Impressed.
The word that pops into my mind when I think about Cataclysm and the response I give when asked what I think about the release. I was online about 30 minutes before it went "live". I put live in quotation marks because my server never went down...at all. There were a couple, maybe 4, of times the server lagged for a couple seconds but nothing to cry about.
I logged out at 02:57 and chatted with my guildmates until 0300 and logged on. The only issue I had was that I was parked at the Sons of Hodir quest hub and turned in 3 quests....and received no XP. Soon, all realized that XP outside the new zones wasn't enabled so it was a mad scramble to the new zones/instances.
I leveled from 80 through 82 in instances with guildmates. It was unbelievable how much XP per kill we were getting. We started with Throne of the Tides and then moved on to the new Black Rock Depths instance. BRD was awesome. We were running it while the bug where we were getting XP from that big bastard that cleaves all those guys as long as we tagged them first (which was fun, blink..arcane explosion..iceblock or tank CD's and spamheals) but at 7k xp per kill, it was well worth it. Started questing in Deephome(Deepholme?) and really loved the improvements to the quest info, map, and continuity of quests. I wish I had mining on my mage, because it was ridiculous before they nerfed the mining spawns, it was fricking everywhere and at over 400g a stack the first couple of days, wow!
Uldum was great although it grew pretty monotonous after a couple of hours of uber-egypt influenced stuff. Harrison Jones was funny for about 3 quests and then became an enemy of the state, IMO.
Twilight Highlands, a great zone. I enjoyed every second while I quested in this zone. I hit 85 while about 1/2 through the zone. Uggh, 9million XP to go from 84-85 was gross to look at but not really a huge issue. It didn't seem to take any longer to level this level than any other while questing.
HEROICS-ARE HEROIC, regular dungeons are not. The difference between them is enormous. I have run one heroic NOT in a guild group and will not do so again for a long time. I love the fact that CC isn't strictly mandatory, but drastically improves the time it takes to get through the instance. The group I ran most of the heroic instances with initially was priest (of both specs), warrior tank, ele shaman, mage(myself), and a rogue. Massive amounts of CC, sap/hex/sheep/fear/shackle/shaman elemental lock thingy, it's about the perfect group for cataclysm heroics.
Gearing is painful at the moment, most of my gear is level 346, 333trinket and 318 trinket, green wand (oh how I hate you wand, you never like to come from the same tier I currently raid). I'm sitting at 16.92% hit and will be over the cap as soon as I change one of my gems. I was a little irritated by the dps meta gem still requiring more blue gems than red gems but at this point, most people are going to have to gem for hit anyway so using a 40hit gem in blue slots and int/hit in others should favor that meta gem.
Tol Barad, or as I like to call it at the moment, Tol Bad is terrible. The server I am on is horde dominated but somehow lose TB during the day and if you have ever been on the offense, it's terrible. I can't wait to read what Gevlon has to say about bads in TB, lol. It seemed like when one is on defense, all you have to do is turtle from one base to the next and you'll not lose. The towers are inconsequential to both offense and defense, serving only to prolong your suffering. It seems like the match is decided within the first five to seven minutes and the rest is torture, but that's just me....I COULD be wrong.
Overall, I'm extremely happy with how things have been done with the release and most everything with the expansion. I'm super excited to get in and play in some of the new raids.
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