Day 0 - initial thoughts and impressions

So the launch went so much smoother than I had expected. There was about 10 minutes where some of us had issues logging in, and of course there was some lag, but the servers were remarkably stable for the launch. There was the usual idiocy surrounding the flight trainer and such, but after about 10 minutes of that nonsense I was able to grab my training and start my Cata experience.

Flying in the old world

This is just too cool for school. Our plan was to run Blackrock Caverns (BRC?) to start, giving the starting quest hubs a chance to thin out. It had also been our experience that even if the world servers were crashing, instance servers 'should' be a bit more stable. After grabbing the portal to the Blasted Lands, it was time to explore the zones from the air while heading over.

Truly awesome to see it that way, and definately worth the gold cost.

The first run

The first run went about like I expected. We timidly put our toes in the water to see if the dungeons were going to be really hard like we were led to believe, or if it was going to be /faceroll 2.0. With each pack we'd grow a little bolder, expecting death to strike at any point. Our tank had read up on the bosses, so we had an idea of what to expect - though it wasn't anywhere close to being difficult. We wiped once on some molten quicksilver boss, but I'm pretty sure that was because the tank had some conflag stacks on him from the elemental, and it was a bad pull.

After the initial run, it was Johnny bar the door, and we were gone. Two runs and the associated quests got me 57% of the way to 81, and I pushed that over this morning with two more speed runs (full tilt boogie, AoE all the way) and the breadcrumb quests to Vashir(sp). I heard things slow down a bit after 81, but I'm not sure. The drops were pretty decent, and I replaced some of my 251 gear with green BoE drops.

The first zone

I went to Vash'ir or whatever it's called, but left after the initial breadcrumbs. There's still a lot of people in the area, and I'm not rushing to 85. I was pretty impressed with the dialoge and such though, and I have decent hopes for the rest of the expansion content.

My hopes

I'm still holding out hope for difficult heroics and raids, but I'm not going to hold my breath. We'll have to see how it goes in the upcoming weeks, and I'm surprised that we haven't seen world first 85s already given the speed we were moving at.