Dusk of the last day
Monday night, before the expansion officially launched, we had our final ES Games. This time the game was hide and seek and so everyone decamped to Winterspring and found a good spot to crouch in while I waited in Orgrimmar. At the start time, I ripped through space and time and landed in Everlook, ready to begin. To quickly gloss over the rules, I start as the only seeker and as new people are found they join my ranks until only one hider remains.
We went through the whole zone with a fine toothed comb multiple times and I personally found the first person at the bottom of the barrow dens just about right off the bat. I stumbled upon my second person when running up that ramp with the pink energy balls. I got struck by one of them, knocked back into a crevice, and landed right next to Ongus who was lying down, naked, under the ramp. Dumb luck!
Of course, my luck continued when suddenly the sky went red and Deathwing flew through the zone and immediately roasted half of the players.
By 10:30 we still have four people hidden, and with the zone slowly descending into PvP chaos (thanks to my seekers indiscriminately killing any 80s they came across) I declared a “lightning round” to finish up the game. All the hiders immediately left their spots and started running for safety. The half of us not currently being corpse camped by a newly arrived Alliance raid of PvPers went and rounded up the last four folks.
I then returned to Org and doled out the last six Sealed Chest/Shadowmourne items in the guild bank to the winners and we officially severed our last ties to the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. All that was left was to wait for the dawn of the new day.
And… they’re off!
Unfortunately, I had ordered a CE from Amazon with their release day delivery, so I wasn’t going to be able to see expansion content until around 6pm Tuesday. Combined with a need to work productively the next day, I bid everyone good luck and logged off for the night.
Now, Ana already recounted how the actual launch left so I won’t pretend that I know anything of that.
Instead I rejoin the story the following day once I cut my way through the jungle of plastic sealant and cellophane and was finally able to install and authorize Cataclysm on my account. Once in game, the very first thing I did was buy my Flight License from (a very much alive) trainer and then did the Fishing and Cooking dailies in Org while I waited for Cendra and Ildara (my leveling buddies) to get their ducks in a row.
Once we were all settled we headed into the depths of Vashj’ir to begin the grind. Mumble was flush with everyone leveling and yakking to keep their minds off the millions of experience still ahead of them. The three of us settled on a specific goal: hit 81, run some dungeons to recharge, and get back to the grind.
The leveling went generally okay, but the quests were a pain with the legions of players competing for mobs and quest items. Not to mention on a pvp server you’re living with the ever-looming specter of an all out war grinding your leveling to a complete halt. Thankfully though, everyone behaved and we all went on our merry way of getting through the quests.
Finally, at 9:13 pm I dinged 81. About two and a half hours in.
We returned to Orgrimmar to grab our level 81 spells (Inquisition hoooo) and then sped over to the Abyssal Maw to discover the entrance to the Throne of the Tides. Summoned two more guildies and zoned in to do a quick-recharge dungeon.
Personally, I remember Throne from beta and it was no cake walk when we did it. Imagine my shock between Ana’s description of the place being a complete faceroll and then seeing it for myself as we just AOE’d down everything in our path without a second thought. It was somewhat anticlimactic. Hopefully the heroic is a bit more painful.
After Throne, one of our group suggested we try some more dungeons, so we went over to Blackrock Caverns to give that a go. By this time, Ana had come on and organized her own 5man, who then joined us in vent while they were getting everyone together. Three of her group were there in that messy BRC run that Ana described in her last post and I could hear them licking their lips at the thought of my group getting rofl-stomped by all the encounters they had previously cut their teeth on.
But, in their eye, we had no issues. The biggest hiccup we had was on the first boss when no one ran out of the Skullcracker (I plead ignorance for not knowing the mechanic) and everyone went splat except for me. With the boss at around 50%, I and Word of Glory guided him down to 0 and wrapped up the fight. I’m told that it was more epic than the time Demogar finished off the last 3% of Icehowl by himself, which is good enough for me.
After BRC we went to Vortex Pinnacle, getting there the same time as Ana’s group. We then began an informal race through the dungeon, doling out strategies as we went and trying to break through the boss fights faster than the other team. Finally on the last fight the other group stalled (perhaps due to overtiredness) and we pulled out the win.
Once that was done we had to jump through some hoops to get to Stonecore, using the other team (once they were done in VP) to help us summon half of ours, who were 81 still and thus ineligible to start the breadcrumb quest that lead to Deepholm. We then reformed our two groups and ducked into the instance.
Stonecore was a breeze as well and in a short amount of time we had finished up the dungeon. With that complete, the group split up and Dara, Cendra, and I went back to questing in Vashj’ir, hopefully to finish as much questing there as possible before Ildara had to crash for work tomorrow.
Just after 2 am I hit 82, and shortly Ildara and Cendra followed suit. Having reached that milestone, Dara logged off for the night and Cendra and I headed over to Deepholm to keep the party rolling.
Deepholm was exactly as I remembered it in beta, and went pretty quickly since I could remember just about everything about the quests we were doing. Within no time the hours began to tick away. At this point Ana joined Cen and I in our quest grind.
Sidenote on guild experience gains: they suck. The rate is way too low. I understand the need to “balance” levels between zerg guilds and tiny RP guilds, but it feels like there was absolutely no attempt to find a happy middle and instead the cap is capriciously low and exceedingly punitive to a guild with more than 10 active members. The daily cap unlocked at 4:00 am (local time) that morning for us and so we could begin racking up points for ES.
At 4:25 am the guild dinged level 2, which was great and exciting and immediately kicked a 5% boost in our shorts.
And then at 4:42 am we hit the daily cap again. It’s obviously going to be a while.
At around 5:00 I was starting to hit the wall. The endless quests were taking their toll and I was getting ready to throw in the towel at any moment, but then I hit my second wind. Determined to hit level 83, I dragged Ana and Cendra with me through another swath of quests. Eventually Ana rebelled and logged off for the night, but Cen and I persisted. We kept going until I finally dinged 83 at just after 6 am.
My goal complete, I deserved a little cat nap. So Cen and I parted ways and agreed to meet again in the morning.
Three blissful hours of sleep later…
I woke up at around 9:00 am and logged on to run a few dailies while I waited for Cendra to get up. When he logged on an hour later or so, we grabbed a third, Gandy the rogue, and headed down to Uldum to start the grind anew down south.
Uldum definitely took questing a step up from the previous zones and the whole place was immensely fun.
I could have done without the 400 cutscenes though, they really nuked the fridge on those. But then again, it was definitely an inventive way to tell the story behind Uldum. If I was reading any of the quest text and not just bulldozing through all the yellow exclamation points I could get my greedy hands on, I’m sure I would have appreciated them a lot more.
Later that day, at just shy of 5 pm I hit level 84. Gandy and I still had a chunk of quests to complete in Uldum, so we continued to bat away at them. Eventually we wrapped up the last major quest chain and were free to head over to the Twilight Highlands to hit the home stretch.
There’s not much to say about Twilight Highlands other than I’m loving it so far. It’s the first zone so far that doesn’t cram Alliance and Horde together at every single questing hub, which is a nice breather from the last few zones. Similarly, there’s some fun Horde-centric lore to be had with the Dragonmaw Clan and helping them overthrow their fel orc masters and formally join the Horde.
Wednesday night I capped out my evening by doing the Crucible of Carnage chain with a few guildmates and a pugged healer. It was… interesting. The area was swarming with Alliance, and the whole place stank of a powder keg just waiting to blow. If the Alliance could have killed every Horde there to finish their quests faster I’m sure they would of. And we’d likely have done the same.
As we were waiting to finish the last two of our quests, the people going before us bugged out the last fight, leaving the arena covered in magma for just about everyone. Not cool.
Somehow we managed to finish, and with a huge chunk of experience points to boot. The chain pushed me just over the halfway mark and I was able to log for the night with the endgame firmly in sight.
Last night I didn’t get to play much, just enough time to run some dailies and do a batch of quests in Twilight Highlands. When I logged after a few hours I somehow managed to be three blocks of experience away from level 85. The finish line!
Tonight I will ding the level cap once more, and that is tremendously exciting.
Hopefully everyone else is feeling similarly productive!
Oh, I wish it was so.
Unfortunately, the postal service is on strike, so I’ll have to wait for my copy of Cataclysm until (hopefully) tomorrow. If that doesn’t happen, I’ll have to wait until Tuesday.
But man, am I excited for all of you who can and are wrapping up the grind to level 85! Even when I do play, guild chat is just so alive right now. All these people came back and are now so happily questing and running dungeons and it’s just so much fun!
Can’t wait :)
New to yoru blog and I am finding it well written and quite enjoyable. Cheers!
Off topic – but I absolutely love your ui – do you have an addon list?
Ha, I was just about to ask what your nameplate mod is and I thought “I wonder if it sucks to put time and effort into these well written posts and have people ask what mods you’re using?”
So yeah, I agree Arik! Fun read.
And what nameplate mod do you use? =P
It’s Tidyplates and then I use the Neon skin that comes loaded with it. :P
Thanks! And here’s the post I did recently about my latest UI revamp, should have everything listed there.
The guild experience cap and the guild reputation cap seem ridiculously low. We hit the guild XP cap in about three hours with only 4 or 5 people online launch day.
It just seems that Blizz chose to gate guild perks by time rather than actual player investment – if you can hit the XP cap without even trying, every single guild is going to level up at the same pace.
As far as guild rep goes, it’s going to take forever to get to exalted at ~4k rep per week. Extremely frustrating.
Not really the best place for this, but I’m currently Twitter-less. You mentioned on Twitter leveling JC high enough to get the Earthen Guardian, but there’s a bug currently that restricts you from having it drop if you hit 85 before 475 JC. It simply won’t drop. The only work around is to find a JC with 475+ who had it hitting 85 or who is not yet 85, and also hasn’t already made it. Then, form a party with them and kill stuff ’till it drops. Then have them trade it to you (it’s a blue and therefore tradeable for 2 hours).
You’ll also need to make sure your JC farmer is capabale of having a tank spec or it won’t drop, so DK, Pally, Warrio or Druid. A Pally or Druid would be capable of farming the others for you as well, if you’re interested. They only take about 5 minutes to drop.
Thanks for the heads up, a few folks also shared the bad news with me on Twitter. Not happy about this, hopefully it’s fixed soon.
Now let’s see if I can find someone in that narrow band you mentioned, haha.