No major news – hit 80 on the rogue on Friday morning. After Thanksgiving I just busted a marathon and 14 hours later my last 2 levels were toasty. Still haven’t run half the instances, so I’m picking up the heroics now for various achievements and gear. My T5/badges held up remarkably well. It’s only now that I’ve started to replace things, with about half my crap being new blues. I have about 9 weapons available right now, not happy with my choices. I won a 143dps MH dagger in a heroic the other night, but I dinged the factions for Ebon Blade and Wyrmrest to get the 130dps MH/OH sword combo. I’m in the process of building rage with Mutilate to just say “fuck it, DPS ain’t worth crying myself to sleep every night” so we’ll how it goes.

Dragonblight is by far my favorite zone so far with Icecrown coming in a close second. Zul’drak is ass. Sholazar, Grizzly and Borean are all tolerable with Storm Peaks and Howling Fjord yet to be touched.

The highlights of my run? Almost entirely solo’d, picked up the epic flying mount (and a purple nether ray from the Skyguard) and am still flush with cash… or as flush as I need to be to support raiding and my normal day-to-day funzies. Leatherworking is coming along with leather farming bein the only issue.

All-in-all a fun beginning to the expansion. I’m looking forward to getting back into real raiding this week with a great semi-PuG Archavon run last night. I’m torn on the timing issues present in Lich King. On one hand it’s lovely to be able to get a lot of varied stuff done in any given evening, but on the other I think it’s weakening the playerbase. I’ve seen it in my own play and it’s readily apparenty in the play of others. All 5-man content I’ve done so far has beeen AE trash for 5-10 minutes, 90 seconds to kill a boss, rinse and repeat. That’s great for the mindless instant-gratification twats running around cryfacing because they couldn’t manage to put in the teeeeeniest bit of effort to do T5+ content, but what about those of us who like a little skill with our peanut butter?

Roll with it, I guess. I’ll throw some pics up when I get home. I loathe the daggers, but I’ve got a pretty striking silouhette.

Yeah, yeah, that was last expansion, but this one doesn’t have a fancy tag line. While I cheated and back-dated this particular post, I WAS waiting in line at midnight. It capped off an excessively long day of driving back from South Dakota (more on that later) and then driving back to Madison from my parents home up north. Two hour nap, then off to wait in line…

What a line it was, too. I had my pre-order waiting at the local Best Buy and the line went halfway around the store. I had my copy in-hand around 12:30am and the line was actually longer than it was when I arrived at 11:30.

Of special note was the conversations of a couple scrubs standing behind me in line. One, apparently, plays a rogue. Poorly, from what I can gather. Anyone who’s done specific content more than once can readily identify folks who haven’t, but insist that they have. Protip: Knowing acronyms and a scan of the BossKillers strat has no actual correlation to seeing content yourself. It also helps to not use fuck and/or shit every 4th word. Despite what Sir Lewis says, “fuck” is not a comma.

That’s all for now, off to explore Northrend!

Yeah, forgot to mention this last week, but my raid dropped Netherspite for the first time. This marked our first complete Karazhan clear, so go us or somesuch.

For a fist-kill the loot was bleh. I got lucky on our first Nightbane kill to walk away with my BP, but no such luck on mah pants! It really chaps my ass that the Spiteblade isn’t an upgrade. Damn you Blizzard! Where are the goddamned swords?!

Oh, wait. They’re in the next 2 tiers of content up. GG, assholes. If I keep pounding away at zee PvP I might get a new pair of swords sometime right before the expansion hits.

note: I don’t think I mentioned it in other wow-posts, but I’m the wtfpwn rogue in the middle with the mongoosed daggers.