...back to the cold icy grinding grip of World of Warcraft. It wasn't something I had planned on doing, but nostalgia over my old days playing with my friends, many of whom have long since left the game, brought me back. My account was reactivated by a friend who used a "Scroll of Resurrection" on it, which gives you 10 free days of play time, provided your account has been inactive for 90 days. Seeing as how I hadn't logged in since July of last year, it was well qualified to be rezzed.

I was sort of excited to get back into the swing of things. I logged into my old main, Shinobu on Skullcrusher, and after getting in touch and caught up with friends and old guildies who still play WoW, I went to play around a bit on my Blood Elf Paladin, Urashima. I hadn't really kept up with the game all that much over the past 7 months, so I was very astonished at how quickly I leveled up my second paladin. It really only took about a month of on and off playing to get him from 40 to 70.

Just about everything has gotten easier in this game. Like getting decent gear, for example. All you have to do is either grind out honor in the battlegrounds, or pay an arena team to put you into their ranks for a few games, gather arena points, and buy even better epics than what the standard honor grind gets you. Money is also very easy to get, since there are dozens of daily quests which net anywhere from 9 to 15 gold for those who do them, AND some of those quests give you items that you can then turn around and sell via vendor or Auction House. It also seems like PvP is easier, but this could be due to the fact that I've been mainly PvPing on my Horde character, rather than my Ally character. In my battlegroup, Ruin, the Horde side tends to have a much better winning percentage than the Alliance does.

All of this ease sort of ruins the game, though. Easy grind quests net rather large profits. Granted, the entire game is just a huge grind, but it just isn't the same. To be honest, pre-Burning Crusade WoW was the best. It wasn't as easy as it is now. Granted, WoW has never been the hardest of MMOs, but its crazy how insanely easy it is in comparison. Even the instances are easy. It seemed to take forever for even the best guilds to down the big bosses in raid instances, like Naxxramus. Now the big instances have shrunk their max raid size to 25, and 3 or 4 well geared players can defeat Onyxia, a feat that used to take a well coordinated 40 people to do. There's even a horde guild on my server selling Black Temple loot like people used to do in Molten Core and Blackwing Lair.

Oh well. I'll probably continue to play off and on untill the next expansion pack releases. Its a good time waste, and console releases have left me sort of jaded again. There's only a handful of releases I'm even that excited about. Mainly Tales of Vesperia, Star Ocean: First Departure and Second Evolution (If they'd ever get freaking released outside of Japan!), and I have to purchase Ikagura when I get the chance to get some more Microsoft Points. I will say that the very averageness of Brawl has left me very Jaded about the Wii, and I still have yet to unlock all the officers on Dyansty Warriors 6, which I really need to get around to doing.

Oh, and to those of you who might be wondering why in the bloody hell I leveled up two Paladins to 70, my only response is this: Shinobu is Holy, Urashima is Retribution, and Otohime is Protection (but only 44. :P). In all honesty, Paladins are good fun. The recent tweaks to Retribution make us a very viable damage class. I've found that Blood Elves are the best choice for Retribution paladins, as Seal of Blood is ungodly good, and Mana Tap and Arcane Torrent actually do help quite a bit in Leveling and in PvP.

Untill next time, ladies and gents.

::Ura::