Personally, I’ve been taking my time leveling my paladin. I didn’t pick Wrath up for a few days after launch, and have been working my way across my 3 70’s as well as my upcoming (63 atm) shadow priest, and my Deathknight (currently 61).

I’ve only knocked out a few quest hubs in Howling Fjord so far, but I’m liking the layout and style I’ve seen so far. I worked my way through the Utgarde Keep quest line as fast as possible and ran it. I have been ret since I headed up here and tanked UK just fine. Although my TPS was horrible due to Divine Storm and Crusader Strike being nerfed to physical damage (was holy).

Now that I’ve gotten the feel for the Deathknight class, I can return my focus back to my paladin, and hopefully ding 80 in the near future.

After a week or so to really play with the achievement system, I firgure it’s time I go ahead and give it a run down.

The thing that really sparked my interest to write about this was the comments made by Rohan, about the difference between the WoW achiement system, and the similar concept in Warhammer online.

He does go over them pretty well, the WoW achievement system (shortened to AS in this post) is pretty transparent. All of the achievment point rewarding goals are listed before you. You can see your targets and work towards those goals. However, in the Warhammer equivalent, all achievements are “hidden” in the fact that you can’t see what they are, or what it takes to accomplish them.

Now while I do like the idea of being surprised by a unexpected/random achievemet, if it were not for the visibility of the goals, lots of the developers efforts would have gone in noticed.

Now, like I mentioned all of WoW’s AP awarding achievements are listed, but there is an additional category that has no reward at all, the “Feats of Strength”. These achievements are hidden to the user, in that they cannot see them before they have accomplished them. They are a little different from the normal goals in the AS, and I’ve only gotten about 3-4 of them (most retroactive from past accomplishments).

I like the direction Blizzard has taken with the AS, it’s definately brought a new aspect to the game, as well as given us high level characters something to do until WotLK drops and we get to level our many alts again.

They released a new build on the beta servers. A few updates for every class, but most important to me is the 3% mitigation buff they put into Shield of the Templar.

With the 30% hp nerf that was in 3.0.2 dungeons and raiding have become a joke. The guild is making an attempt at Hyjal tonight. I really wish I could be there. The Heart of Kazrogal would be nice, as well as T6 gloves.