Beta Test Adventures - Day 13?

I took yesterday off to do Onyxia/ZG with the guild over on Uther, and ended up staying up till 2am in the morning farting around on forums afterwards. Been slammed at work lately, and been wrangling with ceaseless cache file format changes that blizzard has been putting through on their data.

I very recently hit level 64 (monday night) and have been running through quests in Terrokar Forest lately. Zangarmarsh has been a bit overcrowded for my tastes, but reading the beta forums they are going to put in a 'dynamic spawning' system, which should up the respawn rate depending on player counts. "They only recently added more players to the beta", which explains the overcrowding we've seen in Hellfire and to a lesser, but still noticeable degree in Zangarmarsh.

I haven't really run any new instance dungeons, save another attempt at Hellfire Citadel - Blood Furnance, which featured flying Nascent Fel Orcs (graphical glitch), and pet-charm happy warlocks which ended up in a nasty wipe on the final boss which also bugged out and made future attempts on the same instance of the instance impossible.

After that, I begrudgingly tried my hand at the 3vs3 arena combat and died so fast it was pathetic. We were a bit unprepared and undergeared for an angry highwarlord warrior, shadow priest and rogue who promptly feared us and locked us down.

Terrokar Forest has been nice and quiet. For some reason the massive looming trees remind me of playing Planetside, but I'm not really certain why. At the center of the zone is a wasteland of bones with Auchudon in the middle of them -- I haven't ventured into them, although I am finally high enough level to be considered for the mana-tombs. Mainly, I've stuck to the safety of the forest which is filled with warp stalkers (blinking, phasing lizardlike beasts), aggressive wolves, spiders, dusty moths, demonic fel orcs, twilight cultists, broken, aggressive arrokoa (birdmen), and some nasty illidan worshipping blood elves who are allied with the fel orcs. (Funny how all the horde races keep getting to be the villains. -- When am I gonna get to kill some more gnomes and night elves?)

At the center of the zone is the Cenarion Enclave, which has been mysteriously decimated by some sort of magical force. All the druids are dead save two of them. One of them is stark raving mad, and wanders around babbling weird things. Very interesting -- I've made some progress on the quest/mystery, but I won't ruin it for anyone here. ;)

I made a point of monitoring my time /played, and it took me approxmiately 11 hours to go from 63 to 64. I'm not exactly a pokey butt, when it comes to playing -- very little of that time leveling was wasted. Then I hear that a blue posted today that experience is currently accelerated on the test servers. That would probably explain why normal-world level 60 mobs give 250 xp less than outland mobs. I'm not so stoked for 22hrs to finish a level, but what can you expect with the MMO grind eh? -- I've also been pretty much exhausting all the quests I can as I go. If they half the exp from mobs killed, I figure you could expect to run out of quests about 2/3rds of the way through a level. - But, it's a beta test. We'll see what we end up with.

Just respec'd to an assassination build with all the poison talents during lunch. As soon as the game servers come up, I'd like to see how cheapshot, mutilate, mutilate, envenom combo works out. I desperately need an alternative to spamming sinister strike all-combat-sword style.

I'm also peripherally looking forward to the release of NWN2 next week. With the beta test dragging out to January, I don't want to burn out before release. ;(