Seems like Sandy levels insanely quickly, so I finally managed to remember to check /played. I'm not going for any land speed records, but she's got 9 levels in just under 2 hours, 40 minutes. That's three levels per 53 minutes, or a level every 17 min, 47 seconds. That's fast. Jalindrine's screenshot collection doesn't start until level 14, and I'm not sure I checked played much at all, but perhaps there are a few places where I played straight through a level and can approximate his TpL (Time per Level, of course). Sure wasn't this fast... was it?
I also thought I'd mention that this quest map is awful. Look at the range of these quests and turn-ins! Man, I miss being mounted. Almost makes me wistful for the DK alt.
I still don't have time to log Jal back in, so I'll probably keep putting in a few minutes of Sandy now and again. I'd like to give LFR a try. My blog roll keeps coming back to it as a topic, and I'd like to see how it works. And I do occasionally wonder how much trouble it'd be to grab a few more T12 pieces, and if that'd be enough to get Jal into PURs.
Pandaria hasn't really given me much more to be excited about. I've read through some argument about its simplified talent trees (looks like this was Lissanna) being an improvement, saying that the Cataclysm trees were pretty sorry. Though complex, there were (and are), Lissanna argued, essentially "right" and "wrong" talent distributions, where the stuff that's up to personal choice boils down to meaningless fluff.
I did have someone once in a PUG ask me about my points in Cataclysm... second time ever. The first was years ago, in Vanilla, and the fellow said that they liked that I had points in what's now Naturalist (wasn't that before, was it?), showing I knew that I was going to be doing more than just DPSing. This second set of comments that I got told me how I'd gotten the distrib wrong, sure enough. They'd Armoried Jal and very politely told me I should move points around. I did, np, but the point holds: The system still looks complex, but "thanks" to the community of theorycrafters, we "know" there's only a few distribs worth keeping. This will change in Pandaria, and Lissanna thought it was an improvement. I think I tentatively agree, though I don't know much about the expansion yet. Well, other than the Activision-Blizzard-Dreamworks marketing synergy. I did find myself considering a mace for a quest reward tonight, and lamented that there are no longer any weapon skills -- if Sandy wants a mace, there's no reason not to take it, though she's never (iirc) used one herself.
Remember back when you'd have your staff knocked away and your Unarmed combat skill would start shooting up? Ah, the good old days. ;^)
Well, that's it. I'm too tired to write something awfully interesting, it turns out. My only other comment regards the tiny screenshots. They're native res. I've moved, and my only computer right now is an HP Pavilion dm1. It does okay for a really cheap ultraportable with Win7 64-bit, and even runs Visual C# 2010 pretty quickly, all things considered, but it's no screamer. Thus the 800x600 screenshots (I also have an old Dell CRT monitor out; don't ask). fps is sticking in the 30-40 range for Sandy, but I don't think I'd want to raid on this box! Reminds me of the old iBook G4 screenshots I put up.
