Hard drive autopsy and D3

I finally got throught to technical support for my computer this weekend. I don't really understand how they can say they provide 24/7 assistance and then just not pick up the phone, respond to emails, or have anyone available for their live chat service ever. I seriously called every day, multiple times, at different times of the day, and got put on hold by the automated system for ten minutes at a time only to have the call ended eventually. One time I actually got someone who asked me to hold, so I did...for half an hour before I gave up. Finally I got through yesterday, on Sunday of all days, and while I was still put on hold at first, the tech support guy apologized for putting me on hold, even though it was only for about 2 minutes. I explained the situation to him and he told me he was pretty certain my hard drive was dead. No wonder I couldn't do anything. Windows was copying files to it and then going to use those files to install but the hard drive wasn't actually storing the files, just sitting there dead. Luckily they give a 3 year warranty on hardware, so he said replacing the hard drive would be no problem.

At this point I was all prepared to send the computer in, but he told me it takes a long time for them to repair computers themselves and would be faster to send me a knew hard drive and I could repair it myself. Sounds reasonable, and it should only be about a week before I get the new hard drive, so while it's a minor setback, they do a pretty good job of resolving situations like this and giving you options to do it faster. Now I just hope swapping out a hard drive on a laptop is as simple as on a desktop. I guess from now on I better back up my files onto my external hard drive too.

On to more positive news, DIABLO 3 WAS JUST ANNOUNCED!!! In case you didn't know already, Diablo 2 was pretty much my favorite PC game ever...until WoW came out. Now they are going to release the next one, and it looks awesome. Once again you are slaughtering swarms of enemies at once, which I just love to do, and the fighting system looks to be much more sophisticated, with skills set up more like WoW, just not quite so many. I'm really looking forward to what the classes will be like. They have only announce two so far, but I'm confident they will at least bring the Amazon back, although with a choice between male and female I'm not sure they can use the same name (as Amazons are women only). I'm a little disappointed they will only have five classes to start out, but I can live with that. I know, I know, now that they've announced it we probably won't be getting it for at least another year, but just the fact that it's official gets me excited about it.

I am a little worried about some of the previous flaws I saw in D2, and I'm hoping Blizzard's experience with that, as well as with WoW, will change D3 for the better. One thing I've seen concerns about already is that D3 may use Battle.net like the others did, and in this case it would be free to play online and would invite everyone to play, which we all know consists mainly of idiots. This actually isn't too much of a concern for me because while the Diablo series can be played online, there isn't a lot other players can do to mess with your gameplay like there is in WoW, and you an make private games that only your friends who know the password can join to keep anyone else out. What I would be conerned about is how the item system works, including drops, trading, duping, and everything else that made D2 very problematic for players that just wanted to get good items without dealing with all those cheaters. WoW has implemented many good ways to deal with this with the Auction House, and it's pretty much impossible to mess with the code to give yourself good items or duplicate ones you have when you're on a Blizzard server. I know people will find ways, but it Blizzard implements some harsh rules at the beginning and enforces them like they do with WoW, I think D3 will make it without too many problems.

By the end of the week I hope to have my laptop fixed, my new TV, and I will be checking out all the news on D3 since I can't do it from my work computer. With the holiday coming up and a wedding to go to coming up this weekend (with an open bar) it looks like this week could shape up to be a good one.

Total failure

Well my string of bad luck continues as my computer died yesterday. I woke up and found my computer on already. I had left it on all night downloading some music, but I had set it to turn off automatically after it finished downloading so it was strange that one album would take all night. When I opened it up there was a screen up that said "disk read error." Well as always happens with Vista I figured it just needed to be turned off for a bit then turned back on, but no such luck, and I had no time to deal with it so I turned it off hoping I could come home from work to find it functional again. No such luck. I popped in the system restore disk and got settled in to do some Windows restoring, only to find my hard drive had somehow been wiped clean. Luckily I don't really have important stuff on my computer, just WoW and a few other games, some various episodes of anime, and my music, which is also on my ipod an most of it is on my old computer too.

Well I figure I better get settled in to start the process of reinstalling Windows since it looks like that's my only option left, but halfway through installation I get another error saying it can't find some installation sources or something and that I should restart the installation. So I do...about 10 times, and never get past that point, so there has to be something wrong in there somewhere, but I don't know enough to troubleshoot past this so I tried calling the manufacturer. Of course it was around 9pm and their tech support wasn't in so I left an email and I await their reply. I'd rather avoid sending it back in, so hopefully they can give me a solution I can do myself, otherwise I just really need this bad luck streak to end.

To recap, in the past month I have: had my house burglarized, losing my TV, Xbox360, Wii, and all the games that went along with them; had my credit card used on various online purchases, none by me, but all having some sort of free trial with a membership that I had to cancel in order for them to not bill me later for the product they sent, plus the hassle of getting my card number changed, the transactions removed, and a new one sent to me; ordered a new TV, only to have the shipping warehouse call me at 8am on a Saturday, the day it was supposed to be delivered, informing me they were out of stock and I would have to wait at least another 2 weeks, but they couldn't guarantee they would have one at that time either; and now my computer crashes, wiping my hard drive, and for some reason it won't let me reinstall Windows. Could be worse I guess, but I'm getting fed up with it.

Continuing on

Still in Terokkar, but I managed to get a good amount done yesterday in my limited amount of play time. What's up with those bird guys though? Kidnapping little kids is not cool, the Horde didn't even resort to that. Luckily I managed to save them, but then somehow they reappeared in their cages a few minutes later. Makes me think they didn't want to be saved in the first place. I spent most of my time killing lots of the bird guys at their various camps, took out some of their leaders, and took back some items that they stole. That +10% experience buff from the fire festival is awesome, I think I got about half a level just in that playing time alone, and I didn't even get to turn in all the quests yet because I got interrupted.

At one point I was trying to sneak into a camp of bad guys in a disguise when all of a sudden one of them saw through it and I had to make a run for it. I thought the disguise would work flawlessly, but apparently theres a chance they will realize it's you. I went back for another disguise, but decided I'd leave that one for next time so I logged out. Maybe you just can't get too close to the mobs or they'll figure you out, or maybe it's just random, either way I have to be more careful next time.

It seems like there's still a bunch of stuff left to do in Terokkar. I think I finished most of the stuff in the north, but as I work my way south I keep finding more people that need help with something, so it looks like I'll be there for a while still. I'm really looking forward to getting into Nagrand. I hear Nesingwary is there and has some more animals for me to hunt for him. Those quests were part of the reason I like STV so much, and now he's back with more for me to do.

Next time I play I hope to finish up here and move on to Nagrand, and hopefully even get to level 65, that would be ideal. I think by then I will have earned enough money from all the quests to get my swift ground mount...finally. I can't believe I haven't been able to save up the gold to get one yet, on this character or any of my others over 60, but with all the money earned from questing in Outland I'm finding it isn't as hard as I thought, and my other characters shouldn't have too much trouble. It doesn't help that this guy was the one funding my lower level alts on their way up, that was a huge drain on my gold supply, but a while ago I decided to let each one fend for themselves until I hit 70. My hunter and shaman both had to wait for their first mount until around level 45 before they had enough money to buy it on their own, but I didn't mind too much because they both have skills that increase movement speed.

I'm not sure how I feel about the change to first land mounts being available at level 30. I know lots of people are excited by this news, but it took me a long time after I hit 40 to earn enough to buy one, I don't see myself ever having enough to buy one at 30, or even close to it. One good thing is that out of the 4 characters I still have under level 30, one is a warlock and one is a paladin, which means free mounts for them anyway, and maybe the money they save will go to the others. We'll see about that when I get to that point, but for now it's on to more of Outland, more content I haven't seen, and eventually level 70, hopefully before the new expansion comes out. I know I'll be starting a Death Knight right when I get it, and that might seriously hinder any opportunity to check out Northrend right off the bat, but I'm sure the novelty won't take too long to wear off and I can get into the new stuff.

WoW binge

So I had a WoW playing marathon this weekend, and I can't tell you how good it feels to get some quality play time in again. I'm not really sure how long I actually played, but it must have been on the order of 4 hours or so, which may be your normal play time for some of you out there, but for me that's a long time. I managed to finish up the rest of Zangarmarsh, which actually turned out to be less of a drag than I thought as I managed to group the quests together fairly well to save myself a lot of useless travel time. There were a few quests that gave me some trouble, and I was never able to get a group together to kill those two elite nagas, but I can always go back if I want to.

I think the main thing I didn't like were some of the drop rates for quest items from the mobs over there. It really just makes me feel like I'm grinding when I kill the same mobs over and over looking for them to drop a certain item for a quest and I get really burnt out on stuff like that after a while. I don't even really mind just killing X number of a certain mob because then I at least know roughly how long it will take, with items you can run into a dry spell and have none drop and then it gets really frustrating. After I got past those quests though it was smooth sailing until I was done with that zone, and right when I turned in the last couple quests I hit level 64, just in time.

So on I went to Terokkar Forest, and I must say I already like this zone much better. It isn't as alien as the last two zones seemed, and I am starting to do more quests for more of the various factions that I've heard so much about from others but had never gotten a character to the point where they needed my help until now. I decided to side with the Aldor as I plan on sticking with my feral spec, so hopefully I made the right choice. Right now it really doesn't matter, and I'm not sure I'll even get to see the benefits because by the time I get to 70 the new expansion will probably be out and the faction rewards will be mostly obselete. Plus I have a level 63 shadow priest ready to start Zangarmarsh and she will probably side with the Scryers. I spent a couple hours in Terokkar killing various beasts and birdmen. The warp stalkers are pretty cool with their ability to teleport behind you in the middle of the fight, I wouldn't recommend using the keyboard to turn your character around when they do, if you're at that point in the game you shouldn't be doing that anyway. I finished up by taking out a fel orc camp and killing their liaison with the blood elves to the north before calling it quits for the night. I think I got a good amount done in that time; I started with a quarter level into 63 an now I'm almost halfway through level 64, that's a huge jump in one day for a character in Outland, and I'm finding myself enjoying it more and more.

On a side note, I managed to raise enough money to pay for my journeyman riding skill, although I still need to get more to buy a mount. Kinda sad that a level 64 druid is running around Outland with the mount he bought when he turned 40, but thats just how it goes for a casual player like me I guess. It did make me feel better when I saw another player out there with a level 40 mount too, glad to know I'm not the only one. I'm gonna have a hell of a time getting enough money to fly. Do you need the next riding skill to use flight form with a druid? If so, I guess I'm in trouble.

Hopefully I can find more time this week to play, I'm really looking forward to it.

New characters

Well the only new character I plan on making at this point is a death knight when the new expansion comes out, but I thought it might be a good idea to talk about creating a new character and the thought process that goes into it. This will be mainly for newcomers to the game, as I'm sure most veterans already have their own methods when it comes to their creation of characters, but all too often I see characters made with about as much thought as it takes to choose a name for your 10th email address, which I don't think is really enough.

First off, you have to choose your class, faction, race, and gender. I would suggest choosing in that order although faction can come first now that both factions can have every class. The reason to pick your class before race is because you should be more concerned with what class you want to play because I believe this will determine how long you stay interested in that game much more than what your character looks like. Gender seems like just a preference, but it can be a much bigger deal. Your gender determines how most players are going to treat you in the game. If you pick a male character you will pretty much be treated as the average player and no one will second guess you (even if you're actually a girl). As a female character you will get a range of reactions from other players. Some will assume you're a girl and you will get lots of in game help this way, just ask! On the other hand, some will assume you're a guy playing as a girl, and this can backfire on your plan to get helped out because they will think less of you for choosing that way to go about it. Either way you get more help than you would if you picked a male, so it's all up to you on how you decide to play the game.

Next you're going to be picking your look. This step is entirely objective and you can pretty much choose whatever you want here. I usually try to match hair and skin colors up so they look natural (as natural as fantasy races can look), but it isn't necessary since you'll eventually be wearing so much armor that there are only minor differences between you and others of the same class besides what armor you have on.

Last up you have to pick a name, and this is where I see way too many mistakes. Many players out there have it in their heads that your character name should be like a screen name and maybe describe the character somehow, or just be something silly that people will laugh at when they see you run by (e.g. Noobcakes). While I'm not a roleplayer in this game by any means, I strongly disagree with this method of name choosing as it makes you look stupid and you aren't taken as seriously by other players. The other method I disagree with is putting X's at the beginning and end of the name you want because the one you wanted was already taken (e.g. xXSephirothXx). I just call this lazy, and if this happens you should either spell the name slightly differently (still lazy, but acceptable), or come up with something else.

When I choose names I usually use outside references for ideas. Many of the names I chose were characters from books I've read or television, sometimes I looked up names of mythological beings, and when all else fails I hit the random name button a bunch of times until I see something I like, but I usually modify that name to make it my own idea, just with a little outside help. I really feel like you're picking the name for your character in this game rather than just to identify yourself like you would in an FPS or RTS game, or like you probably did with your account name. I do like the idea of picking a name base on your race too, but I don't think it's absolutely necessary so I wouldn't stress too much about that one, just don't pick a really cutesy sounding name if you're an orc.

That about does it for your character creation, now it's time to start playing. Next time I'll give some insight into what I do with a brand new character. Since I've started so many throughout my time playing I like to think I have a pretty good idea of how to get through to early levels.

Back to Outland

I finally hopped on my druid last night to do some questing in Zangarmarsh. The thing that sucks most about switching to a high level character (level 63) after playing on much lower level (under level 25) characters for so long is how slowly the experience bar goes up. I was so used to getting 1000 XP from turning in a quest and seeing my XP jump a couple bars, maybe more, but now I get 10x that when I turn in a quest and I get maybe half a bar. I got a little frustrated at first with this because I really want to push my druid to get to 70 soon, but it seems like it's gonna take forever. I did manage to finish about 6 or 7 quests which got me a quarter of a level, give or take. I guess I can't really expect to be gaining a level or more in one sitting in Outland, that would mean I'd be 70 sometime in the next couple weeks, but the plan is to continue on leveling my druid until he runs out of rested XP, which will probably never happen at the rate I play.

On another note, I just saw some leaked rogue talents for the new expansion and it's making me wonder whether playing my rogue will be fun for me again if I had these new skills at my disposal. I guess when I got to level 60 on my rogue I was sort of burnt out on him. I hadn't started any alts yet so I didn't get the variety of playing any other classes. I know there are many players that won't waver from their one class that they love, but I just can't be exclusive when it comes to games. I can't stick to one of the options a game has to offer when I know there are so many others that I can try out.

With WoW I'm not so much about being an expert at any one class, I'm happy just being mildly proficient with every class. The advantage it does give me is knowing what kind of skills the other classes have at their disposal. In most endgame content it seems that is valuable information to have. On the one hand, in raids it's good to know what your teammates can do, and even though they may not like another class giving them pointers on how to play theirs, if you suggest something insightful that they may not have thought of they are likely to at least consider it. On the other hand, in PVP it is always good to know what your opponents are capable of, and the best way to gain that knowledge is to simply play their class. It can give you a much better idea of their strengths and weaknesses, as well as likely strategies they will use to defeat the class you are playing so you can use that to your advantage. You can read all the analysis you want about other classes, but until you actually play as one and get a feel for how they work, you get very limited insight about them. So go try some alts, see how it feels to play as something else, and you may even find you like it better than your current class, that's how it happened for me.

Questing peeves

I read a bunch of other WoW blogs, and one things I've seen a lot is ranting about raids and what some people do to make you hate them during the raid. What I haven't seen much of is what I run into frequently during my adventures, and that would be douchebags that mess up your questing. I know some would say that grinding is the fastest way to level up, but with the increase in quest experience from level 20-60, I find that questing is the way to go, and it's much more rewarding as well. The thing I can't stand is how some people can mess it up for you and the fact that you can't really do anything about it because half the time they are part of your faction and don't really care.

So here's my list of pet peeves that I encounter when questing:

• Getting ganked. Probably the most annoying thing encountered on a PVP server when all you want to do is finish a damn quest.
• Getting corpse camped. Actually this is the most annoying thing, I usually have to switch to a different character when this happens.
• Somebody tagging your mob right before you hit them so they get the credit, especially when your first attack puts the aggro on you. Half the time I run away until they stop chasing just so that bastard doesn't get the credit for it.
• Somebody picking the node for a quest item while you are fighting the mob that was guarding it. Obviously I was going for that node but you decided to be a jackass and take it while I was doing all the work.
• Ridiculously long corpse runs, especially when the quest area has lots of patrol mobs that tend to sneak up on you. Probably the worst offender I've run into is the harpy area in Feralas since your ghost shows up back in Feathermoon and you can't run straight there because there are mountains in the way.
• Ridiculously fast respawn rates. When you're working your way through a cave or something and you kill a mob, only to find the mob you killed right before that one has already respawned, it's going a little too fast.
• Quest chains that send you halfway around the world and back. Sometimes these can be rewarding if you get something good at the end, but more often than not you end up with some dwarven cheese and a pat on the back.
• Quest chains that require you to kill the same exact mobs in more than one part. The murlocs in Hillsbrad come to mind, first you have to kill a certain number, then you need to collect fins to prove you killed them, when he could have asked for proof in the first place and saved you a trip.
• Goretusks with no livers, bears with no meat, basically any animal that doesn't seem to have a certain body part you are trying to collect. Seriously, how are they walking around, much less putting up a fight when you attack them, if they're deformed, and why are so many deformed in the same way?
• Escort NPCs that are idiots. Need I say more?
• Quest items that were impossible to find until they made them glow in a recent patch. The burnt down inn in Dustwallow had some ridiculously small items.
• Those damn books in the town hall in Andorhal. Probably one of the most frustrating quests I ever did until I figured out what book graphic to look for.

Those seem to be all I can think of at the moment, but I'm sure next time I play I will run into one I forgot. The main thing is to not let it bring you down, because although it seems like these things are what is wasting your time, I think all the running between areas wastes the most time in this game. Sure it's amazing how big they made this world, but it also acts as a time sink to keep us playing longer.

Moving on and questing

Well the pally made it to level 12 and is just starting her adventures in the Ghostlands, but for now I think she needs to take a break and give me some quality time with one of my other characters. I really should get somebody to level 70, and right now it's looking like my druid will be the one, but every time I get to the character selection screen and click the druid, I find myself hesitating to play him. I know I have fun with him, and any quests I do with him from this point on will be brand new to me, but still there's something that makes me question whether I want to push him through new content or pick somebody else and go through content I've already been through but know so well. I think I'm gonna just have to bite the bullet and log him in, since I know once I start up with him I'm gonna have a good time. At this point it just seems that I am a little afraid to venture out into new territory when I know I could pick someone else and be in familiar surroundings where I know exactly what to do.

One big help to me has been the QuestHelper addon that I started using a couple months ago. For a long time I was using online leveling guides to help me organize my quests and get them done in the most efficient way possible. Now with this addon I can just pick up all the quests and it will tell me on the map where to go to complete each one, and it even maps out suggested routes to take to spend as little time travelling as possible. Now obviously it's your choice of whether to follow the routes or not, and sometimes I just happen to know of a better way to go based on what level mobs you have to fight for certain quests, but then QuestHelper updates itself based on where you are on the map and will constantly give you different routes to follow as you move closer to or further from the quests objectives. It's pretty much replaced the online guides for me, although I still plan on using those as references sometimes, but it really seems I won't have to be constantly alt+tabbing to check and see where I have to go next. I highly recommend this addon for anyone leveling alts that doesn't have the brain capacity to remember exactly where to go for each quest you've done on a previous character. If you're just starting out though I would play as long as you can without it, because exploration is one of the best parts about this game when you first get it, although I'm sure if you're reading enough WoW blogs that you ended up on mine you've probably been playing long enough that you should have been using this addon a long time ago.

Starting out

I always find it difficult to figure out how to spend my talent points on a new character. In most cases I have a good idea which tree I want to go down, but for some classes there just isn't a clear cut path down the list of talents. This has most recently come up on my new paladin. When I hit level 10 I knew I wanted to go with retribution for leveling, but looking at the two first tier talents, I had no idea which one to take. Unfortuanately I'm at work and pretty much every WoW site is blocked so I can't see what the talents actually are, but I do remember looking at them and just having no idea which talent would be the better one to take in the long run. I've actually been having the same problem with most of my newer characters, but for some reason it was a lot easier with my older characters. I'm not sure if it's because I just didn't think it was as big a deal before, or if maybe some classes just have talents that are obviously better but some don't. Lets go over some of my choices and you can judge them as you see fit.

For my rogue I went pretty much all combat from the start, and while I've respecced a few times, I am still combat with some points in other trees for various must have talents. The rogue was my first character ever, I picked where to put my talents based on nothing other than what I thought looked cool, never really looking ahead to where I would end up, and I actually didn't do too badly my first time, but I did streamline it a bit later on.

The druid started out feral, and still is, but I put points into other trees too early and I'm level 63 with no mangle. I know, shame on me, but I really don't want to spend the money to respec so I'm just gonna get mangle when I get there. His other talents are a few in resto and then a bunch in balance. What I was really trying for was insect swarm for some reason, but now I don't really think it was such a great idea. Looks like I'll have to respec at some point no matter what.

I started a priest solely for the purpose of getting shadowform, and thats what I did. Everything went into shadow, and when I got shadowform I put the next five points into wand specialization, then went all into shadow again until I was satisfied. I have put a few more points in discipline since then, but not much, and overall I'm pretty happy with my build.

The hunter I really wasn't sure about at first. The marksman tree looked good at first, so I went that way at first until I got Aimed Shot. Then I took a look at beast mastery and decided my pet could use some buffing and went that route. Somewhere in there I made a detour to survival for Hawk Eye to get a little more range, but that's all I have in that tree. At this point you might notice a trend of not being able to stick with one tree all the way to the top tier talents without switching to another, but I think the final outcome is more important than how you get there.

My last Alliance character is my shaman, and she took some though, but I decided to go enhancement, and this time I stuck with my choice and have yet to stray from that tree. I just really wanted a melee character that could dish out a lot of damage and take a beating, and the shaman fits that role quite well. Not much more to say about this one.

On to the Horde characters, and these guys aren't as far along so I'll just mention the plans I have for them. The mage is definitely going all out frost in the intention of getting a water elemental that I can summon at the end, and also because I just really want to throw balls of ice at enemies and keep them from hitting me, plus I'm on a PVP server. The warrior will be going all out fury. I thought about arms at first, but I love being able to dual wield, and I've been reading that fury gets you the most rage generation when soloing. I mentioned the paladin earlier, so those are my Horde characters that I have definitive plans for already.

There is one class however, that I'm not really sure which talent tree I even want to go down, and that would be the warlock. At this point I have one at level 12 and I put my first few points into destruction for now, but I'm still not sure if that's what I really want to do with her. What I really want to do eventually is get a Felguard. Yeah, I know, I need to go all the way down the demonology tree to get that and I already went the wrong way, but from what I've read, that tree isn't the best for leveling until you get a Felguard. So I decided to look at other options and I will respec to demonology when I get to level 50. What I was really looking for was the fastest way to kill things, and while affliction focuses mainly on the DoT and debuff abilities, destruction seems to boost your burst damage and make you more like a mage. I'm actually considering putting 5 points into Improved Corruption right off the bat to get the instant cast, then going all into destruction for the rest of my talents. It might not be the most effictient distribution of my points, but since I'm not boosting any of my other DoT abilities, I figure I may as well try to save time casting them so I have more time to throw other spells. That's my plan so far anyway.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated for any of the classes, so if you few people that may actually read this have something to contribute to help me make some of these decisions then feel free to leave a comment. Armory links are at the top right of the page if you want to check out the builds I have so far and I don't mind if you critique them, just keep in mind that I am not so much focused on where I am currently as where I will end up at the top level, but if there are some obvious bad decisions I want to know about it.

So much I want to do

I don't really care about raiding, mainly because I don't have enough time (or a level 70), but also because I just can't stand stupid people, and most guilds have a bunch of them. I figure if I ever get any of my characters up to level 70 I'd probably just stop playing them until the expansion and just focus on my other alts. In the very unlikely event that I get one character of each class to the top, I would probably just PVP and get better gear that way, it seems a lot less time consuming than spending 3 nights a week killing bosses in hopes of getting the gear you want, only to be disappointed the majority of the time when you come away with nothing useful. But there are other things I want to do in the game that don't necessarily have to do with getting gear or killing bosses or anything. They also don't require being at the highest level, just high enough so you can go to that certain zone, or learn a certain skill.

First and foremost, what I really want to do is summon an infernal in the middle of a low level Alliance town and watch it wreak havoc. I think I was reading another blog where someone mentioned this and I just thought it was an awesome idea, but my warlock is only level 12 so I have a ways to go before I'll be able to. Right now I'm thinking something like Astranaar because I'm not sure if it would work in Alliance controlled zones, but I would love to go to Goldshire if that would work, anybody know?

Secondly, after leveling many characters up through the levels, I have found the zones where I would love to go back and take out my aggression on the opposing faction. Do you know how many times I was ganked in STV? Not to mention the times I got corpse camped afterwards. Ashenvale was pretty annoying too, with power levelers running around the zone with 70s helping them that one-shot you on sight. I know not everyone plays on a PVP server, but those who do will know exactly what I'm talking about. Now this one sort of requires me to get up to 70 with at least one character because I know when the call goes out for help, that's what I'm gonna be up against, but I really want to go back to some early zones and just gank the hell out of everyone for a while. I know it sounds kinda mean, but I wouldn't torment people, just gank once and run off to find the next victim, I'm not the type to harass people.

Next up, I want to solo the low level instances I never got a chance to go to at the proper level. There are actually a bunch I've never been to and I feel like I'm missing out on something. For instance, I've never been to SFK, RFD, Mara, most of the instances in Blackrock Mountain, and a bunch of others that most people ran as 60s before the expansion like DM and Strat SC. At this point I don't have a character at a high enough level to solo many of those instances, but I've heard of 70s soloing those places to farm, and I'm sure when the expansion comes out there will be people able to solo their way through the raids as well. How cool will it be when you get to level 80 and go back to solo MC or ZG, or one of the world dragon bosses? I want to get to that point.

For now I guess I still have my work cut out for me, but I do have some goals of what I want to accomplish eventually, and I think they are actually achievable within a reasonable timeframe given the amount of playtime I get. Well, except maybe being able to solo MC.

Back in action

I'm back from vacation, and it sucks to be at work again. After a full week of nothing but basking in the sun and eating expensive tourist food, I have to go back to the office and sit in front of my computer all day again. I did, however, get to play a little WoW while I was in Hawaii. Normally I try not to play videogames on vacation, I figure it's something you do at home and in Hawaii there is so much more to do with your time, but I don't see any problem with playing while the rest of the people you are with are showering or doing all that other stuff women do before they're ready to go out. So there were a few days where I got to play for about half an hour at a time, maybe a little more, so I decided to start up my Blood Elf paladin.

Out of all the classes, I left pallies for last, and I guess I held off on playing a paladin because my friend that started playing about the same time as me went with a pally as his first character. We both proceeded to level up to 60 and while I started an alt, he joined a casual raiding guild and geared himself up for places like ZG and MC. I think he even ran ZG a couple times, but at this point in the life of WoW pallies really weren't that sought after for raids. They didn't have great tanking gear, and warriors tended to get dibs on it, ret was a joke, and healadins usually lost out to priests in the healer slot. So he got frustrated, started a warrior alt, got frustrated again, and decided to call it quits. After quitting I told him I would probably start running alts mostly and not really focus on one character, so I asked him how he liked playing a pally. He basically told me not to bother with one, because while he did have fun with it, after seeing how involved you have to be in combat with all the other classes he would rather have played something else. I haven't gotten far enough on my pally to know if that's true or not, but I guess most of his combat was just auto attacking until the mob was dead and healing when he needed it, which didn't happen very often when soloing. So his strategy was mostly run up to a mob, right click on it, and sit there until it's dead. Then after he actually watched me play my rogue and how often I had to hit buttons and plan out my finishing moves and he realized that the way he was playing isn't how everyone else is playing and I think he was disappointed at how boring his pally seemed in comparison.

Well I started a pally anyway, and so far it's pretty fun, although I've only gotten her to level 9, but I do like how little attention I have to pay when I'm in combat. I guess I not only play WoW for a casual amount of time, but when I'm playing I like to be casual too. I usually sit on the couch with my laptop and play, but at the same time the TV is on and any time the game doesn't require my full attention I like to watch TV, or eat, or something. I like to think I'm being more productive, because not only am I playing WoW, but I'm watching TV at the same time. Maybe some would say that's just wasting time in two different ways at the same time, but for me it's killing two birds with one stone, and playing my pally makes it so easy to do that. I'm not sure how long I'm gonna stick with her for now though, I really only started her up because of how limited my playtime was in Hawaii and at the higher levels you can't get much done in half an hour, but with new ones you can gain two or three levels and finish five quests in that amount of time. I think I'll at least get her to level 10 and check out the talent trees before I switch over to someone else, but right now I think I'll be levelling as retribution and probably stick with that since I don't see myself ever making it far enough with her to need to make a change. I can't wait to get a free mount.