Zangermarsh, The Burning Crusade, and notes on me being the greatest.

This is going to be another WoW post, so those of you who don't care just move along. This post is also written as a stream of consciousness, and gets really self indulgent, to the point of being masturbatory, towards the end. You were warned.

A whole lot happened recently in my WoW experience. It all starts Tuesday at around 1 when the UPS guy brought my copy of "The Burning Crusade" This means that around two I was online and playing with the new content. There are essentially two routes you can take with this. You could either go explore the outlands and do all the new stuff for people at high levels, or you could roll a character of the new race and take advantage of the fact that alliance can play shamans now. I've mentioned my enthusiasm for shamans before, so I don't think there's any surprise when I say that I rolled out at level 1.

The only ones in my guild who are really gung ho about the shaman thing, and are considering having a shaman as their main, are me and Brisperel. So when I first logged on as Patronsaint (my shaman) and found Illano (his shaman) was already level 7 I was immediately thrust forward on a tidal surge of gamer bravado.

I had, and am continuing to have, no end of fun shammying around with my friends in relic, but it soon became quite clear that the server wasn't having any fun. We were on whisperwind, one of the original servers, and one of the most populated, and it just couldn't handle the BC rush. The outlands crashed once an hour or so. The whole world server went down fairly often too. It was crippling, it was annoying, and it was threatening to ruin the game for a lot of us.

Blizzard knows this, and they don't like it when their servers are chain crashing. I assume, as one logically would, that they have flashing red lights and klaxons that go off every time a server crashes, and if our server alone was doing this hourly they must have been at a constant state of crisis. To help solve this they offered free character transfers to some newly created servers. The guild leadership noted this, and what started with our GM deciding to leave snowballed into a full guild migration.

Greetings from the Zangermarsh server. The name is nowhere near as good as whisperwind, but it works.

So as of Thursday we're all on Zang, and they're having a great time running around in a stable outlands, and I'm having a great time because I have the low level zones essentially to myself. This makes it hard to find a group for those quests that require one, but I can usually get a guild mate to bring their level 60+ char down and fill the roll five people my level usually would. Plus I never have to compete for creatures or mines. Zangermarsh is a smashing success.

One other thing about Zang is that it's only available as a transfer to server. You can't make a new character on this server yet, you have to transfer over. Granted Zang is taking players from five of the most heavily populated servers, but it means that most of the players are level 60+. I've had a lot of fun in the lower level zones playing with the /who command. While punishing the criminal Defias raiders one night I decided to see who else was in the zone. I did "/who westfall" and I found something hilarious. In westfall, in the whole zone, there were five people. And one of them was a 60. The numbers run like that a lot, numbers never getting higher then 10 or so, whereas they would've been a minimum of 20 on whisperwind. The best one though is when I was playing at something like 3 a.m. server time (the server is on central time) and I did a '/who wetlands'. It didn't even have enough people to bring up the results window, all I got was a message in my chat box.

Search 'wetlands'
Patronsaint - 22 Draeni Shaman

I was the only one in the zone. I'm pretty sure I have a screen shot of that, which I'll post later. I'm also level 30 now.

Speaking of me being a shaman and screen shots I have a story to tell, and not to brag, but I'm about to.

The /who command can search on all kinds of conditions, and it wasn't long before I realized that I could do a '/who shaman' and see every alliance shaman online on the server. From there I can sort by level. Can you guess who reliably wins that contest? You're damn right it's me. This has lead to all kinds of really amusing moments.

"Do you see this healing stream totem? This is the first healing stream totem ever on this sever, because I'm the only one on the alliance who can use water totems."
"I just turned into a ghost wolf, nobody else is level 20 yet, I'm the first alliance ghost wolf on this server"
"I'm lost trying to do the wind totem quest, but I can't ask for help because I'm the only shaman on the alliance high enough to do the wind totem quest"

I have a bunch of screen shots of this, as well as some good dramatic "shaman in action" shots which I'll post later. And one last self indulgent note. The game came out 5 days ago, and I'm level 30. It took me at least 5 weeks to reach 30 with any of my other characters.

Another note, more of a bit of trivia really, but I'd like it recorded. The first guy to reach level 70, the new maximum level, was a french college student who plays as a Nightelf Hunter. It took him 28 hours following the release of the game. I'm equally impressed by and sad for that guy, but both of those feelings are dwarfed by my surprise that a eurogamer got it, and not someone on the pacific rim.

What happend to you China? You used to be cool.