This was posted up at MMO-Champion over the Christmas break. It’s really some of the best animation I’ve seen from ANY game so far so enjoy!

Catch the HD version at this link.

On a slightly related note, THAT is how rogues should be, none of this sissypansy dagger bullshit.

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.

We’ve been running Zul’Aman bear runs non-stop for the last 6 weeks or so trying to rack up some bears. The bad news? We fell short too often and as a consequence 2 members of our group won’t get theirs.

The good news?

Yeah, that’s me. I got the last Amani War Bear bear we’re likely to get. So dandy and stuff.

Patch 3.0.x is likely to go live on Tuesday, with much gnashing and wailing of teeth. Mostly by me. The buff changes, class homogenization and rogue fuckery have me on edge. Not only is combat a joke, rogues in general are still 2nd-class citizens within the existing setup. It’s broken, clearly, the questions are a) how long it will take to fix and b) how much they’re even willing to fix things.

I’ve tooled around in beta a bit. Enough to know that leveling won’t be an issue for a death knight or rogue, regardless of spec/changes. So I’ve got a 45-day window or so at least for them to fix end-game before I’m even there to get spanked. Like most things WoW-related, only time will tell.