Outlands.. finally!

So.. I'm leveling a hunter.
Fun times.

I read before starting that the way to go was BM, with a nice tanking pet..., so I went MM with a cat. That's right.. I'm a bad boy! (not really).
Took me forever to find the pet  I wanted, but in the end I did, and Milena (for some reason, I decided to name all my pets as female.. don't ask me why) and I began our journey together.

Doing the old content was fun, I got to visit some of my favorite areas, and even got to explore some new ones (had never quested on Azhara, or Felwood before). The new Battleground XP and the LFG system also helped..., even though I had to put up with the classic drama of people leaving for no aparent reason, I got to finish some instances that were new to me.
All fun and games so far, and last night I finally got to 58 (thanks AV for that last bit of XP ^^). As soon as I hit 58, went straight to Org, and to the portal to the blasted lands. Grabbed the quest just before entering and 5 seconds later, there I was, The Dark Portal, outland's side.

Now the fun really begins, for some weird reason, I feel more exited about TBC content than the Wrath one..., don't ask me why, I don't really know. It was late last night when I leveled, but I couldn't go to bed without at least doing something here, so I went ahead, took the initial quests and queued up for the first instance!

Ten minutes later, I was half way through those quests and in  a failed soon to be failed group for Hellfire Ramps. Luckly the "bad people" (lets not call them for their real names, there could be kids reading this!) left and we got to finish it! No real drop for a lvl58 hunter, but still, it was fun, and did something like 40% of the level just with that run! So all in all, great fun!

Anyways, I'm really looking forward to leveling here and hopefully, find a nice group of people to do some of the more advance content of TBC with (I would love to see Kara "on-level", and some of the heroics aswell...).

So, catcha around Azeroth....

The new LFG system, a few month after...

When Blizzard announced the new LFG system, I thought to myself... "what do you think myself? Is it going to be great or what?!" and myself actually answered me (how wired is that!? :S), he said: "you know what? It has a lot of potential, both to be good and bad".

Myself is always speaking like that..., never giving a straight answer >.<, but still, he was right.

The potential for good:
So, forget about spamming trade/general/gchat to find yourself a group they said..., just click here and queue up they said. What a great idea, forget about the problem of finding your own group, just let the systema do it for you, forget about running/flying to the instance, you'll get teleported... EXCELENT!

The new LFG system had the potential to ease up the leveling process, allowing a lot of players who enjoy the PVE aspect of the game to level up doing a lot of instances. You could just keep questing and get in the queue for your favorite instance or a random one even,  and just wait for it. Efficiency all over the place if you ask me. Then why am I complaining?

The potential for bad:
The problem with random groups is that.. well, they're random.. you really don't know who is going to end up in your group. If you're lucky, they'll be good players, who enjoy having fun and working inside a dungeon, but if you're not lucky (which we both know you're not), you'll get between 1-4 dumb asses, who at the sight of a small problema, they'll just quit the group, and try to find themselves a new one. This leaves you stranded inside a dungeon, most times, waiting for the group to fill up again. Sadly this scenario can repeat several times in a row, which makes finishing the instances a real pain, and therefore, crippling your leveling experience by making it harder to gain XP (less people in the party, less mobs killed inside the dungeon...). Blizzard has tried to solve this problem by giving the players who leave a debuff, which won't allow them to queue up again for a minor period of time, the problem with this is that some people (specially those who enjoy messing around with this random groups) don't mind the debuff, and in the end, you end up losing anyways.

From my personal experience, I've come to the conclusion that this new LFG is not the holy grial it promissed it would be. Even though it might help the leveling process, it cannot shouldn't be your single source of XP, because in the end, it ends up being far more ineficient than questing.

To me, leveling is all about eficiency, getting as much XP as you can, as fast as you can, it doesn't really matter where that XP comes from, and I've found that a healthy combination of questing, LFG (on those lucky nights when you get a couple of "good" runs) and doing some BG now that they give XP aswell (AV specially, once you're high enough ) will get the job done.
But then again, that's my personal opinion... how about you?