A brief update

Well the WoW Blogsphere's been quiet for the last few days because everyone's been too busy playing the expansion. Normally I'd use my lunchbreaks at work to offer my own insights, but I've been off for a few days of annual leave.

I'm not going into much detail. Ulushnar has been my number one concern and he's currently at about halfway through level 75. I haven't exactly been going flat-out, but nor have I been taking my time. He's completed almost all the quests in the Borean Tundra and Howling Fyjord starter areas, and he's making a good crack at the Dragonblight ones. He's also led a load of runs into The Nexus, Utgarde Keep and Azjol'Nerub.

Initial thoughts are I'm having a fecking ball! Blizzard have made a few nice changes like spreading out the quests among smaller hubs rather than have you running back to the same 2-3 hubs in every zone.

I love the asthetic of the place as well. After the vaguely sci-fi overtones of Outland (which I didn't mind), it was nice to get down to some good, honest fantasy. And with that comes good, honest fantasy-looking armor.

I've been merrily replacing Ulu's mix of T5, T6 and Badge gear with a hodge-podge of crafted items and a few instance quest rewards. They've done a much better job this time of making all the levelling armor drops having a similar look and feel, so the end result is Ulu looks more like a scary, bad-ass viking and less like he fell asleep and someone drew graffiti all over his armor. The biggest problem I've seen is Ulu's avoidance is in the toilet. By the time I hit level 75, most of the outland items are giving me about 2/3rd the values they were at 70, simply because of the way Ratings scale. For levelling and instancing, I've basically reduced myself to aiming for roughly the same amount of Stamina, keeping enough Defense Rating for at least 5.4% uncrittability and a good chunk of Strength on top of that.

He hit 75 about 3 hours ago and I've spent the time since then playing with Shield of Righteousness. Even in his slightly gimped gear, Ulu hits for 1.4k on it, or 2.8k on a crit. That's a tasty chunk of threat, and it actually gives Ulu some meaningful DPS.

I'll write more on Tuesday afternoon when I'm back at work. Laters.