I was reading the latest post by Faeldray at Petaholics Anonymous, and enjoying it immensely, when it occured to me that I hadn’t mentioned one of the key things that had brought back some of my enthusiasm for WoW… and which was also one of the things that had originally killed some of my WoW fun.

And it all had to do with being a petaholic.

I think I mentioned it at the time, that when patch 4.0 came out right before Cataclysm was released, Cassie and I both rolled Human Hunters to enjoy the new quest revamps and changed world.

We also simultaneously rolled Horde characters, both Trolls, to try that new quest zone out and explore the flip side of the coin.

Well, we got ourselves up in level on our Hunters enough that I was struck by a funny thought.

“With both lowbie Horde in Barrens, and lowbie Human Hunters on Alliance, wouldn’t it be neat if our Trolls took turns completing the quest that summons Echeyakee the gorgeous White Lion, and let both Human Hunters tame him? We could be the only level 16s running around in Elwynn with white lions. That would be pretty cool.”

We did that thing. Both our Hunters journeyed to storied Northern Barrens, and we took turns summoning Echeyakee for each other.

I loved that cat. I quested through all of Westfall, Redridge, Duskthingieborezone and ALL of Stranglethorn with that cat on my new Hunter.

I really enjoyed the character in all ways.

But there’s a but. On this blog, how could there not be? A really big one.

When Cataclysm was finally released, it was my level 80 Hunter I leveled first. All the way to 85, and then ran things and got geared, and had a great time.

Along the way, leveling professions and all that jazz, doing the reputation chains… I had a hard time imagining ever leveling the second hunter, what with all of my other level 80s clamoring for leveling attention.

For a few months, the low level Hunter sat, untouched and alone.

I’ve long had every slot on Kael’thas filled, to the point that anything I want to make that is new is gonna end up with a level 50 something dying first.

I wanted to try a Goblin Warlock. I’d never leveled a Goblin yet, hadn’t seen the zone all the way through. Somebody had to go.

The Human Hunter, my only doubled class (except for my Troll Druid on the Horde side) was, logically, the one that had to go.

I deleted my Hunter, and in the process the cat I loved was gone.

After the Hunter was deleted, I realized that the white lion represented more to me than just a pretty pet. It was a constant reminder of a wonderful moment where Cassie and I worked together to accomplish something that had absolutely no effect on being more powerful, or better geared, or higher level… it was something we did just for fun and because we love playing Hunters and we love the looks of that cat, and it was something that was impossible for either of us to do without the other.

It took a week or so to really feel it, but killing that Hunter also killed a good bit of my enjoyment of the game itself.

Well, when I created a few new alts on Azuremyst, one of the things I’ve done is create a new Human Hunter. Different name, slightly different appearance, but in general the same character.

And Cassie, without my saying anything, surprised me this afternoon by telling me she created a Horde character on Azuremyst for the express purpose of leveling to the point that she can summon Echeyakee for me.

So, can lightning strike twice? Will I fall in love with a kitty all over again?

I think so.

I know people have some strong feelings that WoW has changed recently, that it’s no longer fun to play.

For myself, I can’t blame WoW. I blame myself, for bone-headed moves like deleting a character that had, in a short time, come to mean a lot to me.

Blizzard didn’t do that, I did. And if I hadn’t made the Goblin and acted sooner, Blizzard probably could have done something about getting the character back, kitty and all.

Has anyone else out there ever done something like that? Specifically, done something for practical reasons that you later really regretted for emotional reasons?

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft almost exclusively for a very long time now.

I know the game, in many ways I love the game, and the familiarity breeds a feeling of comfort. I know it’s ways so intimately that there is very little mystery left in the game for me.

It’s a great game, but when the mystery is gone… well, you might find yourself looking wistfully at other games, wondering what they might have new to offer.

Maybe that’s why my relationship with Cassie is still so strong… I never know what she’s gonna hit me with next. Her mystery (and awesomeness) have endless depths. Plus, she has great graphics. :)

The Cataclysm expansion has been out for about a month now, and I find myself… well, kinda bored.

Even with pacing myself, and switching things up, and going back on alts in different zones and doing professions and all the various things the game has to offer… well, levels 80 to 85 are short. I’m sorry, there it is.

Level 1 to 60 is unparalled excitement and awesomesauce, but once you hit 60, it’s even worse than hitting a wall with your muzzle. I’ve done the exact same zones in Burning Crusade and Wrath far, far too many times over the years to feel any excitement there whatsoever.

So, I’ve hit a plateau where the game is still fun, and I’m really loving all the improvements and fun things to do… but the mystery is mostly gone, and I’ve been receptive to bringing a little suspense back into my nightlife.

In a moment of weakness, my wandering eye alighted on a sexy game in hot pants scrolling by, I saw one gameplay video too many, and I gave in to temptation.

I bought a new MMO game. I paid money for it, which implies a certain level of “now I have to play it to make sure I get some value”.

I’ll admit it, I was weak.

I’ve flirted with other MMOs before, but only on a trial basis. I’d purchased City of Heroes and played it, but I gave that up when WoW came along. I’ve gone out on a few dates with other games, but nothing ever really clicked before.

I even tried Champions as a trial, the newer offering of the superhero themed game.

It didn’t grab me.

But then she came along… DC Universe.

It was just so shiny!

It was superheroes, which I just can’t seem to resist as a concept, but also a tantalyzing promise of storylines and quests interacting with the major heroes and villains of the DC world.

Part of what drew me in, I’ll admit, is how I think of DC these days.

When I think of DC, I think specifically of the writing of Grant Morrison on Justice League of America, Flash and most recently Batman. I think of Geoff Johns and his runs on the Flash and Green Lantern, and the older Teen Titans work.

The trailer for the game that sets the theme of the MMO storyline felt right in line with that epic scope. I wanted to take part in it.

So, last night I basically impulse bought DC Universe.

Don’t get me wrong, I did read everything I could about it first. I’ve been following the articles written about it on Massively, I’ve watched some of the developer videos, I read some first hand impressions. I looked at gameplay videos.

It all looked pretty good. I’ll grant you, the thematic armors towards end game seemed kinda goofy, but I can roll with it for a brand new story.

When I purchased DC Universe, I decided to do so through Steam, for no other reason than to support direct digital downloads of games. I could have driven out to Best Buy, but hey… Steam rocks.

The downside of buying a huge game through digital download, of course, is that you might as well pack a lunch and bring a book, you’re going to be chilling out for a while. 

Four hours after purchasing the game, the download was complete, the SOE account was made, all the final ‘i’s were dotted and ‘t’s were crossed. I was ready to begin.

Cassie has been dubious about this entire enterprise, and with very good reason.

Quests, setting, all of that aside, it’s not a WoW clone. It’s what is getting called a ‘button masher’, an MMO in fighting game format. It’s designed to be friendly with a Playstation 3 controller, and so it’s less about careful positioning and range, lots of abilities and macros, and far more about pressing button sequences to build up complex combos. You can lock onto your target so when you’re furiously pressing buttons, you don’t have to worry about positioning. That kind of thing.

It’s more of a twitch gaming and combo sequence game at heart.

That may scare some people, but I for one have no problem learning combos. I’m sure if you sat me in front of Mortal Kombat, Skorpion would be tossing a harpoon and yelling ‘Get over here!’ in no time.

I did create a few characters last night, very briefly. I did play a little bit, enough to get one character through the first intro sequence to escape from Brainiac.

I’ll probably delete that character, but I got a better idea for what I did and didn’t like for classes and stuff. I’m sure it’ll help in creating a new one that’ll last.

Since I’ve been following along with the Massively articles, I am making my characters on the Zero Hour PvE server, and if I can get a character I like going, I’m sure I’ll ask them if they have a spot for another novice hero wannabe.

So far, all I’ve got is a character name I like, and nothing else. But there is that excitement about investigating a brand new game. 

My one regret is that you just can’t try this one before you decide if you’d like to buy it. It’s new enough that they really do want those initial sales, and I suppose they feel the franchise is strong enough to entice people in on the name alone.

I guess they’ve got a point, since I bought it, right? 

Time will tell how it turns out, but for now, I’ll be having a little fun getting the beat down done!

It sure is a strange feeling,wandering off the known paths and well traveled roads of a game I know by heart, and into the wilderness of completely new experiences and shadowy, hidden adventures. I literally have no idea what the future holds in store… I don’t even know what classes can do what!

A brave new adventure indeed. And not a little scary!

I almost didn’t post this. But you know… blogger. If a tree falls in the forest near a blogger, it doesn’t matter if it made a sound or not, the blogger will spin a 1500 word post out of it called “Even the trees suffer the loss of our form.”

Tonight, I rode it like I stole it.

A while back, I’d set aside some cash for when Cataclysm came out. I intended to make my Tauren Druid a Worgen on launch.

In preparation, and to cut down on post launch delays caused by a blitz of last minute faction changes, I did the faction transfer in advance, returning my Druid to her Night Elf roots.

This time, older and a little wiser, I was more careful about her appearance. This time… she didn’t look like a valley girl with her picture taken two minutes after snorting the nose candy. For years my Druid had this vapid, “wha?” expression on her face that drove me into perpetual Bearform.

No longer. Now, I’m actually happy with her appearance. She’s like the Druid I always loved… only better!

Yeah, so… I never went Worgen.

The Worgen I made, I made on another server. I found that I really, really loved my Fury Warrior Worgen… but being in a two person guild, seeing our guild level never advance contributed to feeling as if, if I’m going to play, time spent on non-guild alts was somehow wasted.

Isn’t that wierd? It’s all time spent having fun…. if you’re having fun, it’s not time wasted. But there’s just something about knowing that you could be contributing to the guild level, but you’re not.

Back to the point… loving the Worgen, but I didn’t want to play outside our guild. Loving the Night Elf Druid, didn’t want to race change to Worgen.

But there was an opportunity there….

I leveled my Orc Warrior to 70 before Cataclysm came out. Rocked the Warrior, good times.

But…. I finally stopped loving the Orc. I’m not sure why, but I just lost interest in being a fierce champion of Orgrimmar.

I think part of it was the Garrosh storyline from the Shattering. Suddenly, I was a little ashamed to be an Orc. Orgrimmar just wasn’t the home Thrall made for our people anymore. It was… well, it was some 16 year old’s id run amok with power fantasies. It wasn’t a refutation of all the Alliance accused our people of, it was an affirmation that yes, we are that brutal and hungry for honor through bloodshed to prove to everyone how mighty and brave we are.

It wasn’t for me.

So I chose to defect from the Orc race, and my Warrior became a Worgen instead. Not coincidentally, this will let me join our Alliance guild and yes… once again contribute to guild leveling. Sad, I know.

I made the transfer tonight, and I logged in eager to see how she looked. The rush of excitement was remarkable; I have been playing this game for years, right? How the heck am I still feeling some surge of wonder out of it?

I appeared in Darnassus, and the first thing I did after getting my addons straightened out was go looking for those buttons I’d never achieved through leveling a Worgen… the mount buttons.

I’d seen Worgen running around on all fours, and from the outside I thought it looked stupid. I wanted a taste of that firsthand.

I found the button, dragged it down to where my old mount button was on my bars as an Orc, and stopped dead.

I had a Tiger head as my new mount button after the faction change.

Wha?

I was in Darnassus, and Worgen don’t get a racial mount. It hadn’t occured to me that they might transfer the racial mount of an Orc into the Night Elf one, based on the faction city.

I mouse over the Tiger mount button… and it tells me the legend…

Winterspring Frostsaber.

WHAT THE F(&^)&?!?!?!

Okay. Lets just hold the heck on, here. Clearly, this is a bug. Don’t get your panties in a bunch.

Well, let’s see how buggy it is. Fire that puppy up!

Poof! I’m a Worgen riding a Winterspring Frostsaber, the mount I always wanted, the most beautiful ground mount in the game, in my opinion, aside from my land chicken from Sethekk Halls.

No telling how long this’ll last, screenshots ho!

I check my Reputations… nope, no Winterspring Frostsaber rep. So, bug.

I check my Mount tab… yep, I’ve got a Winterspring Frostsaber there. Along with… are those Mechanostriders? wtf? I was an orc, shouldn’t I, like, get horses or something? So am I to understand that Orcs are comparable to.. Gnomes?

I’m not sure who would feel more insulted by that, actually.

Man, something is seriously bugged, here.

Now, do I say something on the blog, or do I run with it and hope to slide on by.

Okay, it’s safe to talk about it on the blog… nobody at Blizzard reads my drivel. So, cool. This is so NUTS!

Wait, what if I relog or /reload ui, and it’s gone forever? NOOO!!!!!!

Simple solution… never log out again. Honey, call work for me, I’m calling in dead.

Moar screenshots!

Finally, I tire of riding around Darnassus on my illicit, totally unearned Frostsaber. Waving goodbye with a final screenshot, knowing in my heart that I shall never see her again, I log out to go watch Top Chef.

As I share this story of mine with Cassie, she looks at me as if I’m the stupidest person on the planet.

“Didn’t your Orc have the Un’goro Raptor reputation mount you did a month worth of daily quests for?”

Well, yeah but…. wait. What?

No freaking way!

Holy shit, he did! But there is no way a Winterspring Frostsaber is a fair trade for a Venomhide Ravasaur mount! All I had to do was plug away on a daily each day, and watch the little guy grow. I didn’t do a single mindless grinding farming nightmare!

How is that possibly fair!?!

Wait….

I just realized, I don’t care if it’s fair…. I’ve got a Winterspring Frostsaber! HOT DIGGITY DAMN!

Apparently, my integrity can be bought… all it took was a free pretty purple kitty mount.

The saddest thing is, I now dimly recall, way back a long time ago, reading that this would happen with faction changes, and it just didn’t register. It got lost in information overload. But maybe that’s a good thing, because it sure was a shock!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off. If you need me, just look for the level 70 Worgen Warrior doing doughnuts in Darnassus on her jacked and pimped out ride.

Oh yeah… screenie!

My Feral Troll Druid has reached level 20, and that’s cause for celebration!

Namely, I get to ride a lizard now instead of dashing about as a kitty.

Here are a few of the Troll Druid specific impressions I have from leveling to twenty.

The Troll starting area is really on rails, mon. Neat, love the layout, and even on patch night it flowed well, only two choke points (top of hill waiting for one NPC to kill, and off on an island waiting for some animal to spawn for me to lasso and ride). Very smooth moving through that zone, and I enjoyed the story a lot. Only downside was, it felt desperately short compared to some other starting zones, like the Human one or the Blood Elves. But maybe I’m just remembering them wrong.

The addition of flight points scattered, well, everywhere feels like cheating. More than any other change in World of Warcraft, the concatenation of flight points is the one thing that brings the grumpy old school Bear out in me. “In MY day, we had to RUN from the troll village to Orgrimmar and back! Uphill! Through the snow! BOTH WAYS! You young whipper snappers with your flight points every fifteen feet don’t know how easy you’ve got it!”

It’s very nice, it’s just jarring. Sure, Elwynn Forest slapped me in the face with its flight point out at the logging camp, but somehow putting a flight point at the troll starter village felt more distinctive. And yet, the second we dinged twenty out there in Northern Barrens, did you hear us complain that we could now FLY directly to get our riding training and buy a raptor mount? No, you did not. You heard only a massive sigh of relief that we didn’t have to run it.

Having to play as a caster until level 8 before getting kittyform, after playing so many alts in the days since patch 4.0.1 revamped classes, hurts EVEN WORSE. I don’t want to be a caster. I want to be a kitty or a bear. All I’ve got are caster tools in my toolbox until getting kitty form, so instead of feeling like a Feral Druid in training, I feel JUST like I used to with a new Druid… playing a character through a story where I’m only playing as a fill in, not as my real character. Eight levels that don’t really count as Druid time.

Intellectually, I grasp the concept that understanding and utilizing my casting abilities is very important in having a balanced appreciation for my Druid’s capabilities. I’m supposed to be a hybrid, flexible, shifting force of nature to be reckoned with, able to weave Roots and Insect Swarms and Moonfire dots and Thorn self-casts (grrr) into kitty Rakes and Mangle bleed debuffs and bear Bashes and Growls and damage sponging greatness.

Doesn’t mean I can’t wish I had kitty form at level one, though, does it? I wanna claw face naow!

Moving on, once you get kitty form, AND ding level 11, you’ve got your Feral Tree open to select, PLUS two talent points.

I’ve found that placing two points by level 11 into Feral Swiftness is kind of OP. I get 30% increased travel speed at level 11. That’s…. well, that’s a lot. You don’t get Dash until level 26, but a 30% speed buff all by itself is pretty sweet. Shaman get their Ghost Wolf not long after, so we’re not alone in our speediness, but wow that feels nice to blast across the dusty road.

On the subject of Cat Form.

Keeva wrote a beautifully detailed and artistically styled guide on how to pick your Troll Druid’s form colors based on hair color. It’s indispensible for getting just the flavor of gummybear that you desire.

My favorite ‘flavor’ style in Cat Form is how the color of your mane is shared in the tufts of fur along your legs, starting on the bottom of the pads on your paws and running up the backs of your legs. My coloring is bright orange mane hair with a light green body fur, and so I see a strong contrast, what with the red hair running up the backs of the green kitty legs. That sounds so wrong to say.

Here’s why that has really grown on me.

Each Druid, to me, looks different in style when in forms and that style really matches my impression of the race itself.

With the two we’ve long been used to, Tauren and Night Elf, the Tauren forms have felt strong and massive, beefy if you will, while the Night Elves have felt smooth and precise. Tauren are Feral Sledgehammers battering their opponents to death while the Night Elves are slim Rapiers piercing just that perfectly positioned point above the aorta.

The Troll Druid, with these crazy tufts of vibrant fur sticking out here and there, and those manes and the tusks, have in my opinion a wild, chaotic and in-your-face brashness to them.

To continue with the weapon analogy, the Troll Druid feels akin to having a roll of  quarters in your fist and a steel cap on your knee, then swarming over your opponent, smashing them surprisingly hard in the face, crushing in their nuts while they’re dazed, and leaving them battered and bleeding on the ground, confused over what just happened there. Maybe a little Mike Tyson styled gnawing on the ear tossed in for good measure.

Kinda all over the place nutso berserker-ish. Oh, hey, what’s that Troll racial ability called again? Huh. Go figure.

On the down side, while you’re a crazy kitty chainsaw as you quest, the bear side is lacking a situation to feel needed. Sure, if you get in big trouble you can go Bear, but… I never saw anything even remotely like a difficult situation while questing, and have yet to feel like I need bear form in any way, not even for ‘named mob’ battles.

Since I did not run any instances as tank before 20, and I didn’t do any PvP, I can’t speak to how effective the Bear tools are in those areas, but for questing, the form itself is definitely superfluous.

We’ll see how it goes. I intend to spend much more time getting into instances between 20 and 30 as the tank. And I do NOT want to wait until Swipe or some other AoE threat crutch is available. We’re supposed to be able to do this without AoE just like in the old days, and I want to see it happen.

Self-casting Thorns right before the run in is probably going to be a big initial threat grabbing move, but right now I’m just incredibly sad that I have no Feral Faerie Fire for ranged pulls or threat grabbing, and no Feral Charge. Without those, I’m left with Growl to try and get the mobs as tank before any ranged fires into the crowd I’m running towards, and that’s in my past experience a prescription for disaster.

All in all, though, I’m really enjoying my Troll Druid.

I have one quibble, non-Druid related, and it’s a big one.

They added XP gain from Herbing and Mining. That’s nice. I didn’t ask for it, but you gave it to me, so thank you.

When it was first released, everyone in your party shared that XP gain from an Herb or Ore node. That was nice too, and made a to of sense, since I was leveling a Mage with my wife the Bear Tank. Sharing the XP from gathering while we quested kept us together as we intended.

With the new patch, that vanished. ONLY the person doing the actual Herbing, at least, gets the XP.

I cannot express adequately how incredibly frustrating that is when your entire goal is to level with someone else hand in hand.

I quickly went almost a level past my wife before we hit 12 just by running across the occasional Herb, because she isn’t gathering, she went with Tailoring/Enchanting.

I do not need a 10% plus enhanced XP gain over my wife when we’re leveling together, okay?

It either needs to be changed back to be shared across the party, or give us a tool to shut it the heck off. We’re now having to either NOT Herb, which kinda makes it hard for me to be able to level Inscription at all, OR plan for when she’s going to have to go off for a while grinding solo so she can catch up, which is just soooo exciting and fun filled.

All in all, the experience has been very fun, and I never thought I’d say that about questing in any part of Barrens.

I hope that your own experiences in the new zones and with the new class combinations has been equally rewarding!

This post is just a little bit of musing about then and now.

Tuesday will see the dawn of a new era in WoW.

Or will it?

The Cataclysm will come to the world of Azeroth, surprising our characters, but not us.

That’s not what I’ve been thinking of.

Maybe it’s Tesh’s fault, but I do spend quite some time trying to analyze the intentions of the Blizzard developers NOT from anything they say, but rather from what they actually DO.

You’re not what you say you are, no matter how loudly you proclaim it. You are what you do.

Tomorrow, for the first time since the release of the Burning Crusade expansion, the portal hubs will go dark.

For the very first time since the end of the Vanilla WoW era, there will not be a single place you can set your Hearth that gives you ready access to… anywhere you want to go.

There is much in the patch and the expansion that will move the game forward.

Is the removal of the portal hubs a move forward… or a move back?

In my opinion, trying to get into the heads of the developers to figure out how they hope this will work out, it’s an interesting move.

People bitch about ‘slippery slopes’ a lot, but one thing is usually true; once you’ve removed an action that used to cause long periods of  grinding, grunt work or downtime, if you put it back in, people resent it. 

One of the things that was true in Vanilla WoW was that moving from place to place took a lot of time. Time waiting for boats, time waiting for zeppelins, time on flights across the continents, time running across deadly zones to get flight points hoping you wouldn’t get eaten, but having to do it because there WERE no boat or zeppelin routes that would give you a convenient short cut around them.

‘Fed Ex’ style quests took no skill at playing your character to complete… but they compensated for that by taking up a lot of time in transit.

There was good cause for rejoicing when Burning Crusade brought us Shattrath; a city with Innkeepers to set your Hearth, and filled with magical portals that could transport you in the blink of an eye to any of the major cities on another world.

Suddenly, just by finding a friendly Mage or Warlock of the right level to help you get there, maybe a 10 gold tip, your character could easily pop in and out wherever they might need to go.

The consequence of this convenience was that one of the most powerful benefits of being a Mage or Warlock, or having one for a friend, was marginalized.

Even the Shaman’s ability to reduce the cooldown of the Hearth was slightly reduced in equivalent power.

The LFD tool brought even more convenience to the party, didn’t it? Instant ports, and all that sort of thing.

No question that having portal hubs saves a lot of time… time that once was spent traveling from place to place could now be spent getting it stuck into the fight faster.

The developers chose to include those portal hub cities. First with one in the heart of Outlands… then again in the heart of Northrend.

The developers have chosen to remove all of those portal hubs.

What can we glean from this decision?

I think, despite some of the conspiracy theories I’ve seen in Trade chat the last few weeks, that this is not an attempt to make us waste more time so the content lasts longer before we get bored.

I’ve seen some comments that it is being done, in part, to cut down the ‘Laglaran’ effect of having 80% of a server’s population in the same zone or city. That sounds like a very plausible reason.

I know that it’s been said by developers that a key point is to force players to be out and about running around the world, so it seems populated and full of life.

Well, if I wanted to be a picturesque local to add color for the enjoyment of the new tourists, I’d prefer to be issued a grass-roofed hut, banana leaves and a spear to shake. And a table to sell my hand crafted goods at ridiculous prices. And a bottle of rum. And some bacon.

I’m not here for the tourists. Screw the tourists! I’m here for my own paid playtime. This particular argument you make for why I should now have to spend tons of my own personal time traveling around not having fun when I used to be able to ‘blip’ effortlessly about is not compelling. Stop making it.

It costs a set amount of money to play per month. Time = money. Your change is costing me playtime I used to spend having fun, and that means you’re costing me money.

Or, as Henry Rollins once put it, you’re killing me… you’re stealing my life. Just a teeny, tiny bit at a time.

So, no, that rationale doesn’t quite float my boat, honey.

But there is another good reason they could be trying it. I say trying, because they can always change their mind back later. It’s not like they’re bulldozing, and can’t afford the zoning permits to rebuild.

By reverting us once again to the days of Vanilla WoW… we are returning to a time when having a Mage, a Warlock, or a friend who is a Mage or a Warlock was a damn good thing.

The abilities those classes learn, and  especially those Portal spells the Mages work so hard to acquire over the levels, suddenly go from being  handy once in a while to being freaking awesome.

Which is how they were before the Burning Crusade.

We’ll still have LFD. We’ll still have the new, vastly improved summoning stones as well. Well, maybe. We will even have new perks from Guild Leveling letting us summon guildies directly to the raid (unless they changed that when I wsn’t looking). And of course, the boats and zeppelins.

We’re not turning back the clock all the way back to Vanilla.

But we won’t have Dalaran or Shattrath to set our hearth to be able to pop wherever we want.

I find thinking of it as a planned change to bring Mages and Warlocks more love for their class skills far more satisfying than thinking of it as a way for Blizzard to feel that they’re running a populated world.

Unless we ever see player or guild housing, set up in seperate communities where we have a reason for hanging out there, housing that other people can peer into to see us hanging out but they can’t enter because they don’t have the friend or guild key… any attempt to make us populate world areas is purely superficial.

Oh, and Blizzard… I know you don’t read my blog, it’s cool, I’m an idiot. But seriously, from me to you. I love you, and what you do is awesome, but could you please consider player or guild housing? Think about it. If you seriously set aside areas where a guild could buy, say, a small townhouse with outdoor area in a city park, and only guild members were allowed in the area… but people could walk by and see what was going on in the outside area of the ‘lawn’?

You would likely have a real, living breathing community on your hands in that neighborhood. Instead of doing laps while chatting, people would lounge on an easy chair in the sun catching a few rays, or stand around the BBQ drinking beer while they chatted.

Oh yes we would.

Back to the point, in my opinion changes attempted to bring a classes’ unique abilities back into prominance is a good thing. Unless the class ability was poorly thought out in the first place or no longer fits the intent, and needs a revamp.

It will be interesting to see how people adjust to the changes. Will there be tons of QQ? Will people be so thrilled by all the rest of the changes they don’t even notice?

Will the number of Mages and Warlocks rolled suddenly increase?

I can’t wait to find out.