World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria

I finally was able to renew my subscription to WoW just after MoP came out, but things got very hectic with school.  So I haven’t been able to play it as much as I would have liked to, because I’ve also been enjoying Guild Wars 2.  I play on an extremely casual basis now, mainly only questing and grouping with other people.  I’ve only had the time to run a dungeon once on my Druid in MoP so far, and she just dinged level 86 yesterday.  This would be the first expansion I haven’t been on every day to max out my toons, farming for mats and running dungeons with guildies to get raid ready.  In fact, I have serious doubts I’ll be able to raid at all on a committed schedule like I used to.

I’ve been feeling really bad for letting some things slide after shifting my focus on school.  I thought I could do it all, but it turns out I’m not super woman, and do need my sleep.  The video production group I started with a couple of good friends back in March is starting to really take off, and as a result, I’ve been taking on more work than usual.  I’ve been enjoying myself immensely working with people on videos.  I can now say with certainty that this is what I want to do as a career choice, something to do with video production and working in collaborative projects with other creative people.

I haven’t been able to write much on any of my sites lately, or do any updating to fix things that got broken through updates on the back end.  The Comic Sans font in the header of this site mysteriously appeared one day, and this is a serious faux pas in the web world because the font is that ugly.  As much as that bothers me, I just haven’t had the time to open up this site to fix annoying things like that.  If I had money, I would probably just hire an assistant to do all of those things for me at this point!  Eh, well, I’ve managed to fix that today so that’s out of the way, but there are still some things that are broken here so you’ll have to bear with me

Aidrana before MoP at level 85 as a Restoration Druid

Aidrana Post-MoP at level 86 as a Feral Druid

After doing this for years, it feels so strange to be at the bottom of the barrel so to speak.  Almost everyone I know has at least one level 90 character (or a level 80 character in Guild Wars 2) and is already well on their way to start raiding.  I feel a little sad that I can’t play as much as I’d like to, but I’m okay with that because I know I’m always welcome whenever I log on.  I miss playing with my guildies and friends, but definitely don’t miss the grind that comes with the game.  What do I think about the expansion so far?

I can’t really decide yet, because I’ve been spending most of my time questing, so I can really only evaluate this part.  But before we get into it, you should also know that I hate questing.  For as long as I can remember, I’ve always just run dungeons over and over again to get to my desired level.  It was easy because I was always the healer on my last few characters that I levelled.  I levelled this way on my druid, paladin and then my priest in that order over the last couple of years.  I didn’t feel like doing the same quests over and over again on my toons, so I tried to run dungeons whenever I could.  It was another reason why I got into healing, because the queue time for dungeons were generally much shorter than it is for DPS players.

Running dungeons right now isn’t the best option for me because I don’t really have the time, so questing is more effective in terms of experience gain and getting gold.  I’ve been patiently questing, but oh geez, Blizzard might have out done these quests, because there’s just so many.  Dailies are starting to pop up, I noticed that after doing the Tillers’ storyline, I now have to do farming and profession related dailies.  As much as I dislike doing dailies, I might be able to swing this in my favor for getting experience quicker.  I’m a little disappointed that Blizzard didn’t add a way to interact with NPCs dynamically like you can in Guild Wars 2 and in some other games.  You just walk right up to the quest giver, or the general area of the quest, you get a dialog box to press a key to accept the quest.  I don’t ever have to click on a NPC to get my quests!

I liked that you get those types of quests where you are looking at stories from different characters, but you can’t skip ahead when you’re doing them.  I can see how it could get a little tiresome after levelling a couple of toons though.  I haven’t had any problem playing Feral, and still have most of my gear from level 85, which is really nice.  I was mildly concerned that I’d be facing the same things that I did in the beginning of the Cataclysm expansion with mobs that hit hard and severe mana issues in healing people.  But it’s looking somewhat stable so far in terms of gear progression with the greens.  Playing in 85 heroic gear is somewhat comparable stat-wise to the new level 86 green and blue gear that drop, so I haven’t replaced much of my gear yet.

It has been generally enjoyable just logging on for a bit at a time to play to take a break from everything that is reality.  Speaking of which, this post has gotten long enough, so I’ll wrap this up and send a thumbs up to Blizzard for this exciting new expansion!  I haven’t found anything so far to complain about, and everything looks par to what I was expecting to see in the game.  I’ll be on occasionally, you’re always welcome to hit me up to run a dungeon or to hang out with!  Company is always welcome