I realize it’s been getting close to a month now since you heard from me and I can assure you I’m doing rather well. Doing better than just well actually. I’ve been keeping busy at work with a major project that’s actually quite interesting (albeit frustrating at times) and when I haven’t been dissecting and piecing together code into something resembling a coherent website, I’ve been playing lots and lots of WoW as you can imagine.

As of the Shattering, Kazi and I took full advantage of the new race/class combinations and rolled a bunch of alts. I now have a new tauren priest (who ICly is Anuniaq 2.0) who is being protected by Kazi’s new tauren prot paladin. I kind of scoffed originally at the tauren pallies’ racial mounts but I find now that they’re growing on me more, the level 20 ones more so than the level 40 ones. After some half-hearted grumbling, Kazi convinced me to try out smite healing on my disco priest and I have to say…I thought healing was interesting before, smite healing makes it even more fun! And more amusingly, I’m often 2nd or 3rd on the DPS meters thanks to heirlooms and spam-smiting. 😉

I also rolled a troll rogue (after a failed troll druid who only made it to level 5) to go with Kazi’s orc mage, only to decide I want an orc warrior instead to instance tank. So the group then evolved into my warrior, Kazi’s mage, and one of our friends who we managed to convince to finally make an alt,  so he created a troll priest to heal our sorry arses.

Saraku has joined the ranks of holycows as I switched his race to tauren. There will be some RP stories to come about all of that once I go out and buy The Shattering novel and figure out what the hell happened in the year (or is it 3 years?) since the Cataclysm actually happened. I really do wish they hadn’t glossed over all of it in-game. I feel like I’ve missed whole sections of my characters’ lives, especially Niqora’s.

Once Cataclysm actually came out, I was saddened to find out that my Collector’s Edition preorder was shipped on December 7, instead of arriving on the 7th. Despite me protesting that I’d be fine without it for a couple days, Kazi bought me the digital version and I was able to play that night because of him. What a sweetheart. <3

The first thing I did was buy old world flying and archaeology so I could begin my digging frenzy. Because of Kazi’s work hours, we weren’t able to play until the weekend and we had decided beforehand to quest together on Niqora and Kazimierz. So we spent the work week leapfrogging each other in experience through archaeology/mining/cooking and fishing dailies until the weekend. Then…we quested our hearts out together. 😉

So far we’re just shy of level 84 and have made our way through all of Vash’jir and the majority of Deepholm. The quality of the quests have just floored us and the scenery is completely and utterly amazing. Getting a free seahorse mount is epic. Being able to play as a naga both made us wish that nagas were a playable race. >.> And the cut-scenes in some of the quests are a fantastic idea! Both the zones have just been…wow. And I am eagerly looking forward to seeing the other three. All of our alts will likely be put on the backburner until we’ve at least gotten to level 85.

As a guild, we’ve managed to max out Bloodriver’s leveling every day so far, and we’re not by any means a large guild. Quite a few people are already at level 85, so Kazi and I are hoping to catch up with everyone this weekend and start running dungeons with them to gear up. I’m also really excited to start raiding come January, as we’ll be splitting our raids into casual raids that are open to everyone like before, and progression raids that are made of select members who have proven their skills and who will tackle current content. I am definitely ready to wipe over and over again in the name of progression. 😉

There’s a debate currently going on over which loot system we should use for our progression raids. We’ve been using Suicide Kings in the past and I’ve seen very little complaints about it. However, DKP has been suggested for the progression team and it’s been met by some backlash. It seems that half the members have never been in a raid that used it and the other half that has thinks it’s a horrible idea. I personally have never seen it in use so I’d gladly welcome any comments about DKP here.

As I only plan to get even more preoccupied as the month wears on (including Kazi coming to spend Christmas/my birthday with me! GLEE!), I wouldn’t expect too many updates here. There’s just too much to do and so many things to see right now!