Obviously, I'm an altaholic. There's a pretty good argument to be made that I'm also to grown up and tied down to get any serious WoW play done. I've been playing since April and my highest character is right now at 58 ½. That includes a full three month recruit-a-friend at triple experience rate (Mumphred is 43)

I like playing different characters, classes and races. If no-one was listening and it was safe to do so I might admit to enjoying being on both factions as well. Nevertheless it was inevitable that I would eventually get to the point of needing an expansion to continue.

Seems like another opportunity to write to my future self.

Hello You (Me),

Just wanted to drop you a line and let you know that I'm about to embark on The Burning Crusade.

It probably seems strange to you now but I am not really sure how good it could be. I hear really good things. I get the impression that Blizzard are faintly embarrassed by Vanilla WoW, like it's the dodgy fan-fic they wrote before they got published. Or the demo tape recorded in their mother's basement.

Even so, from here, it seems like a new continent and more quests just seems like continuation. Don't get me wrong; I like what I'm playing now. Maybe it's peaking a bit in terms of industrial NPC packing processing and looting. But there's always something new around the corner. Different levels of play.

I'm doing fine, thanks for asking. My Auction House work is coming along. Got plenty of cash on both sides of the faction barrier now. Little bit less on the Alliance but everybody gets what they want. I believe I am on pretty good track to fly around Outland when I get there. Maybe I wont even need it. A druid should get flight form, right?

Tell me, Future Self, are you enjoying your Blood Elf Rogue? How is the Dranae Inscriber coming along? Making money? I have to ask, did my message reach you at exactly the moment before you upgrade to Wrath of the Lich King? I hope so because that puts you in a similar position to the one I find myself in now.

Do you think the changes will be the same? More so?
What can you tell me without spoilers?

See you in the future,
Me (You)

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Technically, I suppose, it was more like a week but I got quite a bit done on Saturday. The main one was Grexel who's zhevra has burning a hole in her bank bags for some time. In the mean time it seemed only fair to ding Undabridge (troll hunter) even though he has been neglected to the point of abuse.

I kinda liked doing it all on Pirate day. That was fun. And apparently there's a dress up your mount thingy as part of Brewfest.

The other thing I did on Saturday was indoctrinate a new player.

We are up to houseguest number 2. It's not that our primary houseguest shows no interest it's more that her Warcraft is an indulgent, eye-rolling vicarious thing. HG2 just wants in.

So while Katyana was otherwise engaged we rolled up a new character on her account to test. HG2 wanted a redheaded human female mage as well. What is it with the people I know? Katyana says she can't relate to a non-human toon. It might be a matter of the tendencies of people new to gaming in general.

10 Let HG2 = fifipi
20 continue

I set fifipi going on the wolf/kobold slaughtering missions and helped her get a hang of the controls. Then I set up a new priest to hang out with her. It's because I secretly want to be Tamarind.
There's another new player in our village. He's noobing around with a nelf as far as I can tell. We may have the makings of a local guild on our hands.

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My Ravasaur is all grown up. Big enough to carry a Tauren and not look daft. I never really bonded with my Epic Kodo. It's the eyes. They look like evil robots. Not that I have anything against evil robots, your Governatorship, they just lack personality.

Katyana was a bit the same way about the swift mounts. They're all a bit warlike. Maybe we need to get her that monster cat the alliance side can grind out. Mumphred's got his charger.

Only poor Grexel's left behind. She's got the Zhevra in her bank but she hasn't quite managed to squeeze out Lvl40.

I keep meaning to take her out but Paronymous is too happy swooping around the insect hives on his new beastie.

And the spice! We must control the spice!

Sithilis, if you don't know, has little geysers of magic dust. Both factions are in a race of some kind to gather 200 units of it. The current score on Saurfang is Horde 38 Alliance 37. I dropped in two this morning.

My first shot at it was rife with every possible nooishness you can imagine.

The aim is to carry the dust back to a special collection point, glowing as you go and slowed down to make you vulnerable. So the first thing I did when I found some was hop on my sweet new ride. Uh-uhn. Mounting up drops the spice.

Then I hurried back to Cenarion Hold to find the depot; Cenarian Hold is not the depot. The depot is actually marked on the map big enough to be seen from space but being new to the region I hadn't explored down that far.

All the while I'm jumping out of my skin because I assume the full force of the Alliance is about to fall on me for gathering another 200th of their doom. They didn't. A Tauren Death Knight (first one of those I've seen) whispered me to help and grouped up with me so I'd know where to go.

He rescued me a bit too because I picked up a whole bunch of sandworms on the way. Fortunately he got there while I was still putting up a good fight so I didn't feel too much like a dweeb. Then just when it looked like I was going to get away with it I totally failed to find the machine to hand it in. I just ran around trying stuff and getting increasingly mortified until he took pity on me again.

The only way I can think of to atone for this noobishness is to collect as much spice as I can.
For the Horde.

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There's that Monastery again. Doesn't it just look like it should have lightning behind it? By a remarkable coincidence that is exactly how our second attempt went south.

We went in pretty fast but we got a bit messy and picked up too many Scarlet Chaplains. Razzinfrazzin healer frazzers. So we did the corpse run a Lo! Every monk in the place had been replaced by a replica of itself only alive again.

Then we tried a new strategy. Basically less area effect from Katyana and more focused extermination one at a time. This may well be a blazingly obvious truism to non-Noobs but it made a massive difference to us. Kind of like pacing for a long haul up a hill rather than sprinting at it and hoping to make the top before having a heart attack.

Anyway it worked well and we were happy to have figured it out for ourselves. Our houseguest told us that the average UK couple says around 800 words per day to each other, so we were feeling pretty smug about that too. Even if around 4000 of ours were variations on 'Fireblasting now!' and 'I get him'.

But all the while a storm was brewing.

Hong Kong has some mad electrical storms. The humidity gets so high that you can see it hanging in the air. The moment the temperature drops, say, by night falling, it all comes tumbling down.

For a while it was awesome. Dark red skies. Background thunder. Brilliant flashes of light. The dogs going mental.

But then I pull a couple of Monks and a Diviner and start my routine but Katyana doesn't help. Instead she says 'Are you ready?'

On her screen nothing's happening.
On mine the fight is kind of moot because everybody is doing the half cast spell dance.

Bugger.

Fortunately all the technology is okay but we couldn't face going in again. We had a little look in the Graveyard and it was a doddle so we just romped through it. The other fortunate thing was that we had already picked up the book for Katyana's mage quest so we were able to trundle back to Tabetha and hand that in.

We'll close this damn Monastery. Just not quite yet.

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I have noticed two things: Firstly that my blogs have been developing a kind of moaning quality and secondly that I don't think I ever get to play WoW at the moment.

Now the QQ is under my control and I can just stop doing it. The other turns out to be somewhat illusory. I suppose its a symptom of not being able to play as much as I would like. Nor, in fact, as Katyana would like; her schedule is pretty extreme too.

Digging through my screenshots, though, reveals that we have covered quite a bit of ground. Not the kind of speed that would, say, get us up to 60 in the recruit-a-friend period but that's not really what we're after. Personally I am perfectly happy to wallow around in Old World content as long as it lasts and Katyana would rather follow me than have to read the map (ooh snap)

Our main goal has been the Mage Quests for an uber wand from Tabetha of the swamp. It's clearly designed to get you travelling and it's done just that. Got some pretty mad hats along the way. We've been all over and we're nearly there. Just a book of some sort... should be simple enough.

Funnily enough, the only thing I could remember us doing for sure is the thing I haven't got pictures of. Fortunately (sort of) we will have to return to the Scarlet Monastery in a level or two.

We were more or less up to the Library as a challenge it's just a little slower with two. Turns out the refresh rate in there is a killer. I had been merrily telling Katyana that they won't be back unless we leave and come back tomorrow. Totally erroneous. I have since taken the trouble to look this up and discovered that it's usually two hours but that SM is particularly fast.

We had to give up after the 3rd time around nuking our way through the same damn monks. The other thing that's much harder with two is rejoining each other if one of you dies and the bastards have respawned in between you.

Anyway it was fun and we got good at what we were doing but we need either more pew pew or a helping hand.

Also amongst all this I've managed to keep up my daily (almost; missed a couple) so my Venomhide is growing up big and strong. Should get that by the weekend. Hooray.

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So Noobcon came and went. I didn't quite make all of my goals but I am, at least keeping up with my Daily. That's in the singular. I'm babysitting a raptor hatchling to get the new Venomhide Epic Mount.

I've heard a lot about the Daily Quests and I've had a little taste of it before with the Midsummer Festival but now I feel the pull of yet another hook that Blizzard has sunk into my unsuspecting maw.

They are a funny old thing. When hearing about Dailies previously I always thought of them with mild disdain. Like grinding and farming. And there's a lot of truth to that. The quest that I'm doing picks one of, I think, four hunter gatherer quests in the Un'Goro/Tanaris region and only lets you do one every 24hours.

It's a marvellous scam, when you think about it; they spend all this effort creating an environment so that I want to play and then cut me off. And how do react? Ever more obsessively. Maybe it's because it's only for a short time but I need to do this 20 times. If I manage to do it every day it will at least occupy a month. That's my Blizzard fees for at least one more billing cycle.

Now I wouldn't pay Blizzard (or anyone else) for a new mount. Yet somehow, the logic of it says that I will have. Especially at the moment when I have so little time to play. It keeps me coming back for my fix. This morning I got an achievement just for not missing any.

I've pretty much finished Un'Goro crater too. That's going to make it awkward.

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