Out and In

I know I haven't posted in a bit, but work has been insane. I would type up a post, get about half through it before something or someone needing railroad repair information or reassignment contract information from me side tracked me. Dammit! Can't they see I'm trying to blog here at work???

So let me catch you up on Bacon's Take of Cataclysm.

Last Tuesday Cataclysm was released, but you already knew that. I had to work that day (I'm not burning a valuable vacation day on a Tuesday no matter what the excuse is - well ok maybe something medical, but that's it). So I got home that night, logged in and found a queue of 2400+ staring back at me. To let you know how long that is, I was able to eat, bottle a batch of beer, brew another batch and get it into the fermenting bucket by the time my position was at 150. And that still means I had another 20 minutes to wait. :)

That first night consisted of 2 nice runs in Blackrock Caverns and one in Thron of Tides. I healed all three of them and I did find it challenging. I had read blogs and reviews saying that I should be ok and I was, but it wasn't a cake walk. I'm thinking it had more to do with the fact my gear is a mixture of 251/264 items with a couple of 277 pieces. The blog/review writers are running with mostly 277 gear from their 25 man ICC runs. But that's not the main jist of it, what really curdled my milk was the first run of Blackrock Caverns.
I queued up in the Dungeon Finder with our GM (who is our Main Tank) and our leet killing machine Mage. We picked up a level 81 Death Knight and a level 83 Ret Pally. Now, me and my guildmates had never been in this place and we took our normal, "Kick ass and take names later" approach like we always do. Sometimes that backfires and sometimes it only goes so far. For this run it went only as far as the first boss where I got a little too close and pounded by the boss. We wiped and as we're running back (this always happens as someone is running back from a wipe), the Ret Pally asks if we have done this fight before. Uh let me see, the expansion has been out maybe 16 hours and I've been on for maybe 30 minutes of it. I'm pretty sure this qualifies as a first time for me and others. So I say so and the pally goes off with his IPhone text Chat, "Dood, say so. No need 2 wipe cuz u dont know fight". "Ur gerd and I wuz healing 2 help u." Hmmm... ok. The expansion isn't yet a day old and we already have experts. Thanks. And if he was healing, it was because I was dead. It didn't matter after this, because the pally left when we decided that we would take no shortcuts and kill ALL the trash there was. I mean hell, we're trying to level at the same time. Oh well, there's one in every bunch, right?

I finished the night doing a couple of quests in Vashj'ir. I really like the whole underwater environment and the storylines are well done.

My next night was Thursday since I have bowling on Wednesdays. I did some more questing in Vashj'ir and managed to push halfway past 81, but nothing else worth while mentioning here. I did noticed that the queues were still bad on KT as are the quest rewards. I'm thinking/hoping the quest rewards will get better in the next zone.

Friday and Saturday I had planned to spend some good time on questing and leveling. I saw that our GM and leading mage had hit 85 in between the last time I had been on and tonight. From some blogs I read, it's possible to hit level 85 in 16-20 hours or a few days. Unfortunately that's not me. I quest like an old woman drives, slow and methodically (or clueless). The whole quest line in Vashj'ir is somewhat remarkable especially when I started getting into the storyline with the Naga. I really don't want to go into any spoilers here, but I enjoyed the background. I never knew why these guys wanted to kick my ass, but now I know.

Saturday was a bad day for gaming and I was unable to get anything going with my she bacon bear till Sunday afternoon. But once I was on, I was locked on. I leveled to 82 and headed out to Deepholm. I'll come back to Vashj'ir and finish the zone, but as for now I want more feral lootz. And once I got to Deepholm, I realized that I need the lootz. Damn mobs just won't die and it feels like I'm tickling these guys to death. My 5200 gearscore wasn't going to cut it with some of these guys. I think I'm going to have to stop leveling in my tank spec and drop the resto spec for know. At least till I get to level 85.

Now Deepholm is just one horrible and ugly place. It reminds me of Netherstorm with troggs and exploding rock columns. While the quests rewards are better for me and what I'm going to need in Uldum, I can't wait to finish out this place. I can't believe Blizzard thought this place looked good.