This is seriously starting to tick me off. So Blizzard made an “event” for the Wrath of the Lich King release, that’s SERIOUSLY making me want to just stop playing entirely until the damn expansion comes out already.

I’m working on leveling a night elf druid over on Silver Hand right now. As slow as it is because every time I want to go pick up or turn in quests, the entire town is overrun by zombies. The game is practically unplayable.

Basically, there are zombies wandering around. There are crates in the cities, as well as plagued roaches. If you get hit by a zombie, open a crate, or kill a roach, you get the plague. Within one minute (or when you die) you become a zombie. This prevents you from using your normal class abilities, but gives you five zombie abilities so you can spread the disease. It changes your faction to Zombie, and you’re friendly with all other Zombies and hostile to everyone else (like city guards) until you turn them into zombies too.

Being killed by guards while you’re a zombie causes you to take normal durability damage, which sucks even more because you can’t unequip any of your gear as a zombie, regardless of whether or not you’re in combat. Your only recourse is to /beg level 70 players to kill you before the guards do.

So I logged in to my druid, who was sitting in Darnassus about to turn in her Aquatic Form quest. There were three NPC zombies sitting right there, and before I could do anything about it, I was a zombie. I stood there cursing Blizzard until my health eventually ran out, then ran back to my corpse, ran to my druid trainer to turn in the quest.

Hearthed to Westfall, trick or treated, logged out. Logged on to my other characters to trick or treat (my shaman STILL doesn’t have the halloween minipet though my priest has gotten like four of them) and then logged back onto my druid.

There were about four NPC zombies sitting in the inn when I logged in, and yet again, I was zombified within a matter of seconds. Slowly chased after some players outside /begging them, eventually just gave up and used my zombie explosion to kill myself. Ran back to my corpse, ran a significant distance away from town, waited a few minutes until the flight master respawned, then flew back to Stormwind. Barely avoided two more zombies while turning in quests in Stormwind.

Oh, and that’s not all that’s going on. Apparently, there are supposed to be scourge invasions just like way back when Naxx first came out. “Supposed to be” because I haven’t seen any yet. You’re supposed to be able to kill the ghouls at the invasion sites for necrotic runes you can turn in for stuff like an Argent Dawn tabard and some epic gear. But every time I talk to the Argent Dawn guy, he just tells me all the invasion sites are safe. “FOR NOW!” he says. Yeah right. Nothing’s happening anywhere, you loser.

So I’m sorry if I’m a little out of the loop, I only heard about this today.

Tim Burton is doing an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, to come out in 2010. With Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter.

I’m looking forward to it.

So I’m returning to my alliance characters on Silver Hand permanently with 3.02. Mainly because Kirin Tor is a crappy server, and everyone there, especially the WARLOCKS, is an idiot. As I was saying repeatedly at Blizzcon: Everybody on Kirin Tor is an idiot. I mean EVERYBODY. Especially me, for staying there so long. And I can’t NOT play a draenei.

My priest: I can’t help but notice that the holy tree is practically identical to what it used to be. Great. Boring. Disc is quite different, but still has a huge problem of having very few talents early on that I can use, with TONS of talents I want later. I think some of the lower-value talents could really have been moved down in the tree.

Also, I’m still quite upset at the continued lack of a viable smite dps build. It was one of my major hopes for this expansion, and seeing that the 51-point talent can be a damage ability too gave me hope… until I tried it out and discovered it’s practically identical to Smite except it has a cooldown. It is a pretty kickass healing ability, and I’ll probably keep Kalya as a shield-based healing ALT.

But Kalya will no longer be my main. First of all, I’m disappointed in the 3.02 priest changes. Secondly, I hate the fact that everyone mispronounces my name. It’s KAL-YA dammit. I’m not Kayla.

On the other hand, I’m extremely happy about my shaman’s name. Kazzarae rolls off the tongue, shortens nicely to Kazz, and it’s a completely unique name not discovered on any other character worldwide. Which is unusual in these days of 10 million existing accounts. I think Kalya has a counterpart on half the existing servers, but Kazz is unique.

And the changes in 3.02 to hybrid classes make both my shaman and pally very satisfying to play. I respecced my shaman to enhancement and had her equip all of that offspec stuff she had in her bank, including those two beautiful glowing axes I got from Heroic Magisters’ Terrace. I think it’s hilarious, by the way, that I don’t have the achievement for killing Kael’thas in HMgT despite wearing no less than four things that only drop from him.

The new changes are awesome. I have one main thing to talk about for my enhancement shaman: maelstrom. The summoned ghost wolves are neat, and lava lash is kinda cool, and the consolidated totems are helpful, but nowhere near as neat as maelstrom.

Basically, Maelstrom causes me to get instant-cast spells if I build up 5 charges. I build up 5 Maelstrom charges by hitting with my melee weapons. This basically gives my shaman rogue-like combo points, with my spells being finishing moves. I can weave lightning bolts into my damage rotation (with 20% more damage thanks to stormstrike) or alternately, offheal while dpsing.

It really gives a lot of flexibility, and for once makes my shaman feel like a HYBRID, like she always should have been. Now that melee and spell crit and hit are the same stats, using spells and melee at the same time is no longer a waste. Since spellpower and healing are the same, I get a LOT more +healing from attack power than I used to. And it’s surprising how fast maelstrom charges build, so I can offheal pretty well even while doing damage.

Now, my paladin on the other hand… I feel like I’m gonna say someday “Well back in MY day, retribution paladins were mocked!” Ret has been buffed to hell and back. Anything that was ever wrong with retribution has been fixed. Alliance gets Seal of Blood now, to have a good dps seal that scales with haste.

We get a talent to give us spellpower based on attack power. That same talent buffs our heals to get 60% more on a crit, allowing us to use our current dps gear (with all that crazy crit rate) to offheal amazingly well. If that wasn’t enough, every time one of my special abilities crits, I get an instant-cast heal. I’m struggling to find people to use them on as I’m killing stuff so the procs won’t go to waste. Again, making my paladin feel like a HYBRID, able to heal while dpsing.

They got rid of that stupid Sanctity Aura, and for once, Ret pallies are using Retribution Aura. They completely overhauled the judgement system, making it so I don’t have to have Seal of Wisdom up first in order to judge wisdom. They buffed judgement of light like crazy to make it do a good amount of healing.

They gave ret pallies raid-utility in the form of mana regen. They gave them small-group CC by making repentance last a lot longer and work on a lot more targets. They got rid of any kind of downtime I might have had by making my judgements restore a third of my total mana pool.

With the new barbershop, I gave my pally snow white hair and reshaped horns. My shaman put her hair up in a ponytail. I’ve been spending all week working on the halloween achievements, because there’s a minipet and a title of “The Hallowed” in it if you can get them all.

So my pally could not complete the entire Ring of Blood chain, because the 5th guy mortal strikes for a good 4k. I can’t really do much against that kind of damage. But the fact that I could even get that far amazes me. I tried soloing the Ring of Blood on my paladin once before, and the first guy wiped the floor with me. This time, he was pretty much a pushover.

Then I went on to clear out the elite demons over on the west side of Nagrand, and then I went to kill Levixus the Soulcaller outside of Auchindoun. Basically clearing a bunch of group quests out of my quest log. I’ll list the things that make this possible:

1. OK I admit, I am insanely well-geared. My sword is the third tier Blacksmithing weapon, crafted once they made Nether Vortexes non-soulbound. I’ve got the S3 gloves that are considered best in slot due to their +10% Crusader Strike damage boost. I’ve got the epic engineering goggles, S3 boots, the iLevel 141 badge pants, and a myriad of other epics. My gear is not by any means awful. My crits hit REALLY HARD. I actually see chunks of health disappearing from their life bar whenever I hit one of my special abilities.

2. Judgement of Light. It actually does a non-negligible amount of healing now.

3. Divine Storm. Deals about as much as a normal melee strike as holy damage to 4 enemies nearby. It also heals for 20% of the damage it deals divided among 3 raid members. It’s still a good skill to use even against one enemy, and I get all 20% of the healing because I’m by myself ^_^ It really does a good job of taking out any pesky adds that might appear during the fight. Also, because it’s holy damage, it goes through armor, so it ends up being more damage than Crusader Strike against a single target.

4. Art of War. This is the big one. Every time I crit with either a Judgement, Divine Storm, or Crusader Strike, I get a buff that gives me an instant-cast Flash of Light. This heals me for ~1500 health with my current gear. With my current gear, I have about a 25% base crit chance. Talents give my Judgements an extra 25% crit. If I’m not horribly unlucky, I’m proccing this almost every time I complete a rotation.

5. Judgements of the Wise. I never run out of mana, because every 8 seconds, I judge — giving me back 1/3 of my total mana. I’d be hard-pressed to use 1/3 of my mana in 8 seconds.

So what if the big giant elite mob is hitting me for 2k per swing? I’m healing myself for nearly that much constantly. I didn’t even need to use my Avenging Wrath 20% damage buff for most of these. And if things get hairy (like they did in Ring of Blood fight #4 against a voidwalker who hits with armor-penetrating magic damage) I’ve always got bubble > holy light x2 to bring myself back to full health.

Have I mentioned I LOVE BEING A PALADIN?

I wasn’t kidding with the title of that last post. Since then I’ve been testing my limits on my paladin through questing. I did all my dailies in Quel’danas, finding that my average rotation would go Judgement of Light > Crusader Strike > Mob Dies. My mana never goes down because I get it all back every time I judge. After finishing there and moving on to my Outland dailies, two-shotting everything was getting boring.

So when I was trying to get the Sunfury Attack Plans in Netherstorm, I tried rounding up four mobs at once. Judgement of Light > Divine Storm > Crusader Strike > Repeat until dead. Still at full mana and almost full health.

Hmm, I thought. How far can I push this? Maybe I can do some of those elite quests in my log! So I went off to find Netherock, a level 68 elite that’s recommended as a 2-man group quest. I think my rogue soloed him at 70, with some difficulty. I actually ended up having two nearby mobs aggro on me during the fight, but I still ended with full mana and nearly full health.

Uh oh! I thought. I’ve only got two hours left to finish my dailies! I’d better get down to Shadowmoon Valley to pick up those Ata’mal Armaments! I was aggroing several of them at once just to speed up matters, when out of nowhere a giant elite Drakonid aggroes on me. It’s one of those patrolling mobs that if it sees you, you immediately think “AAAH I’M GONNA DIE RUN AWAY” but in my newfound sense of invincibility, I held my ground.

…I killed it. Full mana and well, my health went down to about half before I got enough crit procs to heal myself, but I certainly didn’t have to bubble or anything. I was still about 90% health when it died.

I went to kill another one out of spite, just because of how many times they’ve aggroed on me and killed me in the past. I’m gonna go see what else I can kill if I actually use all the tricks in my bag :D

THIS is why I made this character. To swing a giant sword and smite my enemies with the power of the Light. And watch them fall before me without so much as a scratch on my immaculate plate armor. She’s definitely my new main.