It’s sad, really. I have all this work to do — the contracting gig is taking off and I have two very interesting and lucrative contracts on my plate, plus a horde of work on Petopia to catch up with this last patch, plus way too many comments and e-mails and blog posts to read through — and yet all I can do, it seems, is play.

Of course, as I mentioned last time, sometimes I just get the urge to play compulsively. It’s this urge (plus the one that has me running a fan site, of course) that keeps me out of the true ‘casual player’ bucket. I just get too intense about the game sometimes. *grin* But I fully expected this latest playing kick to wear off by now. I didn’t properly account for the fact that Patch 2.3 would be so much fun.

First there was the guild bank. I oh-so-cleverly set up one-person guilds for myself on both my Horde and alliance worlds specifically to take advantage of the guild bank. Unfortunately Blizzard raised the prices on the first couple of tabs from what I had seen on the PTR, but I went ahead and bought the first tab anyway — it’s much more convenient than mail. When Kaet is full of semi-valuable things out in the boonies she can still e-mail them all back to my auction character (and the new 12-items per mail interface is very handy there), but often she’s passing through Booty Bay or Rachet and can just dump them all in the guild bank for later pick-up. It also gives me more flexibility in storage, since I don’t need to know which alt will eventually be holding the items when I drop them off.

The real excitement is the ‘new’ content, though. I haven’t even been to Dustwallow Marsh yet, but I did Stromgarde for the first time ever, and the Ruins of Alterac for the first time ever, and a whole bunch of formerly elite quests that I had previously skipped. And I still have lots more to look forward to! No wonder I can’t stop playing …

So Kaet hit level 40 and Exalted with Stormwind and bought herself a lovely Chestnut Mare. I would have liked an old-style Palomino and I was expecting to get a Black Stallion, but in the end the Chestnut Mare just fits Kaet the best. Kaet named the mare Sunny.

I did have a few problems with the crabs not wanting to attack, and I kept backing up (often into enemies) as if I still had a huge deadzone, but overall the hunter mechanics changes felt pretty good. And the leveling changes were noticable and welcome at level 40. Now, however, comes the final test — level 41 is the last level for me to ‘auto-level’ my blue crab Frore (that is, tame a new blue crab that’s my level). So from here on out I’m going to be trying to keep three crabs leveled (and incidentally eschewing Claw Ranks 7, 8, and 9). We’ll see how that goes …