Free Candy For Everyone

I was just over at Amazon seeing what kind of things they had to recommend for me (I love recommendations!) and on the New Releases page I was surprised to see the PS3. “Huh. No way!” I thought. I click the link and it brought me to the PS3 product page where THEY HAVE ONE IN STOCK. Wow.

It’s probably not still there, but you could go look if you really want one.

I didn’t trust that it was really there. No, not at all. So I put it in my shopping cart and clicked to check out. Still there, no disclaimers appeared. “BUY NOW” buttons appeared all over my screen. And you know what? I hadn’t the slightest desire to click one. Well. Ok, that’s not true. I had a tiny little desire, just because those buttons are so darn compelling. But buy a PS3? I can’t see any reason to do so at this point. There are no games that I want for it right now. No games at all.

And despite my early negativity, everyone who’s played the Wii says it’s fantastic. So I’m way more likely to pick one of those up than a PS3 right now. Well, they’re both out right now. I’m closing in on purchasing my new laptop, and that comes first!

The same night I ran my Draenei to level 7, I also started up a Blood Elf Warlock, Elyra.

I really enjoyed the Blood Elf starting zone. It was small and well put together. I never had any trouble finding where to go next, and I liked that they gave you a quest to introduce you to using your racial ability.

I took some pictures at the second little town I came to.

And, of course, I wouldn’t be me without some snarky commentary:

Last week I talked about my preparation for getting the WoW expansion. Now I’m into the real thing here, I’ve been playing the Burning Crusade a bit all week. I’ve started both Draenei and Blood elf alts, and spent some time in the Outlands with my Tauren Druid main.

First up, installing the expansion took a bit more effort than expected. I installed, I patched, I patched, I patched. But seeing the installed screen was kinda exciting:

First thing I did was roll a Draenei hunter. Introducing, Xendrya.

I played her through to level 7 that first time through - here she is at the end of the first play session.

Yes, I have a lot of characters. Those are just the ones on my main server.

I really enjoyed the starting zone. They made it a lot easier to level the cooking secondary skill, and the drop rate on greens seemed pretty high. It was fun to actually explore a bit and not know where I was supposed to go. Though there was, of course, a lot of pretty dumb commentary going on.

The Draenei racial ability is pretty awesome - it’s a heal-over-time spell. It increases in amount as you level. The only thing to be aware of is that it doesn’t tick right away, it takes one update period before it actually heals you. But it’s pretty useful when playing a class that doesn’t have any heals.

This was just awesome. We have a level 12 Shaman telling us that his Healing Wave spell is useless, and he only ever needs to use his racial. He’s probably been playing for less than 5 hours! Like he can really make intelligent statements about how useful things will be over the course of the game? Brilliant!

Anyway, despite my snarking, I had fun rolling a new character and figuring out new quests. So much fun that as soon as I finished the first town’s quests, I logged off and rolled a Blood Elf. Pictures and info to follow!

As all you WoW players know, the Burning Crusade expansion came out this week. And I would love to be playing it right now instead of just writing. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to log in to any realm for the last 40 minutes. *sigh*

So, instead, I’m gonna tell you all about what I did while waiting for the expansion to come out! First, I rolled a new character on a new server. “Whatever, so did we all!” you scoff at me. Oh, but wait! I rolled it 4 days before the expansion came out. Why?? Well, you see, the plan was to start Blood Elf characters with a lot of my friends from my new(ish) job. This means we all need to be on a server, and we chose Uther, where one guy has all his characters. I’d rather be able to play on one server with all my friends, but what can you do? Gotta switch around, I guess.

I wanted to be prepared when the expansion came out with a few bags and some money and nifty items. I figured everything would be super crazy on launch week in the starting areas so I’d get a headstart to make things a bit easier. I decided to make a warrior. I’ve played a Night Elf warrior to level 16 and didn’t enjoy it at all. But it’s one of the few classes I haven’t really given a serious shot to, so I thought why not?

And so Lyreska was born. As always, I like to document my journey to level 10. I didn’t break any records, but finished in a solid 3 hours, 24 minutes.

I was, in fact, logged on at midnight on Monday when the BC content went live. This message showed up in game:

I got my copy of the Collector’s Edition overnighted from EB Games mid-Tuesday, so I didn’t get to experience that content immediately. But that’s ok. I was glad I had it in hand that soon!

I’m off to check that I can log in. Look back here for updates on the Blood Elf and Draenei characters I’ve made (including my super long times to level 10!) sometime soon.

I’ve been thinking about and talking about the WoW expansion pack for a long time now. Over a year, in fact! The idea of new races has really had me excited. And now it’s practically here. Midnight tomorrow, some folks will have the Burning Crusade in their hands. They’ll be able to play in the wee hours of the night. I will not be one of those people, however. I pre-ordered my Collector’s edition online, and I’ll be waiting for it to arrive in the mail. Plus, I have work and stuff, so it’s probably best if I’m not up all night playing.

But it’s here, it’s here, it’s here! I can’t help but be a little giddy. I don’t know whether I’ll try to log on Tuesday at all, I’m sure it’ll be a zoo, packed with people everywhere. But maybe I’ll just try to see what I can see (without the expansion installed myself, of course). I expect most of what I see will be more of the long queues we’ve been experiencing for the last few weeks. Oh well. I’m sure it’ll get cleared up soon. And then we can all play our new Blood Elf Paladins together. That’ll be funny.