP since I have few things to say.) These are all very important, don’t get me wrong, but very few people really extol the joys of professions in WoW.

Professions are split into two types: primary and secondary.

Secondary professions are professions that everyone can do after they reach the right level. They are generally handy skills that make the game easier in general.

First Aid teaches players to make bandages from cloth found from killing mobs to use to heal themselves. This is useful when a non-healing class is soloing or if the player cares enough about their own survivability to fill their green bar when running with groups. It is a great profession to have and is very easy to level.  Sadly, some players don’t have this profession because they believe the healer will heal them… Suckers!

Fishing is pretty much what it sounds like. It allows players to pull fish out of bodies of water. This is useful in conjunction with cooking.  Most people HATE leveling fishing. Some people find it relaxing to stand on a shore for hours throwing a fake bobber into water and wait to catch a fake fish. For this reason, fishing can make pretty decent gold.

Cooking allows the player to cook fake food from fake materials. This an incredibly useful skill since often the food often provides bonuses for the players that eat them. Leveling cooking can be a bit of a pain in the ass since you need various meat for different animals and the meat doesn’t always drop and sometimes the only creatures who drop meat are in East Jesus Nowhere. Cooking also provides feasts which are platters of food that an entire party can eat and get the bonuses which help the group win.

Archeology is a new profession with Cataclysm. I haven’t gotten to play with it much but I get the general idea. Basically, you go to various special places in the world and dig up things. After you get enough of these things you combine them into an item. These items vary in levels of awesome from crappy dice to pets and mounts. Most people bad mouth archeology but I think its fun.

The primary professions differ from secondary professions in that you can only pick two. There are two different types of primary professions, crafting and gathering, and you can pick any combination of professions. Since there are so many and I like to make my stupid drawings I am only going to cover five professions today.

Crafting professions:

Blacksmithing: Blacksmithing uses metals and a bunch of other random crap to make plate (think jousting) armor or weapons. There are several classes that use plate armor and some blacksmiths can make some pretty great gear. It seems like a noble profession, I just don’t have any characters that wear plate so it is one of the few professions I have never leveled. I know it is a huge pain to level and very expensive. It also seems that you level the profession for hope of getting three things that are awesome while ignoring the rest of it.

Leatherworking: Leatherworkers use the skins skinners produce and turn them into gear and items that add bonuses to gear. Leatherworkers make both leather gear and mail gear. I don’t quite understand how leather becomes mail but I have never asked. It is easier to level up than blacksmithing with about the same rewards.

Tailoring: Tailors make cloth armor. They use the cloth that mobs drop to turn into pretty pretty dresses and bags to carry your crap. This sounds like an easy profession to level but  the materials need to create some of these items are hard to get or expensive to buy.

Engineering: One of my favorite profession is engineering. Engineering uses metals and a ton of other crap to make gizmos. Some of these thingies are useful items like goggles or teleporters. You can use engineering to make vehicles. My favorite, though, is engineers make explosives. When you level this profession you can make exploding sheep. Also, when you use the items you make with engineering, there is always a terrible chance of something going horribly wrong. Many things carry the caveat of “or it could explode” in their item description. What is not to love?

Jewelcrafting:  Jewelcrafters make jewelry and cut gems found in mining nodes into items that add bonuses into gear. Jewelcrafting has the potiential for making a ton of money. Different gem cuts do different things and therefore are desired by different people. Certain cuts are also worth more than others. It is a very useful profession to have and can save a lot of gold.

There are a few more crafting professions and all the gathering professions yet to cover but I think this ramble has gone on entirely long enough.  I will return Saturday with further discussions and terrible drawings!

Oh yeah… HI CAL

So I was going to write a really cool post today. I really was. Then I spent TWO FREAKING HOURS in wal-mart so I am reposting something I wrote for my guild’s forums last night.

So a lot of us have started running 84-85 dungeons and heroics and some of us has had our teeth kicked in a bit by the new game. That is what this is, a new game, so we all have to learn to adjust. The healers are having a hard time. Druids are having big issues. Priests are having big issues. Pallys are freaking fabulous.
We all need to learn how to play with these new circumstances. In Wrath, I could heal an entire heroic without ever drinking and I could even do damage while healing. Dps could stand in poison, fire, whirlwind, or anything else and we would be pretty much okay. Lifesaving cooldowns were for suckas. In Wrath if you attempted to crowd control, people laughed at you. Cataclysm changed this completely. The healers just do not have the capability to heal through everything anymore. This means other players have to start learning to take responsibility for their own health at times and use any abilities to either mitigate damage or crowd control. Also, if you can cleanse, decurse, remove magic or poison, or whatever, please do that for your healer. That mana adds up and its a HUGE help
A good example of what I am talking about is the first boss in H Shadowfang Keep, he has an ability that takes everyone to 1hp and every heal a healer has to throw on a dps is a heal that can’t go on the tank. Simple things like bandaging or using lifeblood if you are an herbalist helps. If your healer is a druid, using a damage mitigation ability so their hots have time to tick helps big time. This simple stuff can be the difference between a win and a wipe.
Now on the flip side all of us healers have to go out and do our homework. I learned in a glorious fashion that my old habits just didn’t work. I went and did some research on tree druiding at 85 and learned some pretty important stuff. My style and spec had to change. This research has not made me epic pally healer, I still think trees were nerfed a bit too much, but I noticed a huge difference in healing. I am more than willing to type up what I found and link it if there is interest. My point is, though, all of us have to go look. There might not be a lot out there but things like Elitist Jerks are helpful. Everyone, no matter the role, has to learn to be level 85.
One last thing to this wall of text and then I will stop. We need to realize right now that this content is new and we are all relearning our classes so we need to not be assholes to one another. Somethings are universal like standing in fire and might deserve a little scorn but somethings are people trying to learn their stuff. Have patience and keep your criticism constructive. Also, and I am guilty of this too, go look up strats.

Okay, okay, I know my last two blogs have been utter crap. I know it. The good news is that I got my druid to 85 last night (I got the main character that I play to the maximum level that can be achieved) so the caffeine fueled insanity will slow down a bit and I can go back to concentrating on crazy stuff like writing and work and eating.   At some point I am going to realize Christmas is coming up, I am excited for that panic to hit me.  Anyway, it is my sincere intent to craft a better quality blog for you today.

I think it is important to understand the four different roles that characters can play in the World of Warcrack. Time for one of my awesome rundowns.

Tanks:

These are the guys that stand in front of the group and get hit by shit.  Their main jobs are to make sure everything keeps hitting them and staying alive. It sounds simple enough but the problem is that they have to play with other people called dps (more on them next) and dps often feel the need to be dipshits and piss off the monsters and make them hit them instead of the tanks.  This means that often tanks have to go chasing after monsters to save someone’s ass.

Now good tanks use spells and abilities to keep themselves alive because they care about not getting yelled at by their healers. Bad tanks don’t use these abilities and die. They generally blame everyone else including God for their own stupidity.

Classes that play tanks: Warriors, Paladins, Druids, and Death Knights (generally poorly)

Melee DPS:

These guys hit shit. Basically their job is to stand behind the monsters and stab, beat, bludgeon, or slice them to death. It sounds very simple but there are many many ways to screw this up.  I don’t have much experience with melee since I feel that hitting shit is weird but I can tell from the many fails that melee has caused that this is far more difficult than it seems.

I know that if you don’t know what you are doing you can do too little damage and make everything more difficult on everyone else. I know that if you do too much damage you can make the monster hit you instead of the tank, pissing off both the tank AND the healer.  I know that all melee classes have abilities that make fights easier by interrupting or stunning the monsters and sometimes players don’t use these abilities and piss everyone off.

Since melee stand behind the boss (big bad monster or mob) and stab them in the butt, they are often damaged by attacks the boss casts in the area close to them. These attacks are often announced and completely avoidable. Most of the time melee dps chooses to stand in them anyway. Healers and tanks LOVE this.

Classes that can melee dps: Warrior, Paladins, Druids, Shaman, Rogues, and Death Knights (generally badly)

Ranged Dps:

There are two sub classes of ranged DPS; hunters and casters.

Hunters are different from the other ranged dps because they don’t cast magic, they shoot shit. They have pets and traps that either burn things, freeze things, or release a bunch of snakes. They have an ability that makes them play dead.

The rest of the ranged dps cast magic spells to damage mobs. In theory they are supposed to stand away from the monsters and cast spells so they cause damage without taking much damage in return. This is a great theory that doesn’t often happen.  Casters are some of the worst about stealing monsters off the tanks. Their spells often make either big numbers when they single target or many numbers when they cast spells that hit many targets (aoe or area of effect spells) so sometimes its hard to resist the temptation to keep seeing those numbers.

Ranged DPS classes: Hunters, Mages, Shaman, Warlocks, Druids, and Priests

Healers:

Healers are the players that attempt to keep other players’ health bars full. We call it “fill the green bars.” Healers are the biggest prima donnas in the game. We have a tendency to get bitchier than even the tanks.  There are reasons for this but still we can be cranky assholes.

One thing that makes us cranky is when someone dies and they blame us like when a dps stands in a pool of poison that is also on fire while getting hit by 15 mobs that they pulled because they did not wait for the tank to pick them up and they still think we should heal them through it.

We also have a tendency to develop god complexes. (Tanks have this issue too.) I think its because if we are going to get blamed when everything goes wrong, we think its our fault when things go right too. This is normally only slightly true.  We also play a major part in who lives and who dies. Sometimes I can heal that jackwagon who is standing in the flaming poison but I choose not to because I believe in Darwinism.

Like the other three types, there are bad healers. Bad healers are a terrible terrible thing. Healing takes a while to figure out, so in the beginning of something new they have to figure stuff out just like everyone else.  Its a learning curve. The problem is that some healers learning curve is a straight line.  When you have a bad healer it is just best to drink potions and hope for the best.

Healing Classes: Priests, Paladins, Druids, and Shaman.

We are into the afternoon of day three of the release of the xpac. I had planned to do little but play the WoW and level but, like it normally does, life had other plans.  I have gotten to play a far amount and I have noticed some really awesome stuff. I started leveling in the underwater zone of Vashj’ir. I hate nagas (scaly underwater snake people) and I hate murlocs but I went there anyway. It was freaking epic.

You get on a boat from Stormwind, the human capital city, and start to sail out there with characters like Budd who has been in the game before as a mildly retarded troll hunter. The scenery is stunning and you can really see how much work Blizzard put into recreating Azeroth. Then, suddenly, a kraken, but only one of them. This starts one of the many epic cuts scenes that have been added into this zone. Basically, your character gets mostly drown, saved by a shaman, and hauled into the remains of a boat.  From there you quest around to get things like under water breathing and a seahorse mount.

Vashj’ir is massive and full of quests, though I could not find the 160 I needed for the achievement.  One thing I really liked is how the quests moved you naturally through the zone. In the past, a player had to spend time searching for the next quest hub and it got intensely annoying. In Vashj’ir, for the most part, there were quests that moved you from one hub to another. Sometimes you even got to ride on a submarine.

Another thing I liked is that there are portals to the various far flung parts of the new xpac centrally located in Stormwind. It is a major pain in the ass to travel from one place in east jesus nowhere to another place in west jesus nowhere.  Blizzard decided not to torture the players with that and fixed it for us.

I have liked the instances I have done so far. They are interesting and not overly long. All of the bosses and most of the trash has something unique about them that presents a bit of a challenge. I really like this departure from the old idiot style dungeons that we had in Wrath of the Lich King. Cata is really starting to feel like a return to the ideas of orginal WoW and the Burning Crusade. The only annoying thing is that a player has to physically visit an instance before they can queue for it in the dungeon finder.  It is annoying but I understand why the developers did it because it forces players to atleast visit all the zones while they are leveling.

Another really awesome thing about this xpac is that Blizzard really worked with the phasing concept that they began in the later zones in Wrath.  Phasing is when you complete a quest and the world changes. It was always kind of anti-climatic to do all these quests and have nothing change in the world around you. They really fixed this with Cata. The players can really interact with the world around them.

I will write more later. Back to leveling!

So this morning at 2am Central time Cataclysm is supposed to come live. It is 2:24 am and I have yet to be able to log in. Honestly, I am not surprised. I think between installing an entirely new game and all the technical stuff that required combined with dipshits like me constantly pressing the connect button and overloading the servers that it will be atleast 3 am before I log on to the servers to get to play. I’m really not that concerned. In fact, after I get done writing this post, I will probably check to see if I can log on again and if I can’t log on, I will nap.

I didn’t go nearly as insane as other people with their prep work for the release of the xpac. I think I was actually quite zen about the entire thing. I made me and my boyfriend some flasks (fake things that give your character more power in game, think of it as WoW Viagra) and emptied my bags. Other people went insane.

I know people who made lists and maps and charts. I know people who figured out the best way to get materials to level their professions as high as they could. One of my favorite aspects of the game is professions and I have been freakishly excited because picking flowers and mining gives experience points. Still, I am not going to rush to get my character’s professions maxed out the first night. I will get the stuff I need while I level. See how zen I am!

Now one of my guild’s jokes is my farming abilities. Whenever anyone needs something, especially herbs, they come to me because I am insane. I would hazard to say that since Tina left our server that when I am motivated I am Durotan’s best flower picker. Now I know its a silly thing to be proud of and it is Durotan and saying you are the best of anything on Durotan is kind of like saying you are the smartest person on a short bus, but let me have my one distinction. We all need to be good at something and my think is mindlessly picking digital flowers in a digital world to make digital Viagra.  You really should not judge me.

I had planned on taking a nap from 10pm to 1 am but I watch “Ninja Assassin” instead. I know people who have stocked up on Mountain Dew and caffeine pills and probably black tar heroin. I thought about Mountain Dew but I decided coffee and naps would have to work for me. As much as I like the idea of staying up for three days straight tweaking out and playing Warcraft, I know realistically I am just not that hardcore. I like sleep. I like sleep a lot. I am also reading a really good book. Besides, whats the fun in a game if you are hallucinating while playing it. Okay I do know some people who love to play video games while tripping balls, but I am not one of them. I am also not going to get an ego boost from being one of the first in my guild to get to 85.

This blog is crap. Its 2:46 am on release day. What the frel did you expect? Happy hunting people and I will give you more lucid updates later.