Cataclysm Impressions

Cataclysm’s been out for a week now, it’s time for random rambling and a list of impressions! yay!

• Blizzard has officially endorsed gearscore – yay?
• My dwarf warlock was a bust when I remembered I hated warlocks
• I’m pondering a dwarf shaman to get the Dun Morogh experience
• I’ve still yet to roll a goblin
• Archeology is the suck

Spacepally, my prot pally, has been my main since maybe the last 3rd of Burning Crusade and  I had initially intended to keep it that way. I’ve been in an awesome is slacker guild that always accepted and worked around my short comings as MT, namely a spotty connection for nearly a year before I got a new ISP and a change in work times. However as I logged into to start questing I started thinking about what the goals were. Raiding? 5 mans? Questing? With raiding, I figured it was unfair to rest of the guild to have them waiting on me to start a raid, or boot someone so I could step in as tank. Hondarr has stepped up as a great tank so I figured we’re covered there. I figure it’ll be easier to jump in as DPS if a slot’s open. As far as 5-mans, I really hate random groups and their gogogo attitude, healers with 30% telling me they’re good. I’m sick of them and I really don’t feel like jumping back into the fray as tank. Healing is out for many of the same reasons. So I figured DPS is the way to go. I ended up selecting my shaman. So congrats Leita, you’re back in the bigtime! Level faster!

Leita’s now about halfway through 82, she just finished Vashj'ir so I feel I can comment on Cataclysm quest design. Honestly I feel like Blizzard grabbed me by the dick and dragged me around the last two levels. Linear to the extreme. While it hasn’t happened to me yet, I’ve been told if you stray to far you can get out of phase and have uncompletable quests. I still prefer the BC era of questing, grab a crap load of quests, do them in pretty much any order, go back and grab a crap more. I understand Blizz is trying to concentrate on storytelling, but there has to be a middle ground. If Blizzard really wants us to just watch this stuff, I say kick the movie into high gear. Also, the end of Vashj'ir is simply jarring. After being dragged around for 2 levels I was dropped into an instance with no direction to go from there. As I’d been resetting my hearth every new quest hub I even had no way of getting back to civilization. Eventually I figured out (google’d ‘stuck in vashj'ir’) that the boats from 4 quest hubs ago had a flight path back to Eastern Kingdoms.

I rolled 2 worgen characters, a male warrior and a female rogue. I really like the rogue’s combat animations, but she’s got a weird looking head so she had to go. I really like the warrior’s animations and he’s up to 27. I really feel as though Blizzard could have tuned quest XP better. Nasaug (cookies if you gete the reference) is currently in Ashenvale and several levels high than the mobs. Now I haven’t done any random dungeon grinding, I’ve run 2 total –Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep. I actually went to the XP Stopper to stop XP gains. I’ll turn it back on once quests catch up to mob levels. I’m actually a little glad I’d server transferred my warrior heirlooms awhile ago – the XP boost is definitely not needed and now I have upgrades every once in awhile.

I’ll be back later with more musings on Guild XP and… stuff.