Look! A diversion!

I suddenly felt the need to write something again. I guess a quick update is in order.

While on a "break" from WoW, I've been playing mainly Team Fortress 2, and Mass Effect 1 and 2. Team Fortress is fun for a while, but it never manages to keep me stuck for very long. Mass Effect was awesome. Played through the first game three times as an adept (since you need to unlock difficulties in order to beat Insanity). Played through the second game once on Hardcore, and half-way again on Insanity. First time as an adept (imported from ME1), the second time as a Vanguard. After I beat the Collossus on Tali's recruitment mission by charging right up to it and beating it in melee on insanity, I didn't find the motivation to play through the rest. Felt like I had done what I wanted with the game.

Anyway. I've been playing some WoW again recently. About three weeks ago, I created my first "real" alliance character, a gnome warlock with a mean faced called Malict (by the way, if she happens to be undressed it is because I've mailed the heirloom robe to my low-level horde mage).

My initial motivation for creating her was that I wanted to experience the retaking of Gnomeregan once it becomes available, first-hand. It has already been greatly parodied by Complex Actions, with a follow-up. I reckon level 10 or so would be enough, but while playing I found that I enjoyed it a lot and just kept leveling for a while.

It was fun and interesting playing a warlock. I've always liked dots when playing dps, and so affliction came pretty naturally for me. I also liked having a pet from my death knight, and warlock pets are even more functional than the ghoul. Since I've never had an alliance character, I could only mail heirlooms, not money. Thus, I had to earn my keep by using the auction house. It was also pretty entertaining in moderate amounts, and I only earned as much as I needed to buy glyphs, train and live "comfortably", not buy equipment.

Being only dps and not having the option to tank or heal was a different experience. Sure, I've dps'ed before, but this time I *had* to dps. I must admit, I missed the possibility to choose between the two. Or three, in the case of druids.

A downside was naturally that I didn't get to play affliction in any instance. Yes, I was specced affliction, but almost all mobs died before I'd gotten even a full corruption on them, meaning I was ruining my own dps by dotting them instead of just nuking them. Almost all trash mobs ended with me channeling Rain of Fire repeatedly.

Seeing new places (or at least, places from a different angle) was pretty interesting. All the zones seemed very ... empty, though. Not strange, I guess. I just missed any social interaction at all. And in instances, most people are pretty silent. Add to that that I had buttons to click almost all the time to keep up my dps.

I spent some levels as demonology, speccing for max survivability for PVP. However, I specced back at 30 to get Curse of Exhaustion and Siphon Life. I loved those. However, at the same time, my survivability in PVP against rogues went down by 80%.

Last night I found I wasn't very keen on leveling Malicit anymore. I was wondering if I should pick up my troll mage Rime instead, whom I've had at level 20-something since the second year of wow. Look at it this way, her name is Rime. Practically every name meaning anything at all in any vocabulary have already been taken a long time ago.

I've thought a lot about what I want to play in Cataclysm. I guess I'll write more about it later.