The reason that I haven’t done any of these dungeons is not an accident – I’ve purposefully avoided doing any raiding.  I believe I’ve mentioned here before that I suck at old games because they are hard, but I don’t really think that the games are really any harder to complete, I’m just not willing to put in the required effort anymore.  This parallels my attitude about instances in WOW.  Instances and raids require paying attention and actually playing the game, something which is at odds with the intended effect of my time in game.

The end result of this attitude toward a specific section of the game means that I miss out on personally experiencing a lot of the story and progression until long after it is no longer relevant.  I’m not really worried about it, however; I can live vicariously through others.  Even my brother tends to spend more time in that side of the game.  I will be content right now to continue trying to find rare mobs and grinding rep to get cool stuff and money.

Dual specs are what interest me the most, however.  When I started playing I rolled a priest, but I was a shadow priest.  When we began to do battlegrounds, I got very frustrated with playing a DPS priest and respecced to holy and haven’t looked back.  It helps a lot when my brother are trying to do things with just the two of us.  But when I try to do things by myself, such as the Sons of Hodir dailies, I have a much harder time of things and it takes me much longer to do the quests.  Once I’m able to switch between specs at will I am going to pick up shadow as my second spec so that I can stop compromising.  I’m really looking forward to being able to cause some havoc on my own.

Speaking of the Storm Peaks, my brother and I finally finished what we’re able to accomplish by ourselves, and so we’re ready to move on to Icecrown.  It was pretty cool the way the quests ended, though the Thorim quests were much more interesting.  I’m anticipating some Lich King shenanigans in Icecrown to rival the Sons of Hodir stuff.

Faster mounts have helped to do the various dailies that I’ve been doing instead of progressing through the rest of Storm Peaks and Icecrown.  I did the Frenzyheart dailies in Sholazar Basin until I got the achievement for doing all eight of them at least once – there are only three of them each day, with two of them picking from seven different quests.  Once I got that achievement, I switched over to the Oracles by killing Artruis the Heartless again.  Now I’m doing the dailies for the Oracles in hopes of getting a Green Proto Drake from the Mysterious Egg.

As for the other dailies that I’m doing, I do the Sons of Hodir dailies (I’m almost to Revered with them), the daily for K3 with the land mines, and the Hyldnir daily.  Speaking of the Hyldnir daily, Sunday I managed to pick up the Reins of the White Polar Bear from that, which is a pretty rare drop.  Even though that’s really the only item benefit from that daily, it’s easy enough that I’ll continue to do it for the gold reward.

If I find any free time this weekend I’ll probably try to do some actual questing – I’d like to advance in the story.

When I hit 70 in Outland, I didn’t really feel like I had accomplished anything, as the Burning Crusade had been out long enough that everyone and their brother had reached 70.  Now, even though we took our time to get to 80, I feel like I’m doing it right along with everyone else.

My goal while we finish the Storm Peaks and Icecrown is to make as much money as I possibly can, since I never managed to get enough for my Expert Riding and an epic flying mount.  Since all the quests reward gold instead of experience now, it makes it a little easier.  Also, there are quite a few new dailies in Northrend – I think I’m going to start doing the Frenzyheart and Oracle quests in Sholazar Basin.

I’m really excited about finishing the questlines in the Storm Peaks because of some lore characters.  It will honestly have a hard road topping how epic the Sons of Hodir quests were.

However, the Lunar Festival has been a bit different.  It reminds me more of the Midsummer Fire Festival, with quests and tasks that I didn’t mind repeating.  It also has driven me to travel to places in-game that I haven’t visited before.  You see, there are a large number of Elders in various scattered locations around the world.  The main objective of the Lunar Festival is to visit each one and honor him.  It provides a neat little bit of insight into some of the history of those locations, as well as some faction rep and a Coin of Ancestry (used to purchase some of the holiday items).

The whole objective for me is to try and get the meta-achievement for the holiday, but it looks like I won’t be able to pull it off at the moment.  My main is only level 77 at the moment, and the rest of the Elders that I need are in the Northrend dungeons – at least one is in a heroic version.  That means I won’t be able to get to those until I’m level 80, and I don’t feel like rushing there in these couple of weeks just for this.  It goes against my achievement addiction, though.

For an interesting side effect of this event, I’ve had to visit some of the old instances that I never had the chance to experience.  I then decided to go through all of the dungeons that I didn’t have the achievement for, whether or not I had finished them prior to the launch of the achievement system.  It’s pretty interesting soloing all of those dungeons as a holy priest.  I haven’t tried much over level 50 yet.  This has led to a lot of farming of enchanting materials, since I can disenchant everything I come across.  I’ve been throwing all of those on the auction house and I’ve almost recouped all the cash I spent getting cold weather flying.  I’ve also created a bank alt, and it’s helped out a ton with organizing my auction stuff.  The only things I’ve had trouble selling is the Bolts of Imbued Netherweave and Primal Mooncloth from before the expansion.  Nobody seems to want it, and they are relatively expensive items.

Originally when my brother and I started playing, we created a couple of draenei (so we could start from the beginning in the same place).  We made a decision that we would only play those main characters together.  This of course gave rise to a few times where I’d want to play Warcraft when my brother wasn’t around, so I created another character (a tauren druid).  Then I created another character, and another.  Right now I have the aforementioned druid, a gnome warlock, a blood elf hunter, a human mage, a draenei shaman, a dwarf paladin, and a draenei death knight.  Those are all on top of my draenei priest.  (I happen to like draenei.)  These are all in various states of levels, none higher than 40 aside from the priest and death knight.

So every now and again I would play one or more of these characters when I felt like it.  But now that we’ve been playing through Wrath, I haven’t played any of the other characters much at all.  I just can’t bring myself to go through all those old quests and areas when there is most of an unexplored continent just waiting for me.  It will probably change once my priest makes it through the rest of Northrend, but until that happens I’ll be playing much less.

Next time I’ll be posting a spoiler-laden column about one of the quest chains that I really enjoyed while questing in the Grizzly Hills.

I did, however, manage to pick up some Preserved Holly, as you can see here.

This new expansion and the achievements and everything have served as a way to curb my penchant for creating alts, however.  I tend to play my main most of the time, and when my brother isn’t around I stick to my Death Knight.  I haven’t even logged into my Horde characters in ages.

Sorry this is a pathetically short update, but as I said I haven’t played all that much recently.  It isn’t a sign that I’m going to cut back on playing or anything, just that I’ve had real life seriousness taking up my free time lately.

Death Knights are a new class introduced with the Wrath of the Lich King expansion to World of Warcraft.  Like pretty much everyone else who plays the game, I created a new Death Knight character shortly after I got the expansion.  The DK is a little different from any of the other classes in the game.  All races can be one, and you have to have at least one other character at level 55 or better in order to create one.

Most of my characters are casters.  The closest thing I had to a melee class before was my shaman, who uses a lot of magic.  I didn’t really expect to have much fun playing the Death Knight, but it turned out to be pretty interesting.  The initial area for all Death Knights is spectacularly scripted and set up.  The story is terrific – it also has a lot of ‘holy shit’ moments involving well known characters.  Now I’ve been going through Outland with my DK, and it’s been going really fast.  Blizzard changed the leveling pace from 60-70, so it’s been pretty smooth sailing.  Though the Death Knight is a melee class, it has a lot of abilities and strategies to appeal to the caster in me.  It’s a much easier class for me to solo with, which explains why I’ve been able to play it more often than my other alts lately.

It’s a little interesting to me the different ways in which I play the Death Knight.  My style when I’m soloing with my other characters, even my shaman, could be termed a little timid.  I do my best to avoid fighting and I have to be careful to not bite off more than I can chew.  With the DK, I tend to rush headlong into any situation.  Four or five mobs? No problem.  A patrol just wandered in?  Bring them on.  I’m not trying to say I’m really good at it or anything, it’s just a little bit of a departure from my normal style.  It also helps that as an Unholy-specced DK, I get a ghoul minion that can do some damage.

I’ve died a lot.  For some reason, it doesn’t seem as frustrating as when I do that on my squishy characters.  Maybe it’s because I choose to enter battle with my DK, and on my casters I die mostly because of errors.  It’s been a lot of fun playing it so far, and I can only hope that Blizzard keeps innovating in gameplay.  Maybe a healing class next?  I really am a cleric at heart.

I don’t believe admitting that I’ve given up most of my other PC gaming habits is admitting that I have an addiction to World of Warcraft.  It’s the first MMORPG that I’ve played in earnest (my roommate in college played the original Everquest, so I got a tiny bit of that, and I don’t really count Phantasy Star since I’ve never played that online), and I held off on picking it up for a very long time.  I mean, the game was originally launched in 2004 and I didn’t start playing until earlier this year (2008); they had even announced a second expansion before I jumped on.

What keeps me playing now is that I’m actually enjoying myself.  I can’t remember when the last time I had this much consistent fun with a game.  I mean, there have been some that were terrific for a limited time, but I’ve played World of Warcraft for the better part of a year.  There’s also the fact that most of my playtime has been spent with my brother – co-op play is first and foremost the feature I look for in games.

And now the launch of newest expansion brings to mind another reason I like to play World of Warcraft: being a part of something bigger that keeps evolving.  Blizzard will continue to expand and improve the game for a while yet, so the story will keep growing.  As someone who basically devours well-written stories, an interactive one is just pure icing.

World of Warcraft’s second expansion launched last week.  I’ve been enjoying the edges of it very much.  i say the edges just because I don’t have unlimited time to spend playing, so my brother and I have been playing in little chunks at a time.  I just wanted to give my initial impressions of the expansion.

I don’t know if it’s because I started playing World of Warcraft after the Burning Crusade expansion was added, but this is the most excited for game content that I’ve been since I started.  Just stepping off the boat into the Howling Fjord zone gave the impression that Northrend, on the whole, was huge.  It feels like much more of a third continent (as it’s intended) than Outlands ever did.

Speaking of the Howling Fjord, the background music that plays every so often is terrific.  It really fits the mood and setting of the zone.  That’s been the best so far, but the other zones I’ve visited have had terrific music as well.

I’m not sure how the level 80 stuff is going to go, since there hasn’t been level 80 people long enough to set a routine.  I know at level 70 in the Burning Crusade we spent a ton of time in Shattrath.  I’m not sure if Blizzard has intended for Dalaran to be the same way, but I’ll have to wait until I reach 80 to be sure.

The vrykul are a cool enemy to be the main storyline in Wrath, and the lore for their background is well written.  As for the Lich King, he seems to be interwoven with almost every storyline in the continent, which is great.  Illidan never seemed to be that involved in the Burning Crusade stuff, but maybe that’s just me.

As for the other big addition to the game, the death knight, I’ve gotten one through the introduction storyline.  It was awesome.  I may be a little biased, as a big part of the reason I play the game is the depth of story and lore that Blizzard has created for it.  It really felt like I was working for the Lich King (who is present in person, I might add), and the final denouement to the story was epic, and I refuse to ruin it for those people who might actually want to experience it.

So far so good – I’m having a hell of a good time exploring the new content.  If this is an example of what Blizzard can do, I hope they keep updating this game in the future.