One week with patch 2.4

I’ll start by say­ing that Magister’s Ter­race (MrT) is won­der­ful from start to fin­ish. It’s beau­ti­ful to look at, the music is great, the bosses are fun, and the gear poten­tial makes me want to bring all my char­ac­ters there. If it were none of those, it’d still be a new place to go with my guild­mates. But it’s great, so kudos to Blizzard.

(Also, the in-game cin­e­matic should be some­thing that they do ALL THE TIME. Not just in instances, but quests. ALL THE TIME. When you cre­ate a soul­well, or a rit­ual of refresh­ment. You should get an in-game cin­e­matic when you click your hearth­stone. Just get that world of war­craft nar­ra­tor talk­ing, and you feel epic.)

The game mechanic cor­rec­tions and tweaks are all wel­come, as always. New craft­ing rewards are wel­come, new fac­tion, new zone. New com­bat log, new por­tals com­ing. New zomg epics. I was glad to see the excite­ment of my guild­mates as they pur­chased Nether Vor­texes (Vor­tices?) and upgraded their crafted gear.

All good fun.

Maybe I’ve been fol­low­ing the game’s devel­op­ment too much, but I’m still under­whelmed. Not by what’s been given, but by the long bar­ren months between here and the next expan­sion, which is pre­sum­ably six or more months away. The new 25-man raid instance is going to keep the high-end guilds happy for a while, but it means absolutely noth­ing to me and my wife, as well as our guild. I’m guess­ing that it took Bliz­zard a while to make.

The dailies? Well, they’re mostly kill X quests. Yes, the quests even­tu­ally open up new parts of town, and it’s fun to progress as a server and feel actual com­mu­nity with all these peo­ple I’ve been bump­ing shoul­ders with for a cou­ple of years. But the Ogrila quests them­selves were more fun: you have a rop­ing quest, a bomb­ing quest, a por­tal quest. Here, you have a bunch of kill quests and one bomb­ing quest. I’m just say­ing, we could have some story quests mixed in with the unlock­ing of phases.

Oh, a note on the Sun­well bomb­ing run: get a part­ner. Oth­er­wise I don’t see how you could do it in one pass (it’s taken me three tries every time when I’ve tried it solo). With my wife, we did it in one pass.

I’m really look­ing for­ward to Wrath of the Lich King. It’s a long way away. In the mean­time, I’ll be doing the dailies and enjoy­ing Magister’s Ter­race.

More Words!

• WQ: Bet­ter Questing!
• There are Many Ways to Win
• Sec­ond Magister’s Ter­race run
• WQ: Griz­zly Hills Stink
• Max level does not mean Skilled