Eirebull hits level 71

Eve over, I logged onto Eirebull and started knocking out the Borean Tundra quest hubs. Everything south of Warsong Hold is now finished and I am helping out the druids of DEPTHA. I must say two things have struck me about WotLK.

Firstly
There is a sense of humour. The bloodthirsty animal rights activists (the druids) want the crazed looters wiped out. The Crazed looters all work for Nesingwary and spout of things like ‘only 40 more horns to get that new gun’, a direct poke at players and grinding. You can’t talk to the druids for 3 minutes after killing an animal or they try to kill you, the debuff says, don’t talk to the druids for 3minutes or until you find some way of washing off the blood’.

Secondly
The visuals are great. Yes they are cartoon like but they still look excellent. I am thinking about Warsong Hold, the Mist with the Viking like raiders, the flaming bonfires and the spider lair instance. As you can see I haven’t got that far yet.

Eirebull hit level 71 last night, she isn’t shy about killing anything that gets in her way and taking every quest that is going. Apart from the 2 instances I played the night I started I haven’t been back into an instance. There has been very little ganking though you see it mentioned in general, I certainly haven’t been the focus of it, whenever I meet and alliance player or indeed any other player there is usually no problem about sharing a quest node, usually a boss type mob.
I also note that Eirebull can kick out huge amounts of damage. When I use all the cool-downs (wolves, fire elemental, earth elemental, bloodrage, shamanistic someorother) nothing survives. In fact single boss mobs go down disappointingly easily. Where Eirebull gets into trouble is when she takes on several at the same time.

Eve when tired

Last night I had the opportunity to play as much as I could take. So I started off with Eve to check skills, re-organise things a bit and while I was at it, took a mission and got a level 3 Serpentis Extravaganza.

I almost fell asleep.

For me to enjoy Eve I need to be awake, on the ball and not tired after a day at work. I need a goal, interaction and excitement. At the moment I only really log on to change skills. Perhaps when the excitement of WOW dies down and the guild has it’s first tiff then I will think differently but until then I think the only reason I will log on is to show my face in the corporation and change skills.

Quantum Rise

As a result of WotLK, Eve has come to a temporary stop, I log on to change skills and that is about it. Handy for Slayfoe’s Bull that should have nice gunnery skills by the time I get fed up of WotLK. I have been trying to get a handle on why Warcraft is more appealing in the immediate and it must simply be that actual humanoid avatars are easier to relate to than spaceships.
A new expansion, Quantum Rise came out in Eve and apart from 2 items I haven’t really seen a change:

Splash screen
Certificates – greatest waste of time and yet strangely compelling
The certificates will make it much easier for a new player to get on in the game by effectively giving them a syllabus of skill-ups to follow. They can then claim a certificate and work towards the next level. Unfortunately I have been quite scatter gunned and yet focused about my training so I don’t qualify for many certificates. These certificates are then either private or public which I presume will help in application to corporations.

I will be back, as I suspect that Eve is better in the long term, it is just that WoW provides more immediate gratification for the moment – we’ll see how that changes once guild drama and raiding starts up.

Wrath of the Lich King

It is the middle of November and WotLK has been out for 5 days. Even before it came out I was back in Azeroth levelling Flutter. I bought my copy Thursday and Eirebull came back to life, the quest log was cleared out, the bank ruthlessly sold off, the bags emptied, the action bars started anew and talents reselected.

Then it was hop on the zeppelin and off to the frozen north. First stop - Warsong keep. My impressions are that Northrend is beautiful, it is full of vertical surfaces, cliffs, lift shafts, vertical dungeons and northern lights. They really have done a very good job with the setting, it is visually very special.

My first evening was two instances with the guild, Utgard Keep and some Spider instance which was the more impressive of the two. It didn’t cause us any difficulty with Kara/ T5 level gear. The loot is similar though with a lot more haste type stats that will take a while to understand. The second session was getting a feel for the south of the starting zone round Warsong keep. The mobs were HARD and it took a while to adjust and stop biting off more than I could chew. The rewards are not yet good enough to replace purple gear, I suspect it will be the next area quests that will do this.