Well, after playing a little more, I decided WoTLK is the suck and I'm going back to play Final Fantasy..NOT!!!
It's been QUITE AN AWESOME RIDE and it hasn't even been a full week yet since the launch of Wrath.
Blizzard did an amazing job this time around as I have said before. It's like they fired everyone who worked there before and hired extremely crazy LSD-drug induced- shamanistic artists instead. hahaha. Okay or maybe they just had more resources.
We're still split up. (sad, taint, tivi) "group GO GO GO!" and my group (alachia, flipmax, felix) the "oooooh. hang on screenshot group" LOL. Okay, I'm still pretty fast at quest leading etc but I LOVE being able to take my time this go around. We take side detours a lot to check things out or try things out but we stay pretty much on track with questing. Oh and I do my Kalu'ak daily quest every day too! Must get exalted for my [Nurtured Penguin Egg]!
On Saturday, we had time before Tivi was going to be able to play so we decided to hit up an instance since we had five of us on. The question was to do The Nexus or Ahn'Kahet?? Everyone had been doing The Nexus so I said we should try Ahn'Kahet first because I thought it sounded cooler.
I didn't realize what an awesome choice I made. Here's the thing about Wrath that makes it much more intriguing and inspiring to play than the previous WoW releases. The environment is far more advanced. There is hardly a stretch of land that goes on without a huge 3D component to it. The added depth just makes the game THAT much more immersive. You don't feel like you're just on some picture mapped over 2D terrain someone laid down. It looks and feels like a real landscape.
Northrend continues to spark my imagination and every turn, I'm literally sounding like a parrot when we enter a new zone "OMG! THAT IS SO AWESOME!"
And Ahn'Kahet (5 man dungeon in Dragonblight just a couple clicks north of Star's Rest) is something to behold. It's set in the depths of a cavern and you think you're about to go into another "rocky type MC dungeon" but you go through the new fancy portal graphic and WHAM! It's this entire civilization uncovered with bejeweled silk webs and elaborate temple zigurats.
The sister dungeon to Ahn'Kahet is Azjo-Nerub which is a more primal version of beautiful. It does have more cave-like qualities but it's so rich in glowing plant life and stalactite details that you can't help try to eye at as much of it as possible ....as you're taking on waves of spider mobs. lol.
That brings me to the game play...while yes, you're still doing very similar action-types for quests like killing X amount or gather X amount things seem different this time around. I don't read the quests much other than to find out the objective. Skim skim skim...kill X..skim...at X close log. good! let's go!
However, the grouping sequence of quests and the graphic story telling of the quests seem SO MORE pervasive in Wrath. You can't help but remember what you did for most of the quests or the adventure bundle of the quests....ie the Murloc village. hehe. You don't forget baby murloc and murloc suits, a really great homage to Blizzcon.
Hacking up bodies with a machete, making oil-covered wolves poop and sifting through them for parts, saving baby mammoths, riding in a canoe, finding dead gnome pilots, saving baby murlocs, mating seals, fighting my inner-self atop a mountain, harpooning bags of gold from an airplane.....yeah. It's been hella fun questing. I'm so glad we opted not to instance grind! I would have missed out on a lot of content.
And there's so much more content to go! I've only been to Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra so far in the quest chains. Tonight, we plan on hitting up Dragonblight. Hopefully the creamy middle is as good as it normally is (BAAAAAD oreo joke that went wrong but am not deleting it so you can grasp the serious alachi-idiocracy my group has to put up with on a daily basis). Dragonblight is the creamy white patch on the map between Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra...gah. you get it.
I'll be uploading an album of my adventures so far by tonight. You'll see Flip's mage in the screenshots a lot. He always rides in front of my camera. "DANGIT, Flip, move! Camera whore!" lol. Oh well, as my dad says, they can't all be postcard pics.
I'm currently level 74 and 4 bars. I think I'm making pretty good time for not rushing things. We've hit up Utgarde Keep, The Nexus, Ahn'Kahet, Azjol-Nerub, and Drak'Tharon Keep dungeons so far.
Oh yeah, also when we were level 71, we snuck in behind some level 75s to get into the Violet Hold Dungeon in Dalaran. We had no idea what was going on until we beat Wave 1 of the instance. lol. Only 17 more waves and we would have made it!!! Luckily once you fail a wave, the instance resets so we were able to escape!
I'm loving it a lot. Leveling for the first time in a new area is like the honeymoon. I'm going to try and enjoy it as long as it lasts!