0-55 ESPN Highlight Reel

To bring this blog up to speed on where Tooee's at right now...

Last night I dinged 55.  I plan to normally do more involved posts with funny clips of my adventures and actual quotes from players I've encountered.  But since the idea to blog about my experiences in the pug world didn't occur to me until now, I'm going to do a quick ESPN-like highlight reel of leveling thus far.

0-20: Did most of this pre 3.3 and the new LFG tool so no real pug experience to speak of.  But I will say that leveling a druid sucks until cat form and is excruciatingly painful until bear form.

20-30: My first random dungeon ever was BFD. It was the second time I'd ever been there and it sucked as much as I remembered. All that swimming just took forever to get anywhere.  After that I had a mix of RFK and Gnomer.  Gnomer was terrible as always but RFK was fun.  The quality of players was pretty decent but these instances are virtually soloable so I probably wouldn't have noticed if some of them were on auto-follow the entire time.

30-40: Great mix of dungeons here.  I love RFD and all the SMs.  At some point I encountered a warrior who insisted on "helping me tank" which amounted to taunting random mobs off me and then losing threat back to me from a couple swipes.  I also met a shaman who explained that we needed a plan for the final boss in Cath because "tons of adds will come when you aggro him".  Clearly the last group he was in didn't clear the cathedral before pulling him.

40-50: Here we had a retarded order of instances.  I started getting Maura: Orange, meaning killing the lasher boss when I was level 41 and the mobs were level 44-46.  Then I got ZF when I was a higher level than the instance, then Purple Maura at some point followed by the princess part of Maura.  Blizzard definitely needs to revisit what levels it assigns to these instances even though they're all easy even when bosses hit you with crushing blows.

50-55: BRD. Love it or hate it, it's big.  At low 50s, I was getting assigned "Lower BRD" which required the group to kill this chick, taking all of 5-10 minutes.  It was a pleasant surprise since I was so used to wandering around the gigantic labyrinth for hours back in the day.  But at about 53 or 54 I started getting "Upper BRD" where you have to actually kill the emprorer in order to complete the "quest".  It's not as bad as I remember but still annoying enough that I never want to requeue right after completing it.  I'm doing a fair amount of questing in WPL right now to try to get to Outlad ASAP.

Supposedly I'll start getting DM soon which would be fun, but mostly I'm looking forward to Outland instances.  Call me crazy, but I enjoy the short, straight forward nature of BC and WotLK.

I know this update is pretty boring, but I thought it would have felt weird to start talking about stuff at level 55 without at least a brief summary of how I got to that point.  I anticipate the true excitement will come at 80 when I start gearing up in heroics and get shit for having fresh 80 gear.  Pugs tend to be nicer, even if they're dumber at lower levels.