InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Do What You Do."

the wandering dragon (ladykaiyu) wrote,
@ 2008-11-13 21:13:00

Current mood:	discontent
Current music:	none right now

*whimpers*
WoW: Wrath of the Lich King? Win.

A queue with an estimated wait time of over an hour on my primary server: Fail. Epic fail.

Ah well. I guess I shouldn't be at all surprised, given that Feathermoon is one of the servers that was recently offered free character transfers and still has a high population and that the expansion was released at midnight last night...and I'm willing to bet there are multiple people that took vacation time off from work to play because of it being all new and shiny and...yeah.

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inuki42.livejournal.com
2008-11-14 12:30 am UTC (link)

Yeeeeeah. Moon Guard has queues normally during peak times (also one of the free-transfers-off servers...), and I heard it was awful tonight. I was lucky to get in early enough that I was okay. :)

Friends who play elsewhere are like "wait, what's this queue thing?" Even medium-pop servers are queuing; it's kind of insane.

...but. SO SHINY. Aside from some goofiness with timing for the last quest in the DK chain, I am incredibly impressed, and I think the whole thing so far is amazing. The DK quests are really cool, I went all fangirly over Arthas and Rivendare and... well, everyone, because they have these beautiful voices and stuff... and some of them are just... epic is the only word for it. My computer cried, but oh god, so amazing. And I really recommend doing it, just because it's so freaking awesome. I got my DK to 58 and parked her; I'll come back later to really play around with the talents and figure out how the class works (for the quests, "push buttons that are lit up" works pretty good...), but I really only wanted to finish the starter quests. The phasing of the starter zone is really smooth and almost unnoticeable, too; the implementation is amazingly good.

And Northrend, what I've seen of it - it's not epic (yet) but it's very, very well-designed, with lots of quest hubs, and at each hub, a few quests for the area and one or more "go talk to so-and-so at another hub," so it's easy to log in, finish one hub's quests, and then call it good. It's very... portioned? Partitioned? Cut up in small pieces you can handle in a fairly short time. Whatever you'd call that. Some are a chain of 5-8 quests in a row, some are just three questgivers who give you two quests each (or, each gives a 2-3 quest chain), but everything's very close, there's not much pointless running.

Blizz is learning, and it shows - things are looking nicer thanks to tech advances, but they're also getting much better at designing quests and (apparently) encounters that are fun without being too deeply frustrating. (I've heard the instances in Northrend are amazing, too.)

...how much of this pure glee will remain two months from now when everyone starts raiding (after the holidays), well, we'll see. ;)

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ladykaiyu
2008-11-14 11:04 am UTC (link)

Nexus is...wow. Kinda funky at points, but incredibly cool-looking and the music fits perfectly for the area. And they did a very nice job with the encounters, both boss and otherwise. Haven't been to Utgarde yet, but I plan on doing that sometime today--especially since I'm actually doing my questing in the Fjord.

And speaking of quests--I have to agree with what you said regarding them. Also, I'm happy that they effectively had three start zones that people could start with--Scarlet Enclave for the DKs, plus both the starting areas in Northrend. Helps getting quests done when you don't have the entire server competing with you in the first few days...I heard that was one of the major problems with Burning Crusade, with everyone trying to do stuff in Hellfire at the same time at release.

As for the DK and their start quests--agreed. Completely agreed. I have done the full chain on Feathermoon; that DK is currently parked in Thrallmar. I've done the talents with him--he's blood spec focusing on damage and healing, more or less ignoring the tank-ish talents--but I've yet to figure out how to use his abilities to maximum effectiveness. When I get back to playing him I think I'll head back to Orgrimmar and spend some time playing with the target dummies and looking at Recount to see just how to string everything together. And seeing some of the old Naxxramas and Stratholme bosses, plus characters that are going to be bosses later in the game? Win. Pure win.

I'm actually looking forward to seeing the raids, to be honest. So are at least some of the folks in my guild. We'll just have to wait and see how everything works out, eh? I admit to being particularly curious to see how they redesigned Naxxramas...

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