(WoW) Cataclysmic Log, parts 1 and 2

Acquisition
Since I was working nights anyway, it seemed easier to swing by and pick up my copy around midnight on the way home. I showed up at about 11:50, and the line moved after the turn of the hour pretty quickly. Simple and easy. There were, perhaps, forty customers (give or take) present, including gabefinder who had been waiting since around 10. Even if I were home bored, I wouldn't have come that early. Then again, I didn't spring for a collector's edition either.

Installation
So, I got home with slightly less than an hour before Cataclysm content was due to go live. Plenty of time to get installed. And it was. I think the pre-expansion patch (which really contained a good bit of the data and was a download) took a lot longer. So far, so good.

Go-live!
12:01 am, December 7th. Hmm. No, everything seems normal and "old." No worgen, no XP bar. While discussing this and after a couple logins, a server message came up announcing the new content was ready and a restart was required. Actual time was about 12:10. No biggie.

There was a minute or two delay logging in as, presumably, the authentication servers handled many, many requests, but no actual queue and no server crashes. Hands down the best release I've seen yet for the game.

Farewell to Northrend
So I zipped around, turning in the quests I had I my log. Sadly, they didn't give experience, but they did give guild rep. I also heard some people saying they weren't getting XP from kills up there. Glitch? I don't know. There were some reports of new stuff not giving XP either, but I didn't see that myself.

Whirlwind Tour of Stormwind and Out to Sea
So I rounded up the quests for the new zones, trained up my professions, totally spaced archeology (which may be just as well, since you have to level that up from 0 and can't do that in new zones), bought my flight license, marveled at seeing Stormwind from above, then immediately shipped off with some mercenaries to battle the Horde.

Or so they told me.

The ship was attacked by a giant, squidy sea beast, leaving me to be rescued underwater. Welcome to Vashj'ir! The place was unquestionably crowded, this being the first hour of play here, but most of the content still worked okay. There was one or two drop-heavy quests that got to the point of being a pain. I didn't run out of breath once. The underwater movement struck me as mediocre, but not bad until I actually set foot on the ground. You're given a neat, loping/bounding gait along the sea floor that moves pretty quick and actually looks really good. And then you get a sea horse mount, which helps, too.

The quests move more linearly through the zone than I recall in previous expansions, directing you to the next encampment rather than giving you two or three points to possibly go through. So far, I've been knocked off a boat, saved drowning sailors, battled a vicious shark, been kidnapped by naga (and saved), found my first few pieces of obsidian (must... have... more!), prevented the mining and control of a giant sea creature, fended off assaults, and killed many, many naga.

I haven't ducked into any dungeons yet. In fact, I haven't yet found the one in Vashj'ir. It feels like I'm about halfway through the zone, though I'm at level 81 and some change. It's been good, though I do look forward to seeing it again later with less rush and crowd. The gear I'm seeing so far is so-so compared to my main set, not totally blowing it away yet, but giving a run for its money. I think it's pretty clear that I won't be the first in the guild to hit level 85 or anything, but I won't be the last either.

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A little over twenty-four hours since go-live...

Guild Stats
Well, we definitely have a lot of people coming out of the woodwork to play. It's been no trouble for the guild to max out guild experience at the daily cap. This seems rather low, considering we hit the cap well before the end of the day, and we're not a big guild. It looks like the guild will hit level 2 (gaining a small personal XP increase to members) on Thursday. I'm not sure if it'll be 2-3 days per level, then, or if the XP required to level the guild scales. If it's the latter, it'll be quite a while before we see the upper levels of guilds, even for the high-population ones.

And I hit the cap on weekly guild reputation gains at partway into Friendly, which seems especially odd as it wasn't an even number. Maybe the human reputation bonus skewed things a little, I don't know. At that rate, it'll be several weeks before anyone is Exalted with their own guild. I guess that's okay. There's some less pressure to race to the end that way, though I wasn't even particularly trying for this, just doing quests.

Personal Stats
I finished out Vashj'ir at just under halfway through level 82. Again, I'm left wondering if the scaling is going to slow things down, or if I'm going to be close to max level leaving Deepholm.

I'm watching derived stats take a nosedive. After months of having something like .2% miss chance against mobs three levels higher (which would be level 83 raid bosses), I'm now seeing an occasional miss against level 81-82 non-elite mobs. This is not a surprise, as we're getting into the realm where things are focused on level 85 behavior and stats.

Gear Swapping
Still, a lot of things I'm finding via drops and quest rewards are comparable to my ICC gear. Better sometimes, in some ways, worse in others. Of course, very little of what I'm getting is tank-oriented - almost all the plate is for DPS. Which is understandable. And that's where my own biggest changes have come in. My paladin is running around in a mixed tank/DPS set.

Surviving
I haven't died yet. That's not necessarily a surprise, as a protection paladin's focus is survival, but some quests toss you against elites that seem like they should be harder than they are. In fact, I noticed a distinct lack of any quests showing up as group quests. Everything I faced in Vashj'ir, beginning to end, seemed to be soloable with only perhaps three quests that involve a "use this item to weaken your opponent" scenario.

Vashj'ir in Review
The zone was a somewhat different experience than I'm accustomed to. It's more linear than previous work. It's more cinematic - literally, there are three or four notable non-interactive cut scenes. The zone seems really big, and the underwater three-dimensionality adds to that (and makes it hard to find things that show on the minimap sometimes). There's a storyline here, from shipping out, to wrecking, to battling the naga and aiding the native creatures against them.

It's a change that I appreciate, but it still feels strange in a world that's usually more static. The one drawback I felt in the cinematics and scripted events was the pacing - especially during a couple of the sub runs, I was left twiddling my thumbs wondering when things would pick up. I think it's good overall?

I'm curious to see if the stronger plotlines are a general thing or specific to the zone. Most guildmates seem to have started here, so I have heard very little about Mount Hyjal, the other level 80-82 zone.

Professions
My mining is going up, and I've found a moderate amount of obsidium. There's a catch to that stuff, though. You have to smelt it at a 2:1 ratio. Then, for use in anything but a few engineering recipes, you have to turn it into folded obsidium at a 2:1 ratio. So getting a full stack of usable material requires four full stacks of ore.

That feels pretty brutal and, correspondingly, my blacksmithing seems to be going up more slowly. I have had the chance to make a few things, at least, that are currently a step better than quest rewards as far as item level. We'll see if that keeps up.

I've found a very few gems, and I think four volatile earths. Several patterns I've got access to take eight. Heh. Fishing is only going up by virtue of my doing the daily, but it's nice to get a reward on that. Heck, I haven't even tried to fish in Vashj'ir. I don't know if you can. I've come by lot of fish bits, though, and been cooking those up. I think cooking is my highest skill at this point. I've not even touched first aid yet - I may be shipping all my cloth off to my tailor alt to get started on that instead. I like having first aid trained up, but bandages are sort of a low priority for me.