We had an excellent Thanksgiving visit, our little "Planes, Trains, & Automobiles" day aside (and even that was actually pretty fun). But once I got back I needed some time in the isolation tank, and got caught up on some World of Warcraft.

Some random notes:

• I very much look forward to getting a mount. But I don't get one until level 40. This makes me sad.
• There are no loading screens (except for the tougher dungeons, for which they create individual instances for parties). After the loading nightmare that is EQ2, it is difficult to describe how cool this is. Being able to walk from the forest into the massive Night Elf city of Darnassus was breathtaking.
• The visual look is almost exactly what you'd expect if you wanted to zoom in really close to Warcraft III.
• After City of Heroes, all other character generators suffer by comparison. Oh well.
• Druids kick ass. My level 10 druid almost has her bear form.
• I started to feel much better about things when I got my first instant-cast spell, and realized how much damage I could do with my staff. Also, once you hit level 10, you start accumulating talent points that you can put into a very Diablo II-esque skill tree, making for all kinds of customization options.
• The role-play servers are a better idea in theory than practice. In practice, they are magnets for dour literalists who enjoy arguing on the general channel about whether thou should speak out of character on the general channel. Plus, they didn't turn on the interesting faction-based PvP stuff on the RP servers, so I'm going to redo my druid on a PvP server. Sigh.
• As I read through the char descriptions I keep wanting to make more characters. Like a hunter. Or a warlock. Or a shaman. Or a ... sigh.
• OK, OK, but here's the real moment at which I was sold: I got a quest to leave the starting island to deliver something to the mainland. I went over to the hippogriff master and got a ride. And instead of going to a loading screen, I watched my character hop onto the hippogriff and fly over to the mainland over a beatiful moonlit sea, passing over the ferry that had just left. O. M. F. G. Now I have to try out the tram on the eastern continent.

That is all.  2:03:01 PM  (comments [])