Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

I got in beta today with the explecit goal of doing an instance.  I sort of succeeded

I have been seeing this since the day I logged into beta but hadn’t shared it.  There is a graphic glitch that occurs when your mounted to anything.  You randomly tilt back like this and look goofy

On my long run to Azjol-Nerub I saw these polar bears.  The mobs are even more animated and seem to do more than randomly path now.  It is neat to see the one with a baby

I made it! Everyone had to run we couldn’t use the stone.  I thought initially it was broken then I find out this is a 72-74 zone.  The first boss is a wave sort of attack.  All the mobs in this instance are really creepy.

This was standing over by the second boss which we never killed.  I don’t think it was level or equipment, all the players were in like sunwell level gear.  The tank was just not listening.  We were trying to figure out how you deal with them.  Basically you kill mobs while your standing on this web and a big giant spider comes closer and closer.  The boss attacks some of the mobs and I think you wait till he gets to the middle but the tank kept running to him agroing tons of mobs.  I kept everyone alive surprisingly long time.

This instance looks like it is going to be a blast though

I decided I wanted to try the Howling Fjord questing area instead of Borean Tundra which I had been in.  I like Howling Fjord better so far.  For one it is the dwarf settlement   Two the music is awesome!   It is sort of scottish sounding

The ticks for holy nova have the fire bolt animation now as one part of its upgrade.  The 1.5 second cast you get with talents is awesome, not to mention all the extra damage it does.

I was exploring when I ran into this area with shipped wrecks and undead giant guys.  It had this cool earie fog effect while you were there.  Very spooky!

I copied over Mage Laneer at Inians request (he still doesn’t have his beta invite) to test something he heard.  That the AOE’s could crit now.  I tested it out with this spec, and it was pretty awesome.  The mobs have a 85% snare on them, and frostbite procs so much they never got to move.  Another change was they removed the nerf way back when making the ice break easier.  So stuff stays still even if you crit it!  I took some videos as well.  Don’t laugh at me though I’m not a awesome mage, nor did I have my UI or any macros/keybindings set   (Movie1,Movie2)

I went back to playing with things.  I so far have liked the new light well.  Though I never thought I would say this, I think I’ll make it part of my spec.  I think it will find all sorts of uses for it.  I’ve even been using it in an area I’m questing in as a way to heal myself without stopping what I’m doing.

If you kill animals now in the expansion you get bloody.  This makes some new druid group that hates nessing hate you.  A stupid rogue snuck up on me and slayed me after I had that debuff on me so I got a blood red angel

I hope these are place holders, because the model is the same as outlands. Anyways I thought the process number was funny.

Ran down into this really neat area where this level 69 giraffe was.  But I ended up turning back because there were packs of level 69 wasps running around too hehe

Things have been pretty interesting so far.   The server has lots of trouble, world server crashes a lot, but then that is why we are all here to crash the world server!

I had a very long, fun and tiring day today so I didn’t get on much but did sneak into beta to take a peep.  The first thing I did was of course fill out my talents.  I went with this level 70 build because I knew I would be wanting to level and heal the instances.  I have more than enough money to spec many times so I’ll probably play with a lot of specs

I went over to stormwind, I was very interested to see how they fit a port in it.  I remember the first time I read that I was like stormwind doesn’t have a port!  The map looks way different.

The harbor looked pretty amazing, and wrather huge too.  There was one problem I encountered.  The boats don’t pull up close enough to the docks.  I ran right up to the boat and didn’t notice and fell right into the water.  Then the client crashed, yay!  When I got back in the boat was still there but that crashed me again.  Then the northrend world server went down, no boat that time   Finally I was able to head out to northrend, you have to jump on the boat from a log

This side looks a lot different from where we were during blizzcon.  I can’t even remember the name of this area, like howling something I think.  It was fairly desolate looking and the little city here looked heavily under construction

The interesting part about the city is that it was constantly under attack by the lich kings armies.   I think this definietly sets the mood.

I tried many of my mods, but just like Inian had told me, they broke nearly everything.  Everything but one mod, THANK GOODNESS…   If I can have one mod, this would be the mod   Clique, my click casting mod still worked!

The achievement system looks really fun!  This is going to be something that they can update and do all sorts of things with.  A blue on the forum said it has no limitations. The statistical information it is going to track about your character is awesome too!

I look forward to being able to do a few quests tomorrow hopefully.

The download was complete this morning.  After a lengthy install it then had to do another 50meg patch.  Then I did a quick login just to see Laneer had been copied over and he was!

Surprisingly the first thing i noticed, well other than the cool login screen was my weapon had an enchant graphic.  Although you can’t see its entire coolness without animation it is a nifty wavy holy looking thing. Woot!  More tonight when I can play around more.

My Blizzcon key paid out in full today when the WOTLK beta invite arrived in my mailbox at 5:03 pm. I did all the signing up, copied over Laneer and Mooku for now, and am downloading the client as we speak.  The download is a large 1.88GB download so it is taking its time.  It has about an hour left but it is time for bed so it will have to wait till tomorrow evening for a looksee.

Of course stay tuned for all my adventures and feedback from Beta.