Mage Solo's Onyxia

Holy crap, a mage actually solo'ed a raid boss. I'm not sure what else to say. I guess I need to go get me some gear and wait for the next patch to land so I can try it out. Check out Faxmonkey over at WarcraftMovies.com.

Research, Research, Research

Do you ever get too busy with stuff to do stuff? lol.

Since I have hit 80, I've noticed that I've spent quite a bit of time over at Elitist Jerks. I've found that I really enjoy the control and survivability I get from Frost, but I doubt I'm doing the highest DPS I can. I've even played with Deep Freeze even though it has almost no use in Pve, and I seldom used it in my adventures through questing. Right, right... it's a Pvp spell. Kinda a shame that they took out the damage component, but whatever.

So, now I'm left wondering if I'm so low on the damage meters because of my gear, my spec, or because I suck. I'm guessing it's mainly due to the first, possibly some of the second, and hopefully very little of the last. With Focus Magic in my spec, I consider myself partly utility. The Water Elemental's Mana regen helps with that as well. I really enjoy the solo'ing/questing with Frost, but I'm sure I can do more dps with Frostfire.

Besides all that mage talk, I've been researching Holy and Shadow spec's for my wife's toon as well. She's still not even close to 80, but I want to be informed for when she does get there.

Long story short: I've been researching my own personal things way too much bother with this silly blog. lol. Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas.

AH = EBay

I was chatting with one of my raid leaders last night about things that were almost completely unrelated to Wow... until now. *queue ominous music* She works at a comic book store, and she was telling me how she just got their e-bay business/store back up and going, and she's doubled e-bay sales in the first month. (Double over when it was running.)

Then I started thinking about her Wow life. Among the many things she does, she's a very good player of the Auction House. Her alt jewelcrafter made enough money to completely pay for Epic Flying Training and a lot of the rare BoE gem cuts. She also took over selling the excess stuff out of the guild vault, where she's always turned a great profit as well. So... her doing a great job at work with e-bay was no surprise at all.

All in all... it's just another example of the lessons you can learn from playing Wow. Add micro-economics of the things you can learn from this video game.

Hard Habit to Break

I think at times I can be kind of stubborn in my ways, maybe even compulsive to a degree. Kind of reminds me of a smoker... with all the knowledge and education we have about how smoking kills you, there's a lot of people that keep doing it. "Why?" I ask. Why? Why? Call it stubborn, call it dedicated, call it whatever.

Leiandra, my mage, has always been my main character. She has always had tailoring and enchanting as professions. I've respec'ed her very few times. I think I've only paid for 2, maybe 3 respec's, and one of those times was because I didn't put the points exactly how I felt they should be. (Although I have tried most specs due to talent point resets, PTR's, Beta, etc.) Once it was available, I choose to specialize in Spellcloth and I haven't given that one up either.

Which is kind of funny that Leiandra is so set in her ways. My alts were willing to try anything and everything. My priest did healing duty (both as holy and disc), and was also shadow quite a bit. My shaman's done all three trees as well. (Probably my worst toon as far as gear is concerned. Getting multiple sets of gear was never my forte.)

So what's the point I'm making here besides rambling? I posted awhile ago about the different specializations in tailoring for Wrath, and also how much + hit I need for raiding. So, I'm pretty sure I'm going to respecialize to Ebonweave so I can make the necessary cloth to make the two pieces of Ebonweave gear. That will bring me (with current gear) to 280. It's not quite 368, but it's 83 points closer.

My wife's shadow priest is already Ebonweave specialized, but she's pretty far away from 415 skill, so I can't use her cooldowns yet. And I could always make a set of these for her as well. I don't know... it just feels so... warlocky for me to go this specialization. It makes my skin crawl. But, in the name of + hit, I guess I do what I have to do.

If need be, I suppose I can go Moonshroud for a bit so that I can cleanse out that icky feeling. Then I can help my wife get her healing gear. :)

Wotlk BS Bop Items, Wut???

Okay... this will not be a rant. I have to keep telling myself that.

In the PTR's MMO-Champion is reporting that there's a new Bop Blacksmithing sword. Two of them in fact. Titansteel Deflector and Titansteel Defender. Check out the link to see the stats.

This will not be a rant.

I thought Blizzard's platform was that they were not going to allow powerful Bop items from professions. Something about doing the tradeskill that's fun, and not the one that you have to to be the best.

This will not be a rant.

Where's the freakin' Bop items for Leatherworking and Tailoring? Engineering has had their best head piece reign for awhile now. And then there's the hawt JC only gems. And wasn't Inscription supposed to get a 4th major glyph?

Yep, it turned into a rant. Well, finish the professions already. They so don't feel done.

Catching Up to Me

I've been sick for about a week now, although it only knocked me out for Sunday. Without too many details, it feels like the flu with the whole achy feeling. On Sunday, I could hardly move my muscles. I thought I was feeling better, but I notice things that aren't exactly right.

Like after doing holiday baking with the family, and wanting to hit level 79, I found myself just too tired to log on last night. Or how I have this slight "pressure" in my head. Not quite a headache, but still... something uncomfortable.

So, maybe I need to start getting more than 6 hours of sleep. 6-7 has pretty much been my norm for a long, long time. But with the new commute, it's been more like 5-6. I guess that one hour really makes the difference.

So, out of curiosity, how many hours per night do you guys and girls sleep?

Vehicles and Mounts

I was in Grizzly Hills last night questing with my wife who is still level 73. Out of habit of using my old flying mount, I clicked on my bear mount (to stay on the ground with her) thinking that it would kick me off my magic carpet and summon my bear. Instead, I summoned my bear mount on top of my magic carpet, as you can see from the screen shot.

What I find even more amusing is that Leiandra decided to surf the bear as if it were the carpet. So, you have a mage surfing a bear, who's riding a carpet.

For those that didn't realize, a magic carpet is considered a vehicle. This means that it has it's own hit points (almost 9k), can't be dazed, or rooted for that matter (that last one is per wowwiki, if I'm understanding it correctly). There's some negatives to it as well. You can't just cast a spell to dismount like you can your other mounts. Which is something that I'm very used to doing. And it seems to take a second (maybe less) to actually dismount.

It has it's own little pet bar where you can dismount and attack. When I first saw the "attack" button, I got excited thinking about it. I guess I figured that somewhere, there was a little Abu and I'd be able to fling the monkey up into the air. Instead, I get the message of "unable to attack that" every time. Kind of disappointing, but I suppose asking it to be able to actually attack would be too much. Or having one of those Mammoths attack with their huge tusks... yeah, that would be unrealistic as well.

So, instead of attacking, I get to surf on a bear that's balancing on a flying carpet. All things considered, I guess it's a fair trade.

Gearing Up... WOTLK edition

As I am getting closer to 80 (yeah, I know... the flu bug hit me, whatever), I've started looking at all of my gear options. One of the big priorities is to get spell hit capped, or at least to approach it somewhat.

Without me having to write up a whole post on spell hit for mages, go check out Spicy Tuna's post on it. Basically, since I don't usually have a Boomkin with Improved Faerie Fire, nor a Shadow Priest with Misery, and my Dranei Elemental Shaman is now a Death Knight, I have to rely on my own talents and gear for a 14% miss rate (instead of 17%) with Elemental Precision. That means, that I need in the neighborhood of 368 spell hit to guarantee a spell hit against a boss.

368? Are you kidding me? That's a lot of hit! I'm currently at 197, and I've replaced very few pieces of gear since 70. Furthermore, a lot of my stuff is still gemmed for Arcane (Intellect and Mana Regen), so I could regem stuff since I'll either be staying Frost, or more likely going back to Fire with a side of Frost. But I also started looking at items that will help me upgrade quickly once the level restriction on items is no longer an issue.

I'm still a firm believe in Rawr, but I've fallen back on MaxDps.com a bit. Although with Rawr's latest patch of 3.1.4, they've put in filters to make it a bit more appealing again. There's still too many combination of gems if you ask me. I'm trying to look for the best item to upgrade to; that's the hard part. I'll plunk down whatever money I need to for the gems and enchants after that.

I'm not entirely sure MaxDPS has it right now either. They used to heavily lean on + hit, and now it seems like they're more towards haste. But it's still a good tool to start your search. As soon as you're running Naxx, you'll be replacing gear anyway.

So, with that said, there's a couple things that might be easy for you to get before you start your first raid.

Emeline's Locket is a guaranteed item since it's a quest reward from The Admiral Revealed. Sure you have to get a group together for the quest... and it's a fairly long "chain" if you consider all of the Icecrown quests you need to do. But after my recommendation, you were already questing there anyway, right?

The next item I would look at is the Dark Runic Mantle. It's a BoE off the Dark Runic people in Heroic Halls of Stone. You can also pick it up from the AH if you just want to give up the money. There's no + hit on this one, but it's a pretty solid shoulder piece.

As a mage, the Shroud of Dedicated Research should probably be one of your easiest upgrades. It requires you to be Honored with the Kirin Tor, and I believe we start out as friendly with them anyway. Yes, there's other upgrades, but it's a decently solid item.

I have a few options for my chest piece. I figured I'd start off with the Black Duskweave Robe since I have the mats and need to level tailoring. Then I'll upgrade that to the Robes of Lightning for the + hit (it's a quest reward for running Halls of Lightning). But then I'd really like to upgrade my chest piece to the Water-Drenched Robe which is a drop from Ichoron in Heroic Violet Hold.

So, those are some of my pre-Naxx choices. I'll take a look at some more options and let you know what I come up with. There's a lot of other options, and a lot of better ones as well, but I figured that all of these (except for the Water-Drenched Robes) were pretty eash for just about anyone to get. See? I can be "casual friendly".

Hot Lips

Today I am going to shamelessly plug a fun game that my friend and his two buddies created for the iPhone. With all the capabilities of the new iPhone, they've created an application called "Hot Lips" that will tell you just how well you kiss. It provides some funny sayings/voice files along with an actual rating of how you performed.

I tried it out, and it's pretty fun. (No, I didn't actually kiss an iPhone. There's other ways to do it, you'll just have to figure it out for yourself.) It's not like it's going to be the next WoW killer, but it's certainly something fun to do while standing in line for say... Blizzcon tickets or something. ;)

As their web site over at BCD Soft says, "Don't let your little brother play this game or you will never see your iPhone again." So, for those of you with iPhones, head on over to iTunes, search for "Hot Lips", and buy yourself some cheap entertainment. Enjoy!

Fun and Frustration with Phasing

Today's post is actually partly a response to Kulat's comment yesterday on my blog. For those of you with short term memory loss, I was commenting on the very cool aspect of phasing out in Icecrown. It's really neat how Blizzard has worked this technology into the game, and it makes for a lot of possibilities of how they can progress story lines. Excellent for the solo player.

For the groups, however, it may or may not be the coolest thing. As Kulat was saying, he was asked to help with a group quest and he couldn't see the mob; his whole party got knocked off the cliff, but he didn't see the assailant.

When I first heard about phasing, and started playing the beta, I mistakedly thought that phasing only occurred when you had that "fog" around the edges of your screen, such as occurs in Borean Tundra in Riplash Strand. Heck, you can't even see the mobs there until you go into the fog. And it's also an easy way to run away from them, if you just run out of the fog since they disappear.

Fast forwarding a few months, I knew that Icecrown was phased like this, and when I went there in beta, there was none of the fog. But I still thought it was only to certain instances or areas.

Phasing struck again last night in Dragonblight. I have the achievement for quests for Dragonblight, so I'm mostly done (just 3 group quests left there, I think). All of the phasing that will take place probably has already. Although, I didn't realize there was any taking place. That's probably the seamless manner that Blizzard wants the world to appear to you. (Oh! Except up where the movie took place. I really wish there was a way to silence those people. I hate that when I fly by there.) At any rate, we were at Wintergarde Keep where my wife was going to do a few quests before we headed over to Grizzly Hills.

"Go ahead and set your hearthstone here," I said.

"Ok. Where's the inn keeper?"

"Right in front of us. She just walked by you. She's the one pacing."

"Nope, I don't see him," she responds.

So, I lean over to look at her screen, and sure enough... no inn keeper there. Nothing. Is it a loading issue? Lag? Nope, all the other NPC's are there and I can see my own toon on her screen. So, without realizing it, at some point, I quested the inn keeper back to Wintergarde Keep where I can now set me hearthstone if I so desire. My wife, on the other hand, apparently has a quest or two to do.

Icecrown

I'm about 1/3 of the way through Icecrown quests, and so far, it's one of my favorite zones. Without too many spoilers, here's the gist of the zone.

You get sent out to the zone from Dalaraan. The one-way flight they give you puts you on top of this giant flying ship that circles in the eastern part of the zone. They then send you to this one area to start all the quests in the zone. As you complete quests, more parts of the zone become populated with NPC's you can get other quests from. Along with that, there's daily quests that open up as well.

Think of it as Isle of Quel'Danas, but instead of things opening up when the server completes a certain number of quests, things open up when you complete a certain number of quests. The whole zone has that phasing thing, so there could also be a ton of people in the same area, but they won't be spoiling the quest line for you since you can't see them.

So far, it's a very interesting story of how all of the landscape changes. One of the quests has you heading all over the place (Moonglade and Shatt) to save somebody. It's a fun diversion (and they provide portals for you).

My favorite quest, just becaues I found it to be quite different is also a daily quest. King of the Mountain has you get in this robot, and you jump to the top of the mountain to plant a flag. It's also a PVP quest, so there's horde trying to do the same thing. Here's some hints. Don't worry about falling, you don't take fall damage. Also, you don't have to jump onto solid ground, so just jump onto the side of a mountain and then jump again before you fall too far. You can get to the top in a matter of seconds if you scale straight up like that.

At any rate, I hear there's also a movie, so I'll continue questing there so that I can see that. I still haven't replaced much of my gear at this point, but I'm slowly starting to. I went straight out there at lvl 77, so you don't have to wait until 80 to go out there. And the zone is basically designed to be used with a flying mount, so that's nice as well. There... there's one bonus of Cold Weather Flying. lol.

Buffing Classes You Can't Raid Without

A fellow raid leader and I were talking about the sudden lack of Shaman that Primogeniture has now found itself with. Two Shaman re-rolled Death Knights, one went to another server, and one disappeared without a trace. (I really hope the last one is okay... never heard from her again.) So while we may be looking for a few good Shaman (as well as some other healers), that's certainly not the point of this post.

One of the reasons that Shaman not being in our guild is sort of a bad thing is the loss of Heroism/Bloodlust. If I'm not mistaken, some of the melding of the classes and removal of stacked buffs was to get people to take who they want to a raid, and not who they need. Looks like a raid still "needs" a Shaman.

For that matter, it looks like there's still a few classes that are kind of a must have. Looking over at MMO-Champion's nifty tool, it kind of shows who can cover which buffs and debuffs. There's a couple that are slightly flawed, but let's take a look at them anyway.

The first item that is on their list that is only represented by one class (besides the aforementioned spell) is Blessing of Wisdom. With changes to potions, I'd say this is probably a must have. Every 30 seconds or so, that's probably another spell you can cast. So, pretty valuable stuff. Then again, the mana regen portion of Improved Water Elemental, depending on your mana pool, could probably easily be about the same amount of mana regen, just not something that is always on.

Wrath of Air Totem is the next one that is awesome for your caster group. You really should have one of these in your raid. Oh... wait. That's a Shaman again. Dang. Well, let's hope you have one.

Power Word: Fortitude is a Priest only spell, but can be slightly mitigated with Command Shout or Blood Pact. Probably still preferential to bring a Priest, but there's still these minor substitutes.

Then there's Mark of the Wild. Okay, we now need Druids. And then Blessing of Kings. I guess we'll have to take a Paladin with at least 1 point (preferable 5) in Protection spec.

So, there you have it. The only classes you now need are Druids, Shaman, and Paladins. Every other class is simply a filler.

(And in case you didn't get the tongue in cheek attitude, other classes are obviously needed, but maybe not as much as the 3 above.)

Flying in Wrath

Right off the bat, I'm going to have to admit that I am thoroughly disappointed with Cold Weather Flying. I think there's a few things that kind of irk me, and they're probably mostly based on past experiences and expectations.

Think back to when you first hit 40 (or now 30) with your first toon. You had to do your normal routine of going to a major city every 2 levels to train, but then you also had to go off somewhere special to plop down your hard earned cash to get your mount. You had to go off to special nooks such as Menethil Harbor, or Eastvale Logging Camp, or Darnassus (yep, it's that far out of the way). At 60, you had to again break the bank and head off to these same people.

At 70, you had to head out to Shadowmoon Valley to be able to fly. And, oh the freedom! You get to soar above all these trash mobs that you didn't want to kill anyway. You could swoop down on unsuspecting mining nodes. The sky was the limit! (Okay, there is technically a ceiling, but it's still in the sky.) And the incredible speeds you achieved once you learned to fly those epic flying mount... well... that was just stupendous.

But now... at 77. I have get to port back to Dalaraan, pay my 1000g, and I get nothing new. Not another level of riding skill. Not a faster mount. Just the ability to do what I've done since hitting level 70, but now in Northrend.

Furthermore... because I still need to do quests, and I want to get the xp from the mobs, I find that the flying mount (with only 100% ground speed, if I'm not mistaken) isn't all that great. I hit a small hill and take off causing the mobs to evade. It's great for killing those named mobs, dropping out of the sky as if performing a death from above, but I've been doing that for years now.

I certainly don't know what I was expecting. I knew this was the deal all along. I'm certainly glad that I can now put the game on "pause" by flying up into the air in a random spot. I just find that I'm so under-whelmed with the non-newness that I had to post about it.

Edit: I thought of another example of this underwhelming in Wow as well. Druid's have these semi-epic quests to figure out how to turn into a bear and water form. Then at level 20, the trainer just teaches them how to become a cat. The expectation was set in the first 2 forms, and then completely dropped for the next 4. At least for swift flight form there's a quest you have to do at 70... oh wait... you can now train it at 71. Still... unlike Coldweather, at least you're learning something new in these examples.

And I Said: NO

I'm sure I've said this before, but World of Warcraft is the ultimate game of "just one more thing". There's always just one more mob to kill, or one more quest to do, or one more level, or one more person to port, or... or... or... You name it. It's part of what keeps the game engaging and overwhelming all at the same time.

I'm usually not all that great at the self-control when it comes to this portion of the game, especially if I'm excited about the next thing/reward/whatever. If I just hit 75, I can get this new spell. And then after I get the new spell, I want to see how it works in combat. And then how can I make that spell better? You get the picture. This is probably the reason I used to log off nightly around 2 or so.

Now that I'm a little wiser... ok... who am I kidding? It's just because I get up so early in the morning. Getting up around 4:45 to be at work by 7 (yes, my commute sucks that much) means that by 11, I'm pretty tired.

So, last night, I was questing with my wife (which I have been doing a great deal lately, and we've really enjoyed it), playing one more thing World of Warcraft. She got tired around 11, and then we did a couple more things (finished one quest, had her train levels, did my cooking daily, bag management, etc) until about 11:30. I'm currently level 76, and about a bubble and a half away from 77. I'm obviously anxious and excited about hitting 77 so I can start flying again. So, I start thinking what quests I can do really quick to get that last bubble and a half.

My hearthstone is up, so I can head on out to Grizzly Hills where I was solo questing. That way I wouldn't mess up any of the quests I was doing with the Mrs. I could take the plane out to Sholazar Basin, where I have a handful of quests. Any other dailies I could quickly do?

Then I actually showed some self-control. I logged off. I brushed my teeth. And I actually went to bed at the same time as my wife.

The last bubble towards 77 will still be there tonight. It will take me very little time finish that off. I won't fall asleep on my commute to work. And tonight... I will be flying.

Expansion Cheapness

Is it just me, or have people seemed to become really cheap in the expansion? I understand that a good portion of money is being used up to train new spells, new professions, and to buy new mounts, but come on people... even crappy quests of "go talk to the person next to me" seem to reward 5g at a minimum.

One of the many reasons I started noticing this and I bring it up now is due to mage portals.

Let me stop here so I don't lose a bunch of you cheapskates. Yes, the reagent cost is 20 silver. And yes, I only need to press 1 button to cast it. But whether you agree with it or not, the cost of a portal is NOT 20 silver.

While the cost is subjective, it should be more for "higher" cities. We can first learn to open a portal to cities at level 40. (most old world cities) Let's say that's 1g. (Assuming you're at max level, that's being pretty cheap for a high level toon and you probably should give more, but I'll start there for sake of discussion.) We learn portals to Darnassus and Thundering Bluff at 50. There should probably be a higher cost, but with demand so low for those ghost towns, I doubt anyone charges more. At 65, we can open a portal to Shattrath. The time we've spent levelin, plus the opportunity cost easily justify a nice, round 5g for a port to Shat. Just before launch, I was having people offer me 10g all the time.

And finally, our last portal comes at 74. It's to a city that you cannot get to without help unless you're level 74. It's not like the Dark Portal that you can run through at 68 to get to Shat. No, it's 4 levels after you've entered Northrend that you can get to Dalaran alone. Now with the help of a mage, they can send you there. (There's also the ghetto port I talked about before, but you get that messy deserter debuff.)

Now, I'm not setting a price for your port to Dalaran. If Shat was 5, then it makes sense that, especially if you're below 74, you give at least 10g, maybe more. I don't know. But the cheapness comes in when I see people offering 2g for a mage to open a portal to Dalaran for them. When I openely express that that's too little, I basically start a zone-wide arguement on the price of reagents and why it should only be a small stipends. It's not like I'm asking for your first-born or anything. Geez, people. Do a couple quests and pay up for services to others.

On a total side note: I logged in with my Shaman (who hadn't even seen Northrend on Live) last night, and I thought there was an error because he had 365 JC'ing. I swore he wasn't that high. But after a big of research of what I was skiling up on, I realized he was. Dang there's a lot of things to learn as a JC'er.

Veteran of the Wrathgate

For those that haven't quite gotten there yet, I wanted to highlight a "Fun Quest" (as my category puts it). Really, it's more of a required quest line. If you have a toon at 80 and you missed these quests, you must go back and do it. Now.

I'm talking about the quest line for the Veteran of the Wrathgate achievement. It's probably best to simply go look it up on Wowhead on the link provided. It's about 20 quests for the Horde and 30 quests for the Alliance. I believe they're pretty much all in Dragonblight. Pretty easy quests. They're all soloable. Good xp as well.

Why should I drop everything to do this now, you ask? Am I that obsessed with achievements that I think you must do all of them? No, of course not. The reason for the urgency and prodding is that once you turn in Return to Angrathar (the alliance one linked, Horde one is here), you get to see this sweet in game movie.

I won't say anything about it to avoid spoilers, but I think it's a lot of fun how Blizzard really has thrown Arthas in our face ever since we entered Northrend, just like they said they would. It really feels like everyone has a chance to mess with him, very much unlike Illidan in the Burning Crusade.

What are you still doing here? Go quest, now!

Crappy Excuse for a Post

Got wrapped up in work and developing stuff for our new guild web site (had to set up a test environment and all that stuff too), so didn't make time for a post today.

Just remember this: Even if they're the opposite faction, there's still a person behind all those pixels you're stealing kills from.

Yeah... but it felt great when I stole the 10 mobs from the Blood Elf Paladin that kept gathering everything up.

Wrath Tailoring Quests

I've pointed out before that there's not really any patterns that drop from current raid/dungeon experiences. Most of the stuff in Wrath is learned from the trainer with some quests or research that you can do every once in awhile. They basically made it so that anyone can get every recipe in Wrath.

I don't really agree with philosophy. If you're in a guild running the deepest, hardest dungeons, you should get the patterns for the best stuff. Heck, the materials should come from those same dungeons as well. Some random guy that played the AH well should be able to have the best gear in the game. (I'm exaggerating here, folks.)

But all that aside, let's talk about the feats of strength you have to perform in order to get the "cool kid" tailoring patterns.

Wispcloak
This cloak you can make once you've successfully run all of the instances in Northrend and gotten the Northrend Dungeonmaster achievement. Okay, not that big of a deal. You put in a little effort, hit every dungeon, and you get this pattern. I'm on board with this one. Makes sense.

Deathchill Cloak
This one, however, seems a bit more extreme. You have to get the Loremaster of Northrend achievement. That means that you have to complete 875 quests in order to be able to craft this bad boy. So, maybe the "hardcore" people in Wrath aren't the raiders, but the questers and completetists.

And that's it. As far as I'm aware, there are exactly 2 patterns that you have to work for for Wrath crafting. The Wispcloak will be a gimmie for me, but the Deathchill's gonna take some time. But I think I'm about 1/4th the way there. :)

Wotlk Content Finishers

So, I understand that there are a number of guilds that have finished all of the Wotlk content. Good for them. The ex-Nihlium or whatever did it in like 3 days. Good for them. There's at least 2 guilds on our server that have finished everything as well. Good job guys.

But then there's the rest of us. Probably the 99.9% of the Wow community that hasn't done that yet. There's maybe the 90% of the people that haven't hit 80 yet. Now granted, there's some people that just don't want to raid, so even my estimations are most likely skewed.

So, I was thinking about Ghostcrawler's post that basically said that the difficulty of Wotlk is good. I was thinking about all the games that I've rented from Blockbuster, back in the day. Within 1 week, I could generally beat most of the games I rented. Sure, I burned a little more midnight oil than normal sometimes, but I'd generally finish things. Maybe not EVERYTHING, but most things.

Now there's this new era of games called MMO's. Games that people schedule vacations around launches so they can level up as soon as possible. Games that have a huge age range of players. Also there's varying degrees of game time availability. Some people play for a couple hours per week, and some play for 23 hours per day. (Hey, you have to sleep a little, right?)

So, this time around, they didn't make it so you have to spend months raiding in hopes to get one piece of gear like it was in Vanilla Wow. They scaled things down quite a bit so that more people get to see the content. That also means that these hardcore people get to level multiple alts... perfect reputations. Work at getting ALL achievements. All in all, for my $40 and $15 per month... I still think we're getting our money's worth.