"Honey! I'm home!"

What can I say? It's been years. To make a long story short, a bunch of guys from the office have returned to the Altar of Blizzard with the new expansion and said I should revisit it. "I just don't think it's work $15 to re-up for a month, not to mention the box price. That's money I could blow on Pokecoins or, well, something that isn't WoW." Now, despite the time stamp on the last blog entry, I played a couple of months in Pandaland, long enough to get Strev through all of the available content and a few of the alts halfway through maybe level 87 before boredom of the daily grind set in and I left for other pastures.

"C'mon, Strev. You get the Draenor expansion for free and you can pay for your monthly sub with gold!" Now that perked my interest. When I left, I was sitting on a vault that periodically had to be sprayed for swimming cartoon ducks, a month's sub at 35k gold or so wasn't going to break me or even put that big of a dint in the ol' war chest. I rationalized that Draenor would keep me busy for a while and then after I'd sucked every last drop of juice from that lemon, I'd decide whether or not Legion was worth my effort. I mean, I know I'm going to break down and get it, but for now I can pretend. Besides, I'm always a sucker for peer pressure.

Well, I'd never uninstalled the game from my last run. Of course, I never bothered to keep it up to date either so, let's see how big of a downl--- 34 gig?! Yikes. Bear in mind the fastest speed my ISP, AT&T, provides borders on 3rd world speeds, so it will take days to patch the whole damn thing. As an aside, the main thing that keeps me from revisiting other MMOs I've enjoyed in the past to see how they've come along, for better or ill, is the massive downloads required just to pop in and say "Boo." Fortunately, Blizzard has the deal where you don't have to download everything in order to play and the portion I already had on my drive was almost enough to be considered "playable", if I didn't mind the occasional lack of graphical assets and giant delays while transitioning to areas. Good enough. I'd be going in blind after years "on the outside". Let's see...


A Fashionista I am not.

In short order I found myself in the middle of a panda commune surrounded by NPCs. I had no addons, talents, guild, friends, or clues to what was going on. After picking some talents almost at random and sorting out some basic spells to my toolbar, I hopped in a portal to Stormwind, determined to at least get my bearings. After stopping wistfully by the auctionhouse just to say "Hi" to Jaxom and Fitch, I tooled over to the Inscriptionist to see I didn't qualify for a skill increase yet. Fine. Crafting for a previous expansion isn't exactly a pressing necessity, so I'll figure it out later. As predicted, the noticeboard next to the AH gave me the breadcrumb to head to the Blasted Lands and begin our adventure proper.

So, for those of you reading along, new fans and old (who just happened to check this blog and discover it is suddenly active again), welcome to the continuing adventures of Strev, Gnome of the Wild Frontier.

Now let's go out there and do something stupid!