In July of last year I started a new hunter — something I do all too often. But this time I swore it was going to be different! This time I wouldn’t just create the character, play it to level 10 or maybe 20, and then leave it to lie fallow in my character list. No, this time I was going all the way — all the way to 70, baby!
And although it took almost a year (not to mention 12 days and 14 hours in-game), I did it. Last night, Kaet hit level 70.
You know you’re someplace special when you find yourself running across a grassy plain thinking, “Oh! I’d better keep an eye out for poo!”
Luckily, poo is pretty sparkly.
(Yes, I am playing again, just a little. I am mostly futzing around on Kaet because Nagrand is one of my favorite zones for relaxing grind-and-quest action.)
As the title implies, my little dwarf hunter Kaet has just hit level 66. I’ve been playing her lackadaisically — an hour here, two hours there — but rested XP plus the tight quest design in Outland has really made the levels fly. I’m out of rested XP now, though, so I figure it’s time for a report and then a short vacation.
I woke up this morning to a Blue Screen of Death and the smell of ozone. And things just got worse from there.
Twelve hours, three chkdsks, one power supply, two video cards, three sticks of RAM and three failed XP reinstalls later, my main computer is still totally inoperable. (Thankfully, we didn’t have to buy any of those parts except the power supply.) I’ve ordered a new bare-bones machine, but it’s won’t be here for at least a week.
In the meantime, I have the laptop. It’s not my favorite machine for either playing or typing long passages, but I guess I’ll get used to it. I may be even more laconic for the next week or two, though.
(Fortunately, my most important files, including all of Petopia and my recent contract work, are all safely stored in Perforce. I lost a couple of days of Petopia changes I was working on, but no more than that. And I handle e-mail through GMail so I’m fine there … Well, except for the calendar in Outlook, and I’m sure the dentist will call me at some point before my next appointment.)
I’ve continued playing my dwarven lass Kaet as much as I can between tasks over the past few weeks, and slowly but surely she’s continued to progress. Then somehow, suddenly, I realized today that she’s level 60!
There have been some setbacks over the past 10 levels, to be sure. The saddest is that I have given up one of my three lovely crabs. At level 56 I decided that I could no longer do without upgrades to Claw, so I released Niffis (the white crab) back into the wild.