Moo!

Meet Romm, he's part Cow.

So just at the point last night when I though I was going to have to write another blog post about how unpredictable the Blizzard Downloader was in its speed, the damn thing sped up (unpredictably) and completed the patch.

It's the last time I'm going to mention this as I think it's possibly time to "Leave it Be" but checking chat logs with friends from yesterday I inserted that first Vanilla WoW disk at 11.21am and I'm pretty sure I was logged in at about 8.20pm. I still have trouble imagining what it must be like for a first time user to actually have the patience to install a game for 9 hours.

So what's new for me? Pretty much every damn thing! I thought the whole process had gone wrong again and was on the verge of going straight back to Blizz and cancelling when I realised the message on the login screen was about Battle.Net - so that had to be changed, accounts merged etc.

Read more on the first tentative bovine steps of rebirth after the break.

The initial joy of reinstallation though was great as I was treated again to the opening cinematic of those hideously talented people at Blizzard. A quick character creation later - I had already decided on a Tauren Druid before starting, but this post is not about him so much as me - and we're off on sweeping shots of Thunderbluff and the grassy savanah of Mulgore.

Sadly I cannot say the fiirst moment was as awe-inspiring as the first similar shot I experienced through Teldrassil all those years ago when I made my first ever character - but hey I've seen these shots a million times before now so no real surprise there I guess.

Anyway, on with the game. Oh those noob quests you gotta love 'em. "Kill 10 of these" (only 10 - I'm sure it used to be more). "Get me 7 of these" (again - only 7?)... whoa there's like a 100% drop rate. Interesting point - the collection quests at the early stages now seem to have 100% drop rates of quest items - now you have no real complaints from me there as I loathe collection quests from mobs almost as much as I loathe escort quests but I seem to remember that first level "ding" coming whilst still thumping <boars|plainstriders|nightstalkers*> (*delete as necessary) not when handing the quest back in again. So in making the first quest more accessible we've actually lost XP gain from mobs - interesting.

Having said this though the low-level mana and health regeneration seems to be so obscenely high that sitting on your tail spamming Wrath is a fair tactic at this stage of the game

Well I'm going to leave you now with some evidence of Wrath-spam, next time we'll talk about all those addons I used to use and which one's are now redundant since the Blizzard UI team got busy.