Impressions over the last few days.

Started taking screenshots last night, and realized that there's a lot of really beautiful/comical stuff in BC as opposed to how rare this kind of material was in classic. Once again, gg Blizzard.

Btw, the music in old hillsbrad is amazing.

Congrats to blizzard on a job well done

We are finishing up Terokkar forest with our quests (which is kinda sad since we're already level 68, meaning that we have 4 entire zones to go through, and we didnt even touch anything past mana-tombs). That run on ramble behind there, makes Hellkrew recognize blizzard on how good of a job they did with content going from 60-70. For the first impact, the massive amount of quests and content that presents itself to players is staggering. Quest after quest after quest of endless content, lore and combat. Interestingly enough, this brings us to our second huzzah to blizzard. All this new stuff isnt pointless, its freaking amazing. The bomb at the firewing town? The battle between auchindoun and sha'tar SW of the exploded city? The storyline flow is great. Heck, the graphic effects are freaking amazing. The battle mentioned just now, with all the draenie spirits being siphoned and used to empower a corrupted vindicator who is entombed in a huge tomb literally STEAMING shadow energies? Way cool. Tomb of light and the power ball that summons the guardian and later devours restless spirits? Yes please. The murloc quest in Zangarmarsh where the dancing murlocs own the daggerfen village? Way to guy little guys. Instances arent too shabby either. We're not even done with this place...we still have 5 zones, 10 dungeons and 4 raids to go through. We <3 BC.

Congrats blizzard on a great expansion.

PS. Omg, blizzard...sand gnomes? Whoever invented those buggers is a genius, give him a huge box of chocolates. Also poison the chocolates because killing the damn buggers doesnt give experience.

Hellfire...err...Hellfrost?

So I gave into the temptation. I was continuously dueling this frost mage outside stonebreaker in terokkar and I was having a pretty hard time. Sure, I could definetly beat him, and If his cooldowns were against him, the match was mine... but still. So I gave in and when I hit 66 (update 66) I specced Hellfire into frost. 2 words can describe the change: freaking ridiculous. In all honesty, Hellfire, the master of flame and lava, pyromancer of molten fury is now Master G Ice Cube. From a solo PvE perspective, its not as good as fire, since fire's 2shottiness is more fun. From a PvP perspective, its like black and white. More surivavability, more instants, more utility, more CC, more CONTROLLED burst etc. Still gotta try group pve.

Quick update

Went to a college fair, my insight pretty much brings my favorite options down to Wharton (UPenn), Stern (NYU) and BU (boston). We'll see how that goes. Anyways, Mage is 65, warlock finished his enchanting rods and has tailoring up to 247. Finally finished Zangarmarsh quests, moving to Terokkar...should be interesting to finally get out of that swamp.

Leveling With your Friends

http://wowgrrl.com/ made a post about how her character was leveling with members of her guild and this made me think about how I am leveling and how that's working out. Starting out from level 1-60 I leveled more or less with my friends' Undead Priest right by my side. We were able to go through most of the quests in Azeroth (admittedly we did skip entire zones and some instance quests. Most notably EPL, Silithus, North Barrens, Gnomeregan and all of the 60 instances except for BRD and DM). The experience was fun and effective, our classes were able to synergize pretty well and allowed for firepower, healing, aoe, kiting etc...hell, even magetank ;). At 60, my other friend's warlock finally caught up to us and all of outlands it was 3 of us leveling together in instances and all the quests. Oddly enough, when he joined us and started playing, it all of a sudden felt much much more difficult to do this playstyle. Not only does each mob kill equal less experience to you, but its also much more difficult to coordinate 3 people as opposed to only 2, especially on quests with low drop rates or when you have to pick up x items on the ground. Instances seem to be the easiest, and best, way for us to level. However, because we are going to school on weekdays, we are forced to quest on weekdays (1.5hrs playtime) and zerg the instances on weekends. Although its still fun, and the experience is good for the most part, it seems like blizzard designed the outside Azeroth around two players. Honestly, going from 1-60 with 2 players seemed very very fluid, perhaps much more so than going solo. The group exp system and rest system made it easier to make up shared mob exp and many quests were done faster/easier than they could have been otherwise (mage/priest duo of Araj in WPL when we were 58 :D). Although its still fun, and the experience is good for the most part, it seems like blizzard designed the outside Azeroth around two players.

Looking at deep fire PvP

I was dueling Hellbringer the other day and came to the realization that deep fire pvp is pretty bad mostly because it relies on me stopping to cast a 3 second fireball to do any real damage. Other than that, I can burst fire blast, blast wave, dragon's breath and then im out of damage for the next 20 seconds. I cant really do anything, maybe a scorch, other than spam AE and run away...which doesnt work too well nowadays. Suggestion? Bring down Blast wave cooldown to 15 seconds and lower dragon's breath to a 10 second cooldown, this way its on par with cone of cold. which currently does more damage than DB if specced mid-frost, which I don't think is right. Perhaps the DB change is sort of overpowered, so retroactively lower the duration of the disorient to 1.5 seconds