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.