Cuddle Tiem: Water walking wolf

Galli and I had tacitly agreed to keep our leveling perfectly in alignment, so when he was busy yesterday I rolled a death knight for kicks. The starting questline feels pretty damn epic, but pretty damn evil too. Runic power definitely feels like warrior rage, which means combat requires the same kind of patience. Luckily the death knight abilities have such over-the-top colorful swirly graphics that it's easy to keep yourself entertained.

Ohai!!!

The leveling hasn't been super fast so far, since the scenery has been so fascinating. We're halfway to 71 after two nights of questing, a couple of hours per night. This was all with rested XP that seems to have been arbitrarily calculated. I've observed quite a number of cruises and flights with somewhat circuitous path planning — which is great while we're still wide-eyed fresh graduates from Outland, but seems like it could get old soon. People are already jumping out of the boat to Valgarde and swimming instead.

I'm loving the quests and environments so far, and at least one questline has me utterly intrigued. Things just seem more directed and motivated than in Burning Crusade. The wildlife is great too; it's cool to see hawks perched in pairs on rocks and shoveltusk stags sparring with their (oh so sexy) antlers. I did notice that a lot of quests give you control over some entity that replaces your action bars. Maybe after the catastrophes of Teron Gorefiend Blizzard decided that everyone could use more practice with this mechanism.

It's a boy thing.

I also remembered the whole thing about Ghost Wolf not canceling the Water Walking buff, and it is totally true. Now this is a real victory for shamans everywhere.