The expansion

I'm slowly getting back into the real world after my vacation. This first week back at work and on the road has left me somewhat disoriented and woozy. For a while the biggest decisions I was making was what to order off a menu and the extent of my analytical work was calculating a tip. What? I actually have to do something now? You want something in return for my salary? Craziness I tell ya, craziness.

Anyways. I am also slowly trying to catch back up on all the WOW news and the number of unread posts in my Google Reader is a bit ridiculous. So I see that the release date of the expansion has been announced as November 13. Wow, its real now, huh?

For the past couple of months, I consciously made the decision not to talk about the expansion or the beta in this blog at all. I guess I just wasn't really all that interested. All the new talents and skills and changes and whatnot are a lot to keep up with. I figured things would still change and that there are a lot of smarter people to blog about that stuff and what it means. I also didn't really care too much about whether certain classes would be overpowered or nerfed or whatever. I figured that in the end, everyone would still have a role. As long as I can still heal as a tree, I don't have many objections. Though perhaps I also feel this way because I'm in a small guild where we've always looked more at functions vs specific class makeups.

What I do find myself thinking about is how the expansion is going to affect our guild. I think I've mentioned before that most of us in the Left Claw started playing WOW after the Burning Crusade came out. Thus, I am very interested in seeing how far our guild can go now that we are starting on the same starting point as everyone else. With all raids attunable for 10 now in the expansion, how far will we go?

I'm also thinking about how we will deal with the fact that we have to level to 80 now. Will we all level at the same pace? Well, no of course not. Some have more time to play than others. Hopefully we will be somewhat close in levels, or have a couple of groups of people who are similar in level. While I am looking forward to seeing the new raids at level 80, I do hope that our guild doesn't try to necessarily push and race to 80, but will try to actually enjoy the leveling process as we check out a new world. Does this mean I will sometimes pause leveling to check out fishing in Northend? Heck yeah, it does. Well... until Jess does a probably necessary intervention and forces me to go back to leveling.

So what does all of this mean for us now until the expansion releases in 6 weeks? Well my goals include trying help plan for the Left Claw to finally do at least one 25 man raid, potentially leveling up my priest alt a little more, and continuing to grind and stock up gold. I definitely plan to get the mammoth mount as soon as I get out there because I love the idea of having my own vendors traveling around with me!