Moving along

I was pretty busy over the holiday weekend, hence the lack of updating, but I did get my new laptop hard drive in the mail on Thursday and proceeded to replace the old one with it. It wasn't as easy as the tech guy made it sound, and I probably did twice as much work as was actually needed, but after about half an hour I had it replaced and put back together, ready to install Vista and get going. Now this means I've set up two computers from scratch in the past week, and this last one made me remember just how much I hate trying to remember every little thing I need to tweak in order to get it back to how I like it. Installing the operating system is the easy part, it's getting all the settings back that takes time, and I still don't have it back to how it was. I'm missing about 15 websites on my favorites list that I can't remember for the life of me, I can't remember what I did to my video settings to make it show up correctly on my TV, but right now the TV display cuts off the edges even though it displays fine on the laptop screen. I sorta gave up on the details and stuck with just getting WoW installed and patched up to date, and even that took forever again. At least this time I was prepared for it and downloaded a bunch of the patches from other websites while installing the first update to save me time, but I ended up with barely any playtime that night after it was all said and done.

On a more positive note, I had plenty of time to play over the weekend, with my gf being a bridesmaid in a wedding she was busy all day Saturday with the rehearsal, and had to get ready very early on Sunday, which left a good chunk of the day for me to play before going to the wedding. I didn't hold back either. I finally got my epic land mount and the difference in speed was apparent right off the bat. I am outrunning all the mobs, not really worrying about them catching up to me anymore, and travel time is cut nearly in half. I also finished up Terokkar Forest, although I left out most of the group quests after finding out I couldn't solo them, and moved on to Nagrand. Now I thought the forest was cool, but I find the plains of Nagrand to be awesome. It's like being in the Barrens again, except with people that actually know how to play this time. Right when I entered I went straight to the Alliance outpost and picked up all the quests and the flight path, then headed up to see what Nesingwary had in store for me.

I think I mentioned in an earlier post how much I was looking forward to the Nesingwary quests because it reminded my of STV, my favorite zone, but I wasn't prepared for this. Now the killing 3 different mobs is still the same, but this time they upped it to 30 of each. Oh man, that's gonna take forever, and as much as I hate grinding, I'm gonna do it. I did manage to get the first set out of the way before moving on to other quests, and with the respawn rates going fairly quickly and not too many other players to compete with, I didn't have too much trouble finding enough mobs to kill. I also managed to bounce up to a nest in a tree and attempt to steal some eggs for a goblin, then the owner of the nest came down and I killed her with some help from another druid who I gladly healed while he tanked her. They've really made it very easy to keep your gear upgraded as you go through the levels with the quest rewards as compared to before the expansion, and while I know I won't have anything near good enough to do anything other than solo when I hit 70, I don't really need it for anything other than that until that point anyway.

Oh, I almost forgot, I'm now level 66, only 4 more to go and if the next expansion does come out on November 3 I should have plenty of time after hitting 70 with my druid to level up some of my other characters as well. This whole setting goals for yourself thing is really working wonders, and exploring new content hasn't stopped being fun.