Not fair… I worked 7:30 - 3:30 today, which means that I had all evening to play WoW. Unfortunately, the servers have been down. I was really looking forward to hitting level 35 and spending some quality time fishing in Booty Bay…

The one thing I really hate about working retail is how it sucks the holiday spirit right out of you. It is hard to get excited about Christmas when you know it is going to bring longer hours, busier days, and more morons than you can shake a really big stick at. Everyone is grumpy, everyone is mad at you, and everyone is looking for the one thing that you’re sold out of. Makes it very hard to have a merry Christmas.

Today I’ve got to be in to open the store at 7:30 AM. That’s earlier than I’d normally even wake up to open the store during the rest of the year. We officially open for sales at 8:00 AM, but I’m willing to bet that we’ll not have a single sale before 9:00 AM. The mall just doesn’t advertise these holiday hours well enough. Everyone is still amazed when I tell them that we’re open until 10:00 PM until Christmas.

I was there last night, closing…didn’t actually make it out of the mall until nearly 11:00 PM. Got home around 11:30 or so…had dinner…and really didn’t have much time for anything else, since I had to get up so early today. There was a patch for WoW yesterday… Some real fixes, in addition to adding a bunch of fun holiday stuff. I would have liked to check it out, but I had to get some sleep. As it is, I’m only running off about five hours of sleep today.

I got to level 30 last night, which means that I finally get my felhunter pet. I really liked the felhunters in WarCraft III, and I’ve liked how they look in World of WarCraft too. Plus, they’re anti-magic pets, which is great for me - I always hate fighting magic users since they can stay at range and pelt me with spells.

So, I went all the way back to Stormwind to talk with the head Warlock trainer there. He tells me that I’m ready to learn about felhunters, but that he can’t teach me. I have to go talk to some guy in Ratchet. That’s not as big a problem as the first time I had to go to the Barrens for my succubus, since I’ve got the flight path to Booty Bay now. So, I head on over to Ratchet and talk to the guy. He tells me I need some book that’s been ripped into two pieces - one piece in Southshore, the other piece in Thousand Needles. In case you aren’t familiar with WoW geography, they’re on opposite sides of the world.

I go to Southshore and have to pick through a bunch of Murloc camps. What exactly the murlocs are doing with their half of the book, I don’t know. Probably using it for toilet paper or something like that. Anyway, after a few deaths and much killing of murlocs, I get that half of the book. Then it is off to Thousand Needles.

The problem is that Thousand Needles is in Horde-controlled territory, so once again I’m dodging guards. Tho book itself is in a cave filled with centaurs, behind a huge centaur camp. After much killing of centaurs I get the other half of the book, and head back to the librarian guy who’s going to repair the book for me.

At this point in time I’m expecting something along the lines of “yay, you found the book, now go summon a felhunter.” Instead, I get “oh, did we forget to mention the rods?” Yes, that’s right, I need three rods in order to summon the felhunter. More hunting, more killing, more waiting for rare items to drop. Yay!

Yesterday I got my first real taste of PvP in World of Warcraft.

We met up in Lakeshire around 3:00 yesterday, and then headed for the Crossroads. It took us a little while to get there, since not everyone had the flight path to Booty Bay, and we had to battle our way through Stranglethorne Vale. That, in itself, was an adventure. Getting jumped by level 40+ monkeys can be exciting when you aren’t even level 30 yet.

The boat ride over to Ratchet was interesting… We had so many people on the boat that several of us (myself included) lagged horribly while zoning. By the time I loaded into the zone the boat was already on its way back towards Booty Bay. I had to jump off and swim for shore. Luckily it wasn’t too far away from the coast, and I didn’t have to worry about fatigue death.

We made our way to the Crossroads, and were greeted by a bunch of level 50ish guards. Personally, I didn’t like fighting the guards. I’m normally a big fan of PvE raiding, but these guys just weren’t any fun. They were around level 50, which meant I couldn’t touch them at all at level 29. There were a lot of them, and they kept bringing more friends. For every 1 you killed, 2 more would spawn. That just wasn’t much fun at all.

After a little while though, real people started showing up, and that was a lot of fun. It was nowhere near as hard to hit the players as it is the monsters…I don’t know if they’ve got some kind of different resistance thing going with the players or what, but I was landing spells on people up to 10 levels higher than me. Of course…they were all hitting me too, even the folks quite a bit lower level than I was.

I died pretty quickly, and things only got worse as more players showed up an my armor started to degrade. Fortunately it was only about a 20 second run to go from the cemetary back to my body. But the more often you die, the longer you have to wait before you can resurrect at your body. At one point in time I was up to a 4 minute resurrection timer. That wasn’t much fun. It does reset after you stop dying for a little while though, so after we withdrew back to Ratchet and regrouped my timer wasn’t so bad.

Another slight negative to the PvP experience was armor repairs. Every time you die you lose a bit of durability on your equipment. By the end of the night pretty much everything I was wearing was broken. I had about 30 silver in repairs…which isn’t terribly bad…but that’s just because I’m wearing low-level cloth armor. I shudder to think of what some of the higher-level, plate-wearing players had to pay for repairs.

Zowie and I joined up with a full group of guildies and went hunting over in the Wailing caverns last night. The hunting itself was a bit on the uninteresting side… Wailing Caverns is geared more towards the 18 - 20 crowd, and my Warlock is level 24 now. So most of the critters were dying very quickly. Especially considering Xeen had his 30-something Paladin along with us.

While the critters weren’t very challenging, the instance itself was very cool. I’ve never really made it past the entrance to the Wailing Caverns, and it was great to explore the whole place. It was simply huge. Lots of reptilian critters to fight, and corrupted druids, and fun stuff like that. I got to abuse my rain of fire spell quite a bit, which was great fun. We also got to fight some very cool bosses, like a giant murloc. Good storyline to the whole thing too.

The best part came when we popped out of the instance, and ran right into a group of 18ish Horde folks. They looked quite startled, to say the absolute least. Nobody was flagged for PvP, so nothing happened, but it was fun anyway.

We also got a number of quests done… And I walked away from the thing with a 10-slot bag and some new shoulder armor, so I’m pretty happy. I just wish the critters had been a little higher, so I could have gotten some XP off of them…