It was back to WoW for a bit tonight, as I first finished off some of the simpler quests around Stonetalon Mountains and then our regular group hooked up and we did Razorfen Kraul. I’m still too low for most of the quests in there though, so I could only do the escort and tubers ones.

Afterwards I then made it over to Booty Bay for the first time to turn in a quest there and at least get the flight path, and then it was back to the Barrens to head to Dustwallow Marsh to pick up the expert first aid manual.

Today was the release of the long-awaited 2.3 patch for WoW, and aside from various small UI improvements and the usual class changes, the major new feature is supposed to be faster leveling and better loot at lower levels.

So, tonight we decided to put it to the test at Shadowfang Keep. I couldn’t really tell if the experience was that much better since most of the critters were green even to me, but the loot drops were definitely better than usual, with far more blues dropping than you’d expect in a single trip.

The drops are probably better to counterbalance the fact that you’ll probably be in the instances less often if you’re leveling faster. Now to see just how fast that is…

Edit: Ah, here’s a list of all the new loot in the lower-level instances.

Well I *had* intended to spend the rest of the evening in Hellgate: London, but I kept getting disconnected every ten minutes or so, so screw that. The launch of the online play has had…problems…

So, instead I found myself back in WoW again. I was just going to do some of the more tedious quests around Taren Mill, but wound up signing the guild charter, managing stuff at the auction house, and working on mining and smithing more than anything else. Nothing in WoW ever truly goes as planned, of course.

I didn’t spend too much time in WoW tonight, just enough to clear out some old grey quests that were partly done. I’m too obsessive to just abandon them, even though I probably should…

I spent a couple more hours in Hellgate: London, and after today’s patch it seems a bit more stable. It did hang on a blank screen immediately after the patch, but worked fine after that for the rest of the session.

I made it to the end of Act 1, defeating a few more bosses and entering a couple Hell portals. One boss I couldn’t actually kill, as he kept healing himself to full as soon as he was near death, but maybe I wasn’t meant to as the real mission was to place an item there and get out. I still have a lot of attribute and skill points saved up, as I was unsure of where to spend them, but I’ll have to decide soon as it’s becoming tougher to beat enemies with just the plain base stats and skills.

One downside of the random terrain generation is already becoming clear; there just isn’t much variety in some areas, and you’ll see the same kinds of basic rooms and connecting segments over and over again. It’s a common enough problem among all games I know of with random 3D terrain though, so it’s somewhat forgivable.

Today was a big day for my warrior in WoW as he finally hit level 20 and picked up a bunch of important skills and quests, including Dual Wield, Retaliation, and quests for warrior-specific armour. I’m going to have to completely reorganize my hotkeys at this point, though…

We also did Wailing Caverns fairly successfully with just four people for most of the run, so we’ll be back there again soon enough. I’m still not really doing very well in a tanking role, as it’s tough to hold aggro even with the improved set of skills I’ve been gaining, and multi-monster fights are still fairly chaotic. It might be too early to really worry too much about it, but it’s still a big change from the kind of party mechanics I was used to in EQ, where party discipline and careful pulling were crucial to not getting killed.

Tonight we ran through and did all of the quests in Ragefire Chasm. I remember doing them once before, but that was ages ago, so I’d forgotten most of the details. Hopefully it won’t be too long before we’re ready for Wailing Caverns, where the good loot starts to show up.

And now that I’ve chosen my professions, I’ve been doing so much mining that my character probably has copper poisoning now. There’s still a long way to go, though… I’m tempted to just sell the ore/bars and build up some cash, but then that just keeps me from building up my own skills.

I also hit level 16 and gained yet another new type of attack that I have to cram into my hotkeys somewhere. This one should be a fairly useful one though, as it guarantees I’ll grab aggro for at least six seconds. Hopefully that’ll help keep things off the healers, which I’ve been doing a miserable job of so far.