08/12/2010

Expansion Anxiety

I hope everyone else had a better first day of Cataclysm than I had.

You see, my boyfriend and I had made this sweet but slightly cheesy plan to give the expansion to each other as early Christmas gifts. I bought a copy for him on my way home from work. He had ordered a copy for me from Amazon ages ago... and it didn't arrive. Well, crap. He then insisted that I should install the copy that I had bought for myself instead and that he would wait. I didn't argue because I knew that there was no point (he can be quite stubborn) and I was kind of keen on seeing the new content... but once I logged on, I just felt bad about being there without him.

I mean, I didn't want to start levelling without him, obviously. So instead of going to any of the new places I decided to just fly around old Azeroth a bit, picked up some of the new flight paths and so on. I started to idly pick some flowers on the way and was appalled to see that even picking a peacebloom still gives me experience at level eighty - only twenty per flower, but still. No flowers then... hmm, how about I try this new archaeology lark? Guess what, that gives pretty big chunks of XP as well. /sigh

I have to admit, looking at the guild roster didn't make me happy either. The moment I logged on in the early afternoon, several people had already gained at least one level, and one person was just about to hit eighty-three. So much for eighty to eighty-five taking as long as seventy to eighty did, huh?

Tam wrote a nice post about fearing the rat race yesterday, and while I was mentally nodding my head in agreement while reading it, I had forgotten just how bad it could be. Basically, the moment I logged on and immediately saw all my guildies ahead of me already, I had painful flashbacks to the beginning of Wrath. "OMG, why aren't you [level] yet, we need people to run [instance that requires a higher level than I am]?" Nobody did that to me today fortunately, but the mere memory made me cringe. I don't think I'm a particularly slow leveller, but I do like to take my time, and I do have things outside of WoW that I need to take care of. For some reason I thought that my guildies would be the same way, but it's amazing how a group of individuals that is in perfect agreement about raiding can still have vastly different approaches to levelling.

In the end I just logged off my main and rolled a worgen for laughs. Less reason to feel guilty about playing without my significant other (having some alts of our own is par for the course anyway), and no self-inflicted pressure to keep up with the Joneses in terms of levelling.

I just need to keep my calm now. In a few weeks all of this will be forgotten and we'll all be focused on the new group content.

4 comments:

  1. I'm just going to lay low and let the big "world firsters" and "rush rush rush" crowd get done, and then mosey on over. The only thing that's going to kill me is the wait on the BC and Northrend queues.

    Oh well.

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  2. Thankfully we're small and lazy enough that there is only person zooming ahead and he looks like the crazy person. I understand that for some people levelling *is* kind of a race, or a hoop you have to jump through before you're allowed to raid, and obviously I don't want to force people to take content more slowly. But equally I enjoy levelling and I'd rather take my time with it.

    Also sorry about the O Henry Cata issue - that must have been some added and unnecessary stress. My local Game screwed up my pre-order as well but thankfully I still managed to get a copy of the actual game, just not the collectors edition.

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  3. *hugs*
    My guild seem to be racing..
    But there is no pressure to level at all on anyone fortunately.
    I've fallen a bit in love with worgen though, and really enjoyed the starting area.
    I'm so glad I've managed to totally avoid spoilers :)
    I'd intended to start playing right at midnight - we got the downloaded version - however a cancelled flight and a 7 hour drive for Koch put paid to that :)

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  4. Half of my guild pro-ordered the CD and didn't receive it yet. I just bought cataclysm of the blizzard store and now i'm the one who's leveling ahead. I too did notice levelling goes very fast. Too bad it's only 5 levels because i did some of Vashj'ir and 1 instance and i'm allready level 82,5. Even with just doing archaeology a guild mate of me leveled to 82. He wanted to get it up before running the new content.

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