TuppenceABag won the honor of being my first character to level up in Cataclysm. Last night she held her breath and went down to vashj ir to see what all the hub-bub was about.

I hope you like Water and moving around in a 3D space. Vashj ir is quite a sight to look at, everywhere is busy with colour, texture and feels like a living place. Although I’m not that far through with it yet it appears that the questing has moved along a level since WOTLK and is now extremely varied and generally a joy to do. My only real complaints at the moment are caused by the massive amount of people trying to do the content. The sharks teeth quest took me around 15 minutes yesterday as a dozen people fort for slowly spawning objects.

I decided to level the priest with offensive Holy and Disc specs so that i could really try out the smite based builds. So far both have worked quite well but are noticeably slower than a pure DPS build but it is by no means a struggle. Disc seems a little more damage output but does have some ramp up time due to evangelism. Holy in the smite chakra has higher damage off the bat and has some nice additional bits of utility due to the stun from powerword and the bubble speed boost.

Last thing i did yesterday was Throne of Tides which was entertaining and without a doubt was a step above WOTLK dungeons . From the healing side there was a lot of attention needed. Predictable spike damage, general AOE healing and dispels were all needed which gave it a nice varied flavour. My only really gripe for the dungeon was the lift between the two floors which took AGES to move.