Le Sigh

I suppose the reason I don't really mind that this frakking game has its hooks in me so much is because it never really takes me long to start kinda having fun with it again.  All it takes is an idea, a character to poke at for a little while, and some free time on my hands.

I did end up making that priest that I talked about yesterday.  I decided he's an old yamabushi, a mountain ascetic.  Strictly speaking a Japanese tradition, but it would rather surprise me if the Chinese didn't have an equivalent, I just can't find the word for it.  Lama?  Something like that.  Anyway.

In the end I opted to use my free character boost on my rogue.  This was for two reasons: one, I've always wanted a max-level rogue, and two, I decided to make my hunter my main and an engineer/leatherworker, so I needed a max-level skinner to feed the hunter leather.  Give the rogue skinning and engineering and give him the boost and bingo, max-level skinner.

In all likelihood I will pay another sixty to pop the priest up to 90 once I get him to 60.  I wait that long, of course, because the profession boost is too good to pass up and I actually really enjoy playing through old-world content now.  If there's anything good came of Cata, it was the revamping of the old-world.  Ironically, Cata's on-level content is my very least favorite to play through.  It's absolutely worth paying sixty bucks to bypass Cata and Pandaland, and getting to bypass Northrend and Outland is just kind of a nice bonus.  But nu!Old world content is still enjoyable enough to revisit that it's not worth paying to skip it when you consider the loss to professions.

On the subject of professions, wasn't there supposed to be some kind of profession training revamp?  Like, I remember reading that they were doing something to make it way easier to get past old old profession leveling, a la the cooking trainer in Halfhill.  Maybe we don't get that until we get to Draenor?  I don't know.  Right now it looks the same as it always has.

Back to the free 90.  Homg.  Getting a free 90 is nice and all, but the price you have to pay is working through that sad excuse for a "pre-expansion event" without any of your abilities.  Including the ability to fly.  Yeah, let that sink in a minute.

When you log on with the free 90, you get a tiny handful of abilities, and after each series of quests you get a couple more.  You don't get the full suite of abilities until you finish the whole chain, and it's annoying as fuck.  I guess it's to help new-new players ease into their abilities, but come on, there should be some way to skip the tutorial.  It's been eight years, Blizzard, I think I know how to rogue by now.

But leaving that aside, you get pretty good value for your sixty bucks.  A free 90 with a pair of 600-level professions (you get assigned two professions based on your armor type if you don't have any professions) plus full first aid, a full set of embersilk bags (!) and 500 gold.  Oh, and a full set of i476 greens.

Actually, now I understand why the service costs so much.  (Ten dollars more than the price of the expansion, lulwut?)  It's because they give you gold with the deal.  If it was cheap, say, ten bucks, that'd set the price of gold at ten dollars for 500 gold, and it'd be perfectly legal, if a bit time-consuming.  Roll a new toon, bump it to 90, send your gold to a bank alt, delete the toon, rinse, repeat.  Borderline not worth it at ten bucks, not even vaguely feasible at 60.

I gotta admit, I'm looking forward to playing my hunter again.  Like, actually playing.  Questing and exploring.  I like leveling.  I like that kind of guaranteed progress.  In particular because managing multiple max-level characters gets old really fast.

I really thought I was out this time.  Ah well.