The new beta testers' WoW impressions thread!

[mb737]

Color me unimpressed.  This game gave me an incredibly bad first impression.

<aside>
  For all those ready to destroy their monitors for having just read such blasphemy, let me reiterate - FIRST IMPRESSION.  Maybe it's better than I think, "give it a chance", "wait until you see X,Y,Z" etc. have no meaning to me because all I have so far is a terribly confusing, boring, lag-fest of a FIRST IMPRESSION
</aside>

  I'll even tell you why it was so bad.  Made my char, whatever.  Don't know anything about the game mechanics.  Popped into the world (after a truly bizarre wait while my computer did nothing.  I thought the game had locked up!)  

OK here I am.  Re-mapped some movement keys.  Found a bang-head.  Got a quest - fetch me a foozle's hide!  Found a foozle and killed it.  Boring combat.  Went to retrieve said hide.  

Suddenly my char was stuck kneeling.  For about 3 minutes all I could do was slide around the map and even though there were some foozles to kill I couldn't touch them and they just walked around aimlessly.

  Finally I figured out that I wasn't actually doing something wrong (toggled something by accident) but that I was a victim of incredibly long server lag.

  Played about 20 more minutes and in that time I was able to actually PLAY for 10 of them.  Gave up in disgust.

[Knightshade Dragon]

Hmmm....that is really odd.  I wonder if you might have better luck on a less populated server?  On the beta servers (which are not overloaded like the stress test ones) I'm not getting stuff like that.  It just sounds like lag issues...

hhehhee...."foozle".

[Ascendent]

Come to Beta Server 2 empty and lag free. I can show you the ropes and toss a few heals at you as needed. This is a great game if you can just give it a chance.

Ascendent

[warning]

I had that happen twice.  It was always when I tried to loot a corpse while they were still in their death animations.  Sounds like a bug as it happened with different characters.

Don't let that get in the way.  It's a very fun game.

[jament]

Well.. it is a stress test.   I suppose, then, it's hard to be too surprised if the servers seemed ... stressed.

Give it time.  Initially, combat isn't that exciting.  Once you gain a few levels, though, and more skills, combat's a good time.  Also, try different characters.  I thought I wanted to be a caster, but that combat didn't really get me.  Rogue combat, though, sneaking behind mobs and knifing them in the back then executing combo point attacks - zowie.  Good time.

Hope you stick with it and find something that resonates with you.

[Calvin]

Come to Beta Server 2 empty and lag free. I can show you the ropes and toss a few heals at you as needed. This is a great game if you can just give it a chance.

Ascendent

They can't play on our closed beta servers Acendant

[Ascendent]

That sucks...

Ascendent

[Lordnine]

So far I have been under impressed by World of Warcraft.  I love the graphics, I love the variety of races and items, but group questing-the only reason I see to play a MMORPG over a single player RPG, seems to be completely broken.  I might be just missing an option somewhere but I don’t see the point in questing as a group (aside from added protection) if the quest items are not shared.  Basically if the quest is to collect ten maliciously evil plant seeds I don’t want to have to collect thirty just because I have three people in my group.  Not to sway to far off topic but just having completed the Guild Wars beta I can say that although a good share of the game was flawed, the team questing options were superb, and I would much rather have preferred a system like that implemented in WOW.

--Novem
9th lvl Night Elf

[Scott]

I'm not sure of the collection quests, but when you have to kill something, everyone in the group gets the head, sword, etc.  I imagine it is the same for collection type quests.  It is great to not have to kill the boss 5 times for each member.

Grouping seems pretty unnecessary at low levels so far though.  Maybe that'll change.

[Valhuerdi]

It is great to not have to kill the boss 5 times for each member.

I think there's a "share quest" option, but I've never actually seen it work.  Every time I try clicking it, it tells me my party members are ineligible.  Shrug.

[Charlatan]

Collection quests (the normal kind) do NOT typically share the item between party members. The kind of quest where it's "Kill King Bamfoozle and bring me his head" usually IS shared.

Kill X of mob Y quests ARE shared in a group.

The old rule of thumb is that you group for kill quests and solo for collection quests.

As for "Share Quest" it allows you to give your group members quests (as though you're the NPC questgiver). That said, they need to qualify for the quest in terms of their character's level and any needed prerequisite quests.

[Knightshade Dragon]

Or do the collection questions like I do:

Quest to IronForge, Quest to the Auction house, Quest into your pocket, and drop the magical coin into the slot.  Bamkapowwham, instadone.  10 Goretusk livers?  Not in this lifetime...

[Gryndyl]

My Open Beta Noob Impressions

My 24 hour download finished last night around 6:30. Waited a further 6 minutes to copy the file to my roommate's computer as well and then we were both installing.

The install is interminable. After spending a minute or two watching the blue bar creep pixel by pixel we went downstairs and played DOA Ultimate for half an hour on the X-Box.

The opening cinematic was fun to watch again, logging into my account was absolutely painless and then I was faced with the character creation screen.  A moment of discussion with my roommate dedtermined that we would try trolls first. Character creation was extremely simple-very accessible to newcomers but I did find myself wishing that I had the option to twiddle with my stat numbers. As it is it makes the characters very cookiecutter-at least initially. I hope there is more variation as time progresses. There were several appearance options that could be changed, all of them concerning the head. Apparently every character has the exact same body as every other character of their sex and species. The different facial and hair appearance options were pretty varied in appearance, allowing for a lot of differentiation, but there were a pretty limited number of choices. The CoH character generation seems to have spoiled me a bit in this area. The simplicity of the WoW system, however, did have me finishing my character up in less than 2 minutes so that was a plus.

Over the course of the evening we tried as many races and classes as possilbe to get a feel for them. We played each to about level 4, so basically I saw of lot of the different noobie areas and quests. I played a troll shaman, an undead mage, a night elf rogue, a dwarven hunter and a human paladin.

Starting areas were very varied in appearance and had a strong sense of place to them. The graphics were very, very nice, particularly after I turned them upo from the default settings. I left resolution on 1024x768 and cranked all of the other graphic options and experienced a completely acceptable 30 fps average (AMD 2100, 1 gig RAM, Radeon 9600 pro).

There was a little bit of server lag at the start of the evening, causing other characters to blink around a little bit, but nothing overly serious. This changed dramatically as the night wore on. We started the evening playing the different Horde races and had very tolerable lag. When we switched to the Alliance races the game suddenly became almost unplayable. I don't know if it was simply that it was later in the evening and more people were logging in or if there were just that many more people playing Alliance but it was rough going for the good guys. Looting a corpse could take up to 3 minutes, during which you were stuck in a kneeling position. Attacking a mob or talking to an NPC could also take 2 or 3 minutes for the server to register. I expect this to smooth out over time but it was rough going last night.

Troll Shaman- I don't know where this was established but I like the notion of RPing trolls speaking with a faux patois dialect. Cracks me up. My first  impressions of the troll quests was slight disappointment. "Go kill 10 'x' and report back". Upon doing so and reporting back..."Go kill 10 'x'; variation 2 (easily spottable as they are the same graphic, only slightly larger and with a different name) and report bacl". This pattern was to be repeated for the opening quests of all of the other noobie areas I tried.

When you think about it, almost all quests, in games, books, movies or whatever, boild down to a few basic outlines. Frodo taking the Ring to Mordor? A Fed-Ex quest. It's all in how well that basic pattern is disguised. WoW seems to do a fairly competent job of this, giving a good backstory to each quest. I did run across a few that were pretty unique and quite enjoyable beacuse of it. (Noobie quest spoilers following) I had one where instead of killing mobs I was picking cactus apples. Still a 'get 10 x and bring them back" quest, but hunting around for cactus was a nice change and encouraged some nook and cranny exploration. This same idea was repeated with the undead, looking for crates to scavenge supplies from. This one was even more fun as it involved exploring a ruined village with lots of fun eye candy and even a treasure chest to stumble across. I was delighted, playing the troll, to come across some orc peons straight out of the Warcraft RTS games chopping wood, grumbling about their jobs. When I recieved a quest from the foreman to find orc peons that were snoozing on the job and whack them upside the head with a blackjack I was very amused. Another well disguised quest formula. (end quest spoilers)

The troll starting area reminded me a lot of the Coyote and Roadrunner's desert and was fun to run around in. The starting shaman spoells weren't anything to surprising and included one (create water) that I've had zero use for yet but I imagine will come in handy later. Spell graphics weren't anything spectacular but were certainly adequate for their purpose.

Undead Mage: As previously mentioned the ruined village was great fun to explore. There was also a cool quest (spolier) involving killing a specific undead and burying his remains in the cemetary next to his wife (end spoiler). The look of the undead area was nice and haunted. There was also a very cool abandoned mine to explore, essentially a public dungeon. Crowded but plenty of mobs for everyone.  There is a tremendous surplus of undead warlocks, from what I saw. The buggers are everywhere. If you play undead and pick anything other than a warlock you will be a rarity and potentially in high demand later in your career.

Night Elf Rogue: Night Elf women are hot. That being said, this is probably the character that I played the least of primarily because this is where we first started encountering server lag and we switched to dwarves to see if it got any better. Rogues seem like they could be an extremely fun class to play and I look forward to spending more time with this character. The elf starting area was about what you'd expect. Big trees with circling ramps and rooms inside of them. The starting quest that everyone seemed to get involved attacking a camp with a pretty small spawn rate so competition for kills was pretty fierce here.

Dwarven Hunter: I loved the dwarves. Their look is perfect, the look of their starting buidlings is perfect and the snow was fantastic. You leave footprints when you walk, breath frosts in the air and the moon glints off of the snow beautifully. This was another character that I didn't get to spend nearly as much time with as I would've liked as the lag here was even worse than with the night elves. This was when the game came closest to being unplayable. After a bit we retreated and went for the humans

Human Paladin: I realize it's keeping with the spirit and tradition of the RTS but it was a little jarring when the newbie quest NPC told me anachronistically to "Have a good one!" as I left him. I was tempted to respond with the Carlin classic "I've already got a good one, now I'm looking for a longer one" as I was playing a female avatar and the NPC wouldn't have thought it was funny anyway. The spawn for the noobie quest was larger here but there were more people so there was still a lot of stiff competition. There was another mine here to explore; disappointingly it was exactly the same place as the undead mine, just with different mobs. I had fun playing the paladin but I'm not quite sure I grasp yet the most effective ways to use their abilities. And yes, human females are hot.

Interface: Slick, smooth, intuitive and very, very easy to use. My roommate was quite happy with the way pets were handled as well. I have yet to get a pet but it looked like a good system. The map was also incredibly cool. It fills in details as you explore and you get xp for discovering new areas. Quest NPC's and party members show up on it as well which was very nice.

Graphics: Fantastic. I was skeptical about the cartoonish look but once you're in it it works very well. It's like being in an animated movie with consistently very high quality and believable art.

Sound: Very good. Only a couple of times did I expect a sound and not get one. The game is full of the necessary noise, both ambient and from other characters, to make it feel believable and immersive.

Concluding Thoughts: I enjoyed playing enough that I forgot to eat dinner and ended up going to bed an hour and a half late because I flat out lost track of time. I had a great deal of fun. However, the existence of uninspired grind quests was a little disappointing. I can live with it if quests start gaining in variety as levels progress but if, at level 20, I'm seeing "go kill 10 super big bad-ass kobolds and report back" then I'm not going to be a happy guy. It seems that Blizzard has taken existing, tried and true MMORPG formula and spiffed it up a lot but not really innovated a great deal. I typically burn out on MMORPGs pretty fast and I see myself playing this one for 3 or 4 months before calling it in. Unless something occurs at higher levels to keep me captivated I don't see that this one will last much past when the shinyness of a new world to explore wears off.

8/10

[Vesper]

Is there some sort of local area map I don't know about?  The one in the corner is far too small to be useful.  The only other map I found was the World Map, which is way zoomed out.  I REALLY wanted a "local area" map so I could figure out where the heck I was going.

[EngineNo9]

Well if you just hit M it will bring up the map of the zone you are currently in.  Clicking on that map will zoom out so that you see the zones on your current continent area.

[Ascendent]

There are some nice quests out there. But to be honest at 22 I don't quest much. I explore. I roam around finding new and interesting spots find new creatures then kill them. Or try to

With the sheer number of quests available there's going to be overlapping. I don't know how anyone could keep comming up with new types of quests over the course of 60 levels. There's going to be go kill ten undead, go kill 15 rabid wolves, go kill 20 smurfs. Its going to happen but don't let that limit your enjoyment of the game. Whole big world out there explore it

Ascendent

[Toe]

Is there some sort of local area map I don't know about?  The one in the corner is far too small to be useful.  The only other map I found was the World Map, which is way zoomed out.  I REALLY wanted a "local area" map so I could figure out where the heck I was going.

Usually when you turn on your world map it takes you to the region, or zone, map. Not sure why yours would be defaulting to "world" world map or if we are talking about two different things.

You can click on the various "zones" on the world map to zoom in. Where you are is represented by a dot, so clicking it should bring you to the region map. This map has the names of most towns and various other locations name don them and shows roads and things of that nature (edit: forgot to add that until you explore the area you will not see any features of the zone, like a fog of war effect. also, usually staying strictly on the roads of a zone will not remove the fog)

[Toe]

You will have collection quests at ever level i am pretty sure (I am at level 51 and still running across a healthly amount).

But, as you hinted at, Blizzard does a decent job in candy-coating these so you at least feel like you have a purpose for killing. Some chain into other quests that chain into other quests all with a purpose which is often killing the "boss" of that creature type in the area. It seems fairly reasonable to me in a roleplaying sense. But I am pretty easy to please in the department. Anything that keeps me from "grinding" exps for no purpose other than to get to the next level I welcom with open arms.

[Gryndyl]

You will have collection quests at ever level i am pretty sure (I am at level 51 and still running across a healthly amount).

But, as you hinted at, Blizzard does a decent job in candy-coating these so you at least feel like you have a purpose for killing. Some chain into other quests that chain into other quests all with a purpose which is often killing the "boss" of that creature type in the area. It seems fairly reasonable to me in a roleplaying sense. But I am pretty easy to please in the department. Anything that keeps me from "grinding" exps for no purpose other than to get to the next level I welcom with open arms.

I'm pretty much the same way. I loved CoH's story arc progression for the clockwork and the vazhilok-went along the same lines-kill quests leading into other quests then into others, finally progressing up to the boss. Once you'd finished you felt like you'd "solved" the problem. The monsters that you fought along the way were now grey con so they no longer seemed the threat they once were-as if they were mere remnants of what had been. Very cleverly done illusion and it sounds like WoW might be doing something similar

[Falator]

Yup, i tried 2 of the normal servers and both were lagged to unplayable. Then i tried the role playing server and it was totally lagless heh. Now i am a level 6 warlock and having quite a bit of fun.

oh and only 4 levels before i can get the cool looking voidwalker

[olaf]

The problem the original poster described is back end server lag.  Database stuff I guess.  It used to happen a lot during the beta, when the game was crowded.  They fixed it almost completely...I guess its back now with all of the load.

olaf

[jonsauce]

I haven't played in the open beta yet, just the stress test.
I will NOT be picking this up when it launches, but I never planned to.  I'm burnt out on MMORPGs and I am done with them.  They are fun, for awhile.  But then I keep playing them when they are no longer fun.  They sure are adictive though

I think alot of people will have fun with WoW, but the genre is not for me anymore.

[-Lord Ebonstone-]

However, the existence of uninspired grind quests was a little disappointing. I can live with it if quests start gaining in variety as levels progress but if, at level 20, I'm seeing "go kill 10 super big bad-ass kobolds and report back" then I'm not going to be a happy guy.

Don't prepare to be happy, then.

[mb737]

New gripe.  Could be open beta related.  I can only connect to the original server I picked last night.  Otherwise I get disconnected.

  That's not so bad, but what IS is that once you get dropped you can't pick a new server!  It keeps trying to connect to the same one over and over (and subsequently drops you over and over)!  

W
T
F
?

  Luckily I rooted around and found the solution:
{WorldofWarcraftDemoDirectory}\WTF\Config.wtf

Line:
SET realmName "{Server that kicks you}"

change this back to the server that let you in.

[jessie]

im not a newbie. but i can shed some light as to the quests.

the quests are going to be the same, but the ultimate goal of the quests will be different.

******SPOILER!!!*************

for humans, you head off into an area and start fighting as part of a militia formed since stormwind has sent off too many troops and the area is being surrounded by bandits.  you start off fighting back lowbie bandits.  then you come across a traitor who will show you the way to the bandit headquarters.  you have to escort him there, and since he's a traitor, you have to protect him through enemy territory.  once you get there, it's an instanced dungeon and you go after the lead bandit.

[Daehawk]

And those bandits had fairly good loot in the stress 1 I was in..i remember one reward or loot was a red bandana for your mouth/nose so you looked like a train robber hehe

[jessie]

well what's cool about the game is that any monster has a chance to drop something awesome (for your level)  gone are the days of camping only named mobs.

[Toe]

well what's cool about the game is that any monster has a chance to drop something awesome (for your level)  gone are the days of camping only named mobs.

Whats funny is you see folks that do not realize this who are camping named mobs. In the newbie dwarf/gnome area there is a cave with some trolls. Your final mission before you leave the area is to kill the boss troll. You have idiots that just sit there at the spawn killing it when it pops because they think they are going to get a magic item off of it. By the time they do actually get a magic item off the creature I will be 5 levels ahead of them with items better than they got.

I also see higher level noobie folks "grinding" early on and it makes me chuckle. They do not realize that quests are abundant and are much better exps that grinding.

It goes to show that old MMOL habits die hard.

[Ralph-Wiggum]

I played for about an hour last night as an undead Warlock. So far the game seems pretty fun, though not all that much different than other MMORPG's. I've found the quest system to be nice in that at least I have goals; in a normal MMORPG I'd be killing the same monsters over and over again like I do in WoW, but there would be no goal or real point to it other than leveling. In any case, I plan on trying it some more later today.

[Koz]

well what's cool about the game is that any monster has a chance to drop something awesome (for your level)  gone are the days of camping only named mobs.

Whats funny is you see folks that do not realize this who are camping named mobs. In the newbie dwarf/gnome area there is a cave with some trolls. Your final mission before you leave the area is to kill the boss troll. You have idiots that just sit there at the spawn killing it when it pops because they think they are going to get a magic item off of it. By the time they do actually get a magic item off the creature I will be 5 levels ahead of them with items better than they got.

I also see higher level noobie folks "grinding" early on and it makes me chuckle. They do not realize that quests are abundant and are much better exps that grinding.

It goes to show that old MMOL habits die hard.

I was in the same spot last night and there were about 10 people camped around waiting to kill the guy. He spawned maybe three or four times before someone came up with the bright idea for everyone to group so we all would get credit for the kill. Kinda funny.

I would've tried to start a group, but I had no idea how and didn't want to look like a total idiot  

[Toe]

I was in the same spot last night and there were about 10 people camped around waiting to kill the guy. He spawned maybe three or four times before someone came up with the bright idea for everyone to group so we all would get credit for the kill. Kinda funny.

I would've tried to start a group, but I had no idea how and didn't want to look like a total idiot  

Two ways i do it.

If the person you want to group with is in sight, target them. Right click on their portrait (top of the screen next to your portrat/health/mana bar). That brings up options you can click on. One is Invite.

Second way i use when I want to invite someone that is not in sight. Hit enter and type /invite koz.

[Koz]

Yeah, I figured out the right click method after trying to frantically leave the group when everyone else had.

I'm not surprised there's a slash command for it, but I didn't want to be running around saying random things trying to figure out the command for it.

But thanks for the info, I'm better informed now.

[-Lord Ebonstone-]

New gripe.  Could be open beta related.  I can only connect to the original server I picked last night.  Otherwise I get disconnected.

  That's not so bad, but what IS is that once you get dropped you can't pick a new server!  It keeps trying to connect to the same one over and over (and subsequently drops you over and over)!  

W
T
F
?

  Luckily I rooted around and found the solution:
{WorldofWarcraftDemoDirectory}\WTF\Config.wtf

Line:
SET realmName "{Server that kicks you}"

change this back to the server that let you in.

Or you could just click the button in the upper-right corner of the character select screen that says "Change Realm."  

well what's cool about the game is that any monster has a chance to drop something awesome (for your level)  gone are the days of camping only named mobs.

EQ2 has this too.  It's a pleasant surprise to kill a foe and see a treasure chest spawn--you usually have to contend with a trap, but there's always something decent for the mob's level in it.

Sure, you can still loot body parts off the mobs and sell them for coin at merchants, but most of the "cool" loot in EQ2 comes in the form of these treasure chests.  It's thus very handy to have a Rogue around to disarm the traps for you!

[Falator]

My gnome warlock is level 10 now and in a short while i will start to quest for my voidwalker summon

[ebane67]

I had a friend just join the beta and was running about with him last night.  He's a long time eq player and I call him the 'grind master'!
Typical to fashion, he does NOT see the logic of doing quests when he can just find a spot and grind away. :roll:
I am more of the 'Lets run around and see whats over the next hill!' type of player, so we had an interestig go of things.  Personally I like the quest system.  And if someone likes to grind, why not get added xp's for it AND a cool item AND in some cases a little cash AND faction?  
It only makes sense!

[Lordnine]

Quick question; I’m a rogue and I chose pickpocket as a skill.  What can I do with it?  I can’t steal from other players, I can’t steal from NPC’s, and I even tried to steal from a wolf- that didn’t go over so well.

Am I missing something?

[mb737]

Or you could just click the button in the upper-right corner of the character select screen that says "Change Realm."  

  Sorry to dump on your smartass remark, but no, that wasn't possible.  What happened was that I was dropped to the LOGIN screen with no way to pick a server to log into.  Originally I had tried to pick a new server (from the character select screen) and that's when it kicked me to the LOGIN screen and decided to make my default server (In little gray letters in the bottom right under the three buttons) the one that constantly kicked me.  If you can tell me how I might pick a server to log in to from there I'd like to know.

  Thanks for the constuctive help, though.  :roll:

  Arg.  This game really rubs me the wrong way now.  I think I'll make everyone happy (including myself) and quit.  Hooray for common sense!  It really feels like Progress Quest with graphics to me.  I honestly don't see why everyone is so amazed by it.

[Lockdown]

Quick question; I’m a rogue and I chose pickpocket as a skill.  What can I do with it?  I can’t steal from other players, I can’t steal from NPC’s, and I even tried to steal from a wolf- that didn’t go over so well.

Am I missing something?

Nope.  You're not.  The pickpocket skill is used for monsters that Blizzard deems to have "pockets" of some sort.  You may have to be in stealth mode to use it effectively... I don't remember.  There may be NPC's you can steal from later in the game, I never took a rogue too high, so I don't know.

I know I have picked up many a bag by doing this to the Gnarlpines just outside of the opening Night Elf town.  It is a cool skill, just somewhat limited.

LD

[Interloper]

Most of the time I have found pickpocket just about useless, but I did get a ring once.  It's also handy when you get a quest that involves getting an item from an npc that maybe to high for you to kill.  Stealth in, pickpocket your item, finish quest  

[Gryndyl]

Day 2 impressions

So, played from the time I got home to midnight on wednesday and then was sick (for real!) on thursday and spent literally the entire day, 8 AM to midnight, in front of the computer. So I can say without reservation that the game has it's addictive qualities.

Wednesday night, instead of jumping around from class to class we decided to pick one and stick with it for the evening to progress a little past the newbie areas. We switched to the RP server and restarted as a human paladin (moi) and a warrior.  Good intentions aside we did end up taking a break from these characters later in the evening and, still on the RP server which had blissfully low lag, created a Dwarven Hunter (moi) and a Gnome Warlock.  I enjoyed my hunter immensely and it was this character I spent all day thursday playing.

In both instances, human and Dwarven, I was very impressed with how the quests continually led you to a new area, had you spend enough time there running around to get familiar with it, and then progressed you to another area. This is part of what gives it a "single player" feel-you feel as if you are being guided through the world in an intelligent fashion. And should you feel on rails you can easily break loose and do your own thing.

Still up in the air about whether I enjoy the paladin or not. I advanced as far as level 8. We progressed as far as Goldshire and were running quests in that air. We got caught up for a while running errands back and forth between two farms-some of which were kinda funny but all of which felt pretty "small potatoes". We got one quest there to kill a pig in a pumpkin patch but despite quite a lot of searching we never found either pig or pumpkin patch in the area described. This is about where we called it on the humans

We switched to dwarves because we'd really enjoyed the dwarven starting area the day before. We progressed through the early levels rapidly but then my roommate decided he hate his gnome warlock (more due to the race than the class-the voice drove him notes. It *was* funny seeing a warlock with a handlebar moustache though) and I soloed for the rest of the evening. I continued soloing my dwarf most of yesterday while he was at work.

As I progressed, I ultimately became a Dwarf Hunter, skinner, leatherworker, fisherman. All of those seemed to go well together, and gave me my first taste of crafting.

Traditionally, I've hated crafting in every previous MMORPG I've played. I've been enjoying it so far in WoW though. Skinning a varmint is fast and easy and leatherworking is very intuitive and easy tio use. The formulas are simple and the things I was able to make as a newbie were immediately useful to me. Within minutes after learning my crafting skills I was running around dressed entirely in leather armor I'd made myself. Near as I can determine, though, leatherworking is not really a moneymaking proposition. Seems only hunters and rogues wear leather (is that correct?). I don't know if there's a better choice for rogues, but most hunters I ran across were also leatherworkers (the few exceptions were engineers, making guns and ammo) so there didn't seem to be a big market for anything I made. Maybe there are some more varied leather items later-I'll need to check into that.

It also seemed that within an hour or two of making myself some snazzy leather item I'd find one that was better or get a better one as a quest reward. My homemade gear became obsolete pretty fast. Compared with the demand I've seen for bags from tailors, the leatherworkers seem to be of somewhat limited use. However, I did enjoy doing it. It seems though that to make money crafting one should pick high demand perishable items. I think that the cooks and the alchemists are the ones that are going to be making the most money.

The Dwarf ability to spot treasure on the minimap is very cool-once sending me swimming to the bottom of a frozen lake and then later getting me killed when it turned out that the chest belonged to some trolls on top of a mountain who didn't recall having invited me up there. Many of the level 5-10 dwarven quests seemed to involve transporting casks of beer about which was pretty amusing.

II continued to be impressed with the whole look and design of the dwarven areas, and I must say that the main Dwarven city of Ironhold was jawdropping. Exacly what a dwarven stronghold in it's prime should look like, and absolutely massive.

I also got to take my first ride on the tram and my first griffin ride. The tram was fun but the griffin was GREAT! Coolest thing I've ever done in a MMORPG. Flew from Stormwind to Ironhold and passed over some terrifying looking terrain on the way as well as some truly beautiful places. I'm sure the novelty will wear off at some point but for now this is the best entertainment to be had for a mere silver and change.

At level 10 I got my first pet-an ice claw bear whom I named 'Critter'. He gets grumpy easily but is a sucker for fish and I think we'll be getting along quite well in the long run. I gets quite annoyed whenever I manage to get him killed though so I always keep lots of fish on me to mollify him.

I've probably put in a little over 24 hours of actual playtime and am still very much enjoying myself and looking forward to playing tonight.