This past week has been fairly eventful for me in WoW.  I’ve been leveling my Death Knight very casually compared to the seemingly standard pace set by those around me.  As of writing this post I am about halfway through level 76.  I’ve completed all of the quests in Borean Tundra, half the quests in Howling Fjord, all the quests in Dragonblight, and most all the quests in Grizzly Hills.    The Dragonblight quests were, for the most part, enjoyable.  I really enjoyed Wyrmrest temple and the storyline about how the various dragon flights have tkane to fighting the blue flight.  Seeing Alexstrasza in human form really brought back the memories of reading Day of the Dragon and it has begun to really tie together the story for me.  In addition to the lore, the reputation rewards for the Wyrmrest Accord are fantastic.  I’ve been doing the daily quests for them the entire week and hope to be Revered with them in no time.  (Oh, and if you haven’t watched the in-game trailer after completing all the Dragonblight quests then you really should.)

My Grizzly Hills experience has been rather lackluster.  The quests are pretty standard “Kill 10 of this” or “collect 10 of this from these” or “Get 10 of these and talk to this guy to get 10 of those”.  This place was truly a crawl towards the end and I ended up forgoing at least 10 quests that undoubtedtly had followups.  I just couldn’t stand it anymore.  The daily quests here are worth mentioning.  I’ve spent an addition chunk of time running these quests to work up reputation and take advantage of the nice exp and money.  Unfortunately, I think these led to part of my burnout.  These daily quests are trixy, you see, because they lure you in with their flashy rewards but before you realize what’s happened you find yourself despising them.  It’s the “I have to do this crap even if I don’t want to” feeling… almost as though I’m being forced to complete them when I don’t want to because I know if I don’t … bah.   Anyway, the best part of Grizzly Hills is the music, heh.

Now that I’m level 76 I’ve decided to go into Zul’drak.  I know, I know, the place has a bad rap.  Apparently it’s not very much fun?  *shrug*  I’ll be the judge of that.  I’m at least going to give it a shot because of the sheer number of Argent Crusade quests I’ve found.  The rep with these guys will give me a good number of upgrades.  I’m hoping that getting faction with these guys is as easy as it was for the Walrus people in Dragonblight or the Wyrmrest Accord (so easy because of the 250+ rep per quest).   We’ll see how this place goes.  If it ends up being a drag then I can always head over to Sholazar Basin.  I have a quest titled “Where in the world of Hemit Nesingwary” … *shiver* … I hate Nesingwary.  His name alone instills fear into my soul.  At the first opportunity, I think I’ll take an assassination mission from D.E.H.T.A. to take this bugger out…

I can’t leave out my instance runs this week.  I did a run of Drak’theron which was boring.  The mobs, bosses, loot and look of the place were “bleh”.   I just couldn’t get excited about it at all.  I did however enjoy the Dalaran dungeon Violet Hold.  This little one room dungeon offers a couple bosses with great loot all in about 20 minutes or less.  We burned through it four times in a row one afternoon and each walked out with 2-3 upgrades.  How awesome is that?  Seriously, this was a lot of fun.  The best part?  I tanked it!  Yep, my DPS spec’d DK was able to tank with a few tank items on and hold aggro with zero trouble.   I actually enjoyed it too and decided that if needs be I wouldn’t mind tanking more in the future.  It takes me back to my days of tanking MC, Ony, Azuregos, BWL, and AQ40.

This next week should bring a lot of interesting updates.  I’ll probably be close to level 80 with a ton of leftover quests.  I’m sitting at around 3300 gold which means I still need another 3,000+ for my Epic mount (Since I have to buy the basic, basic training, winter flying, and epic mount… ugh), so I hope that the exp-to-money at level 80 is pretty good.

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