Goblin starting area

So with the arrival of the sproglet, I've been needing to find things to do other than group related content. Killing myself to deal with a screaming baby is no problem, wiping a raid or even a 5-man seems a bit d1ckish. I don't mind DPSing in a 5-man, but I prefer my tank and healer play.

One of the things to do in this situation is level some alts. The little one kipped so nicely the other evening while the missus was doing catch-up that I used up all my rested XP on all three alliance sub 85s I'm currently working on. Last night I figured, it's been almost a year and a half, maybe I should check out the goblin starting area.

Man what an experience. You get a hot rod to play carmaggedon with, get to play a bit of mech-warrior football (ok that's a stretch I know), rob a bank, party hard, rob the boss, kill some stuff... and all with a fun story going on and a good feel for seedy goblin life. And this whole area only lasts 5 levels. That's like 20 minutes of play time, even savouring the experience and ready quest text (well skim reading it - still more than I usually do).

I feel a bit short changed for my Worgen chars. Sure the Gilneas thing felt pretty epic, and was well done. The Goblin city is FUN. I've only just washed up in Azhara and I've really enjoyed it so far. Looking forward to exploring the rest of the starter area.

The little things

Wow, it's been a while. The main reason being, I've been on paternity leave. Just under three weeks ago my lovely wife gave birth to a beautiful little baby boy. So all my online time has been devoted primarily to uploading photos and showing him off on Skype.

I have managed to push my rogue and priest through Cataclysm content and top out at 85, bringing my 85s count to 5 - crikey. But it does mean that raiding is off the table for at least a little while as we readjust to having the sprog around.

I've also been keeping an eye on the MoP news, and the pet battle music set off a massive bout of Blizzard nostalgia. One of the first games I played on a PC was Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. It also reminded me of sommething that impressed me about Blizzard games very early on, and that was the little bits of humour they stuck in their games. If you click on a peasant he says "more work?" Or something like that. If you click on him again he'll pick one of his other responses. If you repeatedly click on him he eventually gets annoyed and says "stop touching me." My friends and I quickly made it a mission to find out what the various characters said as soon as we'd unlock a new unit type.

One of the my favourites was the siege tank in Starcraft. Mostly because all their responses where shouted as if they had a bit of hearing damage from all the close proximity to artillery. I had a link to a bunch of StarCraft quotes but my Blogger app lost it, sorry.

I did try clicking on a WoW NPC, but alas they didn't seem to have any hidden responses. But there are other little things in WoW to keep one smiling. I was thrilled to stumble across a foal named Bambino walking around Grizzly Hhills with her two friends, a rabbit and a skunk. I loved finding the Goblin prince's pleasure palace North of Orgrimmar complete with swimming pool and diving board. I read about and subsiquently hunted down the scary weapon wielding critters near Thunder Bluff. There are many, many more fun little bits about, but I'll leave them to you to go hunt down.