WoW: Cataclysm - The First Day

As I'm sure you guessed it - today's post is all about Cataclysm!

For those of you that play WoW or are into video games, you know that the latest World of Warcraft expansion - Cataclysm - was released at midnight yesterday.

I knew the release was coming up but it didn't actually hit me until Monday and so, after figuring out how we could afford to purchase a copy (yay for having a Best Buy card!), hubby and I headed over to Best Buy to pre-order a lone copy for myself as he's just too busy with work this month to actively play. I've played every WoW expansion on release night and really didn't want to break my streak this time. Well, turns out Best Buy stops pre-orders 24 hours prior to release so I was told to just show up around 1130pm (as they claimed that's when they would open the doors) and I should be able to just buy a copy outright.

So I get there right around 1130pm and I'm about 15th in line (and Best Buy has Expectant Mother parking so I took advantage of that, receiving some curious/odd looks in the process). They let us in at 12:01am and had pre-orders line up at customer service while us non-preorders went around the corner to the Geek Squad counter. I was first in line and the first to walk out of the store with a copy of the game - take that pre-orders!

Got home by 12:15am and promptly installed the expansion which surprisingly took about 5 minutes or so.

Unfortunately, Blizzard did it differently this year - they made it so all the servers didn't go live with the new content until midnight PST. My server is conveniently on central time so I had to wait til 2am to play any of the new content and spent the time leading up to launch DEing gear I wouldn't need (mainly my healing set) as I decided I'm leveling my Boomkin first this expansion. I also joined a friend's guild, as I had been unguilded since like August and he insisted I join. Apparently my guild (which is an older one on the server) is going for realm first when it comes to having 1 of each profession maxed out in the guild.

Launch was crazy! Now I play on one of the oldest RP (Role-Playing) servers, although despite it being an RP server, it's really more of a PvE server, only with RP naming rules as RP's been pretty dead since Burning Crusade came out. That being said, we had some horde camping the new flight trainer in Stormwind (the one that you learn Azeroth flying from) and apparently she's one-shotable. It was ridiculous as she'd be alive for literally 10 seconds, with everyone standing on her so trying to interact with her was a pain to begin with and then she'd be dead for several minutes. Mages started opening portals to Dalaran so people could learn the skill there.

Once I got my flying skill, I ended up questing in Hyjal, although the starting quests were a pain as the neutral quest givers kept running off attacking horde who were attacking them and others. How annoying! Also, EVERYONE seemed to sit on the quest givers with their big ol' dragon mounts - move, people! lol...

Anyways, questing hasn't been too bad so far. At launch it involved a lot of camping mobs/items and spawn points to get what you needed done for you quest - the difference playing a caster instead of melee this time is that I can easily pull/tag a mob from a distance thanks to my Moonfire spell. I still love being a hybrid though as there's been a few times after I used all my health pots that I needed to pop out of Boomkin form and HoT myself up to stay alive because I pulled too many mobs!

I managed to hit level 81 in just under 5 hours, although I'm sure I could have gone a little faster had I not gotten sidetracked by skinning stags to up my skinning level, as I did that for at least 30 minutes if not longer.

I went to bed about 8am, woke up around 3pm and I logged in for a bit before hubby got home and did some more questing. Tthere were already a handful of 85s on my server too! I didn't log back in til around 11pm.

I must say, my LEAST favorite quests have been the hatchery ones where you fly around this lava filled room on gryphon-like vehicles doing various quests like jousting enemies off their flying birds, gathering eggs, etc. I had quests that require you to fly around and do something like that when you can't have very good control of your "driving" like this one.

I also learned that it's important to make sure you get EVERY single quest as if you miss one, you can easily "dead-end". This happened to me, as I finished the hatchery quests and returned to the Shrine of Aviana and there were no more quests to do! I flew around to various areas I hadn't been to, but none of the NPCs would talk to me. Eventually I realized I missed a quest somewhere and was able to pick it up and got back to questing, but that was a bit frustrating!

I also did the new instance - Blackrock Caverns and remembered how long it's been since I've done anything in Blackrock Mountain! We wiped twice on the first boss - the first time being my 2 friends I was running with forgot to go over the fight, so me and another had no clue to kill the chains and run away; the 2nd time was because the PuG hunter didn't keep his pet back and aggro'd the boss and a pack of mobs while we were killing a different pack of mobs. After the first death, I opted to just stay dead and wait for a rez as it took me too long to get back - I'm not used to running up the chain in Blackrock Mountain as a wisp! lol... The 2nd boss they described as being similar to the Netherspite fight in Karazhan (which took me a minute to remember which fight that was as it's been so long). While we didn't quite do it right, we still killed the boss easy-peasy. Eventually the hunter got kicked as he wasn't letting the tank pull and we got a new hunter which we waited for at the Corehound boss. This was amusing, as you have to kill "Beauty" - a big momma corehound, but you have to pull and kill her smaller babies first who each have a name (Buster, Spot and Lucky) - I pulled out my little corehound pet just for fun and felt bad killing named little doggies. The last bosses were a bit of a joke for casters as it was just stand there and pew pew pew!

I ended up hitting level 82 right after hubby got home at 4am this morning - 2 levels within the first 26 hours of launch, not too bad considering I did stuff outside of game throughout the day too.

Epics replaced by greens!

By the time I logged this morning, my guild had gotten realm firsts for Engineering, Inscription and Alchemy (hubby and my good friend was the one that got that one) and we had the highest Archeology leveler so far too (one of their main competition for first had bowed out of "the race" and wished them good luck). I've already replaced most of my epics with greens! Granted I was in tier 9 level gear, but still... didn't expect to replace it all with greens that fast! I also finally got my Enchanting up to 450, however the problem I'm running into now is that everything I'm guaranteed to get a skill point from I can only enchant on items with a 300 level or higher... and so far all my gear is like 288ish! Oops!

 

I also made my Worgen mage - Aavarice - and my horde goblin banker - Grinngotts (yes, I just had to!). I still have to make Sprakle, my goblin warlock, on my old roomie's server, but I figured I can wait on that for a bit til the goblin area dies down. I figure, I have 2 good months of play time to squeeze in before Jay gets here so I might as well get one character leveled to max first. I think I might level my Belf hunter next, see how things are on the horde side and quest first in the other start zone.

How's your Cataclysm adventures coming along?