Edit: It seems that I’m not the first to think about this.

Damn about time.

Phasing has been since day one in wow (In fact, each time you die, you’re phased until you recover your body), relatively forgotten to veterans that only experienced it in lowbie quests in darkshore and other places we now ignore. This technique was recently brought to the light again and revamped by the quest Maintaining the sunwell portal, maybe the popularity that gained this quest for the I’m-on-other-plane-of-existence feeling or just wiping the dust on this old tome of ancient techniques lit a bulb on a few brains at blizzard which they have wisely used to make this coming expansion much, MUCH more inmersive than any previous content we may have seen. I fact, the starting questchain for the deaf death knights makes intensive use of phasing to guide you along the timeline of events. It’s really an experience that everyone should go through, even if you delete the char just after they kick you out of the ebon hold.

Cinematics, are also another sadly wasted lore-inmersion tool.  I can’t even remember a single cinematic until quel’danas and the magister’s terrace kicked into the game. It seems that blizzard used that patch as proof-of-concept and probe baloon, for what they were preparing for wotlk.

Can you spell AWESOME?

Yesterday, a new beta build was released, and revealed the existance of a cinematic, related to the quest chain that introduces you to icecrown glacier. This cinematic alone would the most epic thing you’ve ever seen in wow if the meaning of ‘epic’ wasn’t abused so much in this game already. Seriously, when you see it, you’ll shit bricks.

WTF? I’m on a new faction now?

Now, many players that haven’t played WAR III and even some that did will get some erroneous impresions of this video. Yes, hordies and allies can talk to each other, interfaction commuication is only forbiddent for game balancing (Stupid measure if you ask me). And what is worse: No, the forsaken won’t split from the horde.  You haven’t probably noticed if you’ve never played horde, but the forsaken are a split society already. They have their own extremist subgroup called the Royal apothecary society. Founded by Lady Sylvanas herself. Sylvanas, since it’s transformation into an undead has only one thought in her mind: Vengeance, this has led her to take a few cuestioable decisions while ruling the Undercity, first of them being allying a dreadlord. The Royal apothecary society, other huge mistake, plans wiping the Scourge and all the living. They are developing a new plague to do so.

Now back to the video, wonder what’s next?  Summarized, Grand Apothecary Putress and Varimathras conquer the Undercity, the horde wants Sylvanas un-undead, and the Alliance marches against the horde to avenge it’s fallen hero. What a mess!

To me, this expansion’s content was pretty lackluster, yes, we have more talents, skills and a new class that I love to play, but the content itself seemed more of the same we had until now. This video has filled me with expetation and I hope you too. Having watched the wotlk teaser left me with a feeling of ‘nice, really nice, but it’s just a pretty render with no background story’. This video has actually teased me far more thant the ‘teaser’ did.

I’m not that fanatic to think that MacOS has no defects, in fact it has and a lot of them. But its core philosophy is well designed and THAT makes the difference. When you look at the internals: A mach-BSD hybrid kernel, a full unix(posix compliant), Quartz screen-pdf and all the OS APIs you end up thinking why MS is just bloating each version of its US (see above) with new crap while keeping the old crap. Don’t tell me about legacy compatibility, Apple does support 4 (PPC/x86 and variants) different architectures and about 3-5 core APIs (Cocoa, carbon, quartz, posix) of so different nature and does it elegantly and inappreciably to the end-user. Let’s stop gloryfying OSX, shall we?

Today I arrived at my workplace and turned on the screen just to notice several memory fault errors, disk-write errors and complete frozen-ness of the whole UI. As expected, the reboot took about 40 minutes, this on a workstation which has only the necesary tools instaled for me to work. And which has always the same 6-7 applications open (Skype, outlook, PuTTY, firefox, eclipse and sometimes excel or word) Needless to say, this machine is far more poweful (in theory) than my personal machine at home (a PC build with the cheapest parts I could find with MacOS 10.5.5) which has 10 times the workload in a 24×7 basis. Here I can spend 3-4 endless minutes launching EACH application, whereas at home, they can be openned in a matter of seconds, WoW included.

I just keep on dreaming the day I can use a mac at work.

But now, my archenemy enters the stage again: My hesitation. I’m completely unable to choose a class to level up first. If I could, I’d transfer my current three 70s to horde. I love shaman healing, I adore feral versatility and being a warlock is just EZ-Mode. Now as my leveling partner has chosen a belf rogue I should choose something that fits it so we could help each other more effectively and instance together.

Each time I think of it, I’m more convinced that probably the class that fits best this task is the drood (though I personally hate taurens appearance in wow, loved them in Warc III) he stealths, he tanks, he heals, and he just rules.

I’m pretty sure that if I ever lvl one horde char to 70 I’ll probably level also my other options. I’m a severe altoholic if you didn’t notice.

P.S. I’m on a low-pop PVP realm! Sometimes I amaze myself.