Well it’s now just under a week since the Blizzard’s second expansion to World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King was released. In that time I’ve managed to level Spangles to the dizzy heights of level 72 and thought I’d post some of my thoughts and experiences.
The day of release
The day of the release was a frustrating day for me, I had ordered my copy of WotLK from Amazon and had received notification that it had been shipped two days before the launch date. I sat a home eagerly awaiting the arrival of the postman… and I waited… and waited… Didn’t he realise how important today was, surely he could have delivered to me first and then gone about his day! Eventually patience gave way to frustration and by lunchtime I was down right p’d off!! So I jumped in the car and droving into Bolton to buy a copy from Game, I even found that I had £10 on my points card so I scored a copy for a mere £9.99. Upon returning home I discovered that Postie had been waiting around the corner for me to leave before delivering our mail and more to the point there was no post from Amazon* 
Anyway enough rambling… disk in… install… patch… here we go!!!
I teleported to Stormwind, mounted up, ran to the harbor. As the harbor started to come into view I was feeling quite excited, so excited in fact that I forgot to turn right for the path and ran off the walls and crashed to the floor losing half my hit points, not a Good start! Not letting this minor mishap put me off, I dusted myself off and boarded the boat to Northrend, zoned and the game crashed! I could tell it was going to be one of those days, several crashes and one or two choice words later the game was stable and I was ready to go.
Borean Tundra
Upon arrival in Valiance Keep I was initially concern that it would be very difficult to get things done due to the vast amount of people there. However this concern was short lived as it became apparent that all required mobs were spawning fast enough to allow everyone the change to complete their quest reasonably quickly. The vast number of people in the zone also had another advantage, that being there is no shortage of people to help complete group quest with a group invite often getting sent as you arrive in the area where the required mob is. I did find it very amusing when there was 3 or 4 groups both Alliance and Horde all huddled in a small cave frantically spamming their AoE spells to try tag the mob upon re-spawn 
As I ran through the quests I was good to see that each quest chain has been given a good deal of thought and generally have good story lines, with one or two twists.
My First Instance
I have a group of friend who I have recently started going TBC instances with and they invited me over to do a run in The Nexus, Coldarra. It was great to get away from the manic questing to be able to take the time to view a zone without it being cluttered with other players. It was great to go into an instance without all the strats down to pat and have to work things out for ourselves, the first two bosses we fought Ormorok the Tree-Shaper and Anomalus were not too much of a challenge and were quickly dispatched. The fun started with Grand Magus Telestra who likes to throw you around the room, thus forcing you only to use instant cast spells, this caused us some healing problems which all came to a head when she played her next trick. Half was through the fight she split into three aspects, one fire, one frost and one arcane, after our first wipe we put a mage on the fire and frost aspects (yes, we have two mages in our group) to sheep them and then tried to DPS down the arcane, again we wiped as sheep kept breaking quickly. Third time lucky, we played this exactly the same as the second time but this time the mages just constantly sheeped their target until the arcane mob was down, then we killed the other two in turn.
On to the final boss a red dragon call Keristrasza, I love dragons to be honest they are one of the reasons I played games like wow, I want to see dragons… and kill them 
Keristrasza casts a a debuff that slows you casting and attack speed, so yet another fight where we were having to rely on instant cast spells most of the time, as we started to wipe I Ice blocked and then when everyone else was down proceeded to kite Keri around the outside of her room. Unfortunately she caught up with me before anyone else managed to get back in and get some agro so she re-set 
Second attempt we did the same thing except this time I kited while everyone else rezzed and buffed then we finished her off, but not before she killed me and unfortunately the she went down before I got back into the instance so I didn’t get the achievement but I did get a nice new pair of boots [item]Attuned Crystalline Boots[/item] 
All in all I really enjoyed my first day in the new expansion and think it will bring many more hours of fun, more about some of my favorite quest lines and most hated areas in furture posts.
*FYI the copy of WotLK eventually arrived two days after launch, well worth pay for First Class delivery… NOT! 